Ahmed Errachidi had never heard the story of Robert the Bruce and the indefatigable spider until this week.

But in the cell blocks of Guantanamo Bay, Inmate 590 learnt the same lesson as the Scottish King, in the same hard way.

Just as the Bruce took heart from the spider, the most inspiring moment in Mr Errachidi’s five-and-a-half years of internment came as he watched a solitary ant’s struggle for life.

The insect was trapped inside the fortified glass dome housing the security camera that watched Mr Errachidi’s every move in his isolation cell. It was trying to climb out, but kept slipping backwards again and again.

The tiny creature’s survival became, at that moment, the most important thing in the world. Mr Errachidi decided to intervene, taking a square of toilet paper, separating it into single ply and rolling it between his palms to form a thin thread.

He slipped the lifeline through a slim gap between the ceiling and the glass and hoped that the ant would find it.

To his delight, it did – climbing on to the paper and walking along it as Mr Errachidi pulled the paper out of the dome. In a matter of moments he had the ant in the palm of his hand and laid it down in a corner where other ants were feeding on the crumbs that he had left them from his meal. “I was so pleased, so excited,” Mr Errachidi said as he described the rescue operation to The Times in his first interview since he was freed from Guantanamo.

“When you’re alone for so long, when it’s only you, you do a lot of thinking. You see things that before you never paid attention to. I learnt a lot from the ants. They were another form of life and reminded me that there was hope. I used to get so angry with the guards when they killed the ants.”

In similar vein, a pebble that fell from the sole of a guard’s boot assumed huge significance when he was in the punishment block.

Apart from himself, the stone was the only nonmetal object in the cell.

It is just six weeks since Mr Errachidi, 41, a chef who worked in London hotels, restaurants and gastro-pubs for 16 years, was released from the camp, where he was interned without charge or trial, at the United States naval base in Cuba.

He was freed after the sole allegation against him – that he had been a senior figure at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in July 2001 – fell apart. The claim came from an unidentified source and was proved false by lawyers from the London-based charity Reprieve.

According to payslips, witness statements and bank records, Mr Errachidi was a long way from Afghanistan during July 2001 – working in the kitchens of the Westbury Hotel, Mayfair. The US military eventually declared Mr Errachidi “approved to leave Guantanamo” – as close as it comes to proclaiming him innocent.

Even though the evidence that could have freed him years ago lay in Britain, and that British officials were aware of its existence, Whitehall had rejected appeals to help him.

Mr Errachidi, a Moroccan, had been a resident in Britain but never a citizen and the Government decided it had no obligation to negotiate his release.

Freedom came on Tuesday, April 24, with a brutal farewell present. Mr Errachidi was taken from his cell in his orange jumpsuit, his ankles shackled, arms cuffed to a waistband, ear-muffs, goggles and a muzzle clamped on his head.

“The mask was cutting into the corners of my eyes, it was hurting me and I couldn’t see so I tried to lift my shackled hands to pull it down,” he said.

“As I did that, they grabbed me and threw me against the wall, my head smashed into the wall and they started beating me. They tightened the shackles and gave me one last beating.

“I decided not to scream. I said to myself this is the last time, I’m going to take it.”

Mr Errachidi was then taken to the base’s airfield. As he approached the cargo plane on which he would be flown to Morocco, the mask and goggles were removed to allow a military film crew to record his departure. Once inside the aircraft they were replaced and remained on his face throughout the seven-hour flight.

The Red Cross had asked him before he left Guantanamo if he would not rather stay than go back to Morocco where there was a risk of torture. He found the question insulting and says that in his homeland the police received him with kindness, courtesy and mint tea. After seven days, he was sent home to his family in Tangier.

It has been hard to get used to liberty. For five years he has not been allowed to walk more than three paces – the length of his cell – unshackled.

Sitting in the shade of a tree at Cap Malabata, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, it is not long before he stumbles over memories of captivity that are too raw and painful to talk about.

There were 19 days in the Dark Prison at Bagram airfield near Kabul, permanently in chains; 26 days of torture; long, long periods of solitary confinement. The tears well up and the usually fast-flowing words are choked off.

“I am on the edge,” Mr Errachidi says after a pause. “I don’t want to fall off.” He is remembering how to cook, but learning again how to be a father to his sons, Mohammed, 11, and Imran, 7, is much more difficult.

He pretends to his family that he is OK, that he is a tough guy, that he has come through it all unscathed. Everyone is going along with the pretence for now, but no one is really fooled.

Mr Errachidi’s incarceration was worse than that endured by many other Guantanamo inmates because the guards decided he was a senior man in al-Qaeda. Camp Delta’s commanders nicknamed him “The General” because he seemed to wield an influence over the other inmates.

He did, but only because he spoke English, understood what the guards were saying, got bored easily and was prepared to challenge the petty rules. It was Mr Errachidi who, after three-and-a-half years of arguing, convinced the commanders that toothpaste and toothbrushes were not “comfort items” and achieved an increase in the allocation of toilet paper from ten sheets per day to thirty.

