Tag Archives: binyam-mohamed

While U.S. courts and the Obama administration have been reluctant or unwilling to pursue the cases, countries that once backed former President George W. Bush's war on terrorism are carrying out their own investigations of the alleged U.S. torture program and the role that their governments played in it. Judges in Great Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland and Lithuania are preparing to hear allegations that their governments helped the CIA run secret prisons on their soil or cooperated in illegal U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects. Spanish prosecutors also have filed criminal charges against six senior Bush administration officials who approved the harsh interrogation methods that detainees say were employed at U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other sites. Detainees already have won one victory in a foreign court: Last November, an Italian judge convicted a CIA station chief and 22 other Americans — nearly all CIA officers and contractors — in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric who ended up in a secret prison in Egypt. The trend, although it's slow-moving and involves disparate plaintiffs, forums and legal strategies, could represent the end of a reviled chapter of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, which ensnared hundreds of detainees with the clandestine cooperation of dozens of countries. Now, some of those countries, led by new governments or under pressure from their citizens, are trying to pry open those secrets. Last month, the new British prime minister, David Cameron, announced a judicial inquiry into whether British intelligence services had participated in the abuse of terrorism suspects. Cameron's decision followed a public outcry over the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national living in Britain who charges that British authorities knew that CIA agents were torturing him in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo and did nothing to stop it. “Our reputation as a country that believes in human rights, justice, fairness and the rule of law … risks being tarnished,” Cameron said. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/08/18/99359/detainee-torture-cases-proceed.html added by: toyotabedzrock