see no evil

The first to bring news from the dark side, Shafiq Rasul, who returned from Guantánamo in March 2004, relived his experience for an entire month in his lawyer’s office, demonstrating to an illustrator with chains borrowed from a nearby market stall the forms of torture that he had endured in Afghanistan and then at Guantánamo Bay. By July 2004 he had produced a hundred-page illustrated account. Every aspect of his detention, every technique of torture used on him, is prohibited as a crime against humanity and yet this, the first account made public from Guantánamo, also appears to have been entirely ignored by the Intelligence and Security Committee when in March 2005 it reported that it had reviewed two thousand interrogations in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Iraq by British intelligence agents who saw no evil, save for one, who became aware that US interrogators were getting a detainee ready for interrogation by a process that appeared to involve ‘hooding, deprivation of sleep’ and making him stand in ‘painful stress positions’.