Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar finally arrived back in Britain last week after their three-year imprisonment in Guantanamo, to near-universal acclaim and sympathy. Their lawyers insist that they are totally innocent of any involvement in terrorism. The men themselves say that they have been tortured, and that the admissions made by three of them — that they had been recruited by al-Qa'eda , and undergone training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan — are completely false.The horrors of what undoubtedly took place in Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq, have convinced many people that the Americans must also have administered hideous tortures to everyone they imprisoned at Guantanamo. In fact it is not at all clear that the Americans have tortured anyone in Guantanamo. Some of the "sexual tortures" — women interrogators rubbing their breasts against the backs of those being questioned — sound, to Western ears, too close to the comfy chair of Monty Python's Spanish Inquistion to be taken seriously. Surprisingly, perhaps, the US army authorities took them very seriously: they dismissed for "inappropriate conduct" a female interrogator who was found to have run her fingers through one detainee's hair and sat on his lap during an interrogation.
The detainees in Guantanamo were certainly humiliated and made to feel extremely uncomfortable. They may have been deprived of light and sleep and forced to stand for long periods. But did it constitute torture? The US Department of Defence insists that none of the Britons even alleged they had been tortured or abused until October last year — and that when US officials investigated those claims, they not only found they had no foundation, but that one of the Britons had assaulted one of his interrogators.