In collaboration with
In collaboration with
A Flight to American Justice
A
Flight to
American
Justice
It was Wednesday, 3rd October 2012. Adel learned of his fate watching BBC News. The headlines named him and the other four men for extradition, one by one.
The decision had been taken.
“I was on the phone to my lawyer and told her that I’m sure the plane is already waiting for us.
I told her to please tell my wife to take care of herself, take care of the children.
Just take care, please.”
On Thursday, Adel’s son and daughter came to visit and take all the possessions from his cell.
On Friday night, he was taken.
Adel went with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. The legal papers he had with him were confiscated and never returned. The glasses he needed were given to him with special permission from the court. They dressed him in an orange jumpsuit that had been unevenly cut at the legs and shredded in areas.
“Just for humiliation, they dressed us like this.”
It was night time. Freezing cold. The heavens had opened up and rain was pounding.
They were sat in an adapted van with cells inside. He was in a van with Babar Ahmad, Talha Ahsan, and Khaled al-Fawwaz. These were men whom Adel had known at certain points during his time in prison. When he had some recourse, he advocated for them within prison.
When they were together in Long Lartin, he asked to be put together with them. Because of the nature of the War on Terror, men on vastly different charges were often lumped together as generic terrorists. It was only when the van set off and he heard them speak, that he realised they were with him here, too. The rain lashed the windows for the 2.5-hour drive to the military base in Suffolk. Hard, heavy, relentless rain.
They arrived at gates where police, government agents, and a single American were waiting. The police took his handcuffs off, and the American immediately put a hood over his head and handcuffed him.
They were at a base infamous for rendition flights.
“I knew we were on a rendition plane; it was so small there were no stairs, you just step on.”
Adel did what he could to pray his late-evening Isha prayer, asking God to forgive the shortcomings therein.
Then they did something Adel was familiar with during his time being tortured in Egypt. They started playing games with him. While hooded and shackled, they barked orders at him:
“TURN RIGHT,
TURN LEFT,
HEAD UP,
HEAD DOWN.”
They made him jog inside the same small square of space — as if he was going anywhere. “It’s all about control, humiliation, and fear. They have you hooded and force you to run, turn, walk, spin.” Then they pretend there are doors and stairs around you.
“PUT YOUR HEAD DOWN FOR THE DOOR FRAME!”
There was no door frame.
“RAISE YOUR LEG HIGHER — IT’S STEEP STAIRS!”
There were no stairs.
“TURN AROUND, YOU’RE CLOSE TO THE EDGE!”
There was no edge.
Once the games had been played and the men were sufficiently disorientated, they boarded the rendition jet through the pilot’s door — the cabin was that small. Adel sat on the left. Khaled was on the right. There were two US Marshals in front of Khaled and two in front of Adel. In the back, he heard Abu Hamza and Babar’s voice. At that point he realised they would be travelling together in the same jet.
And it was cold. So cold. The kind of cold that simultaneously sensitises your entire body to every movement, yet covers you in a deep, dull ache.
A cold that burns. A temperature that pounds your head and holds you there, radiating mercilessly through your bones.
A cold that makes your extremities sting to the touch. It was also wet, which meant the rain exacerbated the worst effects of the cold. The rain helping to pound the discomfort right into the marrow of your bones.
Adel’s legs and wrists were shackled with chains in the jet. The cold triggered his asthma. He tried to lift his inhaler to his mouth but didn’t make it. Some time into the flight, they took his hood off.
Hours passed. An hour before landing, they put it back on. They disembarked and carried out the same “Turn left, turn right, leg up/leg down” game before putting them into another car. Adel signed a document without reading it and heard the car he was in turn on its siren.
Adel had been awake for the entire journey. It was now Sunday. The car journey ended with them removing his hood and standing him in an empty corridor with bright lights.
The lift opened and a throng of US Marshals exited in military fatigue — all khaki and helmets.
Big boots. Guns. Walking like human tanks. Lots of beefed-up bravado in the air.
And what was in Adel’s head at that time?
“The whole journey felt like a movie, from where we were in Long Lartin to being dressed in ripped-up jumpsuits being taken into the freezing night with thunder and rain. No access to a toilet, no food, no drink, no sleep, no warmth, no idea what was ahead. Now I was sat there with a doctor and my head was overflowing with questions.
Will my attorney come?
What is this?
Where exactly am I?
Can I call my family?
What happens next?
Where will they put us?”
Adel had arrived at the Southern District of New York and was presented and arraigned on 6 October before US Magistrate Judge Frank Maas. His case was assigned to US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, an esteemed judge who later would preside over the fantastically high-profile Prince Andrew sex trafficking case.
Across the pond, while Adel was being “processed”, then-Home Secretary Theresa May addressed the party faithful at the Conservative conference. May opening her speech with:
“Wasn’t it great to say goodbye — at long last — to Abu Hamza and those four other terror suspects on Friday?”
to jeers and applause.
This was the same Home Secretary who had — just a fortnight prior — blocked the extradition to the US of British computer hacker Gary McKinnon, who had admitted accessing US government computers but claimed he was looking for evidence of UFOs.
For Adel, the first stop was being placed in solitary confinement in a cell. The walls of the cell were metal. The floor was cement. The table was cement. The seat was cement. The bed was a longer cement slab. One thin orange blanket that doubled as a cement-cover.
No window, no external light, no clock. There was always a regular, urgent banging coming from the ceiling above. “To this day, I don’t know what it was, it just went on and on and on.” There were no cells up there, so it couldn’t be other prisoners. Was it other officers?
Was it prison guards? At this point it could have been magenta unicorns doing the locomotion, Adel would be none the wiser.
“That was the worst time in a cell that I ever spent.”
Adel reflects.
What he didn’t anticipate was what would come in the cell after this. Despite Adel’s asthma and warning from the doctor, he was moved to another cell where a ceiling vent was the only way to get oxygen.
Except, the air came like a compressor. It shot out ice-cold air, so cold your eyes would burn. Adel could only lay there curled in the foetal position on the cement slab and hope his body shakes would soon subside. Icy air blasted for hours. The pain shot like lasers into Adel’s bones, yet it would not stop. The night went on. The night was long.
He was on the 10th floor of the building and all the windows outside of his cell were covered in nets, so you could not see outside them. His cell had no windows, naturally. Then, Hurricane Sandy hit. Hurricane Sandy left a storm of destruction particularly affecting New York City, its suburbs, and Long Island.
Sandy’s impact included the flooding of the New York City Subway system, of many suburban communities, and almost all road tunnels entering Manhattan. It also affected Adel’s prison. “It was a total disaster. All the electricity was gone. The water pressure in the toilet was gone. It was like death now entered the cell.”
“I call it a cell, but it wasn’t a cell — you were actually just living in a big toilet.
There were no screens, no barrier, no privacy. There were two cameras in every cell:
one above the cell and one directly facing the shower.”
The officers were constantly watching the screens. Occasionally, they would put their mics on and make derisory comments to undressed prisoners taking a shower. Or on the toilet, “Hey! What’s going on there, Cell 26, you got tummy trouble?” would come with a laugh.
“It was a humiliation that had no end. It also had no ears and nobody who cared.”
When Adel finally got a chance to speak to his solicitor in his cell, his eyes were overflowing with tears simply from the pressure of the air. It was blasting, blasting, blasting.
“Out of everything, I think Allah must have really given me some patience against this cold. It was so bad.” Adel had always had respiratory problems, back pain, knee pain, and shoulder pain. Ice-cold air doesn’t help. Neither did the guards. “The mental torture was worse than the cold, and the cold was evil. Just knowing anything can happen to you and nobody cares was so dark, so hopeless.”
“The mental torture was worse than the cold, and the cold was evil.
Just knowing anything can happen to you and nobody cares was so dark, so hopeless.”
Two months passed in solitary confinement. A 7:00pm dinner would often show up at 10:30pm with no explanation, calls would be arbitrarily denied, showers would sometimes not give water, and there was no newspaper, no radio, no means of communication with a living soul in the outside world.
“I found things to do with whatever I had. I would scrape the end of coffee out of a cup and use a cotton bud to paint on any paper I could find. I would make little cards out of the cheese packaging and draw flowers on it.
I’d save the Kool-Aid drinking sachet and use it as a water colour.” The one thing Adel did stick to was writing a diary every single day.
“I wrote what I ate, what I did,
what I was thinking, what I was hoping,
I just wrote to feel human,
like I still existed somehow.
I had nothing to do but wait for something better.”
“Until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man,
all human wisdom is contained in these two words,
—‘Wait and hope.’”
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas
A Deal Like a Plea Bargain
A Deal
Like a
Plea
Bargain
With legal work always running, walking, and crawling along in the background, it was two years later when Adel would have his day in court.
19th September 2014 was sentencing day. The original 286 charges against Adel were dropped to three, and Adel pled guilty to all of them:
one count of conspiring to make a threat to kill, injure, intimidate, and damage and destroy property by means of an explosive;
one count of making such a threat;
one count of conspiring to kill US nationals.
US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan imposed a 25-year sentence on Adel in Manhattan Federal Court, reduced by 16 years for time already served.
In addition to his prison term, Adel, then 54, was ordered to pay restitution to the amount of $33,816,561, including $7,516,561 to victims’ family members for loss of income and $26,300,000 to the United States for property loss.
Judge Kaplan did not immediately accept the plea deal and gave the lawyers for the government and Adel one week to submit letters on why he should accept the plea deal. A prosecutor said Adel engaged in no overt acts which resulted in the murders themselves.
So why, the question burns, would he plead guilty if he is not?
“It’s simple. A plea bargain is a deal. This is your only hope of ever leaving prison alive. If I were to plead ‘not guilty’ to any of the three charges, I would be guaranteed life without parole.
The Americans have a system you would not believe. The ‘favour’ of the plea bargain is that you may not get life, you may get just 25 years. This is a system you cannot fight.”
At the time, any three crimes — no matter what the sentences they carried — would automatically mean life without parole. Some get ambitious and try the legal system. “One of the other prisoners had 110 charges against him. He chose to go to trial, he was so sure he could clear his name. He was found not guilty of 109. He was found guilty of one charge and given life without parole.”
Adel consulted his solicitor at length about the options on the table. What became evidently clear was that there were no options.
Adel had already consulted the stats in cases like this within the American legal system. “From the research we did, we found 98% of cases like this are settled with a plea bargain.
Just 2% go to court. Within that 2%, only 4% of defendants win their case — 96% of those who were bold enough to go for a trial were found guilty. With all the money and resources it takes to go to court, they will make sure you’re guilty by the end of it.”
Adel had asked his solicitor Andy what the risk was of putting the case to court. “There is no risk”, Andy responded, “You’re going to get life without parole, it’s a fact.”
Adel had to look at what he was being offered: a 25-year sentence with 16 years discounted, meaning he hoped he would still be alive at the end of it and able to see his family again before his death… Or life without parole in solitary confinement in a Colorado supermax prison.
He pled guilty to the only three charges that remained against him.
Adel had already seen what the Colorado supermax did to prisoners. He tells me of one night where he couldn’t sleep as two prisoners were having loud, animated, and passionate conversations between themselves all night long.
They had to shout extremely loud to be heard through the concrete (prisoners would sometimes even shout down the sink to have their voices carried to other cells), yet this did not deter them. It went on all night.
Chatting, whooping, fighting, screeching, jeering, shouting, cheering, laughing, arguing, joking, at times even crying.
A few nights in, Adel called to Khaled in the cell next to him:
“I really can’t sleep with them shouting over to each other all night. Please, please, can you just tell them to keep it down when it gets very late, they’re so loud and I haven’t been able to sleep at all.”
“The voices from the cells next to mine?”, Khaled queried.
“Yes, the two guys shouting over at each other all night”, Adel confirmed.
“That’s not two guys.
That’s one man.
He’s from Colorado.”
Lewis Grassic Gibbons
