Posts Tagged ‘Binyam Mohamed’

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Ex-Gitmo detainee: memos show UK torture complicity

March 9, 2009

Jurist, March 8, 2009

Former Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed claimed in March 8 media reports that documents sent from MI5 to the CIA show that the British intelligence agency was involved with his alleged torture in Morocco. Mohamed claimed the documents reveal that MI5 fed the CIA questions that ended up in the hands of his Moroccan interrogators. A telegraph to the CIA dated Nov. 5, 2002, reportedly has the heading, “Request for further Detainee questioning.”

Mohamed, a native of Ethiopa who claims to have been transferred to Morocco for torture under a US program of extraordinary rendition, said he obtained the documents through the US legal process while seeking his release from Guantánamo Bay. Conservative MP David Davis called for investigations into British collusion in torture.

Last week, the UK government’s independent reviewer of terror laws called for a judicial inquiry into British complicity in US rendition and torture. British media reported last week that UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak told British ministers that MI5 may have been complicit in torture committed while detainees including Mohamed were in US custody. Mohamed was returned to the UK last week following seven years of detention, including five at Guantanamo Bay, where he was held on charges of conspiring to commit terrorism. Those charges were dismissed in October, but Mohamed remained in custody while US authorities considered filing new charges.

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Guantánamo: we need the truth

February 26, 2009

Without transparency about Binyam Mohamed’s torture, the damage done will linger for years after the camp’s closure

With a stoic grace, Binyam Mohamed has described his return to the UK today after seven long years of detention in Guantánamo Bay as “more in sadness than in anger”.

I have met that sense of emptiness and loss before. I have worked with two constituents who returned to the UK after a long incarceration in Guantánamo. In both cases the men had been illegally taken, in the process known as extraordinary rendition, by the CIA from an African country; and in both cases there were allegations of torture and degrading treatment. The journey to rebuild a life and to reconnect with family has been long, slow and fraught with pain. How do you come to terms with the lost years, the shame of allegations you cannot refute, or to witnessing humanity at its very darkest? Binyam Mohamed will need his friends and family around him, and the time and space to move on. It will therefore fall to others to ask the vital questions he is too weary to ask for himself.

We must not be squeamish or turn a blind eye to what has happened to him. Over seven years he has been shackled and blindfolded, flown to dark prisons across the world and kept incommunicado. He has made allegations of systematic torture, and says he had up to 20 or 30 cuts made into his penis and genitalia, with chemicals poured on the wounds for extra pain. In Guantánamo, reports suggest he was routinely humiliated and abused, resulting in long periods on hunger strike in protest. In all this time, Mohamed was never charged with a crime.

We might have expected the government to protect a UK resident from such barbaric treatment. Instead, their fingerprints are all over his case file.

Torture is wrong, pure and simple. Civilised and democratic governments, including Britain, should have absolutely no role in a practice that is both ineffective and inhumane, and there is no excuse to put our so-called special relationship with the US before the rule of law. It is not enough to simply speak out against torture: the foreign secretary has a duty to help root out and end such practices.

We cannot stamp out torture unless we know why and how it was allowed to happen in the first place. Barack Obama’s commitment to close Guantánamo is a huge leap forward, but we need a full investigation to make sure that such fundamental basic principles can never be flouted again. Without this openness and transparency, the damage done by Guantánamo will linger on long after the detention camp is closed.

The Labour government should be standing up to the United States, not colluding in a cover-up. If British residents have been subjected to torture, and if our own government have turned a blind eye, then we have a right to know. If the British government is sitting on vital evidence then it should immediately release it to the public.

Binyam Mohamed has said that, when he asked a camp guard why he was being tortured, the guard replied, “It’s just to degrade you, so when you leave here, you’ll have the scars and you’ll never forget.”

We should not forget either. The wounds and scars inflicted on Mohamed are not just a personal tragedy for him, they also represent a vicious assault on the values and humanity of our country. Labour’s already bruised and battered human rights record lies in tatters. President Obama has promised a fresh start but, before the slate can be wiped clean, we have to be told the truth.

Sarah Teather is Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Guantánamo Bay

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Who is Binyam Mohamed?

February 25, 2009

By Andy Worthington | Counterpunch, Feb 24, 2009

As British resident Binyam Mohamed stepped off a plane at RAF Northolt on Monday February 23, six years and ten months since he was first abducted by the Pakistani authorities at Karachi airport, it was impossible not to sympathize with the words written in a statement made by the tall, thin, slightly-stooped 30-year old, and delivered by his lawyers at a press conference.

“I hope you will understand that after everything I have been through I am neither physically nor mentally capable of facing the media on the moment of my arrival back to Britain,” the statement read. “Please forgive me if I make a simple statement through my lawyer. I hope to be able to do better in days to come, when I am on the road to recovery.”

For the last three and half years, since Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers (at Reprieve, the legal action charity) first released his harrowing account of his torture in Morocco at the hands of the CIA’s proxy torturers, the British resident’s story has, understandably, had few bright episodes. As Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, explained in his book Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side, during the three days in Guantánamo that Binyam related the story of his horrendous ordeal — for 18 months in Morocco, and then for another five months at the CIA’s own “Dark Prison” near Kabul, until he finally made false confessions that he was involved with al-Qaeda and had planned to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in New York — he explained, “I’m sorry I have no emotion when talking about the past, ‘cause I have closed. You have to figure out the emotion part — I’m kind of dead in the head.”

And yet, as Binyam embarks on his long “road to recovery” — attended by his lawyers, and, mercifully, by his sister Zuhra, who flew from her home in the United States to meet him, and to fill what would otherwise have been an aching void, as Binyam has no family in the UK — it is unlikely that the media will, in general, manage to report much of the man behind the myth that has grown up around him.

To that end, I thought it appropriate to relate a few anecdotes that bring Binyam the human being, rather than Binyam the prisoner, to life. The first comes from Stafford Smith’s book, where he describes his first meeting with Binyam as follows:

“Binyam was twenty-seven. He was tall and gangling, dark-skinned, originally from Ethiopia. He smiled and immediately told me how glad he was to see me. He spoke quietly, with a particular dignity. Some prisoners would take many hours of convincing that I was not from the CIA, but Binyam immediately opened up.”

Of particular interest is an extraordinary chapter, “Con-mission,” which relates the farcical story of Binyam’s first hearing for his proposed trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo, in 2006, just before the Commissions were declared illegal by the US Supreme Court. It’s worth buying the book for this chapter alone, as it explains in extraordinary detail quite how farcical Guantánamo’s rigged trial system was, and how it was exploited mercilessly by Binyam, who arranged for Stafford Smith to get him “a proper type of Islamic dress,” dyed orange (he wanted a Dutch football shirt, but Reprieve couldn’t find one), to make a clear visual statement in court that he was no ordinary defendant and this was no ordinary trial. He also asked for a marker pen and a piece of card, and, during the hearing, after he had thrown the judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kolhmann, off his stride by launching into a rambling monologue about justice that Kohlmann found himself unable to interrupt, he took the marker pen, scrawled “CON-MISSION” on it, showed it to the gathered journalists, and declared, “this is not a commission, this is a con-mission, is a mission to con the world, and that’s what it is, you understand.”

Warming to his theme, as Col. Kohlmann “ was staring into the headlights of Binyam’s speech and could see no way to cut him off,” he continued,

“When are you going to stop this? This is not the way to deal with this issue. That is why I don’t want to call this place a courtroom, because I don’t think it is a courtroom.”

“I am sure you wouldn’t agree with it, because if you was arrested somewhere in Arabia and Bin Laden says, ‘You know what, you are my enemy but I am going to force you to have a lawyer and I give you some bearded turban person,’ I don’t think you will agree with that. Forget the rules, regulations and crap … you wouldn’t deal with that. That is where we are. This is a bad place. You are in charge of it.”

Stafford Smith then proceeded to explain:

“It was an extraordinary lecture. Binyam finally came to a firm conclusion. ‘I am done. You can stop looking at the watch,’ he said. He then turned away from Kohlmann, as if to ignore any response. He was holding up his sign, ‘CON-MISSION,’ and waving it to the journalists behind him, just in case they had missed it the first time.”

