Guantanamo detainee sues British government for torture info

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Attorneys for a detainee held here as an alleged al Qaeda co-conspirator filed suit against the British government on Tuesday, claiming it would violate its own foreign policy by permitting a former resident to face war crimes trial here with evidence allegedly obtained by torture.

Pentagon officials have not yet charged Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohammed, 29, with war crimes. In the last, aborted U.S. effort to stage military commissions, he was accused of planning to explode a radioactive ''dirty bomb'' in New York City.

The suit seeks to extract from the British government any secret intelligence that the two war on terror allies may have exchanged in the case in a bid to prove any trial would be tainted by torture.

Pakistani security forces arrested Mohammed at the Karachi airport in April 2002. From there, his lawyers claim, he disappeared into a secret network of U.S. supported prisons -- including 18 months in Morocco between 2002 and 2004.

There, according to an affidavit his London lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, filed at the U.S. Supreme Court, he confessed under torture to crimes he never committed.

''The torture included shackling, being suspended from walls and ceilings, brutal beatings and being cut all over his body with a scalpel, including his genitals,'' according to the 21-page petition filed Tuesday at the British High Court of Justice.

``Unsurprisingly, the claimant co-operated to avoid further torture.''

President Bush has said the United States does not engage in torture.

Under military commissions law, evidence obtained through coercion may be admitted at trial, if the military judge considers it necessary. But evidence from torture is banned, because it is illegal under both U.S. and international law.

It will be up to each detainee's judge to decide the distinction between the two once the trials get under way in the first exclusively U.S. war crimes tribunals since World War II.

Mohammed lived seven years in London, starting at age 16. His family had fled his native Addis Ababa, first to the Washington, D.C., area, then to Britain.

He claims he never joined al Qaeda but confessed to crimes he never committed under torture. His lawyers say he traveled to Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on a religious journey to shake a drug habit.

His attorneys argue in the pleadings that the British government has evidence that could help Mohammed prove he was tortured and are obliged to assist in his defense under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, as well as British law.

''Mr. Mohammed has been the victim of extraordinary rendition, horrific torture, years of detention without trial, all apparently with the assistance of or, at least, the Nelsonian blindness of the British government,'' solicitor Richard Stein said, releasing the suit on behalf of the legal aid organization Reprieve. ``It beggars belief that they will not lift a finger to help a British resident when he may face the death penalty.''

Since the Bush administration opened the Guantánamo prison camps in January 2002, the British government has systematically succeeded through diplomatic channels in securing the release of its citizens plus several former legal British residents held here as ``enemy combatants.''

Some of the citizens had been earlier identified as candidates for trial by commission.

British legal experts have long argued that the U.S. war court doesn't meet international norms; some have called it a ``kangaroo court.''

Last year, it specifically included Mohammed's name on a list of detainees whose release it sought, to no avail.

Now, his attorneys suspect he will be charged as the Pentagon prosecutor revives old cases earlier halted by the Supreme Court.

In part to prove their case, the lawyers quote Mohammed as telling them from behind the razor wire at Guantánamo that in his first year of secret detention his interrogators referred to material in his case provided by the British intelligence service MI-5.

In the earlier aborted war court cases, Mohammed was among the most colorful of commission defendants.

He spoke extemporaneously at pretrial proceedings in British accented English, declared the process a ''CON-mission,'' insisted on serving as his own defense attorney and wore a Pakistani-style tunic and trousers he had his attorneys dye fluorescent orange to illustrate his prison camp attire.

In the intervening years, according to his Pentagon attorney, Air Force Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, he has declined emotionally and mentally in the isolation of this offshore Navy base, at times smearing feces on the walls of his cell and on himself to protest his conditions.

Prison camp spokesmen have confirmed the presence of a feces smearer and said he was segregated from the other ''enemy combatants'' because he was disruptive but have never identified the man under a policy they say is designed to protect a detainee's privacy.