Web of Deceit

Some were grabbed off the streets, blindfolded and bundled into the back of a car. Others were detained at airports and taken away by force on small private jets, often to secret locations in countries known for torture. Extraordinary rendition, a kind of state-sanctioned kidnapping that breaches international law, became a popular method used by US authorities to capture terror suspects in the years following the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks. But only now are full details about the practice, and the many corporations that have profited from it, beginning to emerge.

In recent weeks human rights group Reprieve has been publicising some of the private companies that helped organise the renditions, most carried out under the authority of the George W. Bush administration between 2001 and 2008. Among the firms are military contractors such as Virginia-based DynCorp, paid to organise the logistics of rendition flights to places like Thailand, Egypt, Syria and Morocco. But there are also less conspicuous firms that played a key role, some with strong UK connections. One is Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), an IT firm that has held contracts with the NHS and Transport for London.

“The role played by the prime contracting companies – DynCorp and CSC – was extremely significant,” says Crofton Black, a Reprieve investigator. “They basically ran a significant proportion of the entire project in terms of helping move people around between detention sites. The various operating companies that provided the airplanes and crews are significant too, because it’s unlikely these guys didn’t know what was happening in their planes.”

According to Reprieve, court documents show that CSC organised rendition flights on behalf of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry prisoners between a number of locations, including the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention camp and secret “black sites” in North Africa, South East Asia and Eastern Europe. It is alleged that the prisoners were held incommunicado and tortured during lengthy interrogations. CSC, which turned over £10.2 billion in 2011, has a string of British investors, including Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and Prudential.

Earlier this year, Reprieve wrote and asked CSC to sign its “zero tolerance for torture” pledge promising that it would not be involved in rendition, secret detention and torture in the future. The company declined, saying that individual pledges on specific topics were “not within the framework” of its existing corporate responsibility programme. Reprieve is now writing to investors in the firm asking them to “confirm whether investing in companies implicated in torture is compatible with their ethical commitments.”

“CSC has explicitly refused to rule out taking on such missions in the future,” Black says. “It’s fine for the investors to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that ‘we didn’t know such missions were going on in 2005.’ But they can’t say that anymore. So they have to come to come to terms with the fact that they are investing in a company that has basically made a commitment not to honour international law, which is effectively what CSC refusing to sign the zero tolerance for torture pledge means.”

At the same time as details about private companies’ involvement in extraordinary rendition continue to emerge, new information about the scale of Britain’s role in the programme has also been revealed. In the wake of the civil war in Libya last year, documents were uncovered showing in 2004 MI6 had helped US authorities abduct Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhadj and his pregnant wife in Bangkok, where they were flown to Tripoli and abused by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

Belhadj is now suing MI6 and then-foreign secretary Jack Straw, a serving Blackburn MP, for complicity in torture and misfeasance in public office. Government sources say MI6’s role in rendition was part of “ministerially authorised government policy" – but Straw has gone on record claiming that "no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time."

In other countries, too, the repercussions of extraordinary rendition continue to be felt. In March, Poland became the first EU country to indict one of its officials over CIA renditions, with the country’s prime minister promising an end to “under-the-table deals." It is alleged that a military garrison in the north-east of the Poland was used as a CIA black site where terror suspects were interrogated and subjected to waterboarding, a kind of torture that makes a person feel as if they are drowning.

Some details about the rendition programme, like the names of the terror suspects involved, are difficult to establish as they remain classified. But more revelations may soon emerge as part of a major new academic effort to pull together all of the information that has so far been published about extraordinary rendition. Launched by University of Kent academic Dr Ruth Blakeley in May, the Rendition Project is studying reams of court documents and flight logs, collating data about hundreds of victims of rendition and secret detention since 2001. It hopes to chronicle the 45 countries, 6500 flights and 140 aircraft allegedly connected to the CIA renditions programme.

“I don’t think the world is very well informed about the types of things that governments in the US and UK do,” Blakeley says, explaining her motivation for starting the project. “On both sides of the pond current governments don’t really want to carry out investigations [into rendition] because their own records are not that squeaky clean either.”

Prior to coming in to office in 2008, US president Barack Obama condemned many of his predecessor’s more aggressive counter-terror policies. He barred waterboarding and signed an executive order entitled "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations," designed to increase oversight. But he didn’t outlaw extraordinary renditions. Obama has also significantly heighted the use of unmanned military drones, remotely controlled aircraft that are used to bomb suspected militants in places such as Pakistan and Yemen. Some argue that, to avoid using the costly and controversial rendition method, Obama has favoured drone strikes – killing rather than capturing.

“It’s expensive to detain people in prison,” Blakeley says. “A lot of people say drone attacks are Obama’s preference because you just get rid of the people and you don’t have all the messy stuff afterwards to deal with... It avoids the public outcry around rendition.”

London-based human rights group Cage Prisoners, founded by Birmingham-born Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo detainee, believes rendition is still happening today but on a lesser scale. The group, which campaigns to raise awareness about individuals held extra-judicially as part of the so-called War on Terror, argues public inquiries into extraordinary rendition are the only way to redress the abuses of international law that became commonplace after 2001.

“There’s no way that we can adequately compensate those who had these things happen to them,” says Asim Qureshi, executive director at Cage Prisoners. “In the grand scheme of things, for those people inquiries mean nothing, because they’ve already had their lives ruined by renditions.

“But for the future they become important, because this is effectively the way the human rights industry can fight back – by bringing these legal cases, by having the process of accountability, and by really placing the emphasis back on due process and the rule of law.”

Secret Justice

Alarming links between British spy agencies and torture, unlawful abductions and dealings with dictators have been exposed in recent years, prompting investigations and major court cases. But now, in a historic move that could erode centuries-old principles of open justice, the government wants to limit sensitive material being disclosed publicly – enabling complicity in human rights abuses to be kept secret.

The controversial plans are set to be included in the Justice and Security Bill, formally announced earlier this month in the Queen’s Speech. The Ministry of Justice says “common-sense” change is needed to protect national security and better equip courts to pass judgment in cases involving classified information. Because the new legislation would enable the government to present evidence to a judge without having to disclose it to the whole court, however, there are major concerns it could lead to cover-ups and put the government and other public bodies above the law.

“The simple fact is that closed courts are inherently unfair,” says Clare Algar, executive director of human rights group Reprieve. “What the government is proposing is a system in which they can use whatever evidence they like against the citizen, but the citizen is unable to challenge or even to see that evidence. This is unacceptable in any circumstances.

"Our current system is working well, and judges have always been extremely deferential to the government on matters of national security. Yet it appears that our security services are attempting to undermine our justice system because they are unwilling to be held accountable in a court of law."

Justice secretary Ken Clarke argues that the government will have to reveal “damaging” secret security information or settle out of court unless ministers can order some cases to be conducted behind closed doors. Clarke says that Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with America was dented after a ruling in 2010 forcing ministers to reveal a document showing British complicity in the torture of West London resident Binyam Mohamed, who was held at US-run prison Guantanamo Bay over alleged links to terror groups.

But last month the government’s claims that US authorities have withdrawn or reduced the amount of intelligence it shares with Britain were attacked by the joint parliamentary committee on human rights as being based on “spurious assertions”. And former officers from the US Central Intelligence Agency told the Daily Mail the US would “never hold back” information from British spies if it was “important to their domestic security.”

Prominent critics argue that the reform, far from being motivated by a desire to protect national security, has more to do with preventing politically damaging details from being made public.

“We should not sacrifice Britain’s open and transparent justice system simply to protect politicians and their officials from embarrassment,” said former director of public prosecutions Ken MacDonald in February. “After a decade in which we have seen our politicians and officials caught up in the woeful abuses of the War on Terror, the last thing the government should be seeking is to sweep all of this under the carpet. However, that is exactly what their disastrous secret justice proposals are likely to do.”

Macdonald’s scathing remarks took on added significance last month, when it emerged spy agency MI6 had tried to avoid having to appear in open court by offering a payment of £1 million to Abdelhakim Belhadj, a Libyan dissident it helped hand over to Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004 as part of America’s extraordinary rendition programme. Belhadj and his pregnant wife were abducted by US authorities in Bangkok after a tip-off from MI6. They were forced on a plane to Libya where they were mistreated by Gaddafi’s secret police – and are now suing Sir Mark Allen, an ex-senior member of MI6, for “complicity in torture" and "misfeasance in public office."

If the Bill were to become law by the time Belhadj’s case makes it to a British courtroom, a government minister could sign off a “closed material procedure” (CMP) certificate vetoing sensitive information about MI6’s role being publicly disclosed. CMPs were first established by Labour in 1997 to be used mainly in a small number of immigration cases concerning the deportation of terror suspects. In 2010, for instance, alleged extremists based in Manchester and Liverpool were accused of having links to al-Qaida – but in subsequent deportation hearings CMPs were applied to keep evidence against them secret.

Crucially, aside from cases involving terror suspects and torture, the newly proposed Bill has far wider ramifications. It would apply across all civil court cases or inquests and could potentially be used not only to protect the security services – but also to halt sensitive information involving the police, the army and other public bodies from being revealed. (The definition of “sensitive” information is broad, encompassing the disclosure of anything deemed contrary to the interests of national security, the international relations of the United Kingdom, or the detection and prevention of crime.)

Inquest, a charity that provides support to bereaved people affected by contentious deaths, such as deaths in custody and police shootings, believes the government’s proposals “seriously undermine fundamental legal principles of natural justice and open justice.” The group, whose members number lawyers involved in high-profile cases including the Hillsborough disaster and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, has warned that the Bill, if legislated, would “fuel fears that the state is attempting to deliberately prevent information about its own culpability in deaths becoming publicly known.”

“It is deeply regrettable that the government is pursuing proposals to extend the use of closed material procedures,” says Helen Shaw, Inquest’s co-director. “It is abundantly clear that there is no need for such sweeping changes to the law.”

But not all elements of the Bill have been subject to such intense criticism. While many argue it would be particularly detrimental to the accountability of the secret services in the courtroom, others point out that at the same time, in stark contrast, it also contains a proposal to enhance their accountability to parliament. Currently spy agencies MI6, MI5 and GCHQ are overseen by the intelligence and security committee (ISC), an executive-appointed group of nine parliamentarians, which reports directly to the prime minister. The government wants to improve the ISC by having it report formally to parliament for the first time.

“I see this as a measure of making them more accountable,” says Anthony Glees, an expert in security and counter-terrorism at the University of Buckingham. “There is a problem with accountability in our secret agencies; too much secrecy fuels speculation and it leads to a lack of responsible behaviour. But we can’t expect that they can’t have full accountability because then they wouldn’t be secret agencies.”

By enhancing parliamentary accountability while simultaneously planning to radically reduce judicial accountability, though, it is ultimately the overall impact that is of most significance, according to Hugh Bochel, professor of public policy at the University of Lincoln.

“The proposals give greater parliamentary oversight but they reduce the amount of judicial oversight and to some extent civil society and the media,” Bochel says, adding that this is a “negative step.”

“What you need is overlap between all those different forms of oversight and that should give you a good view as you can and accountability in all sorts of different ways.”

Campaigners point out that the Ministry of Justice’s own impact assessment of its plans for secret court proceedings warned of a “reduction in confidence in court processes” and a “higher risk of potential security breaches,” costing up to £11 million every year. This was compounded last month by condemnation from the joint parliamentary committee on human rights, chaired by Dr Hywel Francis, which said in a report that the court plans were a “radical departure from our longstanding traditions of open justice” and “inherently unfair.”

“The government has now tested the parliamentary waters and its proposal to expand secret evidence has been condemned as unfair and unjustified,” says Angela Patrick, director of human rights policy at campaign group Justice. “Proceeding in the face of these conclusions would undermine the coalition’s commitment to civil liberties and could damage public confidence in the justice system irreparably.”

Mass Surveillance in Former Soviet Republics

Western firms that sold dictatorships in the Middle East mass-surveillance technology have been subject to intense scrutiny over the past year. But now a new exposé by journalists in Sweden has shed light on how the same tools are being used closer to home — in ex-Soviet republics across Europe and Central Asia, whose leaders were seemingly shaken by the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

Last week an investigative documentary shown on Swedish public service broadcaster SVT revealed in fascinating depth the extent to which Stockholm-based telecommunications firm Teliasonera is linked to spy agencies in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia, facilitating crackdowns on dissident politicians and independent journalists.

Citing a multitude of sources — including official government documents and whistle-blower testimony — SVT’s reporters documented how companies owned by Teliasonera had allowed “black box” probes to be fitted within their telecommunications networks. The black boxes allow security services and police to monitor, in real-time and without any judicial oversight, all communications passing through, including texts, Internet traffic and phone calls. (Similar so-called “monitoring centers” were set up in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria with the help of European companies.)

SVT found some citizens who said they had been targeted for the strangest, most banal reasons. Several Azerbaijanis, for instance, said they had been summoned by police and subject to interrogation after phone records showed they had voted for a country other than their own during the televised Eurovision Song Contest in 2009. One man said he was told by officials working for Azerbaijan’s security agency that he was a “traitor” because he had voted for a song performed by musicians from Armenia, a neighbor with whom Azerbaijan has historically had tense relations.

Other cases were far more serious and sinister. Documents obtained by SVT showed an Azerbaijani reporter had his phone tapped after he published a piece about being beaten at the hands of government security agents while covering a story. He was subsequently stabbed in a savage attack and had to flee to France, where he has since taken up a case against the security agency and Teliasonera-owned Azercell in the European Court of Justice.

SVT also reported that the black-box surveillance was used in Belarus to track down, arrest, and prosecute protesters who attended an anti-government protest rally following the 2010 Belarusian presidential election.

Similar stories were reported in relation to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia. In Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, sources said security agencies had even been given their own offices within the telecom providers’ headquarters to snoop on communications. One whistle-blower who worked for Teliasonera told the reporters, “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance... There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.”

In response to the documentary, a spokeswoman for Teliasonera said that “police tap into information from telecom networks to fight crime” and “the rules for how far their authority goes are different from country to country.” When pressed about complicity in human rights violations, she looked shaky, refusing to comment on why security agencies were being given access to telecom buildings in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

This article first appeared at: slate.com

Business as Usual? Arms, Surveillance and Arab Dictatorships

A wave of revolution across the Middle East and north Africa this year has left tyrants and dictators clinging to the power they once took for granted. Citizens of countries including Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria have taken to the streets and in some cases fought and died in an attempt to overthrow their rulers. But as Britain has offered its support to the newfound freedom fighters, some have made accusations of hypocrisy. After all, like many other western nations, the UK has been doing business with authoritarian regimes in the Arab world for decades.

Little is known about the true extent of the relationship the UK has maintained with dictators and autocrats across the region. However, as the old regimes crumble, details have begun to slowly emerge. Last week the organisation Human Rights Watch released documents it discovered in Libya, revealing that UK intelligence agency MI6 collaborated with Muammar Gaddafi's security services to transport terror suspects to Libya for interrogation, where they were allegedly subjected to torture. MI6 continues to deny involvement, though the secret documents paint an altogether different picture.

Amid the uprising in Egypt earlier this year, protesters made a similarly shocking find. After ransacking a government intelligence agency headquarters in Cairo, they unearthed hidden underground interrogation cells, evidence of torture, and a stockpile of documents that outlined a paranoid government programme of industrial-scale mass surveillance. Most controversially, among the many files was a letter from an English, Andover-based IT-security company, dated June 2010, offering to sell Egyptian authorities spy technology that would enable them to intercept dissidents’ emails, record audio and video chats, and take copies of computer hard drives.

The company, Gamma International, denies that it sold the technology, worth over £250,000, to the Egyptian authorities. “Gamma complies in all its dealings with all applicable UK laws and regulations,” it said in a statement. “Gamma did not supply to Egypt but in any event it would not be appropriate for Gamma to make public details of its transactions with any customer.”

Many similar products, manufactured in western countries, are believed to be widely available to Arab governments facing uprising. An extensive recent investigation conducted by the Bloomberg news agency, for instance, found that Trovicor, a German company with links to Siemens and Nokia, had supplied “monitoring centres” to at least twelve Middle Eastern and north African nations.

Such technology is used by governments around the world, including in the UK. However its use in most western countries is strictly regulated and can only be used when authorities have grounds to believe it could help prevent or detect a crime. Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East do not have the same regulatory framework, though this does not restrict western firms such as Gamma International and Trovicor from selling them their products.

Since the discovery of documents showing British and other European companies had either offered or sold intrusive spy technology to regimes across the Middle East and north Africa, a group of concerned European politicians has taken action. Six MEP’s including Baroness Sarah Ludford, Liberal Democrat MEP for London, made a joint request to the EU’s head of foreign policy calling for a decision on whether European companies contributed to human rights violations in countries including Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt and Syria.

“I don’t know whether the EU has paid sufficient attention to this,” Ludford said. “It raises very important issues about whether export of surveillance equipment from the EU is being used in repression and human rights abuses. The law is a mess: it’s not being properly or rigorously applied and that needs to happen alongside responsible companies that check what the ultimate use [of the technology] is going to be.”

According to Dr Andrea Teti, a specialist in international security at Aberdeen University, it is not possible to stop surveillance systems from being used for repressive purposes unless firm new legislation is implemented, controlling the countries to which it is exported.

“Just because the physical harm comes once removed from this particular technology, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about it,” he said. “If there are safety implications for people in terms of their human rights or physical safety, then we should have some kind of controls. The problem that we have in the west is that in most cases those regulations are quite poor when it comes to export licensing. The onus is definitely on us to deal with that side of things – and we haven’t done so.”

Through the course of the Arab Spring the murky world of mass surveillance has undoubtedly been exposed by the fracture of once intensely secretive regimes. But important questions have also been raised about the UK’s role in arming state forces responsible for brutally repressing protests across the region.

In February the Foreign Office said it was conducting an “immediate and rapid review” of all UK arms export licences to affected countries. Between February and June, however, arms sales to Libya, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia totalled over £30m – 30 per cent more than for the same period in 2010. Weapons exported included sniper rifles, shotguns and submachine guns, according to an investigation by The Times.

The government has since blocked the export of arms to Libya and Syria as part of an EU embargo, and also revoked a number of military export licences to Bahrain. But Oliver Sprague, director of human rights group Amnesty International’s UK arms control programme, said it was a case of “closing the stable door after the horse had bolted,” and called for tighter regulations.

