Monday
Feb162009
Guantanamo Update: Binyam Mohamed Coming Home, No Need to Talk about Torture
Monday, February 16, 2009 at 9:34
The New York Times offers the welcome news that, after six years in captivity, Binyam Mohamed "was examined Sunday by a British medical team at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in preparation for his return home".
Mohamed's release is the overwhelming priority. At the same time, there is the stench of action being taken to avoid embarrassment for US and British authorities. There has been a steady drip of emerging information, which we have tried to highlight, about Mohamed's torture, after his "rendition" from Pakistan, in Morocco and Afghanistan before he was taken to Guantanamo. The latest revelations of The Observer of London on Sunday of a UK-US collusion to keep evidence from being presented in the British High Court follows a letter from Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, to Barack Obama outlining the US Department of Defense is keeping information from the President.
Meanwhile the Obama Administration, far from owning up to the torture carried out against Mohamed and other detainees, is trying to block any public hearing in a US court as well as in Britain. It is the efforts of human rights organisations that are bringing out the confirmation, in hundreds of pages of heavily-censored US documents, of the scale of the abuses carried out in the name of the US Government.
So today we have the near-disgrace of the US media averting its eyes from state-sponsored crimes. CBS News has lengthy coverage of the Mohamed case, but papers like The Washington Post are silent.
And The New York Times? It mentions Mohamed's impending release in a four-sentence article but limits its attention to any abuses with "[Mohamed] says he was tortured while in American custody".
Mohamed's release is the overwhelming priority. At the same time, there is the stench of action being taken to avoid embarrassment for US and British authorities. There has been a steady drip of emerging information, which we have tried to highlight, about Mohamed's torture, after his "rendition" from Pakistan, in Morocco and Afghanistan before he was taken to Guantanamo. The latest revelations of The Observer of London on Sunday of a UK-US collusion to keep evidence from being presented in the British High Court follows a letter from Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, to Barack Obama outlining the US Department of Defense is keeping information from the President.
Meanwhile the Obama Administration, far from owning up to the torture carried out against Mohamed and other detainees, is trying to block any public hearing in a US court as well as in Britain. It is the efforts of human rights organisations that are bringing out the confirmation, in hundreds of pages of heavily-censored US documents, of the scale of the abuses carried out in the name of the US Government.
So today we have the near-disgrace of the US media averting its eyes from state-sponsored crimes. CBS News has lengthy coverage of the Mohamed case, but papers like The Washington Post are silent.
And The New York Times? It mentions Mohamed's impending release in a four-sentence article but limits its attention to any abuses with "[Mohamed] says he was tortured while in American custody".
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