Britain’s role in the secret abduction of terror suspects came under intense new scrutiny with the return to the UK of Binyam Mohamed on Monday after more than four years in Guantanamo Bay.
Senior members of parliament said they intended to pursue ministers and officials over what they knew of his ill-treatment and why Britain helped the CIA interrogate him.
In a statement released shortly after he arrived in a US Gulfstream jet at RAF Northolt in west London, Mohamed said: “For myself, the very worst moment came when I realized in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence.”
Once inside the terminal building Mohamed met his sister for the fist time in more than seven years and in the most emotionally charged moment of the day they both cried and hugged.
Mohamed was released after several hours of questioning by police and immigration officials.
Clive Stafford Smith, his lawyer, spoke of a “fantastic day” after the long campaign to free his client, who spent weeks on hunger strike being force-fed at Guantanamo and looked “incredibly skinny and very emaciated.”
Binyam was “extraordinarily grateful to be back in Britain,” said Stafford Smith, who said he had “zero doubt” Britain was complicit in his client’s ill-treatment.
“Britain knew he was being abused and left him,” he said, referring to his secret abduction to Morocco where Mohamed says he was tortured. The lawyer also said his client was subjected to “very serious abuse” in Guantanamo.
Stafford Smith said that while his family was not vindictive, they wanted the truth to be known. Mohamed hoped to be allowed to remain in the UK.
“What we in Britain need to do is to make up for some of the things in the past and if the British government was, as I contend, deeply involved in the torture that Binyam had to go through, the least we can do is offer him his homeland,” Stafford Smith said.
Andrew Dismore, chairman of the Westminster parliament’s joint human rights committee, said he would lead a private meeting yesterday to consider where their inquiry goes next.
Separately, Mike Gapes, chairman of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “We will be pursuing the issue with ministers,” adding that his cross-party group had been trying to discover the UK’s role in the rendition of terror suspects for years.
His committee intended to question British Home Secretary David Miliband and Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch Brown over what he called “outstanding issues.” He said they included “rendition, what happened to people in Guantanamo Bay and black sites” — a reference to prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS