David Rose
Sunday August 5, 2007
The Observer
Bisher al-Rawi, the British-based Iraqi and former MI5 source detained by America for more than four years, is suing the US private airline that transported him to Afghanistan on an illegal CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’ torture flight.Last week’s Observer revealed how MI5 failed to protect al-Rawi when US agents abducted him during a business trip to Gambia in November 2002, despite the fact that he had helped the Security Service keep tabs on the radical preacher Abu Qatada – Osama bin Laden’s ‘ambassador to Europe’ – when he was in hiding.
After a month being interrogated in Gambia, he was rendered to the CIA’s ‘dark prison’ in Kabul on a US charter plane, chained, immobilised and in nappies. Later he spent four years in Guantanamo Bay before being released in March, cleared of any connection with terrorism.
He has joined a legal action already filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three other detainees, including a UK resident, Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian. It claims that the aviation firm Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing, ‘knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA enabling the clandestine transportation of Bisher al-Rawi to secret overseas locations where he was subjected to torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.’
‘Being a victim of the CIA’s rendition programme was horrific beyond words,’ al-Rawi said yesterday.
Jeppesen this weekend declined to comment.