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An "interesting" trial

The IHT reports on a case in the UK which may reveal significant evidence on the actions of the Americans in their program of renditions:

"A British judge has ordered a hearing into whether the government must turn over evidence bearing on accusations by a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he was tortured during interrogation in Morocco.

The judge, acting on a request by lawyers for the prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, rejected an argument of the British government that releasing any documents risked "that more robust evidence of mistreatment of CIA prisoners could emerge in the future."

The government, in a court filing last month, accepted that Mohamed had presented an "arguable case" that he had been tortured after his "extraordinary rendition" to Morocco and Afghanistan.

Mohamed has said that, among other things, his interrogators in Morocco made cuts on his chest and genitals with a razor. To support that assertion, his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, is seeking photographs that he said an American soldier had taken of Mohamed's injuries during a flight from Morocco to Cuba.

"I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that those photographs exist," Stafford Smith said in an interview Thursday. Under the strict secrecy rules imposed by the Pentagon on lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees, Stafford Smith said he could not go into any more detail."

Obviously stay tuned.

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