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Rumsfeld Must Face Vet’s Claim He Was Tortured

By JOE CELENTINO | Courthouse News Service |  August 4, 2011

A U.S. citizen and Army veteran who says he was imprisoned and tortured by his own military can sue former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally for damages, a federal judge ruled.

Court filings do not name the veteran, but note that he worked for the Marine Corps as an Arabic translator along Iraq’s Syrian border.

He claims he was the first American to begin direct talks with Sunni sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, who later became an important U.S. ally.

In November 2005, as he prepared to return home on leave, the man said he was taken into an interrogation room for four hours. He refused to answer the questions, citing concern for the confidentiality of sensitive information he had learned during his tour.

He was transported to Camp Cropper military jail for “high-value” detainees and kept for more than nine months. His family had no idea of his whereabouts or whether he was alive.

John Doe said interrogators exposed him to extreme cold and continuous bright light. They also allegedly blindfolded and hooded him, kept him awake by banging on the door and windows, and blasted heavy metal or country music into his cell at “intolerably loud volumes.”

Doe said he also sustained physical attacks from other detainees hostile to the United States because they learned about his military affiliation.

Though the government claimed he had provided classified information to the enemy and helping anti-coalition forces enter the country, he was never charged with a crime.

A detainee status board authorized the translator’s continued detention in December 2005, determining that he was a threat to coalition forces. Doe never got to talk to a lawyer and was not permitted to see the evidence against him.

In August 2006, Doe was placed on a military flight to Jordan and eventually made it back home. U.S. District Judge James Gwin, presiding in Washington by designation from his court in Ohio, found that Doe clearly has a civil rights case.

“The stakes in holding detainees at Camp Cropper may have been high, but one purpose of the constitutional limitations on interrogation techniques and conditions of confinement even domestically is to strike a balance between government objectives and individual rights even when the stakes are high,” Gwin wrote.

Rumsfeld argued that court intervention would improperly allow the court to review wartime matters and foreign affair constitutionally committed to the president and Congress.

But Gwin rejected this argument.

“Avoiding the ‘risk of assuming a role that is almost always best suited for Congress,’ however, does not recommend that courts be entirely powerless to review legislative or executive action during a time of war,” he wrote. “Rather, ‘a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.'”

Rumsfeld also cannot dodge the suit on qualified immunity grounds, Gwin said.

“Although it may be unlikely that Rumsfeld evaluated the detention conditions of each detainee in detail, it is not implausible that he authorized the use of interrogation techniques on the detainee population at Camp Cropper, or even on specific detainees,” the 47-page ruling states. “Though Doe must eventually support his factual allegations with evidence, a motion to dismiss simply calls upon the court to evaluate whether a plaintiff has alleged with specificity fact supporting a plausible claim.”

“This case affects tens of thousands of American citizens who work on behalf of the United States in warzones,” Doe’s attorney, Mike Kanovitz, told the Government Accountability Project. “We are relieved that the courts are going to exercise their constitutional role of judicial review instead of giving the president a blank check when it comes to the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens. There is a clear record showing that Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the use of brutal interrogation techniques that violated our nation’s constitution. Like all Americans, my clients just want a level playing field and a fair jury. Now they are going to get that.”
Doe’s suit is one of just two that has been allowed to proceed of the many against Rumsfeld alleging torture of detainees in Iraq.

Last year, two Americans filed suit claiming they were tortured following accusations of illegal activities by their company. A Chicago federal judge allowed them to hold Rumsfeld personally responsible for the torture. The 7th Circuit is expected to rule on the case soon.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | 3 Comments

Shop and Shoot

By Linh Dinh – State of the Union – 8/3/11

We are being ruled by thespians and gangsters. Far from incompetent, they are lethally good at what they do. They create crisis after crisis, then solve each by sacrificing countless innocents while enriching themselves. Whatever the challenge, domestic or international, their only goals are to gorge and to gouge, so they never fail, actually, even when they miscalculate. They’ll make money blowing things up, and they’ll make even more pretending to fix what they have destroyed. They never pay for their mistakes, only you do, and when they function perfectly, you will still pick up the check, if not bleed. In fact, you will pay even more if they’re in top form.

During this never ending public spectacle, they’ve introduced us to a cast of rather outlandish characters: a stuttering Texas idiot; a fist bumping, long range shooting and Harvard educated Muslim Commie; a blow job-loving burger clown. Splitting into opposing camps, they’ve climbed into a ring to perform for the whole world. In the front row, a mob of rightish and leftish pundits. These ad-peddling charlatans have parsed each choke slamming and brain busting move as if it was real. Thus, Obama tapped out on canvas. Thus, Obama steam rolled by Republicans. Thus, Obama’s bad bargain. Obama caved in. He’s no criminal, he’s weak. Thus, Obama surrendered.

Those who don’t swallow entire these farcical blow by blows are branded nutcases and conspiracy theorists. Whether it’s about 9/11, Bin Laden, Iraq, Afghanistan, War on Terror, Iran, Underwear Bomber, BP oil spill, Corexit, Libya, death of Bin Laden, on and on and on, the official narrative is always, and I mean always, nonsense, yet repeated often enough, from all angles, left, right and center, these clumsy fairy tales will coalesce in the brainpans of the inattentive or stupid as uncontestable truths and history.

In spite of all the recent bombast about fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice, the wasteful wars continue, though few Americans can tell you why or even where we’re unleashing horror, hatred and sorrow. America must kill because wars are so lucrative. No other country has been fighting so continuously, for so long. Anham, a Northern Virginia company, has just been busted for charging the Pentagon $900 for a $7 control switch, $3,000 for a $100 circuit breaker, and $80 for a $1.41 piece of plumbing equipment. Blah, blah, blah. Tell me something new, why don’t you? And Lockheed Martin has just been given a $72 million contract to install those universally despised irradiating scanners at 300 U.S. airports.

Meanwhile, one in six Americans is on food stamps, and more and more Americans are losing jobs, including teachers, firemen and cops, as unemployed and deranged teens run wild in “flash mobs” to beat up random strangers. It has happened repeatedly in Philadelphia, my neck of the woods, as well as Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Boston, Brooklyn, South Orange and Greensboro. There are racial and class components to this phenomenon, as these wilding youngsters are invariably poor blacks converging on white shopping districts. In the latest episode, an 11-year-old Philly kid was arrested for assaulting a stranger.

With these mobs, all the pathologies of a post-industrial, post productive society, with its dead-end jobs, bad schools and a nonstop, stupefying media, are on full display. Another factor not often cited is the phenomenon of children being raised almost exclusively by strangers, practically right after birth, and the poorer the kids, the crappier the quality of daycare and subsequent schooling. How many times have you seen black women push strollers with well dressed white children, so the rich kids are pampered by their parents and nannies, while the poor ones are left alone in nightmarish neighborhoods. Also, when your government is so openly corrupt, anger is inevitable, although punching a stranger in the face is certainly not a solution. The biggest criminals are out of sight, leaving us bottom feeders to inflict pain on each other.

In any struggle, it’s important to know the nature of your enemy. Is he a klutz, prone to a goofy mistake now and then, or does he have murder on his mind? Again, we are being lorded over by a gang of criminals. War criminals.

For two years, there was a military entertainment complex inside a Philadelphia area shopping mall. At the Army Experience Center, young teens could play shoot them up, blood splattering video games for free, while those over 18 could climb into a realistic mockup of a tank or chopper to massacre bad guys in desert settings, also for free. An advertisement: SHOP FOR SOCKS. GRAB A BITE. PILOT AN AH-64 ATTACK HELICOPTER. After receiving 40,000 visitors and enlisting 236 recruits, the Army decided to shut down this 13-million dollar facility on July of 2010, “It’s been a great success. Basically it’s mission accomplished.”

