Just a couple of other things to throw in – here seems as good a place as any.

The British via Scotland (I can’t help it, I like that the AG’s name invokes a separate kingdom) have made a torture referral to Scotland Yard. That referral, though, has not been limited to the Binyam Mohamed case. Instead, they have taken information compiled by cagedprisoners and other sources and made a referral on TWENTY NINE cases.

Compiled over four years by lawyers acting for British monitoring group Cageprisoner, the dossier corroborates claims that Britain was involved in a systematic international torture policy, with one case predating the 11 September attacks, going back as far as 1999. Six countries are named as being complicit with Britain, including Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Four cases relate to Kenya and the most – seven – involve Pakistan.

Oh yeah- Pakistan, where Chaudhry is now back on the bench. (btw – Chaudhry has also ordered an investigation of the Taliban flogging of the teenage girl – not exactly a shy and retiring justice). Is Pakistan going to cooperate before, after or during its meltdown, or never. It would be kind of a scarey thing to have to rely on our intel sources supposedly working in Pakistan to help prevent a meltdown also having some vested personal interests in keeping criminal cases quiet and having to wonder what they pick as their higher personal priority, wouldn’t it. Good thing we won’t have that on our plate.

The seventh country in the reference above would seem to be Morocco, although there is also reference to the United Arab Emirates. I’m wondering, though, how they address Afghanistan and Iraq (do they treat them as separate nations or US branches) and the bigger elephant in the room, the US.

A spokesman for Cageprisoner said Scotland would also be asked to investigate alleged MI5 complicity in the questioning of men who claim to have been tortured, the majority while in US custody abroad.

Back to Batarfi – apparently if and when they get around to releasing him, Obama’s administration thinks no one is entitled to know where they release him. Kind of an Obama thumbs up to the approach of dumping Khalid el-Masri in a foreign country with no papers in the middle of nowhere. It’s like the US gov has their own little internal reality game of Survivor, only they get to kidnap real people from around the world and play with them.

This BBC article and this kos diary by Valtin highlight the “secret destination” approach Gov is taking for Batarfi.

The US justice department has agreed to transfer a Yemeni inmate from America’s controversial Guantanamo Bay prison.

But it declined to provide details of where Ayman Saeed Batarfi would go.

Sullivan may have something to say on that – or not. Bitter snark about el-Masri aside (althought the failure of the US judicial system on that case is as complete as anything I’ve ever seen) the Obama approach on Batarfi does echo the Bush approach on Errachidi. He was the bipolar London chef who was detained in Pakistan and handed over to the US for $$ based on some guy (who got the $$) saying that he had been leading an al-Qaeda training camp. After years of abuse at GITMO, including lots of isolation (bc he tended to react as an Englishman first and demand rights and better treatment which tended to piss off his kidnappers) his lawyers were finally able to get access to the super secret info on him and figure out that he was accused of being at an al-Qaeda training camp. In no time flat they had hard evidence that he was making souffles in Mayfair when he was supposedly camping out in the hills of Afghanistan.

After that was made very clear, the US grudgingly cleared him of charges, but they didn’t send him back to London, where his family (from whom he was COMPLETELY disappeared until the GITMO names came out) was waiting. Instead, they cut a secret deal with Morocco to ship him there. Remember Morocco – the place where, according to the US own files and records that it won’t hand over in Mohamed’s case, prisoners go to be tortured? So who authorized that? Will we ever know? What was the “negotiation” on torture? [This, btw, is the area I wish Rachel had asked Powell about – did he as Sec of State negotiate wtih Egypt and Syria et al on the transfers of people like al-Libi and Maher Arar to them and insure that torture would not be used?]

In any event, after “clearing” Errachidi, with his family waiting for him, the US ships him off to Morocco. This link doesn’t go into it much, but at the time there was a lot of reporting as he was first “lost” for a bit until the pressure from his lawyers elicited the Moroccan information. They then worked to get him released from Morocco and reunited with his family.

A London chef held for four years in Guantanamo Bay on the basis of false information from an anonymous informant has been reunited with his family, The Times has learnt.

…
He was taken to a Moroccan prison and appeared in court in Rabat on Wednesday on terrorist charges. But local human-rights lawyers, instructed by the British charity Reprieve, argued successfully for the allegations to be dropped and secured his release.

This was also a story that got almost no US coverage. [Although of more recent date, apparently it was conversations with Errachidi in particular that were an important part of the Islamic conversion of the GITMO guard referenced in the more recent article – I can’t remember where it was, Newsweek maybe?]

Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve and Mr Errachidi’s lawyer, said: “Ahmed’s case is an exhibit of everything that is wrong with Guantanamo Bay. The US military relied on false intelligence, saying Ahmed was the ‘General’ of al-Qaeda when he was a London chef.

Now that same Reprieve lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who made the US look – well, at best lets say ridiculous, is now facing charges from the Obama administration because of the letter he sent to Obama about Binyam Mohamed.

Kind of ruins all that ‘deniability’ stuff when you get letters detailing the torture.

Judge Thomas Hogan has ordered Smith and his colleague Ahmed Ghappour to appear in his court on May 11 and explain why they should not be held in contempt of court — and perhaps jailed for up to six months — for their alleged transgression.

“What is particularly irksome about this is the issue involved,” Smith wrote in an e-mail this morning. “The government is covering up evidence of torture against Binyam Mohamed, while accusing us of violating a rule in (bizarrely) NOT revealing that evidence.” He added: “What this is really all about is official embarrassment at looking bad.”

Don’t worry – mabye Obama will drop the charges and just … ship Stafford Smith off to Morocco.

17 – yeah, I know. That’s why I ended with a, “too bad it won’t happen” It’s just kind of had me peeved, that Blagojevich presser, after the Padilla presser years back, and all by a dept that is itself so riddled with torture support and corruption that it pretty much only has people with no reverse peristalsis capacity left to work for it.