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War Criminals In High Places, hold the bastards accountable for their crimes - Binyam Mohamed: Judges overrule attempt to suppress torture evidence

This article, by Richard Norton-Taylor, was published in The Guardian, October 16, 2009

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David Miliband, the foreign secretary, acted in a way that was harmful to the rule of law by suppressing evidence about what the government knew of the illegal treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was held in a secret prison in Pakistan, the high court has ruled.
In a devastating judgment, two senior judges roundly dismissed the foreign secretary's claims that disclosing the evidence would harm national security and threaten the UK's vital intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US.
In what they described as an "unprecedented" and "exceptional" case, to which the Guardian is a party, they ordered the release of a seven-paragraph summary of what the CIA told British officials – and maybe ministers – about Ethiopian-born Mohamed before he was secretly interrogated by an MI5 officer in 2002.
"The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law," Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled. "Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy."
The summary is a CIA account given to British intelligence "whilst [Mohamed] was held in Pakistan ... prior to his interview by an officer of the Security Service", the judges said. The officer, known only as Witness B, is being investigated by the Metropolitan police for "possible criminal wrongdoing".
The seven-page document will not be released until the result of an appeal is known. However, the judges made clear their anger at the position adopted by Miliband, MI5, and MI6 in their hard-hitting judgment.
An explanation was needed, they said, about "what the United Kingdom government actually knew about what was alleged to be cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture, in particular what Witness B knew before he interviewed [Mohamed] ... in Pakistan". The judges added that it was important to explain what MI5 "and others knew when they provided further information to the United States to be used in the interrogation".
There was a "compelling public interest" to disclose what Miliband wanted to suppress, they said; there was nothing in the seven-paragraph summary that had anything remotely to do with "secret intelligence".
"In our view, as a court in the United Kingdom, a vital public interest requires, for reasons of democratic accountability and the rule of law in the United Kingdom, that a summary of the most important evidence relating to the involvement of the British security services in wrongdoing be placed in the public domain in the United Kingdom."
The judges sharply criticised the way Miliband and his lawyers tried to persuade the Obama administration to back the suppression of the CIA material. Lawyers acting for Mohamed, the Guardian and other media organisations pointed out that Obama had himself set up an inquiry into CIA practices and published details of their interrogation techniques.
In the end, Miliband had to rely for help on a CIA letter to MI6 claiming that disclosure of the document would harm the security of the US and UK.
The judges made it clear they did not believe the claim was credible. "The public interest in making the paragraphs public is overwhelming," they said.
The document would show what Witness B – an MI5 officer who interrogated Mohamed in Pakistan in 2002 – knew about Mohamed's condition before he questioned him incognito in a Pakistani jail, the judges said.
The CIA secretly flew Mohamed to Morocco, Afghanistan and then Guantánamo Bay, the court has heard. The judges criticised MI5 and MI6 for the belated disclosure of documents that revealed an MI5 officer was in Morocco when Mohamed was held there in a secret jail.
Miliband's lawyers continued to argue that a number of passages in the judges' ruling must be redacted as well as the seven-paragraph CIA document.
Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, admitted in a speech at Bristol University on Thursday that the Security Service had been "slow to detect the emerging pattern of US practice in the period after 9/11".
"But it is important to recognise that we do not control what other countries do, that operational decisions have to be taken with the knowledge available, even if it is incomplete, and that when the emerging pattern of US policy was detected, necessary improvements were made."
He repeated the mantra that MI5 "does not torture people, nor do we collude in torture or solicit others to torture people on our behalf".
However, he said the situation posed a dilemma. "Given the pressing need to understand and uncover al-Qaida's plans, were we to deal, however circumspectly, with those security services who had experience of working against al-Qaida on their own territory, or were we to refuse to deal with them, accepting that in so doing we would be cutting off a potentially vital source of information that would prevent attacks in the west?
"In my view we would have been derelict in our duty if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this country from attack. I have every confidence in the behaviour of my officers in what were difficult and, at times, dangerous circumstances".

War Criminals In High Places, hold the bastards accountable for their crimes - Brit High Court Slaps Down US And British Torture Coverup

This article, by bMaz, was posted to After Downing Street, October 16, 2009

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In a stunning and refreshing decision, the British High Court has overruled the British government’s attempt to suppress torture evidence on the US and British treatment of Binyam Mohamed. From The Guardian:

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, acted in a way that was harmful to the rule of law by suppressing evidence about what the government knew of the illegal treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was held in a secret prison in Pakistan, the high court has ruled.
In a devastating judgment, two senior judges roundly dismissed the foreign secretary’s claims that disclosing the evidence would harm national security and threaten the UK’s vital intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US.
In what they described as an “unprecedented” and “exceptional” case, to which the Guardian is a party, they ordered the release of a seven-paragraph summary of what the CIA told British officials – and maybe ministers – about Ethiopian-born Mohamed before he was secretly interrogated by an MI5 officer in 2002.
“The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law,” Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled. “Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy.” (emphasis added)

