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46 | 3 Guantánamo beyond Guantánamo Toward a Global Detention System On April 10, 2002, Binyam Mohamed was arrested while boarding a flight to Zurich from Karachi Airport in Pakistan. Born in Ethiopia in 1978, Mohamed had been residing in London, England, before traveling to Afghanistan in the spring of 2001. Mohamed says he went to Afghanistan to escape the London street culture and to experience living in a Muslim country. The U.S. government had a different story: that Mohamed received weapons training at an al Qaeda camp in the summer of 2001 and additional training in bomb making before he and American citizen Jose Padilla were tapped by al Qaeda’s leadership to travel to the United States to set off a “dirty bomb,” a device containing radioactive materials.1 The government based these suspicions largely on statements obtained from Abu Zubaydah, the suspected al Qaeda agent who was captured in March 2002 and rendered to a secret CIA prison for waterboarding and other torture.2 Following his arrest, Binyam Mohamed was taken to a series of local prisons, where he was questioned by Pakistani intelligence, British intelligence , and the FBI. During those interrogations, Mohamed was repeatedly threatened. As one FBI agent told him the first day, “If you don’t talk to me, you’re going to Jordan. We can’t do what we want here; the Pakistanis can’t do exactly what we want them to. The Arabs will deal with you.”3 And sure enough, in July 2002 Mohamed was taken by masked CIA agents and flown to Morocco on a CIA-operated Gulfstream jet plane. In Morocco, Mohamed was imprisoned for eighteen months and tortured by a team of eight men and women, who, among other things, beat him, cut his penis with a razor, and threatened him with rape and electrocution. Mohamed never saw a judge or a lawyer. As he later recalled, “I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors.”4 Mohamed’s captors forced him to repeat information they fed him, including making him admit under threat of torture that he had met A Global Detention System | 47 Osama bin Laden and had volunteered to serve as an operations man for al Qaeda.5 Binyam Mohamed’s journey did not end in Morocco. In January 2004, he was flown on another CIA plane to a secret CIA-run prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, known as the “Dark Prison” because captives there were kept in total blackness for twenty-four hours a day while made to listen to music loud enough to perforate an eardrum. From the Dark Prison, Mohamed was taken in May 2004 to Bagram in Afghanistan, where he was forced to sign a false confession.6 Three months later, he was flown to Guantánamo and charged before a military commission. He was then held at Guantánamo for more than four years without a trial or a hearing. Finally, after seven years of illegal detention, the government abandoned the allegations that Mohamed was involved in a bomb plot, dropped all charges against him, and returned him to England, where he was released.7 The case of Binyam Mohamed’s alleged accomplice, American citizen Jose Padilla, took a different path. On May 8, 2002, the FBI arrested Padilla as he was entering the United States at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport . Padilla was initially detained as a material witness in connection with the government’s criminal investigation of the 9/11 attacks. Padilla’s courtappointed attorney, Donna R. Newman, filed a motion in the district court challenging the warrant and seeking Padilla’s release. The district judge, Michael B. Mukasey, scheduled a hearing for the following week. But before the hearing took place, President Bush issued a one-page order on June 9, 2002, declaring Padilla an “enemy combatant” and directing the secretary of defense to take him into custody.8 The order alleged that Padilla was “closely associated with al Qaeda,” had “engaged in conduct that constituted hostile and war-like acts,” and represented “a continuing, present, and grave danger” to the United States.9 Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly announced that Padilla—who the government said had previously met and trained with al Qaeda in Afghanistan—was planning to explode a “dirty bomb” in the United States and that his designation as an “enemy combatant” had “disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot.”10 Ashcroft did...

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