“Countries are entitled to purchase weaponry for legitimate defence and policing purposes, but was it ever remotely sensible for the UK to sell weapons and crowd-control equipment to countries like Gaddafi’s Libya?” he said. “The key question is: are our existing risk-assessment procedures tight enough when it comes to sending arms overseas? The lesson of countries like Bahrain and Libya is that they’re not and we could still end up sending weapons to human rights abusers in the future.”

The Foreign Office said that there was no evidence of any misuse of controlled military goods exported from the United Kingdom, though admitted “further work is needed on how we operate certain aspects of the controls.”

A spokesperson said: “We do not export equipment where there is a clear risk it could be used for internal repression ... Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are mandatory considerations for all export licence applications. HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] reacted quickly to the events in the Middle East: we reviewed licences and moved swiftly to revoke where they were no longer in the line with the criteria.”

This article first appeared in issue no.893 of the Big Issue in the North.

The Inslaw case: Dirtier than Watergate

It was described as dirtier than Watergate, and involved US government dealings with Iraq, Libya, Korea and even the late British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. The story is deep, dark and complex; a web of strange dealings and dubious characters, it implicates wealthy arms dealers, Israeli intelligence services, the Soviet KGB, MI5 and the CIA. But unlike Watergate, this scandal, from a particularly dark chapter in American history, has appeared in no Hollywood film and is yet to reach a satisfying conclusion.

It began in the late 1970s, when the Washington-based software developer Inslaw pioneered people-tracking technology, designed to be used by prosecutors to monitor case records. Known as the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS), the software was developed under grants from the US department of justice. The US government, as it helped fund the creation of PROMIS, had been licensed to use the software on condition that it did not modify, distribute or create derivative versions of it. The government, however, did not stick to this agreement.

Under the Ronald Reagan administration's covert intelligence initiative known as "'Follow the Money", the US National Security Agency (NSA) misappropriated PROMIS for sale to banks in 1982. The version of PROMIS sold by the NSA had been "espionage-enabled" through a back door in the programme, allowing the agency to covertly conduct real-time electronic surveillance of the flow of money to suspected terrorists and other perceived threats to US national interests.

A letter from the US department of justice in 1985, later obtained by Inslaw, documented more plans for the covert sale and distribution of the espionage-enabled version of PROMIS, this time to governments in the Middle East (which would surreptitiously allow the US to spy on foreign intelligence agencies). The letter outlined how sales of the software were to be facilitated by the late Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz and the arms dealers Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar. PROMIS should be delivered without "paperwork, customs, or delay", it stated, and all of the transactions paid for through a Swiss bank account.

In the years that followed, friends of then attorney general Edwin Meese, including a Reagan associate, Dr Earl Brian of the government consultancy firm Hadron, Inc, were reportedly allowed to sell and distribute pirated versions of PROMIS domestically and overseas. As a House judiciary committee report found in 1992, these individuals were apparently permitted to do so "for their personal financial gain and in support of the intelligence and foreign policy objectives of the United States".

Brian, who was later jailed for four years on an unrelated fraud charge in 1998, has since denied any association with the Inslaw case. According to the former arms broker and CIA "contract operative" Richard Babayan, however, he was instrumental in selling PROMIS to the governments of Iraq, Libya and Korea. When Brian was unable to market PROMIS further, it is claimed that, with the help of Rafi Eitan, a high-ranking Israeli intelligence officer, the British publisher Robert Maxwell was recruited to assist.

In a sworn affidavit, the investigative author Gordon Thomas recounts how Eitan told him Maxwell alone sold over $500m worth of espionage-enabled versions of PROMIS – including licences to the UK, Australia, South Korea, Canada and the Soviet KGB. The British counter-intelligence agency MI5, according to Eitan (who himself was an adviser to the UK secret service MI6), used PROMIS to track members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), as well as Irish republican political leaders including Gerry Adams.

Inslaw alleges the US government, by selling PROMIS to other governments around the world, engaged in what equates to "multibillion-dollar theft". This claim was supported by two separate courts in 1988, which ruled that it "took, converted, stole" PROMIS from Inslaw "through trickery, fraud and deceit". Three years later, however, a court of appeal overturned both rulings on a "jurisdictional technicality" after pressure from the federal justice department.

Now more than two decades since he pioneered PROMIS, the Inslaw president Bill Hamilton today believes the story illustrates an enduring, fundamental problem at the heart of the US justice system. "[It] chronicles the continued inability of the US government to enforce federal criminal laws in cases involving national security issues, or even to render ordinary civil justice," he says. "National security appears to suspend the checks and balances built into the system of government in the United States, to the detriment of the citizens."

Some, including the US government, have tried to dismiss the Inslaw saga as conspiracy. But a message relayed to Bill Hamilton and his wife from the former chief investigator of the Senate judiciary committee, Ronald LeGrand, seems to confirm that the strange PROMIS affair – which remains unresolved – is much more than just a case of chronic paranoia.

