Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad

How Two Administrations and Both Parties Made Illegality the American Way of Life 
By Alfred W. McCoy Tom Dispatch

After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.
President Obama has closed the CIA’s “black sites,” its secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. But via rendition -- the sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that torture -- and related policies, his administration has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.  In this way, he has avoided the political stigma of torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them.

This “resolution” of the torture issue may meet the needs of this country’s deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy an international community determined to prosecute human rights abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term risk of another sordid torture scandal that will further damage U.S. standing with allies worldwide.

Perfecting a New Form of Torture

The modern American urge to use torture did not, of course, begin on September 12, 2001.  It has roots that reach back to the beginning of the Cold War and a human rights policy riven with contradictions. Publicly, Washington opposed torture and led the world in drafting the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the Central Intelligence Agency began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions.
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with two findings foundational to a new form of psychological torture. In the early 1950s, while collaborating with the CIA, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered that, using goggles, gloves, and earmuffs, he could induce a state akin to psychosis among student volunteers by depriving them of sensory stimulation. Simultaneously, two eminent physicians at Cornell University Medical Center, also working with the Agency, found that the most devastating torture technique used by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, involved simply forcing victims to stand for days at a time, while legs swelled painfully and hallucinations began.

In 1963, after a decade of mind-control research, the CIA codified these findings in a succinct, secret instructional handbook, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. It became the basis for a new method of psychological torture disseminated worldwide and within the U.S. intelligence community. Avoiding direct involvement in torture, the CIA instead trained allied agencies to do its dirty work in prisons throughout the Third World, like South Vietnam’s notorious “tiger cages.”
The Korean War added a defensive dimension to this mind-control research. After harsh North Korean psychological torture forced American POWs to accuse their own country of war crimes, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered that any serviceman subject to capture be given resistance training, which the Air Force soon dubbed with the acronym SERE (for survival, evasion, resistance, escape).

Once the Cold War ended in 1990, Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, which banned the infliction of “severe” psychological and physical pain. The CIA ended its torture training in the Third World, and the Defense Department recalled Latin American counterinsurgency manuals that contained instructions for using harsh interrogation techniques. On the surface, then, Washington had resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.

But when President Bill Clinton sent the U.N. Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included language (drafted six years earlier by the Reagan administration) that contained diplomatic “reservations.”  In effect, these addenda accepted the banning of physical abuse, but exempted psychological torture.

A year later, when the Clinton administration launched its covert campaign against al-Qaeda, the CIA avoided direct involvement in human rights violations by sending 70 terror suspects to allied nations notorious for physical torture.  This practice, called “extraordinary rendition,” had supposedly been banned by the U.N. convention and so a new contradiction between Washington’s human rights principles and its practices was buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Normalizing Torture

Right after his first public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his White House staff expansive secret orders for the use of harsh interrogation, adding, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”

Soon after, the CIA began opening “black sites” that would in the coming years stretch from Thailand to Poland.  It also leased a fleet of executive jets for the rendition of detained terrorist suspects to allied nations, and revived psychological tortures abandoned since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the agency hired former Air Force psychologists to reverse engineer SERE training techniques, flipping them from defense to offense and thereby creating the psychological tortures that would henceforth travel far under the euphemistic label “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

In a parallel move in late 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to head the new prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, and gave him broad authority to develop a total three-phase attack on the sensory receptors, cultural identity, and individual psyches of his new prisoners. After General Miller visited Abu Ghraib prison in September 2003, the U.S. commander for Iraq issued orders for the use of psychological torture in U.S. prisons in that country, including sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and a recent innovation, cultural humiliation through exposure to dogs (which American believed would be psychologically devastating for Arabs). It is no accident that Private Lynndie England, a military guard at Abu Ghraib prison, was famously photographed leading a naked Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.

