| Binyam Ahmed Mohamed | |
|---|---|
| Born | 24 July 1978 Ethiopia |
| Detained at | The dark prison, Guantanamo |
| Alternate name | Benjamin Mohammed, Benyam (Ahmed) Mohammed, Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi |
| ISN | 1458 |
| Charge(s) | All charges dropped |
| Status | Released |
Binyam Ahmed Mohamed (Amharic: ብንያም መሐመድ?) (Arabic: بنيام محمد) (also described as Benjamin Mohammed, Benyam (Ahmed) Mohammed and Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi) (born 24 July 1978) is an Ethiopian national, who was detained in Guantanamo Bay prison between 2004 and 2009.[1] He was captured and transported under the US extraordinary rendition program. Mohamed's military representative reported that he had admitted while he was detained that he had trained in the Al-Qaeda terrorist training camp Al Farouq,[2] but has since said that the evidence against him was obtained using torture.[3] After charges against him were dropped, he was eventually released and arrived in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2009. In February 2010, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that he had been subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities".[4]
Contents |
Mohamed has said that he was tortured in US custody, and tortured while in nominally Moroccan custody.[5] He was alleged to have played a role in what American counter-terrorism analysts characterized as a "dirty bomb plot" with Jose Padilla, despite the fact that it became clear, almost from the moment that Mohamed was seized, that the plot never existed. In June 2002, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy to US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, admitted that "there was not an actual plan" to set off a radioactive device in America, that Padilla had not begun trying to acquire materials, and that intelligence officials had stated that his research had not gone beyond surfing the internet.[6]
Born in Ethiopia, Mohamed came to United Kingdom in 1994, where he lived for seven years, sought political asylum and was given leave to remain while his case was resolved.[7]
In June 2001, Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan. The reasons for the trip are in dispute. British and U.S. authorities contend, and the US Military-appointed Personal Representative's Initial Interview notes state, that Mohamed admitted to receiving paramilitary training in the al Farouq training camp.[8] Mohamed's supporters contend that he had gone to conquer his drug problems and to see Muslim countries "with his own eyes". Mohamed said that he had made false statements while being tortured in Pakistani jails. He admitted to military training, but said that it was to fightin Chechnya, which was not illegal.[2] On 10 April 2002, Mohamed was arrested at Pakistan's Karachi airport by Pakistani authorities as a suspected terrorist, while attempting to fly to the UK using a false passport.[9] Mohamed contends that he was a subject of the United States extraordinary rendition policy, and entered a "ghost prison system" run by US intelligence agents.[10]
Before his transfer to Guantánamo Bay, Mohamed states that he was incarcerated in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, and that while in Morocco, interrogators tortured him by using scalpels or razor blades to repeatedly cut his penis and chest.[11]
Mohamed was taken from Bagram airbase to Guantánamo Bay on 19 September 2004. He says that since then he has been "routinely humiliated and abused and constantly lied to". In February 2005 he was placed in Camp V, the harsh "super-maximum" style facility where, reports suggest, "uncooperative" detainees are held. He was told that he would be required to testify against other detainees.[12]
Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said that Mohamed participated in recent hunger strikes to protest against the harsh conditions and lack of access to any judicial review.[13] The hunger strike started in July 2005, and resumed in August 2005 because the detainees believed the US authorities failed to honour promises to meet their demands. From a written statement by Mohamed dated 11 August 2005:
On 7 August 2007, he was one of five Guantánamo detainees that British Foreign Secretary David Miliband requested be freed, citing the fact they had all applied for or had been granted refugee status, or similar leave, to remain in Britain prior to their capture by US forces.[16]
On 7 November 2005, Mohamed was charged with conspiracy. The complaint alleges that Mohamed was trained in Kabul to build dirty bombs (weapons combining conventional explosives with radioactive material intended to be dispersed over a large area). According to the complaint, he was planning terror attacks against high-rise apartment buildings in the United States and was arrested at an airport in Pakistan, attempting to go to London while using a forged passport. [17]
At the start of his military commission Mohamed chose to represent himself. He decried the military commissions and stated he was not the person charged because the Prosecution had spelled his name incorrectly. He held up a sign "con mission" and stated: "This is not a commission, it's a con mission, It's a mission to con the world."[18]
In mid-2006 the United States Supreme Court over-ruled President Bush. The judges ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the President lacked the constitutional authority to create military commissions and Mohamed's military commission was halted.
In late 2008, new charges were filed against Binyam Mohamed after the United States Congress authorized new military commissions under the Military Commissions Act in 2006.
On 21 October 2008 Susan J. Crawford, the official in charge of the Office of Military Commissions, announced that charges were dropped against Mohamed and four other captives, Jabran al Qahtani, Ghassan al Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi, and Noor Uthman Muhammed.[19][20]
Carol J. Williams, writing in the Los Angeles Times, reported that all five men had been connected to Abu Zubaydah — one of the three captives the CIA has acknowledged was interrogated using the controversial technique known as waterboarding. Williams quoted the men's attorneys, who anticipated the five men would be re-charged within thirty days.[20] They told Williams that "... prosecutors called the move procedural", and attributed it to the resignation of fellow Prosecutor Darrel Vandeveld, who resigned on ethical grounds. Williams reported that Clive Stafford Smith speculated that the Prosecution's dropping of the charges, and plans to subsequently re-file charges later, was intended to counter and disarm the testimony Vandeveld was anticipated to offer that the Prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence.
In December 2005 the declassification of his lawyer's notes permitted further claims of abusive interrogation to be made public.[21] Mohamed's further claims included that he was transported to a black site known as "the dark prison", where captives were permanently chained to the wall, kept in constant darkness, and constantly bombarded with "The Real Slim Shady " by Eminem for 20 days[22]
On 21 June 2008 the New York Times reported that the UK Government had sent a letter to Clive Stafford Smith, confirming that it had information about Binyam Mohamed's allegations of abuse.[23]
On Monday 28 July 2008 his lawyers filed a petition in an UK court that the Foreign Office should be compelled to turn over the evidence of Binyam Mohamed's abuse.[24] They also filed a petition with the Irish government for the records of his illegal transport over Ireland. On 21 August 2008, the High Court of the United Kingdom found in his favour, ruling that the Foreign Office should disclose this material. The judges said of the information that it was "not only necessary but essential for his defence".[25][26]
Although the documents were disclosed to Mohamed's legal counsel as ordered, they were not released to the general public,[27] and a later examination by the High Court found in favour of the Foreign Secretary not to force their publication.[28] The reasons given were that — even if it was unreasonable for it to affect international relations — if the Foreign Secretary thought it was going to harm the special intelligence relationship with the United States, it would not be in the public interest.[29]
In February 2009, CBC News reported that Mohamed had described being warned to cooperate by two women, who represented themselves as Canadians.[30] Each woman met represented herself as a third-party intervener, who warned him that she thought he should co-operate, and answer the American's questions fully, or he was likely to be tortured. According to the CBC report, Canada had an obligation to object if it were determined that the Americans had falsely represented US security officials as Canadians, as a ploy to trick Mohamed into confessing.
Binyam's attorneys reported that he had been subjected to "extraordinary rendition", transferred to Morocco, where he was tortured, and that he had also been held in a network of secret CIA interrogation centres, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo in 2004.[31][32]
On August 1, 2007 Mohamed joined a civil suit filed under the United States' Alien Tort Statute against Jeppesen Dataplan, with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union.[33] [34][35][36][37] The defendant in the case was a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging extraordinary rendition flights for the CIA. This was a joint lawsuit with four other plaintiffs, Bisher Al-Rawi, Abou Elkassim Britel, Ahmed Agiza, and Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah.
Accepting the argument of the Obama administration that hearing the case would divulge state secrets, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed the lawsuit on September 8, 2010.[38]
On 7 August 2007 the United Kingdom government requested the release of Binyam Mohamed and four other, men who had been legal British residents without being British citizens.[39] He was not released however, and in June 2008 the U.S. military announced they were formally charging him.
On 16 January 2009 The Independent reported that Mohamed had told his lawyers he had been told to prepare for his return to the United Kingdom.[40] The Independent quoted a recently declassified note from Mohamed: "It has come to my attention through several reliable sources that my release from Guantánamo to the UK had been ordered several weeks ago. It is a cruel tactic of delay to suspend my travel till the last days of this [Bush] administration while I should have been home a long time ago."
Interviewed by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News on 9 February 2009 his military lawyer, Lt-Col Yvonne Bradley, asserted that there was no doubt that Mohamed had been tortured, and that Britain and the US were complicit in his torture.[41] Bradley subsequently took up his case directly with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on 11 February 2009.[42]
According to Agence France Presse Mohamed had been on a hunger strike but had stopped on 5 February 2009, when his lawyers informed him he could expect transfer to the UK soon.[43] He was visited on 14 and 15 February 2009 by a delegation of UK officials, including a doctor, who confirmed he was healthy enough to be flown back to England.
On 23 February 2009, almost seven years after his arrest, Mohamed was repatriated from Guantánamo to the UK, where he was released after questioning.[44]
Two weeks after his release, the BBC published claims that British intelligence (MI5) had colluded with his interrogators by getting them to ask him specific questions which led to his making false confessions of terrorist activities. In the first memo, the MI5 agent asked for a name to be put to him and then for him to be questioned further about that person. The second telegram concerned a further interrogation. The legal organisation Reprieve, which represents Mohamed, said its client was shown the MI5 telegrams by his military lawyer Yvonne Bradley.
Although his claims of MI5 collusion are being investigated by the government, the Shadow Justice Secretary, Dominic Grieve, called for a judicial inquiry into the allegations and for the matter to be referred to the police. Shami Chakrabarti, director of campaign group Liberty said: "These are more than allegations - these are pieces of a puzzle that are being put together. It makes an immediate criminal investigation absolutely inescapable."[45]
On 12 March 2009 in an op-ed piece in The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash called for Mohamed's claims of torture and MI5 collusion to be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, saying that any other decision "will inevitably be interpreted as a political cover-up."[46]
On 10 February 2010, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that material held by the UK Foreign Secretary must revealed. The court regretted that it had 'to conclude that the reports provided to the SyS [Security Service] made clear to anyone reading them that BM [Binyam Mohamed] was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment." "The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972 [in the UN convention on torture]." '[47]
The case of determining British involvement (mainly MI5 and MI6) in the unlawful treatment of a UK resident Mohamed by the CIA, was eventually tried at court in 2009 and appealed in 2010. Despite attempts by the foreign secretary, David Miliband to suppress evidence citing such disclosure would harm national security because it was given in confidence by the US authorities, the government lost the case at the high court. On 14 December 2009, Miliband appealed against the six high court judgements ruling, that CIA information on Mohamed's treatment, and what MI5 and MI6 knew about it, must be disclosed. In a case unprecedented, counsel for the Guardian and other media organisations, Mohamed and two civil rights groups, Liberty and Justice, argued that the public interest in disclosing the role played by British and US agencies in unlawful activities far outweighs any claim about potential threats to national security.[48][49]
On December 20, 2009, a U.S. judge, Gladys Kessler, found that there was "credible" evidence that a British resident was tortured while being detained on behalf of Washington. A formerly classified legal opinion, handed down by a judge in the US district court and obtained by the Observer, acknowledges that the US government does not dispute "credible" evidence that Binyam Mohamed had been tortured while being held at "its behest".[50][51]
On January 27, 2010, it was reported that the "United Nations human rights investigators have concluded that the British government has been complicit in the mistreatment and possible torture of several of its own citizens during the "war on terror". Among the cases listed, in which they conclude that a state has been complicit in a secret detention, the authors highlight "the United Kingdom in the cases of several individuals, including Binyam Mohamed.[52]
On February 10, 2010 three senior judges, sitting in the Court of Appeal, ordered the British government to reveal evidence of MI5 and MI6 complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, overruling the foreign secretary, David Miliband.[53]
In response to highly critical media coverage, Mr Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, insisted that the coverage of the torture had been “baseless, groundless accusations”.[54] He also said that government lawyers had not forced the judiciary to water down criticism of MI5, despite an earlier, draft ruling by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a "culture of suppression" that undermined government assurances about its conduct.[55]
According to the Washington Post the court order forcing the British Government to publish secret memos it received from US intelligence officials will jeopardize future US-UK intelligence sharing.[56] The Washington Post quoted "White House officials" on February 10, 2010, who said the publication: "will complicate the confidentiality of our intelligence-sharing relationship.". According to The Guardian an anonymous White House officials had told them: "the court decision would not provoke a broad review of intelligence liaison between Britain and the US because the need for close co-operation was greater now than ever."[57]
At the end Mohamed received 1 million UK pound compensation from the British government.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055474/Going-shopping-terror-suspect-pocketed-million-compensation-torture-claims.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||