"Dirty Bomb" Charges Dropped Against Gitmo Prisoner Binyam Mohamed

The Washington Post recently reported that the U.S. Justice Department has dropped the key allegation against British resident and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed -- that he was involved, with American citizen Jose Padilla, in a plot to detonate a "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city.

For over three years, Binyam's lawyers at Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity, have been arguing that the allegations against Binyam were extracted through the use of torture -- in Morocco, where Binyam was tortured for 18 months, after being rendered by the CIA, and at the CIA's own "Dark Prison," near Kabul, where he was held for four or five months from January 2004, before his transfer to the U.S. military prison at Bagram airbase, and his eventual arrival at Guantánamo in September 2004.

As Binyam explained to Reprieve's Director, Clive Stafford Smith, during the meetings at Guantánamo that first established what had happened to him after he was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, his torturers in Morocco insisted -- in spite of his protests that he had only recently converted to Islam and did not speak Arabic -- that he knew some of the big names in al-Qaeda:

Some of the time they said that some big people in al-Qaeda were talking about me. Some of the time they told me that the U.S. had a story they wanted from me and it was their job to get it. They talked about Jose Padilla and they said I was going to testify against him and big people. They named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. I was meant to be working with these people, giving them ideas like the dirty bomb. It is hard to pin down the exact story, because what they wanted changed all the time. First in Morocco it changed, then when I was in the Dark Prison, then in Bagram and again in Guantánamo Bay.

Binyam explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers "would tell me what to say." He added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still "training me what to say," and one of them told him, "We're going to change your brain."

As it happens, one of the confessions that was tortured out of Binyam is so ludicrous that it was soon dropped, but not before Clive Stafford Smith had learnt of it and had been able to use it to demonstrate the extent to which it indicated that all of Binyam's "confessions" were untrustworthy. As he explained in his book The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side, "[T]he U.S. authorities insisted that Padilla and Binyam had dinner with various high-up members of al-Qaeda the night before Padilla was to fly off to America. According to their theory the dinner party had to have been on the evening of April 3rd in Karachi … Binyam was meant to have dined with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Sheikh al-Libi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Jose Padilla." What made the scenario "absurd," as Stafford Smith pointed out, was that "two of the conspirators were already in U.S. custody at the time -- Abu Zubaydah was seized six days before, on 28 March 2002, and al-Libi had been held since November 2001."

Binyam's lawyers have long maintained that the charges against him would not stand up to independent scrutiny in a courtroom, and this is indeed what has happened. After June's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court -- that the prisoners have constitutional habeas corpus rights (the right to ask a judge why they are being held) -- the District Court in Washington D.C. established a timeline for the government to submit factual returns stating their reasons for holding the prisoners.

When Binyam's case came up for habeas review last month, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered the government to release any exculpatory evidence in its possession by October 6. The evidence in question -- 42 documents provided to the U.S. administration by the British government -- is not the only undisclosed evidence in U.S. hands, but Judge Sullivan was able to order these particular documents to be released because their existence had already been confirmed this summer, during an extraordinary judicial review of Binyam's case in the British High Court.