Detainee Says U.S. Handed Him Over for Torture
CAIRO — The burly men who Mamdouh Habib says bundled him onto a small jet in Pakistan bound for a grisly torture cell in Egypt didn't give their names. But their nationality seemed clear.
"They
Habib had already been interrogated in Pakistani jails by three other Americans -- two women and a man. Now, according to court papers, they watched silently as one of the tattooed men forced the handcuffed prisoner to the ground, placed a foot on his neck and posed for pictures. The tattooed "Americans
Habib, a 48-year-old Australian citizen who grew up in Egypt, was about to disappear for six months into an Egyptian prison. There, he says, his Egyptian captors shocked him with high-voltage wires, hung him from metal hooks on the wall, nearly drowned him and mercilessly beat and kicked him.
The former coffee shop owner soon confessed to a litany of terrorism-related crimes, including teaching martial arts to several of the Sept. 11 hijackers and planning a hijacking himself. Habib later insisted that his confessions were false and given under "duress and torture."
Habib's more than three years of incarceration came into sharp focus this week, when the Bush administration agreed not to charge him with any crime and to repatriate him to Australia. Once home, he will be free, Australian officials said Wednesday.
"When he returns to Australia, he will not be detained or charged," said Matt Francis, a spokesman for the Australian Embassy in Washington. "He is a person of security interest, but we do not have any laws under which he can be charged."
Habib's vivid account of his secret delivery by U.S. forces to an Egyptian prison and his torture before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in May 2002 is the most detailed to surface of a CIA-run operation that has played a growing role in the war on terrorism. The operation, the controversial "extraordinary renditions" program, is run by a secret unit in the CIA's counter-terrorism center.
Habib's U.S. lawyer, Joseph Margulies, said he planned to inform his client of his impending freedom when he visited him at Guantanamo on Saturday.
"If the U.S. government believes he's done something wrong, they wouldn't let him go," he said.
In a statement, the Defense Department said the Australian government had "made a number of security assurances
The CIA declined to comment on the case.