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how it is done. Make no mistake, this is as big of a slap at the United States government as it is the British and Milibrand. The pure fiction that the security relationship between the two countries rested in the lurch has never been anything short of a craven coverup of unconscionable and criminal conduct.
The Brit High Court was not done though:

“In our view, as a court in the United Kingdom, a vital public interest requires, for reasons of democratic accountability and the rule of law in the United Kingdom, that a summary of the most important evidence relating to the involvement of the British security services in wrongdoing be placed in the public domain in the United Kingdom.”
The judges sharply criticised the way Miliband and his lawyers tried to persuade the Obama administration to back the suppression of the CIA material. Lawyers acting for Mohamed, the Guardian and other media organisations pointed out that Obama had himself set up an inquiry into CIA practices and published details of their interrogation techniques.
In the end, Miliband had to rely for help on a CIA letter to MI6 claiming that disclosure of the document would harm the security of the US and UK.
The judges made it clear they did not believe the claim was credible. “The public interest in making the paragraphs public is overwhelming,” they said.

Production of the evidence will be stayed pending a right to seek appeal, but this is an outstanding decision and opinion. A nice and uplifting piece of news to round out the week.

War Criminals In High Places, hold the bastards accountable for their crimes - Wanted: scapegoats on torture

This editorial, by Clara Gutteridge, was published by The Guardian, September 11, 2009

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The foreign secretary, David Miliband, today admitted that MI6 had referred "a case" to the attorney general, involving complicity in torture by one of its agents operating abroad. In a letter to the shadow foreign secretary, Miliband reveals little else, except that the torture happened in an undisclosed foreign country; and unlike the tranche of recent cases where MI5 agents have been accused of complicity in torture, the victim in this case was not a UK national, or a UK resident.
There are many instances of individuals known to have been held in US secret prisons where it would have been a grave dereliction of duty for the British intelligence services not to have been involved in questioning the prisoners.
One such example is Abu Zubayda, accused of being an al-Qaida facilitator, arranging travel for would-be jihadists from the UK, among other countries, to attend training camps in Afghanistan. We also know that Abu Zubaydah was tortured by the US – he was waterboarded 83 times – and that during his interrogation, he implicated people who have turned out to be innocent. He was saying what he thought his torturers wanted to hear. And herein lies the question: were UK agents involved in the interrogation of people such as Abu Zubaydah – in principle, they should have been – and if they were, what did they do about his torture?
My bet is that they were involved, and that they did nothing about the torture, and that information about their activities is starting to leak out as things start to open up in the US with the various inquiries into torture and abuse getting under way across the Atlantic. Just as the US military attempted to blame the systematic abuse at Abu Ghraib on a few "bad apples" acting beyond their orders, the British government appears to be trying to ringfence the rising tide of evidence of its complicity in torture abroad.
To refer an individual agent for investigation by the attorney general conveniently places the blame squarely on the shoulders of a subordinate, and keeps people higher up the chain, including government ministers, out of the picture.
If there is one thing we should have learned from the various official reports and documents that have been released since Obama took office, it is that the abuse that has taken place in the name of "counter-terror" in the past eight years was anything but the actions of a few rogue agents. Rather, in the US at least, the torture was institutionalised. We now know that techniques such as almost drowning people, slamming their heads against walls and staging mock executions were operational norms in US prisons abroad. We also know that the torture programme was systematic, ordered from the top, and that it involved professionals – doctors, psychologists and lawyers.
Against such a cultural backdrop – one that legitimised and bureaucratised torture – it is looking increasingly untenable that British government ministers were unaware of what was going on, or that UK agents colluding in this programme were acting beyond orders.
Thus, as the government has tried to do with the MI5 agent who was involved in interrogating Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan, this recent referral is likely just a last-ditch attempt by the those in command to avoid justice. It is about time the leaders of our country stopped attempting to scapegoat a few unfortunate field agents and started to answer some questions about exactly how the Britain became the sort of country that is involved in torture.

War Criminals In High Places, hold the bastards accountable for their crimes - MI6 officer investigated over torture allegation

This article, by Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Cobain, was published by The Guardian, September 11, 2009

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Fresh questions were raised tonight about the behaviour of British officials towards terror suspects by the disclosure that MI6 had referred one of its officers to the attorney general over allegations of complicity in torture.
The unprecedented move was disclosed in a letter from David Miliband, the foreign secretary, to his Conservative shadow, William Hague. He said MI6 had acted on its own initiative, "unprompted by any accusation against MI6 or the individual concerned".
The Metropolitan police specialist crime branch said Lady Scotland, the attorney general, had asked it to investigate "the conditions under which a non-Briton was held" and the "potential involvement of British personnel".
Officials were reluctant to say anything more about the case other than it was "unrelated" to that of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who says he was tortured and ill-treated in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Morocco and Guantánamo Bay.
The police are separately investigating allegations of what the high court has called "possible criminal wrongdoing" by an MI5 officer involved in Mohamed's secret interrogation.
Miliband said the government could not comment further on the MI6 case "to avoid prejudice and to protect the individuals involved".
Officials told the Guardian that the circumstances surrounding the MI6 case had never been referred to in public. But Whitehall sources said they came to the notice of MI6 lawyers as concerns about the activities of both MI5 and MI6 were being raised by the high court, MPs, and the media. The court heard growing evidence of Britain's involvement in the interrogation of detainees and CIA flights transferring them to secret destinations .
There was speculation among human rights groups that MI6 was prompted to take action as a result of evidence that will emerge in the US inquiry into the CIA's interrogation of terror suspects.
Sir John Scarlett, the head of MI6, told the BBC last month that there no torture and "no complicity in torture" by the Secret Intelligence Service.
Miliband said in his letter, published yesterday on the Foreign Office website, that the government "wholeheartedly condemned torture". He added: "We will not condone it. Neither will we ever ask others to do it on our behalf. This is not mere rhetoric but a principled stance consistent with our unequivocal commitment to human rights. We are fortunate to have the best security and intelligence services and armed forces in the world."
Miliband was responding to a letter Hague wrote to Gordon Brown last month in light of a report by parliament's joint committee on human rights. The committee said the government could no longer get away with repeating standard denials of complicity by the security and intelligence agencies.
Hague asked the government to "clarify as a matter of urgency whether you intend to instruct the attorney general to consider ... allegations of UK complicity in the light of the joint committee report, which documents allegations of UK complicity in torture in respect of detainees held in Pakistan, Egypt, and Guantánamo Bay, and in the case of Uzbekistan, raises concerns about the receipt of information which may have been obtained through torture".
Hague said later: "It is very important that any such allegations are thoroughly investigated. Torture or complicity in torture is unacceptable, immoral and counter-productive".
Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, called for a full judicial inquiry into the British authorities' possible complicity in torture. "Given the gravity and number of allegations of UK complicity in torture, separate limited police investigations alone are inadequate," he said.
Tim Hancock, Amnesty International's UK campaigns director said: "If the UK authorities are serious about their responsibilities to combat torture, we need a full, impartial and independent investigation into all allegations that UK personnel have colluded with torturers."
Shami Chakrabarti, director of campaign group Liberty, said: "Criminal investigations into individual officers don't reveal what ministers knew or authorised … Only an independent judicial inquiry can get to the bottom of this rotten business."
According to Westminster's intelligence and security committee, by early 2005, MI5, MI6 and military intelligence officers took part in more than 100 such sessions in Afghanistan, and MI5 and MI6 officers had been involved in a similar number at Guantánamo Bay. There had been about 2,000 such interrogations in Iraq involving MI5, MI6, military intelligence and civilians.

War Criminals in High Places: holding the bastards accountable for their crimes - Britain Admits Complicity in U.S. Rendition

This article, by William Fisher, was originally distributed by IPS, February 26, 2009

