Torture Update: US Tried to Silence Binyam Mohamed

The Independent of London reveals that the US Government offered a deal to British resident Binyam Mohamed, held in Pakistan, Morocco, and then Guantanamo Bay for more than six years: he could go free "if he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, ended his High Court case to prove his claims of torture, and agreed not to speak to the media about his ordeal".

The plea bargain was offered to Mohamed last year while he was still at Guantanamo Bay; under its terms, he would have received a 10-year sentence, nine years of which would be suspended. He rejected it.

After a sustained campaign earlier this year revealed further evidence of his rendition and torture, Mohamed was returned to the United Kingdom.

Death of a Blogger: Sayafi dies in Iranian Prison

News is emerging of the death of journalist and blogger Omidreza Mir Sayafi in Evin prison in Iran.

The 29-year-old Safayi's blogs were mostly on music and culture, but he was charged with "insulting Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei" and inciting others against national security. He was sentenced to two years in prison. A pending case accused him of "insulting sacred values".

According to Iranian human rights activists, he was taken to the prison clinic on the morning of 8 March this year in critical condition. According to Safayi's doctor, Hessam Firouzi, "[He] was deeply depressed and prison conditions would have been unbearable for him." The physician added, "The prison doctors were even reluctant to have blood pressure and basic medical tests done. Everything was done because of my persistence at every step of the way"

Iranian officials have not commented on the case.

Red Cross: The US Tortured Detainees in CIA "Black Sites"

From today's New York Times:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration's treatment of al-Qaeda captives "constituted torture," a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The article continues:

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA "black site" prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

The findings were based on an investigation by ICRC officials, who were granted exclusive access to the CIA's "high-value" detainees after they were transferred in 2006 to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 14 detainees, who had been kept in isolation in CIA prisons overseas, gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding, or simulating drowning.

The Times report is based on an article in The New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, who obtained a copy of the Red Cross's findings. Danner quotes the specific claim of the ICRC, "The ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture."

The response of the US Government? ""It is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves." Officially, the Bush Administration only admitted to the use of "waterboarding" against three "high-value" suspects and claimed that the practice was halted in 2004.

The leak of the ICRC report follows last week's publication of a United Nations report that a US-led system authorised torture, a Center for Constitutional Rights study of continuing abuses at Guantanamo Bay,  and a Human Rights Watch report that Britain "colluded" in the torture of detainees.

United Nations: US Tortured, Britain Followed

Related Post: The BBC and the UN Report on Torture - Shhhh, Don’t Tell Anyone
Related Post: Text - UN Report on Counter-Terrorism, Human Rights, and Torture

The United Nations report released yesterday is clear and concise: Britain was complicit with a US-created system which violated basic human rights and condoned the torture of detainees.

The Special Rapporteur remains deeply troubled that the United States has created a comprehensive system of extraordinary renditions, prolonged and secret detention, and practices that violate the prohibition against torture and other forms of ill-treatment. This system required an international web of exchange of information and has created a corrupted body of information which was shared systematically with partners in the war on terror through intelligence cooperation, thereby corrupting the institutional culture of the legal and institutional systems of recipient States.

The report continues:

While this system was devised and put in place by the United States, it was only possible through collaboration from many other States. There exist consistent, credible reports suggesting that at least until May 2007 a number of States facilitated extraordinary renditions in various ways. States such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Georgia, Indonesia, Kenya, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Pakistan and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have provided intelligence or have conducted the initial seizure of an individual before he was transferred to (mostly unacknowledged) detention centres in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Thailand, Uzbekistan, or to one of the CIA covert detention centres, often referred to as “black sites”. In many cases, the receiving States reportedly engaged in torture and other forms of ill-treatment of these detainees.

Two specific cases are cited by the Special Rapporteur: "Evidence proves that Australian, British and United States intelligence personnel have themselves interviewed detainees who were held incommunicado by the Pakistani [intelligence service] ISI in so-called safe houses, where they were being tortured. Many countries (Bahrain, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan) have sent interrogators to Guantanamo Bay as
well."

This is not "enhanced interrogation". Not "aggressive questioning". Not any other euphemism. Torture.

This isn't breaking news. Allegations of British participation in interrogation of tortured prisoners have been about for several years. Only last month, Human Rights Watch documented at least 10 cases at Guantanamo Bay where British residents were interrogated, after beatings and other techniques violating human rights, by UK intelligence services. Representatives of Binyam Mohamed, recently released from the US base in Cuba, have provided further details.

So why is this report special? Simply because it doesn't come from an organisation like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International which are dismissed by Government authorities as politically biased. It comes from the UN, the international body to which the US and UK belong. (No doubt various media outlets, if this story gets traction, will offer the image of the United Nations as hostile to the American and British Governments, but the UN still has an international legal standing that has to be recognised.)

More importantly, this statement exposes the lie (and the liars) at the heart of the British Government. The UK was far from alone in propping up the US-sanctioned torture. It was the Blair Government, however, that stood side-by-side for years alongside the US proclaiming that they were protecting human rights in the War on Terror, indeed extending those rights by taking that war from Afghanistan to Iraq. It was Tony Blair who lay down the doctrine for moral intervention in 1999:

No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer.

Ten years later, it is Blair's successors who have upheld "the values of liberty, the rule, [and] human rights" through evasion, deceit, and denial. Nine days ago, Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith declared:

We will continue to ensure that our co-operation with other countries and partners does not undermine the very principles and values that are the best long-term guarantee of our future security. Central to those values is an abhorrence of torture, and the determination that when allegations of torture are made they are properly investigated. That has been, and will remain, the government's approach.

Maybe it's best, given this economy with the truth, to return to the UN report:

[The Special Rapporteur is] worried by the increasing use of State secrecy provisions and public interest immunities for instance by Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the United Kingdom or the United States to conceal illegal acts from oversight bodies or judicial authorities, or to protect itself from criticism, embarrassment and - most importantly - liability.