The government as kidnapper

Imagine, if you will, that I have had a twinge of conscience, and I come to you with an admission – I have been complicit in kidnapping.

I have worked with a gang that grabbed a man against his will, took him from his home, tortured him, and even now continues to hold him in some secret location. I tell you that I feel bad about what I did, and ask your understanding and forgiveness.

Perhaps you feel some sympathy for me, and respect the difficulty of my confession.

Naturally, you ask me who the victim of this crime is. “I’d rather not tell you,” I say.

Well, you demand, will you help us set the man free? “Oooh, no, I don’t want to do that!” I reply. To do so would embarrass the other members of my criminal conspiracy.

Presumably you are now underwhelmed by my candour, and decide that it’s time to call in the Metropolitan police.

It pains me, then, to report on the role of the British government in the case of Saad Iqbal Madni, whose legal case Reprieve begins today. Mr Madni was seized in Jakarta on January 11, 2002, and badly beaten. The Americans put him in a coffin, and flew him to Egypt, apparently stopping off in the British colony of Diego Garcia en route. When Mr Madni arrived in Cairo, he was still bleeding through his nose and mouth from his earlier abuse, yet this was soon relegated to a minor complaint. At the behest of the Americans, he spent 92 days being tortured with electric cattle prods, before being rendered to Afghanistan and ultimately to Guantánamo Bay.

The British authorities would have us believe that it did not know about his rendition when it happened in 2002. Sceptics may question why all the Diego Garcia flight records up to 2008 have mysteriously been destroyed -- this matter that will be addressed by the court in due course. Yet one critical fact remains undisputed by the Government: On February 21, 2008, David Miliband made a mea culpa admission in Parliament. He also wrote me a polite letter – apologising for the government’s repeated, and false, assertions to Reprieve that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights. Two such flights had refuelled on the British territory, he said, each carrying one man. He stressed his “disappointment” that this was the case.

I felt some sympathy with Mr Miliband, saddled as he was with the illegal acts of the Bush Administration. I was in Guantánamo Bay working on prisoners’ cases when I received the letter, and I immediately wrote back to him. While I had no proof, I suggested that one of the men might be Mr Madni, who was even then suffering at the US prison base. I asked Mr Miliband to confirm whether this was true, and to help us reunite Mr Madni with his legal rights.

“These were illegal acts, involving the crime of kidnapping, as well as violations of the Convention Against Torture,” I wrote to him. “It is certainly not going to rebuild public confidence if we say that two people were illegally rendered through British territory but then refuse to reveal their fate...”

Here we are 17 months later, and the Government still refuses to admit whether Mr Madni was one of the victims of this crime. Through the tireless work of volunteer lawyers, Mr Madni is now home in Pakistan, freed when the US essentially recognized that it had relied on false information in kidnapping him in the first place. As he struggles to rehabilitate his fractured body and mind, he owes no gratitude to the British government, which sat firmly on its hands rather than take a basic step to redress an obvious wrong.

For better or worse, the Government is the great teacher – either for good or evil. In this case, the Government seems to be delivering its lessons from a rather dubious handbook.

This article also appeared in the Guardian