BBC News, March 13, 2009
A UK resident freed from Guantanamo Bay has said he would not have faced torture or extraordinary rendition but for British involvement in his case.
US interrogators told him, “This is the British file and this is the American file,” Binyam Mohamed, 30, told the BBC in his first broadcast interview.
He said he wanted to see ex-President George Bush put on trial and, if there was evidence, former UK PM Tony Blair.
The UK says it does not condone torture, but will investigate claims.
The US, which has dropped all charges against Mr Mohamed, says he has a history of making unsubstantiated claims.
BBC News reporter Jon Manel, who conducted the interview at a secret location, said that Mr Mohamed looked “very thin” and claimed to be suffering from health problems.
Mr Mohamed, who spoke to the media against the advice of his psychiatrist because he wanted people to know what happened to him, described his return to the UK last month.
 |
 Feelings of happiness and sadness, I still don’t have them. As far as I am concerned, nothing matters 
|
“I didn’t feel like I was free. Even now I don’t feel that I’m free,” he said.
“It’s been seven years of literal darkness that I have been through. Coming back to life is taking me some time.”
He added: “I don’t have the regular person’s feelings that people have. The feelings of happiness and sadness, I still don’t have them.
“As far as I am concerned, nothing matters.”
The former terror suspect said that the six years and 10 months he spent in detention had left him feeling “dead”.
MI5 involvement
While detained in Pakistan, Mr Mohamed said he was interviewed for three hours by an MI5 officer calling himself John whose role, according to Mr Mohamed, was to support the American interrogators.
“If it wasn’t for the British involvement right at the beginning of the interrogations in Pakistan, and suggestions that were made by MI5 to the Americans of how to get me to respond, I don’t think I would have gone to Morocco,” he said.
“It was that initial help that MI5 gave to America that led me through the seven years of what I went through.”
The MI5 agent who questioned him has previously denied at the British High Court any suggestion that he threatened or put any pressure on Mr Mohamed.
|
In the ‘dark prison’ I was … dead. I didn’t exist. I wasn’t there. There was no day, there was no night
|
During the interview, Mr Mohamed’s lawyer prevented him from answering questions about travel documents he had used to get to Afghanistan and a training camp he attended.
This was because Mr Mohamed’s immigration status is currently under review.
Mr Mohamed said that in July 2002 he was flown to a secret site in Morocco where, he claimed, he was tortured by local officers asking him questions supplied by British intelligence operatives and showing him hundreds of photographs of Muslim men living in the UK.
“The interrogator who was showing me the file would say, ‘This is the British file and this is the American file.'”
Mr Mohamed said that 70% of questions put to him had to have come from sources in the UK.
In the UK, the attorney general is continuing a review into whether to ask police to investigate allegations of British collusion in mistreatment of Mr Mohamed.
His lawyers have previously placed on record claims that the torture included a razor being used to slash his genitals.
Special agent
Mr Mohamed said his mistreatment began soon after he was arrested in Pakistan in early 2002.
In the interview, extracts of which were broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said he was questioned by a middle-aged man with a ponytail claiming to be “Jim from the FBI”.
Jim reportedly said he was a special agent sent from Washington to ask questions on behalf of the White House.
He asked about Mr Mohamed’s alleged role in a plot to detonate a dirty bomb in the US, which Mr Mohamed said was a “fantasy”.
The former detainee told the BBC he had never been involved in any plots and had not attended terrorist training camps before 9/11.
Asked if he had been an al-Qaeda operative, he replied: “I don’t even know what that means because how am I supposed to be an al-Qaeda operative?
“How do you become an al-Qaeda operative?”
Camp closure
In January 2004, Mr Mohamed said he was taken to a place he calls the “dark prison” in the Afghan capital, Kabul, where he said he almost lost his mind.
He claimed he was put in a dark cell with just a blanket on the floor.
Speakers attached to the walls pumped out music by the American rapper Eminem 24 hours a day for a month.
“In the ‘dark prison’ I was literally dead. I didn’t exist. I wasn’t there. There was no day, there was no night.”
Following his experiences in Kabul, Mr Mohamed signed a confession which he said he agreed to only because he was told he would be flown back to the “dark prison” if he didn’t co-operate.
Shortly after this he was sent to Guantanamo Bay where, he said, guards attacked him for refusing to give his fingerprints.
He claimed abuses at the camp had increased since President Barack Obama announced his intention to close it within a year.
On Thursday, a Home Office spokesperson said: “The government unreservedly condemns the use of torture as a matter of fundamental principle and works hard with its international partners to eradicate this abhorrent practice worldwide.
“The security and intelligence agencies do not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or inhumane or degrading treatment.”
Peace and Justice Post 
Sri Lankan newspaper editor held without charge
March 13, 2009By Nanda Wickramesinghe |WSWS, 13 March 2009
The detention of N. Vithyatharan, the editor of the Tamil daily Sudar Oli, is another example of the police-state methods being used by the Sri Lankan government to silence any media criticism, in particular of its criminal war against the country’s Tamil minority.
