7 detainees taken to nations of torture Guantanamo prisoners say they were abused before arrival

Farah Stockman Boston Globe Apr. 26, 2006 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - At least seven U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo Bay say they were transferred to countries known for torture prior to their arrival at the base, according to recently released transcripts from military commission hearings and other court documents.

At least three of them allege that they were tortured during interrogations in Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt.

The transcripts represent the first accounts of rendition from prisoners who are still in U.S. custody, and they contradict statements made last year by the Bush administration that all suspects who are "rendered" to foreign countries are treated in accordance with international laws.

In the statements, made during hearings to determine whether the detainees are enemy combatants, some say U.S. forces took them to foreign prisons. Others don't specify who took them abroad, but most say the United States is holding them at Guantanamo based on confessions coerced by foreign interrogators.

Military prosecutors did not challenge the fact that they were sent to other countries and limited their questioning to whether the detainees were, in fact, tortured, according to the transcripts.

As the Pentagon slowly begins to prosecute detainees for terrorism-related offenses, defense lawyers are arguing that those confessions should be thrown out. One of the seven detainees was abruptly released before being charged with terrorism, after his allegations of torture in an Egyptian prison became public.

Another of the seven detainees is on trial for conspiring to set off a nuclear ''dirty bomb" in the United States. But that defendant is arguing that the case against him is built on a confession coerced in Morocco.

"After four years of torture and rendition, you have the wrong person in the stand," Binyam Ahmad Mohammed, an Ethiopian detainee, told a military tribunal this month.

Like most of the seven detainees, Mohammed says he was arrested in Pakistan, questioned by Americans, then transferred to a prison abroad, according to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.

Mohammed told tribunal officials that his jailers in Morocco sliced him with a scalpel on his chest and genitals, Smith said.

In January 2004, Mohammed was sent to a U.S.-run detention facility in Afghanistan and then transferred to Guantanamo, where he became one of 10 out of 480 detainees to be formally charged with crimes.

But Smith, his lawyer, argues that the entire case should be dismissed.

''There is no evidence against Binyam that I am aware of that is not evidence tortured out of him," he said.

Evidence obtained through torture is not admissible in U.S. courts. But the military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay had no such prohibition until last month, when the rule was added just before a key Supreme Court decision on the issue. Even now, defense lawyers and human rights groups say the rules of evidence are so loose, allowing secret evidence and anonymous witnesses, that it is impossible to screen out evidence obtained illegally.

Still, allegations of torture led to the release of one major suspect last year.

Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen accused of having prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, was on the verge of being formally charged before the military tribunal. But U.S. officials abruptly set him free in Australia after his allegations of being tortured with a cattle prod in Egypt became public.

Habib's lawyer, Joseph Margulies, had described the alleged torture in a legal filing in a U.S. federal court.

"They released him because they didn't want the particulars of his rendition to become the subject of inquiry by a federal district court," Margulies said.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch researcher who has been combing the newly released Guantanamo documents for new information on rendition and torture, said torturing terrorism suspects makes it difficult to try them later in court, and increases their chances of walking free.

Pentagon officials say the U.S. government does not transfer prisoners to other countries for torture, but they do not challenge the detainees' assertions that they were sent abroad.

"U.S. policy requires all detainees to be treated humanely," said Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Guantanamo spokesman. He also warned that al-Qaida members are trained to make false allegations.