UK Judges Order Release of Details About the Torture of Binyam Mohamed by US Agents

October 19, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

www.truthout.org

In August 2008, while British resident Binyam Mohamed still languished in a prison cell in Guantánamo, two British High Court judges attempted to inform the public about what, in May 2002, the CIA had told their British counterparts about how they had treated him while he was being held in Pakistani custody, shortly before a British agent interrogated him.

The judges were Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, and their attempt to inform the public came in a judgment that followed a judicial review of Mohamed’s case during the summer of 2008, which was itself triggered by the British government’s refusal to release 42 documents in its possession regarding his detention in Pakistan.

August 2008: The Quest to Reveal Information About US Torture Begins

In their ruling last August, the judges made it clear that they were appalled by the global torture program in which they had found themselves unexpectedly immersed. In one of the most extraordinary stories in the “war on terror,” Mohamed, a British resident picked up in Pakistan in April 2002, had been rendered by CIA agents to Morocco in July 2002, where he had spent 18 months being tortured, had then been rendered to Afghanistan, to the “Dark Prison” outside Kabul, a secret prison run by the CIA, where he had spent another four months and had then been flown to Guantánamo, where he remained while the judges grappled with the largely classified evidence of a global web of kidnapping and torture.

In a remarkable ruling, the judges roundly condemned the British government for sending an agent to Pakistan to interview Mohamed in May 2002, when he was being held incommunicado (which was illegal), and for providing and receiving intelligence about him for at least eight months after his disappearance from Pakistan, even though the British intelligence services claimed not to know where he was being held, and should not have been involved without receiving cast-iron assurances about his welfare. In the judgment, they stated explicitly that, “by seeking to interview BM [Mohamed] in the circumstances found and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.” Read full article…