Hey, wait a minute, I thought WE were the torturers! Oh, never mind...
A lawyer for one of the detainees at Guantänamo Bay, Cuba, has asked the federal district court here to block the Bush administration from sending the detainee to Egypt, asserting that he would be tortured there.
The motion was filed in November on behalf of the detainee, Mamdouh Habib, and asserts that he was tortured in an Egyptian prison for nearly six months in 2001 before being transferred to Guantänamo. The filing, which was declassified and released on Wednesday, includes details of the alleged torture, based on Mr. Habib's account to his lawyer, Joseph Margulies of Chicago.
It is unclear from the court papers if the American government is planning to transfer him to Egypt, as his lawyer asserts. But the case is one of the rare instances in which the practice known as rendition, in which a prisoner is transferred to the custody of another government, may be openly considered by a federal court.
The administration has given little information about whether or when it engages in the practice, which could violate international law if a government had reason to believe that the government receiving the prisoner might use torture.
The court petition said that while in prison in Egypt Mr. Habib was subjected to regular beatings, electric shocks and attacks by dogs. During his imprisonment, he confessed to several crimes, and his lawyer said that those coerced confessions had been used by American military authorities at Guantänamo to deem Mr. Habib properly detained there as an unlawful enemy combatant.
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