Madni’s Coffin Flight Rendition

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.