"What Mr and Mrs Hamilton think happened, did happen," LeGrand wrote, conveying information he had received from a trusted government source. "The Inslaw case is a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice than Watergate was, in both breadth and depth. The Department of Justice has been compromised in the Inslaw case at every level."

This article appeared originally at: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/04/promis-government-inslaw

Teargas and Corpses: a Photographer's Journey to Libya and Bahrain

It was during the afternoon of February 14 that Bahraini police opened fire on a funeral procession, killing one and injuring scores of others. As a ripple of unrest spread from across North Africa to the Middle East, authorities in Bahrain were anxious to repress any prospect of revolution. Just a few weeks earlier, Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had been removed from 23 years in power after 28 days of protests. Meanwhile Egyptian protesters, taking inspiration from events in Tunisia, had also managed to force their own president, Hosni Mubarak, to reluctantly resign after 17 days of massive demonstrations and strike action.

In London, freelance photographer and student Michael Graae watched the events in Bahrain unfold. He was on his way to class at the London College of Communication when news broke that riot police had attacked anti-government demonstrators gathered in the capital city Manama. Just three days after the funeral shooting, it seemed like events were beginning to spiral out of control. In the latest incident, it was reported that police had fired live rounds and rubber bullets into thousands of anti-government protesters at Pearl Roundabout in the north west of the city. Protesters had been trampled and suffocated amid clouds of teargas as tanks and armoured vehicles attempted to disperse crowds. At least four people reportedly lost their lives, including a 2-year-old girl who was struck by several bullets as she tried to flee the scene with her parents.

Upon hearing about the violence, 21-year-old Graae made an almost instant decision to travel to Bahrain to document what was happening. He consulted his tutor and asked for some time off, before promptly booking flights and a hotel. Only a few hours later he was on his way to Heathrow; the next morning he woke up bleary-eyed in Manama.

At the airport it wasn’t long before he encountered his first problem. After reading reports of journalists being detained by Bahraini authorities, he had decided to conceal his camera equipment in his suitcase. Making it swiftly through the arrivals lounge, when he reached customs his bag was x-rayed. The authorities immediately noticed his camera and pulled him aside for questioning. Graae tried to convince them he was a student, certainly not a journalist; however, the suspicious officials never bought a word of it. They confiscated all of his equipment, leaving him only with his laptop and clothes.

Cameraless but now in Bahrain, Graae proceeded to make some emergency phone calls. Luckily, he was quickly able to reach a friend living in New York who helped him reach a fellow journalist working in Manama. Within a few hours he had made contact and was eventually able to borrow a small single lens camera.

The unrest in the city was continuing to mount in the wake of the previous day’s violence. Pearl Roundabout had since become the focal point for demonstrators, who continued to gather in the area despite repeated crackdowns from authorities. The morning Graae arrived there had been more clashes between police and protesters. Like earlier in the week, live ammunition had again been fired into crowds of unarmed civilians.

After taking photographs of a funeral in Manama for one of the protesters killed in the unrest, Graae visited Pearl Roundabout before being taken to a nearby hospital where he seen for the first time the scale of the casualties. Crammed full of injured people, the atmosphere in the hospital was chaotic. Graae was allowed total access and tried to keep out of the way as he watched ambulance after ambulance arrive with more injured civilians. Hours later, instead of returning to his hotel, he decided that rather than chance missing any action the best thing to do would be to sleep in the hospital. He was given pillows by a doctor and bedded down for the night on the floor of the hospital’s blood bank.

The following day, after leaving the hospital, Graae had his first encounter with teargas. Walking alongside protesters to Pearl Roundabout, police launched an attack. They bombarded the crowds with a mass of teargas combined with rubber bullets and occasional live rounds. Panic ensued and a protester handed Graae an onion, telling him to rub his face with it to stave off the effects of the gas. His nose and eyes were burning as he turned to photograph a crowd of demonstrators running from police. “It felt almost like someone was almost tightening around my windpipe,” he says. “I could breathe but it was tough.”

Soon after, he managed to escape by getting a lift on the back of a pickup truck. Empty teargas canisters and rubber bullet cartridges littered the streets, and all of those seen by Graae were either manufactured in America or Britain. One of his photographs shows teargas canisters bearing the name Non-Lethal Technologies – a Pennsylvania based company that specialises in “riot control munitions”. But as Graae was well aware, teargas had already proven itself potentially lethal. During the Tunisian uprising in January, a 32-year-old French photographer, Lucas Dolega, was killed when he was shot in the head at close range by a teargas canister.

Returning back to the hospital, streams of injured demonstrators continued to arrive. Many had been caught up in the same incident as Graae, though unlike him they had not managed to dodge the bullets. Despite the government continuing to claim they were not using live rounds, several people arrived with gunshot wounds. Graae photographed one man in intensive care, his eyes glazed with shock and his chest blooded and punctured by pellets from a shotgun. The non-lethal weapons, too, had caused substantial damage. One demonstrator, whose leg veins had been torn apart by a rubber bullet, died from complications resulting from his injuries later that night.

After two consecutive evenings sleeping on the floor of the hospital’s blood bank, Graae relocated to a tent near a makeshift media centre near Pearl Roundabout. One of his first observations was that, unlike the protesters in both Tunisia and Egypt, the people of Bahrain were slow to mobilise technology. While the generator-powered media centre had satellite TV as well as internet access, organisers never immediately harnessed the power of tools like Twitter and Facebook as had their counterparts. Graae was surprised when one asked him how to use Twitter. “I thought they would’ve had it set up long ago, but they hadn’t,” he says. “So I told him: ‘you’ve gotta make a Twitter account and you start tweeting."

By the time Graae left the camp, the organisers had figured out how to tweet and were also blogging frequently. Things had begun to calm down in Bahrain at the time. Thousands gathered peacefully at Pearl Roundabout after the government issued orders for military and police forces to withdraw from the capital. Amid the crowds, Graae met another lone freelance, Alex, and hatched a plan to head west to Libya.

Now February 22, the Libyan unrest was still in its early stages but was beginning to rapidly escalate. The previous day, Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi had ordered warplanes and attack helicopters to launch air strikes on protesters. There were reports of snipers firing into unarmed crowds, and Col. Gaddafi’s son, Saif, gave a live interview in which he blamed the foreign media for trying to “trick” the Libyan people.

The situation was tense and Graae’s journey gruelling. There was no way to fly in to Libya. Foreign journalists were banned from the country, and the runways at the main airport in Benghazi – the focal point of the unrest – had been destroyed by rebels in a bid to prevent Gaddafi flying in mercenaries. The only way in was by car or bus. Graae collected his confiscated camera equipment from Bahrain airport and flew 1200 miles north west to Cairo where he met Alex, who had arrived on a separate flight. The two then embarked on a 400 mile, nine hour car trip to the Libyan border, accompanied by a Libyan doctor returning to his wife and children after years of exile in Ireland.

Chaotic but friendly scenes greeted them as they approached the border. Rebel forces holding rifles welcomed the journalists with peace signs and cheering. Graae, who had been ready to bribe his way in to the country if necessary, was amazed that he was never even asked to show his passport upon entry. He simply wrote his name, nationality and passport number on a form

Finally arriving in Benghazi five hours later, people on the streets were in triumphant spirits. While clashes continued to take place between rebels and pro-Gaddafi forces 600 miles west in capital city Tripoli, Benghazi had been ‘liberated’ after Libyan soldiers were reported to have defected. The roads were clogged with cars, people were honking their horns and those with guns were firing them in the air in celebration. “It was a jubilant mood, everyone was carefree,” says Graae. “No one thought they were going to get bombed or arrested or anything of the sort.”

But the atmosphere was short lived. Reports filtered through of brutal violence in Gaddafi’s Tripoli stronghold, leading to former British foreign minister David Owen calling for an immediate intervention. Thousands of mercenaries were believed to have been flown in from other countries, indiscriminately slaying protesters on the streets and attacking people in their own homes. Horrifying videos appeared on YouTube depicting plain clothes men shooting dead peaceful demonstrators. One eye witness report from website February 17 Voices described how pro-Gaddafi forces had entered a hospital in the city and opened fire on doctors and the injured.

Among the first of the western press to arrive in Benghazi, Graae immediately noted how a sense of paranoia preoccupied rebels in the city. There were rumours that all phone calls were being listened to by Gaddafi forces, and that the 68-year-old dictator had somehow routed all internet connections through his headquarters in Tripoli, where he had a kill switch that could turn off the power at any moment. The paranoia quickly spread. If they had to use phones to communicate, the journalists would speak in codes and would not give names or locations over the phone for fear of being traced. “You would go off for an hour and people would have to hope that you came back because no one could contact you when you were gone,” says Graae.

Yet their fears were far from unfounded. Libyan authorities had successfully been jamming the broadcaster Al Jazeera’s signal for days and every time Graae tried to make an international phone call he had severe difficulty. Luckily, tech savvy groups of young Libyans had set up makeshift internet connections using equipment they had smuggled in to the country from Egypt and Tunisia. It was with their help that Graae was able to send his photographs back to his agency in London.

As violence spread to other cities in Libya, Gaddafi claimed the rebels had consumed hallucinogenic drugs and were operating under the direction of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Meanwhile, in Benghazi, Graae visited a former Gaddafi palace that had been torched during a battle a few days before he arrived. The grounds of the palace compound had been dug up by local people looking for underground prisons. Some dug with their hands, others with stones or anything else they could find. Eventually machinery was brought in to excavate the ground, tearing through pipes and leaving huge craters. Several corpses were later found and four people discovered alive – one of whom had apparently been missing for four years.