Though it had planned on opening more of these centers, the Army soon realized there was no longer a need. Thanks to the Mother of All Depressions and rapidly increasing unemployment, desperate Americans are flocking to recruitment stations even without the promise of a free video game. It’s a win, win situation for our military industrial complex: destroy the economy, and Americans will enlist. They will beg to be blown up.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Economics, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | 2 Comments

Meet Debbie Schlussel, who says Norway’s ‘HAMAS Youth’ got what was coming to them

By Paul Mutter | Mondoweiss | August 5, 2011

One of Pamela Geller’s cohorts, Debbie Schlussel, has explicitly stated that those killed at Utoya got what was coming to them because they were “HAMAS Youth” and (at the same time) “Fatah PLO” terrorists.

Schlussel may not be as well-known as Geller (perhaps because Schlussel has not exercised a leading role in anything as prominent as the “Ground Zero Mosque” furor), but she is a politically active Republican and more mainstream than Geller because she is also a culture writer with a strong media presence. (Not that she separates this work from her anti-Islamic campaign – she has criticized the film industry for not doing enough to portray Islam “correctly”).

Her opinion on the Norway terror attacks can be summed up with these quotes taken from her ongoing screeds against the terror victims:

“Based on these pics, seems like he’s [Glenn Beck’s] spot on, though he should have added, HAMAS Youth camp, too. As we all know, Nazis boycotted Jews and were Jew-killers. And these hateful, privileged brats at the camp boycotted Jews and sided with Jew-killers.

But what goes around comes around. You support terrorists against innocent civilians in Israel, then you get attacked by terrorists who are upset with your support . . . .

Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik . . . .

I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.”

Far stronger words than Geller was willing to use. But they are par for the course as far as Schlussel is concerned.

Her prominence derives from her utility to the male conservative-dominated anti-Islamic movement. The fact that she is a woman (and also the daughter of Holocaust survivors) speaking out against Islam gives greater credence to an ideological group whose most well-known speakers are white Christian males like Newt Gingrich, Geert Wilders and Pat Robertson (the movement is, as a whole, dominated by sociopolitically conservative men, although many are not Christians).

Gingrich and Robertson, for instance, denounce Islamic attitudes towards women, while still being hostile to “feminism” under the cloak of “family values.” Having women on their anti-Islamic bandwagon helps prove their “point” about Islamic backwardness and their moral righteousness, which is a combination of faux-progressivism (treating Geller and Schlussel as intellectual co-equals) and paternalism (evoking Orientalist images of rapacious Muslim brutes). A similar logic animates the GOP embrace of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Michele Bachmann. Schlussel and Geller, among others, are useful for the right (while at the same time, they castigate individuals on the left for being Islam’s “useful idiots”).

But back to Schlussel’s own anti-Islamic agenda. Before this most recent denunciation of insufficiently Zionist individuals, she famously responded to Osama bin Laden’s death by quipping “1 down, 1.8 billion to go.” When a family of West Bank settlers were murdered earlier this year, she approvingly quoted PM Netanyahu’s son’s remarks that “terror has a religion and it is Islam” and “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 2 Comments

Occupation profiteer Ahava soaks up EU science grants

By David Cronin – The Electronic Intifada – 08/05/2011

Not for the first time, the European Union is in denial about how it is subsidizing Israel’s crimes.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s commissioner for scientific research, recently acknowledged that the cosmetics-maker Ahava was allocated more than €1 million worth of innovation grants from the Union over a period stretching from 1998 to 2013. Giving even one cent to Ahava involves facilitating breaches of international law because of the firm’s unlawful activities in the West Bank.

As Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t appear to recognize this problem, she would be well-advised to read a report, issued in May, by the human rights organization B’Tselem. It highlights how Ahava is partly owned by two Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land: Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya. Both of those settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.

Responding to a parliamentary question, Geoghegan-Quinn effectively conceded that some of Ahava’s EU-funded research may have been undertaken in the West Bank. While Ahava is “formally established within the borders of the internationally recognized state of Israel”, she said, beneficiaries of EU grants are not required to carry out the related research in the place of establishment.

I would alert Geoghegan-Quinn to two salient facts:

  1. The rules covering EU science grants stipulate that projects which violate “fundamental ethical principles” are ineligible for funding. Carrying out research in one or more illegal settlements must surely violate such principles.
  2. Ahava may be able to give its offices in Holon or Airport City, industrial zones near Tel Aviv, as an address for its headquarters when applying for Euro-lolly. Yet its core manufacturing activities are conducted in Mitzpe Shalem. If Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t believe me on this, I urge her to take a trip to the settlement, where she will no doubt be given a warm welcome to Ahava’s official visitors’ centre.

There are other questions about why any of my tax euros should be going to a private cosmetics firm. A glance at Cordis, the EU’s database on its science grants, shows that in one of the projects concerned, Ahava has teamed up with the US Department of the Interior. The objective of this scheme is to assess what impact tiny toxins (nanoparticles, as boffins call them) can have on the environment.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I never had the impression that the Department of the Interior spent too much time worrying about trees and dolphins. So what is the real agenda here?

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Illegal Occupation | 1 Comment

Exactly How Big Is This So-Called Al Qaeda?

Sibel Edmonds | Boiling Frogs | August 5, 2011
tankcamel
Massive Perpetual Wars against Fantastical Terrorists

For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.

For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.

For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?

We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities.  We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:

Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.

Let’s first begin by engaging in a rational process of elimination, and take out the wars and targets that are not related to the 9/11 terrorists, the supposed Al-Qaeda. That will take out Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and also Libya and Gaddafi.

Next, we should take out Afghanistan as a terrorist nation state. Afghanistan has been under our occupation for almost ten years, and we have our puppet government installed there, and when it comes down to it, the Taliban does not equate to Al-Qaeda, it never did. The Taliban did not exercise terrorism in the United States or its Global territories.

We must also remove Pakistan as a terrorist country, thus a nation state target. If you remember, neither the quasi 9/11 Congressional Inquiry nor the quasi 9/11 Commission Report ever declared the Pakistani government/nation as terrorists or an Al-Qaeda member. Let us go with their official judgment. After all, haven’t we been giving Pakistan billions of dollars in US aid since 9/11 and continuing to date? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to on one hand categorize our drone war there as war against Pakistan as a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and on the other hand support and finance them? Exactly; that eliminates Pakistan as an Al-Qaeda nation-government. Are you with me so far? What does this leave us with?

Our war on Al-Qaeda terror does not include a single nation state or organized state military. No military infrastructure or headquarters. No trained army-navy-air force. No tanks, warplanes, nuclear warheads, drones. No intelligence institutions or landmarks. No communication satellites. No technology. No borders. No GDP…

The supposed Al Qaeda’s top leadership was declared by our government to be Osama Bin Laden, aka Al Qaeda Commander in Chief; a sickly old man who was hooked to a dialysis machine; who supposedly lived and hid in caves, and later, in a mud house located in a remote third world village with chickens and goats. A man who sustained himself and his family by periodically selling his wives jewelry or bartering milk from his goats for occasional lamb chops. All this according to our own government; coming out in bits and pieces, and of course, sometimes in a totally contradictory fashion.

The supposed Al-Qaeda network’s communication and intelligence sharing infrastructure, according to our government, was kept very simple to evade our trillion-dollar intelligence institutions. The Al-Qaeda commander-in-Chief wrote down notes and instructions. He then waited for the courier to come and pick it up. The old man courier would hop on a donkey and travel from a bigger town to the Commander-in-Chief’s mud house in a third world village. This sometimes took several days. He’d take the note, then hop on his donkey, and go back to the town where he’d meet another intermediary courier. The intermediary courier would take the note to a nondescript little house, climb up to the roof where he kept trained courier pigeons and hawks, and based on the importance of the communication given to him, he’d either choose a hawk or pigeon to send the intelligence to the next courier. The next one used couriers who traveled to the remote deserts by camels, and so on and so forth.

How about the sophistication of weapons-methods used by our target terrorists, the ominous Al Qaeda? We are talking about a dozen or so pocket knives priced at approximately $4 a piece (probably made in China), and of course if bought in bulk, for a total under $40. That for the supposed execution of the massive terror plot over here, in the world’s super power nation. As for other worldwide terror incidents that have been placed under the  ‘Al Qaeda Track Record,’  we are talking about rudimentary bomb-making ability paired up with ultra simple bombs created by ingredients such as fertilizer; we are talking a few loads of cow dung here; literally, that is.

What about the size of the manpower these terrorists, Al-Qaeda, possess? Interestingly no one in our government has ever touched upon any scientific or even commonsensical estimate as to the number of active-combative Al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, our government, through their stenographers in the media and their marketing arm in the Hollywood filmmaking industry, has succeeded in forming this public perception of a massive number of boogieman-Al Qaeda-terrorists out there who are actively and constantly planning and executing terror plots against the West.  Thus, to get a certain level of rational perception we must look at some factual indicators:

We have had this $3 trillion ‘War on Al Qaeda Terror’ for the last 10 years with nearly a quarter million military members, thousands and thousands of intelligence operatives and analysts, highly sophisticated and gigantic intelligence gathering tools (Think NSA, satellite technologies, wiretaps, spooks and snitches), mega rewards for turning in Al-Qaeda members …You’d think in ten years of these constant war and intelligence gathering operations we’d have tens of thousands of captured Al-Qaeda terrorists in our jails here and abroad. No?

Interestingly ‘No.’ Let’s take a look at the mother of all our captive top Al Qaeda terrorists detention center; Guantanamo Bay:

Since October 7, 2001, when began the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Of these, most have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries. The Department of Defense often referred to these prisoners as the “worst of the worst”, but a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants … GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Currently we have less than 200 detainees at Guantanamo most of whom have not been proven guilty of being ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’ Let’s be even more generous and count in those detained in other US military prisons like Bagram. Again, we are looking at 500 or so prisoners none of whom having ever been charged; none of whom legally found to be an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Now please put all these facts in perspective: Ten long years of continuous wars, trillions of dollars, 250,000 military personnel, billions of dollars worth of intelligence gathering institutions and capabilities, millions of dollars set in rewards for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a supposed network with supposed  Al Qaeda active terrorist members in very large numbers. Yet we have less than 1000 detained who have been accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists, and none ever proven to be an active Al Qaeda terrorist member.

Does this make sense to you? Does it make sense as far as the trillions of dollars you have been made to pay for this? What are we talking about here? A massive never-ending war against a fantastical network of technologically and militaristically dwarfed terrorists whose proven guilty members we haven’t been able to catch or kill.

Everyone is busy arguing whether we should cut or add a few billion dollars to the several trillion dollars war on Al Qaeda. People keep talking about which country we should be getting out of, or, how many more countries we should get into to fight against terrorist Al Qaeda. No one is asking what Al Qaeda is or who really these supposed Al Qaeda terrorists are. The question that never seems to come up is exactly how big is this Al Qaeda we are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting against. I mean no one.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 2 Comments

US troops kill Iraqi child and policeman

Press TV – August 5, 2011

Local officials in Iraq have said that US troops in the country have killed an Iraqi child as well as a policeman in the Salahuddin province north of Baghdad.

Officials say the two were killed during an apparent mistaken raid.

Reports on further causalities remain sketchy so far, Press TV reported.

The US-led military invasion in Iraq that began in 2003 has so far led to over a million ‘violent deaths’ among Iraqi citizens, according to a study by the British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB).

Further, Washington continues to exert pressure on Baghdad to extend US military presence in Iraq.

Some reports have suggested that senior Iraqi politicians have agreed to negotiate a US military training mission in an effort to extend their stay in the country beyond the 2011 deadline despite a surging public opposition.

Washington, however, is obligated to withdraw its forces by the end of 2011 in line with the 2008 US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

The agreement also forced Washington to end its combat operations in Iraq in August 2010.

Despite American insistence that it no longer engages in combat operations in Iraq, there have been numerous reports of US troop engagements in military actions in the war-torn country.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Leave a comment

3 Palestinians, including a child wounded in Israeli occupation airstrikes

Palestine Information Center – 05/08/2011

GAZA — Three Palestinians, including a child, were wounded in one of five airstrikes carried out by the Israeli occupation airforce at dawn Friday against various targets in the Gaza Strip.

Adham Abu Selmeyyah, spokesman for the emergency services in Gaza said in a statement on Friday morning that three Palestinians, including a child were wounded when an Israeli occupation airstrike targeted an open area in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.

He added that the three were taken to the Kamal Adwan hospital and that two of them lost lower limbs.

The Israeli occupation airforce carried out 4 other airstrikes against targets in the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in the central and southern Gaza Strip, but no casualties were reported.

Local sources told PIC correspondent that occupation aircraft fired two rockets at a chicken farm to the east of Deir al-Balah before targeting resistance training grounds to the west of the town.

Meanwhile, sources in Khan Younis said that occupation aircraft targeted a container used as mobile accommodation to the west of Asda’a Media City.

The sources added that occupation tanks fired artillery shells at agricultural fields to the east of Qara town, in Khan Younis district.

Abu Selmeyyah said in the statement that the airstrikes on Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah did not result in human casualties, adding that the air raids cause a lot of distress to the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

British secret policy on torture unveiled

Press TV – August 5, 2011

Secret British policy discloses intelligence officers could get information from tortured prisoners.

A top-secret document has confirmed that British intelligence officers were allowed to get information from detainees who were being illegally tortured overseas.

The British government has been part of the torture policy for almost a decade, trying to repress the document, making a series of false statements. The document showed how the UK government allowed MI6 and MI5 to be involved in torture and then cover up that involvement.

The interrogation policy, which is claimed to be sensitive and therefore cannot be made public at the government inquiry into the UK’s role in torture and rendition, instructed high-ranking intelligence officers to “weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer,” the document read.

A copy of the secret policy demonstrated that British ministers and intelligence officers worried that the revelation of the secret document would put public safety at risk, adding the disclosure would also damage the reputation of the UK agencies.

“If the possibility exists that information will be or has been obtained through the mistreatment of detainees, the negative consequences may include any potential adverse effects on national security if the fact of the agency seeking or accepting information in those circumstances were to be publicly revealed.

“For instance, it is possible that in some circumstances such a revelation could result in further radicalisation, leading to an increase in the threat from terrorism,” one section read.

Human rights groups and lawyers have strongly opposed the decision that the interrogation of policy document and other similar secret papers would not be made public at the inquiry into the country’s involvement in torture and rendition.

Ten human rights groups, including Liberty, Reprieve, and Amnesty International expressed their refusal to give evidence or participate in the hearings, as the inquiry does not have “credibility or transparency,” and it’s arrangements are “secretive, unfair and deeply flawed.”

The inquiry led by Sir Peter Gibson, a retired judge, would begin after police investigation into torture accusations are completed.

This is while that, there is no evidence that the UK intelligence was directly involved in torturing the prisoners, because the intelligence officers left jails when the torture sessions began and returned only after the prisoners were physically abused.

In the case of Zeeshan Siddiqui, a British national suspected of having links with al-Qaeda who was captured by Pakistani officials in 2005, Human Rights Watch revealed that Siddiqui “reported being repeatedly beaten, chained, injected with drugs and threatened with further torture and sexual abuse.” He insisted that after being tortured, British intelligence officers began his investigation.

Human Rights Watch also takes the case of Salahuddin Amin as an example. Amin, also a British citizen, accused of plotting attacks on UK targets, was “repeatedly tortured by Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and forced into a laundry list of false confessions”.

While he was being tortured he “was met by British intelligence officials on almost half a dozen occasions. He would be tortured, then forced back to his cell to do ‘homework,’ wherein he would provide a written confession at ISI instruction, then meet British interrogators the next day, who would ask questions on the same subjects. If the ISI felt his answers to the British agents were unsatisfactory, he would be told that he had embarrassed them ‘in front of our friends’ and be punished with further torture,” Amin said.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment