How Could the US Government Sanction Torture?
Britain Discloses Data on Ex-Detainee
By John F. Burns / February 10, 2010
LONDON — The British government lost a protracted court battle on Wednesday to protect secret American intelligence information about the treatment of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, and immediately published details of what it called the “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” administered to the prisoner by American officials.
The seven paragraphs published on the Foreign Office Web site summarized secret information provided by American intelligence officials to Britain’s security service, MI5, on the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a 31-year-old Ethiopian. Mr. Mohamed, the son of an Ethiopian Airlines official, moved to Britain as a teenager and left in 2000 for Pakistan, where he was arrested in April 2002 on suspicion of terrorist links.
Under intense American pressure, Foreign Office lawyers had sought for more than a year to prevent publication of the information. Citing warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others, they argued that the summary’s publication could cause irrevocable damage to intelligence-sharing between the United States and Britain — a relationship that British officials said was essential to Britain’s security, in particular to its counterterrorist operations.
After the court ruling, Mr. Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who has handled many cases involving Guantánamo detainees, was bitterly critical of the “the shameful way” in which the British government had battled to keep secret what it knew of Mr. Mohamed’s treatment. “Suppressing any evidence of government criminality on the grounds of national security sets a very dangerous precedent,” he said in a comment posted on the Web site of The Guardian.
The newly released document said that while Mr. Mohamed had been in American custody before reaching Guantánamo he had been subjected to “continuous sleep deprivation,” was shackled during interrogations and was exposed to “threats and inducements” that included playing on his fears of being “removed from United States custody and ‘disappearing.’ ”
It also said that he had been kept on a suicide watch and cited that as evidence that the treatment was causing him “significant mental stress and suffering.” But David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, told the House of Commons that Britain had “no information” to support other allegations made by Mr. Mohamed, including claims that interrogators under American orders cut his chest and genitals with a razor and that he was regularly tied to a wall, naked, and exposed to scrutiny by women who were also “naked or part naked.”
The details relate to Mr. Mohamed’s treatment after he was arrested in April 2002 by Pakistani officials, who accused him of using a false British passport, and handed over for a $5,000 bounty to American officials. He was then transported to a “ghost prison” in Morocco, where he said some of the worst abuses occurred, before being taken to the so-called dark prison in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and from there to Guantánamo Bay in 2004.
After the United States military dropped charges that he had planned with others to mount a “dirty bomb” attack on the United States, in part because of concerns that his confessions under interrogation would be voided at trial by the fact that they were obtained under physical duress, Mr. Mohamed was flown back to Britain in February 2009.
In themselves, the revelations in the Foreign Office document contained little that was not already known from previous disclosures by the Central Intelligence Agency about the so-called stress techniques used by American interrogators while questioning terrorist suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
What was starkly new, however, was the Foreign Office’s conclusion that the treatment Mr. Mohamed endured, had it been carried out under the authority of British officials, would have breached international treaties banning torture. It was the first time that Britain has been so blunt about its disapproval of the interrogation techniques approved by former President George W. Bush and curtailed last year by President Obama.
“Although it is not necessary for us to categorize the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities,” the document posted on the Foreign Office Web site said.
The court order, issued by a three-judge panel, could have been further appealed by the Foreign Office. Mr. Miliband told the Commons that the government had decided not to pursue the case because the judges had reaffirmed the so-called control principle governing intelligence-sharing relationships.
That rule, as Mr. Miliband put it, holds “that intelligence material provided by one country to another remains confidential to the country that provided it, and that it will never be disclosed directly or indirectly by the receiving country, without the permission of the provider of the information.”
Mr. Miliband said that he had discussed the case with Mrs. Clinton by telephone on Tuesday night, and that Britain was pledged to “work carefully with the United States in the weeks ahead to discuss the judgment and its implications” for future intelligence sharing. In response to opposition questioners, he hinted at continuing American disquiet, saying that it was “too early to come to this House and say that this will have no effect” on American-British intelligence relationships.
The foreign secretary said that what had persuaded Britain not to mount a further appeal— and by implication, what had opened the door to American agreement that the secret information could be released — was a United States district court ruling in December in Washington, D.C., which he said had “made a finding of fact” in respect to Mr. Mohamed’s allegations of mistreatment that closely paralleled what was revealed in the Foreign Office document.
Mr. Miliband was at pains to say that the government acknowledged that Mr. Mohamed had been right to allege that he had been mistreated. In fact, he said, “this judgment is not evidence that the system is broken; rather it is evidence that the system is working and the full force of the law is available when citizens believe they have just cause.”
See also The Lede: British Court Summary of Secret Documents Says U.S. Mistreated Detainee.
Source / New York Times
Fluxed Up World
0 comments:
Post a Comment