The British resident at the center of a legal battle over alleged torture could leave Guantanamo Bay insane or in a coffin if the case continues to be dragged out, his lawyer said on Monday.
Yvonne Bradley, Binyam Mohamed’s lawyer, said: “It’s amazing he has lasted this long.”
Bradley flew to London yesterday to impress on members of parliament and the UK government the urgency of the case of one of the last British residents detained in what she called the “hell hole” of Guantanamo Bay.
“I do not want to act after the fact, including death. If this keeps getting dragged out, he will leave Guantanamo Bay insane or in a coffin,” Bradley said.
She last saw Mohamed last month just after the authorities started to force-feed him. She knew he had been on hunger strike but she had not been prepared for what she saw.
“His arms were so thin I described them as twigs,” she said.
His weight had dropped to about 55kg.
“He is very poor, mentally, physically and emotionally,” she said.
His cell was smeared with his own feces for three weeks at the end of 2007. She said she had begged the authorities to stop treating Mohamed’s behavior as a disciplinary matter and tried to persuade them there were what she called “mental health aspects” involved.
Mohamed was the subject last week of an unprecedented high court ruling accusing British Foreign Secretary David Miliband of hiding behind claims of a threat to national security to suppress evidence of torture.
Bradley, an experienced US defense department attorney, has seen evidence given to her by the US and passed it to the Foreign Office. The US warned that if the evidence was released, it would stop sharing intelligence with Britain, thus causing damage to the UK’s national security.
Bradley said she had no doubts Mohamed had been tortured. The case “has nothing to do with national security whatsoever,” she said, adding that it was probably to do with embarrassment.
Meanwhile, the lawyers for a young Canadian Guantanamo Bay detainee were set to release a plan today detailing how he should be brought home, a move designed to put pressure on Canada and US President Barack Obama a week before Obama visits Canada.
Omar Khadr, a Toronto native, faces charges that include supporting terrorism and murder for allegedly killing US Army Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer of Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a grenade during a 2002 battle in Afghanistan when he was 15.
His lawyers, Dennis Edney and Nathan Whitling, want him repatriated to Canada, especially now that Obama has ordered Guantanamo shut down within a year.
“President Barack Obama’s visit to Ottawa [on] Feb. 19 offers a clear chance for Canada to secure the repatriation of Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr, the Canadian child soldier captured and rigorously imprisoned since age 15,” Edney said in a statement.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has not asked for Khadr’s return, but has come under pressure to bring him back to Canada. Khadr is the only westerner left at Guantanamo and one of the youngest people ever charged with war crimes.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS