Madni’s Coffin Flight Rendition

/in /by

As Andy Worthington indicated in a comment last month, the rights group Reprieve has been working up a report on Guantanamo detainee Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni and his rendition. Reprieve announced today the formal start of proceedings in the case. From Clive Stafford Smith today in the Guardian:

It pains me, then, to report on the role of the British government in the case of Saad Iqbal Madni, whose legal case Reprieve begins today. Madni was seized in Jakarta on 11 January 2002, and badly beaten. The Americans put him in a coffin, and flew him to Egypt, apparently stopping off in the British colony of Diego Garcia en route. When Madni arrived in Cairo, he was still bleeding through his nose and mouth from his earlier abuse, yet this was soon relegated to a minor complaint. At the behest of the Americans, he spent 92 days being tortured with electric cattle prods, before being rendered to Afghanistan and ultimately to Guantánamo Bay.

From a separate article in the Guardian today:

The government is refusing to provide details of the torture and wrongful detention of a man rendered through British territory, it was claimed today, depriving him of a remedy for "serious civil and criminal wrongdoing".

Mohammed Madni, who was arrested in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2002, is thought to be one of the two men the foreign secretary, David Miliband, admitted last year were rendered through the British Indian Ocean island Diego Garcia.

Milliband was forced to admit that the rendition, by the US, had used British territory, but has resisted calls that the identity of the men should be revealed and an apology issued.

Read the articles for the full bone chilling details of this, yet another heinously wrongful detention, rendition and torture of an apparently innocent man by the United States government. The long and short is the US snagged Madni, beat him up, put him in a coffin on a flight to be tortured by our Egyptian partners for at least 92 some odd days and then shuttled to Gitmo to be warehoused in misery for six years. All before releasing him with the attitude of "no harm, no foul".

But President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder want to investigate a few grunts that may have exceeded the torture regime guidelines without looking critically at the Executive Branch officials that created and propagated the outrageous and inhuman torture program.

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  1. maryo2 says:

    January 11, 2002, capture of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni needs to be added to the Torture Timeline.

  2. BoxTurtle says:

    “We have made our disappointment about these flights clear with the US and secured firm new assurances that on no other occasion since 11 September 2001 has a US intelligence flight with a detainee on board passed through UK territory,”

    Huh. Any DOD flights? How about private contractors? Boats?

    Boxturtle (Submarine?)

    • Hmmm says:

      Not even fun parsing these things any more, is it? You’d think there’d be a spokesperson training class by now about that. Also no disavowal of renditions before the attacks. Also ‘passed through UK territory’ — how ’bout UK airspace? UK leased bases in other countries? Aircraft carriers? Etc. etc. etc.

        • jimhicks3 says:

          & when that runs out (& it will) then what.
          Oh well with my attention span shot to hell…………..

      • BoxTurtle says:

        Remember when we had to depend on bmaz and EW to parse these things for us? They must be so proud of how far we’ve come!

        Boxturtle (I had a head start, I became cynical in 4th grade)

        • Loo Hoo. says:

          Boxturtle (I had a head start, I became cynical in 4th grade)

          I was kicked out of the girl scouts in 6th grade. It’s been downhill since then.

  3. MadDog says:

    And as has become totally clear, the Bush/Cheney Administration wasn’t interested in notification, neither to our own Congress nor apparently to our pet poodle Britain:

    …Today, the Foreign Office refused to confirm whether Madni was one of the individuals rendered through the Diego Garcia base. “As the foreign secretary made clear in his statements to the house last year, these flights passed through Diego Garcia in 2002 without the UK’s knowledge or permission,” a spokesperson said. “We were only informed about the flights in February 2008.

    “That rendition flights had passed through UK territory was contrary to previous explicit assurances we had received from the US…”

    We are not surprised.

  4. plunger says:

    OT – but also from the Guardian, and highly relevant to the future of speech on the Internet, in forums such as this:

    BE VERY AFRAID!!!

    The risk of cyber-terrorism escalating to a nuclear strike is growing daily

    The absurdity of it all is a bit much to bare. The masters of the universe can’t wait to restrict access to speech – under the premise that your computer can be used to launch a theaterwide thermonuclear strike. Now you know why the US Air Force lists cybersecurity as one of its missions – though it’s all total big brother bullshit.

  5. MadDog says:

    Btw bmaz, I hope you’ve got some shade somewhere out there in Phoenix.

    Been seeing your daily temperature hovering in the 110-115 range for the last few days.

    And I k-n-o-w you’re drinking lots of liquids. *g*

      • fatster says:

        Thnx for answering my complicity question. Please include lots of H2O as you are imbibing. 113 degs–Yikes!

      • MadDog says:

        Yeow!

        It’s been mostly cool here in the Twin Cities. July is normally mid-80s to mid-90s here, but instead we’ve been mostly mid-70s to low-80s.

        The high today is right now at 74. Mighty pleasant and I’m not complaining. *g*

  6. fatster says:

    bmaz, does “complicity” apply when there is failure to investigation these horrors? Excellent post, of course. Many thnx.

    • bmaz says:

      I believe it can under international norms, but US officials will never be held to answer under those provisions.

      • maryo2 says:

        I just noticed that in the article. Why Afghanistan in early 2002? Is that where contractors had already setup shop? Did anyone else get sent to Afghanistan in late 2001-2002 when the torturers were conducting human experiments? Isn’t this when the torturers were showing captives pictures of people and asking if they knew them? So, they flew him to Afghanistan to see if he recognized others?

    • Mary says:

      That was the number of days he spent being actively tortured. According to this History Commons recitation, he stayed in Egypt until March, 2004

      http://www.historycommons.org/…..qbal_madni

      In Jan 2004, al-libi recants and in March 2004, CIA gets around to telling Congress
      http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12…..intel.html Al-libi also went to Egypt in Jan 2002.

      During his time in Egyptian custody, Mr. Libi was among a group of what American officials have described as about 150 prisoners sent by the United States from one foreign country to another since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks for the purposes of interrogation.

      That would be the planted with media number, in addition to black sites.

      Not to worry, though, Dr. LauraCondi says that we shipped people around like that bc we were just trying to, ya know, draw on cultural expertise:

      American officials including Ms. Rice have defended the practice, saying it draws on language and cultural expertise of American allies, particularly in the Middle East, and provides an important tool for interrogation.

      I guess it was a mere lack of cultural expertise that led us to ship Madni in a coffin. Who knew Muslims weren’t vampires?

        • Mary says:

          That’s true. Imagine if, instead of being nailed in a coffin and sent to Egypt, the poor guy had to be interrogated with a gay translator. Good thing Condi was at least culturally sensitive enough to know that would have been torturous.

  8. bmaz says:

    Oh, lookee, another fine disposition of a Bush DOJ terror prosecution. They jammed a poor immigrant into a deferred prosecution agreement (the most lenient pile of nothing I have ever seen in my life in a Federal prosecution; complete BS) so as to prevent him from having even a better civil suit.

    • MadDog says:

      It’s as if the only thing that was holding back complete totalitarianism by the Bush/Cheney administration was incompetence.

      I guess I should be thankful for small favors.

    • Mary says:

      Good lord! Surely the DOJ didn’t withhold evidence! They never do that.

      At least, not when they get a chance to destroy it first, right?

  9. tjbs says:

    Torture

    Murder

    Treason

    What time is it? Nuremburg 2.0 time. Pat Tillman would expect nothing less.

  10. Mary says:

    Just bc I know a lot of people don’t have time or the connection speed to click throught he links, I want to add this part from Stafford-Smith’s piece you linked

    Madni is now home in Pakistan, freed when the US essentially recognised that it had relied on false information in kidnapping him in the first place.

    He also mentions, like our CIA torture tapes, the mysterious disappearnce of Diego Garcia’s flight logs from before 2008.

    @2 – then there’s the fact that they had “firm assurances” originally when they said there were none. They have the “firm assurances” of guys who destroyed tapes and issued a threat letter to their govt if they revealed evidence of other crimes. And I seem to remember firm assurances given to Spain that ended up being proven to be lies as well -so the back up in Spain, after our “firm assurances” that there had been NO flights had to give way to proof of flights, was that we said the torture flights that touched down in Spain were all empty at the time – either on the way to picking up the tobetortured, or on the way back from dropping off the currentlyintorture.

    • bmaz says:

      Yes, I should have emphasized the innocence bit more I think. And the innocence must be complete and unequivocal for them to have let go. It is just disgusting.

      • Mary says:

        It’s disgustng no matter what and I think it probably should stand alone. But I think it makes a difference to how some people process the information to know that there ended up not being anything there. I think all they had was that at some point, he crossed paths with Richard Reid.

        I’d really love to know what happened vis a vis the cables/emails/texts or whatever between Egypt and Washington when al-libi was being interrogated and put in the “live burial” that generated the al-Qaeda in Iraq “confession.” And if that preceded the decision to ship Madni in a coffin.

  11. Mary says:

    BTW – one question I have on all these rendition flights – when we have a statute that says it is torture if you put someone in fear of their life I have to wonder – how do you load someone on a plane to a torture destination (like we did Arar, and many others) even without the horrific element of the coffin, without having put them in fear of their life if they resisted you?

    How do you have rendition to torture enhanced interrogation without the statutorily defined torture of putting someone in fear of their life? Who goes along with these guys but-for being afraid they will be killed?

  13. alabama says:

    But President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder want to investigate a few grunts that may have exceeded the torture regime guidelines without looking critically at the Executive Branch officials that created and propagated the outrageous and inhuman torture program.

    Tell me: how do we know this?

    • bmaz says:

      Because they have repeatedly said so recently. Well, actually, Obama has made clear he doesn’t want to investigate anybody or otherwise delve into the past on torture and Holder has said he would consider investigating the grunts only. Did you miss all those posts?

      • alabama says:

        Of course not. But then I haven’t heard a word about anyone saying that they don’t want “to look critically” at something, and I don’t suppose that a public investigation is the only form that investigation can take. I also don’t suppose that “investigating” one thing is the same as “looking critically” at another thing (though I do admit to a taste for ambiguities…).

        • bmaz says:

          Ah, okay. Well, I have not seen any inclination to make any critical investigation, whether criminal, commission or Congressional based. In fact, Obama seems to be perfectly consistent on this. As to Holder, his only deviation from that mantra is the one I mentioned so far as I am aware.

  15. fatster says:

    O/T, but “systemic” comes to mind. Records for thousands of kids sent to prison by two PA judges are supposed to be destroyed. The judges were bribed by private prison companies to the tune of $2.6m and are seeking dismissal of lawsuits against them because of “the doctrine of judicial immunity”.

    Link.

    • MarkH says:

      I read about that when it first came out. I can’t see how hiding their records can be allowed if it isn’t their judicial behavior that’s in question. If the records are used to show their non-judicial behavior of accepting bribes, then what’s the problem?

  17. MadDog says:

    On a related case, this from the NYT:

    Obama Faces Court Test Over Detainee

    The fate of one of the youngest detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison is emerging as a major test of whether the courts or the president has the final authority over when prisoners there are released.

    After a federal judge said earlier this month that the government’s case for holding the detainee, Mohammed Jawad, was “riddled with holes,” the Obama administration conceded defeat and agreed that Mr. Jawad would no longer be considered a military detainee. But the administration said it would still hold him at the prison in Cuba for possible prosecution in the United States…

    …American officials say Mr. Jawad, who was a teenager when he was captured, threw a hand grenade that seriously wounded two American servicemen and their Afghan translator in an attack in Kabul in 2002…

    Here’s what I can’t even begin to fathom:

    Just why on earth was this teenager ever held as unlawful combatant? And just why the fook is he still being held?

    In war, both sides attempt to kill the other. Throwing a hand grenade at your enemy is standard practice in wars.

    Why is this somehow different? Frankly, I don’t believe it is.

    Even if Mohammed Jawad did what the US says he did – “threw a hand grenade that seriously wounded two American servicemen…”, why under the laws of war was he not viewed simply as a “Prisoner of War”?

    A “Prisoner of War” entitled to all of the things that the Geneva Convention says are due a “Prisoner of War”.

    If Mohammed Jawad did what the US says he did – “threw a hand grenade that seriously wounded two American servicemen…”, I don’t condone it, but we don’t unlawfully imprison our adversaries for an act common in wars.

    When Germans or Japanese threw hand grenades at Americans during World War II, and if we captured them, we didn’t disappear them into gulags.

    We treated them as “Prisoners of War” entitled to all of the things that the Geneva Convention says are due a “Prisoners of War”.

    As I said at the beginning, I can’t even fathom how almost unbelievably screwed up our government, our military, and our sense of justice has become to do what we’ve done to the teenager Mohammed Jawad.

    And for those incompetent attorneys at the DOJ who are now suggesting Mohammed Jawad be tried in US Courts for an act of war all to common in wars, I’m just flabbergasted.

    Surely we must be dreaming about being in the Twilight Zone, and just as surely we will wake up…won’t we?

    • bmaz says:

      From HRF

      The government also relied on a signed “confession” made while Jawad was in Afghan custody. Jawad has alleged that Afghan police tortured and beat him and threatened to kill him if he did not confess.
      …
      At a pretrial hearing on June 19, 2008, Maj. Frakt argued a motion to dismiss the case on the ground that Jawad was subjected to a regime of sleep deprivation in Guantanamo known as the “frequent flyer program.” Maj. Frakt’s motion was based in large part on Jawad’s detention records, which were turned over by the government on discovery. The records show that prison guards moved Jawad from cell to cell 112 times over a two week period, shackling, moving and unshackling him on average every two hours and fifty minutes. Just several months earlier, Jawad had attempted suicide. Jawad testified at the hearing as did a sleep deprivation expert.

      At the next pretrial hearing beginning on August 13, 2008, Maj. Frakt moved to dismiss the case on the ground that that Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the military commission’s chief legal advisor, had pressured prosecutors to charge his client. Judge Stephen Henley found evidence of bias and barred Gen. Thomas Hartmann from any further involvement in the case, determining that Hartmann could not serve as a “neutral” advisor. Judge Henley also ordered a new top-level review of the charges facing Jawad.

      This is also the primary case that caused the military prosecutor Col. Morris Davis to quit too.

    • Mary says:

      It’s not credible or believable, but here’s what the Bush/Obama approach on Jawad. A. He was not in uniform, therefore he cannot be a lawful combatant (even though yes, he was a resident of Afghanistan and yes, the Geneva Conventions provide that when an invading force enters a country, the non-uniformed populace that take up arms against the invaders are privileged combatant, not illegal combatants) B. This was not a battlefield or battle theatre, there was just a convoy (iirc) and someone trying to blend in with the civilians on the streets (using a saboteur type theory) lobbed the grenade and so it was an act of terrorism and sabotage, not an act of war.

      Of course, then there’s Khadr, also a teenager who they also are going after for throwing a grenade. B Doesn’t apply much to him, since we had already called in airstrikes and dropped a couple of pretty big bombs on the house where he was holed up, with his father who had drug him there and others. All of them were killed by the bombing (one may have survived briefly) and Khadr as the juvenile survivor supposedly throws out a grenade (although apparently there was also covered up evidence that it might even have been tossed by one of our own guys, with bad aim, and that was covered up). Putting that into a “war crimes” category has never made a lot of sense to me. You are living in a country, an armed force invades, they bomb your home, but if you toss a grenade at them, its a war crime? I understand why if US forces had opened fire on him that would NOT have been a war crime, it would have been privileged combat, but how it is that he committed a war crime by fighting back after being bombed confuses me to the point where I can’t even lay out their thought process.

