Tarek Dergoul is a citizen of the United Kingdom of Moroccan origin who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He spent six or seven months in US custody in Afghanistan, prior to his arrival at Guantanamo on 5 May 2002. After he was repatriated to the United Kingdom on 8 March 2004, he asserted that conditions in US detention camps were brutal, and he was coerced to utter false confessions.
Background
Dergoul had held a variety of jobs in the UK, including being employed as a care worker at an old age home, and as a mini-cab driver, before traveling to Afghanistan, in 2001, where he was handed over to US forces, and ultimately transferred to Guantanamo.
Dergoul described how he and some friends saw the war as an opportunity, and pooled their funds to become land speculators. The property they purchased from other foreigners, fleeing the war, would be sold for a profit, when peace was restored. Unfortunately, they were on one of those properties, when it was struck by an American bomb, killing his friends and seriously wounding Dergoul.
He was one of the first captives to be repatriated, on 9 March 2004.
Dergoul said injuries from his time in US custody prevented him from working after his return to the UK.
Dergoul sued the British government, claiming its security organizations MI5 and MI6 had been complicit in the interrogations he underwent while in US custody, that violated both the USA's and the UK's obligations under the international human rights agreement.
Repatration
Dergoul, and four other British citizens, Jamal al Harith, Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul, were repatriated in March 2004. After their repatriation, all five men were taken into British custody, under its Prevention of Terrorism Acts.
But all five men were released less than two days after their arrival, and when British authorities were satisfied, there were no grounds for their detention. Four other British citizens, and nine nationals of other nations, who had long term permission to reside in the UK, remained in US custody in Guantanamo.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the United States and the United Kingdom spent five months negotiating, before the five men were repatriated.
Dergoul's first account of his experience in Guantanamo
On 16 May 2004, David Rose, writing in The Observer, published an article based on Dergoul's account of life in Guantanamo. Other former captives had offered accounts of how the camp's riot squads, the Guantanamo Emergency Reaction Force, used brutality in an arbitrary and excessive manner. But Dergoul was the first to describe how every time the riot squad deployed, a sixth member of the team stood back to record a video of the event. Camp spokesmen confirmed Dergoul's account that all ERF deployments were filmed, for review by superior officers, and that they were all archived. Politicians in both the United Kingdom and the United States called for the recordings to be made available for review, to see if they did record unnecessary use of force. Rose quoted Senator Patrick Leahy of the Senate Judiciary Committee { | class="wikitable" | If evidence exists that can establish whether there has been mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it should be provided without delay. That must include any tapes or photos of the activities of the Extreme Reaction Force. |}
On 15 May 2004, CNN noted Dergoul's role when it reported General Jay Hood, the camp's commandant, brought DVDs of ERF squad incidents when he was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. After watching the videos camp authorities had selected to show the committee, Leahy concluded that they did not appear to show abuses similar to those revealed by the trophy photos collected and distributed by guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
At a time when the Guantanamo captives were widely described as having been "captured on the battlefield", Dergoul told Rose he had been apprehended by members of an Afghan militia. Dergoul said his Afghan captors traded him to US forces in return for a $5,000 bounty. Dergoul told Rose that half of the captives were, like him, traded to the US for a bounty.