Just two months after CBS News broadcast those notorious photos from Abu Ghraib in April 2004, 35% of Americans polled still felt torture was acceptable. Why were so many tolerant of torture?
One partial explanation would be that, in the years after 9/11, the mass media filled screens large and small across America with enticing images of abuse. Amid this torrent of torture simulations, two media icons served to normalize abuse for many Americans -- the fantasy of the “ticking time bomb scenario” and the fictional hero of the Fox Television show “24,” counterterror agent Jack Bauer.
In the months after 9/11, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz launched a multimedia campaign arguing that torture would be necessary in the event U.S. intelligence agents discovered that a terrorist had planted a ticking nuclear bomb in New York’s Times Square. Although this scenario was a fantasy whose sole foundation was an obscure academic philosophy article published back in 1973, such ticking bombs soon enough became a media trope and a persuasive reality for many Americans -- particularly thanks to “24,” every segment of which began with an oversized clock ticking menacingly.

In 67 torture scenes during its first five seasons, the show portrayed agent Jack Bauer’s recourse to abuse as timely, effective, and often seductive. By its last broadcast in May 2010, the simple invocation of agent Bauer’s name had become a persuasive argument for torture used by everyone from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to ex-President Bill Clinton.

While campaigning for his wife Hillary in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Clinton typically cited “24” as a justification for allowing CIA agents, acting outside the law, to torture in extreme emergencies. “When Bauer goes out there on his own and is prepared to live with the consequences,” Clinton told Meet the Press, “it always seems to work better.”

Impunity in America

Such a normalization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” created public support for an impunity achieved by immunizing all those culpable of crimes of torture. During President Obama’s first two years in office, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz made dozens of television appearances accusing his administration of weakening America’s security by investigating CIA interrogators who had used such techniques under Bush.

Ironically, Obama’s assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 provided an opening for neoconservatives to move the nation toward impunity. Forming an a cappella media chorus, former Bush administration officials appeared on television to claim, without any factual basis, that torture had somehow led the Navy SEALs to Bin Laden. Within weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder announced an end to any investigation of harsh CIA interrogations and to the possibility of bringing any of the CIA torturers to court.  (Consider it striking, then, that the only “torture” case brought to court by the administration involved a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who had leaked the names of some torturers.)

Starting on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the country took the next step toward full impunity via a radical rewriting of the past. In a memoir published on August 30, 2011, Dick Cheney claimed the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on an al-Qaeda leader named Abu Zubaydah had turned this hardened terrorist into a “fount of information” and saved “thousands of lives.”
Just two weeks later, on September 12, 2011, former FBI counterterror agent Ali Soufan released his own memoirs, stating that he was the one who started the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah back in 2002, using empathetic, non-torture techniques that quickly gained “important actionable intelligence” about "the role of KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks."

Angered by the FBI's success, CIA director George Tenet dispatched his own interrogators from Washington led by Dr. James Mitchell, the former SERE psychologist who had developed the agency’s harsh “enhanced techniques.” As the CIA team moved up the “force continuum” from “low-level sleep deprivation” to nudity, noise barrage, and the use of a claustrophobic confinement box, Dr. Mitchell’s harsh methods got "no information."

By contrast, at each step in this escalating abuse, Ali Soufan was brought back for more quiet questioning in Arabic that coaxed out all the valuable intelligence Zubaydah had to offer. The results of this ad hoc scientific test were blindingly clear: FBI empathy was consistently effective, while CIA coercion proved counterproductive.

But this fundamental yet fragile truth has been obscured by CIA censorship and neoconservative casuistry. Cheney’s secondhand account completely omitted the FBI presence. Moreover, the CIA demanded 181 pages of excisions from Ali Soufan’s memoirs that reduced his chapters about this interrogation experience to a maze of blackened lines no regular reader can understand.
The agency’s attempt to rewrite the past has continued into the present. Just last April, Jose Rodriguez, former chief of CIA Clandestine Services, published his uncensored memoirs under the provocative title Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions after 9/11 Saved American Lives. In a promotional television interview, he called FBI claims of success with empathetic methods “bullshit.”

With the past largely rewritten to assure Americans that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” had worked, the perpetrators of torture were home free and the process of impunity and immunity established for future use.