The other story was related by another British resident held at Guantánamo, Bisher al-Rawi, who was released in March 2007, and his words capture how Binyam’s concern for justice permeated his entire approach to his imprisonment, and, in Bisher’s opinion, also reflected a very British approach that he had learned during the seven years he had lived in the UK before his capture:

“He is so British — I mean so British! The way he stands, the way he talks, his painstaking use of logic. He’s such a gentleman. And he is knowledgeable and he stands up for his rights in a really British way. Like with S.O.P. This is something the guards have. It is called Standard Operating Procedure — S.O.P. And the funny thing about this Standard Operating Procedure is that it changes every day. Every day you have new Standard Operating Procedure. And Binyam, he draws attention to this and insists on his entitlement to be treated the same way as the Standard Operating Procedure dictated the day before. And they hate him for this. But he’s just being British.”

Perhaps the media snipers who are asking why Binyam should be allowed back into the UK would like to dwell on this as they ignore both the seven years that he lived in Britain, when, as MI5 confirmed, he was “a nobody,” and was not wanted in connection with any crime, and the seven years that he spent in the custody of the United States — or its proxy torturers — when, as David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has conceded, he had “established an arguable case” that “he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States,” and was also “subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States.”

In addition, as the British government struggles with claims that it has regularly fed intelligence information about British “terror suspects” seized in Pakistan to Pakistani agents, knowing full well that the Pakistanis regularly use torture, those same critics might want to recall the words of the judges who reviewed Binyam’s case in the High Court last summer. The judges explained that the British government’s involvement in Binyam’s case, and its relationship to the US — which involved sending agents to interview him in Pakistan, even though he was being held illegally, and providing and receiving intelligence about him while he was being tortured in Morocco — “went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.”

There are more revelations to come about torture policies that involve — or involved — the US, the UK, Morocco, Pakistan and a host of other countries, but for now I’m content to let one of its victims try to rebuild his life in peace. As Binyam also explained in his statement after his release,

“I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares. Before this ordeal, ‘torture’ was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim. It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways — all orchestrated by the United States government.”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of ‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk
He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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Victim of American terrorism Binyam Mohamed arrives in UK

February 23, 2009

BBC, Feb 233, 2009

Binyam Mohamed: His full statement

Binyam Mohamed

Mr Mohamed claims confessions were obtained using torture

A British resident who said he was tortured while being detained at Guantanamo Bay for more than four years has issued a statement on the eve of his return to the UK.

Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, 30, says his experience was worse than his “darkest nightmares”.

Here is his statement in full:

I hope you will understand that after everything I have been through I am neither physically nor mentally capable of facing the media on the moment of my arrival back to Britain.

It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways – all orchestrated by the United States government
Binyam Mohamed

Please forgive me if I make a simple statement through my lawyer. I hope to be able to do better in days to come, when I am on the road to recovery.

I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares. Before this ordeal, “torture” was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim.

It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways – all orchestrated by the United States government.

‘I have a duty’

While I want to recover, and put it all as far in my past as I can, I also know I have an obligation to the people who still remain in those torture chambers.

My own despair was greatest when I thought that everyone had abandoned me. I have a duty to make sure that nobody else is forgotten.

I am grateful that in the end I was not simply left to my fate. I am grateful to my lawyers and other staff at Reprieve, and to Lt Col Yvonne Bradley, who fought for my freedom.

Lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith reads a statement on Binyam Mohamed’s behalf

I am grateful to the members of the British Foreign Office who worked for my release. And I want to thank people around Britain who wrote to me in Guantanamo Bay to keep my spirits up, as well as to the members of the media who tried to make sure that the world knew what was going on.

I know I would not be home in Britain today if it were not for everyone’s support. Indeed, I might not be alive at all.

I wish I could say that it is all over, but it is not. There are still 241 Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo.

Many have long since been cleared even by the US military, yet cannot go anywhere as they face persecution. For example, Ahmed bel Bacha lived here in Britain, and desperately needs a home.

‘Horrors’

Then there are thousands of other prisoners held by the US elsewhere around the world, with no charges, and without access to their families.

And I have to say, more in sadness than in anger, that many have been complicit in my own horrors over the past seven years.

For myself, the very worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence.

