Released from Guantanamo, Binyam Mohamed Is Tortured to the End

Andy Worthington first reported that Binyam Mohamed, a key figure in legal battles around the U.S. government's attempts to use state secrets privilege to spike legal cases against the torture apparatus of rendition and prisons, will leave Guantanamo and return to the UK "early next week" (that is, this coming week). Now the Washington Post is now reporting that Binyam's attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, is "confident" his client will be released on Monday (2/23).)

But the most amazing part of the story, from the UK Guardian, and caught by Glenn Greenwald in his column Sunday, concerns the ongoing abuse of detainee Mohamed, even unto the final days of his release from Guantanamo and planned return to the UK.

Quoting from the Guardian via Greenwald's column, so I can preserve his bold emphases:

Mohamed will arrive back tomorrow in the UK, where he was a British resident between 1984 and 2002. During medical examinations last week, doctors discovered injuries and ailments resulting from apparently brutal treatment in detention.

Mohamed was found to be suffering from bruising, organ damage, stomach complaints, malnutrition, sores to feet and hands, severe damage to ligaments as well as profound emotional and psychological problems which have been exacerbated by the refusal of Guantánamo's guards to give him counselling.

Mohamed's British lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said his client had been beaten "dozens" of times inside the notorious US camp in Cuba with the most recent abuse occurring during recent weeks. He said: "He has a list of physical ailments that cover two sheets of A4 paper. What Binyam has been through should have been left behind in the middle ages."

[U.S. Army] Lieutenant colonel Yvonne Bradley, Mohamed's US military attorney, added: "He has been severely beaten. Sometimes I don't like to think about it because my country is behind all this." . . .

Greenwald also makes the obvious comparison to the story released late last week, wherein Obama's Pentagon review of conditions at Guantanamo found all to be well, with prisoners treated humanely as required by the Geneva Conventions. I can hardly wait to see the part of the report where the force-feeding of hunger strikers is explained, or even the fact that over 1/5th of the facility's inmates are on hunger strike.

The Pentagon has lied all the way on the torture issue, and continues to lie. I criticized the make-up of the various committees assigned by President Obama to investigate Guantanamo and interrogation techniques as being . As I wrote last month after Obama's executive orders were released:

Obama's changes are in general positive. But they do not go far enough, and the status of what exactly will be changed, as in the case of future adjudication of the Guantanamo prisoners, or how "terror suspects" will be handled in the months or years to come, await the conclusion of review task forces. The latter are headed by the main administration bureaucracy at State, Defense, and the intelligence agencies, and coordinated by the Attorney General. Their trustworthiness is yet to be determined, and in some cases these people are already known and not very untrustworthy, given their support of the Iraq War, or over-identification with intelligence and covert operations.

Let's look briefly at Admiral Patrick Walsh, who Obama's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates (left over from the Bush Administration), picked to head the Pentagon investigatory team. (Talk about "who will watch the watchers"! Bush's Secretary of Defense gets to pick the man who will investigate Guantanamo. You couldn't ask for such brutal irony.)

Admiral Walsh is a true believer in the endless war against radical Islam or fundamentalist terrorism, hence, he may not look kindly upon dismantling the gulag assembled for the purpose. Here's Walsh in 2006 in Dallas for a meeting of the Rotary Club:

In an exclusive television interview with CBS 11, Admiral Walsh cautioned an impatient American public that a long fight against Islamic extremists lies ahead. "I think we really need to understand the adversary that we are up against here and I think part of the impatience is not understanding fully the commitment that the enemy has to destroy not just us, it's our culture....

"What we are talking about today is an ideology that thrives on murder, intimidation, and fear. It puts innocent people at risk particularly those in open societies. What we are talking about are people who worship death itself."

I'm getting pretty tired now of the free ride President Obama seems to be getting on the Guantanamo and related torture issues. Of course, that's not true of everybody, as the references in the essay attest. But for the most part, I don't believe the majority of Americans are yet fully aware of how problematic many of Obama's decisions have been on this issue thus far. A whitewash of conditions at Guantanamo. Threatening allies regarding release of classified information on torture. A determination to keep some form of illegal rendition. Reliance on an army manual for interrogations that still allows many abusive procedures. The torture beatings of an inmate prior to release.

The latest "shock" to human rights activists came when the administration ruled it would deny hundreds of U.S.-held prisoners at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul any constitutional appeal or rights. Bagram holds many of the same kinds of prisoners as Guantanamo, but is not on leased territory 90 miles from America, and the detainees are easily out of sight of U.S. news crews or popular notice.

The time is coming close when the Obama administration will have passed beyond the point of no return, and will become irretrievably associated with many of the worst aspects of the Bush torture regime. That time is not yet, and the administration may yet have other plans up their sleeves, as many Democratic supporters avow. But the torture beating of Binyam Mohamed, in full light of the world's press, and knowing this would have to come out, demonstrates the blatant hubris and contempt of the people running this country, especially its military prisons.

Silence from the White House on Guantanamo Abuse

Andy Worthington has a timely and important article today, titled "Who's Running Guantanamo?"

On Jan. 20, the answer to that question seemed obvious. In his inaugural speech, with George W. Bush standing just behind him, President Obama pointedly pledged to "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals" – a clear indication that, as he promised in a speech in August 2007, he would dismantle the extralegal aberrations of the Bush administration's "War on Terror"....

President Obama requested the military judges at Guantánamo to call a halt for four months to all proceedings in the military commissions at Guantánamo....

The day after, he signed his first executive orders, stating that Guantánamo would be closed within a year, upholding the absolute ban on torture, ordering the CIA to close all secret prisons, establishing an immediate review of the cases of the remaining 242 prisoners in Guantánamo, and requiring Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ensure, within 30 days, that the conditions at Guantánamo conformed to the Geneva Conventions....

Worthington goes on to describe a struggle within the Pentagon to defy Obama's stay on prosecutions as it pertained to Saudi prisoner Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri. Ultimately, the convening authority of the military commissions at Guantanamo dismissed charges against al-Nahiri, though he is charges can be re-filed again later.

As Bush appointees and Cheney proteges muck around the Pentagon and the Naval Base at Guantanamo, Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed's attorney, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, reports deteriorating conditions at that facility, with "savage beatings," forced extractions from inmate cells, and forced feedings in an effort to quash a mass hunger strike among inmates. Over 20% of all inmates at the facility are currently on hunger strike.

Worthington concludes:

... although Bradley's account indicates that the crisis in Guantánamo is such that ongoing discussions about implementing the Geneva Conventions should be replaced by urgent intervention to address the prisoners' complaints (and alleviating the chronic isolation in which most of the prisoners are held would be a start), the conditions in Guantánamo have been met with a resolute silence from the Pentagon and the White House.

Will it really take another death in Guantánamo – the sixth – to provoke a response?

Reactions to Obama/Holder Injustice in Jeppesen Case

Ateqah Khaki, from the National Security Project, in an article posted at ACLU Blog of Rights, has described the significant press reaction following the Obama Administration's decision to claim "state secrets" in their argument to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to drop plaintiffs' plea to let their suit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplans, Inc. go forward. ACLU attorneys argued the case for plaintiffs.

It is public record that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the CIA extraordinary rendition program, providing critical flight planning and logistical support services and aircraft crews. Jeppesen employees were even known to brag about their services to the CIA program. One managing director told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker:

"We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights—you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way."

The five men involved in the lawsuit, which was dismissed by a lower court in February 2008 thanks to the Bush administration's inappropriate assertion of "state secrets privilege," that release of information in court regarding the case would supposedly harm national security. The men had been forcibly disappeared by the Jeppesen-serviced CIA program and sent from countries like Sweden, Gambia, Pakistan, and Jordan and flown to secret detention and torture in CIA prisons, or by CIA proxies in Morocco and Egypt, or elsewhere.

One of these five, Binyam Mohamed, lies near death on hunger strike in Guantanamo prison, where U.S. authorities are pondering his release to return to Britain. One of Mohamed's attorney's, Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley, an American military lawyer, has written an appeal for his release, published in today's UK Guardian. She describes some of what her client is currently suffering. This, not yesterday's Obama press conference, displays the real face of American power and how it is used:

Guards told Binyam that he was going home in December, and so he is on hunger strike (together with 50 or so other prisoners). This means that he is tube-fed while strapped to a chair, twice a day. Binyam has lost so much weight that he speaks of the pain he suffers from being strapped to the chair for hours each day – he speaks of feeling his bones against the chair. I am really worried that if Binyam does not come home soon, he will leave Guantánamo Bay in a coffin.

The Joint Task Force, which runs Guantánamo Bay, gives me no information about Binyam. When I called to enquire about his condition, they said first, that they would look into it and then that they would tell me nothing and that I should make a Freedom of Information request, which would have taken months to process. Therefore, whenever I want information about Binyam, I have to make the 5-hour trip to Guantánamo. Each time, he asks why he is still there.

It is worth bearing in mind that all charges against Binyam have been dropped and that Binyam's chief prosecutor resigned, citing the unfairness of the system.

Meanwhile, outrage continues to pour out regarding the injustice of the Obama administration's actions in court on Monday. The Los Angeles Times highlighted the incredulity of one judge regarding the government's argument to dismiss the Jeppesen case:

At one point during the hearing, Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, a Clinton appointee, told the government’s lawyer that he was not convincing.

"So any time the executive branch of the government says the fact is classified, it means it cannot be examined?" Hawkins asked Letter.

Letter, noting that national security was at stake, told the court it should "not play with fire" by permitting the suit to go forward.

"Nor should the government in asserting [secrecy] privilege," Hawkins shot back.

The New York Times editorialized today against the Obama Department of Justice actions:

The Obama administration failed — miserably — the first test of its commitment to ditching the extravagant legal claims used by the Bush administration to try to impose blanket secrecy on anti-terrorism policies and avoid accountability for serial abuses of the law....

Incredibly, the federal lawyer advanced the same expansive state-secrets argument that was pressed by Mr. Bush’s lawyers to get a trial court to dismiss the case without any evidence being presented. It was as if last month’s inauguration had never occurred....

The fact that some of the evidence might be legitimately excluded on national security grounds need not preclude the case from being tried, and allowing the judge to make that determination. More fundamentally, the Obama administration should not be invoking state secrets to cover up charges of rendition and torture.

The simple truth is this: the government has had years to make their cases against the Guantanamo detainees. If they cannot bring a case today, the detainees should be released. They could be given provisional residency status in the United States, pending final disposition. Those for whom their is acceptable evidence of crimes could be turned over to federal courts and charged and tried accordingly. Binyam Mohamed should be released immediately. Britain has already indicated they are ready to accept him.

The news last week that President Obama is still considering some kind of modified version the hated military commissions to try Guantanamo prisoners should be dropped. The U.S. courts can handle any appropriate prosecutions. Whether its bogus military commissions or "state secrets privilege" to torpedo accountability lawsuits, why doe the U.S. government want to keep these issues out of American courts? One good reason: their actions and programs would not withstand legal scrutiny.

FYI: The ACLU has posted a link so everyone can hear the oral arguments made last Monday in the Jeppesen case.