Rendition Under Obama

Apart from these Republican pressures, President Obama’s own aggressive views on national security have contributed to an undeniable continuity with many of his predecessor’s most controversial policies. Not only has he preserved the controversial military commissions at Guantanamo and fought the courts to block civil suits against torture perpetrators, he has, above all, authorized continuing CIA rendition flights.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama went beyond any other candidate in offering unqualified opposition to both direct and indirect U.S. involvement in torture. "We have to be clear and unequivocal. We do not torture, period," he said, adding, "That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions.”

Only days after his January 2009 inauguration, Obama issued a dramatic executive order ending the CIA’s coercive techniques, but it turned out to include a large loophole that preserved the agency’s role in extraordinary renditions. Amid his order’s ringing rhetoric about compliance with the Geneva conventions and assuring “humane treatment of individuals in United States custody,” the president issued a clear and unequivocal order that “the CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” But when the CIA’s counsel objected that this blanket prohibition would also “take us out of the rendition business,” Obama added a footnote with a small but significant qualification: “The terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ in... this order do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Through the slippery legalese of this definition, Obama thus allowed the CIA continue its rendition flights of terror suspects to allied nations for possible torture.


Moreover, in February 2009, Obama’s incoming CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the agency would indeed continue the practice “in renditions where we returned an individual to the jurisdiction of another country, and they exercised their rights… to prosecute him under their laws. I think,” he added, ignoring the U.N. anti-torture convention’s strict conditions for this practice, “that is an appropriate use of rendition.”

As the CIA expanded covert operations inside Somalia under Obama, its renditions of terror suspects from neighboring East African nations continued just as they had under Bush.  In July 2009, for example, Kenyan police snatched an al-Qaeda suspect, Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, from a Nairobi slum and delivered him to that city’s airport for a CIA flight to Mogadishu. There he joined dozens of prisoners grabbed off the streets of Kenya inside “The Hole” -- a filthy underground prison buried in the windowless basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency. While Somali guards (paid for with U.S. funds) ran the prison, CIA operatives, reported the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, have open access for extended interrogation.

Obama also allowed the continuation of a policy adopted after the Abu Ghraib scandal: outsourcing incarceration to local allies in Afghanistan and Iraq while ignoring human rights abuses there. Although the U.S. military received 1,365 reports about the torture of detainees by Iraqi forces between May 2004 and December 2009, a period that included Obama’s first full year in office, American officers refused to take action, even though the abuses reported were often extreme.
Simultaneously, Washington’s Afghan allies increasingly turned to torture after the Abu Ghraib scandal prompted U.S. officials to transfer most interrogation to local authorities. After interviewing 324 detainees held by Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) in 2011, the U.N. found that “torture is practiced systematically in a number of NDS detention facilities throughout
Afghanistan.” At the Directorate’s prison in Kandahar one interrogator told a detainee before starting to torture him, “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban; even stones confess here.”

Although such reports prompted both British and Canadian forces to curtail prisoner transfers, the U.S. military continues to turn over detainees to Afghan authorities -- a policy that, commented the New York Times, “raises serious questions about potential complicity of American officials.”

How to Unclog the System of Justice One Drone at a Time

After a decade of intense public debate over torture, in the last two years the United States has arrived at a questionable default political compromise: impunity at home, rendition abroad.

This resolution does not bode well for future U.S. leadership of an international community determined to end the scourge of torture. Italy’s prosecution of two-dozen CIA agents for rendition in 2009, Poland’s recent indictment of its former security chief for facilitating a CIA black site, and Britain’s ongoing criminal investigation of intelligence officials who collaborated with alleged torture at Guantanamo are harbingers of continuing pressures on the U.S. to comply with international standards for human rights.

Meanwhile, unchecked by any domestic or international sanction, Washington has slid down torture’s slippery slope to find, just as the French did in Algeria during the 1950s, that at its bottom lies the moral abyss of extrajudicial execution. The systematic French torture of thousands during the Battle of Algiers in 1957 also generated over 3,000 “summary executions” to insure, as one French general put it, that “the machine of justice” not be “clogged with cases.”

