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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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March 23rd,
2009 - Plea Bargain Was Considered for British Detainee News article from the New York
Times |
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Plea Bargain Was Considered
for British Detainee By Raymond Bonner New York Times March 23, 2009 London - Details of negotiations
on a highly restrictive plea bargain for a Guantánamo detainee were revealed
in a legal document released by a British court on Monday. The measures proposed by the
United States included a prison term of at least 3 years more than the 7 he had
already been detained, a gag order, an end to his efforts to obtain documents
that might bolster his claims that he was tortured in C.I.A. custody, and an
agreement not to file any lawsuits against the United States government or
any of its officials. The detainee, Binyam
Mohamed, rejected the offer, and eventually all charges against him were
dropped. Last month, he was released to Britain and is now free. The document was prepared by
the court last October but was not made public because, the court said, the
rules of plea bargaining with the United States military commissions required
confidentiality. His lawyers were not even allowed to say that a plea bargain
was being discussed. With negotiations ended, the court said, it could
release the document. At one point, the document
said, Mr. Mohamed agreed to plead “no defense” to charges of support for
terrorism in exchange for a sentence not to exceed three years, which he
would be allowed to serve time in Britain. The prosecutors rejected this, the
court noted. In a statement released
Monday, a lawyer for Mr. Mohamed, Clive Stafford Smith, said his client would
have pleaded guilty “to being the pope himself,” if it would have ended his
ordeal. Mr. Mohamed, who was born in
Ethiopia, and moved to Britain as a teenager, was apprehended in Pakistan in
April 2002 as he was trying to leave the country with a false British
passport. He had been in Afghanistan and had undergone military training,
which he said was to prepare him to fight in Chechnya. But American officials
initially said that he was preparing to carry out terrorist attacks in the
United States. At one point, American officials said he had been part of a
plot to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States. He was held at the Bagram
air base, where he says his torture began. A few months after his capture,
according to American and British officials, he was secretly flown by the
C.I.A. to Morocco. As part of the Bush administration’s rendition program,
some terrorism suspects were transferred to countries where torture is known
to be used. The C.I.A. has declined to say publicly where Mr. Mohamed was
held and has denied that it ever engaged in or condoned torture. Mr. Mohamed has said that he
was in Morocco for 18 months, during which time his captors used scalpels to
cut his chest and genitals. “I was in agony, crying,
trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming,” Mr. Mohamed said
earlier this month, in an interview with The Mail on Sunday two weeks ago. “There was blood all over,”
he added. “They cut all my private parts.” They also tempted him with
women, “naked or part naked,” Mr. Mohamed told his lawyer, Mr. Stafford
Smith, during an interview when he was still in Guantánamo. Mr. Stafford
Smith wrote down many of his interviews with his client, and they were
subsequently cleared by military censors. Mr. Stafford Smith provided what he
calls Mr. Mohammed’s “diary” to the Times. On the day that Mr. Mohamed
left Morocco, in the custody of what he said were American soldiers in black
masks, they first cut off all his clothes, according to the diary. Then a “white female with
glasses” took pictures of his injuries, the diary says. “She was one of the few
Americans who ever showed me any sympathy,” he said in the diary. “When she
saw the injuries I had she gasped. I could see the shock and horror in her
eyes.” His lawyers have filed
lawsuits to obtain these photographs, as well as 42 other classified
documents, which the British court said lend credence to Mr. Mohamed’s
allegations. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/world/europe/24london.html |