This was a major step towards holding government officials accountable for complicity in torture, but when a letter from Jonathan Sumption QC, acting for the government, was accidentally released to the media, it became apparent that, at Sumption’s request, a paragraph in the ruling, written by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, had been removed. The paragraph in question was severely critical of the trustworthiness of the Security Services, and Sumption was concerned that it was “likely to receive more public attention than any other parts of the judgments.”

In a ruling today (PDF), the judges restored the paragraph, although they made it clear that no one had acted improperly, and that the government was perfectly entitled to ask for changes to be made to what was, at the time, a draft judgment. The judges wrote that they were concerned that “a damaging myth may develop that in this case a Minister of the Crown, or counsel acting for him, was somehow permitted to interfere with the judicial process. This did not happen, and it is critical to the integrity of the administration of justice that if any such misconception may be taking root is should be eradicated.”

Nevertheless, Lord Neuberger decided to restore his original paragraph, explaining that, although “Mr. Sumption’s concerns about the first draft paragraph 168 were justified,” these concerns were “to a significantly more limited extent than I had initially thought,” and that “it was right to revert to the first draft of paragraph 168.”

The restored paragraph is reproduced below, and the full, amended ruling can be found here:

168. Fourthly, it is also germane that the Security Services had made it clear in March 2005, through a report from the Intelligence and Security Committee, that “they operated a culture that respected human rights and that coercive interrogation techniques were alien to the Services’ general ethics, methodology and training” (paragraph 9 of the first judgment), indeed they “denied that [they] knew of any ill-treatment of detainees interviewed by them whilst detained by or on behalf of the [US] Government” (paragraph 44(ii) of the fourth judgment).

Yet, in this case, that does not seem to have been true: as the evidence showed, some Security Services officials appear to have a dubious record relating to actual involvement, and frankness about any such involvement, with the mistreatment of Mr Mohamed when he was held at the behest of US officials. I have in mind in particular witness B [the British agent who visited Mohamed while he was being held in Pakistan, under US supervision, in May 2002], but the evidence in this case suggests that it is likely that there were others. The good faith of the Foreign Secretary is not in question, but he prepared the certificates partly, possibly largely, on the basis of information and advice provided by Security Services personnel.

Regrettably, but inevitably, this must raise the question whether any statement in the certificates on an issue concerning the mistreatment of Mr Mohamed can be relied on, especially when the issue is whether contemporaneous communications to the Security Services about such mistreatment should be revealed publicly. Not only is there some reason for distrusting such a statement, given that it is based on Security Services’ advice and information, because of previous, albeit general, assurances in 2005, but also the Security Services have an interest in the suppression of such information.

Responses to the restoration of the paragraph were swift. Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey said, “The implication that David Miliband had the wool pulled over his eyes is deeply embarrassing for the foreign secretary. However, the suggestion that he acted in good faith means the real questions need to be answered by others in Government. Did former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sign off on the ‘coercive techniques’ referred to in the judgment?” Davey concluded by calling for an inquiry. “The suggestion that there were others in the security services involved in unacceptable practices makes the need for a full judicial inquiry irrefutable,” he said.

Cori Crider, the legal director of Reprieve, which has represented Binyam Mohamed since he was in Guantánamo, said, “The sun shone on open justice today. Throughout this process the judges have shown the utmost integrity and concern for the public interest — one hopes the UK justices’ brethren across the sea are taking notes.”

Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK, also spoke out. “This whole affair has been bedevilled by attempts to block the truth about torture ever getting out,” she said, adding, “Today is another small victory against those who would like to keep these matters shrouded in darkness.”

To this I would add that the judges’ questions about the Security Services’ “dubious record” with regard to “frankness” concerning Binyam Mohamed should prompt a close examination of a story that emerged last year — but was little noticed at the time — indicating that the British government and the Security Services lied about not knowing what happened to Binyam Mohamed after his detention in Pakistan, when he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco.

This was outside the scope of the judicial review that led, finally, to the ruling by the Court of Appeal, but, as I explained in a series of articles last year — “UK Government Lies Exposed; Spy Visited Binyam Mohamed In Morocco,” “Government Bans Testimony On Binyam Mohamed And The British Spy,” and “What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed” — it involves a Moroccan-born informer (a British resident identified as witness A), further revelations about witness B, revelations about unacknowledged visits to Mohamed while he was held in Morocco, where he was brutally tortured, and lies about the duration of the intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and the UK regarding Mohamed.

It’s time, I think, for another can of worms to be opened up to scrutiny.

(’’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on The Public Record and Uruknet.

For other articles relating to Binyam Mohamed, see the following: Urgent appeal for British resident Binyam Mohamed, “close to suicide” in Guantánamo (December 2007), Guantánamo: Torture victim Binyam Mohamed sues British government for evidence (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s letter from Guantánamo to Gordon Brown (May 2008), Guantánamo trials: critical judge sacked, British torture victim charged (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed: UK court grants judicial review over torture allegations, as US files official charges (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s judicial review: judges grill British agent and question fairness of Guantánamo trials (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Guantánamo torture victim Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), In a plea from Guantánamo, Binyam Mohamed talks of “betrayal” by the UK (September 2008), US Justice Department drops “dirty bomb plot” allegation against Binyam Mohamed (October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), The Betrayal of British Torture Victim Binyam Mohamed (February 2009), Hiding Torture And Freeing Binyam Mohamed From Guantánamo (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Coming Home From Guantánamo, As Torture Allegations Mount (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s statement on his release from Guantánamo (February 2009), Who Is Binyam Mohamed? (February 2009), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009), UK Government Lies Exposed; Spy Visited Binyam Mohamed In Morocco (May 2009), Daily Mail Pulls Story About Binyam Mohamed And British Spy (May 2009), Government Bans Testimony On Binyam Mohamed And The British Spy (May 2009), More twists in the tale of Binyam Mohamed (in the Guardian, May 2009), Outsourcing torture to foreign climes (in the Guardian, May 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), Former prisoners launch the Guantánamo Justice Centre in London (August 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), Former Guantánamo Prisoner Binyam Mohamed Speaks (Video) (September 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), UK Judge Approves Use of Secret Evidence in Guantánamo Case (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009).

This is another blow for the government, which recently gave up a short-lived struggle to prevent the release of the documents to Shaker Aamer’s lawyers, following a High Court ruling in his favour. Expressing  dissatisfaction with the government, Mr. Justice Sullivan stated on Friday, “These whole proceedings have been a gigantic waste of time and money,” and ordered the government to pay the costs of Aamer’s lawyers, granting an interim payment of £25,000.

As I have explained before, the emergence of torture allegations against Shaker Aamer — and his lawyers’ pursuit of relevant documents in the possession of the British government, allied to the claims that MI5 was complicit in the torture — reflects the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was freed from Guantánamo last February, after both the British and American governments realized that releasing him would, at least, take the edge off a mounting torture crisis that showed no sign of going away.

In Mohamed’s case, the High Court judges refused to back down, leading to an extraordinary ruling two weeks ago, in the Court of Appeal, ordering the government to release information revealing how US agents had tortured Mohamed in Pakistan, and how the British government knew about it, which foreign secretary David Milband had been trying to suppress for 18 months.

The police investigation into Shaker Aamer’s allegations is the third such case to be pursued by the Metropolitan Police, which is investigating claims relating to the interrogation of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan by an agent identified only as “Witness B,” and also to allegations against MI6 that have been made by another unidentified man. There is, moreover, an overlap between two of these cases, because Shaker Aamer is a key witness in the allegations made by Binyam Mohamed.

In Shaker Aamer’s case, there is no guarantee that releasing him will do much to ease the discomfort of the security services and the government in light of increasing calls for an independent investigation into the full extent of British complicity in torture. These now have a momentum of their own, unprecedented in any country that was deeply involved in the “War on Terror,” and in marked contrast to the recent whitewash in the US of the Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing the use of torture.

On Saturday, it was reported that the British government’s human rights watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, had become involved, and that the Commission’s Chair, Trevor Phillips, had written to Justice Secretary Jack Straw, stating, as the Times described it, that “it can no longer ignore the growing body of allegations against MI5 and MI6.” In the letter, Phillips wrote that the government’s “blanket denials” were “an inadequate response,” and that “Not enough has been done to reassure the commission and the public that these allegations are unfounded.”

Entering into territory that has previously been almost the exclusive preserve of the Guardian (whose reporter, Ian Cobain, has worked tirelessly to expose evidence of British complicity in the torture of British citizens abroad), the Times added, “A dossier of 25 cases has now been built up, including complaints of ill treatment, illegal detention and torture.” The Times also devoted a two-page spread to these cases, and added that the Equality and Human Rights Commission was “concerned about mounting evidence that these actions were condoned by British agencies.”

Trevor Phillips explained, “Given the UK’s role as a world leader on human rights, it would be inexplicable for the Government not urgently to put in place an independent review process to assess the truth, or otherwise, of these allegations.” He also told the Times that he found it “inexplicable” that the government was a year late in providing a report to the United Nations Committee against Torture.

Given these developments, the plight of Shaker Aamer is unlikely to be a show-stopper. However, securing his release would certainly blunt some of the criticism, and would, moreover, demonstrate that the government is still capable of doing something right.

Shaker Aamer has been cleared for release from Guantánamo since 2007, but has not been freed, despite British requests for his return. The US authorities have cited ongoing security concerns, which makes a mockery of the whole process of clearing someone for release. However, beyond this obvious hypocrisy there are also fears that it suits both the British and the Americans to keep holding, for as long as possible, a man routinely described as the most influential prisoner in Guantánamo — not because he has any terrorist connections, but because he is extraordinarily eloquent and charismatic, and a passionate advocate for justice who has resisted the lawlessness and brutality of the “War on Terror” from the first day that he was sold to US forces by bounty hunters in December 2001. As a result, he may well know more about the dark workings of Guantánamo than any other prisoner, and this — added to his eloquence and outspokenness — undoubtedly makes him a threat.

Last September, former prisoner Moazzam Begg, one of Shaker Aamer’s closest friends, captured something of his personality in an excerpt from the last letter received by his wife in 2008, in which he wrote:

Yes I lost a lot of weight, yes I have a lot of sicknesses, yes I’ve got short sight, yes my bones are aching, yes I got white hair, yes I got old, but my heart is still young, my mind still strong — a lot stronger than ever. My soul’s got the biggest wings to fly and help others to fly. I am a lot wiser, a lot [more] patient, a lot [more] knowledgeable, a lot [more] merciful, a lot [more] loving and caring, a lot [more] helpful. I feel I can change the world to be a better place. I feel I can restore justice so we can have peace and love amongst each other.

Clearly, holding onto Aamer is not a delaying tactic that can prevail forever, and it would, therefore, make sense for the British government to exert the kind of pressure on its closest ally that it is undoubtedly capable of when necessary, and demand Shaker Aamer’s immediate return to the UK, to rejoin his British wife and his four children. As his solicitor, Gareth Peirce, explained on Friday, “Mr. Aamer is a victim and key witness in [the police] investigation — and yet where is he? He is in Guantánamo where the police can’t go to interview him.” She added, “It is of central importance that everything is done to have him returned to this country,” and also explained that, although the British government claimed that it was making “strenuous efforts” to have him returned, “There is no diplomatic pressure being exerted. There is none. The Americans are saying: ‘What pressure?’”

Note: Gareth Peirce will be speaking about Shaker Aamer at a screening of the new documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” at the National Film Theatre on Saturday February 27, at 2 pm. Further information about the screening, which is organized by the BFI, can be found here, along with booking details.

Directed by filmmaker Polly Nash and journalist Andy Worthington (also the author of The Guantánamo Files), “Outside the Law” tells the story of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 flight from the law by focusing on the stories of three prisoners in particular: Shaker Aamer, Omar Deghayes, and Binyam Mohamed. Omar, Andy and Polly will also be speaking after the screening, in a Q&A session chaired by Victoria Brittain, and Omar and Andy are then taking the film on a UK tour, where they will focus on Shaker Aamer’s plight. Details of the tour can be found here, and details of an Amnesty International campaign to secure Shaker Aamer’s release can be found here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Binyam was thinking about Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen, who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, and who now faces a trial in the much-criticized Military Commission trial system that was ill-advisedly resuscitated and revived by the Obama administration and Congress last summer. I have written extensively about Khadr’s case (and would be delighted if you checked out one of my favorite articles here), and was dismayed when Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November that Omar Khadr would face a trial by Military Commission.

Recently, following a toothless ruling by Canada’s Supreme Court, I spoke about Omar with the progressive radio host Jeff Farias, but I have not, of course, had the opportunity to meet Omar, whereas Binyam Mohamed has. And so, after Binyam got in touch with me to ask if I’d like to reproduce the following article, I was delighted to accept. It was first published on the website of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, an organization founded by ex-prisoners to raise awareness about Guantánamo and to assist other former prisoners to rebuild their lives, and also on Binyam’s own newly established website, The Political Hostage.

Omar Khadr is a scapegoat for a failed “war on terror”
By Binyam Mohamed

I was and continue to be astonished by the fate of Omar Khadr, a 15-year-old child who has grown into a man in an illegal prison. Locked away in neighbouring cages, we spent a lot of time trading torture and abuse stories. We were psychologists treating each other. By listening to each other we beat an exploitative system established to break us and drive us insane.

Commissioning [being put forward for trial by Military Commission] brought peace to us. It meant the end of “enhanced interrogations” (otherwise known to the common man as torture) and offered our only opportunity to break our silence and attempt to refute falsehood with truth. Due to the public nature of the first ten commissions [in 2004-05, before the Supreme Court struck down their first incarnation], we few emerged from the hundreds of forgotten prisoners, our testimony exposing America’s injustices.

I am amazed how US officials, driven by the desire to justify their illegal acts, have turned this Palestinian-Canadian child into a hero in the eyes of the Muslim youths around the world. And I am more amazed at how America keeps hiding exculpatory evidence in his case, claiming secrets of national security. Yet we all know the facts.

There is a contradiction in the “evidence” tortured out of this man, and the facts hidden. I can’t comprehend nor can I write of the torture and abuse suffered by Omar. The scars seen say it all. Those who witness them swell up with tears and are embarrassed at sharing their own experiences of oppression, as the evidence also classified as secret in the interest of national embarrassment shows.

As we sat in the recreation yard in Camp 5, Guantánamo Bay, Omar recounted to me what happened: the one who threw the grenade at the Americans was shot and killed, the American soldier who Omar is accused of killing with a hand grenade died of a gun shot wound, and not of grenade shrapnel as the American government claims. As the American soldiers came in, they shot Omar in the back, and he fell amongst the other people killed. They shot at one man who was still standing, defending himself from the American onslaught. Once the soldiers had killed him, they walked over and stepped on Omar, thinking him to be dead. I have not only seen the bullet holes on his back, but I have touched them.  He has lost his eyesight in one eye and partially in the other, due to the grenade thrown at him by the Americans in the ensuing gunfire.

The American government is guaranteed a conviction in an illegal system they call “military commissions.” And what a great victory it must be for them: America versus a juvenile, imprisoned and tortured for eight long years. Yet the question greater than this is, “where is justice, equality and a fair trial?” I am enraged to hear these baseless allegations against a juvenile for the interests of oppressive politics. Omar could refute all of these charges in a regular court established under the pretext of justice, fairness and equality, but after the recent case against Aafia Siddiqui, convicted without any evidence, we know that justice will not be upheld, as the American government will never admit to its wrongdoing, and will continue to seek to justify these illegal practices.

