US Department of Justice drop ‘dirty bomb’ allegations against Binyam Mohamed

The US Department of Justice has withdrawn a series of allegations that were used to justify Mohamed’s prolonged detention at Guantanamo Bay, filed in May 2008 by military prosecutors, that accused Binyam Mohamed, of plotting to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States, blow up apartment buildings and release cyanide gas in nightclubs. Allegations against 4 other detainees were dropped as well.

The Justice Department’s decision came after a Washington federal judge, in a habeas corpus proceeding, ordered on 6 October the government to turn over all available exculpatory evidence to Mohammed’s attorneys. The material includes 42 classified British intelligence documents, among them communications with the United States about Mohammed’s fate after his arrest in Pakistan in April 2002. Last month, Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the prosecutor in all five cases, said the military was withholding evidence that could have helped clear the defendants. He resigned in what he called a crisis of conscience. The Pentagon denied Vandeveld’s testimony had anything to do with the charges being dropped. The Pentagon reports recommending dismissal said only that the new prosecution teams taking over the cases needed more time to evaluate them. “I find the prosecution has been unable to complete its preparation for this case,” Pentagon legal adviser Michael Chapman concluded in two of his reports, copies of which were obtained by The Associated Press.

Earlier the London High Court had determined in August 2008 that these documentis had to be given to Mohammed’s attorneys in order to be able to properly prepare his impending trial at the Military Commissions in Guantanamo. The UK’s government objection that these document were covered by “public interest immunity” because their release would damage intelligence cooperation and relations with the United States was rebuked. The British government, however, said U.S. authorities had copies of the documents, effectively transferring any decision-making about their release to Washington.

Defence lawyers said the decision should force the Pentagon to drop the other charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism, since they were solely based on confessions obtained under torture. Stripped of the core allegations, the government case focuses on Mohammed’s training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. His attorneys don’t deny that their client received training in Afghanistan, but they said he wanted to fight in the war-torn Russian republic of Chechnya.

“It’s no coincidence that this happened when the judge ordered discovery,” said Clive Stafford Smith, one of Mohamed’s attorneys and the director of Reprieve, a London-based group that advocates for the human rightsof prisoners. “It’s clear they think that by dropping the allegations they can avoid having to turn over the  documents.”

As Binyam explained to Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith, during the meetings at Guantánamo that first established what had happened to him after he was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, his torturers in Morocco insisted — in spite of his protests that he had only recently converted to Islam and did not speak Arabic — that he knew some of the big names in al-Qaeda:

Some of the time they said that some big people in al-Qaeda were talking about me. Some of the time they told me that the US had a story they wanted from me and it was their job to get it. They talked about Jose Padilla and they said I was going to testify against him and big people. They named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. I was meant to be working with these people, giving them ideas like the dirty bomb. It is hard to pin down the exact story, because what they wanted changed all the time. First in Morocco it changed, then when I was in the Dark Prison, then in Bagram and again in Guantánamo Bay.

See also ACLU’s pressrelease and an article in the New York Times.