    • Jeff Kaye says:

      All good points, MadDog, and a big thanks to bmaz for posting this article.

      I only want to update the Jawad story, as Marisa Taylor at McClatchy has an article today that claims the govt. will release Jawad after a prescribed waiting period which Congress mandated in their recent legislation attached to the supplemental Defense spending bill:

      Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said the department’s handling of the Jawad case showed that the administration has “made a dramatic break with the policies of the past by rejecting the use of torture without exception or equivocation”….

      Jawad’s lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union said that while they’re hopeful that their client will be sent home soon, they think the government should move more quickly.

      “We’re cautiously optimistic that they appear closer to recognizing that Mr. Jawad needs to be sent home as soon as possible,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “We remain concerned by some of the arguments they make with regards to the court’s power to order an immediate remedy”….

      If he’s released, Jawad would be the first detainee transferred from Guantanamo since Congress imposed new restrictions on the Obama administration intended to make sure Congress is notified in advance of any plans either to bring Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for trial or to send them to another country.

      Under those limits, passed as part of a supplemental Defense spending bill, Congress must be told 45 days in advance of any plans to bring a detainee to the U.S. for trial and 15 days in advance of plans to send a detainee, such as Jawad, to another country.

      On a related note, thinking of the recent exposures about police-military spying at burgeoning “fusion” centers, shredding posse comitatus, total lack of accountability for torture, public indifference and ignorance about ongoing mistreatment of prisoners through Appendix M-type protocols (AFM), war everlasting in Afghanistan, the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the economic rape of America, the cowardice and parliamentary cretinism of the so-called progressive party in this country, etc., one must pause and ponder, and, if there is an ounce of sense left after escaping the inanities of everyday television and the press, wonder if the world isn’t entirely mad. I know I’m not insane.

      Yossarian and Huck and I just may light out for the territories (wherever they might be), because there isn’t enough Mylanta in the world to keep the gorge down.

      • bmaz says:

        Heh, Huvelle may not think so much about their little 22 day delay. Absent a Constitutional procedural defect that can be cured by the government, the general rule is that a successful Habeas petitioner is entitled to release forthwith – i.e. immediately. It is a Constitutional remedy within the purview of the court. The court just may call their bluff here.

    • MarkH says:

      Unlawful combatant is pretty much the best we’ve got when the ‘enemy’ isn’t art of a government’s military and wore a uniform. Apparently our laws were ill-prepared for dealing with non-government sponsored fighting units/people.

  18. Mullic@ says:

    My god, to think that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. How many have been tortured to death…for which the cause of death isn’t at all controversial among those who don’t avert their eyes? I tremble to think of what we don’t know yet, and may never know, given the proclivities to ‘look forward’ of the current administration.

    I hate what is being done to my country. Given that meaningful healthcare reform is pretty near to dead-in-the-water, I can’t think of anything more important than getting a special prosecutor named.

  19. Mason says:

    The drip-drip-drip of revelations about the horrific acts committed by agents of our government on innocent people at the behest of the twisted desires of Bush and Cheney leaves me numb and speechless for awhile until my rage ignites and I begin to burn from the inside out. And then, when I discover they also did this children , , , and Obama and Holder want to protect the monsters at the top . . . Excuse me, but I’m not going to finish the thought.

    • Mary says:

      One of those, Jabbarov, has had a lot of non-US press.

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8174262.stm

      He was a refugee from Uzbekistan, living in bad conditions on the boarder wtih his elderly mother, his pregnant wife and a young son. Everyone agrees that he hitched a ride with Northern Alliance fighters (an odd thing to do if he was an “enemy combatant”) and that they sold him to the US. The US has made the kind of argument it made wit the Uighurs, i.e., that even though he never fought against the US in any way and probably didn’t have time to do much more than try desparately to feed his family, he must have had some kind of ties to an Uzbek Islamist group (fighting religious suppression in Uzbekistan) and that’s good enough.

