24 February,2009 10:42 AM IST | | Agencies
A British resident, who spent seven years in US captivity and was allegedly tortured, has become the first prisoner to be released from Guantanamo Bay by the Obama administration.
Binyam Mohamed (30) returned to Britain and resumed life as a free man after what he described as an ordeal he had never dreamed of in his "darkest nightmares", one in which he was "abducted, hauled from one country to the next and tortured in medieval ways -- all orchestrated by the US government."
This case led to a lot of criticism of the Guantanamo detention center, the allegedly brutal treatment meted out by American security forces and the secrecy with which the US and other countries have shrouded policies on controversial practices such as "extraordinary rendition."
Mohamed spent four years in Guantanamo after initially being picked up in Pakistan in 2002 and interrogated in Morocco. US authorities accused him of training in al-Qaeda camps and plotting with others to set off a "dirty bomb" in the US.
But last October, the Pentagon dropped all charges against Mohamed, despite earlier avowals that he had confessed to helping plan attacks on American cities. Mohamed maintains that those confessions were extracted from him by security agents who beat him, deprived him of sleep and used a scalpel to slash his genitals.
"He is a victim who has suffered more than any human being should ever suffer," said Clive Stafford Smith, one of Mohamed's lawyers. "He just wants to go somewhere very quiet and try to recover."
His return to Britain came after a diplomatic tussle between the US and its closest ally in the war on terrorism. The British government has pressed for Mohamed's release and joined other European countries in urging Washington to shut down its heavily criticised detention centre in Cuba.
David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, welcomed Mohamed's release as a step "toward the closure of Guantanamo Bay, which we all want."
The former inmate, who is Ethiopian by birth, but was a legal British resident at the time of his arrest, was flown to a British military base near London. After several hours of questioning by police and immigration authorities, Mohamed, wearing blue jeans and a white skullcap, emerged a free man.
Pending problems
The controversy surrounding his years in detention will continue, however.
Earlier this month, the British high court ruled that certain details about Mohamed's time and treatment in custody could be kept confidential by the government, but the justices blamed the blackout on US threats to stop cooperating with British intelligence authorities if the information were released. The information in question amounted to just 25 lines of text, but reputedly contained accounts of torture.
Britain's attorney general also has begun investigating whether British agents were complicit in Mohamed's alleged torture during questioning in Pakistan, where he was arrested on a passport violation.
In addition, Mohamed is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan Inc, a transport services company based in San Jose that provided the aircraft and flight crews for the renditions of dozens of men that the CIA allegedly snatched in foreign countries and transported to foreign interrogation sites. The suit is pending before a US court
