På Guantanamo for at læse satire

Hvor meget eller lidt skal der egentlig til, for at man bliver mistænkt for at være terrorist og sendt til Guantanamo?

Den britiske borger Binyam Mohamed blev sendt afsted og mistede syv år af sit liv, fordi han havde læst en satirisk artikel om, “hvordan man laver en brintbombe”, skriver Mail on Sunday:

A British ‘resident’ held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a  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.

The Foreign Secretary is refusing to release classified documents relating to Mohamed’s detention.

Det har senere vist sig, at den britiske regering selv bad den amerikanske udsende en erklæring om, at det kunne “true forholdet mellem de to lande”, om dokumentationen for den tortur, Mohamed blev udsat for, blev offentliggjort – fordi det naturligvis er pinligt for den britiske regering, at de nu kommer frem, at de i alle disse år har kendt til, bifaldet og assisteret fremmede magters tortur mod deres egne borgere.

Det er pinligt for den britiske regering, som sagt, og for de ministre, som måske kan retsforfølges. Tortur er vold og mishandling og dermed ulovligt  – selv mod en suspekt person som Binyam Mohamed, der uomtvisteligt har gjort sig skyldig i at læse en satirisk artikel på nettet. Gad vide, hvor mange år på Guantanamo man kunne få for at se en video med Jon Stewart eller Ricky Gervais?

Via Lenin’s Tomb.