Al-Jazeera Reporter Imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay to Sue George Bush July 18, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Criminal Justice, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Torture.Tags: al-jazeera, al-Qaeda, british intelligence, bush administration, detainees, geneva conventions, George Bush, Guantanamo, guantanamo justice, gwladys fouche, illegal detention, nuremberg, roger hollander, sami al-haj, torture
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Sami al-Haj – freed in May 2008 after more than six years – to launch legal action against former US president
by Gwladys Fouché in Oslo
An al-Jazeera reporter who was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay plans to launch a joint legal action with other detainees against former US president George Bush and other administration officials, for the illegal detention and torture he and others suffered at the hands of US authorities.
The case will be initiated by the Guantánamo Justice Center, a new organization open to former prisoners at the US base, which will set up its international headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month.
“The purpose of our organization is to open a case against the Bush administration,” said co-founder Sami al-Haj, an al-Jazeera reporter from Sudan who was illegally detained by US authorities for over six years. He was freed in May 2008.
“We need to start our organization first and then we will prepare a whole case. We don’t want to do this case by case,” said the 40-year-old reporter during a recent visit to Oslo.
“We are in the process of collecting information from all the people, such as medical evidence. It takes time,” he said.
He added: “I need them to go to court … we don’t want [what happened to us] to be repeated again.”
The legal action may be modeled on an action against General Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested in the UK in 1998 at the request of a Spanish prosecutor for the alleged murders of Spanish citizens in Chile under his dictatorship.
Al-Haj said: “I spoke to my lawyer, who advises me to do this in Europe. The courts do not have the power to bring [US officials] by force, but at least they can’t visit European countries. If they do, [the authorities] would catch them and send them to court.”
The Guantánamo Justice Center, which will be led by British ex-detainee Moazzam Begg, will open a British-based branch this month in addition to its Geneva headquarters.
Al-Haj, who is back at work for the Arabic satellite channel in Qatar, is in frequent contact with Guantánamo detainees, both past and present.
“Torture is continuing in Guantánamo ,” al-Haj said. “Obama needs to close Guantánamo immediately.”
Al-Haj said he was questioned by British intelligence officers during his detention, once in Kandahar in March 2002, and another time at Guantánamo later that same year. He said: “They asked me questions about al-Jazeera, whether it had links with al-Qaeda. They asked me questions about the British detainees at Guantánamo.
“They told me I should cooperate with the Americans and work as a spy,” upon his release. He said he was not mistreated by the British intelligence officers.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Britain’s bizarre reaction to war crimes allegations: investigations needed March 8, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Britain, Criminal Justice, Torture.Tags: binyam mohamed, british government, british intelligence, british national security, cia, dahlia lithwick, dana milbank, David Miliband, department of defense, dod, dominic grieve, foreign office, geneva conventions, geneva standards, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, house of commons, International law, jacqui smith, journalism, journalistic ethics, m15, media complicity, media ethics, micael mcconnell, michael hayden, president obama, roger hollander, state secrets privilege, tom friedman, torture, us media, War Crimes
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(updated below – Update II)
Binyam Mohamed is the British resident who, two weeks ago, was released from Guantanamo and returned to Britain after seven years of detention, often in brutal conditions. Since his return, compelling evidence has been steadily emerging that British agents were knowingly complicit in Mohamed’s torture while in U.S. custody — including the discovery of telegrams sent by British intelligence officers to the CIA asking the CIA to extract information from him. How does a country with a minimally healthy political class and a pretense to the rule of law react to such allegations of criminality? From the BBC:
MPs have demanded a judicial inquiry into a Guantanamo Bay prisoner’s claims that MI5 was complicit in his torture. . . .
[Mohamed’s] allegations are being investigated by the government, but the Foreign Office said it did not condone torture.
Shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve said the “extremely serious” claims should also be referred to the police. . . .
Daniel Sandford, BBC Home Affairs correspondent, said Mr Mohamed’s claims would be relatively simple to substantiate.
“As time progresses it will probably become quite apparent whether indeed these are true telegrams and I think it’s unlikely they’d be put into the public domain if they couldn’t eventually be checked back.”
The Conservatives have called for a police inquiry into his allegations of British collusion.
Mr Grieve called for a judicial inquiry into the allegations.
“And if the evidence is sufficient to bring a prosecution then the police ought to investigate it,” he added.
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey said there was a “rock solid” case for an independent judicial inquiry. . . .
Shami Chakrabati, director of campaign group Liberty said: “These are more than allegations – these are pieces of a puzzle that are being put together.
“It makes an immediate criminal investigation absolutely inescapable.”
New revelations by Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, claiming that British intelligence played a central role in his torture and interrogation, must be answered by the government, the former shadow home secretary David Davis said last night. . . .
[Mohamed’s] allegations appear to contradict assertions by foreign secretary David Miliband and home secretary Jacqui Smith that the British government would never “authorise or condone” torture.
Davis said Mohamed’s testimony demanded a response from these ministers. “His revelations show that the government’s claims about its involvement in the interrogation of Mohamed are completely untenable,” Davis said. “Either Miliband or Smith should come to the House of Commons and reveal exactly what the government knew.”
Last night other public figures said there should be wider efforts to look into the allegations that the British government had colluded in Mohamed’s torture.
Notice what is missing from these accounts. There is nobody arguing that the dreary past should simply be forgotten in order to focus on the important and challenging future. There’s no snide suggestion that demands to investigate serious allegations of criminality are driven by petty vengeance or partisan score-settling. Nobody suggests that it’s perfectly permissible for government officials to commit serious crimes — including war crimes — as long as they had nice motives or were told that it was OK to do these things by their underlings, or that the financial crisis (which Britain has, too) precludes any investigations, or that whether to torture is a mere “policy dispute.” Also missing is any claim that these crimes are State Secrets that must be kept concealed in order to protect British national security.
Instead, the tacit premise of the discussion is that credible allegations of criminality — even if committed by high government officials, perhaps especially then — compel serious criminal investigations. Imagine that. How shrill and radical.
If one stays immersed in American domestic political debates, it’s easy to lose sight of just how corrupted and rotted our political and media class is, because the most twisted ideas become enshrined as elite orthodoxies. Britain is hardly the paragon of transparency and adherence to international conventions; to the contrary, they’ve been with the U.S. every step of the way over the last eight years, enabling and partaking in many of the worst abuses. Yet this one single case of documented complicity in torture — mere complicity with, not actual commission of, the torture — is generating extreme political controversy and widespread demands across the political spectrum for judicial and criminal investigations. The British political class may not have wanted to see it, but when compelling evidence of criminality is rubbed in their faces, they at least pay lip service to the idea that crimes by government officials must be investigated and subjected to accountability.
By stark and depressing contrast, America’s political class and even most of its “journalists” — in the face of far, far greater, more heinous and more direct war criminality by their highest political leaders — are explicitly demanding that nothing be done and that it all be kept concealed. They’re surveying undeniable evidence of grotesque war crimes committed over many years by our government — including enabling legal theories that even Fred Hiatt described as “scary,” “lawless” and “disgraceful” — and are literally saying: “just forget about that; it doesn’t matter.” Our country is plagued by “journalists” like The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank, giggling with smug derision over the very few efforts to investigate these massive crimes — and then even lying on NPR by claiming that support for investigations is confined to “a small but very vocal minority within the Party – these are the same folks who were pushing for the impeachment of the President and the Vice President right up [dismissive chuckling] basically to the time of the Inauguration” (to see how flagrantly false is Milbank’s statement about support within the Party for investigations, see here and here and here; the NPR host, needless to say, said nothing to correct him).
The accountability-free, self-loving mentality that demands that nothing be done about America’s war crimes over the last eight years is hardly confined to America’s detention, surveillance and interrogation policies. This is exactly the same bloated, insular corruption that allows multi-billion-dollar insider frauds like this one not only to go unexamined but also to result in those responsible being further empowered with high government positions. It’s what lets someone like Tom Friedman think he can lecture us all with a straight face on the evils of overconsumption, the ravaging effects of our “growth model,” and the environment-destroying impact of consumerism as he lives in this house, financed by his heiress-wife’s shopping-center-developing company, his books urging unfettered globalization, and his columns urging various wars.
In sum, we have the only country, and the only results, that it’s possible to have given who has been wielding influence. And nothing expresses more vividly what they are than their explicit insistence that systematic war crimes committed by their own Government be immunized and forgotten, underscored by their bizarre feelings of “centrism”-smugness and Seriousness-superiority for expressing that definitively lawless and amoral view.
* * * * *
One other point about Mohamed: Last month, the Obama DOD claimed that it conducted an investigation and concluded that Guantanamo now fully comports with all Geneva standards. In a New York Times interview yesterday, President Obama claimed (for the first time, to my knowledge) that most of the problems with Bush’s detention policies were confined to what he called “the steps that were taken immediately after 9/11,” and that most of those problems were fixed by CIA Director Michael Hayden and DNI Michael McConnell “by the time [Obama] took office” because Hayden and McConnell “were mindful of American values and ideals.”
Compare all of that to Binyam Mohamed’s post-release statements — supported by other corroborating evidence — that “conditions at the US detention camp in Cuba have worsened since President Barack Obama was elected. . . . “‘Since the election it’s got harsher,’ Mohamed told the newspaper.” Isn’t this something that the U.S. Government should be called upon to address?
UPDATE: Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick reviews, and dismantles, each of the justifications being offered by the Obama administration for keeping Bush crimes concealed and shielding them from investigations and prosecutions (h/t Bystander). It’s quite concise and well worth reading in its entirety (as is Digby’s discussion of that article).
UPDATE II: In comments, Cocktailhag writes:
It is something of an upside down world wherein journalists, as a class, comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, and see nothing odd about this.
At times I’ve wondered whether Watergate would have even been discovered by the mindless media we have today, but even worse, whether they all would have just explained it away.
It’s difficult to select what one thinks is the single most illustrative symbol of how our country now functions, but if I were forced to do so, I would choose the fact that it is America’s journalists — who claim to be devoted to serving as a check on Government and exposing its secrets — who are, instead, leading the way in demanding that the Government’s actions of the last eight years be concealed; in trying to quash efforts to investigate and expose those actions; and in demanding immunity for government lawbreakers. What kind of country does one expect to have where (with some noble exceptions) it is journalists, of all people, who take the lead in concealing, protecting and justifying government wrongdoing, and whose overriding purpose is to serve, rather than check, political power? “Upside down world,” indeed.
Worse Than My Darkest Nightmare February 23, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Human Rights, Torture.Tags: ahmed belBacha, binyam mohamed, british intelligence, detainees, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, morocco, muslim prisoners, pakistan, rendition, reprieve, roger hollander, torture, yvonne bradley
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As I gain my freedom, I am determined that neither those who remain in detention, nor their abusers, are forgotten
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. 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.
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. 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo. 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. 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. Thank you.
This is the statement issued by Binyam Mohamed on his return to the UK
More accuse Britain in torture of Guantanamo detainee February 11, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Criminal Justice, Torture.Tags: andrew tyre, binyam mohamed, britain, british intelligence, david milibrand, extraordinary renditions, foreign secretary, Guantanamo, guantanamo detainee, guantanamo hunger strike, julie sell, m15, morocco, obama administration, roger hollander, torture, uk, uk conservative, uk parliament
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Julie Sell | McClatchy Newspapers, February 10, 2009
LONDON — Despite years of denials, new questions are being raised about Britain’s possible involvement in the torture of a detainee now on a prolonged hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
Both an American military lawyer who’s seen classified documents on the case and the head of a special parliamentary committee said Tuesday that the British government might have been complicit in the alleged mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed. The former British resident was seized in 2002 and held in several countries — including Morocco, where he claims he was tortured — before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2004.
Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, a U.S. military lawyer assigned to defend Mohamed, said that British intelligence agency “MI5 was involved a long time ago” in the interrogation of her client.
“They were feeding certain information to his interrogators when he was in Morocco,” said Bradley, who’s in London this week to lobby members of Parliament to press for her client’s release and his return to Britain.
Meanwhile, Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative member of Parliament and the head of a committee investigating extraordinary renditions — the international transfer of suspected terrorists by the U.S. — said he’s also convinced that Mohamed was “severely tortured” during interrogations and that British officials had a role in his mistreatment.
Tyrie said the official line on British involvement in torture “has gone from flat denials to a succession of admissions that there was involvement.” The latter have come in the form of court documents, the most recent being last week’s ruling by a British high court.
Tyrie also said Parliament’s intelligence and security committee, which has broader authority than his own, “appears to have been misled” about Britain’s role in interrogations and torture of American detainees when it was preparing an official report on the subject in 2007. That report cleared Britain of any wrongdoing, saying the CIA never told British officials where detainees were being held or how they were being treated.
It emerged last week that 42 classified documents seen by the British court and Mohamed’s lawyers had never been passed on to the intelligence and security committee when it was researching Britain’s role in the case the case.
A possible probe of British intelligence agencies is “under consideration” by the United Kingdom’s attorney general’s office, a spokeswoman said Tuesday. She couldn’t provide a timetable on the conclusion of its work. Another member of Mohamed’s legal team, Clive Stafford Smith, said that last fall he offered to provide the attorney general with documents to advance the inquiry if they were needed, but they have never requested them.
Under Britain’s Criminal Justice Act it is against the law for British officials to commit or be complicit in acts of torture anywhere in the world. Violation of the act can lead to life imprisonment.
Bradley, who’ll speak before several parliamentary committees and meet Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Wednesday, has suggested that there could be a “conspiracy” to keep her client in Guantanamo Bay in hopes that he might die there and never tell his story publicly. Mohamed is among a group of prisoners on a long-term hunger strike, and Bradley said there’d been a “drastic” deterioration in his health when she saw him two weeks ago on a regular monthly visit.
Bradley said she “applauds” the Obama administration’s plans to close Guantanamo Bay and send the remaining detainees home as soon as possible, as well as Britain’s willingness to let him settle here.
But Mohamed’s continued detention and stories about other abused prisoners suggest to her that not all officials have yet adopted the new policy. “Somewhere in the middle people need their mind changed to get along with the program,” she said. “But Mr. Mohamed doesn’t have months or years to give up his life for this to trickle down.”
(Sell is a McClatchy special correspondent.)
Ministers Must Explain Destruction of ‘Torture Flight’ Papers, Says Panel of MPs August 9, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Britain, Criminal Justice.Tags: Amnesty International, binyam mohamed, britain, britain torture, british intelligence, cia, cia torture flights, David Miliband, detainees, diego garcia, extraordinary rendition, human rights, indian ocean island, m15, mark townsend, rendition, rendition circuit, roger hollander, torture, torture flights, uk torture
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Foreign affairs select committee calls for disclosure on why Diego Garcia documents have vanished
by Mark Townsend
Ministers must explain why crucial documents relating to CIA “torture flights” that stopped on sovereign British territory were destroyed, a panel of MPs has said.
A damning appraisal by the influential foreign affairs select committee on Britain’s role in the rendition of terror suspects and alleged complicity of torture condemns the government’s lack of transparency on vital areas of concern.In particular, the MPs, in a report released today, call for an explanation for the missing papers, which might explain the role of Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory, in the US’s “extraordinary rendition” programme. The report says: “We recommend that the government discloses how, why and by whom the records relating to flights through Diego Garcia since the start of 2002 were destroyed.”
Foreign secretary David Miliband admitted 18 months ago that two US planes refuelled on the Indian Ocean island. The committee now wants a detailed account of the record-keeping and disposal policy regarding flights through the territory and “elsewhere through UK airspace”.
It also criticises the government’s inability to offer assurances that ships anchored outside Diego Garcia’s waters were not involved in the rendition programme. “The government must address the use of UK airspace for empty flights that may be part of a rendition circuit,” says the report.
Amnesty International said the MPs’ verdict underlined the need for a full, independent inquiry into the UK’s involvement in “war on terror” and human rights abuses.
The committee also voiced disquiet over claims that British intelligence officers were complicit in the torture of detainees held overseas. According to documents revealed by the high court last month, an MI5 officer visited Morocco three times during the time British resident Binyam Mohamed claims he was secretly interrogated and tortured there.
Of concern to the foreign affairs committee were claims relating to the involvement of the British security services and the practices of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence officers, who are known to routinely condone torture.
Details of the investigations the government has carried out into any of the claims should be made public, according to MPs. Mike Gapes, chairman of the committee, said it was time ministers also disclosed the guidance given at the time to intelligence officers interviewing suspects.
He said details of people captured by UK forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and placed in US custody should be divulged as part of a drive to improve transparency. The committee report notes: “We conclude that the potential treatment of detainees transferred by UK forces to the Afghan authorities gives cause for concern, given that there is credible evidence that torture and other abuses occur within the Afghani criminal justice system.”