Graae was taken through a thick door and a labyrinth of tunnels to be shown some of the prison cells in the compound by a handful of rebels. It was dark and there were no lights, the walls charred from the fire that had ravaged the palace in the days before. “You could tell people had just run through and set fire to the whole thing because they hated it so much,” says Graae, who felt slightly uneasy in the bunker. “Even if there’s only loyal people around you, you never know. There was only one way in and one way out, and if someone is to snatch you, then, well, that’s it.”

The atmosphere in Benghazi remained somewhat calm. But Graae was reminded of the scale of the violence that had preceded his arrival when he later visited the city’s Al-Jalah hospital. There was not enough space in the hospital to accommodate the amount of those needing medical assistance, so waiting rooms had been turned into makeshift operating theatres. And while basic healthcare is provided free in Libya, even in normal circumstances hospitals are understaffed and facilities limited. The situation was dire. With scarcely a bed left, the hospital was teeming with those who had been brutalised at the hands of Gaddafi’s mercenaries.

Graae was asked if he wanted to visit the hospital’s morgue and felt it was his obligation to say yes. “Someone had to document it,” he says. With his camera round his neck he was taken to a small building at the rear of the hospital. As he entered through a heavy green door he was suddenly overwhelmed by an awful smell. The air was thick with a stench of death. In a room to his left, corpses lay on the floor in body bags, most of which were damaged beyond recognition. The walls were lined with large refrigerators, each containing a body – some demonstrators, others mercenaries. While a doctor pointed out gunshot wounds on the corpses, Graae tried to distance himself psychologically from what he was being shown. “It was horrible, absolutely horrible,” he says. “I couldn’t even recognise the people I saw. They had been shot to the point that you couldn’t recognise their face, or burnt to the point that you could barely tell that it was a body except for the fact that you could see teeth.”

Not long later, Graae’s visit to Libya would come to an abrupt end. Having spent a total of nine days travelling across north Africa, an encounter with heavily armed Gaddafi militia stopped him in his tracks. Heading west on a search for territory not yet covered by western media, Graae and his accomplice Alex were stopped at a checkpoint near oil fields, ten miles from the small town of Bishr. A 30-strong unit of Gaddafi soldiers approached them, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers and wearing heavy body armour. “Sahafiy? … Sahafiy? … Sahafiy?” the soldiers repeated. Graae and Alex pleaded ignorance, pretending they did not know ‘Sahafiy’ is Arabic for ‘journalist’. They feared if they acknowledged they were from the western press they would be detained – or worse. “You could tell that if they had to have pulled the trigger they would have done it in a heartbeat,” says Graae.

The soldiers rigorously searched their vehicle, looking underneath seats and inside the boot. They took everything the two journalists had between them. Cameras, laptops, even memory cards. There was nothing the pair could do in response; they had no choice but to accept their fate, and so were forced to turn back to Benghazi. The most important thing, after all, was that they had escaped with their lives.

Slightly shaken, his equipment gone and with no means to get another camera, Graae decided he would have to return to London. He and Alex embarked on a long overnight drive to Cairo, intent on getting the first flight home. At 3am they stopped for coffee at a roadside shisha bar to keep themselves awake. On the television inside a state news channel was replaying a Gaddafi speech from earlier that day, in which the volatile leader decried western journalists as agents of Al Qaeda.

Alex, who had purchased a copy of Gaddafi’s infamous Green Book of political philosophy as a souvenir, stood up and begun mimicking the colonel. Sympathetic to the Libyan rebels, the men in the bar laughed and cheered loudly. Then, in a sudden release of frustration, Alex took a lighter to his book and set it on fire. It was a final symbolic act, greeted with raucous applause from the locals. As the pair left, they approached the bar’s owner to settle the bill for their coffee. He wouldn’t let them pay. “That was worth a million dinars,” he told them. “Thank you!”

Back in London days later, Graae walked the bustling streets for the first time since his return and felt shell-shocked. He was devastated about the loss of his camera equipment, though glad to be back safe and in good health after coming face to face with Gaddafi’s militia. Several journalists were detained by Gaddafi forces amid the unrest – Graae was lucky to get away. Watching closely as violence in both Libya and Bahrain continued to escalate, he returned to university as NATO announced they would impose a no-fly zone across Libya in order to quell civilian killings. “Even now I still look on TV and see the images and think, 'I can’t believe I was there,'” he says. “But I was."

This article originally appeared at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ryan-gallagher/teargas-and-corpses-photographers-journey-to-libya-and-bahrain