Britain sued for 'complicity' in torture

ONE of the world's leading human rights lawyers is to sue Britain for its ''complicity'' in the torture of terror suspects who have never been convicted of a crime.

The news comes as a former leading British diplomat has accused the government of basing its anti-terror policies on information from torture victims that was "bollocks".

And the former American spy chief who devised a controversial scheme for snatching terror suspects and imprisoning them has criticised its use as a means of delivering them to US-friendly countries for torture.

The developments all focus on "extraordinary rendition flights", which take terror suspects abducted by the US from all over the world to countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Uzbekistan, where they are tortured.

In one case, Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi - a British resident from Ethiopia - was captured in Pakistan.

He claims he was visited in prison by two MI6 officers after he was tortured by Pakistani interrogators, who told him that he was going to be sent to an undisclosed Arab nation for more torture.

Later, Habashi was flown to Morocco on one of the CIA's fleet of Gulfstream jets used in renditions.

There, he says, he was subjected to appalling abuse, the worst of which involved his interrogators cutting his private parts with a scalpel.

While in Morocco, he claims his torturers made it clear that they were working with British intelligence as part of his interrogation.

The British supplied information to the Moroccan interrogators which was used to question Habashi.

Habashi's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, OBE, who is acclaimed in both the USA and UK for his human rights work, is now to sue Britain for breaching the Convention on Torture. Stafford Smith said: "The UK was complicit in this process.

What happened to Benyam was morally wrong and stupid. People will say anything when you take a razor blade to their genitals."

Habashi is now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. During his interrogation he was forced to admit to plotting to "dirty bomb" the USA, and to being al-Qaeda's "ideas man". Before his arrest, he was a teenager in London with a drug problem who couldn't even speak Arabic. Stafford Smith added:

"The US government used false information, that stemmed from the point of a razor blade, to scare the whole world."

Habashi's sister Zuhra, who lives in Washington DC, said: "I didn't expect this of the UK government.

Britain isn't a third-world nation. It is shocking. It shows that there is no respect for human rights anywhere in the world. Britain assisted with my brother's torture. They knew what was happening."

The UK allows British airports to be used for refuelling by the CIA's fleet of planes, which ferry captives around the globe. Glasgow and Prestwick airports are the two most favoured CIA stop- overs.

Human rights organisations say extraordinary renditions breach just about every piece of international legislation designed to protect human rights.

In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Herald, Craig Murray, the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan until late 2004, said that completely unreliable information extracted under torture was being fed back to British and American intelligence agencies, who in turn passed it on to politicians who used it to make claims about terror threats and the prosecution of the war on terror.

"I'd look at these reports and, to be frank, I realised they were bollocks, " Murray told the Sunday Herald. "What terrifies me is that our government is saying that we need to lock up various people in Britain on the basis of intelligence material that can't be used in court.

"But we know that the intelligence material is dodgy. ."

The Sunday Herald has also interviewed the CIA officer who invented the extraordinary renditions programme. Michael Scheuer, who was the special advisor to the head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit until late 2004, said the programme was never meant to operate as it does today.

He devised it to ensure that only individuals who had outstanding arrest warrants or had been tried in absentia were to be targeted. Once targeted, the country in which the person was residing had to agree to the snatch, and, crucially, once the person was captured, they were to be taken back to the USA, treated as a prisoner of war and given the full protection of the Geneva Conventions and access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Today, however, anyone can be targeted merely because of suspicion.

Copyright 2005 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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