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NEW YORK, Feb 26 (IPS) - In a stunning reversal, Britain’s government admitted Wednesday that it participated in the ‘extraordinary rendition’ to Afghanistan of two terror suspects captured in Iraq.
British Defence Secretary John Hutton told Britain's House of Commons that the two individuals were captured by British forces in Iraq, transferred to U.S. detention and later moved to a U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan.
His admission contradicts the British government’s earlier assertions that there were only two cases involving detainee rendition. That statement involved the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, a British territory, which the government admitted had twice been used by the U.S. as a refueling stop for the secret transfer of terrorism suspects.
Apologising to lawmakers for the error, Hutton said, "I regret that it is now clear that inaccurate information on this particular issue has been given to the House by my department," Hutton told lawmakers. "I must stress that this was based on the information available to ministers and those who were briefing them at the time."
At the time, the U.S. denied using the island for extraordinary rendition flights, but later acknowledged that it had misled the British government. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband later released a statement declaring that the U.S. had studied a list of 391 flights compiled by British human rights groups and lawmakers and that no other cases had been found.
Hutton told lawmakers that the two men are still being held in Afghanistan. He said the U.S. has given assurances that they are being held "in a humane, safe and secure environment."
It was unclear if the men were being held along with some 600 others at the U.S. military prison at Bagram Air Force Base, near Kabul. That base has been the target of recent charges from human rights groups that it has become Afghanistan’s Guantanamo Bay, that many prisoners have been locked up there for years without charges or access to lawyers, and that some have been tortured and abused.
Hutton’s disclosure comes on the heels of a firestorm caused by a lawsuit brought in Britain by British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, and who charged that British intelligence was complicit with the CIA in rendering him to Morocco, then to Bagram, and finally flying him to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Mohamed was held there since 2004 before his release and return to Britain earlier this week. No charges were ever filed against him. Until shortly before his release, he had been on a hunger strike at the Caribbean military prison.
The lawsuit he filed in Britain - similar to a separate suit brought in the U.S. - has caused a furor there, where officials asked the British High Court not to make public documents that Mohamed’s lawyers say substantiate his treatment. Opposition spokesmen there claimed the U.S. had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Britain if the documents were made public. Secretary Miliband denied there was any threat.
Mohamed’s U.S. lawyer, Steven Watt, a staff attorney in the Human Rights programme of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS, "It’s about time the U.K. came clean. News of Britain’s complicity with the CIA has been slowly leaking out for several years. We now know more than enough to conclude that the U.K. has played a role."
"Both countries are still trying to keep this information secret, either to avoid political embarrassment or to cover up some egregious human rights abuses," he said.
Asked by an IPS reporter about the timing of the Defense Minister’s announcement and apology, Watt said, "Maybe they finally want to make a clean breast of it."
In a related development, newly-confirmed CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday that President Barack Obama may limit the countries to which the U.S. sends alleged terrorists to those with good human rights records, and will ensure they are not tortured or abused.
"If it's someone we are interested in, there is no purpose to rendering anyone, particularly if it's a high-value target," Panetta said.
Panetta added that he believes prisoners should only be handed over to countries that have a legitimate legal interest in them, such as their home country or a country where charges are pending against them.
Panetta seemed to be trying to distance himself from statements he made during his congressional confirmation hearing earlier this month. He told lawmakers that the Obama administration intended to continue rendering prisoners captured in the war on terrorism.
Panetta said the administration would rely on a long-standing policy to first secure "diplomatic assurances" from the country that the prisoner would not be tortured or have his human rights violated. But human rights groups point out that such assurances have proved to be virtually worthless in the past, when suspects have been flown to countries with egregious human rights records.
Panetta said the Obama administration would "make very sure" that prisoners are not mistreated after they are rendered. Asked by the Associated Press exactly how that would be done, Panetta said, "Well, I guess, you know, A, make sure, first of all, the kind of countries that we render will tell us an awful lot about that," he said. "No. 2, I think diplomatically we just have to make sure that we have a presence to ensure that that does not happen."
The White House is currently reviewing the extraordinary rendition policy and programme.
Panetta said he does not believe additional prisoners will be sent to Guantanamo this year. In his first week in office, Obama ordered the prison closed within a year, but no decision has yet been made public on what to do with the roughly 250 inmates still there. Only a handful have been charged with a crime, and those trials have been suspended while the Obama administration reviews its legal options.

War Criminals in High Places: holding the bastards accountable for their crimes - Revealed: full horror of Gitmo inmate's beatings

