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Monday, February 09, 2009

Rolling Stone Satire Led to Gitmo Torture

clipped from rawstory.com

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopan janitor who was seeking asylum in Britain, allegedly admitted to browsing a story that instructs readers how to building a nuclear bomb. Trouble is, that story was apparently a joke.

Mohamed says that he made the admission -- and others relating to purported terrorism -- after being beaten, hung by his wrists for a week, having a gun held to his head, and held in a dungeon-like cell at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.



A British newspaper reported Sunday that the "offending article," "How to Build An H-Bomb," was actually published in Rolling Stone and re-posted on other websites.

Mohamed was subject not simply to apparent torture but also to the Bush Administration's extraordinary rendition program, in which terrorist suspects are kidnapped and put on private jets, then dropped in third-party countries that condone torture.
Among the things that it's illegal to do these days, add "reading Rolling Stone while Muslim." Better put down Mad Magazine too, just to be on the safe side. The piece tells us:

"Unclassified evidence corroborates Binyam’s claims that he was threatened – at the time the White House was obsessed by the idea terrorists had access to nuclear materials," said Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. "Binyam said that he told them about a website he had once seen on the internet called How To Build An H-Bomb. He said that this was a joke but they thought it might be serious.

"I am speculating but I think this news was sent up the line to the White House, which is when the paranoia kicked in," Stafford Smith added. "This is how they made their huge mistake, thinking he was a major terrorist as opposed to a London janitor."
Feel safer now? Never let it be said that the Bush administration wasn't paranoid enough. They were always willing to err on the side of stupidity and cruelty.

1 comments:

vet said...

The Binyamin Mohamed case is a shocking one to anyone who thinks that there is such a thing as a "right" side of the War on Terror.

I'm deeply ashamed to hear of the involvement of British intelligence services in his torture. But no-one escapes blame entirely.

Only last week, British high court judges announced that they wanted to release details of the "interrogation" techniques he'd suffered, but the Home Secretary had asked them not to because it would jeopardise future intelligence sharing with the CIA. And - and this is the kicker - the Obama administration was reported to be maintaining its predecessor's obstruction on this point.

I don't know if that's true: it might well be a lie cooked up by MI6 to cloak their own involvement. But the only way Obama can put rumours like that to rest would be to order the publication himself. Ball's in his court: is he serious about this torture thing, or not?

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