I had met with British intelligence in Pakistan. I had been open with them. Yet the very people who I had hoped would come to my rescue, I later realised, had allied themselves with my abusers.

I am not asking for vengeance; only that the truth should be made known, so that nobody in the future should have to endure what I have endured.

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Very Bad News: Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base Will Be Obama’s Guantanamo

February 23, 2009

By Stephen Foley, Independent UK. Posted February 22, 2009.

The Afghan air base is to undergo a $60 million expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as remain at Gitmo.

a month after signing an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, President Barack Obama has quietly agreed to keep denying the right to trial to hundreds more terror suspects held at a makeshift camp in Afghanistan that human rights lawyers have dubbed “Obama’s Guantanamo.”

In a single-sentence answer filed with a Washington court, the administration dashed hopes that it would immediately rip up Bush-era policies that have kept more than 600 prisoners in legal limbo and in rudimentary conditions at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul.

Now, human rights groups say they are becoming increasingly concerned that the use of extra-judicial methods in Afghanistan could be extended rather than curtailed under the new U.S. administration. The air base is about to undergo a $60 million expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.

Apart from staff at the International Red Cross, human rights groups and journalists have been barred from Bagram, where former prisoners say they were tortured by being shackled to the ceiling of isolation cells and deprived of sleep.

The base became notorious when two Afghan inmates died after the use of such techniques in 2002, and although treatment and conditions have been improved since then, the Red Cross issued a formal complaint to the U.S. government in 2007 about harsh treatment of some prisoners held in isolation for months.

While the majority of the estimated 600 prisoners are believed to be Afghan, an unknown number — perhaps several dozen — have been picked up from other countries.

One of the detainees who passed through the Afghan prison was Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who is expected to return to the UK this week after his release from Guantanamo Bay. Mr. Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, head of a legal charity called Reprieve, called President Obama’s strategy “the Bagram bait and switch,” where the administration was trumpeting the closure of a camp housing 242 prisoners, while scaling up the Bagram base to house 1,100 more.

“Guantanamo Bay was a diversionary tactic in the ‘War on Terror’,” said the lawyer. “Totting up the prisoners around the world — held by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, the prison ships and Diego Garcia, or held by U.S. proxies in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco — the numbers dwarf Guantanamo. There are still perhaps as many as 18,000 people in legal black holes. Mr. Obama should perhaps be offered more than a month to get the American house in order. However, this early sally from the administration underlines another message: it is far too early for human rights advocates to stand on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announce, ‘Mission Accomplished.'”

Four non-Afghan detainees at Bagram are fighting a legal case in Washington to be given the same access to the U.S. court system that was granted to the inmates of Guantanamo Bay by a controversial Supreme Court decision last year. The Bush administration was fighting their claim.

Two days into his presidency, Mr. Obama promised to shut Guantanamo within a year in an effort to restore America’s moral standing in the world and to prosecute the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.” But on the same day, the judge in the Bagram case said that the order “indicated significant changes to the government’s approach to the detention, and review of detention, of individuals currently held at Guantanamo Bay” and that “a different approach could impact the court’s analysis of certain issues central to the resolution” of the Bagram cases as well. Judge John Bates asked the new administration if it wanted to “refine” its stance.

The response, filed by the Department of Justice late on Friday, came as a crushing blow to human rights campaigners. “Having considered the matter, the government adheres to its previously articulated position,” it said.

Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, the New York human rights organisation representing the detainees, warned last night that “by leaving Bagram open, the administration turns the closure of Guantanamo into essentially a hollow and symbolic gesture.”

She said: “Without reconsidering the underlying policy, which has led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the indefinite detention of hundreds of people all these years, then we are simply returning to the status quo. The exact same thing that had the world up in arms has been going on at Bagram since even before Guantanamo.

“People have been tortured to the point that they have died; it is a rallying cry for those who oppose the U.S. actions in Afghanistan; it is not strategic for the U.S.; and, more importantly, holding people indefinitely, regardless of who they are and regardless of the facts, is completely inconsistent with everything we stand for as a country.”

The Department of Justice would only say that the legal briefs in the Washington case “speak for themselves.” It says Bagram is a special case because, unlike Guantanamo, it is sited within a theatre of war.

