The case of Binyam Mohamed: US charges the last Brit in Gitmo

The US have announced they have charged the last British citizen held in Guantánamo Bay. The Pentagon has arraigned Binyam Mohamed, 30, for plotting with al-Qaeda to bomb apartment buildings in the US. His defence lawyers argue that the only evidence for these charges was extorted from him under torture. His lawyers wrote a letter to the Pentagon official overseeing the tribunal system to dismiss the charges stating that all the evidence against him appears to have been "derived from coercive interrogation and torture.” Binyam is the 20th detainee selected to face the military tribunals at Guantánamo, and the fifth in the last week.


Binyam Mohamed al-Habashi, was born in Ethiopia in 1979 and came to the UK with his father in 1995. He worked as a janitor at a mosque in west London. After seven years he applied for political asylum and was allowed to remain while his case was resolved. Binyam travelled to South Asia in 2002 and was arrested in Pakistan on a visa violation. Pakistan, then doing a lucrative trade in extraordinary rendition, turned him over to the US authorities for $5,000. Binyam asked what crime he had committed, and insisted on having a lawyer if he was going to be interrogated. The FBI told him: ‘The rules have changed. You don’t get a lawyer.”

US authorities flew him to Morocco where he underwent 18 months of regular torture including having a scalpel used to make incisions on his chest and penis. He was then transferred to the notorious “Dark Prison” in Kabul, Afghanistan. In operation between 2002 and 2004, it inmates called this top secret facility the “dark prison” or “prison of darkness,” where they were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in total darkness with loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for weeks at a time.

Binyam would later describe his experiences at the Dark Prison to his attorney:
“It was pitch black no lights on in the rooms for most of the time.... They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb.... There was loud music, [Eminem’s] “Slim Shady” and Dr. Dre for 20 days.... [Then] they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. [At one point, I was] chained to the rails for a fortnight.... The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night.... Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.”

Despite being held there for several months Binyam did not lose his sanity. However, his hopes of release were dashed when was sent to Guantánamo Bay in September 2004. Binyam has been there ever since. In November 2005, the Pentagon used the evidence they gained under torture in Morocco to charge him with conspiring to plot attacks against the US. The court papers alleged that he was an accomplice of Jose Padilla in Pakistan where they allegedly proposed a fanciful plan to al Qaeda leaders that they travel to the US to detonate a "uranium-enhanced" explosive device. Although he faced a preliminary hearing, he was never fully tried. Britain sought his release along with another four other British residents in August 2007. While the others were released by Christmas, US refused requests to release Binyam. Last week, he was charged with terrorism-related offences and is due to be brought before a military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay.

In 2003 one of Britain’s top law lords described Gitmo military tribunals as “kangaroo courts”. Lord Steyn, one of the most senior judges in Britain's highest court, said the term implied "a pre-ordained arbitrary rush to judgement by an irregular tribunal, which makes a mockery of justice". Yet mockery or no, Binyam now faces the very real prospect of the death penalty. Binyam is being represented by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and his Reprieve team who specialise in representing “prisoners facing execution at the hands of the state in the conventional criminal justice system, or those subject to imprisonment outside the reach of the law in the ‘war on terror.’”

Smith says Binyam is in a very fragile mental and emotional state. Binyam is suffering from depression and has taken to smearing the walls of his cell with his own faeces. On Friday 30 May, Reprieve delivered a letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown from Binyam that castigated British intelligence services for supplying evidence to his Moroccan torturers. The letter gave a graphic account of the pain inflicted including the cuts to his penis. "I felt like I was being stung by a million bees at once,” he wrote. “The floor was full of blood.” Binyam also spoke of a desire to commit suicide as “that would be one way to end, it I suppose”. A saner way to end it would be for the US to end this obscene charade and release Binyam from baseless and immoral charges.

Rendition made ordinary

Last week, the European parliament released a report which blasted its own members for its involvement in the CIA extraordinary rendition program. The report said 14 European governments in Europe turned a blind eye to over a thousand CIA flights through their airspace between 2001 and 2005, some of which were used to illegally abduct terrorist suspects for questioning. The report, emerged from a year-long investigation by a special European Parliament committee and named Germany, Britain, Ireland and Portugal as the worst offenders permitting the most number of covert flights.

Italian Socialist MEP Giovanni Claudio Fava, who drafted the report’s final conclusions, told reporters that "involvement in detainment amounts to a certain extent to involvement in torture." Although the parliament cannot impose sanctions on its member states, the release is a serious embarrassment to the EU. The report goes to a vote of the full parliament next month.

In US law, rendition means the surrender of persons or property from one jurisdiction to another. However it does not have any validity in the canon of international law. The US describes it as an “extra-legal process”. The history of extraordinary rendition dates back to the Clinton administration. The CIA began an intelligence-gathering program that involved the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where they thought federal and international legal safeguards would not apply.

The process remained a small-time CIA operation until 9/11. From then on, the program expanded dramatically. Non US-nationals suspected of terrorism were transported to interrogation facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere. CIA agent Robert Baer described a pecking order of detention centres: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt, “ he said.

It is difficult to get a feel for how many people have been victims of these secret renditions. The EU report named 1,245 flights through Europe alone. But the report’s release may be a sign that the tide is turning against rendition. On 16 February, an Italian judge gave approval for a trial in absentia of 25 CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric four years ago. Meanwhile victims who have escaped the rendition hellholes are also seeking redress in the courts. The two most famous cases known so far are Maher Arar and Khalid El-Masri.

Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian wireless technology consultant. On 26 September 2002, Arar was in transit in New York’s JFK airport when returning to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. Likely acting on false information from Canadian police, US officials detained and interrogated him about alleged links to al-Qaeda. Twelve days later, he was chained, shackled and flown to Syria. Syrian military intelligence held him in a tiny “grave-like” cell for ten months before they moved him to a better prison. He was beaten, tortured and forced to make a false confession. He was released after a year. A 2006 Canadian enquiry totally exonerated Arar of any involvement in terrorism. The US did not co-operate with the enquiry and Arar remains on a US watchlist because of "his personal associations and travel history”.

Khalid El-Masri has also suffered brutally in the name of rendition. El-Masri was born in Lebanon and moved to Germany to escape the civil war. There he married a Lebanese and gained German citizenship. In 2003, he travelled from his home in the city of Ulm to Skopje, Macedonia. On arrival at the Macedonian border, he was detained by police who thought his passport was fake. El-Masri’s misfortune was to have a similar name to Khalid Al-Masri who was wanted in connection for his involvement in the Al Qaeda Hamburg cell which carried out the 9/11 attacks. Macedonian police held El-Masri for three weeks before releasing him. They also informed the CIA.

The CIA sent a snatch team to Macedonia and kidnapped El-Masri. They assaulted and drugged him, then flew him out of the country to the infamous “Salt Pit” prison near Kabul in Afghanistan where he was frequent tortured and injected with drugs. After two months US officials concede his passport was genuine and El-Masri was not a terrorist. El-Masri was finally taken to Albania where he was deposited on a desolate road at night with no apology and no money. Suspicious Albanian authorities initially arrested him on suspicion of terrorism. In May 2005, he finally made it home to Germany only to find his wife had gone back to Lebanon, thinking he had left her. One year later a Washington Federal District Judge dismissed a lawsuit El-Masri filed against the CIA explaining that a public trial would "present a grave risk of injury to national security”.

The full truth of extraordinary rendition may never be known.