Not. Helpful.
Posted on 05/14/2005 7:26:39 PM PDT by aculeus
'I'm self-sufficient now. I earn enough to support my family and I'm not dependent on benefits." The pride in Sandy Mitchell's voice is unmistakable. Given what he has been through, it is also justified.
Five years ago, the tough Glaswegian was earning his living working in a hospital in Saudi Arabia as an anaesthetic technician, putt-ing in canulas, checking doses and weighing patients before they had operations. He and his Thai wife had just had a baby. He was happy and prosperous. Then, on December 17 2000, he was kidnapped by Saudi Arabian police as he got out of his car to walk into the hospital. Handcuffed and thrown into a police van, he was taken to an interrogation room in a prison in Riyadh. At that point, his nightmare began in earnest.
"Two men came into the room," he remembers. "They were Captain Ibrahim al-Dali, who introduced himself as an officer from Saudi Arabian intelligence, and Lieutenant Khalid al-Sabah, the interpreter. Ibrahim was short - hardly over 5ft 5in - but very strong. Khalid was tall and had rotting teeth. They told me I had to confess or they would do things to me that would make me go mad.
"I was totally confused. I had no idea of what I was supposed to confess to. I tried to ask them. Their response was to start hitting me with a pick-axe handle. They beat me all over my body. They brought in a huge 22 stone Saudi to sit on me while they beat the soles of my feet. They forced a metal rod between my knees and hoisted me upside-down, and beat me on my exposed buttocks. It was excruciating."
Mr Mitchell's two torturers eventually told him they wanted him to confess to planting a bomb that had killed another Briton named Christopher Rodway. "They said my wife and son were involved too. It sounded like a joke: my son was a year old." The two interrogators were in deadly earnest. "They kept on hitting me. The only time they broke off was when they went to pray."
That night, covered in blood and bruises, Mr Mitchell was chained standing up to a steel door in a room 5ft by 8ft. Bright lights burnt in his face throughout the night. The moment he looked as though he had fallen asleep, a guard came in and prodded him or hit with a stick to wake him up. And next day, Ibrahim and Khalid were there again, ready with their pickaxe handles.
After three days of torture, Ibrahim and Khalid summoned a doctor to examine Mr Mitchell. The doctor took his blood pressure. It was dangerously high. "Try to relax more," the doctor suggested helpfully to Mr Mitchell. When Mr Mitchell protested that he was being tortured, the doctor calmly replied: "They all say that. You'll just have to cope the best you can." And the moment the doctor left, the torture began again.
Ibrahim then told him that they were going to arrest his wife and son. "We will torture them. When you hear their screams, you will know that they are suffering because you haven't told us the truth."
That threat was enough to break Mr Mitchell. "I was starting to hallucinate because of the sleep deprivation. But I knew I couldn't let them harm my wife and child. I would have done anything to avoid that. I was very frightened for my son and for my wife. Ibrahim said that because she wasn't British, it was even easier for them to make her disappear."
Mr Mitchell's torturers wanted him to sign a confession which implicated Simon MacDonald, an official in the British embassy (he is now the British ambassador in Israel). "They had his picture," Mr Mitchell remembers. "They wanted me to say he had ordered the bombing and that I was working for MI6. It was all absolutely crazy. I invented some names of people I said had ordered me to do the bombing. They discovered the names were invented the next day and beat me extra hard as a result."
Mr Mitchell signed a preposterous confession in which he claimed to have detonated the bomb that killed Christopher Rodway while he was driving his car. "That was easily disprovable. I had receipts which proved that my car was being repaired when I was supposed to have detonated the bomb. The Saudis knew we were innocent from the start," he insists. "I had friends in the police force who told me that they knew the bomb had been planted by Islamic extremists, probably al-Qaeda."
Dr Bill Sampson, another Briton, was arrested on the same day as Mr Mitchell. Raf Schyvens, a Belgian nurse who knew Mr Mitchell, had been arrested and tortured several days earlier. Mr Schyvens had named Mr Mitchell and Dr Sampson as co-conspirators in his nonexistent bomb plot. "I don't blame Raf for that," says Mr Mitchell. "Everyone has their breaking point." Why the Saudi Arabians wanted to frame Mr Mitchell and Dr Sampson remains a mystery. Prince Naif, the Saudi Arabian government's intelligence chief, was determined to blame Westerners for the bomb: he simply refused to accept that Islamic militants were responsible. That Mr Mitchell and Dr Sampson were chosen as culprits may have been just bad luck.
"It was odd," says Mr Mitchell, "because I had assisted anaesthetists twice when Prince Naif was being operated on. I had had him prone on the operating table twice. He had even given me a gold watch as a present for my work. But I was tortured because of the orders of that man."
After he made his confession, Mr Mitchell was forced to go on television with Dr Sampson and Les Walker, another Briton, and repeat it. He thought the torture would then stop. It didn't. "They kept coming to beat me. They would do it for no reason at all. 'What do you want me to say?' I would ask them. 'What questions do want me to answer?' They would reply, 'There are no questions! We just want to beat you.' They enjoyed it. These men were savages."
There was one occasion when they made him kneel down and told him they were going to execute him. He felt a sudden blow to his neck, passed out - and awoke a few minutes later, covered in his own excrement. Ibrahim was laughing at him.
After four months of violence, Ibrahim and Khalid noticed a sudden deterioration in Mr Mitchell's condition. "I kept passing out for no apparent reason," he remembers. They sent for a doctor, who examined him and sent him to the hospital. The stress of the beatings and sleep deprivation had given him a potentially lethal heart condition. "They gave me beta-blockers as medication. The beatings stopped after that."
He was then placed in alone in a tiny cell with no windows. He would remain there for 15 months. "I wanted to die. I thought I was going to die anyway: I was convinced that the only way I would get out of that prison was in a coffin." Earlier, he had been taken out for a trial in a building on "Chop-Chop Square", the notorious location of Riyadh's public beheadings. The trial lasted 10 minutes. The chief prosecutor was Ibrahim, the man who had been his chief torturer. The judges asked Mr Mitchell if he had confessed to the bombing. He tried to explain that he had been tortured - they dismissed that, and announced his punishment: crucifixion, then partial beheading, after which his body would be left out to rot in public.
"In solitary confinement, I lost hope. The routine was soul-destroyingly monotonous. I would hear the call to prayer at 5am. A guard would shove bread and lentils in at about 7am. Then - nothing, nothing at all. Just silence. The tedium was all-enveloping. I was still on the beta-blockers for my heart condition. I split each one I was given and saved one of the halves. When I had what I thought would be enough to kill me, I swallowed the lot. But I survived. The only effect they had was to make me feel ill. I then thought, perhaps I'm not meant to die yet. Maybe God has something else in store."
Mr Mitchell was finally released more than two and a half years after he had been arrested. The bomb that blew up an American military base in 2003 seemed to have made it clear even to Prince Naif that al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombings in Saudi Arabia.
"The first I heard of it," Mr Mitchell, now 49, recalls, "was when the Saudi lawyers came in and said I would be released if I signed a letter to the King apologising for the bomb. I refused. We all did. They came back the next day and said I just had to sign a piece of paper thanking the King for his clemency. I signed that - and soon afterwards, I was on a plane home with the -others. It all happened so fast, I hardly had time to take it in."
Mr Mitchell now lives near Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire, working part-time as an anaesthetic technician, filling in for those in permanent jobs when they are on leave. For now, he says, it is all that he can manage. He still feels nothing but hatred for the men who tortured him - "they will burn in hell for what they did to me" - but, as he writes in his new book, co-written with Mark Hollingsworth and published this week, he's also very bitter about the way he has been treated by the British government. "The fact that I and the other Britons who were picked up and tortured were released had very little to do with any activity from the British government. The Americans got Mike Sedlak [a US citizen also arrested for the bombing] released within two months. We had to wait nearly three years. Why? Simply because our government is terrified of upsetting the Saudis. They'd rather help British businessmen sign arms deals with the Saudis than stop British people being tortured by them."
What irks him most is that the Foreign Office still hasn't made a public statement in which they proclaim Mr Mitchell and the other men's total innocence and criticise the Saudi Arabians for framing and torturing them. "They won't do it," he says. "The Saudi version of what happened is blatantly ridiculous. Yet the Foreign Office won't contradict it."
Even worse, the British government is supporting the Saudi Arabian government in its appeal to the Law Lords to overturn the decision by three judges on the Court of Appeal to allow Mr Mitchell and the other tortured Britons to sue the Saudi Arabians for compensation. "Jack Straw says that it would be a violation of state sovereignty. He says that the principle that states can't be sued in national courts is one that it is in the interest of Britain to protect - so sorry, we're supporting the Saudis on this one. It's disgusting."
Fortunately, Mr Mitchell has other concerns. He and his wife are expecting a new baby in August. His son Matthew, now six, "keeps telling me that he hopes the baby will be a girl, because then he won't have to share his toys… It's things like that which keep me sane."
Saudi Babylon: Torture, Corruption and Cover-Up Inside the House of Saud, by Sandy Mitchell and Mark Hollingsworth is published on Thursday by Mainstream (£15.99).
Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence.
damn
At least the Koranimals didn't put panties on his head.
"The fact that I and the other Britons who were picked up and tortured were released had very little to do with any activity from the British government. The Americans got Mike Sedlak [a US citizen also arrested for the bombing] released within two months. We had to wait nearly three years. Why? Simply because our government is terrified of upsetting the Saudis. They'd rather help British businessmen sign arms deals with the Saudis than stop British people being tortured by them."
Why would this suprise anyone? Remember, when they deal with infidels, anything goes....just don't miss prayer 5 times a day.
Great post.
Sad.
Muhammad/s insanity
Fixed your typo.
When I read stories like this, I wonder if extraterrestial aliens have taken over the planet. The leaders in democracies make no earthly sense in the acts they take against Islamics, Fascists, and Communists. Among them. they seem to have killed a good percent of the world's people. Yet, they go unpunished. I find Bush's comments on immigration baffling to say the least. Who is controlling the leaders?
good tagline
never underestimate the availability of evil.
Actions like this have a way of coming back to haunt those who commit them. Who knows, the man's son may grow up to become a very powerful global move and shaker, and may exact level of vengence on S.A. and the U.K. that will be truly historic.
Everyone acts the way they are incented to act.
We trust people that we should not trust because they have oil and money; they fund terrorists to kill us and torture our citizens.
It works the same way with the Chinese. They are only play-acting being a civilized society, yet we let them run a huge trade deficit against us, expose ourselves by investing in their country and grant a facist state legitimacy (e.g. the WTO admission).
We get what we deserve.
Why anyone ever goes to that hell hole is beyond me. As for us in general, it is way past time to nuke mecca.
The House of Saud appears to be the root of all evil. But it looks as if their turn won't come very soon. We still need to deal with Syria and Iran first, and who knows what will happen to the War on Terror after Bush leaves office?
yup ,... who has the "splash day" photo of W holding hands with the grandpoopie????
And our soldiers catch hell for putting panties on some clown's head and laughing at his johnson.
Not. Helpful.
They can go and pound sand.
Now is 12:30 pm here - Lunchtime - I will be monitoring happenings here and in Indonesia to see if this takes hold. Updates will be on my blog.
The world is so bass ackwards now, the US and Israel are seen as the most dangerous countries in the world.
...who knows what will happen to the War on Terror after Bush leaves office?
The American people have short memories and like change, even if it is the wrong change. This means the Democrats will win the presidency in 2008. When that happens, the war on terror will end. We will pay ransom in the form of higher oil prices, buy more crap from China and soon be a has been major power.
I'm older and can hang in there. Tough luck for our kids in the coming decades.
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