In an eerie parallel, Washington has reacted to the torture scandals of the Bush era by generally forgoing arrests and opting for no-fuss aerial assassinations. From 2005 to 2012, U.S. drone killings inside Pakistan rose from zero to a total of 2,400 (and still going up) -- a figure disturbingly close to those 3,000 French assassinations in Algeria. In addition, it has now been revealed that the president himself regularly orders specific assassinations by drone in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia off a secret “kill list.”  Simultaneously, his administration has taken just one terror suspect into U.S. custody and has not added any new prisoners to Guantanamo, thereby avoiding any more clogging of the machinery of American justice.

Absent any searching inquiry or binding reforms, assassination is now the everyday American way of war while extraordinary renditions remain a tool of state.  Make no mistake: some future torture scandal is sure to arise from another iconic dungeon in the dismal, ever-lengthening historical procession leading from the "tiger cages" of South Vietnam to "the salt pit" in Afghanistan and "The Hole" in Somalia. Next time, the world might not be so forgiving. Next time, with those images from Abu Ghraib prison etched in human memory, the damage to America’s moral authority as world leader could prove even more deep and lasting.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, which provided documentation for the Oscar-winning documentary feature film Taxi to the Darkside. His recent book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (University of Wisconsin, 2012) explores the American experience of torture during the past decade.

US Muslim: I was tortured at FBI's behest in UAE

By MALIN RISING and NIGEL DUARA | Associated Press – April 19, 2012

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — His interrogators usually came in the morning. Peeking under a blindfold in a cold concrete cell, Yonas Fikre says he caught only glimpses of their shoes.

They beat the soles of his feet with hoses and sticks, asking him about his Portland, Ore., mosque and its imam. Each day, the men questioning him in a United Arab Emirates prison told the 33-year-old Fikre he would be released "tomorrow," according to an account he gave on Wednesday at a press conference in Sweden, where he has been since September.

"It was very hard, because you don't know why you are in there and the only person you speak to is either yourself, or the wall, or when you go to the restroom or when you go to the torture place," said Fikre, who was held for 106 days. "I have never been that isolated from human beings in my entire life."

An advocacy group alleges that over the past two years the FBI has been using aggressive tactics against Muslim-Americans travelling abroad to try to pressure them to become informants when they got home. Gadeir Abbas, staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says there have been several instances of FBI agents calling travelers into embassies or consulates for questioning.

The FBI is not commenting other than to say its agents follow the law.

Fikre, who converted to Islam in 2003, is the third Muslim man from Portland to publicly say he was detained while traveling abroad and questioned about Portland's Masjid as-Sabr mosque.
The mosque, the largest in Oregon, has been in the news on several occasions. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali American charged with plotting to set off a bomb in downtown Portland in 2010, occasionally worshipped there. A decade ago, seven Muslims with ties to the mosque were arrested following a failed effort to enter Afghanistan and fight U.S. forces.

Fikre says he met Mohamud a handful of times, but wouldn't call him a friend or even an acquaintance.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner confirmed Wednesday that Fikre was held in Abu Dhabi "on unspecified charges." Toner said when State Department officials met with him in July 2011, he showed no signs of mistreatment.

Fikre, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born in Eritrea, a country east of Sudan. He moved to Sudan when he was a boy, then moved with his family to San Diego in 1991, then later to Portland.

He married in 2008, and says he traveled to Sudan in December of the following year to pursue business opportunities.

Fikre says that in April 2009 he was asked to go to the U.S. Embassy to discuss concerns about "safety and security" for U.S. citizens.

Instead, he claims, two FBI agents told him he was on the U.S. government no-fly list, and they could help get him off it if he gave them information about the Portland mosque and helped them with a "case" they were working on. Fikre says he declined.

Fikre says he traveled to Scandinavia to visit relatives, and then to the United Arab Emirates to pursue business possibilities with a friend who had moved there from Portland.

According to Fikre, non-uniformed police pulled him out of his Abu Dhabi neighborhood on June 1, 2011, and took him to a prison.

Fikre says he was held there for more than three months, with his captors asking him questions like those he was asked at the U.S. Embassy in Sudan — details about the Portland mosque.

He says one of the worst moments was when a U.S. Embassy representative visited him in the prison on July 28. He says he was warned by his interrogators not to tell the representative he was being beaten, or "hell would break loose."

