We're talking about reporters being banned from or not allowed into Guantanamo, kicked off of the prison camp last week. Carol Williams is with us, Caribbean Bureau Chief for the L/A. Times. She was flown out last week. She's now in St. Kitts. David Rose is a British journalist, writes for the Observer of London and Vanity Fair and has written the book, Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights. He was expecting to come in to Guantanamo but was barred from entering.

David Rose, today the British Parliament is holding a hearing on British complicity in the rendition of Binyam Mohammed, the British resident who was arrested in Pakistan. Can you talk about this case, why you were going to Guantanamo?

DAVID ROSE: Yes, absolutely. Binyam Mohammed's case is one of the most shocking and the most copiously documented cases we have of extraordinary rendition. He was arrested in Pakistan in, I believe, April of 2002, and he was taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and then a place which is known as the “dark prison,” a C.I.A. facility in Afghanistan.

By the time he left that place, after what he says was extremely abusive coercive treatment, he had made a confession, which was so extraordinary it barely bears consideration. He apparently, as a new Muslim convert, who had in fact gone to Pakistan because he had a drug problem, is supposed to have had in a public restaurant in Pakistan in the early part of 2002, months after 9/11, a dinner party with the entire al-Qaeda leadership, including, for example, Khaled Shaikh Mohammed, then the world's most-wanted man, the architect of 9/11; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the former flatmate of Mohamed Atta; and Jose Padilla, the American citizen who, of course, was shortly to be arrested himself.

Now, the allegation is that at this dinner party Khaled Shaikh Mohammed cooked up a plan, whereby Binyam Mohammed would fly to Central Asia, somehow obtain some uranium, smuggle it into the United States -- not an easy thing to do, you might think -- and then he and Padilla would build a dirty bomb together and set it off somewhere in New York.

Well, having made this confession, he was then shipped to Morocco by the C.I.A., where he was held for about a year in a place which is clearly a center for torture, where really unspeakable things were done to him. The worst thing that was done was that on a number of occasions he was cut on his body and also on his genitals with a scalpel. He was also severely beaten. He endured sexual assaults. And I should say that I've interviewed two other prisoners in recent weeks, who were also in the same place, who described these things happening, not to themselves, but witnessing it happening to other prisoners.

Having spent a year in Morocco, he was finally taken to Guantanamo Bay, and he faces trial by military commission for this plan to let off a dirty bomb with Jose Padilla, who he says he has never met. And it was for his military commission hearing, the preliminary hearing, motions hearing in that case that I was planning to go to Guantanamo.

Now, the interesting thing, of course, is that Padilla himself was facing charges as a so-called enemy combatant, despite the fact he was a U.S. citizen and he was being held in a military prison, I think it was in North Carolina. And eventually, the authorities realized they just couldn't make this stick. He’s now back in federal custody, and he’s facing much less serious charges.

But the crucial thing is, why did they send Binyam Mohammed to Morocco when he had already made this confession? Now, we don't have proof of this, but certainly we speculate that the reason was that in Morocco, they hoped they would so crush his resistance that he would in fact become the prosecutor's witness, the prosecution witness against Padilla. They could then try Padilla on the dirty bomb charge. And he would perhaps have some lesser punishment as a witness.

Now, he wouldn't do that, and that's why he is now facing this dirty bomb charge in Guantanamo, where, of course, the rules of evidence and due process are far laxer than they are in any federal court, although the case against Padilla has been dropped now. Almost as we speak, a hearing is about to take place in the House of Commons in London, in which evidence will be called that suggests that the British Intelligence and Security Service, MI5, played a substantial part in his treatment in Morocco, in that the interrogators in Morocco who were torturing him so vilely, were feeding him questions that can only have been obtained by the security service in London.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is the tribunal you thought you were going down to cover? And this is what the British Parliament's dealing with today?

DAVID ROSE: It's not actually the Parliament. It's an M.P. in the Parliament who has convened a kind of special hearing to call evidence on this. It's taking place in the precincts of the Parliament, but it's not the Parliament itself.

AMY GOODMAN: It's not just journalists who have been barred from Guantanamo. Lawyers have been, too, and apparently witnesses. Attorneys representing detainees were prevented from meeting with their clients at Guantanamo, and on Sunday the Boston Globe revealed the U.S. government failed to provide Guantanamo detainees access to key witnesses for their tribunals, even though some of those witnesses were readily available.

In nearly every single case, out of a total of 64 witnesses, 34 detainees were told their witnesses couldn't be located. But in the case of one detainee alone, the Boston Globe was able to locate three witnesses in a span of just three days. In another case, the State Department said it could not locate Afghanistan's Minister of Energy, even though the minister meets frequently with U.S. diplomats. Your response?

DAVID ROSE: Well, these military commissions are a mockery of any kind of normal court process. They've changed the rules repeatedly since they first announced they were setting them up, but they're essentially there, I think, to provide a kind of spurious justification for the whole Guantanamo experiment, for this wholesale erosion, both of the principles of the U.S. Constitution, the law of war and international law in general. They have to get somebody convicted in these commissions or else the whole experiment is going to look like such a catastrophic disaster.

If every single one of those detainees eventually ends up going home, as I strongly suspect they will, without anybody having been convicted for any kind of crime, the political damage and embarrassment, not only within the U.S. in the implications for the administration which is responsible for this, but the damage to the United States' image abroad is almost incalculable. A senior Pentagon intelligence official told me a long time ago, when I was preparing my book, that he imagined that for every Guantanamo detainee, you would create at least ten terrorists. I think possibly that figure should be multiplied by another ten, or even a hundred. The way these things are going, you know, there could not be a better recruiting sergeant for international terrorism than Guantanamo Bay.

AMY GOODMAN: We're also joined by Carol Williams. And Carol, the beginning of your piece, "Kicked out of Gitmo: A Times Reporter's Struggle to Get the Truth about America's Island Prison Just Got Tougher,” you write, “In the best of times, covering Guantanamo means wrangling with a kafkaesque bureaucracy with logistics so nonsensical that they turn two hours of reporting into an 18-hour day with hostile escorts, who seem to think you're in league with al-Qaeda.” Do you think you were thrown off the island because of the suicides and the kind of coverage that you and your colleagues were doing there?

CAROL WILLIAMS: I think it's all mounted to create the situation where the Pentagon just doesn't want any coverage of Guantanamo. What David was saying about the specific case of Binyam Mohammed, he was in the tribunal in April, and it became apparent that the case against him, you know, is weak at best. He was able to make a mockery of the proceedings. The presiding officer ended up having to suspend the session because of the challenges that were brought by his attorneys. The few windows we've had into the judicial process have been a public relations disaster for the Pentagon, and I think their move to bar all coverage is a consequence of that. Now they're finding it impossible to manage the message in the way that they had expected to.

AMY GOODMAN: Carol Williams, can you talk about what it is like? You've been to Guantanamo how many times now?

CAROL WILLIAMS: Six, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: And how you gather information? For example, how you found out about a mass hanging?

CAROL WILLIAMS: As I said in the Sunday opinion piece, much of what we get is by accident or from people who don't know that they're supposed to be spinning the story, as opposed to telling it or answering questions directly. The mass suicide, that I was told about inadvertently, occurred in late 2003, and I found that out because I was being taken on a tour of the detention facilities. I was in the prison annex of the U.S. naval hospital, and the naval hospital commander, who was showing me, you know, the 48-bed facility and all the state-of-the-art equipment was giving me statistics. And I asked him, just, you know, apropos of nothing, "Have you ever been at or near capacity?" And he said, innocently, "Just after the mass hanging incident," and nobody from the U.S. media or any media had ever heard about any mass hanging incident.

The Pentagon was, you know, asked to provide details about this, and two-and-a-half weeks later at 10:00 on a Friday night, they emailed the three of us who had been at Guantanamo when this disclosure was made to say that, yeah, 23 of the detainees had hung themselves together with torn-up bed sheets during a particular week in what was clearly a coordinated effort to make a statement, even back then -- this was almost three years ago -- that, you know, they were despairing of their conditions and clearly wanted to make a statement.

AMY GOODMAN: Carol Williams, there's a piece in the London Times, “Guantanamo Deaths Not Suicides, Say Families.” I wanted to ask you about it. It's by Simon Freeman. It says, “Fresh post-mortems were being prepared today on the repatriated bodies of three Guantanamo detainees found dead in their cells last week, amid claims from grieving relatives that the men were killed. The distraught families of the three men have demanded independent autopsies on their remains in their native countries, claiming that the devout Muslims would not have violated the Islamic faith by committing suicide. Coffins containing the men's corpses were flown back to their homes at the weekend. Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 28, went to his native Yemen while Manei Shaman Turki al-Habadi, 30, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, 21, were returned to Saudi Arabia.” Your response?