In a 28 July 2009 story, UK urged to reveal ‘torture’ file, BBC reports on the efforts of a British charity, Reprieve, to force the British government to admit its complicity in the kidnap, rendition, imprisonment, torture, and human rights abuse of Qari Iqbal Madni, who was freed from Guantánamo Bay last year, and now lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

According to BBC:

Mr Madni, who claims he was shackled tightly and packed in a wooden box on the flight, told BBC File on 4 he was tortured in Egypt.
“When I arrived in Egypt I was blindfolded and left in a room… they interrogated me three times. Each was for 17 hours and they electrocuted me in my knees,” he said.
“And they asked if I knew Osama Bin Laden or went to Afghanistan or if I met Richard Reid or knew anything about a shoe bomb or future attacks.”

It is interesting that Madni was questioned about Reid, who is known to have travelled to and from Israel in mysterious circumstances, and yet — thanks to effective propaganda — is linked in the public mind with travel to Pakistan, on which the evidence is questionable; the word Israel does not appear in the Wikipedia entry for Reid! For more, see the following extract from on a 3 June 2009 post by Andy Worthington:

“The story of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni

As I reported after Madni’s release, his case “deserves to be more than a mere footnote in the history of the Bush administration’s vile and unprincipled policies of “extraordinary rendition” and torture,” as the suffering inflicted on the 24-year old Islamic scholar — which involved three months of torture in Egypt, followed by eleven months in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and over five years in Guantánamo — was based not on detailed evidence that he was a terrorist, but on a single ill-advised comment picked up by the Indonesian intelligence services (which, Madni has stated since his release, was not even made by him).

A renowned Islamic scholar, fluent in nine languages and from a wealthy and influential family, Madni maintained throughout his imprisonment that he was betrayed by one of four would-be jihadists whom he met by accident on a trip to Indonesia in November 2001 to sort out family business after his father’s death. “After I went to Indonesia, I got introduced to some people who were not good,” he told his tribunal in Guantánamo, adding, “They were bad people. Maybe I can say they were terrorists. When someone gets introduced to someone, it is not written on their foreheads that they are bad or good.”

In fact, Madni had not been betrayed by one of these men, but had been seized by the CIA after the Indonesian intelligence services, who were monitoring the men he had met — members of the Islamic Defenders Front, an organization that espoused anti-Americanism, but had not been involved in any terrorist attacks — heard him say that bombs could be hidden in shoes, and handed the information on to the CIA.

Although a US intelligence official told Ray Bonner of the New York Times in 2005 that Madni was nothing more than a “blowhard,” who “wanted us to believe he was more important than he was,” and another thought that he would be held for a few days, “then booted out of jail,” more senior officials, in a heightened state of fear following the capture of the inept and mentally troubled British shoe-bomber Richard Reid, demonstrated how casual the Bush administration’s use of “extraordinary rendition” was by rendering him to Egypt, presumably under the mistaken belief that torture would reveal the truth, one way or another.

More recent details of Madni’s rendition and torture

Since Madni’s release, Reprieve has been in touch with him, and he was also featured in a New York Times article in January, which added gruesome details to what was already known of his experiences. Madni explained that he had first suffered physical abuse at the airport in Jakarta, before his rendition flight took off. “One person from Egyptian intelligence, he come and he punch me here, very hard,” Madni said, hitting his chest to make his point, “and he grab me like this and he throw me against the wall.”

On the flight, Madni said, he was “bleeding from his nose, mouth and ears,” and on arrival in Cairo “they make me naked, they torture me.” Locked up in an underground cell like “a grave,” he said that he was held for 92 days, and was interrogated on three occasions soon after his arrival, for 12 to 15 hours at a time. He told the Times that his interrogators were Egyptian, but that “there were other men in the room whose faces were covered and who did not speak, but who passed notes with questions to the Egyptians.” When he refused to concede that he had traveled to Afghanistan and had met Osama bin Laden, he said that the Egyptians tortured him with electric shocks. “I cry and I yell,” he explained, adding, “they gave me brain electric shocks,” and that they also gave him drug-laced drinks “so you don’t know what you are talking about.”

Transferred to Bagram in early April, Madni confirmed that the abuse continued. He explained that a CIA agent told him, “We forgive you; just accept you met Osama bin Laden,” but that despite his refusal to confess, and even though he took several polygraph tests, which showed that he was telling the truth, he was subjected to sleep deprivation for six months, moved from cell to cell every few hours as part of a program that, when it surfaced in Guantánamo, was known euphemistically as the “frequent flier program.”

After his arrival at Guantánamo, on March 23, 2003, Madni was so depressed that, according to Mamdouh Habib, an Australian prisoner, released in January 2005, who had also been rendered for torture in Egypt, “he tried to hang himself twice, and went on three hunger strikes.“ By the time of his release, as the Times described it, “he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.”

Everything about Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni’s treatment at the hands of US forces — and their willing accomplices in Egypt — should be a source of profound shame, and it is no wonder that Madni told the New York Times, “It’s easy for the United States to say no charges were found, but who is responsible for the seven years of my life?” and that his lawyer, Richard L. Cys, said he planned to sue the US government for his client’s unlawful detention, and has filed a lawsuit in the federal courts in the hope of gaining access to his medical records from Guantánamo, which, he hopes, will confirm his account of his torture in Egypt.”

The full post, well worth a read, is here.