He said he tried to wink and signal to her that he was under duress, but she didn't notice.
"She was the only person that I felt could get me out of that position at the moment because she is my representative to the outside world, she's my representative to my embassy and she just left me there and she walked away," Fikre said.

Toner confirmed State Department officials were granted access to meet with him on July 28.
"According to our records, during the July 28 visit, Mr. Fikre showed no signs of mistreatment and was in good spirits," Toner said. "He reported that he had been treated professionally and was being well-fed, and did not have any medical conditions or concerns."

Fikre says the beatings and interrogations continued, and that during the last days of his confinement an interrogator acknowledged the FBI had requested that he be detained.

State Department officials requested to visit Fikre again in September, but learned days later that he had been deported to Sweden, Toner said.

Beth Anne Steele, a spokeswoman for the FBI office in Portland, said she could not discuss specifics of the case.

"I can tell you that the FBI trains its agents very specifically and very thoroughly about what is acceptable under U.S. law," she said. "To do anything counter to that training is counterproductive — we risk legal liability and potentially losing a criminal case in court."

When Fikre was released on Sept. 14, he had lost nearly 30 pounds. He has applied for asylum in Sweden.

He, his attorney and the Council on American-Islamic Relations are demanding the U.S. Justice Department investigate his treatment.

___

Rising reported from Stockholm, Sweden. Associated Press writer Matthew Lee in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

UK complicit in my rendition - testimony of Umm Dawud

Written by Asim Qureshi Wednesday, 19 January 2011 cageprisoners.com

Umm Dawud gives her testimony to Cageprisoners regarding her detention in Kenya and subsequent rendition to Ethiopia with the complicity of the British government.

The conflict had begun in Somalia at the very end of 2006. Ethiopia had invaded the country on the pretext of wanting to remove the Union of Islamic Courts from power, despite the peace that was in the country at the time.

My sister-in-law and I knew that we needed to flee from the country and go to the closest British embassy which we knew to be in Nairobi. It was awful, there were gunshots and helicopters above us and there was no road to travel on. We decided to join a convoy of other women who were foreign nationals attempting to get to Nairobi as well – this was in January 2007. It turned out that most of the women in this convoy were pregnant, and I was four months pregnant myself at the time. There were also a number of children with us.

The journey took us three weeks from Mogadishu through Kismayo and eventually arriving in Kenya where we were arrested at the border. We were then taken to Nairobi and detained at a police station.

Four of us women were detained in the cell – this was without the Tunisian woman, Enis, who had been shot during the arrest. The shooting incident happened when we had just got up to pray fajr (the pre-sunrise prayer). At the time the children of an American lady who passed away from malaria during our journey were sleeping with her, although they usually slept with me, on this occasion Enis had taken charge of them. There was literally a moment when the little girl Sumayyah, was handed over to me by Enis and just as I sat down with her, we heard gunshots everywhere. We began to move out of the building in order to comply with the soldiers and we saw Enis just lying on the floor, she was not moving at all. I kept on trying to get her to move, but she could not speak any English and showed me blood, we realised that she had been shot in her back – she was five months pregnant at the time and so we were worried about her and her baby.

The soldiers were really agitated and kept on repeating that Enis was a man, but we kept on trying to convince them that we were all women and that the children were screaming. One of the soldiers gave an order that they should start shooting as we could not be trusted, he kept on reiterating that it was the women who were the worst. To be honest, none of us thought we would survive, we felt as if our life would be ended here and we kept on repeating our shahaadah (Islamic declaration of faith).

It was at this time that I noticed that the person who seemed to be conducting the entire operation was a white American soldier. I began to shout at him that we needed help, that we needed to get to some kind of refugee camp, just to go anywhere to flee the conflict. I kept on shouting that we were just civilians and that there were many western nationalities amongst us, such as Swedish, many different citizens. It was at that moment that he gestured to them to stop and they did so. From the place where this initial arrest took place, we were taken to the cell in Nairobi to be detained further.