It rankles, however, that he was not able to have the inmates recognised as people. Mr Errachidi said: “Even the name detainee was not given to us. We were called packages because we were in identical jumpsuits and wrapped up in chains.

“Two guards would escort you everywhere, they would radio their control room and say, ‘Package has been picked up’ and outside the interrogation room they would contact the interrogator and say, ‘Package is at the door’.

“If you ask why you are called a package, why you can’t be called a person they say, ‘This is the procedure’.” The same procedures forbid the guards from telling the inmates what day or month it is. [Link]

It's approaching six years since the 9/11 attacks but, as two recent sets of judicial rulings illustrate, America is still at odds with itself over its war on terrorism -- and how to treat captives.

Is the globe America's battlefield? Is al Qaeda ideology and the war on terrorism like Soviet communism and the Cold War, meaning an American president can someday declare victory?

Or, in the view of U.S. law, is it more like the drug war -- with no end in sight -- picking off alleged criminals one by one?

And, most critically, there is still no consensus about whether to treat U.S.-held captives as alleged criminals afforded a presumption of innocence or as enemy combatants allowed no recourse in federal court.

In other words, when does the Bush administration get to treat those it brands as ''terrorists'' as criminals? When are they warriors?

Legal scholars say the federal judiciary has traditionally deferred to presidential authority in time of war. And that has more or less been the case since the Sept. 11 attacks. But the latest rulings suggest that the pendulum may be swinging back to the courts.

Last week, a conservative federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., decided 2-1 that the clock ran out on the president's designation of Ali al Marri, 42, as an enemy combatant. He has been in a military brig in South Carolina since June 2003.

Marri and his family arrived in the United States Sept. 10, 2001, ostensibly to attend graduate school in Peoria, Ill. But the Bush administration claims he is an al Qaeda ''sleeper agent'' who met Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

'Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing in the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them `enemy combatants,' '' wrote Judge Diana Gribbon Motz in a 77-page decision.

The Justice Department said it would appeal to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, one of the most conservative circuits in the country. Unless the U.S. transfers him to a civilian proceeding, releases him or deports him, one side or the other is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Former Bush administration deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo, an architect of the policy, said the matter of how to handle detainees designated enemy combatants should have been already settled.

Twice the Supreme Court sought to give certain rights to detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as a result of the war on terror. And twice, Yoo said, Congress and President Bush overruled them, with the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, which stripped non-U.S. citizens designated by Bush as enemy combatants of the right to challenge their detention in federal court through habeas corpus.

'BIZARRE' OPINION

He called the appellate court decision an ''outlier'' by judges who don't agree that America is engaged in a global war on terrorism. He expects the full Fourth Circuit to overrule them.

The judiciary defers to the executive and Congress in a time of war, he said, and as he sees it, America is at war with al Qaeda, not battling a criminal enterprise.

''It's completely bizarre. Under this opinion, none of the 9/11 hijackers were enemy combatants,'' Yoo said by phone from Berkeley Law School in California, where he is a professor.

Suppose the passengers aboard the fourth airliner that crashed in a Pennsylvania field in 2001 had wrestled control of the plane from the hijackers and landed it safely? he asked.

``According to this opinion, the hijackers on that plane could not be enemy combatants. They would have to be given lawyers, Miranda warnings and a jury trial.''

Precisely, say opponents of enemy combatant policy who argue the executive branch got it wrong by assuming the power to have the military detain -- indefinitely, without charge or trial. In the instance of Marri, in fact, without any review.

A Defense Department spokesman said as long as the court appeal was under way, the Pentagon would not be staging a so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunal in which U.S. military officers, not judges, simulate a battlefield status hearing to determine if there is reason to hold him.

That very process was at the heart of a dispute that saw not one, but two, U.S. military judges dismiss charges against a Canadian and Yemeni at Guantánamo.

Neither Navy Capt. Keith Allred nor Army Col. Peter Brownback III, the judges, dispute that they are at war. In fact, their roles presiding at the military commissions are conditioned on the assumption. But they said the Pentagon's own processes had -- so far -- failed to distinguish between captives who were legitimately on the battlefield, and therefore ''lawful enemy combatants,'' and those who either fought unfairly or didn't have the right to be there -- ``unlawful enemy combatants.''

The overarching issue reflects an evolving process across the years on how to categorize and hold captives, and a continuing debate on whether they are to be treated as criminals or combatants, said constitutional law scholar Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine University.

LAW TAKING SHAPE

Before 9/11, he said, there was no law that would govern a war on terrorism that ranged across the globe. ''It was largely undeveloped and unstructured before we confronted it, and it's only beginning to take shape now,'' he said.

That's why it's no coincidence, he said, that the Supreme Court this year left to lower courts to grapple with the latest challenges to the war tribunals and habeas corpus stripping provisions.

Tradition and precedent has allowed the president vast powers in times of war.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and used military tribunals -- only drawing a Supreme Court rebuke in 1866, once the war was over. During World War II, the justices upheld Franklin Roosevelt's executive order authorizing the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans -- and it took until 1988 for Congress and a president, Ronald Reagan, to apologize. [Link]