Tag: David Miliband

Stonewalling of Torture Evidence in Britain

A couple of months ago, the British High Court ruled that a document containing information on the torture of Binyam Mohamed should be disclosed in full.  The original document supposedly contains seven paragraphs which describe the brutal methods used to interrogate Mohamed, including waterboarding and slicing his genitals with a scalpel.

David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary who has been resisting the High Court’s efforts to release the document, now describes the decision as irresponsible.

David Miliband accused the two senior judges of irresponsibly “charging in” to a diplomatically sensitive area over what happened to former terror detainee Binyam Mohamed while held by the Americans in Pakistan.

Jonathan Sumption QC, appearing for the Foreign Secretary, told the Court of Appeal the judges’ stance was “both, in many respects, unnecessary and profoundly damaging to the interests of this country.”

Mr Sumption added: “I would go so far as to say their views were irresponsible.”

Torturers To Binyam: “We’re going to change your brain”

David Rose at the British paper The Mail got the scoop that was former Guanatanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed’s “world exclusive” post-release interview. Entitled “How MI5 colluded in my torture: Binyam Mohamed claims British agents fed Moroccan torturers their questions”, the article presents a brief biography of Mr. Mohamed’s troubled life, including the experience of racial prejudice in the United States (Binyam is Ethiopian-born), abandonment by his father, and later the adoption of his mother’s religion, Islam.

But the article’s most sensational sections describe his torture by Pakistani, Moroccan, and U.S. officials, who all the while were in collaboration with British intelligence services, who not only were feeding them questions, but also withholding exculpatory evidence as well. The torture was horrendous: