Sharif Mobley is an American citizen, born in New Jersey. In 2010, he was in Yemen, and abducted by security forces there. Anonymous American and Yemeni officials say he had contacts with Anwar al-Awaki.
Mobley was questioned by two FBI officials, and then disappeared into a secret Yemani prison system.
Recently, Mobley has gotten out two desperate phone calls, apparently using the cell phone of a sympathetic prison guard.
Spencer Ackerman, at the Guardian, calls attention to the case.
Various voices are heard yelling in anger in the background of the call, which Mobley made through a smuggled cellphone early on Thursday morning.
A frightened-sounding Mobley says that guards at the military prison “are beating me with a stick” in what he considers a life-threatening assault.
“They’re trying to take me right now, they’re about to take me. There are a lot of people on the phone. I gotta go,” Mobley is heard saying.
The last time Mobley’s lawyers at the human rights group Reprieve were able to contact him on the smuggled phone, he was in a prison on a military base in the capitol, Sana’a. That call was the first time Mobley’s lawyers had heard from him for over a year, after he went missing from the centrally located prison where he was awaiting trial on a murder charge.
American Sharif Mobley in call from Yemeni jail: 'They're trying to kill me', Guardian
Amel Ahmed, at al-Jazeera, calls attention to the case as well.
Five years ago in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, eight masked Yemeni security officials burst out of two white vans, shot Mobley in the legs and shoved him into a van, according to legal documents seen by Al Jazeera.
Mobley’s lawyers at Reprieve say the FBI interrogated Mobley shortly after this violent kidnapping. The Yemeni officers said at the time they were acting at the behest of an FBI attaché that suspected Mobley of having ties to Al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, according to Mobley’s lawyers.
This alleged practice of proxy detention where the FBI facilitates or exploits the arrests of U.S. citizens by foreign governments has been widely condemned by civil libertarians, who say it circumvents due process rights by leaving the interrogation of suspects to others.
US citizen abducted in Yemen pleads for help amid Saudi strikes, al Jazeera
The general outline of the story, of an American thrown into a foreign secret prison system, after FBI questioning, and then tortured by the foreign security services, is similar to
a number of others.
Mobley's story, his lawyers say, is an example of a more disturbing development in the relationship between the US and Yemen; the proxy detention of an American citizen by the Yemeni government, arranged and overseen by US agents in the country.
US accused of Yemen proxy detention, al Jazeera (2010)
The European Court of Human Rights had ordered Poland to pay $250,000 to Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, for allowing the CIA to torture them there. Media is reporting that Poland will make the payments. Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri are currently imprisoned by the United States, at Guantanamo.
Poland is paying a quarter of a million dollars to two terror suspects tortured by the CIA in a secret facility in this country – prompting outrage among many here who feel they are being punished for American wrongdoing.
Europe’s top human rights court imposed the penalty against Poland, setting a Saturday deadline.
It irks many in Poland that their country is facing legal repercussions for the secret rendition and detention programme which the CIA operated under then-President George W Bush in several countries across the world after the 9/11 attacks.
So far no US officials have been held accountable, but the European court of human rights has shown that it does not want to let European powers that helped the programme off the hook.
Poland pays $250,000 to victims of CIA rendition and torture, Associated Press
John Kiriakou makes a long story short. He served two years in prison after blowing the whistle on CIA torture. Nothing has happened to the people who did the torturing.
After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, the fallout for me was brutal. To make a long story short, I served nearly two years in federal prison and then endured a few more months of house arrest.
What happened to the torture program? Nothing.
Closing the Door on Torture, OtherWords
Having done nothing about torture, as an entire nation I'd say, we need belatedly to do something about it now.
There has to be a red line: The United States of America must oppose torture and ban its use absolutely. That begins in the Oval Office, and Obama needs to belatedly do something about it.
Closing the Door on Torture, OtherWords