|
The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
|
June 6th,
2008 - British Judge Sets Hearing on Evidence for Detainee News article by the New York Times |
|
British Judge Sets Hearing
on Evidence for Detainee By Raymond Bonner New York Times June 6, 2008 London - A British judge has
ordered a hearing into whether the British government must turn over evidence
bearing on accusations by a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he was
tortured during interrogation in Morocco. The judge, acting on a
request by lawyers for the prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, rejected an argument of
the British government that releasing any documents risked “that more robust
evidence of mistreatment of C.I.A. prisoners could emerge in the future.” The British government, in a
court filing last month, accepted that Mr. Mohamed had presented an “arguable
case” that he had been tortured after his “extraordinary rendition” to
Morocco and Afghanistan. Mr. Mohamed has said that, among other things, his
interrogators in Morocco made cuts on his chest and genitals with a razor. To support Mr. Mohamed’s
claim, his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith is seeking photographs that he said an
American soldier took of Mr. Mohamed’s injuries, during a flight from Morocco
to Cuba. “I can tell you with 100
percent certainty that those photographs exist,” Mr. Stafford Smith said in
an interview on Thursday. Under the strict secrecy rules imposed by the
Pentagon on lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees, Mr. Stafford Smith
said he could not go into any more detail. Last week, Mr. Stafford
Smith wrote a letter to Representative Bill Delahunt, Democrat of
Massachusetts, who has been holding hearings into the prison at Guantánamo,
urging him to make an official request to the Pentagon for the photographs. Mr. Delahunt’s office said
in an e-mail message on Thursday that the congressman would be making an
official request for the photographs. Mr. Mohamed’s case has been
the source of tension between the United States and Britain. Last August,
Britain formally requested that Mr. Mohamed, the last of 15 British citizens
or residents still being held at Guantánamo, be released and returned to
Britain. The Bush administration declined to do so, and last week, he was
officially charged by military prosecutors with two counts of terrorism. The British government has
also unsuccessfully sought an investigation by the United States into Mr.
Mohamed’s accusations that he had been tortured. In February, American
officials told the British Embassy in Washington that “they were not looking
into the allegations of mistreatment,” the British Foreign Office noted in an
internal report recently released to Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers, who provided a
copy to The New York Times. In the court case, the
British government argued that it was not complicit in any “wrongdoing” by
the Americans, and that it had no obligation to release any documents to Mr.
Mohamed. In his ruling, on Tuesday, Justice John Saunders rejected the
government’s position. Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers had made
a reasonable argument that the British government had an obligation to
disclose material that might assist Mr. Mohamed “in establishing before the
American Military Court that he was tortured,” Justice Saunders wrote in his
one-paragraph decision. He, therefore, ordered an expedited hearing, at which
a judge could decide not to require the government to release the documents. Mr. Mohamed, who was born in
Ethiopia, lived in the United States for a few years as a teen-ager, before
moving to Britain in 1994. He went to Afghanistan in May 2001, later saying
he had done so to get off drugs, and the Taliban had a strict no-drugs
policy. In the charges filed against
him last week, prosecutors assert that Mr. Mohamed had trained at several
camps of Al Qaeda, and that he had conspired with other Qaeda operatives to
carry out terrorist attacks in the United States, including the detonation of
a so-called dirty bomb. At his Combatant Status
Review Tribunal hearing at Guantánamo in 2004, Mr. Mohamed admitted that he
had received paramilitary training at a Qaeda camp, including how to falsify
documents and how to encode telephone numbers, according to the official
transcript of the hearing. He said that the training
was in preparation for going to fight in Chechnya, and he denied that he had
any intention to carry out any attacks against the United States. Mr. Mohamed was arrested
with a false passport in April 2002 by the Pakistani immigration authorities
at the airport in Karachi, and turned over to the United States. Copyright 2008 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/06london.html |