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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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August 10th,
2009 - U.S. Battling CIA Rendition Case in 3 Courts |
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U.S. Battling
CIA Rendition Case in 3 Courts By Bob Egelko San Francisco Chronicle August 10, 2009 The Obama administration is
fighting on multiple fronts - in courts in San Francisco, Washington and
London - to keep an official veil of secrecy over the treatment of a former
prisoner who says he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay. The administration has asked
a federal appeals court in San Francisco to reconsider its ruling allowing
Binyam Mohamed and four other former or current prisoners to sue a Bay Area
company for allegedly flying them to overseas torture chambers for the CIA. Obama administration lawyers
also argued that Mohamed's attorneys had violated secrecy procedures by
writing a letter to President Obama, accompanied by a blacked-out document,
asking him to disclose their client's treatment. A federal judge ordered
Mohamed's lawyers to answer contempt-of-court charges in May that were
punishable by up to six months in jail, but has since dropped those charges. Most recently, a British
government lawyer told her nation's High Court last month that Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S.
intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of
Mohamed's treatment in Guantanamo. The British court declared
in August 2008 that there was evidence Mohamed had been tortured, but deleted
the details from its public version of the ruling at the Bush
administration's insistence. The court is now considering
requests from lawyers for Mohamed and the news media to make the details
public in a case over alleged British participation in his mistreatment. According to a transcript of
the court's July 29 hearing, Lord Justice John Thomas said there was
"nothing in the paragraphs (about the U.S. government's treatment of
Mohamed) that could conceivably identify anything that is of a national
security interest." Jeppesen sued Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian
refugee and British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and turned over
to U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist and Taliban fighter. He said he
was tortured in Morocco, where guards slashed his genitals with a razor
blade, and in a CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, hung from a
pole and held in darkness and isolation. He was sent to Guantanamo in
September 2004. He and four other men have
sued Jeppesen Dataplan, a San Jose subsidiary of the Boeing Co., for its
alleged role in arranging their flights for the CIA. A Council of Europe
report in 2007 described Jeppesen as the CIA's aviation services provider. Suit reinstated The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated the suit in April, rejecting arguments
originally made by the Bush administration that the case posed grave risks to
national security. Obama administration lawyers endorsed those arguments at a
hearing in February and have asked the court for a rehearing. Mohamed's lawyers, Clive
Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour of the British human-rights group Reprieve,
were threatened with jail after drafting a letter to Obama in February urging
him to release the evidence of their client's treatment in U.S. custody or to
authorize Britain to do so. The lawyers said a Defense
Department review team refused to let them provide a summary of the
classified evidence to Obama, so they sent him a blacked-out sheet instead
and released both documents to the press. But government lawyers said
Mohamed's attorneys misled the review team about their plans and misled the
public by accusing the team of concealing information from the president. Contempt charges Citing the government's
accusations, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan of Washington ordered Mohamed's
attorneys to appear before him in May and face contempt charges, punishable
by up to six months in jail, for allegedly violating terms of the agreement that
allowed them to gain access to Guantanamo prisoners. But after further arguments,
Hogan said there had been misunderstandings by both sides and no violation.
The Justice Department declined comment on the case last week. External link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/10/BAHQ195SJR.DTL |