Mr. Obama has pushed out the wider questions about the U.S. policy on detaining terror suspects and supporters of the Taliban in Afghanistan until the summer, ordering a review that will take six months to complete.

The administration is weighing the likely increase in prisoners from an expanded fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, against the international perception that it is embedding extra-judicial detention into its policies for years to come.

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UK agents ‘colluded with torture in Pakistan’

February 22, 2009

• Intelligence sources ‘confirm abuse’
• Extent of Mohamed injuries revealed

A shocking new report alleges widespread complicity between British security agents and their Pakistani counterparts who have routinely engaged in the torture of suspects.

In the study, which will be published next month by the civil liberties group Human Rights Watch, at least 10 Britons are identified who have been allegedly tortured in Pakistan and subsequently questioned by UK intelligence officials. It warns that more British cases may surface and that the issue of Pakistani terrorism suspects interrogated by British agents is likely to “run much deeper”.

The report will further embarrass the foreign secretary, David Miliband, who has repeatedly said the UK does not condone torture. He has been under fire for refusing to disclose US documents relating to the treatment of Guantánamo detainee and former British resident Binyam Mohamed. The documents are believed to contain evidence about the torture of Mohamed and British complicity in his maltreatment. Mohamed will return to Britain this week. Doctors who examined him in Guantánamo found evidence of prolonged physical and mental mistreatment.

Ali Dayan Hasan, who led the Pakistan-based inquiry, said sources within the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), the Intelligence Bureau and the military security services had provided “confirmation and information” relating to British collusion in the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Hasan said the Human Rights Watch (HRW) evidence collated from Pakistan intelligence officials indicated a “systemic” modus operandi among British security services, involving a significant number of UK agents from MI5 rather than maverick elements. Different agents were deployed to interview different suspects, many of whom alleged that prior to interrogation by British officials they were tortured by Pakistani agents.

Among the 10 identified cases of British citizens and residents mentioned in the report is Rangzieb Ahmed, 33, from Rochdale, who claims he was tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents before being questioned by two MI5 officers. Ahmed was convicted of being a member of al-Qaida at Manchester crown court, yet the jury was not told that three of the fingernails of his left hand had been removed. The response from MI5 to the allegations that it had colluded in Ahmed’s torture were heard in camera, however, after the press and the public were excluded from the proceedings. Ahmed’s description of the cell in which he claims he was tortured closely matches that where Salahuddin Amin, 33, from Luton, says he was tortured by ISI officers between interviews with MI5 officers.

Zeeshan Siddiqui, 25, from London, who was detained in Pakistan in 2005, also claims he was interviewed by British intelligence agents during a period in which he was tortured.

Other cases include that of a London medical student who was detained in Karachi and tortured after the July 2005 attacks in London. Another case involving Britons allegedly tortured in Pakistan and questioned by UK agents involves a British Hizb ut-Tahrir supporter.

Rashid Rauf, from Birmingham, was detained in Pakistan and questioned over suspected terrorist activity in 2006. He was reportedly killed after a US drone attack in Pakistan’s tribal regions, though his body has never been found.

Hasan said: “What the research suggests is that these are not incidents involving one particular rogue officer or two, but rather an array of individuals involved over a period of several years.

“The issue is not just British complicity in the torture of British citizens, it is the issue of British complicity in the torture period. We know of at least 10 cases, but the complicity probably runs much deeper because it involves a series of terrorism suspects who are Pakistani. This is the heart of the matter.

“They are not the same individuals [MI5 officers] all the time. I know that the people who have gone to see Siddiqui in Peshawar are not the same people who have seen Ahmed in Rawalpindi.”

Last night the government faced calls to clarify precisely its relationship with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, which are known to routinely use torture.

A Foreign Office spokesman said that an investigation by the British security services had revealed “there is nothing to suggest they have engaged in torture in Pakistan”. He added: “Our policy is not to participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture, or inhumane or degrading treatment, for any purpose.”

But former shadow home secretary David Davis said the claims from Pakistan served to “reinforce” allegations that UK authorities, at the very least, ignored Pakistani torture techniques.

“The British agencies can no longer pretend that ‘Hear no evil, see no evil’ is applicable in the modern world,” he added.

Last week HRW submitted evidence to parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights. The committee is to question Miliband and Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, over a legal loophole which appears to offer British intelligence officers immunity in the UK for any crimes committed overseas.

It has also emerged that New York-based HRW detailed its concerns in a letter to the UK government last October but has yet to receive a response.

The letter arrived at the same time that the Attorney General was tasked with deciding if Scotland Yard should begin a criminal investigation into British security agents’ treatment of Binyam Mohamed. Crown prosecutors are currently weighing up the evidence.

Hasan said that evidence indicated a considerable number of UK officers were involved in interviewing terrorism suspects after they were allegedly tortured. He told the Observer: “We don’t know who the individuals [British intelligence officers] were, but when you have different personnel coming in and behaving in a similar fashion it implies some level of systemic approach to the situation, rather than one eager beaver deciding it is absolutely fine for someone to be beaten or hung upside down.”

He accused British intelligence officers of turning a blind eye as UK citizens endured torture at the hands of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

“They [the British] have met the suspect … and have conspicuously failed to notice that someone is in a state of high physical distress, showing signs of injury. If you are a secret service agent and fail to notice that their fingernails are missing, you ought to be fired.”

Britain’s former chief legal adviser, Lord Goldsmith, said that the Foreign Office would want to examine any British involvement in torture allegations very carefully and, if necessary, bring individuals “to book” to ensure such behaviour was “eradicated”.

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Miliband faces new ‘torture cover-up’ storm

February 16, 2009

Richard Norton-Taylor | The Guardian, Monday 16 February 2009

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, was last night facing fresh pressure over torture allegations after it was revealed that his officials asked the US for help in suppressing crucial evidence.

The Foreign Office solicited a letter from the US to back up its claim that if the evidence was disclosed, Washington could stop sharing intelligence with Britain. The claim persuaded two high court judges earlier this month to suppress what they called “powerful evidence” relating to the ill treatment of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay.

In response to the British request, John Bellinger, the state department’s chief legal adviser, said in a letter to the Foreign Office last August: “We want to affirm the public disclosure of these documents is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence information-sharing arrangements between our two governments”.

In their judgment, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones made it clear that without Miliband’s claim about what they called the “gravity of the threat” from the US, they would have ordered the evidence to be revealed. Though the judges repeatedly used the word “threat”, Miliband subsequently denied the US had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Britain.

Miliband’s denial last week led lawyers for Mohamed and the media, including the Guardian, to ask the judges to reopen the case on the grounds that the foreign secretary had fundamentally undermined his case. The judges agreed, against Foreign Office opposition, to reopen the case next month.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, the legal charity which represents Mohamed, said yesterday: “This just isn’t going to go away unless both the US and the UK stop trying to suppress evidence of torture”.

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Bring Binyam home

February 13, 2009

The greatest injustice I fear is that Binyam Mohamed is still being held at Guantánamo only to suppress evidence of his torture

I am a lawyer and a soldier, and I act for Binyam Mohamed, who is currently on hunger strike in Guantánamo Bay. I came to England to ask everyone to work as hard as possible to get Binyam home. The new administration in the US has said that it wants to close Guantánamo. The UK government says that it has been asking for Binyam’s return since August 2007. Despite that, and despite England being the US’s closest ally, Binyam is still in a cell in Guantánamo Bay. I believe that now is the time to press the new administration.

Guards told Binyam that he was going home in December, and so he is on hunger strike (together with 50 or so other prisoners). This means that he is tube-fed while strapped to a chair, twice a day. Binyam has lost so much weight that he speaks of the pain he suffers from being strapped to the chair for hours each day – he speaks of feeling his bones against the chair. I am really worried that if Binyam does not come home soon, he will leave Guantánamo Bay in a coffin.

The Joint Task Force, which runs Guantánamo Bay, gives me no information about Binyam. When I called to enquire about his condition, they said first, that they would look into it and then that they would tell me nothing and that I should make a Freedom of Information request, which would have taken months to process. Therefore, whenever I want information about Binyam, I have to make the 5-hour trip to Guantánamo. Each time, he asks why he is still there.

