Worst of the worst?

Weidenfeld and Nicolson 308pp 16.99

HIS NAME IS AHMED ERRACHIDI, but his captors called him The General. Pentagon informants insisted he was at an al-Qaeda training camp in July 2001, months before the Twin Towers came down. They made no other formal charge, but they were sure he was head of the military wing of al-Qaeda.

Once the US had him in the world's most notorious camp, Guantanamo Bay, he kept complaining about conditions, and the other prisoners agreed, which just proved it. Officially, Errachidi was an enemy combatant, among the worst of the "bad men" President Bush has locked away where it is almost impossible for the law - national or international - to help them. They're the enemy made visible in the war on terror, proof that 9/11 can be avenged.

Unless, as the US has now admitted, they got the wrong man.

Clive Stafford Smith is an Anglo-American lawyer who has niggled and battered his way into Guantanamo to defend whatever rights remain to the men held there. Errachidi was and still is his client. He was freed at the end of April - after the publication of this book - when the Americans decided he was guilty of nothing. Now with his family in Morocco, it appears he will face charges there. Stafford Smith says they're baseless, a "sop to the US" by the Moroccan government.

The General's story is in many respects the sorry story of Guantanamo itself. Errachidi, it turns out, is a chef and a bit of a bore about his cooking skills, especially fish, and a veteran of bipolar disorder, who used to think he was God when he saw the colour black. Five years in Guantanamo didn't help: the isolation, the night-long lights, the yellow water, the threats.

In July 2001, when he was supposed to be in Afghanistan, Stafford Smith could prove he was planning menus in Muswell Hill. He couldn't have left Britain because the British immigration authorities were holding his passport while they pondered his exact status.

So how did he end up in Guantanamo Bay? Well, he was foolish enough to have ideas. He thought he could raise money for an operation on his son, who has a heart condition, by going to Pakistan to buy silver jewellery to sell in his native Morocco. In Pakistan he saw CNN's reporting from Afghanistan and was, he said, filled with a dottily honourable impulse to share the people's suffering and to help if he could. He found there wasn't much he could do, and he was in a car going back to Lahore airport when his whole life went wrong.

He was stopped by police, and handed over to Americans who paid $5,000 for him. He was taken to the notorious Bagram Air Force base and tortured for 26 days. He learned to agree with whatever was suggested to him. Pakistan's President Musharraf rather confirms his story: "We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars," he boasts in his autobiography. Errachidi was an Arab who'd been to Afghanistan, after all, and electrodes and razors could help fill in the details.

There are many horrors documented in Stafford Smith's angry brief for the defence, and one more which is selfish: is this as good as intelligence gets? Does our safety depend on this kind of unchecked deal and wrong information? The Americans don't have the right names, birth dates, even nationalities for many of their prisoners in Guantanamo; one prisoner, accused of joining al-Qaeda in London in 1998, was 11 at the time and had never left Saudi Arabia.

Washington has acknowledged in the clearest way that more than half of the "worst of the worst" weren't worth holding: they let them go. When men who worked at Guantanamo have spoken out, they say at most 10 per cent are dangerous, maybe only a few dozen. The rest don't even know why they're there.

All the schoolroom debates about whether it would be right to use torture to make a terrorist confess the hiding place of a bomb that could kill thousands, the discussions about whether it's all right to keep murderous persons in jail without proper legal process, depend on one assumption: that we actually know who is guilty.

There is not much point in compelling confessions from people with nothing to confess. In fact, it can be disastrous. When the FBI questioned Ibn Sheik al-Libi, a Libyan with proven ties to al-Qaeda, the intelligence was impressive; but the CIA were not prepared to wait; they boxed al-Libi and shipped him to Egypt for what is wonderfully known as "mining". Under torture, al-Libi stopped denying anything. He willingly confirmed that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were jointly developing weapons of mass destruction.

Al-Libi took back his story two years after he told it. Unfortunately, just one year after his confession, George W Bush felt justified in his assault on Iraq.

Stafford Smith is a brave and dogged defence lawyer, long linked to American cases where the wrong man faces the death penalty. He sees his Guantanamo clients briefly, his notes are censored and his focus is necessarily narrow - although it's useful to be reminded that "human rights" is something for a philosophy class in America, where basic legal "rights" belong only to US citizens under the Constitution.

You won't find much here about the neo-cons' brutish belief that force is everything and easy to use well, that nobody else has a worthwhile view and that only American interests are legitimate. The assault on al-Jazeera's reporters, one of whom is in Guantanamo, makes perfect sense in this context: it's a way to control unAmerican eyes and minds. I spent decades reporting on America, trying to show how complicated and honourable American ideas and actions could be; it is terminally depressing that, from 11 September on, America decided to be only what her enemies always thought.

Stafford Smith confirms my worst fears. It isn't intelligent to lean on years of torture to extract information that would be out of date even if it were true. Indeed, we forbid evidence extracted by torture not out of delicacy, but because it isn't reliable.

Yet the Guantanamo prisoners have stories that are almost pornographic in their horror - slicing at a prisoner's penis with a razor - as well as miserably debasing: the abuse of the Koran, using a fundamentalist Southern Baptist as spiritual guide to Muslims. Official language confirms the contempt: hunger-strikers as "spoiled brats", suicide as a "PR stunt", prisoners' anger seen as "hatred of Americans". Someone here is thinking with his testosterone and not his head.

This process is solid and very disturbing in Stafford Smith's account. He's freshest on the 1950s' sci-fi movie atmosphere of Guantanamo: still and hot, scuttling iguanas, passionately meaningless salutes about being "honour bound to protect freedom"; the blank lies and appalling military tribunals, where the accused are dressed in suits for the media, but aren't allowed to know all the charges or evidence; where lawyers' notes have to be screened in Washington and there is no way to produce the witnesses who could stop our defenders wasting time on men like The General.

We wouldn't know any of this half as well without Stafford Smith, and we might not know it at all. He's written a most useful book, but it must be said: the book cannot ever match his courage.