On the day after the 4th of July, when Americans celebrated our freedom from tyranny, Richard Taylor Norton of the Guardian wrote Binyam Mohamed launches legal fight to stop US destroying torture images: British resident says photographs are evidence of abuse at Guantánamo.
The photograph will be destroyed within 30 days of his case being dismissed by the American courts.
The Guardian is also writing to the court asking for the photographs to be disclosed in the interests of open justice and freedom of expression.
On July 6, 2009, Ben Leach of the Telegraph wrote: Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo detainee, fights legal battle to stop US destroying abuse evidence
The evidence is said to consist of a photograph of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, taken after he was severely beaten by guards at the US navy base in Cuba.
He claims the image, now held by the Pentagon, had been put on his cell door because he had been beaten so badly that it was difficult for the guards to identify him.
Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick wrote CIA threw out 92 videotapes of terror suspects in the Washington Post on March 3, 2009.
"The sheer number of tapes at issue demonstrates that this destruction was not an accident," said Amrit Singh, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Singh said the ACLU had secured a court order in September 2004, more than a year before the tapes were eradicated, directing the agency to preserve materials related to the interrogation of prisoners overseas. "It's about time the CIA was held accountable for its flagrant violation of the law," she said.
CIA spokesman, George Little, replied,
"If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts."
Andrew O. Selsky of the Associated Press wrote on June 12, 2009 : Questions surround death of detainee, Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi, who
volunteered to represent prisoners in talks with the military and left his jailhouse for a meeting with the detention camp's most senior commanders. But he never returned - from then on, he was held in the prison's psychiatric ward
and who
died in the ward this month in what the military has called an apparent suicide - the fifth since the prison opened and the first on President Obama's watch.
The military has refused to say how Saleh allegedly killed himself in the closely watched psychiatric ward. But the former detainee, Binyam Mohamed, said it wasn't like him to commit suicide.
"He was patient and encouraged others to be the same," Mohamed said. "He never viewed suicide as a means to end his despair."
So, now Binyam Mohamed is attempting to use what is left of our legal system to prevent the destruction of a photo of himself that would prove he was badly beaten at the offshore Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The outcome of that appeal will be a litmus test of whether we are still a free society or have lost our Constitution and open society to become a country that tortures with impunity.
As I watched the magnificent 4th of July fireworks over the Charles River in Boston, I kept thinking how we were no longer a nation of laws, but a land where some people were above the law, which made them feel they could push the limits of their power to unimaginable indecent proportions. I thought how our country tortured to force false confessions to justify lies concocted to wage a war that made some very rich through lucrative no bid contracts and access to the world's 2nd largest oil fields, but killed and maimed thousands of innocent people.
If anyone before the war dared to utter the truth: that this was a war about oil, they were discounted as conspiracy theorists and disloyal, unpatriotic Saddam lovers.
The 92 video tapes were powerful, so powerful the CIA felt they had to destroy them in order for their content not to affect the opinion of We the People, whose opinions are closely controlled by the controlled media that passes for a no longer free press.
It's basic human psychology that visual evidence is much more compelling than reading or hearing about an event. Daily Kos's occams hatchet wrote Cheney, Nuremberg and aggressive war: the day the smirking stopped about how the Nuremberg trials were going nowhere until they showed footage of emaciated Holocaust prisoners to the courtroom, at which point, even the perpetrators appeared to be distraught, actually seeing the victims of their cold and heartless plans.
One would hope that after that debacle, the world, especially our own country, who valiantly helped free the Concentration Camp survivors and vanquished their captors, would take the Geneva accords seriously.
Now a single photograph may determine whether we still have the
open justice and freedom of expression
we celebrate on Independence Day.