Le Temps, Switzerland

Five French Inmates of Guantanamo Sentenced in Paris

JUSTICE. The trial has helped to highlight the ambiguous attitude of France toward the American base in Cuba.

By Caroline Stevan

December 20, 2007

Switzerland - Le Temps - Original Article (French)

A year in prison for "criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise". Five of the six French Guantanamo were sentenced Wednesday by the Correctional Court of Paris. Mourad Benchellali, 26, Nizar Sassi, 27, Khaled Ben Mustapha, 35, and Redouane Khalid, 39 years old, have been sentenced to four years in prison, including three suspended, while Imad Achhab Kanouni, 30 years, was released. The court followed the indictment of the prosecution.

None of these young people will return to prison, however, since the penalty has been largely paid by their temporary detention upon return from Guantanamo. The six men were arrested in Afghanistan by American forces after September 11, 2001 and transferred to the detention center on the island of Cuba, where they spent between two and three years each.

Their trial opened in France in the summer of 2006, and was suspended for ten days for further investigation. The daily, Liberation, published an article that stated that French agents visited the detainees in Cuba by pretending to be diplomats from the embassy."They came to see us three times between January 2002 and January 2004, says Mourad Benchellali, one of the five convicted (see below). They told us they would bring us to France if we answered their questions. “I started to wonder when they showed me a album-photos of supposed terrorists that was the same as that used by the Americans.”

Additional information obtained in 2006 validates the thesis of Liberation and the defense lawyers who were demanding release of their clients because of the invalidity of the procedure. The problem is not with the work of the intelligence services, nor that they were present at Guantanamo Bay, argues Jacques Debray, lawyer for Mourad Benchellali, but that passing themselves off as diplomats and promising their return to accelerate the exchange of information has prompted inmates to incriminate themselves.

The fact that these young people had gone to Afghanistan, and passed through London ... was information that the French authorities did not know before and which was used to build the accusations, although the PV was never been formally placed on file.

The defense opposes the prosecution terrorism by harvesting information in a context where "people suffer at best abuse, and at worst torture." France is indeed a signatory to the Convention against Torture, which prohibits the use in trials of information that one can suspect was obtained under torture. The verdict of the criminal court, therefore, validates the process.  "It is very worrying for the future”, again denounces Jacques Debray. “And when you know that it is the judge who requested further investigation is the same one who ultimately believes that the method is fair, we must ask questions about the independence of the judiciary!"

In its judgment, the court found that the dispatch of French counter-espionage agents (DST) to Guantanamo was "a mission that adhered strictly to the administrative intelligence activities of the DST." From the Quai d'Orsay [French Ministry of Foreign Affairs], there is no comment on the case.

"These are French police, why didn’t they present themselves as members of the embassy?”, wonders Eric Denécé, French director of the Center for Intelligence Research. There is nothing shocking in this story. "The problem is that Guantanamo is a legal hole: an American base in Cuba where prisoners are without any status," says Joseph Henrotin, a researcher at the International Center for Analysis and Prediction of Risk. The intelligence services are exploiting this vacuum to do their jobs. Passing oneself off as someone else or promising a reduced sentence in return for cooperation is a classic tactic. There is nothing really illegal, even if it is ethically objectionable. "Paris, therefore, may well condemn the existence of Guantanamo and send double agents.”

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