Tarek Dergoul


Tarek Dergoul is a citizen of the United Kingdom of Moroccan origin who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.
He spent six or seven months in US custody in Afghanistan, prior to his arrival at Guantanamo on May 5, 2002.
After he was repatriated to the United Kingdom on March 8, 2004, he asserted that conditions in US detention camps was brutal, and he was coerced to utter false confessions.

Background

Dergoul had held a variety of jobs in the UK, including being employed as a care worker at an old age home, and as a mini-cab driver, before traveling to Afghanistan, in 2001, where he was handed over to US forces, and ultimately transferred to Guantanamo.
Dergoul described how he and some friends saw the war as an opportunity, and pooled their funds to become land speculators.
Property they purchased from other foreigners, fleeing the war, would be sold for a profit, when peace was restored. Unfortunately they were on one of those properties, when it was struck by an American bomb, killing his friends and seriously wounding Dergoul.
He was one of the first captives to be repatriated, on March 9, 2004.
Dergoul said injuries from his time in US custody prevented him working after his return to the UK.
Dergoul sued the UK government, claiming its security organizations MI5 and MI6 had been complicit in the interrogations he underwent while in US custody, that violated both the USA's and the UK's obligations under international human rights agreement.

Repatration

Dergoul, and four other UK citizens, Jamal al Harith, Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul were repatriated in March 2004.
After their repatriation, all five men were taken into UK custody, under its Prevention of Terrorism Acts.
But all five men were released less than two days after their arrival, when UK authorities were satisfied there were no grounds for their detention. Four other UK citizens, and nine nationals of other nations, who had long term permission to reside in the UK, remained in US custody in Guantanamo.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald the United States and the United Kingdom spent five months negotiating, before the five men were repatriated.

Dergoul's first account of his experience in Guantanamo

On May 16, 2004, David Rose, writing in The Observer published an article based on Dergoul's account of life in Guantanamo.
Other former captives had offered accounts of how the camp's riot squads, the Guantanamo Emergency Reaction Force used brutality in an arbitrary and excessive manner. But Dergoul was the first to describe how every time the riot squad deployed a sixth member of the team stood back to record a video of the event.
Camp spokesmen confirmed Dergoul's account that all ERF deployments were filmed, for review by superior officers, and that they were all archived. Politicians in both the United Kingdom and the United States called for the recordings to be made available for review, to see if they did record unnecessary use of force. Rose quoted Senator Patrick Leahy of the Senate Judiciary Committee
On May 15, 2004, CNN noted Dergoul's role when it reported General Jay Hood, the camp's commandant, brought DVDs of ERF squad incidents when he was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
After watching the videos camp authorities had selected to show the committee Leahy concluded that they did not appear to show abuses similar to those revealed by the trophy photos collected and distributed by guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
At a time when the Guantanamo captives were widely described as having been "captured on the battlefield" Dergoul told Rose he had been apprehended by members of an Afghan militia.
Dergoul said his Afghan captors traded him to US forces in return for a $5,000 bounty. Dergoul told Rose that half of the captives were, like him, traded to the US for a bounty.
Dergoul described how two Pakistani friends who had partnered with him as real estate speculation, and how this innocent enterprise lead to his wounding, capture, and ultimately, the amputation of his left arm and a big toe.
Dergoul's arm was damaged when a large recently abandoned house he and his partners were considering buying was targeted by a US bomb. His toes became frostbitten. According to Dergoul his formerly frostbitten toe was badly infected, but his US captors withheld anti-biotics from him, in order to pressure him into confessing to a role in terrorism. Dergoul claimed he did, ultimately, falsely confess to fighting and being captured at Osama bin Laden's mountain redoubt in Tora Bora, rather than in Jalalabad a major city fifty kilometers and a mountain range away.
Rose noted that former Guantanamo commandant Geoffrey Miller, who had introduced interrogations techniques to Iraq which triggered controversy there, because the USA acknowledged that Iraqi captives were protected by the Geneva Conventions.
Rose identified Dergoul as someone who reported being subjected to techniques the USA acknowledged would not be allowed on individuals protected by the Geneva Conventions.
In particular Dergoul had described to Rose being subjected to "short shackling", and other long confinement in "stress positions", "extremes of heat and cold" and sleep deprivation.
He described watching other bound captives routinely being beaten into unconsciousness, when he was in US custody in Afghanistan.
Dergoul described a technique where guards would deliver him to an interrogation room, where he would be shackled to a chair, or short schackled to a bolt in the floor—and then left alone.
Dergoul would describe how the temperature in the interrogation room would be set to painfully cold. He described how the cold would be particularly painful on the stumps left from his amputations. Dergoul described how after being left alone, shackled, all day, he would feel a mounting pressure to void his bladder or move his bowels, and would eventually be forced to soil himself.

Comments on the first deaths in Guantanamo to be publicly reported

On June 10, 2006, camp authorities, less than a month after they published the first official list of the names of the Guantanamo captives, camp authorities announced three men had died, had committed suicide.
Historian Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, noted that Dergoul had gone on record that he had been held in cells adjacent to two of the three men, and simply could not believe they could have killed themselves.