This child’s case has pushed America to break all laws, go against her constitution, and to violate everything that she preaches.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

In one short session, the Court of Appeal brought an end to a transatlantic game of cat and mouse that for the last year and a half has prevented two High Court judges from making public a seven-paragraph summary of an intelligence briefing, supplied by the US intelligence services to their British counterparts, which provided information about Mohamed’s treatment after his capture in Pakistan in April 2002.

Disclosure of the summary, which was written by the High Court judges, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, had been opposed by the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, since August 2008, when the judges delivered a stern rebuke to the British government, ruling that, “by seeking to interview BM [Binyam Mohamed] in the circumstances found and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom Government and the United States authorities went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.” However, Miliband argued that releasing any information publicly would damage the valuable intelligence sharing relationship between the UK and the US, and the judges, with some reluctance, accepted his claims.

However, the judges ordered 42 documents in the possession of the British government to be released to Mohamed’s lawyers, on the basis that they were vital to his defense in a planned trial by Military Commission, in which he might face the death penalty. In the months that followed, further wrangling over the disclosure of these documents was transferred to the US courts, where the Justice Department tried in vain to keep them away from Mohamed’s legal representatives.

By November 2008, however, these last-ditch attempts had failed, and, as a result, the central allegation against Mohamed — that he was involved in a “dirty bomb” plot (noticeably, one that never existed) — was dropped by the Justice Department, his planned trial by Military Commission was also dropped, and on February 23, 2009, he was flown back to the UK as a free man.

The manner in which Mohamed’s case was fast-tracked to the top of the pile of cases being reviewed by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force strongly suggests that both the US and UK governments hoped that releasing Mohamed would seal the lid on further embarrassing disclosures about his torture — not only in Pakistan, but also in Morocco, where he was sent by the CIA for 18 months, and in the CIA’s own “Dark Prison” near Kabul.

However, instead of backing down, the High Court judges refused to let go of the case, arguing that, although it was appropriate for the contents of the 42 documents to remain secret, it was in the interests of “open justice” for their own summary of those documents to be made available to the public.

David Miliband disagreed, maintaining, as he had in August 2008, that releasing the summary would threaten the intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and the UK, with dire consequences for national security, even though the judges maintained that their summary contained “nothing secret or of an intelligence nature,” as it merely comprised “admissions by officials of the United States Government as to BM’s [Mohamed’s] treatment by them.”

Throughout 2009, the case rumbled on, as the judges maintained pressure on the government, and in November, the most revealing information to date was disclosed, when two previously redacted paragraphs in an earlier ruling were reinstated. These, as I noted at the time, were extremely significant, because they revealed that the judges had referred to the memos released by the Obama administration last April, written by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005, which purported to redefine torture and approved the use of banned techniques by the CIA.

The judges had also noted that “the techniques described were those employed against [Abu] Zubaydah,” the supposed “high-value detainee,” captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, who was, officially, the first prisoner to be subjected to ten “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which included physical violence, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding.

The Court of Appeal judges order the release of the torture summary

On Wednesday, after 18 months of obstruction on the part of the government, the judges in the Court of Appeal — Sir Igor Judge, the Lord Chief Justice; Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls; and Sir Anthony May, President of the Queen’s Bench — finally dismissed Miliband’s claims, and, as the Guardian described it, “shattered the convention that the courts should not question claims by the executive relating to national security.”

In the ruling, Sir Igor Judge said that the case raised issues of “fundamental importance,” of “democratic accountability and ultimately the rule of law itself.” He added that the reasons for publishing the summary were “compelling,” because they concerned the involvement of British agents in the “abhorrent practice of torture,” and because the information contained in the summary helped to “vindicate Mr. Mohamed’s assertion that UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated the ill-treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of USA authorities.”

Finally accepting defeat, Miliband made the summary available on the website of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The seven paragraphs are reproduced below:

It was reported that a new series of interviews was conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May [2002] as part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer.

v) It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM [Binyam Mohamed] had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.

vi) It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him. His fears of being removed from United States custody and “disappearing” were played upon.

vii) It was reported that the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics was increased by him being shackled in his interviews.

viii) It was clear not only from the reports of the content of the interviews but also from the report that he was being kept under self-harm observation, that the interviews were having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering.

ix) We regret to have to conclude that the reports provide to the SyS [the British intelligence services] made clear to anyone reading them that BM was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment.

x) The treatment reported, if it 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 1972 torture convention]. Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities.

As can be seen, the summary describes a range of techniques, which, in the judges’ opinion, “could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities,” including “continuous sleep deprivation,” combined with “threats and inducements,” including the threat of “disappearing.” As the judges also explained, “the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics” was “causing him significant mental stress and suffering,” to the extent that he was being “kept under self-harm observation.”

The evidence demonstrates that torture began before it was sanctioned by the Justice Department in August 2002

That such tactics were being used by US agents in April 2002, four months before the ten previously banned techniques — including sleep deprivation and waterboarding — were approved by lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, should come as no surprise. As I pointed out in an article last April, “CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months Before DoJ Approval,” lawyers for Rafiq Alhami, a Tunisian prisoner in Guantánamo, demonstrated in court submissions that the CIA was torturing prisoners in Afghanistan from December 2001.

In a lawsuit, Alhami stated that he was held in three CIA “dark sites,” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and where, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” He also stated that his interrogators “sprayed pepper spray on his hemorrhoids, causing extreme pain.”

Nevertheless, Alhami’s statements, which reflect similar statements made by other prisoners held in secret CIA prisons at this time, were largely ignored last April, and it is to be hoped, therefore, that the official confirmation of Binyam Mohamed’s torture in April and May 2002 will put pressure on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate how it came to pass that prisoners were tortured — or, at least, subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment — so many months before the OLC provided what senior Bush officials referred to as their “golden shield,” providing a twisted rationale for the torture and abuse that followed in the memos issued on August 1, 2002.

According to a recent article in Newsweek, the conclusions of a long-awaited internal report into the behavior of the OLC lawyers who drafted the “torture memos” — conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) — have been fatally watered down in the report’s final version, so that the primary authors, John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, are no longer regarded as having “violated their professional obligations as lawyers” when they drafted the memos, and have only been mildly reprimanded for showing “poor judgment.”

Even if this is the case, however, it fails to explain who was responsible for authorizing the infliction of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment before August 1, 2002, and this is a question that needs to be answered. As Marcy Wheeler explained on Firedoglake:

[The] abuse was inflicted by “an expert interviewer” implementing “a new strategy.” That “expert interviewer” and that “new strategy” almost certainly were associated with [James] Mitchell and [John “Bruce”] Jessen [the psychologist facilitators of a torture program based on reverse-engineering the military’s SERE program, which teaches US personnel to resist torture by subjecting them to banned techniques], who were at that moment pitching using their “new strategy” with Abu Zubaydah. So this is not just proof that the US was engaging in torture before they got their … memo authorizing such torture. But it was proof that they were using Mohamed, in addition to Abu Zubaydah, as guinea pigs to test out that torture.

How Binyam Mohamed’s torture was revealed in a US court

Further disturbing evidence of the use of torture emerged through close scrutiny of a statement issued by David Miliband in the wake of the ruling by the Court of Appeal. Miliband noted that “At the heart of this case was the principle that if a country shares intelligence with another, that country must agree before its intelligence is released,” and that “This ‘control principle’ is essential to the intelligence relationship between Britain and the US.”

With some satisfaction, he added that the government had “fought the case to preserve this principle,” and that “today’s judgment upholds it,” explaining that the court only ordered the release of the summary “because in its view their substance had been put into the public domain by a decision of a US court in another case,” and that “Without that disclosure, it is clear that the court of appeal would have overturned the divisional court’s decision to publish the material.”

