International Complicity in US Abuses, Part III

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20090410.html

A growing scandal has erupted in Britain over the government's role in human rights abuses, centering on claims of British involvement in the torture of terrorist suspects detained abroad. The uproar was sparked by allegations by former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed that British agents were complicit in his abuse, but it has since broadened significantly in its scope.

Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who had lived for several years in the UK, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He claims that he was questioned by a British intelligence agent while detained and mistreated in Karachi, and that later, after he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco, a British agent provided questions that he was asked by interrogators who tortured him. He was later moved to Afghanistan and then spent years in military detention at Guantanamo.

The British Attorney General announced last month that she would ask the police to probe allegations of "possible criminal wrongdoing" in relation to Mohamed, who was released from Guantanamo in February.

Britain is hardly alone in having collaborated with the US in "war on terror" abuses. In my last two columns, I explored some examples of such collaboration, showing how other countries facilitated abusive US practices. Today's column sets out a few more examples, underscoring the need for countries besides the UK to carry out a searching probe of their records.

Pakistan

In the post-9/11 period, Pakistan was in a category all its own in collaborating in abusive U.S. counterterrorism policies. Without any legal process, it handed over hundreds of suspects to U.S. security forces, allowed the CIA and other intelligence agencies to operate with impunity on its territory, and ran secret proxy detention facilities to hold suspects of interest to the United States, giving U.S. agents full access to interrogate those suspects.