Dergoul sues the UK government over its complicity in his abuse

Dergoul had offered accounts of UK government complicity in his abuse from his first interview after his repatriation.
On September 16, 2007 Dergoul was the first former captive to sue the UK government.
Dergoul claim was thirteen pages long, and focused on the cooperation and active involvement of two of the UK's security agencies -- MI5 and MI6—in his detention and interrogation.

2008 McClatchy interview

On June 15, 2008 the McClatchy News Service published a series of articles based on interviews with 66 former Guantanamo captives.
Tarek Dergoul
was one of the former captives who had an article profiling him.
Tarek Dergoul acknowledged traveling to Afghanistan following the al Qaeda's attacks of September 11, 2001.
He said he regarded the flight of refugees as a business opportunity. He and some other associates thought they could buy property from fleeing refugees at bargain prices, and then re-sell them when order was restored.
However, he said, his companions were killed, and he was injured, when a shell landed in a villa they were about to buy.
Tarek Dergoul told his McClatchy interviewer he was buried in the rubble, and woke in hospital, to find himself under an armed guard. His left arm was amputated. After some time in Afghan custody he was sold to the Americans for a $5000 bounty, and transferred to the Bagram Theater internment facility.
Tarek Dergoul reported that when he arrived in Bagram medical treatment was withheld from him, and then, when a doctor oversaw the amputation of one of his toes, pain medication was withheld from him, so that he would still be able to feel pain, when he was next interrogated.
Tarek Dergoul reports that he only became religious during his detention.

WikiLeaks leaks Dergoul's formerly secret JTF-GTMO assessment

Dergoul was repatriated prior to the United States Supreme Court ruling that the Department of Defense had to prepare a list of the allegations used to justify Guantanamo captives' continued detention.
But on April 25, 2011, the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks published formerly secret assessment of 766 current and former captives.
Dergoul's assessment was drafted on October 28, 2003.
It was two pages long, it was signed by camp commandant Geoffrey Miller, and it recommended his continued detention.
Historian Andy Worthington incorporated information from Dergoul's assessment in a profile of him he published on August 2, 2011.
He noted that JTF-GTMO analysts had concluded "not been cooperative or forthright during his detention," that he had been "assessed as having been recruited to fight on behalf of the Taliban" and as having "probable Al-Qaida affiliations and links with known Al-Qaida supporters in the UK."
They concluded he was "of moderate intelligence value to the United States," but posed "a high threat to the US, its interests or its allies."''

Dergoul sentenced to community service

In August 2011 Dergoul and a friend were in a shop when they saw his car being given a traffic ticket for being illegally parked.
The parking official testified at Dergoul's trial that after the men told him they were searching for the change to recharge the parking meter he told them it was too late and the ticket had already been issued. He then testified he crossed the street to capture a picture of the car, only to see Dergoul and his friend charging him. He testified they struck him, pushed him to the ground, and rained kicks and blows upon him.
Dergoul interrupted the proceedings, yelling from the prisoner's dock.
He complained that the parking official had escalated the tension through taking photos, and that he feared the parking official was an undercover security official, and the pictures were part of a surveillance campaign.
Dergoul was given a one-year conditional sentence that required him to undergo a mental health assessment, and included six months of community service.
He was also fined £30, which was to be paid in installment to the parking official.
Benjamin Wittes, a legal scholar who focuses on counter-terrorism issues, referred to the controversial issue of competing assessessment as to what percentage of former Guantanamo captives should be considered "Guantanamo recidivists", when he asked whether Dergoul's conviction would make him a recidivist.

Scholarly comments

Dergoul's description of abusive conditions at Guantanamo have been quoted, used as an example, by a number of legal and human rights scholars.
In "American Methods: Torture And the Logic of Domination" Kristian Williams quoted Dergoul's account as an instance of an ERF squad being used to punish captives, rather than its mandated use to maintain order and protect the safety of staff and guards.
Human Rights Watch quoted Dergoul four times in its report "The Road to Abu Ghraib":
They offered him as an example of a captive who reported being threatened with extraordinary rendition to a torture state, for torture;
They offered him as an example of a captive who reported being shackled for so long he was forced to void his bladder or move his bowels;
They offered him as an example of a captive who reported being left alone all day in a frigid interrogation room;
They offered him as an example of a captive who reported being beaten and pepper sprayed when he objected to repetitive unnecessary cell searches.
Scholar Alexandra Campbell quoted from Dergoul when she compared the fictional demonization and extrajudicial abuse of Muslims in the Hollywood film The Siege and the abuse that Dergoul described to David Rose in his first interview.
Jeannine Bell, writing in the Indiana Law Journal, asserted Dergoul was lucky not to be beaten unconscious like nearby captive, while he was held in Bagram.
Jody Anstee chose a quote from Dergoul to lead her PhD thesis.
Anthony Lewis, writing in the New York Review of Books, cites Dergoul's description of being made to soil himself as an example of the USA violating the international "Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, Degrading Treatment or Punishment".