This article, by Mark Townsend, was published by The Observer, February 22, 2009

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Binyam Mohamed will return to Britain suffering from a huge range of injuries after being beaten by US guards right up to the point of his departure from Guantánamo Bay, according to the first detailed accounts of his treatment inside the camp.
Mohamed will arrive back tomorrow in the UK, where he was a British resident between 1984 and 2002. During medical examinations last week, doctors discovered injuries and ailments resulting from apparently brutal treatment in detention.
Mohamed was found to be suffering from bruising, organ damage, stomach complaints, malnutrition, sores to feet and hands, severe damage to ligaments as well as profound emotional and psychological problems which have been exacerbated by the refusal of Guantánamo's guards to give him counselling.
Mohamed's British lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said his client had been beaten "dozens" of times inside the notorious US camp in Cuba with the most recent abuse occurring during recent weeks. He said: "He has a list of physical ailments that cover two sheets of A4 paper. What Binyam has been through should have been left behind in the middle ages."
Lieutenant colonel Yvonne Bradley, Mohamed's US military attorney, added: "He has been severely beaten. Sometimes I don't like to think about it because my country is behind all this."
The former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who campaigned for Guantánamo Bay to be closed, said any allegation of US abuse against a British resident inside the prison should be urgently raised by the foreign secretary, David Miliband, with the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
"If there are credible accounts of mistreatment then they need to be pursued," said Goldsmith.
Claims that Mohamed was beaten during the period after President Obama announced Guantánamo's closure in January risk harming diplomatic relations between the administration and the British government. Prime minister Gordon Brown is believed to have raised Mohamed's case with the US president during their first talk following Obama's inauguration two months ago.
Stafford Smith, the director of legal charity Reprieve, said yesterday that Mohamed had been routinely beaten by Guantánamo's notorious emergency reaction force, a six-strong team of guards in riot gear who have been the subject of previous abuse allegations. The alleged beatings were routinely administered against Mohamed "for no reason" and some were "recent" according to Stafford Smith.
Upon his return to England after more than four years inside Guantánamo, Mohamed will be taken to a secure, secret location in order for him to be fully rehabilitated by a team of volunteer doctors and psychiatrists. Mohamed will be kept under a "voluntary security arrangement" which involves reporting to the authorities, but he will not be subject to an anti-terror control order. His lawyers reiterate that he has nothing to hide after US terror charges against him were dropped last year.
Mohamed will not be debriefed upon his arrival by the British authorities or face any interview from the British security agencies. At least one MI5 officer is currently waiting to hear whether he will face a criminal investigation over alleged complicity in the torture of Mohamed, who settled in Kensington, west London, after arriving from Ethiopia as a teenage asylum seeker.
Mohamed's eventual testimony may also shed light on MI5's alleged complicity in his interrogation and alleged torture. One likely step will involve suing the British government and its security services over potential allegations of complicity in his illegal detention, abduction, treatment and interrogation.
Lord Carlile of Berriew, the independent reviewer of the anti-terrorism laws, warned yesterday that, once settled, Mohamed's possible legal action against the US or British authorities could force them to disclose vital evidence relating to the torture allegations.
Following his arrest in Pakistan more than six years ago, Mohamed has claimed he was told by British government officials that everything would be done to help him.
Lt Col Bradley, who is staying in England until Thursday to welcome Mohamed, said the most crucial issue was stabilising his health. Mohamed's weight has fallen from 170lbs to about 125lbs. "He needs to get his weight back on and start eating," she said.
Mohamed's return to England coincides with signs that the government is preparing to accept more detainees from Guantánamo in the face of increasing US pressure to help shut the camp.
The Foreign Office appears to be softening its stance towards accepting more detainees from the prison after last month insisting there were "no plans" to accept more inmates. The position has now shifted to a statement explaining that "no formal decision has been made" on the UK accepting detainees from other countries.
A Foreign Office source added that all cases were now being reviewed on an individual basis by the home secretary Jacqui Smith. This comes amid intensifying pressure from the US authorities, with the Observer learning that direct requests for Britain to accept more detainees have now been lodged by the Obama administration. Sources at the US department of defence said talks were ongoing with countries, including the UK, to re-house inmates.
Dean Boyd, spokesman for the US department of justice, said: "We will undoubtedly need the assistance of our close friends and allies as we work towards closing Guantánamo."
Goldsmith said Britain should accept prisoners from the camp if it would help Obama to close it down.
British citizens and residents mentioned in the report is Rangzieb Ahmed, 33, from Rochdale, who claims he was tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents before being questioned by two MI5 officers. Ahmed was convicted of being a member of al-Qaida at Manchester crown court, yet the jury was not told that three of the fingernails of his left hand had been removed. The response from MI5 to the allegations that it had colluded in Ahmed's torture were heard in camera, however, after the press and the public were excluded from the proceedings. Ahmed's description of the cell in which he claims he was tortured closely matches that where Salahuddin Amin, 33, from Luton, says he was tortured by ISI officers between interviews with MI5 officers.
Zeeshan Siddiqui, 25, from London, who was detained in Pakistan in 2005, also claims he was interviewed by British intelligence agents during a period in which he was tortured.
Other cases include that of a London medical student who was detained in Karachi and tortured after the July 2005 attacks in London. Another case involving Britons allegedly tortured in Pakistan and questioned by UK agents involves a British Hizb ut-Tahrir supporter.
Rashid Rauf, from Birmingham, was detained in Pakistan and questioned over suspected terrorist activity in 2006. He was reportedly killed after a US drone attack in Pakistan's tribal regions, though his body has never been found.
Hasan said: "What the research suggests is that these are not incidents involving one particular rogue officer or two, but rather an array of individuals involved over a period of several years.
"The issue is not just British complicity in the torture of British citizens, it is the issue of British complicity in the torture period. We know of at least 10 cases, but the complicity probably runs much deeper because it involves a series of terrorism suspects who are Pakistani. This is the heart of the matter.
"They are not the same individuals [MI5 officers] all the time. I know that the people who have gone to see Siddiqui in Peshawar are not the same people who have seen Ahmed in Rawalpindi."
Last night the government faced calls to clarify precisely its relationship with Pakistan's intelligence agencies, which are known to routinely use torture.
A Foreign Office spokesman said that an investigation by the British security services had revealed "there is nothing to suggest they have engaged in torture in Pakistan". He added: "Our policy is not to participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture, or inhumane or degrading treatment, for any purpose."
But former shadow home secretary David Davis said the claims from Pakistan served to "reinforce" allegations that UK authorities, at the very least, ignored Pakistani torture techniques.
"The British agencies can no longer pretend that 'Hear no evil, see no evil' is applicable in the modern world," he added.
Last week HRW submitted evidence to parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights. The committee is to question Miliband and Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, over a legal loophole which appears to offer British intelligence officers immunity in the UK for any crimes committed overseas.
It has also emerged that New York-based HRW detailed its concerns in a letter to the UK government last October but has yet to receive a response.
The letter arrived at the same time that the Attorney General was tasked with deciding if Scotland Yard should begin a criminal investigation into British security agents' treatment of Binyam Mohamed. Crown prosecutors are currently weighing up the evidence.
Hasan said that evidence indicated a considerable number of UK officers were involved in interviewing terrorism suspects after they were allegedly tortured. He told the Observer: "We don't know who the individuals [British intelligence officers] were, but when you have different personnel coming in and behaving in a similar fashion it implies some level of systemic approach to the situation, rather than one eager beaver deciding it is absolutely fine for someone to be beaten or hung upside down."
He accused British intelligence officers of turning a blind eye as UK citizens endured torture at the hands of Pakistan's intelligence agencies.
"They [the British] have met the suspect ... and have conspicuously failed to notice that someone is in a state of high physical distress, showing signs of injury. If you are a secret service agent and fail to notice that their fingernails are missing, you ought to be fired."
Britain's former chief legal adviser, Lord Goldsmith, said that the Foreign Office would want to examine any British involvement in torture allegations very carefully and, if necessary, bring individuals "to book" to ensure such behaviour was "eradicated".

