For months, the U.S. and British government have been urging a British court not to release seven paragraphs of a U.S. summary of intelligence information relating to former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, on the grounds that it would “damage” intelligence cooperation. Mohamed claims he was rendered to Morocco where he was tortured, but that he was also tortured at the hands of U.S. authorities while detained in Afghanistan. He is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary his lawyers say facilitated his rendition. The U.S. originally believed Mohamed was at the center of a “dirty bomb” plot involving Abu Zubayda and Jose Padilla, but he was ultimately released without charge last year.
The threat from the U.S. and British governments not to share intelligence always rang hollow–U.S. and British intelligence agencies wouldn’t put their countries at risk in this manner–but the hollowness of the threat is what makes it so insidious. The U.S. was trying to intimidate a foreign court out of revealing evidence of its own illegal behavior by invoking a threat of mutual self-annihilation. Now that the information has been revealed, it’s clear how ridiculous the threat was, given that it substantiates Mohamed being mistreated in ways that have already been disclosed.
The paragraphs disclosed by the court indicate that Mohamed was subject to sleep deprivation and threatened with being “disappeared” to another country to be tortured further.
The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972. 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.