The conditions in Nairobi were amongst the worst that I experienced, it was a hard concrete freezing cold floor, there was nothing for us to use for comfort, no mattress, blanket or cushion, nothing at all. The children were in so much pain, some of them had diarrhoea, stomach pains and nappy rash which was making them cry. We were forced to use our own clothes as pillows, and that was the only comfort that we were afforded during that time. The whole situation was horrible.

We were kept in the Nairobi cell for five days and we were absolutely begging them to give us any legal help that they could or just to be able to contact our embassies. They would just laugh and say that you are terrorists and you have been arrested under the terrorism laws and so you have no rights to such access. At the time I told them that I had British residency, that I had been granted permanent leave to remain there, but they were not interested at all in giving me any of my rights.

It was during my time at the cell that I was interviewed for the first time. I am not entirely sure by who, but it seemed that it was the Kenyans who were using a Somali as well. A group of men came who interviewed us and asked about where we came from and why we had come to Kenya. They were asking many questions about our husbands who were attempting to flee from the conflict and get to their embassies in separate convoys. They kept on telling us that we were arrested while fighting back – that we were terrorists and were fighting them with guns etc. They just could not hear anything else that we had to say.

Although we were not abused as such in the cells that we were being kept in, we were abused when we were first arrested. There was a man who was shoving us everywhere and then he took off all of our hijabs and began to film us. They were laughing at us and taunting us during this filming. They also took many of our possessions away from us – from me they took $1000 and much gold jewellery from others.

On the fifth night of our detention, without warning they came to start transporting us to another location. This man came who was actually really quite scary, he just looked really mean. He first took the children of the American lady away, as by then they had realised that the children were American citizens. This was really quite difficult for me as the children had become really close to me. We were trying to cross the border, the women thought that they would not allow the children to cross also without a parent, and so it was better that we pretended that the children were our own for the purpose of crossing over to safety at least. During the three week period, I had been telling them that I would be their ‘mummy’ for a little while until they met with their other ‘mummy’. They actually then began to start calling me ‘mum’ and it resulted in them becoming really attached to me. The soldiers snatched the children away from me and put them on a counter while shoving us into a van – the children were hysterical, in tears and completely terrified. We didn’t know where we were being taken and I kept on asking about what was going to happen to the children. The soldiers told me that I should be worried about myself and that the children would be fine.

We were handcuffed, blind-folded and taken away in a van, without knowing anything about what was going to take place. It was a tinted van and it was at night, so we really could not see anything. The next thing that we knew, we were at the airport and we could see the men, who had attempted the border crossing, also arrested – they were in a really bad condition – they looked unwell, freezing cold and like they had been shoved around a lot. Some of them were being slapped. At that time we did not know where we would be going, but because of the plane, we knew it would be somewhere.

The flight itself was one of the most difficult moments for me – obviously I was pregnant and I really needed to go to the ladies. I asked one of the guards, who seemed like he was a Muslim due to the way that he was dressed, if I could go. My handcuffs were behind my back on the flight and I was really desperate to go, so things were very difficult for me. He got this lady officer to take me to the toilet, but she refused to take my cuffs off and so there was this horrible situation where she was required to then take my trousers down for me. I kept on saying to her, that you have searched, I do not have anything on me, why can’t I just use the toilet like a human being. She did not care – she kept on repeating that you are the worst, it was like their mantra. It was such a humiliating experience that I feel that it was my worst moment.

During the flight we were not allowed to speak to one another. They kept on shouting over and over again, “SHUT UP!” One officer said to me, “Shut up, or I’ll pop your eyes out.” On the flight with us there was a Sudanese girl, who could only have been around eight-years-old, and she just could not stop crying the whole way, she was terrified and the whole situation was so disturbing.

When we arrived in Somalia, it was the Ethiopian troops we were dreading, as the war was with Ethiopia and they were the ones who were keeping us detained – we knew they would be the worst. As I am originally Ethiopian, I was particularly concerned they would be harsh with me.

When we got there, we noticed that the detained men from the flight were being marched towards the Indian Ocean – we could not see where they were taking them exactly and thought that it was the end for the men, that they would be shot and so we all began to scream. I asked one of the soldiers if they were now going to just kill us, I told him I was Ethiopian, and he became shocked. I think this may have changed our situation a little as they began to treat us better.

