Guantanamo Update: Binyam Mohamed Coming Home, No Need to Talk about Torture

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".

Scott Lucas on BBC1 TV "The Big Questions": Is Torture Ever Justified?

I thought this morning's live discussion "Is Torture Ever Justified?" on BBC1's The Big Questions raised some important points, especially given the limited time (25 minutes) available and the initial attempt to frame the question around the "ticking bomb" scenario.

It was a particular pleasure to talk with Moazzam Begg (pictured), who was detained and tortured in Afghanistan's Camp Bagram before being moved to Guantanamo Bay. He is now working with CagePrisoners, an organisation raising the cases of and providing assistance to detainees around the world.

The programme is available until next Sunday on the BBC iPlayer.

Update: Binyam Mohamed and the Hiding of Torture Evidence

Related Post: Binyam Mohamed - Guantanamo Torture Evidence Hidden from Obama
Related Post: Binyam Mohamed - "I Know Beyond a Doubt He Was Tortured"

On 4 February, we reported on a British High Court decision which reluctantly ruled that it could not consider documents related to the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The court said that US authorities had threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain if the evidence was disclosed.

Well, guess what? Turns out it was the British Foreign Office who asked the US to make the threat. From this morning's Observer of London:

[A] former senior State Department official said: "Far from being a threat, it was solicited [by the Foreign Office]." The Foreign Office asked for it in writing. They said: 'Give us something in writing so that we can put it on the record.' If you give us a letter explaining you are opposed to this, then we can provide that to the court."

The letter, sent by the State Department's top legal adviser John Bellinger to foreign secretary David Miliband's legal adviser, Daniel Bethlehem, on 21 August last year, said: "We want to affirm in the clearest terms that the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence-sharing arrangements."

Mr Obama's World: Alerts in US Foreign Policy (13 February)

Latest Post: Analysing the Iran (Non-)Threat
Related Post: US Government Documents - Proof of “Ghost Detention”, Torture, Death
Related Post: US Director of National Intelligence - No Evidence that Iran Has Restarted Nuclear Weapons Programme
Related Post: Afghanistan - Karzai Talks Back to Washington



10 p.m. And yet more manoeuvring on Iran. The US State Department has condemned the Iranian Government's charges of espionage against seven members of the Baha'i religious community.

9:45 p.m. An interesting political twist in Iraq. Former Prime Minister Ayad  Allawi has warned that the country's fragile political stability could be broken if national elections later this year are as unfair as last month's provincial polls: ""If we don't rectify, if the process is not inclusive, and there are not laws in Iraq to clarify the funding and the capabilities of the various groups ... then we unfortunately will have a catastrophe in the next elections."

Evening Update (8:40 p.m): Here comes the Magic Link. The US Government has now tied its suspension of missile defence deployment in Eastern Europe to Russian agreement to end assistance to Iran's nuclear energy programmes: ""If we are able to work together to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, we would be able to moderate the pace of development of missile defenses in Europe," said a "senior Administration official".

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that if North Korea "completely and verifiably" ends its nuclear arms programme, then the US is willing to normalize ties.

8:30 p.m. We've just posted a separate entry on how folks itching for a showdown with Iran have effectively thrown out the latest US intelligence assessment that there is no evidence Tehran has resumed production of nuclear weapons.

1:30 p.m. Afghan authorities have condemned a raid by Australian forces in which five children died.

10:20 a.m. In his first day of talks in Afghanistan, US envoy Richard Holbrooke will meet the Ministers of Defense and Interior. He sees Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday.

9:55 a.m. A quiet start to the day has been disrupted violently by a suicide bomb south of Baghdad. At least 32 Shi'a pilgrims have been killed and 84 injured.

The attack is the second on Shi'a pilgrims this week, following the killing of eight people yesterday in Karbala.

Morning Update (9 a.m. GMT; 4 a.m. Washington): We're taking advantage of a slow news period to post a series of analyses: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's attempt to seize the public relations initiative from the US, the Director of National Intelligence's statement that there is no evidence for resumption of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, and --- most importantly --- confirmation in US Government documents of extraordinary rendition, "ghost detainees", and torture.

US Government Documents: Proof of "Ghost Detention", Torture, Death

Last night we closed an update with a note that CNN had just reported on hundreds of pages of documents obtained by Amnesty International USA, New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and the Center for Constitutional Rights — which established that the Pentagon sought loopholes in the Geneva Conventions to hide “ghost detainees”. They also confirmed that the Bush Administration delayed the release of Guantanamo Bay detainees to avoid negative publicity.

This morning the American Civil Liberties Union has released two pages from a Department of Defense document concerning the death of two detainees at Camp Bagram in Afghanistan:

"In both cases, for example, [prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake. Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of "compliance blows" which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma.

Seven years after the Bush Administration effectively set aside the Geneva Conventions, declaring they were not relevant to US detentions from Guantanamo Bay to Camp Bagram to CIA "black sites" in North Africa and Eastern Europe, five years after Abu Ghraib, here are the documents establishing not only that detainees were tortured and, yes, murdered. Here is the evidence that US Government officials sanctioned the renditions and "enhanced interrogations" and that they were willing to lie to cover up the programme they had authorised.

It was with a sense of expectation that I have just turned to the headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London. And here is what I found: nothing. I cannot find the story in any "mainstream" US or British newspaper this morning.

Full credit to CNN. And full credit to Harper's, Mother Jones and The Raw Story because, without outlets such as these, "ghost detainees" --- and what happens to them --- would remain, well, ghosts.