Vithyatharan was seized by police at a family funeral in the Colombo suburb of Mount Lavinia on February 26. Police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekera initially refused to acknowledge any police involvement, saying that the editor had been abducted by an unidentified group in a white van.
The official denial was particularly ominous as hundreds of people have been abducted or murdered over the past three years by death squads sanctioned by the security forces. The white van is their well-known trademark.
In a matter of hours, however, police changed their tune, admitting that Vithyatharan had been arrested by the Colombo Crimes Division and was being held at its headquarters. A Defence Ministry spokesman Lakshman Hulugalle told the media that the editor was detained in connection with a February 20 air attack on Colombo by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) with two light planes.
Vithyatharan is still being held without charge under the draconian provisions of the government’s emergency powers.
James Ross, legal and policy director at the US-based Human Rights Watch, commented earlier this month: “Once again the government has arrested a Tamil journalist on allegations that border on the absurd. And if the accounts of a beating are accurate, it shows the open contempt the government has for Sri Lanka’s independent media.”
The government of President Mahinda Rajapakse has become increasingly sensitive to criticism as news of the army’s killing of Tamil civilians in fighting in the North has been covered in the international media, provoking protests in a number of countries.
Well before the LTTE’s air attack, the Colombo Criminal Division (CCD) had already grilled Vithyatharan on February 13 over two articles published in the Sudar Oli. The day before Vithyatharan’s arrest, officers from the state intelligence unit searched the Sudar Oli office at Grandpass and asked for the names and contact numbers of all the newspaper’s journalists. The newspaper’s managing director, E. Saravanapavan, refused to provide any details.
Saravanapavan, who is also Vithyatharan’s brother-in-law, told the WSWS what happened on the day of the arrest. “The abductors might have calculated that there would be only a handful of people at the funeral parlour by mid-morning. But quite a considerable number had arrived by 9.45 a.m. when the abductors crashed in. They had to face more people than they expected.
“When the three policemen in uniform started to drag Vithyatharan out through the gate of the parlour, relatives hung onto him and tried to pull him back into the building. Our people almost managed to free him after a tug-of-war. When this happened, three toughs in civvies jumped out of the vehicle in which the police arrived and came running into the parlour. They began hitting us, causing injury to a number of our relatives. Then they forcibly dragged Vithyatharan away.
“Our people raised an outcry. We noted that the number plate of the white van was HX 0640. A few of us then got into a vehicle and started to follow the van. But we could not catch up with the abductors. Finding that our complaints to the police stations in the area were of no avail, I took steps to immediately inform the international news media and diplomatic missions as well as the police headquarters and also a number of ministers,” Saravanapavan said.
As this was taking place, government spokesman L. Y. Abeywardene made a call to the media rights group, Reporters without Borders, at 11.45 a.m., saying that Vithyatharan was being held by police and was being interrogated, but his relatives would be able to visit him.
Saravanapavan explained: “After Vithyatharan was taken away, he was blindfolded and beaten severely on the feet and head, so badly that the CCD had to take him to a hospital to get his head x-rayed. His wife and children who saw him after they were notified by the police have been very disturbed by his condition.”
If the government had not been forced to acknowledge Vithyatharan’s arrest, it is quite possible that he could have been killed. As in hundreds of other cases, his murder would have been blamed on “unknown abductors” and after a perfunctory police investigation the case would have been closed. What stands out about Vithyatharan’s abduction was its brazen character. It took place in broad daylight in front of scores of people and involved uniformed police officers.
Sudar Oli and its sister paper in the northern town of Jaffna, Uthayan, have been targetted before. Their offices have been attacked several times and six of their employees have been killed. Following Vithyatharan’s arrest, senior staff have received threatening phone calls, telling them to leave the country or face the same fate.
The arrest of Vithyatharan followed the murder of Sunday Leader editor, Lasantha Wickrematunga, on January 8. Wickrematunga, who had been increasingly critical of the Rajapakse government, was shot in his car by unknown gunmen as he was travelling to work in Colombo. Two days earlier, armed thugs burst into the premises of the Sirasa TV station, smashing equipment and attacking staff. Police have made no arrests in either case.
According to the Sri Lankan media organisation Free Media Movement, 12 journalists have been killed in Sri Lanka since August 2005 and 27 are in detention.
Well-known journalist J.S. Tissainayagam has been detained for more than a year along with two colleagues, Vettivel Jasikaran and Vadivel Valamathy. The charges brought against Tissainayagam, some five months after he was detained, are blatantly political. He is accused of inciting communal disharmony in articles written in 2006 and 2007, as well as writing and raising money for the North Eastern Monthly magazine. The three each face up to 20 years’ jail if found guilty.
For all its boasting about the army’s victories over the LTTE, Rajapakse is confronting a deepening economic crisis and the prospect of widespread social unrest over mounting unemployment and deteriorating living standards. The government’s repression of the media is a sharp warning of the measures that are being prepared more broadly against working people.
Share this:
Tags:journalists in detension, killing of Tamil civilians, N. Vithyatharan, Sri Lankan government, war against Tamils
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »