From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Feb 05 2009 - 01:47:01 EST
Detainee 'just skin and bones' after six years in custody
British resident went on hunger strikes after claims of mental and physical torture
Esther Addley
The Guardian, Thursday 5 February 2009
On 24 July last year, Binyam Mohamed marked his 30th birthday, and his sixth in US military custody. It was not a very festive occasion. Two months earlier, it had emerged, Mohamed had begun a hunger strike, though for 16 days his guards at Guantánamo Bay did not notice, according to his lawyers. When it finally became apparent he was refusing his food, by which time he had lost more than 6kg (about 14lb), they say he was shown a book called Healthy Eating, featuring photos of gourmet treats from around the world.
Mohamed was taken into custody in Pakistan in 2002, as he attempted to fly home to Britain using a fake British passport. He was born in Ethiopia but moved to London as a refugee with his parents in 1994, aged 15, and while he has never been granted British citizenship, Mohamed was given leave to remain in the UK. He spent his late teens and early 20s in Notting Hill, working as a janitor while studying engineering.
By the summer of 2001, he has claimed, he had a drugs problem, but his Muslim faith was deepening and he travelled to Afghanistan to see the Taliban's hardline regime for himself. He was detained at Karachi airport the following April.
The US authorities claimed Mohamed had been attending al-Qaida training camps and accused him of conspiring with the American Muslim convert Jose Padilla to plot a "dirty bomb" attack on a US city. Those charges were dropped, but the US said it expected further charges.
The British authorities were informed, and he was visited by an MI5 agent. The agent later told his superiors in a telegram that Mohamed had been recruited at a London mosque to travel to Afghanistan to learn about weapons and explosives.
"[BM] is intelligent and patient," the agent wrote to his superiors. "I suspect that he will only begin to provide information of genuine value if he comes to believe that it is genuinely in his interests to do so. I don't think he has yet reached this point."
Last August the high court ruled that the British security services colluded in his treatment at the time, during a period of detention which it ruled illegal under Pakistani law. The court heard of the agent's "veiled threat", which amounted, in effect, to the implication "we won't help you unless you confess".
Mohamed claims he said he would co-operate with US interrogators when he had seen a lawyer, but was told the law had changed and there were no lawyers. He was hung by leather wrist straps so he could barely stand, he says, and fed every second day.
In July 2002, Mohamed was secretly flown to Morocco, where he spent 18 months in what he called a "torture chamber". He says he was beaten, scalded and blasted with music for hours at a time, and his genitals were repeatedly sliced with a razor blade.
"When I later sat across from him in the cell, he described how psyops methods were worse than [the mutilation]," his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, has written. "He could anticipate physical pain, he said, and know that it would eventually end. But the experience of slipping into madness as a result of torture by music was something quite different. 'Imagine you are given a choice,' he said. 'Lose your sight or lose your mind.'"
Despite his treatment, Mohamed says he refused to confess to the dirty bomb allegations until he was flown to Kabul in January 2004, and subjected to a further five months of torture. Flight logs show that he arrived at Guantánamo Bay in September 2004. In his four years there, according to his lawyers, Mohamed has been on numerous hunger strikes and recently showed signs of severe mental disturbance.
In August 2007 David Miliband wrote to Condoleezza Rice, then US secretary of state, requesting his release, with four other British residents; last May Mohamed wrote to Gordon Brown about the "kangaroo court" conditions he was held in.
Last month Mohamed was told unofficially to expect his imminent release, but after another hunger strike he is said to be close to death. "He is just skin and bones," said Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, a US military lawyer who visited him last week. "The real worry is that he comes out in a coffin."
Last remaining Guantánamo Bay detainee with automatic right to return to UK faces death penalty after being charged with terrorism offences by Pentagon
James Sturcke
Binyam Mohamed: profile
Thursday 21 August 2008 14.20 BST
Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident held in Guantánamo Bay. Photograph: PA
Binyam Mohamed, the last remaining Guantánamo Bay detainee with an automatic right to return to the UK, faces the death penalty after being charged with terrorism offences by the Pentagon.
He was arrested in Pakistan as he tried to board a flight to Britain in April 2002 travelling on a false passport, the US government says in its charge sheet (pdf) against him.
The Pentagon alleges that Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who claimed asylum in Britain when he was 16, travelled to Afghanistan in May 2001 and attended terror training camps where he was lectured by Osama bin Laden.
It says he trained for city warfare and fought on the Taliban frontline against Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan in late 2001.
He went on a bomb-making course and travelled to Pakistan where he met and conspired with Jose Padilla, a US citizen and former Chicago gang member who was last year convicted by a federal court of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.
While in Pakistan, Mohamed and Padilla discussed the feasibility of constructing an improvised dirty bomb from instructions they had read on a computer, it is alleged.
Prosecutors claim they also discussed plans to attack petrol tankers and spray nightclubbers with cyanide.
Senior al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan then allegedly ordered Mohamed on a mission to attack high-rise flats and petrol stations.
Today's high court judgment says that much of the case against Mohamed is believed to have been compiled from confessions he made in Bagram, Afghanistan, between May and September 2004, and in Guantánamo Bay before November 2004.
The judges said, and the British government agreed, that Mohamed has established an arguable case that he was first held by the US incommunicado without access to a lawyer or a court in Pakistan; that he was held in cruel and inhuman conditions; and that he was subject to torture during his detention by or on behalf of the US.
The court established that the British security services facilitated the interrogation of Mohamed in Pakistan, and that he was seen by British agents in detention. The British security service provided interrogation questions and information about Mohamed in the full knowledge of the reported conditions of his detention and treatment.
Mohamed claims he was then rendered to Morocco, where he was subjected to more prolonged and brutal torture, including the repeated slashing of his genitals with a razor blade, after being made to "disappear".
Finally, he was rendered to Guantánamo, where he has spent the past four years.
In August last year, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, formally asked the Bush administration to release Mohamed and four other UK residents at Guantánamo.
Three of the men were sent home, but the US refused to release Mohamed and Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, citing security concerns.
In May, it was revealed that Mohamed had written to Gordon Brown, pleading with the prime minister to use his influence with the US president, George Bush, to stop a military court from sentencing him to death.
According to Mohamed's legal team, after working as a caretaker in Kensington he travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001 in an attempt to resolve "personal issues".