War Criminals in High Places: holding the bastards accountable for their crimes - Rendition Case Enters "Bizarre" Realms of Secrecy

This article, by William Fisher, was published by IPS, February 13, 2009

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NEW YORK, Feb 13 (IPS) - A prominent British-American lawyer who represents an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee is charging that U.S. Defence Department officials are intentionally concealing evidence of his client's rendition and torture from President Barack Obama.
The lawyer is Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve. He says he sent a letter to Obama through the Defence Department detailing "truly medieval" abuse inflicted on Binyam Mohamed, but that much of it was blacked out, preventing the president from reading it.
In the letter to the president, Stafford Smith urges Obama to be aware of the "bizarre reality" of the situation. "You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by U.S. personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command."
The central figure in this British case is the same Binyam Mohamed who appealed a separate U.S. case, on behalf of himself and four other terror suspects, to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco last week.
In that case, government lawyers from the Obama administration sought a decision not to reinstate a case that was thrown out by a lower court last year because government lawyers argued successfully that allowing the case to go forward would jeopardise U.S. national security.
In opposing reinstatement of the case, Obama's lawyers used the same "state secrets" privilege used by Bush lawyers in the original case. The appeals court has not yet ruled in the case, which charges that a subsidiary of the Boeing Company, Jeppesen Dataplan, knowingly provided aircraft and logistical services to facilitate the Central Intelligence Agency's rendition of Mohamed to overseas prisons where he was tortured.
The letter and its blacked-out attachment were disclosed as two high court judges agreed to reopen the court case in which Mohamed's lawyers, the Guardian newspaper and other media are seeking disclosure of evidence of alleged torture against him.
Mohamed's lawyers are challenging the judges' gagging order, claiming that David Miliband, the foreign secretary, changed his evidence. The attachment is titled "Re: Torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed by US personnel." The entire body of the memo and the name of its recipient are also redacted.
Stafford Smith told IPS in an email exchange that his letter to President Obama speaks for itself. He says he doesn't know who redacted the materials he submitted to the Defence Department.
In a judgment last week, British Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones stated repeatedly that Secretary Miliband claimed the U.S. had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Britain if information relating to Mohamed's alleged torture was disclosed. Miliband subsequently denied the U.S. had applied such pressure, but a U.S. State Department spokesperson thanked the British government for respecting the confidentiality of shared intelligence. The British case will be reopened next month.
Stafford Smith's letter to Obama says: "I am writing with great urgency concerning the rendition and torture of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner represented by our charity. His name is Binyam Mohamed, and he is a British resident."
"You will doubtless have been informed about Mr. Mohamed's torture - he was abused in truly medieval ways over a period of more than two years in Pakistan (at the behest of the U.S.), then again in Morocco (where he had been rendered by the CIA), and then in the Dark Prison in Kabul. There has been a firestorm in the media of our closest ally, the United Kingdom because, according to two British judges, the Bush Administration 'threatened' to withdraw national security cooperation with the UK if the judges ordered the release of materials concerning the torture of Mr. Mohamed in U.S. custody."
"The British judges bowed to this 'threat'- but suggested at the end of their Judgment that your administration might reconsider the position taken by your predecessors....
"Since we, at Reprieve, are U.S. lawyers with appropriate security clearances, we have access to this classified material. We have therefore assembled a memorandum that collates the evidence of torture in question. It is attached...for now, to deal with the British judges' request, we are submitting this information to you with no reference to any agent's name, or even the location of the abuse. Thus, as the British judges suggested, there is nothing in the memo that divulges material that should be considered classified."
"We are submitting this letter and attachment to the Privilege Review Team established by the Department of Defense to deal with these issues...If the DOD is unwilling to forward this material to you, then we will send you only what we are allowed to send you - which will be a copy of this letter and a redacted version of the memo illustrating the extent to which it has been censored."
Earlier, Mohamed's U.S.-appointed military lawyer told a press conference that his treatment "would make waterboarding seem like child's play".
The Guardian newspaper reported that Stafford Smith and his military lawyer last week met in private with members of the British intelligence and security committee, the group of MPs and peers facing mounting criticism in Westminster over claims it failed to effectively scrutinise the activities of MI5, the British intelligence agency.
Stafford Smith said he told the committee it would have been "absolutely impossible" for it to have cleared MI5 of involvement in the torture of Mohamed had it seen 42 key documents in the case - as he has - that Miliband says cannot be released for reasons of national security.
Binyam Mohamed is a 30-year-old Ethiopian who was granted political asylum in Britain in 1994. In 2002, he was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned over to U.S. intelligence officials in connection with the Bush administration's extraordinary renditions programme. He was shuttled between CIA-operated facilities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Morocco.
During this period of U.S.-sponsored detention, according to court papers, Mohamed was "routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot tingling liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution, and death."
Mohamed, who had been scheduled for release from Guantanamo shortly, has been on a hunger strike for the past month. He is reported to be close to death.

Where's the Outrage 125 - An Air Force lawyer fights to free a Guantanamo inmate

This article, by Julie Sell, was published by The Bellingham herald, February 15, 2009

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A U.S. military lawyer blitzed London last week, calling for the immediate release of her client, who allegedly was trained in an al-Qaida terrorist camp, from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Claiming that Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident who's on a hunger strike at Guantanamo, will leave prison "insane" or "in a coffin" if he's not released soon, Air Force Reserve Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley has made herself a thorn in the side of her military superiors, her commander in chief and other officials on both sides of the Atlantic.
All the charges against Mohamed have been dropped, and in a private meeting on Wednesday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband told Bradley - and subsequently the news media - that the Obama administration had agreed to make reviewing Mohamed's case a "priority." A British delegation plans to visit Mohamed in prison "as soon as possible," and it will include a doctor who can assess his ability to travel, Miliband said.
Part of Bradley's reception in London stems from her "novelty," said Clive Stafford Smith, a member of Mohamed's legal team and the director of the human rights group Reprieve. She's an African-American woman and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve who doesn't flinch when she describes her client's treatment or criticizes her country's policies.
"I think this comes as quite a shock to a lot of people in England that a serving military officer would say the things she says," Stafford Smith said. "It illustrates the very best about America."
Bradley, 45, who calls herself "a lawyer and a soldier" and a "lifelong Republican," told McClatchy Newspapers in an interview that she blames the Bush administration for Mohamed's arrest and for his treatment in captivity. Asked if she thinks her client is innocent, Bradley replied that he "was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"If 9/11 never happened, this whole series of events would never have happened," Bradley said. "This was an experiment that failed. It is a shame and a legacy that will follow (the United States) in its history."
Bradley, who grew up near Philadelphia, got her law degree at Notre Dame two decades ago and began practicing law in the Air Force. She joined the military, she said, because it would expose her to different types of law and give her a chance to travel. She spent six years on active duty, including a stint on a U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia.
She then took a job in a federal public defender's office representing convicts on death row, where her most notorious client may have been Harrison "Marty" Graham, a convicted serial killer in Philadelphia. "I was glad there was a piece of glass between Marty and I," Bradley recalled.
She continued to serve in the Air Force Reserve, which normally involves a commitment of one weekend a month and two weeks a year, and after about six years in the federal public defender's office, she set up a solo law practice in the leafy Philadelphia suburb of Swarthmore.
In 2005, Bradley, then a major, got a call from Col. Dwight Sullivan, the chief defense counsel for Guantanamo Bay inmates at the time.
"He said he had the perfect case for me," she recalled. Partly because of her work with inmates on death row, she said, Sullivan wanted to partner her with Stafford Smith, who also had defended death row inmates and was already working on Mohamed's case.
Stafford Smith, who has dual British and American citizenship, recalled that he initially was wary about working with a Republican military lawyer.
Now obviously fond of Bradley, who spent this weekend at his home in southern England, Stafford Smith added: "That just goes to show you how wrong we were - almost every stereotype you can think of turns out to be wrong."
Her views have changed dramatically since she joined Mohamed's legal team in 2005. She said that when she was assigned to his case, she was "a true believer" in America's campaign against terrorism.
Bradley recalled that after she got a call to defend Mohamed at Guantanamo Bay in 2005, she was ready to shut down her law practice in suburban Philadelphia. "I knew these were war crimes," she said of the charges against her client.
Then she received orders that her assignment would last 90 days. "That should have been my first warning that something was wrong," she said. "I can't try a small possession of marijuana (case) in 90 days, let alone a major war crime."
When Bradley first visited Mohamed at Guantanamo Bay, she recalled, she was "scared," although as a federal public defender she'd represented a serial killer and other murderers on death row. "I believed my government when they told me he was a terrorist," she said.
She flew to Cuba and met with Stafford Smith. She let him do most of the talking and wore civilian clothes rather than a military uniform to avoid frightening her client. She remembers meeting a "baby-faced" young man who seemed quiet and shy.
"I was thinking, 'This guy's supposed to be the worst of the worst; we're going to try him as one of the first 10 cases? What the hell are we doing down here in Guantanamo?' "
She left Mohamed's cell feeling "upset and confused," she said.
A review of Mohamed's charge sheet raised more questions. "I was waiting for the blood on his hands, the trigger finger, links to the dirty-bomb plot," she said. Instead, over time, she came to believe that "his story was all spun out by the CIA" after Mohamed was held in several countries, including Afghanistan and Morocco - and, he alleges, tortured.
Bradley's defense of Mohamed has ruffled feathers and nearly landed her in trouble.
Stafford Smith and Joseph Margulies, a law professor at Northwestern University who also was on Mohamed's defense team when Bradley joined it, recall an incident early in the case when she was nearly held in contempt of court.
Under the rules that governed military commissions at the time, a client's defense was "reduced to a script relegating counsel to being a potted plant, but Yvonne was not going to put up with that," Margulies said.
Bradley had a "heated exchange" with the judge, Margulies recalled. "He ordered her, and she wouldn't back down." As a superior military officer, the judge could've held Bradley in contempt. "We thought she was going to be taken into custody right then and there," Margulies said.
At the next break in the proceedings, Margulies said, he and Stafford Smith huddled with Bradley. "She was completely unruffled," he recalled.
To avoid trouble with the judge, though, they urged her to plead the Fifth Amendment.
"That's not something I've had to do for a fellow lawyer before," said Stafford Smith. "I don't think Binyam (Mohamed) could ask for a more dogged advocate."
"She didn't win any Miss Congeniality awards that day," Margulies said, "but at that moment her client understood that he had a lawyer there."
Asked what her relationship is with Mohamed now, Bradley paused. "Uncertain trust," she said. "I trust him, but I'm not sure he trusts me." A turning point came about a year ago, when Mohamed wrote her a thank you note. "I thought 'Yes, Binyam.' He had finally realized."
Bradley told McClatchy that she was hopeful, based on what Foreign Secretary Miliband had told her, that Mohamed might be released soon. She's due to leave London on Monday, but was trying to extend her stay in case he's flown back to London.
Still, her optimism remains guarded.
"I've been lied to so many times, deceived so many times, until Mr. Mohamed is in the UK," she said, her voice trailing off. "It's not over until he's here."
(Sell is a McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent.)

ABOUT BINYAM MOHAMED

Binyam Mohamed was born in Ethiopia 30 years ago and moved as a young man to Britain, where he converted to Islam. He traveled to Pakistan in 2001, Bradley said, because he was "enthusiastic about his new religion" and wanted to escape "the drug culture" in London.
In 2002, Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan while he was trying to board a flight to London. U.S. officials said they suspected that he'd trained with al-Qaida and was involved in plotting to attack America with a radioactive "dirty" bomb.
He was arrested and subsequently sent to Morocco, where he claims he was tortured and interrogated with the involvement of the FBI, the CIA and MI5, Britain's international intelligence agency.
He was sent to Guantanamo in 2004, where he was interrogated further. All charges against him have since been dropped. He's been on a hunger strike since late December, and is one of many detainees who're being force-fed by prison authorities.