Rendition Victim Binyam Mohamed Was Just Released from Gitmo. This is His Story

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted February 23, 2009.

"When are you going to stop this? This is not the way to deal with this issue. That is why I don't want to call this place a courtroom, because I don't think it is a courtroom.

"I am sure you wouldn't agree with it, because if you was arrested somewhere in Arabia and Bin Laden says, 'You know what, you are my enemy but I am going to force you to have a lawyer and I give you some bearded turban person,' I don't think you will agree with that. Forget the rules, regulations and crap … you wouldn't deal with that. That is where we are. This is a bad place. You are in charge of it […]"

It was an extraordinary lecture. Binyam finally came to a firm conclusion. "I am done. You can stop looking at the watch," he said. He then turned away from Kohlmann, as if to ignore any response. He was holding up his sign, "CON-MISSION," and waving it to the journalists behind him, just in case they had missed it the first time.

The other story was related by another British resident held at Guantánamo, Bisher al-Rawi, who was released in March 2007, and his words capture how Binyam's concern for justice permeated his entire approach to his imprisonment, and, in Bisher's opinion, also reflected a very British approach that he had learned during the seven years he had lived in the UK before his capture: 

He is so British -- I mean so British! The way he stands, the way he talks, his painstaking use of logic. He's such a gentleman. And he is knowledgeable and he stands up for his rights in a really British way. Like with S.O.P. This is something the guards have. It is called Standard Operating Procedure -- S.O.P. And the funny thing about this Standard Operating Procedure is that it changes every day. Every day you have new Standard Operating Procedure. And Binyam, he draws attention to this and insists on his entitlement to be treated the same way as the Standard Operating Procedure dictated the day before. And they hate him for this. But he's just being British.

Perhaps the media snipers who are asking why Binyam should be allowed back into the UK would like to dwell on this as they ignore both the seven years that he lived in Britain, when, as MI5 confirmed, he was "a nobody," and was not wanted in connection with any crime, and the seven years that he spent in the custody of the United States -- or its proxy torturers -- when, as David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has conceded, he had "established an arguable case" that "he was subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by or on behalf of the United States," and was also "subject to torture during such detention by or on behalf of the United States."

In addition, as the British government struggles with claims that it has regularly fed intelligence information about British "terror suspects" seized in Pakistan to Pakistani agents, knowing full well that the Pakistanis regularly use torture, those same critics might want to recall the words of the judges who reviewed Binyam's case in the High Court last summer. The judges explained that the British government's involvement in Binyam's case, and its relationship to the US -- which involved sending agents to interview him in Pakistan, even though he was being held illegally, and providing and receiving intelligence about him while he was being tortured in Morocco -- "went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing."

There are more revelations to come about torture policies that involve -- or involved -- the U.S., the UK, Morocco, Pakistan and a host of other countries, but for now I'm content to let one of its victims try to rebuild his life in peace. As Binyam also explained in his statement after his release,

 I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares. Before this ordeal, "torture" was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim. It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways -- all orchestrated by the United States government.

 

See more stories tagged with: guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, pakistan, clive stafford smith, bisher al-rawi, binyam mohamed

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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