NEW YORK: For years, as he was caged in a barely acknowledged detention facility on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, Yunus Rahmatullah’s captors denied him access to a lawyer.

Rahmatullah, a Pakistani man first detained by the UK in Iraq in 2004, has described his inability to even speak to counsel in a lawsuit he has filed in Britain, where, unbeknownst to him, his case had attracted the attention of UK judges. Although he claims he “endlessly and relentlessly requested access to a lawyer,” the US military uniformly denied him.

Until his release in May, Rahmatullah was among the most secret cohort of detainees the US still holds in the Obama era: the dozens of non-Afghans, mostly Pakistanis, within the Detention Facility at Parwan, about an hour’s drive from Kabul.

Those detainees are off-limits to human rights advocates and, critically, legal counsel - a key reason why US courts have not extended them the habeas corpus rights recognised for their counterparts at Guantanamo Bay. In July, it was reported that the detainees often engage in hunger strikes to protest their treatment, effectively the only mechanism they have for redress.

On the rare occasions when Rahmatullah was permitted to speak with his family by telephone — starting in 2010, six years after he was first captured — “we were informed that we were only allowed to say how we were doing and ask how our family was doing”, he asserted in a July witness statement for his lawsuit against the UK foreign and defence ministries, shared with the London-based Guardian by his attorneys.

Only “very recently”, Rahmatullah said in his filing, did he learn that human rights lawyers in Britain had taken up his case, to the point where the UK supreme court ruled in 2012 that Rahmatullah’s detention was unlawful.

Yet among the arguments the UK government makes in its defence is that Rahmatullah’s pleadings have come too late to be valid.

“We could not speak about the circumstances or conditions of our detention, how we got to be in Bagram, other detainees, provide information about the jail or speak about our DRB cases.” DRB is an acronym for Defence Review Board, a non-legal, non-adversarial administrative process at Bagram and Guantanamo to determine if a detainee poses a continuing threat.

“I am also sure that if I had tried to share or give any useful or detailed information to my family to pass on to the UK lawyers working on my behalf, the phone line would have been cut and I would not have been allowed to talk to them again for some time.”

Rahmatullah maintains that he was mistaken for a terrorist in 2004 by UK special forces in Iraq, where he says he travelled — in the midst of a deepening insurgency — in the hope of opening a rice importation business. British forces, Ramatullah contends, tied him to a moving vehicle, stripped him naked and doused him with cold water, placed him in a tiny room where he could neither stand nor recline, and poured water onto his cheesecloth-wrapped face in a style reminiscent of waterboarding.

Later, when US forces in Iraq took custody of Rahmatullah, the Pakistani man claims that among other abuses, he had his hands secured to a post above his head; was stripped naked; was suspended above a tank of cold water; and was led around on a makeshift leash by a woman guard.

One US interrogator allegedly told him: “If you don’t speak to us we will take you to Guantanamo Bay.” Had he been transferred to Guantanamo Bay, he would have eventually had access to legal counsel and the right to challenge his detention, the result of a landmark 2008 US supreme court case.

Instead, around May or June 2004 and for unclear reasons, US officials sent Rahmatullah to Bagram, where he would spend the next ten years of his life.

“Throughout my time in detention in Bagram, I endlessly and relentlessly requested access to a lawyer,” Rahmatullah writes in his witness statement.

He and the other non-Afghan detainees were “persistently refused”. Neither his “personal representative” — a military officer assigned to explain his case before the Defence Review Board — nor the International Committee of the Red Cross could provide one. His infrequent phone calls to his family, which began in 2010, were monitored.

Rahmatullah said in his witness statement he has a “vivid memory” of asking one prominent military official at the Bagram detention centre, an Army Reserve military-police one-star general named Phillip Churn, why Bagram detainees were treated differently from Guantanamo detainees.

“Because they have lawyers, now the jail is famous around the world,” Rahmatullah, who is not a native English speaker, quoted Churn replying. “We don’t want this jail to be famous. This is a different place with different rules; we don’t want you to communicate with the lawyers otherwise this jail will be known to the world.”

Repeated efforts by the Guardian to speak with Churn were unsuccessful.

“If I was able to secure access to a lawyer I would have instructed them to do anything they thought might secure my release and get my story out,” Rahmatullah said in his statement.

By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2014