      This piece from Radio Free Europe explains the Uzbek fighter concept
      http://www.rferl.org/content/P…..72987.html

      Jabbarov has also been deemed “uncooperative” bc he went on a hunger strike (he has been on the cleared for relase list for over 2 years now, and he was one of several cases in front of Walton that Walton originally dismissed pretty much solely because of the timing of passage of the MCA – booyah Harry Reid and Dems!) so I can’t imagine why he would have been anything but cooperative and happy in his detention.

      They have, since the Radio free europe piece, managed to locate his wife and children (who were left with nothing and no one after the US bought Jabbarov) Apparently the son he has never seen is alive, but no one has mentioned what happened to his elderly mother that he was also caring for. The wife and children were shuttled from one refugee camp to another, ending up in Iran and now in Pakistan.

      Here’s the really sad part to me. His attorney, Michael Mone, is Irish American. Even with the history of violence that Ireland has lived through recently, in the end Mone realized that it wasn’t worthwhile to try to get America to accept the transfer of the man they bought and held in depraved conditions (at one point his weight had dropped from 167 lbs to 100lbs, and the “reaction force” that left even a US soldier disabled has had multiple “incidents” with him.

      Jabbarov’s health is poor. Surgery for a ruptured disk in his back in May 2007 was unsuccessful and led to nerve damage. For months, he could urinate only through a catheter. He was also confined to a wheelchair or walker, but has improved somewhat recently.

      (that quote is from the older, Radio Free Europe piece – nothing in the recent pieces on health status)

      So Mone looks at his client and what has happened to him at US hands and realizes that he has to look back to Ireland for any hope for his client, but there is no hope with the US. I just find that so sad it’s hard to process.

      Another piece:
      http://74.125.47.132/search?q=…..#038;gl=us
      And it explains that, just as we let the Chinese intel have a go at the Uighurs, we let Uzbek intel have access to the Uzbek detainees

      At first, I was happy to be in American hands. I held the US in high regard and figured that it would be only a matter of time before they realized that I was innocent and let me go. But they didn’t. They held me in Bagram, then Khandahar, and eventually Guantánamo Bay.

      The Americans now realize that I ended up here by mistake and have told me that they want to let me go. But where can I go? Members of the Uzbek security service visited me here at Guantánamo and accused me of being a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. When I told them that I didn’t know anything about this group, they warned that once I was back in their custody, they would make me cooperate

      BTW, these were the guys who were boiling people alive – people we gave them for questioning.

      • fatster says:

        I grieve too, Mary. And not just for the suffering inflicted purposefully and viciously on so many who had little or nothing of value to disclose, but that these things were done in our name. And the perpetrators at the top who set these horrors in motion, apparently, will not be held accountable. It is unbelievable.

      • Blub says:

        I’d really like to see one of these torture invitations: “Dear Uzbek Generalissimo, We are pleased to extend an invitation to you to interrogate an Uzbek insurgent we have on our custody. Our State Department will expedite visas for your select intelligence personnel to come to our secret prison and interview your national. Please let us know what equipment your
        secret policemen will require to help you facilitate the cooperation of your interviewee. We politely request that your personnel avoid killing the interviewee or otherwise irrevocably remove any limbs or vital organs.” Did they have to sign any disclaimer forms?

  23. eCAHNomics says:

    Sad history of Diego Garcia here. U.S. & U.K. always play legal deniability because of the unusual arrangement of it’s being officially U.K. territory, but no Brits are actually there. Completely U.S. naval base. In the late 1960s, U.S. made U.K. kick out the 5000 residents of the Chagos archipeligo, without compensation, move them 1200 miles away to Seychelles with no resources to start their lives over. Their law suits against the U.S. or U.K. have been thwarted at every turn, claiming that the court has no standing or soverign immunity. Quite a story.