UK Judges Order Release of Details About the Torture of Binyam Mohamed by US Agents
Monday 19 October 2009
by: Andy Worthington, t r u t h o u t | Report
In August 2008, while British resident Binyam Mohamed still languished in a prison cell in Guantánamo, two British High Court judges attempted to inform the public about what, in May 2002, the CIA had told their British counterparts about how they had treated him while he was being held in Pakistani custody, shortly before a British agent interrogated him.
The judges were Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, and their attempt to inform the public came in a judgment that followed a judicial review of Mohamed's case during the summer of 2008, which was itself triggered by the British government's refusal to release 42 documents in its possession regarding his detention in Pakistan.
August 2008: The Quest to Reveal Information About US Torture Begins
In their ruling last August, the judges made it clear that they were appalled by the global torture program in which they had found themselves unexpectedly immersed. In one of the most extraordinary stories in the "war on terror," Mohamed, a British resident picked up in Pakistan in April 2002, had been rendered by CIA agents to Morocco in July 2002, where he had spent 18 months being tortured, had then been rendered to Afghanistan, to the "Dark Prison" outside Kabul, a secret prison run by the CIA, where he had spent another four months and had then been flown to Guantánamo, where he remained while the judges grappled with the largely classified evidence of a global web of kidnapping and torture.
In a remarkable ruling, the judges roundly condemned the British government for sending an agent to Pakistan to interview Mohamed in May 2002, when he was being held incommunicado (which was illegal), and for providing and receiving intelligence about him for at least eight months after his disappearance from Pakistan, even though the British intelligence services claimed not to know where he was being held, and should not have been involved without receiving cast-iron assurances about his welfare. In the judgment, they stated explicitly that, "by seeking to interview BM [Mohamed] in the circumstances found and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing."
As I explained in an article last November:
The judges also seized on an admission, made on behalf of the foreign secretary, David Miliband, that Mohamed had "established an arguable case" that, until his transfer to Guantánamo, "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," and ruled that, because the information obtained from Mohamed was "sought to be used as a confession in a trial [by military commission at Guantánamo] where the charges ... are very serious and may carry the death penalty," and that it is "a long-standing principle of the common law that confessions obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment cannot be used as evidence in any trial," the British government was required to hand over the evidence - 42 documents in total - to his lawyers.
In the end, however, the judges stopped short of ordering the government to release the 42 documents - and also stopped short of including in their judgment a seven-paragraph summary of these documents - bowing to pressure from David Miliband, who, in the absence of any other straws to which to cling, urged them not to order disclosure of the documents because of national security concerns; specifically, that to do so might damage the intelligence-sharing relationship between the UK and the US.
Developments in the US, and an Unusual Request From the British judges
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