They took us to a room which was really dusty and horrible and kept all the women and children detained there. There were all sorts of insects and scorpions in the room and one of the women was found to have a yellow scorpion on her shoulder and there were even snakes entering into this tiny room. There were so many of us in this room, that there was only standing or sitting room, you could not lie down as there was just not enough room to do so. There were so many women pregnant and they tried to bring a couple of doctors but it obvious to us that the people they brought, really did not know anything at all. All-in-all it was a miserable situation.

In Somalia I was questioned by both the Somali and Ethiopian agents. It was really silly, it was nothing to do with why I was held there or why I had been in Somalia, every question related to why I became a Muslim. That was all they wanted to know. I asked them if they had any other questions for me, but he kept on saying no, he just wanted to understand why anyone would want to become a Muslim. It was baffling for them that someone with a sane mind who had lived in Europe, would have chosen to become a Muslim. They really did not ask me about anything else.

We were detained in Somalia for 10 days before being transferred on to Ethiopia. We were kept in that room for ten days. We were not given anything to eat for the first 24 hours, but then started to receive food once a day. We used to beg them to give us something for the kids to eat at least, by this stage I was close to being five months pregnant.

We were never told anything before our transfer to Ethiopia. It was always sudden, they would not say anything at all. We only knew we had arrived in Ethiopia when one of the soldiers informed me of that fact after we had arrived. On the flight we had been blindfolded and taken to another destination – it was from there we were driven to Addis Ababa. Before being driven there though, we were forced to sleep at our point of arrival, and the soldiers made us sleep in the open air on the concrete floor – this was another particularly difficult night for us all. There was one Somali man detained with us, while he was lying on the concrete, handcuffed, he would ask to use the toilet everything other minute, and every time he would do so he would be beaten on his wound which would then force him to let out an unforgettable scream. The soldiers then started saying that they should start with killing the babies that were with us, as they would become the same as the terrorists tomorrow. They were saying all sorts of things the whole night and it was so cold that things were difficult.

We arrived in Addis Ababa by car and were detained in something that looked like an abandoned police station. Again we were all put in very cramped rooms, but at least this time they had provided us with mattresses and blankets which considering our previous treatment, was a luxury. Our treatment was considerably better than the men who were being held in wire cages.

Before long we were brought before a court and told that we were prisoners-of-war – the women were told this at least. The men were told that they were ‘enemy combatants’ but the women were marked as prisoners-of-war.

Soon enough the international community became aware of our detention by the Ethiopians and they were trying to give us better conditions due to this added scrutiny. We were told this specifically by the guards. By this time, we were also being given better medical support.

I was questioned two to three times by the Ethiopian officers, they were predominantly concerned with my husband. They kept on repeating that I knew where he was and that I was hiding it. I really had no clue where my husband was and still am worried about his fate now. They also kept on asking me what position I held within the Union of Islamic Courts, and things like that.

The British authorities came to question me once. This was about a month after I arrived in Ethiopia. A female agent came to question me, and although I do not remember her name, she specifically introduced herself as being from MI5. She was interested in the men, if I knew the men, if I knew what was going on, about my husband. She also showed me a number of pictures of people in the UK, none of whom I knew. She kept on going over these questions again and again. She never offered me any assistance in terms of actually helping, she said that I was Ethiopian and so there was nothing the British government could do, this is despite the fact that I had been given asylum in the UK from Ethiopia and had been returned there without any due process. The interview with MI5 happened a month after my detention there.

It was another two months after the MI5 interview that I was finally released. I don’t know why my release came about specifically at that time, it did seem to be a little random. It may be have been because I was very close to giving birth and they did not want me to give birth in the detention site. They picked up a few of us and dropped at a hotel at some random location

However difficult our plight was as women, I have to say that it was just horrible to see the way that the detained men were being treated – how they were placed in these tiny cages like animals. Some of them were being beaten up and taken away for interrogation, it was just really sad to see that. Also what happened to the children, what was their crime, what was our crime? Three women had their children in the prison itself, I was close to eight months pregnant at my time of release, but praise be to God I was released and am now home.