It is worth bearing in mind that all charges against Binyam have been dropped and that Binyam’s chief prosecutor resigned, citing the unfairness of the system.

I profoundly hope that he is not being kept in Guantánamo to avoid information surrounding his rendition and torture coming out. Clive Stafford Smith and I are testifying at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition in Portcullis House, Westminster today, which is open to members of the public. I understand that a number of intelligence agents and politicians will also speak in an attempt to get Binyam home. I am meeting with David Miliband , this Thursday, and I hope that he will assure me that Binyam is coming home.

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Gitmo Detainee’s ‘Genitals Were Sliced With A Scalpel,’ Waterboarding ‘Far Down The List Of Things They Did’

February 12, 2009
Ben Armbuster | Think Progress, Feb 9, 2009

binyamweb2.jpgLast week, two British High Court judges ruled against releasing documents describing the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay. The judges said the Bush administration “had threatened to withhold intelligence cooperation with Britain if the information were made public.”

But The Daily Telegraph reported over the weekend that the documents actually “contained details of how British intelligence officers supplied information to [Mohamed’s] captors and contributed questions while he was brutally tortured.” In fact, it was British officials, not the Americans, who pressured Foreign Secretary David Miliband “to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution.” According to the Telegraph’s sources, the documents describe particularly gruesome interrogation tactics:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.

Another source familiar with the case said: “British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it.”

“It is very clear who stands to be embarrassed by this and who is being protected by this secrecy. It is not the Americans, it is Labour ministers,” former shadow home secretary David Davis said. But one unnamed U.S. House Judiciary Committee member told the Telegraph that if President Obama “doesn’t act we could hold a hearing or write to subpoena the documents. We need to know what’s in those documents.”

Mohamed remains at Guantanamo Bay and “is currently on hunger strike.” “All terror charges against him were dropped last year,” the Telegraph reported.

UpdateToday in San Francisco, “a little-publicised court case into the treatment of Mohamed will open” in federal court. Andrew Sullivan notes that “we’ll find out if the Obama administration intends to keep the evidence as secret as the Bush administration did.”

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A Call to End All Renditions

February 11, 2009

JURIST –  Forum

JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says that instead of leaving the door open for the CIA to continue to engage in the rendition of terrorism suspects to other countries so long as the process is somehow handled “humanely”, the Obama administration should end renditions altogether and prosecute those who have ordered renditions since 2001…

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian residing in Britain, said he was tortured after being sent to Morocco and Afghanistan in 2002 by the U.S. government. Mohamed was transferred to Guantánamo in 2004 and all terrorism charges against him were dismissed last year. Mohamed was a victim of extraordinary rendition, in which a person is abducted without any legal proceedings and transferred to a foreign country for detention and interrogation, often tortured.

Mohamed and four other plaintiffs are accusing Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. of flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured. In Mohamed’s case, two British justices accused the Bush administration of pressuring the British government to block the release of evidence that was “relevant to allegations of torture” of Mohamed.

Twenty-five lines edited out of the court documents included details about how Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel as well as other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding “is very far down the list of things they did,” according to a British official quoted by the Telegraph (UK).

The plaintiffs’ complaint quotes a former Jeppesen employee as saying, “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights – you know, the torture flights.” A senior company official also apparently admitted the company transported people to countries where they would be tortured.

Obama’s Justice Department appeared before a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday in the Jeppesen lawsuit. But instead of making a clean break with the dark policies of the Bush years, the Obama administration claimed the same “state secrets” privilege that Bush used to block inquiry into his policies of torture and illegal surveillance. Claiming that the extraordinary rendition program is a state secret is disingenuous since it is has been extensively documented in the media.

“This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the course,” said the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, counsel for the five men.

If the judges accept Obama’s state secrets claim, these men will be denied their day in court and precluded from any recovery for the damages they suffered as a result of extraordinary rendition.

Two and a half weeks before Obama’s representative appeared in the Jeppesen case, the new President had signed Executive Order 13491. It established a special task force “to study and evaluate the practices of transferring individuals to other nations in order to ensure that such practices comply with the domestic laws, international obligations, and policies of the United States and do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control.”

This order prohibits extraordinary rendition. It also ensures humane treatment of persons in U.S. custody or control. But it doesn’t specifically guarantee that prisoners the United States renders to other countries will be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that doesn’t amount to torture. It does, however, aim to ensure that our government’s practices of transferring people to other countries complies with U.S. laws and policies, including our obligations under international law.

One of those laws is the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty the United States ratified in 1992. Article 7 of the ICCPR prohibits the States Parties from subjecting persons “to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The UN Human Rights Committee, which is the body that monitors the ICCPR, has interpreted that prohibition to forbid States Parties from exposing “individuals to the danger of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment upon return to another country by way of their extradition, expulsion or refoulement.”

Order 13491 also mandates, “The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” The order does not define “expeditiously” and the definitional section of the order says that the terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Once again, “short term” and “transitory” are not defined.

In his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Eric Holder categorically stated that the United States should not turn over an individual to a country where we have reason to believe he will be tortured. Leon Panetta, nominee for CIA director, went further last week and interpreted Order 13491 as forbidding “that kind of extraordinary rendition, where we send someone for the purposes of torture or for actions by another country that violate our human values.”

But alarmingly, Panetta appeared to champion the same standard used by the Bush administration, which reportedly engaged in extraordinary rendition 100 to 150 times as of March 2005. After September 11, 2001, President Bush issued a classified directive that expanded the CIA’s authority to render terrorist suspects to other States. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the CIA and the State Department received assurances that prisoners will be treated humanely. “I will seek the same kinds of assurances that they will not be treated inhumanely,” Panetta told the senators.

Gonzales had admitted, however, “We can’t fully control what that country might do. We obviously expect a country to whom we have rendered a detainee to comply with their representations to us . . . If you’re asking me, ‘Does a country always comply?’ I don’t have an answer to that.”

The answer is no. Binyam Mohamed’s case is apparently the tip of the iceberg. Maher Arar, a Canadian born in Syria, was apprehended by U.S. authorities in New York on September 26, 2002, and transported to Syria, where he was brutally tortured for months. Arar used an Arabic expression to describe the pain he experienced: “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.” The Canadian government later exonerated Arar of any terrorist ties. In another instance, thirteen CIA operatives were arrested in Italy for kidnapping an Egyptian, Abu Omar, in Milan and transporting him to Cairo where he was tortured.

Panetta made clear that the CIA will continue to engage in rendition to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects and transfer them to other countries. “If we capture a high-value prisoner,” he said, “I believe we have the right to hold that individual temporarily to be able to debrief that individual and make sure that individual is properly incarcerated.” No clarification of how long is “temporarily” or what “debrief” would mean.

When Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) asked about the Clinton administration’s use of the CIA to transfer prisoners to countries where they were later executed, Panetta replied, “I think that is an appropriate use of rendition.” Jane Mayer, columnist for the New Yorker, has documented numerous instances of extraordinary rendition during the Clinton administration, including cases in which suspects were executed in the country to which the United States had rendered them. Once when Richard Clarke, President Clinton’s chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, “proposed a snatch,” Vice-President Al Gore said, “That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”

There is a slippery slope between ordinary rendition and extraordinary rendition. “Rendition has to end,” Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, recently told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!: “Rendition is a violation of sovereignty. It’s a kidnapping. It’s force and violence.” Ratner queried whether Cuba could enter the United States and take Luis Posada, the man responsible for blowing up a commercial Cuban airline in 1976 and killing 73 people. Or whether the United States could go down to Cuba and kidnap Assata Shakur, who escaped a murder charge in New Jersey.

Moreover, “renditions for the most part weren’t very productive,” a former CIA official told the Los Angeles Times. After a prisoner was turned over to authorities in Egypt, Jordan or another country, the CIA had very little influence over how prisoners were treated and whether they were ultimately released.

The U.S. government should disclose the identities, fate, and current whereabouts of all persons detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody by the CIA since 2001. Those who ordered renditions should be prosecuted. And the special task force should recommend, and Obama should agree to, an end to all renditions.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law. Her new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd), will be published in April 2009. Her articles are archived at http://www.marjoriecohn.com.

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