Mwa ha ha welcome to another room of the Bush-Cheney House of Horrors, friends, step right in. This is your country's recent past, things done in your name and creating brand-spanking new terrorists every day as we speak. America tortures. Then they cover it up, and Americans don't even care. Aren't these nice people?
Ethiopian-born Mr Mohamed came to the UK as a 16-year-old asylum seeker and lived in the U.S for seven years. Shortly after September 11, 2001, he was picked up by the American secret service in Pakistan.
While in detention, Mr Mohamed says he was hung up by straps, beaten and had his genitals mutilated with a scalpel to make him confess to a 'dirty bomb' plot, very similar to that previously alleged of Jose Padilla. He was released in 2009 and sent back to the UK. Some dangerous terrorist, huh?...
He was held for six and a half years in U.S. custody.
Now, in a lawsuit against the British government, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has threatened to end intelligence sharing if the High Court publishes its findings on what happened. Clinton sticking her face in it means there may be more details more explosive, according to court documents and credible UK investigators. The link to Jose Padilla and the suspiciously similar sounding "dirty bomb plot" calls into question one of the Bush administration's most celebrated examples of "keeping us safe": the Padilla Railroad Show. Mohammed's interrogators said they were going to "change his brain," a la the now-a-vegetable Padilla.
On 21 October 2008 Susan J. Crawford, the official in charge of the Office of Military Commissions, announced that charges were dropped against Mohamed and four other captives, Jabran al Qahtani, Ghassan al Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi, and Noor Uthman Muhammed. Carol J. Williams, writing in the Los Angeles Times reported that all five men had been connected by Abu Zubaydah — one of the three captives the CIA has acknowledged was interrogated using the controversial technique, known as waterboarding.
I get it. Torture one guy, make him link someone else to a plot, then make the second guy link yet another guy, under - guess what? - torture. Guess that's one way to "connect the dots."
The UK Guardian did run an interview with Mohammed in 2005, perhaps giving a notion of what it is the Obama administration doesn't want to come out. He was flown on a US government plane to a prison in Morocco, and while temporarily "extraordinary renditioned" to Morocco, says:
They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they'd electrocute me. Maybe castrate me.
They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.
One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.
They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.
Doctor No 1 carried a briefcase. "You're all right, aren't you? But I'm going to say a prayer for you." Doctor No 2 gave me an Alka-Seltzer for the pain. I told him about my penis. "I need to see it. How did this happen?" I told him. He looked like it was just another patient. "Put this cream on it two times a day. Morning and night." He gave me some kind of antibiotic.
I was in Morocco for 18 months. Once they began this, they would do it to me about once a month. One time I asked a guard: "What's the point of this? I've got nothing I can say to them. I've told them everything I possibly could."
"As far as I know, it's just to degrade you. So when you leave here, you'll have these scars and you'll never forget. So you'll always fear doing anything but what the US wants."
Later, when a US airplane picked me up the following January, a female MP took pictures. She was one of the few Americans who ever showed me any sympathy. When she saw the injuries I had she gasped. They treated me and took more photos when I was in Kabul. Someone told me this was "to show Washington it's healing".
But in Morocco, there were even worse things. Too horrible to remember, let alone talk about. About once a week or even once every two weeks I would be taken for interrogation, where they would tell me what to say. They said if you say this story as we read it, you will just go to court as a witness and all this torture will stop. I eventually repeated what was read out to me.
When I got to Morocco they said some big people in al-Qaida were talking about me. They talked about Jose Padilla and they said I was going to testify against him and big people. They named Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Zubaidah and Ibn Sheikh al-Libi [all senior al-Qaida leaders who are now in US custody]. It was hard to pin down the exact story because what they wanted changed from Morocco to when later I was in the Dark Prison [a detention centre in Kabul with windowless cells and American staff], to Bagram and again in Guantánamo Bay.
They told me that I must plead guilty. I'd have to say I was an al-Qaida operations man, an ideas man. I kept insisting that I had only been in Afghanistan a short while. "We don't care," was all they'd say.
PLEASE CALL Attorney General Eric Holder, "Appoint a Special Prosecutor"
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Office of the Attorney General - 202-353-1555
FAX: (202) 307-4613
E-MAIL AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
David Ipolitto's Torture Song