By Kenneth J. Theisen
The Obama administration is currently engaged in an international cover-up of the Bush regime’s abusive treatment of Binyam Mohamed. Binyam was one of the thousands of prisoners taken in the so-called “war on terror” during the Bush years in power. He also became a victim of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. Now the Obama administration is engaged in courts in London, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. to keep the public from knowing the full extent of the Bush administration crimes against this man and others like him.
Binyam was arrested in 2002 in Pakistan while attempting to fly to the United Kingdom (UK). He became a “ghost prisoner” of the CIA. He entered the ghost prison system run by U.S. intelligence agencies and was held in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan. While being held in Morocco, intelligence interrogators used scalpels or razor blades to repeatedly cut his penis and chest. In the CIA-run prison in Afghanistan, Binyam was beaten and hung from a pole.
On September 19, 2004 he was taken from Bagram’s U.S. Air Force base to the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay where his abuse continued. After suffering years of abuse at the hands of his U.S. captors, all charges against him were eventually dropped. He was released and arrived in the UK in February of 2009. But since then Binyam Mohamed has fought back against the U.S. torture state in the courts.
He joined four others in a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, a San Jose, California subsidiary of the Boeing Co., for its role in arranging extraordinary rendition flights for the CIA. (To learn more about the case, see http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/29921res20070530.html)
The plaintiffs in that case contend that the company flew them to various torture chambers run by the CIA. In 2007 a Council of Europe report identified Jeppesen’s services to the CIA. In April, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that this case could proceed against Jeppesen despite the objections of the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ). DOJ argued that if the case proceeded it would pose grave risks to national security. Now DOJ is requesting the federal court to reconsider its April ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.
Not only is Obama’s DOJ involved in the attempted cover-up, but so is the U.S. State Department. In July a British government lawyer asserted to the UK’s High Court that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with the UK if that court revealed details of Binyam Mohamed’s treatment at Guantánamo Bay. In August 2008, the UK court had declared that there was evidence Mohamed had been tortured. But the court, at the request of the Bush regime, had deleted the details from the public version of its ruling.
But Clinton had to intervene because the UK court is now considering a motion from Binyam’s attorneys and news media outlets to reveal the details in a case over the alleged British participation in his torture. If these details are released, it will reveal crimes by the U.S. and British governments.
As part of the Obama administration attempts at cover-up, Binyam’s attorneys were threatened with jail time by DOJ. Binyam’s lawyers had drafted a letter to President Obama in February this year. In that letter they urged Obama to release the evidence of Binyam’s treatment in U.S. custody or to allow the UK to release the information. DOJ attempted to have U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan of Washington, D.C. hold the lawyers in contempt of court and to have them jailed. Judge Hogan rejected the DOJ request to hold the lawyers in contempt.
Since the Obama administration took over from the Bush regime in January this year, it has
appeared in several courts on cases brought against the national security state. In each of these cases, Obama’s DOJ has fought hard to protect the U.S. government from having to reveal the crimes of the Bush regime. These latest court cases are just part of the pattern of cover-up. Obama may have promised change, but his actions prove that he is intent on protecting his predecessor’s criminal actions. The question is why?