Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, 31, says UK authorities knew he was tortured at the behest of US authorities after his detention in Pakistan in 2002.
Judges ruled that paragraphs which say his treatment was “cruel, inhuman and degrading” should be released.
David Miliband said the ruling was “not evidence that the system is broken”.
The judgement was delivered by the three most senior Court of Appeal judges in England and Wales.
Clive Stafford Smith in The Guardian:
This is a high-profile example of a national disease. Because we fear for our safety and cherish our privacy, politicians argue that we will lose both if we do not sacrifice our right to free speech, our “right to know”. We should, in other words, simply trust them.
This is the path that British politicians have been treading all too frequently. Nobody would have known that three Labour MPs committed expense fraud, or that scores of others spent money on the ethical equivalent of a duck pond, if we were only allowed to see the redacted version of the MPs expenses. The claim in that case was “privacy”.
The seven paragraphs should rate little more than a footnote in the full story, yet that is a tale that remains untold. The court tells us that a “vast body” of government reports about Mohamed’s abuse remain secret. I was in Washington last week reviewing a similarly “vast body” of evidence indicating British complicity in the abuse of another Guantánamo prisoner, Shaker Aamer. Not a word of that has been revealed, again on grounds of national security.
Since I am not as temperate as a judge, I would not characterise the arguments made by Miliband as “irrational”: after beginning with the term “foolish,” I fear I would descend to epithets unfit to publish here . Suppressing any evidence of government criminality on grounds of national security sets a very dangerous precedent. As the saying goes, those who would sacrifice their freedoms to ensure their safety deserve neither – and can expect to lose both.
Con Coughlin in the Telegraph:
Why don’t our judges just come clean and sign up with the Taliban? Every time they are asked to choose between the defence of the realm, or upholding the rights of some Islamic militant who claims his human rights have been violated, the judges invariably find in favour of the latter. Whether it is holding suspected terrorists so that thorough investigations of their activities can be carried out, or pandering to civil rights campaigners such as the odious Clive Stafford-Smith, the judical establishment never misses an opportunity to undermine the government’s efforts to protect us from harm.
Perhaps it’s because me lerned friends are too grand to travel by public transport, but the only reason I can think of to explain their egregious behaviour is that they somehow feel immune from the threat posed by Islamist terror groups. Even when the security services have raised the current terror threat level to “severe”, the judges are more interested in bending over backwards to accommodate deeply unsympathetic characters like Binyam Mohamed than paying proper attention to the nation’s security needs.
Poor Binyam claims he was tortured after he was caught “back-packing” in Afghanistan. Of course no one in the judiciary pays the slightest bit of notice when Binyam insists that he had travelled to Afghanistan simply to help out with some charity work, rather than, as our intelligence and security services suspect, to assist the Taliban and al-Qaeda with their plots to blow up the West. They are only interested that, once he had been safely removed from the battlefield, his human rights might somehow have been violated.
The document that has now been released by the Foreign Office relates that Binyam was subjected to sleep deprivation, rather than the more lurid claims his lawyers have made about him having his testicles slashed with razors. Poor diddums. When I travel to Afghanistan with the Army we live on three hours sleep a night, but no one complains about sleep deprivation. We just get on with it.
But there is a serious point to today’s disgraceful ruling by the High Court. Our national security depends heavily on our intelligence-sharing cooperation with the U.S., and it is thanks to the intel provided by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies that we have managed to avoid a repeat of the July 7 bombings. But if the Americans, alarmed at the willingness of our judges to humiliate them in public, decide to scale down the level of cooperation, our national security will undoubtedly be placed in jeopardy.
Certainly, if another al-Qaeda bomb goes off in London, the judges will be as much to blame as Osama bin Laden.
Should the law change because our security agencies shift the scareometer from “black” to “black special”? I don’t think so. During the time of the IRA, which objectively posed a much greater threat to us (and often tragically delivered on that threat) we did not allow our way of life to be changed. When we did – from removing bins on Oxford Street to Diplock courts – the changes were far smaller and more robustly debated than presently, as we change things in the face of a smaller threat, perhaps because we lived in a society more intellectually committed to the values of liberty and freedom than today. When we did make those less significant changes in the face of the Republican terrorist threat, it was wrong. Consider that in comparison with the enormous changes wrongly wrought post-9/11, largely unchallenged by our legal system, and then look at the crass odium poured on the heads of our judges here by someone who presumably wants no fetters at all on what the security services can do. This isn’t a debate about a man’s right to benefits or protection from deportation or freedom from phone tapping, for pity’s sakes – it’s about not being complicit in torture.
That is what we’re concerned with here. The judgment concluded that Binyam Mohamed had been subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities” – that is to say, a British citizen was tortured, by our allies. Is that something we should not know?
Mohamed’s treatment was first discussed in a High Court judgment last year, which was redacted after an appeal by David Miliband. That judgment concluded: “We regret to have 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].”
More broadly, we now can’t know how dangerous or guilty or terrible a person he really is. Torturing him – and Con, sleep deprivation is a little different from surviving on three hours sleep a night while on patrol with the army in Afghanistan – leaves the matter cloudy, not clear.
Fundamentally, these techniques are wrong not simply because they abuse the prisoner but because they degrade us. If you don’t think that’s the case – and it seems plenty of people don’t – then you should probably argue that they be used in a whole range of situations. If this sort of thing is fine for Binyam Mohamed then why isn’t it fine for the police to use these techniques on, say, someone arrested on suspicion of murder or kidnapping or child abuse or whatever?
But we don’t permit that because, generally speaking, most of us can appreciate that it’s wrong to treat people in such a fashion. It doesn’t mean that we – or the judges – are on the side of suspected murderers, kidnappers or paedophiles.
So Coughlin’s suggestion that “the judges just come clean and sign up with the Taliban” is among the more odious things I’ve read this year. If the courts constitute a fifth column, then what about the law? And once you’ve called, implicitly, for the judges to be arrested, then who’s next?
Coughlin responds to Deane:
If I understand correctly Alex Deane’s high-minded rant about the rights of innocent people receiving a fair trial (which, just to put the record straight, I fully support), he is prepared to accept at face value former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed’s claim that he was brutally tortured during his interrogation with the full complicity of British security officials. David Davies, the former shadow Home Secretary, made a similar argument on the Today programme this morning, preferring to believe the word of Mr Mohamed rather than our own intelligence establishment.
I am well aware that MI6 and MI5 are highly practised in the dark arts of looking after their own interests, but I would sincerely urge mssrs Deane and Davies to take a close look at Mr Mohamed’s activities prior to his arrest in Pakistan in 2002, when he was apprehended trying to board a flight on a false passport, before they adopt him as their cause celebre.
Do we really believe Mr Mohamed’s claim that he travelled to Afghanistan in 2001 – the world’s leading exporter of heroin – to kick his drug habit? And why did he boast to his FBI interrogators that he had attended a number of al-Qaeda training camps while in Afghanistan? Is Osama bin Laden now running drug rehabilitation programmes?
Nothing Mr Mohamed has said since the British government did him the enormous service of securing his release from Guantanamo adds up, which is why I am deeply concerned that Conservative voices are being raised in defence of his human rights. If this is the type of cause that modern Conservatives wish to defend, you really have to question whether the party is fit to govern this country.
Con Coughlin misunderstands two crucial points. Mohamed’s activities in Afghanistan, which bear no examination (and the guy should be prosecuted if a legitimately acquired case can be brought against him), are immaterial. The question is whether Anglo-American security services colluded in Mohamed’s torture. The second point that Coughlin still fails to grasp is that it was a US court which published the evidence that such collusion had taken place, evidence that the British court openly referred to in its judgement. The rest, as they say, is noise from two governments who have been caught performing and endorsing illegal and unacceptable practices.
Firstly, and without wanting to sound glib, I think it’s also important that guilty people receive a fair trial. But that process is hindered, not enhanced, when they are subjected to the sort of treatment Mohamed describes. Just as significantly, the American government does not disputeMohamed’s account of his treatment. Indeed, that’s rather why both governments wanted to keep the matter secret in the first place.
More generally, one need not find Mohamed’s explanation of why he was in Afghanistan persuasive or doubt that he might well be guilty of something to object to the manner in which he was treated. Again, the manner of his interrogation has made discovering the truth more, not less, difficult. if the rule of law – and the rights of man – are to mean anything then they have to be applied consistently. That means even unsavoury characters must be protected by them; otherwise what’s the point of the law in the first place?
Contra Con, I’d be appalled if the Conservatives weren’t appalled by this case and conclude that if this were the case then they would indeed be unfit for government.