This is an accurate assessment, although it glosses over the importance of the material that “had been put into the public domain by a decision of a US court in another case.” The case in question was the successful habeas corpus petition, in November 2009, of an Algerian prisoner in Guantánamo, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed. In her ruling, made available in December (PDF), Judge Gladys Kessler expressed serious doubts about the reliability of allegations made by other prisoners, as she had in previous cases, and as the judges in general have throughout the habeas process. These doubts have contributing significantly to the 32 out of 41 rulings that have resulted in the judges concluding that the government failed, by a preponderance of evidence, to establish that the prisoners in questions were involved with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

In the case of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, one of the dubious witnesses identified by Judge Kessler was Binyam Mohamed. As she described it, Mohamed’s statements, placing bin Mohammed at a training camp in Afghanistan,

cannot be relied upon, because he suffered intense and sustained physical and psychological abuse while in American custody from 2002 to 2004. Petitioner [bin Mohammed] argues that while Binyam Mohamed was detained in locations in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan, he was tortured and forced to admit to a host of allegations. When he arrived at Guantánamo Bay, Binyam Mohamed implicated Petitioner in training activities … However, after being released from Guantánamo Bay, he signed a sworn declaration claiming that he never met Petitioner until they were both detained at Guantánamo Bay, thereby disavowing the statements he made at Guantánamo Bay about training with Petitioner.

Judge Kessler also made some important points about torture, refuting the government’s claims that Mohamed had made statements voluntarily at Guantánamo, and concluding that the effects of the torture he endured from 2002 to 2004 had not dissipated by the time of the later statements. This is undoubtedly an important precedent for future cases, but with specific reference to Binyam’s court case in the UK, the significance of Judge Kessler’s ruling relates to the government’s refusal — or inability — to challenge the assertions made about Binyam Mohamed’s torture.

In response to bin Mohammed’s claims about Binyam Mohamed’s statements, Judge Kessler noted, “The Government does not challenge Petitioner’s evidence of Binyam Mohamed’s abuse,” and at another point, after running through the whole horrendous story of Mohamed’s abuse in Pakistan, Morocco and the “Dark Prison,” as recounted in statements to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, she noted that “The Government does not challenge or deny the accuracy of Binyam Mohamed’s story of brutal treatment.”

Further evidence of a British cover-up

It is somewhat ironic that information that the British government tried so hard to suppress was actually disclosed in greater detail in a judicial ruling in a US court, which made its protestations worthless, but this is not the last piece of shocking evidence to emerge from the Court of Appeal ruling.

Just hours after the ruling was announced, the Guardian reported that one of the judges, Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, had included in the ruling a statement regarding the behavior of the British security services that was so critical that Jonathan Sumption QC, representing the government, had written to the court, warning that the paragraph in question was “likely to receive more public attention than any other parts of the judgments.”

As referred to in Sumption’s letter, which came to light following intervention by lawyers and media organizations including the Guardian, Lord Neuberger’s statements included assertions that MI5 did not respect human rights, had not renounced participation in “coercive interrogation” techniques, deliberately misled MPs and peers on the intelligence and security committee, which is supposed to be able to scrutinize its activities, and had a “culture of suppression” in its dealings with Miliband and the court.

With reference to the MI5 officer known as Witness B, who interrogated Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan in May 2002 (and is now the subject of a police investigation), Neuberger apparently indicated that he did not believe that he was acting alone and that he believed that his conduct was “characteristic of the service as a whole,” and also noted that MI5’s culture of suppression “penetrates the service to such a degree” that, as the Guardian explained, “it undermines any government assurance based upon information that comes from MI5 itself.”

At the government’s request, Lord Neuberger dropped his comments from the final ruling, without advising any of the other parties involved in the case. However, after Sumption’s letter was disclosed, Lord Neuberger conceded that it was “over-hasty” to withdraw it without allowing other voices to be heard, and provided objectors with a deadline of 4 pm on Friday to make representations, to enable him to decide whether to reinstate his judgment.

Throughout this whole tawdry saga, Binyam Mohamed was not present, but it must come as some relief to him, after his long ordeal, to realize that, one year after his release, his torture by US agents in April 2002 will cause questions to be raised regarding the authorization of prolonged sleep deprivation and threats to make him “disappear,” and that the British security services face questions about their entire way of operating, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when the UK zealously embraced its role as America’s closest foreign ally.

As published exclusively on Truthout, as “Details of British Resident’s Brutal Torture by CIA Officers Released.” A quote from Marcy Wheeler was added to the original.

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Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For other articles relating to Binyam Mohamed, see the following: Urgent appeal for British resident Binyam Mohamed, “close to suicide” in Guantánamo (December 2007), Guantánamo: Torture victim Binyam Mohamed sues British government for evidence (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s letter from Guantánamo to Gordon Brown (May 2008), Guantánamo trials: critical judge sacked, British torture victim charged (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed: UK court grants judicial review over torture allegations, as US files official charges (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s judicial review: judges grill British agent and question fairness of Guantánamo trials (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Guantánamo torture victim Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), In a plea from Guantánamo, Binyam Mohamed talks of “betrayal” by the UK (September 2008), US Justice Department drops “dirty bomb plot” allegation against Binyam Mohamed (October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), The Betrayal of British Torture Victim Binyam Mohamed (February 2009), Hiding Torture And Freeing Binyam Mohamed From Guantánamo (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Coming Home From Guantánamo, As Torture Allegations Mount (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s statement on his release from Guantánamo (February 2009), Who Is Binyam Mohamed? (February 2009), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009), UK Government Lies Exposed; Spy Visited Binyam Mohamed In Morocco (May 2009), Daily Mail Pulls Story About Binyam Mohamed And British Spy (May 2009), Government Bans Testimony On Binyam Mohamed And The British Spy (May 2009), More twists in the tale of Binyam Mohamed (in the Guardian, May 2009), Outsourcing torture to foreign climes (in the Guardian, May 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), Former prisoners launch the Guantánamo Justice Centre in London (August 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), Former Guantánamo Prisoner Binyam Mohamed Speaks (Video) (September 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), UK Judge Approves Use of Secret Evidence in Guantánamo Case (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009).

In the first part, following introductions, Moazzam talked about the difficulties facing prisoners released from Guantánamo, and Omar talked about the most vulnerable prisoners in Guantánamo: those from countries, including Libya, who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured on their return. Omar also spoke about the aims of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, launched in August, which hopes to provide support and legal assistance for released prisoners around the world.

In the second part, following a question about Shaker Aamer (one of three prisoners on whom the film focuses, along with Binyam Mohamed and Omar) and the role of the British government in attempting to secure his release, Moazzam spoke about the enormously significant role that Shaker played in advocating for the prisoners’ rights in Guantánamo, and how it may be that he is still held because he knows too much about the dark secrets of the prison’s long history, and Andy reprised the discussions about prisoners who cannot be repatriated, and the role that European countries can play in providing new homes for them, including the UK, which has turned its back on Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who lived here for several years. Omar also spoke about Shaker, reinforcing the notion that he has the most extraordinary recollections about events in Guantánamo.

In the third part, Polly responded to a question about the future of the film, encouraging people to organize their own screenings, and Moazzam very kindly plugged The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, the book on which the film was based.

In the fourth part, in response to a question about the future of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners, Andy discussed the obstructive nature of America’s lawmakers who, just before the launch, had threatened to pass a law preventing any prisoner from being transferred to the US mainland, even to face a trial. At the time of the launch, the administration had secured the right to bring prisoners to the mainland to face trials, but had no explanation about what was going to happen to the rest of the men still held. Andy also explained the pernicious longevity of the Bush administration’s claim that Guantánamo held “the worst of the worst,” despite the fact that they were mostly rounded up randomly, and stressed how, in the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, US judges have dismissed the government’s allegations in 80 percent of the cases, and Omar spoke about how prisoners were being pressed to accept plea bargains in order to secure their release, and also mentioned the horrors of Bagram, Guantánamo’s “evil twin,” telling the audience how his brother-in-law had recently ended up in Bagram, after being seized while visiting family members in Afghanistan, and how, on Obama’s watch, he had been subjected to brutal treatment in US custody. Andy also spoke about the situation at Bagram now, and how it still violates the Geneva Conventions, and Moazzam mentioned how his time at Bagram was so bleak that he looked forward to being transferred to Guantánamo.

In the fifth part, following a question about how Moazzam and Omar had survived their long years in US custody, Moazzam explained how his faith had enabled him to survive, and also how his faith in people — his fellow prisoners, the lawyers, and, in some cases, American soldiers — had also contributed enormously.

In the sixth part, following a question about the use of secret evidence in terror-related cases in the UK, and whether evidence extracted in Guantánamo and Afghanistan was used in the UK — Moazzam responded by stating that information from Guantánamo and elsewhere was definitely used by the British intelligence services, and stated his belief that it was definitely part of the reason that the supposed evidence is being discussed behind closed doors, and Omar spoke about how the British resident Jamil El-Banna had been interrogated incessantly about his knowledge of Abu Qatada in the UK, and had been offered rewards if he provided information (whether true or not), and also spoke about Lahsen Ikassrien, a Spanish prisoner who had been pressurized to act as an informer in connection with people in Spain whom he didn’t know.

In the seventh part, in response to a question about losing faith in humanity (based on a statement made by Clive Stafford Smith about prisoners who have been tortured), Moazzam spoke about how a tiny gesture of revulsion at what was happening by a solitary American guard could be enough to revive one’s hope for humanity, and Omar spoke about how suspicion became part of the fabric of Guantánamo, because interrogators lied so persistently, pretending to be lawyers or Red Cross representatives, for example, and also spoke about how important it was to receive letters from supporters.

In the eighth part, in response to a question about the prisoners who died in Guantánamo, Omar described the deaths as murders, spoke once more about Shaker’s knowledge of the deaths, and explained that there were many ways to drive someone to death, and in response to another question about how prisoners would be tried, in Guantánamo and elsewhere, Moazzam stated that it would be extremely difficult to prosecute prisoners who have been tortured, and also lamented the fact that prisoners in Bagram, who have not even been adequately screened according to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, will never receive trials, because that prison remains deliberately and defiantly outside the law. Moazzam also spoke about how Bagram was a major contributing factor to losing the battle for hearts and minds in Afghanistan, which Andy reinforced with an anecdote about an Afghan prisoner in Guantánamo.

In the ninth part, in response to a question about other torture victims around the world, who are being overlooked as the world focuses on the crimes of the US administration, Moazzam spoke about how he had indeed heard stories from people tortured by other regimes which made his own experiences pale in comparison, and Andy mentioned how sad it was that an increase in racism and xenophobia in the UK has led to a situation in which few people in Britain care.

About the film

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a new documentary film, directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, telling the story of Guantánamo (and including sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and, in his first major interview, Omar Deghayes, who was released in December 2007), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of three particular prisoners — Shaker Aamer (who is still held), Binyam Mohamed (who was released in February 2009) and Omar Deghayes — “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

For further information, interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Andy Worthington or Polly Nash.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a Spectacle Production (74 minutes, 2009), and copies of the DVD are now available.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The documents include claims that British agents were, on occasion, present during brutal interrogations that punctuated a regime in which Aamer was “subjected to weeks of torture including sleep deprivation over nine days, cold water torture which led to frostbite, ‘hog tying’ and regular beatings along with threats that he would be sent to be tortured in Egypt, Jordan, or Israel.” As a result of this treatment, Aamer has claimed that he made false confessions, which are being used against him, even though a military review board under the Bush administration cleared him for release from Guantánamo in 2007.

On Wednesday, the legal action charity Reprieve, which represents Aamer in the US, announced that, at a hearing on Thursday, the British security services would argue that they are not required to release the information to Aamer “because he has not been formally charged with a crime.” This prompted Reprieve’s director, Clive Stafford Smith, to exclaim, “Essentially, MI5 are saying they would owe Shaker this evidence if the Americans would bother to charge him.  But because Shaker will have no charge and no trial, they say he has no right to any evidence at all and must continue to face indefinite detention with no end in sight. What kind of down-the-rabbit-hole argument is this?”

In the end, however, despite flagging up this argument, and claiming that they would apply for a “Public Interest Immunity” certificate to resist the disclosure of the material on national security grounds, government lawyers capitulated at the last minute. As the proceedings got underway on Thursday, Lord Justice Sullivan and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones announced that “overnight,” as Paul Calahan explained for the Wandsworth Guardian, the government “had agreed Mr. Aamer’s US lawyers — with the relevant security clearance — could have access to the files.”

As Paul Calahan described it, Aamer’s barrister, Richard Hermer QC, “welcomed the development but told the court the U-turn showed the Government had not ‘done all it could’” to secure his client’s release, as had previously been claimed. “The assertion that they had done everything they possibly could is incorrect,” he said, adding, as Clive Stafford Smith explained last week, with reference to the fact that the documents had been provided to the US government, but not to Aamer’s lawyers, “By sending documents with an express proviso they were not shown to the claimant does not match their claim.”

Lord Justice Sullivan adjourned the case until January to give the Task Force time to hand over material to Aamer’s lawyers, explaining that “the case would be made redundant if the material was handed over,” and adding, pointedly, “It would seem to us that dealing with the matter in this way might concentrate the minds of those involved with both governments … it seems this is in the best interests of all parties.”

As I mentioned in my recent article, I hope that this attempt by Lord Justice Sullivan to “concentrate the minds of those involved with both governments” will lead to Shaker Aamer’s prompt release, as he has suffered for too long in US custody, not because of what he is alleged to have done — involving a selection of spurious allegations of involvement with al-Qaeda which appear to have been derived from his false confessions under torture, and possibly through false allegations made by other prisoners under unknown circumstances — but because he has been an eloquent and outspoken opponent of the manner in which the prisoners have been abused and deprived of their rights.

Speaking after the ruling, Clive Stafford Smith described it as “a step forward,” but, as Paul Calahan put it, was “wary of the concession being used as a delaying tactic — as the US would now have a short time to agree to releasing the documents.” As Stafford Smith explained, with reference to the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident released in February, whose story also involves the complicity of the British intelligence services, in an even more harrowing example of the use of torture in the “War on Terror”:

To date, everything has been a delaying tactic. One might well ask why anyone would think it appropriate to cover up evidence of torture under any circumstances. I’m not sanguine about this. The question is how we can make them do it. Last time, with Binyam Mohamed, they reached a deal with the US and the US prosecutors still gave us only seven of the 42 agreed documents, and it took another round of litigation in the UK to force the issue.

Both Stafford Smith and Gareth Peirce, Shaker Aamer’s solicitor in the UK, expressed concerns that the US could transfer their client back to his native country, Saudi Arabia, where, as Paul Calahan explained, “pressure groups like Amnesty International have concerns about human right abuses,” and where, as I explained last week, both the British and American governments would also be secure that he would not be able to speak out freely about his deep knowledge of abuse at Guantánamo. As Gareth Peirce stated after the hearing, “We know they have already tried to make him board a plane to Saudi Arabia once and this could happen again.”

She also said that the case was important in forcing the Government to make public information relating to the activities of the security services. “What we are saying is that the UK has been complicit in appalling crimes, abuses and tortures,” she explained, adding, “There’s a fight to the death in the courts to keep this secrecy.”

As the case of Binyam Mohamed shows (which I reported most recently here), this “fight to the death” has now been ongoing for 14 months, although the judges show no indication of backing down. In Shaker Aamer’s case too, the message from the courts seems to be that questions of national security have nothing to do with topics involving the alleged wrongdoing of the British intelligence services, and that uncovering the truth is extremely important in the interests of justice, whether it leads to embarrassment on the part of the government or to something far darker: proof of complicity in the war crimes initiated, in the name of fighting terrorism, by the government of George W. Bush.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The key to the pressure exerted by Reprieve is torture, and, specifically, what the British government knew about the torture of both men while in US custody. Mohamed’s case is well-known, as he was rendered to Morocco by the CIA in July 2002, three months after his capture in Pakistan, where he was reportedly subjected to torture for 18 months.

