The Special Relationship: Godfather to Godfather

It's like the “Mafia Protocol”, the omertà or Code of Silence: if the Americans admit to torture, but object to anyone mentioning it, the British are apparently required to keep quiet...

There has been much ado of late about the horrific abuse of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident held in Guantánamo Bay.  First, he was tortured in Pakistan at the behest of the American authorities – sleep deprived, brutally beaten, hung from the ceiling in the strappado position (with an appropriate nod to the Spanish Inquisition), and threatened with rendition to an unpleasant Arab country where his treatment would be even worse.  Fulfilling this promise, the CIA then duly rendered him to Morocco, where his tormentors took a razor blade to his penis over 18 months.  In due course, the CIA picked up the husk that remained, and carried him to the “Dark Prison” in Kabul for another five months of the third degree.  After a spell in Bagram Air Force Base, he was shuttled over to Cuba, where he has spent the past four years in a concrete cell, divorced from the rule of law.

It has been my privilege, as a lawyer with the UK charity Reprieve, to represent Binyam. We hope to have him home within the next 48 hours, but that will merely be the next chapter in his story. Torture cannot simply be swept under the rug, as an embarrassing secret that governments would rather forget. 

In 2005, I spent three draining days across a table from Binyam in his Guantánamo gaol, noting down his torture diary.  “You’ll have to fill in the emotion,” he told me. “I’m kinda dead in the head.”

Every essential of Binyam’s story has gradually been corroborated.  We have slowly dragged the torture documentation from unwilling governments on either side of the Atlantic.  Yet virtually none of these documents have been made public.  The skeletal chronology that I am permitted to sketch out here comes from the fragments made public so far.

Binyam was arrested on a passport violation on April 10, 2002.  On May 17, 2002, a British agent came to see him in Pakistan, allowed in by the American abusers.  Agent B, as he has been dubbed, encouraged Binyam to cooperate with his captors, and assured him that the British would look into his case. 

What Binyam did not know -- when Agent B offered him an amicable cup of tea -- was that the Americans had already shared a number of documents with the British.  These included admissions by American agents that they were torturing Binyam.  Yet Agent B did not even ask him how he was being treated.

Binyam was then rendered to Morocco.  There must have been many depths in his two thousand days of despair, but he told me that the darkest point came one morning in Morocco. For the four months after Agent B’s visit, he waited for the British to appear, perhaps as cavalry riding camels across the North African desert to his rescue.  It was a mirage.  Marwan, his Moroccan torturer, came into the interrogation room with questions and photographs that had clearly been provided by the British. 

At that moment, Binyam knew his abandonment was complete. The British were supplying information that was being used to torture him.  Indeed, nobody in the British government would whisper a word about his torture for six years, not until they were forced to when we sued them in a British court.

If we are to understand how this came about, we must know the facts. We cannot learn from history if we do not know what that history is. Yet the facts have been slow to seep out.

The current wheeze being wheeled out by the Government is that we cannot allow you, the British public, access to the American torture documents because there is an intelligence-sharing protocol that forbids the recipient to share information over the originator’s objection. While this may be true as a general matter, it simply cannot apply to cover up evidence of the crime of torture. Its like the “Mafia Protocol”, the omertà or Code of Silence: if the Americans admit to torture, but object to anyone mentioning it, the British are apparently required to keep quiet.

This cover up merely provokes more questions. One, does the Government rely on the Mafia Protocol to justify silence when they first learned of Binyam’s torture? If they had complained in May 2002, they could have saved him from two years of the most savage abuse.

Two, we now know that Binyam was telling the truth when he said the Moroccans tortured him using British intelligence.  Documents quoted in court reveal that in October and November 2002, months after they learned of Binyam’s torture, the British shared intelligence with the US -- background information, questions to be asked of him, and photographs to be shown to him.  The Americans passed this material on to the Moroccan secret service.  So does the Protocol only work one way?  Or did the British authorize the intelligence-share with the Moroccan torturers?

Three, since when can the US and the UK come to an informal arrangement to ignore the criminal law? Section 52 of the International Criminal Court Act of 2001 provides that a prosecution can be brought against a person who “assists in concealing” a war crime such as torture. Thus, suppressing the evidence is an independent crime.

The idea that there really is, or should be, a Mafia Protocol is simple nonsense.  Not only may the British government publicize evidence of torture received from a foreign source – it is legally obliged to do so.  A democratic nation such as the United States should expect nothing else.

David Miliband says that the British government has worked hard to secure Binyam’s release from Guantánamo Bay.  This is absolutely true, and he should be congratulated for his genuine commitment.  But the Government risks throwing away all the goodwill gained through those efforts when it continues to suppress evidence of torture.