| Asif Iqbal | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1981-04-24)24 April 1981 (age 44) West Bromwich,West Midlands, England |
| Arrested | 2001 Pakistan |
| Released | 9 March 2004 |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Detained at | Sheberghan;Guantanamo |
| ISN | 87 |
| Charge | extrajudicial detention |
| Status | released |
Asif Iqbal (born 24 April 1981) is a British citizen who was held inextrajudicial detention as a terror suspect in theUnited StatesGuantanamo Bay detainment camps inCuba from early 2002 to 9 March 2004.[1]
He is one of theTipton Three, three friends from the same town who were captured together in Afghanistan. Their story was portrayed in the docu-drama,Road to Guantanamo (2006).
Iqbal was born on 24 April 1981 inWest Bromwich and later lived inTipton, both of which are in theWest Midlands of England. He had traveled to Pakistan in the fall of 2001 with friendsRuhal Ahmed andShafiq Rasul, also fromTipton.[2]
The three were captured in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance and transferred to United States military custody. After the completion of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in January 2002, they were transferred there, where they were interrogated and held without recourse to lawyers.
Iqbal's Guantanamo detainee Internment Serial Number was 87.[2]He and his friends were returned to Britain, where the government released them without charges the day after their arrival.
In August 2004, Iqbal, Ahmed and Rasul released a lengthy report on the physical and mental abuses suffered while in US custody, which included sexual and religious humiliation.[3]According to theBBC, the three describe significant abuse, including being repeatedly punched, kicked, slapped, forcibly injected with drugs,deprived of sleep, hooded, photographed naked, and subjected to body cavity searches, and sexual and religious humiliations. An American guard allegedly told the inmates: "The world does not know you're here - we would kill you and no-one would know."[3]
Iqbal said when he arrived at Guantanamo, one of the soldiers told him: "You killed my family in the towers and now it's time to get you back."[3] Rasul said a BritishMI5 officer had told him during an interrogation that he would be detained in Guantanamo for life. The men said they saw the beating of mentally ill inmates and that another man was left brain damaged after a beating by soldiers as punishment for attemptingsuicide.[3] The Britons said an inmate told them he was shown a video of hooded men - apparently inmates - being forced to sodomise one another.[3] Guards threw Qur'ans belonging to prisoners into toilets and tried to force them to give up their religion.[3] In the report they allege that those who identified as being fromMI5, or the British Foreign Office, seemed unconcerned with their welfare.[3]
They said that the appointment of GeneralGeoffrey Miller coincided with the alleged introduction of new, harsher, treatment, includingshort shackling and the forced shaving off of beards, which the men kept for religious purposes.[3]
In the end, the abusive interrogation led the three to falsely confess to being the three previously unidentified faces in a video that showed a meeting betweenOsama bin Laden andMohamed Atta, although Rasul was in the UK during the time period when the video was created.[4]
While still in detention, the Tipton Three had filedhabeas corpus petitions, which were consolidated underRasul v. Bush (2004). All the detainees had been prevented from seeing or contacting legal counsel and challenging their detention before a tribunal, underhabeas corpus. Two other major cases ofhabeas corpus petitions were consolidated underRasul v. Bush, includingHabib v. Bush andAl-Odah v. United States. In a landmark decision by theUnited States Supreme Court, made in June 2004 after their release, it determined that detainees were covered by the jurisdiction of US courts and had constitutional rights, including the right to counsel and tohabeas corpus. Following that, theUnited States Department of Defense (DOD) devised theCombatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) to evaluate whether detainees qualified as enemy combatants, and military commissions to try charges against them. CSRTs were held beginning in 2004.
After their release, in 2004,Rasul v. Rumsfeld, the plaintiffs and former detaineesShafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal,Ruhal Ahmed, andJamal Al-Harith, sued former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in theUnited States District Court for the District of Columbia. They charge that Secretary Rumsfeld and the military chain of command permitted illegal interrogation tactics to be used against them. The plaintiffs each sought compensatory damages for torture and arbitrary detention while being held at Guantánamo.[5]
Some aspects of the case were dismissed at the District Court level. The Appeals Court overturned the lower court ruling on coverage of religious protections. In 2008, the United States Supreme Court grantedcertiorari, vacated the judgment, and remanded the case to the Court of Appeals, based on the interveningBoumediene v. Bush (2008). In that case, it had ruled that detainees and foreign nationals had thehabeas corpus right to bring suit in federal courts.
On 24 April 2009, the Court of Appeals dismissed theRasul v. Rumsfeld case again, on the grounds of "limited immunity" of government officials. It ruled that the courts at the time of the alleged abuses had not yet clearly established legal prohibitions against the torture andreligious abuses suffered by the detainees. On 14 December 2009, the US Supreme Court declined to accept the case for hearing.
Thefilm,The Road to Guantánamo (2006) is adocu-drama by the directorMichael Winterbottom based on their accounts of their capture, interrogations and detention. It uses both actors and interviews with the former detainees.
On 25 April 2011, whistleblower organizationWikiLeaks published formerly secret assessments drafted byJoint Task Force Guantanamo analysts.[6][7]The three-pageJoint Task Force Guantanamo assessment was drafted on 28 October 2003.[8]It was signed by camp commandantMajor GeneralGeoffrey D. Miller. He recommended continued detention by the Department of Defense.
HistorianAndy Worthington, author ofThe Guantanamo Files, called Iqbal's assessment "extremely dubious".[9] He pointed out the following inconsistencies.
The Daily Telegraph, along with other newspapers including The Washington Post, today exposes America's own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world's most dangerous terrorists. This newspaper has been shown thousands of pages of top-secret files obtained by the WikiLeaks website.