The British government’s knowledge of, or complicity in Mohamed’s torture in Morocco has been inferred by Mohamed’s lawyers from his long-standing claims that his Moroccan interrogators asked him questions about his life in London that could only have been provided by the British intelligence services, and also because of claims, which surfaced in May this year but have largely been ignored to date, that a British informer and a British agent actually visited him while he was in Moroccan custody.

These claims, however, are not at the heart of Mohamed’s torture story as it relates to the British government. Instead, the High Court judges in his case — Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones — focused on 42 documents in the possession of the British government, which, apparently, explain what, in May 2002, the CIA told their British counterparts about how they had treated Mohamed while he was being held in Pakistani custody, shortly before a British agent flew out to interrogate him.

For 16 months, the British government has refused to allow the judges to release a seven paragraph, 25-line summary of these documents, written by the judges themselves, on the basis that revealing the information would threaten the intelligence-sharing arrangement between the US and the UK.

The government’s claims about this “threat” to the intelligence-sharing relationship have been maintained despite the judges’ insistence (in a recent ruling comparing Mohamed’s treatment with that of Abu Zubaydah, the CIA’s most notorious torture victim) that the description of the treatment of Mohamed in Pakistan, which is contained in their summary, “could never properly be described as ‘a secret’ or an ‘intelligence secret’ or ‘a summary of classified intelligence.’”

The government’s claims have also been maintained despite the judges’ assertion that “the issue is one of considerable importance in the context of open justice,” and despite the fact that, in the opinion of the Special Advocates (lawyers assigned to represent Mohamed in the closed sessions of the judicial review, which included most of the cross-examination of the British agent who had interviewed him in Pakistan), the government’s Public Interest Immunity Certificate (the document urging non-disclosure) “failed to address, in the light of allegations made by BM [Mohamed], the abhorrence and condemnation accorded to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

In the case of Shaker Aamer, the allegations of torture do not involve “extraordinary rendition” and Moroccan dungeons, but they do involve the alleged complicity of the British intelligence services, and they also involve the same attempts by the British government to claim that disclosure of any documents relating to British knowledge of Aamer’s treatment in US custody, while British agents were present, would threaten the intelligence-sharing relationship between the two countries.

Married to a British citizen, and with four children (the youngest of whom he has never seen), Shaker Aamer, who was born in Saudi Arabia, had traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, with his family, and with his friend Moazzam Begg and his family, to establish a girls’ school and to oversee a number of well-digging projects, as Begg explained in the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself, and featured in a recent Truthout video), which focuses on Aamer’s story, as well as those of Binyam Mohamed and another released prisoner, Omar Deghayes.

Seized in the chaos following the US-led invasion by Afghan forces, who sold him to the US military, Shaker Aamer ended up at Guantánamo, where his eloquence, his mastery of English, his natural leadership abilities, and his outspoken opposition to the conditions in which the prisoners were held as “enemy combatants” without rights marked him out, in the eyes of the authorities, as a leader of al-Qaeda. As I explained in an article earlier this year:

In 2004-05, after a Supreme Court ruling had granted the prisoners the right to file habeas corpus petitions asking why they were being held, he helped a number of prisoners with their petitions by designating himself as their “next friend,” which authorized him to file suits on their behalf. In an affidavit filed in a court in Washington D.C., he wrote, “I am their close friend as a result of being placed with them in Guantánamo. And I know they want me to act on their behalf as their next friend.”

In August 2005, he was briefly part of a six-man Prisoners’ Council that was allowed — over the course of a few weeks — to meet to discuss how to end a hunger strike that involved around 200 prisoners, but when the Council was brought to an abrupt end by the authorities, apparently because Shaker in particular had been agitating for their right to have a fair trial or to be released, they were so worried about what they regarded as the influence that he wielded over the other prisoners that they moved him to Camp Echo, a state-of-the-art isolation block … where he was held in solitary confinement for at least 18 months until he was moved to Camp 3 — for prisoners regarded as having significant intelligence value, or, like Shaker, significant leadership qualities — where he is still held.

Throughout this time, Shaker Aamer also became one of Guantánamo’s most persistent hunger strikers, but despite the fact that the authorities regarded him as a threat because of his influence in the prison, they have never managed to find any evidence whatsoever to back up their claims that he was involved, in any way, with al-Qaeda, and he was, in fact, cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2007 by a military review board.

Quite what has happened in the years since is unclear. The US authorities have, on occasion, put out propaganda attempting to justify his ongoing detention, despite having cleared him for release, and although the British government requested his return in August 2007, he remains in Guantánamo to this day.

As a result, the lawsuit filed by his lawyers in the UK was a smart move, as it shifts the focus of his case from the Byzantine maneuvering of the Pentagon and the secretive negotiations of diplomats (who may or not be doing anything worthwhile) into the courts that did so much for Binyam Mohamed in circumstances which, although in many ways dissimilar, nevertheless share certain key characteristics.

In Shaker Aamer’s case, the torture to which he was reportedly subjected took place after his capture, when he was held in the US prison at Kandahar airport in Afghanistan. There, according to his lawyers, Aamer explained that an MI5 officer was present during a brutal interrogation that led to a false confession, which only took place after he had been “subjected to weeks of torture including sleep deprivation over nine days, cold water torture which led to frostbite, ‘hog tying’ and regular beatings along with threats that he would be sent to be tortured in Egypt, Jordan, or Israel,” as the Daily Telegraph described it.

In a statement submitted to the court, Aamer explained:

Once after a few days of sleep deprivation they took me to the interrogation room and the intelligence team starting coming one after another and the room was full, up to ten or more. One of them, a British MI5 agent, was standing and they started talking to me in different languages — English, French, Arabic — and shouting. I felt someone grab my head and start beating my head into the back wall so hard that my head was bouncing. They were shouting that they would kill me or I would die. After this, they left the room and told me to think and tell them the truth or I would die. I just sat, scared.

Last Tuesday, judges in the High Court ruled that Aamer should be allowed to see classified documents in the possession of the British government, which, according to his lawyers (as described by AFP), “support his claim that confessions he made were obtained through torture,” and “include evidence that British intelligence officers were present on at least two occasions when he was tortured but failed to help him.” It was also revealed that the British government had sent material to their American allies with a strict proviso that it should not be made available to Aamer’s civilian lawyers in the United States. His lawyers in the UK also argued that the documents were urgently needed, because his case is currently being reviewed by the interagency Task Force set up by President Obama, which is expected to reach a decision sometime next month.

Lord Justice Jeremy Sullivan evidently agreed, ruling in favor of Aamer’s request, and explaining, “Our present view is that this matter is clearly very urgent. If this information is to be of any use it has to be put in the claimant’s hands as soon as possible.”

Predictably, however, given its response to Binyam Mohamed’s case, the government is reportedly planning to block disclosure by issuing a Public Interest Immunity certificate (to prevent disclosure in the interests of “national security”), as it did with Mohamed’s judicial review. A government spokesman explained:

We are disappointed by the court’s decision and will now necessarily need to consider matters of public interest immunity in relation to the documents at issue in this case. The release of these documents is not necessary to support the review of Shaker Aamer’s case in the United States. We have already provided all the relevant information held on Mr. Aamer by the UK to the US Review Panel, which is coordinated by the US Attorney General and which is considering his case, along with those of more than 200 others held in Guantánamo.

In a line that could have come directly from David Miliband, the foreign secretary, when talking about the threat to the intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and the UK in Binyam Mohamed’s case, the spokesman added:

We will continue to argue strongly the point of principle involved in this case: that it is fundamental to the national interest of the United Kingdom that our intelligence and security services are able to operate without fear of having to disclose secret intelligence material. They work to protect this country and save lives.

On Saturday, the Independent reported that, despite opposing the judge’s ruling, the Foreign Office was deeply engaged in negotiations for Shaker Aamer’s return, but the Obama administration was resistant to the British government’s demands, claiming that he still “represents a security risk.” A Foreign Office spokesman explained, “We have made an exceptional request for the release and return of Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national, to the UK,” adding, “This is because of the exceptional nature of the Guantánamo facility and our sustained efforts to see it closed. Though we were successful with securing the return of four other non-UK nationals, we have not been able yet to do so with Shaker.”

If Binyam Mohamed’s case is anything to go by, the prospect of another Transatlantic torture scandal may be just the spur that the British government needs to add the required weight to its “exceptional request,” and ensure that Shaker Aamer, like Binyam Mohamed, is fast-tracked to the top of the Guantánamo Task Force’s review pile and returned to the UK as swiftly as possible.

Otherwise, those of us who have been studying his story closely may start to suspect that the British government’s “exceptional request” is just a ruse, and that both the British and American governments would prefer him to be returned to Saudi Arabia, where there is far less chance that he will speak out about the horrors of the last eight years — not so much in connection with the brutal treatment he received in Afghanistan, but with his deep knowledge of events in Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout (as “Torture in Afghanistan: UK Court Orders Release of Evidence”).

For the last 15 months, Mohamed has watched as two British High Court judges have tried to release to the public information conveyed by the US intelligence services to their British counterparts regarding his torture in Pakistan, prior to his rendition to Morocco.

In this, they have been thwarted, time and again, by the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, who has repeatedly argued that the disclosure of a seven paragraph, 25-line summary of these documents, compiled by the judges themselves, would threaten Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States.

Binyam Mohamed was still in Guantánamo, facing a trial by Military Commission, when the judges first attempted to make their summary available to the public last August. In the months that followed, the US Justice Department dropped its claim that he was involved in a “dirty bomb plot,” the Military Commission charges were also dropped, and in February this year, in a clear attempt by both the British government and the Obama administration to keep a lid on the leaking torture story, he was fast-tracked to the top of the pile of cases being reviewed by the Obama administration’s interagency Task Force, and released in the UK.

Undaunted, however, the judges — Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones — refused to back down, challenging the foreign secretary regarding the release of the information on four occasions between October 2008 and October 2009, and, in an apparently unprecedented move, asking the British media to become involved. Last Friday they issued a sixth judgment on the case (PDF), declaring that the treatment of Mohamed “could never properly be described as ‘a secret’ or an ‘intelligence secret’ or ‘a summary of classified intelligence,’” and, moreover, restoring two passages from their fifth judgment, which were removed at the request of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

These passages, it transpires, were restored at the insistence of the Special Advocates (lawyers appointed by the government to deal with secret evidence in court on Mohamed’s behalf), who have long maintained that the government has no grounds for hiding “information which pointed to the commission of serious criminal offences” on the basis of national security, and who told the foreign secretary that the previous redactions “were more extensive than was required.”

Although four other passages — and the elusive summary — remain redacted, the two reinstated after the FCO dropped its objections are significant, as they refer to the notorious memos issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002 and May 2005, publicly released by the Obama administration in April this year, which purported to authorize the use of torture by the CIA.

The first passage stated, “One of those memoranda dated August 1 2002, from Mr. J.S. Bybee, Assistant Attorney-General, to Mr. John Rizzo, acting General Counsel of the CIA, made clear that the techniques described were those employed against Mr. Zubaydah, alleged to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.”

The second stated, “As the paragraphs relate to the actions of the United States itself, disclosure of the redacted paragraphs is consistent with the publication of the CIA interrogation technique memoranda [referred to in the paragraph above] and does not publicize any information about foreign States.”

The judges proceeded to express their displeasure with the government’s insistence that the other four passages remained redacted, noting that “The entire content of the four passages [was] already in the public domain,” and adding, “No contention has or could be advanced to the contrary.”

They also reiterated their reasons for stating that their summary of the documents conveyed by US intelligence to their British counterparts should be made publicly available, pointing out, as they have many times before, that “What is contained in those seven paragraphs gives rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” and that they contain “nothing secret or of an intelligence nature,” as they merely comprise “admissions by officials of the United States Government as to BM’s [Mohamed’s] treatment by them.”

This whole process is clearly nothing less than a long, slow circling around the dark truth of Binyam Mohamed’s torture by US agents in Pakistan (with the knowledge of the British authorities) before he was even sent to Morocco, and in this context, the judges’ decision to compare the still-undisclosed details of Mohamed’s treatment with the publicly available details of the treatment of Abu Zubaydah marks another small but extremely important step towards bringing into the open what the judges (and the Special Advocates) clearly regard as information that has no business being hidden.

As Clive Stafford Smith, Mohamed’s lawyer, explained in the Guardian:

I have had a copy of the infamous Bybee memo [PDF] for months, and this allows us to consider which of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” the British government would rather keep under wraps. As identified by Bybee, the 10 techniques are:

(1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard.

As Mohamed has never mentioned that he was subjected to waterboarding, and as it appears from the OLC memos that CIA operatives never actually placed insects into Abu Zubaydah’s “confinement box,” despite being authorized to do so, it seems that we are looking, instead, at some, or all of the other eight techniques.

Perhaps this, then, is the reason that the British government remains so desperate not to have the details disclosed of what it knew about Mohamed’s treatment in Afghanistan, because it was complicit in the techniques that were being developed for the CIA’s “high-value detainee” program, whose first official guinea pig was Abu Zubaydah.

To be fair, most of these techniques later migrated to Guantánamo anyway, as part of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s desire not to be excluded from the torture game by his old chum Dick Cheney. But what the British judges did last Friday was to take us back to April 2002.

Looking back to that feverish time, shortly after the capture of both Zubaydah and Mohammed, and nearly four full months before Jay Bybee and John Yoo attempted to redefine torture so that the CIA could indulge in its practice, the British judges have made two important points.

Firstly, they have reminded us that torture was, in fact, taking place long before it was supposedly authorized, with disturbing ramifications for those who ordered its use, which have not been adequately addressed by the Obama administration, and which are not addressed at all in Eric Holder’s decision to investigate only those agents who exceeded the indefensible guidelines for “enhanced interrogation” that were laid down by Bybee and Yoo in August 2002.

Secondly, by comparing the treatment of Binyam Mohamed with that of Abu Zubaydah, the judges have also reminded us that the use of torture was not confined to a select group of 14 “high-value detainees” — including Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — who were moved to Guantánamo in September 2006, but also to 80 other prisoners that the OLC acknowledged were held in secret CIA prisons, and the many dozens of others who had their torture outsourced to proxy torturers in countries including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria.

Binyam Mohamed was unfortunate enough to face both options — proxy torture in Morocco both before and after he received his own dose of “enhanced interrogation” at the hands of Americans — but last Friday, the tenacious judges in the UK’s High Court at least took one step further towards ensuring that information about these torture programs cannot be concealed by those who authorized it, or were complicit in it, on the spurious basis that disclosure would damage national security.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout.

For other articles relating to Binyam Mohamed, see the following: Urgent appeal for British resident Binyam Mohamed, “close to suicide” in Guantánamo (December 2007), Guantánamo: Torture victim Binyam Mohamed sues British government for evidence (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s letter from Guantánamo to Gordon Brown (May 2008), Guantánamo trials: critical judge sacked, British torture victim charged (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed: UK court grants judicial review over torture allegations, as US files official charges (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s judicial review: judges grill British agent and question fairness of Guantánamo trials (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Guantánamo torture victim Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), In a plea from Guantánamo, Binyam Mohamed talks of “betrayal” by the UK (September 2008), US Justice Department drops “dirty bomb plot” allegation against Binyam Mohamed (October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), The Betrayal of British Torture Victim Binyam Mohamed (February 2009), Hiding Torture And Freeing Binyam Mohamed From Guantánamo (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Coming Home From Guantánamo, As Torture Allegations Mount (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s statement on his release from Guantánamo (February 2009), Who Is Binyam Mohamed? (February 2009), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009), UK Government Lies Exposed; Spy Visited Binyam Mohamed In Morocco (May 2009), Daily Mail Pulls Story About Binyam Mohamed And British Spy (May 2009), Government Bans Testimony On Binyam Mohamed And The British Spy (May 2009), More twists in the tale of Binyam Mohamed (in the Guardian, May 2009), Outsourcing torture to foreign climes (in the Guardian, May 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), Former prisoners launch the Guantánamo Justice Centre in London (August 2009).

The use of secret evidence in cases related to terrorism involves prisoners held on control orders (a form of house arrest), or imprisoned on deportation bail, who are assigned special advocates to speak on their behalf in closed sessions of the Special Immigrations Appeal Court (SIAC), but who are then prohibited from speaking to the special advocates about what took place in these closed sessions. This regime is now under threat, after the Law Lords ruled in June that imposing control orders breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, because a suspect held under a control order is not given “sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate assigned to him.”

Yesterday, however, a new front in the assault on open justice opened up when Mr. Justice Silber ruled, in the cases of seven former Guantánamo prisoners who are suing the government for damages, related to claims that agents of the intelligence services were involved in unlawful acts and conspiracy, that, for the first time ever in a civil case, MI5, MI6 and the police will be able to withhold evidence from defendants and their lawyers on the basis of national security.

The seven men in question are Bisher al-Rawi, Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Jamil El-Banna, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga, and they anticipated that their challenge would involve wrangling over the use of Public Interest Immunity certificates, designed to prevent the use of evidence in cases where the government asserts that disclosure would reveal intelligence sources or pose a threat to national security. The use of PII certificates has plagued the disclosure of documents in the long-running case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture by the US government, with the complicity of the British intelligence services, but no one anticipated that, in this particular case, a judge would authorize the use of the same system of special advocates used by SIAC.

Mr. Justice Silber acknowledged that the case raised what he called a “stark question of law,” and added that he agreed with the claimants that an appeal “should be expedited.”

It is to be hoped that the Court of Appeals will recognize that Mr. Justice Silber’s ruling must be overturned, but in the meantime Louise Christian, the solicitor for some of the former Guantánamo prisoners, captured the full, horrific implications of the ruling when she explained:

The judge has sanctioned what would be a constitutional outrage, allowing government to rely on secret evidence in the ordinary civil courts. [He has done this] by treating the issue as if it was a purely technical legal matter, not a question of overturning the whole history of the common law and the fundamental principle that both sides must be on an equal footing. By giving the government such an advantage in civil litigation, the court would overthrow the very essence of the rule of law.

She added that she was “confident that the court of appeal will not allow such a massive erosion of the rights of the individual to hold government to account, particularly on the all-important issue of complicity in torture,” and we must all hope that her analysis is correct. As with the case of Binyam Mohamed, it appears that justice is being undermined, with issues of national security being invoked not to protect national security, but to prevent the government and its agents either from embarrassment or, more gravely, from being held accountable for complicity in the systematic torture and abuse at the heart of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about my film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian), Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew (June 2009), Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws, Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh, Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK (all June 2009), Testing control orders and Dismantle the secret state (for the Guardian), UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt (July 2009), Secret evidence in the case of the North West 10 “terror suspects” (August 2009), Letting go of control orders (for the Guardian, September 2009).

For further information about this visit, for interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Andy Worthington. For inquiries relating to my book The Guantánamo Files, and to order retail copies in the US, please contact Denise De LaRosa at Palgrave Macmillan, my US distributors.

Here’s an appraisal of the film from Debra Sweet of The World Can’t Wait, who‘s seen a review copy:

“‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’ is very engaging and moving, and personal. The first film to really take you through the lives of the men through their own eyes.”
Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can’t Wait

Wednesday November 4, 7 pm: Talk – Torture and Lies: The Story Of Guantánamo. Followed by Q&A.
Talk by Andy Worthington at Revolution Books, 146 W. 26th Street, New York.
Phone: 212-691-3345 or email.
Press contact: Phone 917-449-9064 or email Connie Julian.
This event is sponsored by Revolution Books, NYC.

Thursday November 5, 9-11 pm: Film screening – Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo. Followed by Q&A.
Screening at Soho House, 29-35 Ninth Avenue, New York.
Introduced by Karen Greenberg, Director, The Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law.
Contact: Nicole Bruno.
Please note that there is limited seating on a first come, first served basis for this screening, and if you want to attend you have to contact Nicole.
This event is sponsored by the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law.

Friday November 6, 8 pm: Film screening – Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo, Followed by Q&A.
Screening at Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor, New York.
With special guest Tina Foster (International Justice Network, Bagram habeas litigation) and moderator Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can’t Wait.
Phone: 646-732-3261 or email.
This event is sponsored by Alwan for the Arts and The World Can’t Wait.

Saturday November 7, 4:30-6:30 pm: An Afternoon with Andy Worthington, hosted by The World Can’t Wait.
The Art Club, 100 Reade Street, Tribeca, New York.
Selections from “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo” and a chance to meet Andy Worthington, and to benefit the work of The World Can’t Wait in stopping the US torture state.
Contact: Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can’t Wait (or phone: 866-973-4463).
This event is sponsored by The World Can’t Wait and Have Art Will Travel.

Sunday November 8, 5.30 to 9 pm: Film screening – Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo. With introductory talk and post-screening Q&A.
The Auld Shebeen Irish Pub, 3971 Chain Bridge Road, Fairfax, VA, 22030.
Contact: Bart Frazier.
This event is sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Monday November 9, 4 pm: Film screening – Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo. Followed by Q&A.
New America Foundation, 1899 L St, NW Suite 400, Washington, 20036.
With special guest Tom Wilner and moderator Peter Bergen.
Phone: 202-986-2700 or email Stephanie Gunter.
This event is sponsored by the New America Foundation.

Tuesday November 10, 7 pm: Film screening – Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo. Followed by Q&A.
North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Avenue (at Martin Luther King Jr. Way), Berkeley, California. Details here.
Phone: 818-480-1860 or email Curt Wechsler, The World Can’t Wait.
This event is sponsored by The World Can’t Wait and Berkeley students.

Wednesday November 11, 12 noon: Film screening – Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo. Followed by Q&A.
University of San Francisco School of Law, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA  94117.
Contact: Elizabeth Hinchman.
Please note that this screening is for students and staff of USF School of Law.
This event is sponsored by the University of San Francisco School of Law.

Wednesday November 11, 7 pm: Talk – Torture and Lies: The Story of Guantánamo. Followed by Q&A.
Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA  94704.
Phone: 510-848-1196 or email Reiko Redmonde.
This event is sponsored by Revolution Books, Berkeley.

Andy’s visit to the US is sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation and The World Can’t Wait.

About the film

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a new documentary film, directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington (and inspired by Andy’s book, The Guantánamo Files). The film tells the story of Guantánamo (and includes sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and, in his first major interview, Omar Deghayes, who was released in December 2007), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of three particular prisoners — Shaker Aamer (who is still held), Binyam Mohamed (who was released in February 2009) and Omar Deghayes — “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

For worldwide inquiries about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Andy Worthington or Polly Nash.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a Spectacle Production (74 minutes, 2009).

About the directors and the production company

Andy Worthington is a journalist, and the author of three books, including The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Pluto Press). Visit his website here.

Polly Nash is a lecturer at the London College Of Communication (LCC), part of the University of the Arts, London, and has worked in film and TV for 20 years. Core funding for the film was provided by LCC.

Spectacle is an independent television production company specializing in documentary, community-led investigative journalism and participatory media. Spectacle programs have been broadcast across Europe, Australia and Canada and have won international awards. Visit their website here.

For excerpts and extras, follow the links on the Spectacle website. A short trailer is available here, and please visit this page for photos and reviews of the UK launch on October 21, 2009.

Andy’s book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison is published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, and if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.