Tipton Three

The Tipton Three is the collective name given to three British citizens from Tipton, England who were held in extrajudicial detention by the United States government for two years in Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba. Ruhal Ahmed was born on 11 March 1981; Asif Iqbal was born on 24 April 1981; the United States Department of Defense estimated that Shafiq Rasul was born in 1977. Other reports state he was only a couple of years older than his friends. The three men in their early 20s were captured in Afghanistan in 2001, transferred to United States Army custody and transported to Guantanamo, where they were detained as enemy combatants. Their families were not told of their whereabouts until the British Foreign Office informed them in January 2002. They were three of nine Britons detained at Guantanamo. After negotiations between the governments and British assessment of their interrogations, the men were repatriated to the United Kingdom in March 2004. They were released without charge the next day. With many others, Shafiq Rasul filed a habeas corpus suit in 2004 against the United States government for his detention, in a case that ultimately went to the US Supreme Court. In the landmark, Rasul v. Bush (2004), the court held that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge whether their detention is constitutional in the US courts. The three men were represented in the UK by the lawyer Gareth Peirce. In addition, the Tipton Three and Jamal Udeen Al Harith filed a suit in 2004 against the US government in Rasul v. Rumsfeld, challenging its use of torture and religious abuses of detainees. This case was dismissed in April 2009 by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, based on "limited immunity" of government officials; the court ruled that such treatment had not been legally defined at the time as prohibited. In December 2009 the US Supreme Court declined to accept the case for hearing, so the lower court ruling stands. The three men were featured as the subjects of The Road to Guantánamo (2006), a docu drama about the events directed by the British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom.

The three travelled together, were captured together, and were released together on 9 March 2004, along with two other detainees.

Ruhal Ahmed (born 11 March 1981 in Birmingham, West Midlands, England) is a British citizen. His detainee identification number was 110. He has taken part in a campaign against torture, organised by Amnesty International.

Shafiq Rasul (born 15 April 1977 in Dudley, West Midlands). His detainee ID number was 86. The three were among the first detainees released who gave an alternative view of conditions within the camp to that offered by United States Department of Defense.

The Road to Guantanamo (2006) is a docu drama about the Tipton Three made by director Michael Winterbottom and based on their accounts. The screenplay was based on the initial account from the three detainees.

In May 2007, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul agreed to appear on the Channel 4 reality show Lie Lab. The technology used on the show was developed by Sean Spence from the University of Sheffield. It uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the activity in the brain's pre frontal cortex to view how a subject reacts to questioning. Critics of the test have included neuroscientists and legal scholars, who have said the technique is unlikely to accurately measure truth telling, as there are too many variables affecting results. They think the technique may be useful for additional research.