Torture and Cover-Up Reported in the British Press

This story is breaking in England, not much in the American press about it yet. From The Daily Mail:

A British 'resident' held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a 'joke' website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night.

Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the 'instructions' after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail.

It was this confession that apparently convinced the CIA that they were holding a top Al Qaeda terrorist.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the offending article – called How To Build An H-Bomb – was first published in a US satirical magazine and later placed on a series of websites.

Written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the publication's food editor, Rolling Stone journalist Peter Biskind and scientist Michio Kaku, it claims that a nuclear weapon can be made 'using a bicycle pump' and with liquid uranium 'poured into a bucket and swung round'.

Despite its clear satirical bent, the story led the CIA to accuse 30-year-old Mohamed, a caretaker, of plotting a dirty bomb attack, before subjecting him to its 'extraordinary rendition programme'.

During his eight-year imprisonment, Mohamed has allegedly been flown to secret torture centres in Pakistan, Morocco, an American-run jail known as the Dark Prison near Kabul in Afghanistan and, finally, to Guantanamo Bay. Food writer's online guide to building an H-bomb...the 'evidence' that put this man in Guantanamo

You can find this article anywhere on the Internet. It says things like this:

Many families are attracted to the H-bomb simply as a "deterrent." A discrete sticker on the door or on the living room window saying "This Home Protected by H-bomb" will discourage IRS investigators, census takers, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

There's actually a lot more to this story. The British government has suppressed information about the case, and the Daily Telegraph found out why:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said. UK government suppressed evidence on Binyam Mohamed torture because MI6 helped his interrogators

Let's run through that again. His genitals were sliced with a scalpel?

The American people will not want to hear these stories, but we need to be aware if only to avoid repeating these mistakes. Our nation behaved atrociously and it is now time to account for it.

Oh, and don't think this is something the Brits are doing, the CIA is doing all they can to cover it up. The Kansas City Star:

Facing a furor in Parliament, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband all but confirmed on Thursday that the U.S. had threatened to break off intelligence sharing if details were revealed about the alleged torture of a British resident held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. U.S. withholds Guantanamo documents, angering British

It will be necessary for the new leadership to repair and not try to justify the horrible misdeeds of the preceding administration. The new guy has only been in office a couple of weeks, I'm sure the status quo is still running things in the bureaucracies -- he needs to step in and get responsible people in place to repair the kind of damage this sort of reprehensible barbarity causes. Apologies might be appropriate.