US:The Pentagon official overseeing the Guantánamo war crimes court dismissed all charges against five prisoners yesterday, including a British resident who says he falsely confessed to a radioactive "dirty bomb" plot while being tortured. All five cases were assigned to military prosecutor army Lieut Col Darrel Vandeveld, who quit his Guantánamo assignment last month because he said the US government had withheld information that could help clear an Afghan defendant in an unrelated case.
The defence department gave no reason for dropping the charges, but said new prosecutors had been appointed to review the cases and could refile the charges later. The latest setback for the much-criticised Guantánamo court system came after the US declined to pursue the dirty bomb charges in a Washington court case challenging the detention of Ethiopian-born British resident Binyam Mohamed.
Mr Mohamed, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, had said repeatedly that he is innocent and gave false confessions while being tortured in a Moroccan prison. He had been transferred there extrajudicially and held for 18 months before being sent to Guantánamo.
He said he was beaten, strung up by his arms and cut on the chest and penis with scalpels and told interrogators what they wanted to hear so they would stop.
The Pentagon spelled his surname Mohammed, but his civilian lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, says Mohamed is correct. He predicted the charges would be refiled after the US presidential election.
"This is more of the Guantánamo farce, sadly. Instead of delivering justice, the military tries to hide all the mistakes and crimes that have been committed, including 18 months of torture of Mr Mohamed in Morocco," Stafford Smith said by e-mail.
Six military prosecutors have quit the Guantánamo court in the last four years. Some said the US government sought to use evidence obtained through torture, while one alleged the trials were tainted by political interference.
"The implosion of these five prosecutions painfully underscores how the Bush administration's torture and detention policies have failed to render justice in any sense of the word," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The US accused Mr Mohamed, who had refugee status in Britain, of training and plotting attacks on targets in the US with Jose Padilla, a Chicago gang member once also accused by the Bush administration of plotting a radioactive bomb attack. Padilla was never charged with that crime, but was convicted in a Miami court of providing support for terrorism and sentenced to 17 years.
The Pentagon appointee overseeing the Guantánamo tribunals, Susan Crawford, dropped all charges against Mr Mohamed, Saudi Arabian captives Jabran al- Qahtani and Ghassan al-Sharbi, Algerian Sufyian Barhoumi, and Sudanese Noor Uthman Muhammed. Military prosecutors have filed charges against 24 Guantánamo captives since the current war crimes court was established in 2006, but Ms Crawford has now dismissed all charges against six of them without public explanation