In a recent comment piece, the Daily Mail goombah Richard Littlejohn accuses those who criticise the treatment of the former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed of trying to “undermine our security services and destroy our special relationship with the US”. His headline is deliberately misleading: “How should we grill terrorists — with a cuddle and a cup of tea?”
Mohamed, who spent five years in Gitmo only to be released without charge, was not a terrorist. To present him as such is simply dishonest. The UK Court of Appeal ruled this month that he had been subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” by his captors; even David Miliband has conceded that “there were practices that were unacceptable to us to which he was subjected”.
Yet Littlejohn’s response is typically tenuous: “His treatment wasn’t pretty, but it has to be put in context of the 3,000 people killed in the worst-ever terrorist attack on US soil.” But why? Mohamed wasn’t responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks. He was arrested on a charge of visa violation.
Evidence held by the Foreign Office, which had been suppressed until the government was forced to disclose the information on 10 February, reveals that the UK Security Service knew Mohamed was being deprived of sleep and shackled during interrogation. In January 2004, over a year after his capture, he was transferred from Morocco to a secret, CIA-run prison near Kabul.
He described his incarceration there for the human rights campaign group Reprieve:
It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time. They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb. There was loud music, Slim Shady [by Eminem] and Dr Dre for 20 days. Then they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. At one point, I was chained to the rails for a fortnight. The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.
Interviewed on the BBC’s Newsnight, David Miliband said: “All of us who are decent, good British citizens . . . never want to see cruel and inhuman treatment that contravenes our legal obligations, or the morality of this country.” That is why the allegation that MI5 colluded in his mistreatment — by feeding his torturers questions — is so disturbing.
Miliband might try to worm the UK intelligence services out of admitting any complicity; and Littlejohn might idiotically dismiss “any concern about the Binman’s ‘yuman rites’ ” — but I like to think that most Britons take pride in their commitment to fairness, and to what is right.
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