Binyam to be released to UK: BBC & The Lede- NYTimes (with more related items)

21/02/2009

A British detainee held at Guantanamo Bay is to be released "as soon as practical arrangements can be made", the Foreign Office has said.

Binyam Mohamed, 30, will return to the UK after more than four years at the controversial US military base in Cuba.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said agreement had been reached between the UK and US governments on his transfer.

Mr Mohamed, who was arrested in Pakistan, claims he was tortured into falsely confessing to terrorism.

The Ethiopian-born detainee has been held at Guantanamo since September 2004.

Earlier this year he went on hunger strike for more than a month, and was described by his legal team as "close to starvation".

He was declared well enough to travel back to the UK last weekend by a team of British officials who had visited him.

Mr Mohamed lived in London before his arrest in Pakistan in 2002.

SOURCE: BBC News
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February 20, 2009, 2:14 pm The Lede/The NYTimes
Guantánamo Detainee Can Return to Britain
By Robert Mackey

There has just been a development in the case of Binyam Mohamed, the detainee at Guantánamo Bay whose case we discussed on The Lede last week. The British Foreign Office released a statement today saying that Mr. Mohamed, who was born in Ethiopia but had been granted British residency before he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, will be allowed to return to Britain.

A short statement from the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, posted on the Web site of the Foreign Office, reads in full:

The U.K. and U.S. Governments have reached agreement on the transfer of Mr. Binyam Mohamed from Guantánamo Bay to the U.K. He will be returned as soon as the practical arrangements can be made. This result follows recent discussions between the British and U.S. Governments and a medical assessment, undertaken by a U.K. doctor, that Mr. Mohamed is medically fit to return.

The U.K. Government requested the release and return of all former legal U.K. residents detained at Guantánamo Bay in August 2007. The Home Secretary and I took this decision in light of work by the U.S. Government to reduce the number of those detained at Guantánamo with the aim of closing the facility and our wish to offer practical and concrete support to those efforts. In reaching this decision we gave full consideration to the need to maintain national security and the Government’s overriding responsibilities in this regard.

Mr. Mohamed’s return does not constitute a commitment by the Home Secretary that he may remain permanently in the U.K. His immigration status will be reviewed following his return and the same security considerations will apply to him as would apply to any other foreign national in this country. As always, all appropriate steps will be taken to protect national security.

Mr. Mohamed’s detention, and claims that he was tortured as part of the Bush Administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, has led to legal proceedings on both sides of the Atlantic.

As John Schwartz reported in The New York Times last week, Mr. Mohamed is one of five detainees who have sued a subsidiary of Boeing for what they claim was the company’s role in flying them to countries where they were secretly detained and, they say, tortured. In another article in The Times last week Ray Bonner reported that Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers in Britain were “pressing for the release of American intelligence reports pertaining to his treatment.”

Negotiations for Mr. Mohamed’s release from Guantánamo Bay took place while he was on a hunger strike, as legal proceedings in Britain threatened to reveal details about the British government’s cooperation with the American rendition program.

As Mr. Bonner explained:

A British court said that seven paragraphs of its opinion that summarized evidence about Mr. Mohamed’s treatment while he was in American custody should be released in the public interest. But, the court said, they had been redacted because of objections from the British Foreign Office.

In response, Mr. Miliband argued, in a letter to the British court, that American intelligence reports about Mr. Mohamed’s interrogation had to be kept secret because their publication “would seriously harm the existing intelligence-sharing arrangements between the United Kingdom and the United States and cause considerable damage to the national security of the United Kingdom.”

Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that the British intelligence agency MI5 had cooperated with the C.I.A. by providing material for Mr. Mohamed’s interrogation after he was transferred from Pakistan, where he was arrested in 2002, to Afghanistan or Morocco. According to The Guardian, MI5 “fed questions” to the C.I.A. for Mr. Mohamed, “even though it had no idea where he was being held and in what condition he was in.”