-Guantanamo defendant calls tribunals a sham

Reuters AlertNet - RPT-Guantanamo defendant calls tribunals a sham:

"GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba, April 6 (Reuters) - An Ethiopian prisoner called his Guantanamo war crimes tribunal a con on Thursday and said that after four years of interrogations, the U.S. military had not even managed to learn the correct spelling of his name.

The defendant, a 27-year-old British resident, is identified in the charge documents as Binyam Muhammad but he said his surname is Mohammad. He is accused of conspiring with al Qaeda to commit war crimes, including plotting to set off a radioactive bomb, and would face life in prison if convicted.
There is no uniform system of transliteration of Arabic names into English, and so either Muhammad or Mohammad could be correct.

Mohammad, as he said he prefers to be called, has proclaimed his innocence and has stated in court documents that he made false confessions after being extrajudicially transferred to a Moroccan prison where he was beaten, strung up by his arms and cut on the chest and penis with scalpels.

'This is four years of interrogation, highly intensive ... torture, and you still don't have the right name,' he told the tribunal's presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann. 'The man you are looking for is not here.'"