The Binyam Mohamed case and the threat of dictatorship

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The Binyam Mohamed case and the threat of dictatorship
22 February 2010

Each day brings new revelations about the full extent of British
involvement in the torture of those detained by the United States
during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Friday, it emerged that the London Metropolitan Police are
investigating allegations that the British intelligence service MI5
was complicit in the torture of Shaker Aamer, the last remaining
British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Aamer has been imprisoned at Guantánamo without charge since February
2002. His lawyers claim that British security and intelligence
officers were aware that he was previously tortured while held in US
custody at the US military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Aamer alleges that, in the presence of an MI5 officer, his head was
repeatedly “banged so hard against a wall that it bounced” and that he
was beaten by up to a dozen men and threatened with death.

The British High Court recently ruled that documents pertaining to the
torture of Aamer had to be released to US authorities. Foreign
Secretary David Miliband had refused a request to release them.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has now called for an
inquiry into claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit
in the torture of more than 20 terror suspects.

These developments follow the British Court of Appeal judgment in the
case of Binyam Mohamed resulting in the release of an earlier ruling
confirming that MI5 colluded with US authorities in his torture. The
court agreed, in the face of fierce government opposition, to release
a redacted seven paragraph statement concluding that Mohamed was
subjected to treatment that “could readily be contended to be at the
very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States
authorities.”

Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in April,
2002, and imprisoned and tortured in Pakistan. Turned over to the US,
he was flown to Morocco, then to Afghanistan, and finally to
Guantánamo Bay, where he was repeatedly tortured before being released
without charge in February 2009. MI5 is alleged to have provided
questions and information to Mohamed’s American torturers.

The mounting evidence of the routine use of torture and abuse is of
great political significance not only in Britain, but in the United
States and internationally. These cases reveal that the entire state
machinery in the US and Britain is guilty of heinous crimes, including
sadistic torture. Such acts are themselves the essential product of
criminal policies—the illegal colonial-style wars of aggression
pursued by the US and Britain against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Definite methods of rule must flow from such policies, which are based
on a complete break with previous democratic processes. These methods
include assassination, torture, abduction, extraordinary rendition and
the denial of due process.

In order to pursue its war aims, the Bush administration repudiated
international law enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, particularly
the Third Geneva Convention, which provides humanitarian protections
for prisoners of war. The US claimed that its provisions did not
extend to so-called “illegal enemy combatants.”

However, the British Labour government, under Prime Minister Tony
Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, never felt able to issue such a
brazen repudiation of international law. Instead, it has placed itself
in the forefront of efforts to cover up the crimes perpetrated jointly
with Washington and protect those responsible from having to answer
for them.

The political establishments in the US and Britain are mired in
criminality and filth, and their counterparts in the other major
capitalist countries are also implicated. Their crimes of aggressive
war and torture are compounded by their illegal efforts to conceal
their actions and protect the guilty.

The Obama administration is fully implicated in the cover-up. Since
assuming office, Obama has moved to bar the prosecution of Bush
officials who authorised torture. This, itself, is a violation of the
Geneva Conventions and other statutes of international law, which
impose on governments an obligation to prosecute those guilty of torture.

In the case of Binyam Mohamed, the Obama administration threatened to
end security cooperation with Britain if US communications with the UK
were made public. This provided the basis for the British Foreign
Office’s argument that secrecy was necessary in the interests of
national security.

It also emerged that the British government’s lawyer engaged in secret
communications with a judge to ensure that one of the paragraphs
criticising MI5’s role in the torture of Mohamed was heavily redacted.
In English courts of law, such secret communication is prohibited and
has been for almost 400 years.

Following the Court of Appeal ruling, Bruce Anderson, a leading
Conservative columnist in the Independent, wrote an op-ed piece
entitled “We Not Only Have a Right to Use Torture, We Have a Duty.”

Anderson defended the use of torture not only against those accused of
terrorism, but against their families. He posed what he called “a
devilish intellectual challenge,” whereby, “[w]e have captured a
terrorist, but he is a hardened character. We cannot be certain that
he will crack in time. We have also captured his wife and children.”

In such a situation, he asserted, “I have come to the conclusion that
there is only one answer…. Torture the wife and children.”

Anderson then attacked the Court of Appeal, saying it “traduced an
entire security service, showed no understanding of the courage which
its officers routinely display—no understanding, indeed, of anything
beyond courtroom niceties.”

Such comments reveal the extent to which broad layers within the
ruling class have abandoned any commitment to the rule of law. What
are the necessary consequences of the naked advocacy of torture and
other abhorrent practises other than a general overturning of
democratic norms? The resort to torture against “terror suspects” can
only be a precursor to the widespread use of state violence by an
elite that feels itself threatened by rising social and political
discontent.

This political danger must not go unanswered. To accept that such
crimes can be committed with impunity is to politically disarm the
working class in face of an ever more naked resort to repression.

The Nuremberg principles, based on the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal,
which brought to justice some of the leaders of the German Nazi regime
following the Second World War, enshrined in international law,
including the Geneva Conventions, the concept of war crimes.

In 2006, Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg
trials, said that “a prima facie case can be made that the United
States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity—that being an
illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.”

A major component of the indictment against German officials at
Nuremberg concerned the abuse of POWs. The US has also breached the
United Nations Charter and the United Nations Convention on Torture.

The demand must be made for those guilty of war crimes to be brought
to justice. These include former US President George W. Bush, former
Vice President Dick Cheney, former US Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former MI5
Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller, and the former head of MI5
counter-intelligence, Jonathan Evans, who is now MI5 director general.

This demand is an essential part of the international mobilization of
workers and young people against imperialist war and in defence of
democratic rights.

Robert Stevens

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/pers-f22.shtml

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