Hiding Torture

This long post is nevertheless only a part of the essential well-researched original. IF you have any strong interest in working on this crucial problem of torture and the complicity of US, Britain, Canada and other Gov's, please read the whole article and others on Binyam.

Please do all you can to help stop torture and to free those who are crying out desperately for all the help they can get to salvage their lives. Their lawyers and those few who are writing in their behalf are most in need of other lawyers, writers and human rights experts and non-experts alike...

Find the related references both below for some of the following topics as well as in the Comments section of this blog and also Andy Worthington's website. Also see the articles posted just below this one on Renditions and Torture and how to become involved. Thanx for tuning in, Connie

Please go often to read what GTMO expert Andy Worthington has to say
here

Hiding Torture And Freeing Binyam Mohamed From Guantánamo by Andy Worthington
12.2.09

This has been an extraordinary week for British resident, torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed. For important background item go here

Last Thursday, his lawyers’ ten-month campaign to secure the disclosure of documents in the possession of the British government, which apparently confirm details of his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, sparked a crisis when the High Court judges in his case, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, bowed to pressure from the foreign secretary, David Miliband, not to make public a summary of the evidence because the US government had threatened to re-evaluate its intelligence sharing relationship with the UK, which “could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains.”here

This was in spite of the fact that, since last August, the judges have made it clear that they believe that a summary of what happened to Binyam should be made available in the interests of “open justice, the rule of law and democratic accountability,” and also because “The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials (in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security) would be inimical to the rule of law and the proper functioning of a democracy.” here

Hiding torture in the UK

In response to the judges’ capitulation, the media seized on a particular passage in the judgment — which stated that one of the main reasons that the judges had made their decision was because they had “been informed by counsel for the Foreign Secretary that the position had not changed” with the inauguration of Barack Obama — to confront the foreign secretary about the nature of these threats. On Channel 4 News, David Miliband played down the talk of a “threat” — even though the judges had mentioned it no less than eight times in their judgment — and explained,

What there is is a simple fact, which is that intelligence cooperation depends on confidentiality. We share our secrets with other countries, and they share their secrets with us, and the founding principle, for us and for them, is that we can trust the confidentiality of that relationship. In this case, the United States made clear, in documents that have been published, that there would inevitably be lasting harm if that fundamental principle was breached.

This was undoubtedly true — although it also conveniently allowed the British government to avoid having to deal with the revelation, in public, of its own agents’ complicity in war crimes — but Miliband then appeared to back up his counsel’s claim that the situation had not changed with the arrival of a new administration in the White House. After Jon Snow asked him, “Have you checked that this threat — and it is a threat, because the judges call it a threat — still stands under the Obama administration?” Miliband responded by stating, “There’s no evidence that it doesn’t stand.”

This was in marked contrast to a statement earlier that day by a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who maintained, as the Daily Mail described it, that Downing Street “was unaware of any threat from the Obama administration to withdraw intelligence sharing.” The spokesman stated, explicitly “We have not engaged with the new administration on the detail of this case.”

On Thursday, in a response to the furore in the House of Commons, David Miliband dropped his carefully worded response to Jon Snow’s question about the Obama administration, and contented himself with repeating the mantra about the “fundamental principle” of confidentiality between governments regarding the disclosure of intelligence information. However, the gulf between what the judges had been led to believe, and the statement from the Prime Minister’s spokesman, prompted Binyam’s solicitors, at Leigh Day & Co., to prepare a new submission (PDF), asking the High Court to reconsider its judgment.

Binyam’s lawyers request the High Court to reconsider its judgment

The submission included a witness statement from the journalist David Rose, who reported that, in addition to the comments made on behalf of the Prime Minister, a spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had stated on February 4, “We haven’t made any representations to the court regarding the new administration’s approach to this case. We have not approached the new administration about these paragraphs. We haven’t made any representations about their attitude and we haven’t been asked by the court to do so, despite the new executive orders and the attitude that may now prevail in Washington.”

The demands made in the submission were stark. In light of the fact that “No threat was made by the US Government,” and “No approach had been made by the UK Government to the new US administration of President Obama, and no representations had been made to the Court about the attitude of the new administration,” Dinah Rose QC and Ben Jaffey declared that “these statements call seriously into question the accuracy and completeness of the evidence and submissions given by the Defendant [David Miliband] on which the Court relied in reaching its judgment,” and asked the Court “to reopen its judgment in this matter, and to order the Defendant to swear evidence setting out the complete and accurate factual position as to the making of a threat; and the maintenance of any threat by the Obama administration.”

For the rest of this ground-breaking article by Worthington, please go
here See the rest beginning with the catagory...HIDING TORTURE in the US Also read the lively Comments with Andy's answers on Worthington's site...

A few references to above article (look also for more to be updated in Comments section of this oneheartforpeace blog posting and ADD your own.

1) Torture/Renditions Jane Mayer, ACLU
here

here

2) Transcript of Jon Snow and David Miliband here

3) US Gov. Threatens to Withdraw Intelligence- Channel4 website:
here

4) More on the US Threats:
here

5) Binyam's solicitors PDF submission:
here