Two senior British judges accused the U.S. of threatening to stop sharing intelligence with Britain if the British Government released details of the extraordinary rendition of British citizen, Binyam Mohamed.
Why?
Perhaps this explains it:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqBFY0xxAIQ&feature=channel_page[/youtube]
So, while a few die hard “24” fans — and Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey — might still claim confusion about waterboarding being torture, nearly everyone else would agree that having your penis sliced with razors once a month IS torture.
According to the close-the-barn-door-late theory, should official confirmation of this behavior escape the U.S. establishment cone of silence, it would be a PR disaster. That, not the perennial whine of “National Security,” is the source of the pressure the British Judges felt.
There is a lot of smoke around the L.A. Times article suggesting Barak Obama’s Executive Order ending extraordinary renditions was bogus.
But even if Mr. Obama did end the extraordinary brand of renditions, according to a Democracy Now! interview with Michael Rattner of The Center for Constitutional Rights, there is still a hole big enough to drive tour busses full of victims into the Gulag.
Will this be another big disappointment like Mr. Obama’s plans to double the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan — and his authorization of Predator drone strikes on the tribal people of Pakistan? And will we meet other Binyam Mohameds in the future, this time created by the Obama Administration?
These things AREN’T done to gain information.
They ARE done to radicalize Arabs.
Both Sayyid Qutb, one of the leading members of The Muslim Brotherhood and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of The World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (erroneously referred to by the MSM and it’s parrots as Al-Qaeda) were both subjected to very similar treatment for years… and then released once they snapped and became radical.
So was the war against Afghanistan,kiddnapping people and rendering them to be tortured,the so amy seceret prisons and gulags the US built.From Bargham base prison:The plight of prisoner No. 650 (Dr. Afia Siddiqui),Guantanamo Bay detention camp,Abu Ghraib,and so may others.So the US would always be in constant conflicts with the Arabs and Muslims which serves Israel and its supporters very well.
“AMP Report – August 10, 2008
The plight of prisoner No. 650 (Dr. Afia Siddiqui)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
After intensive civil rights groups pressure and angry protests in Pakistan, the US authorities have formally acknowledged arresting Dr. Afia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist, five years after her mysterious disappearance in Karachi with her three teen age kids.
On August 5, the FBI suddenly produced Dr. Siddiqui in a New York court to charge her with possessing documents including recipes for explosives and chemical weapons and description of New York land marks plus firing two shots at a US army captain which, very conveniently, missed.
But the story of the circumstances, the timing and the place from where she had been picked up that the Americans purveyed for the world to believe hardly sounds credible.
According to the charge sheet, Dr Siddiqui was loitering outside the compound of Ghazni Governor in Afghanistan on July 17 this year when she was taken into custody and had in her possession numerous documents on making explosives, chemical weapons and other weapons involving biological material and neurological agents. Then while under detention at the notorious Bagram airbase cell she shot at American officials after getting hold of a rifle of one of them.
Tellingly, the story of the Afghan police in Ghazni contradicts the FBI charge sheet. The Afghan police said officers searched Siddiqui after reports of her suspicious behavior and found maps of Ghazni, including one of the governor’s house, and arrested her along with a teenage boy. US troops requested the woman be handed over to them but the police refused. US soldiers then disarmed the Afghan police, at which point Siddiqui approached the Americans complaining of mistreatment by the police. The US troops thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.
According to the New York Times, the United States intelligence agencies have said that she had links to at least 2 of the 14 men suspected of being high-level members of Al Qaeda who were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006. The charges against her, however, do not appear to be related to those allegations, but to her assault on the Americans who were about to question her.
The hearing cleared up none of the mysteries that have surrounded Ms. Siddiqui’s case since she disappeared with her three children while visiting her parents’ home in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2003.
Her mysterious disappearance story
Dr. Afia Siddiqui left her mother’s house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Karachi, Sindh province, along with her three children, in a Metro-cab on March 30, 2003 to catch a flight for Rawalpindi, but never reached the airport. The press reports claimed that Dr. Afia had been picked-up by Pakistani intelligence agencies while on her way to the airport and initial reports suggested that she was handed over to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). At the time of her arrest she was 30 years and the mother of three sons the oldest of which was four and the youngest only one month. (Still there is no news about her three children.)
A few days later an American news channel, NBC, reported that Afia had been arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of facilitating money transfers for terror networks of Osama Bin Laden. A Monthly English magazine of Karachi in a special coverage on Dr. Afia reported that one week after her disappearance, a plain clothed intelligence went to her mother’s house and warned her, “We know that you are connected to higher-ups but do not make an issue out of your daughter’s disappearance.” According to the report the mother was threatened her with ‘dire consequences’ if she made a fuss.
Dr. Afia Siddiqui, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, for about 10 years and did her PhD in genetics, returned to Pakistan in 2002. Having failed to get a suitable job, she again visited the US on a valid visa in February 2003 to search for a job and to submit an application to the US immigration authorities. She moved there freely and came back to Karachi by the end of February 2003 after renting a post office box in her name in Maryland for the receipt of her mail. It has been claimed by the FBI (Newsweek International, June 23, 2003, issue) that the box was hired for one Mr Majid Khan, an alleged member of Al Qaeda residing in Baltimore.
Throughout March 2003 flashes of the particulars of Dr. Afia were telecast with her photo on American TV channels and radios painting her as a dangerous Al Qaeda person needed by the FBI for interrogation. On learning of the FBI campaign against her she went underground in Karachi and remained so till her kidnapping. The June 23, 2003, issue of Newsweek International was exclusively devoted to Al Qaeda. The core of the issue was an article “Al Qaeda’s Network in America”. The article has three photographs of so-called Al Qaeda members – Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Dr. Afia Siddiqui and Ali S. Al Marri of Qatar who has studied in the US like Dr. Siddiqui and had long since returned to his homeland. In this article, which has been authored by eight journalists who had access to FBI records, the only charge leveled against Dr. Afia is that “she rented a post-office box to help a former resident of Baltimore named Majid Khan (alleged Al Qaeda suspect) to help establish his US identity.
At a news conference in May 2004, US Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that the FBI was looking for seven people with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. MIT graduate and former Boston resident Aafia Siddiqui was the only woman on the list.
The prisoner No. 650 at the notorious US prison at Bargham, Afghanistan
Dr. Afia’s plight was highlighted by a British journalist and peace activist, Yvonne Ridley, who flew to Pakistan to address a press conference in Islamabad on July 7, 2008. “Today I am crying out for help, not for myself but for a Pakistani woman neither you nor I have ever met. She has been held in isolation by the Americans in Afghanistan and she needs help,†Ridley told a crowded press conference.
Ridley first learnt about the woman while reading a book by Guantanamo ex-detainee Moazzam Begg. One of the four Arabs who escaped from the infamous Bagram cell in July 2005 also told a television channel that he had heard a woman’s cries and screams in the prison but never saw her.
Ridley called her the Grey Lady of Bagram because she was almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her.”
http://www.amperspective.com/html/dr__afia_siddiqui.html
Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national and Saudi resident, was just 14 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces in October 2001, in a raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, 700 miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan.
El-Gharani’s defense lawyers charge he was treated with appalling brutality. They say that, after being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to U.S. forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier “would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.”
They claim his treatment did not improve in Guantánamo. Subjected relentlessly to racist abuse, because of the color of his skin, he was hung from his wrists on numerous occasions, and was also subjected to a regime of “enhanced” techniques to prepare him for interrogation — including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions — that clearly constitute torture.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/GITMO-S-CHILD-SOLDIERS-by-William-Fisher-090204-662.html
Why do people see war an act in a play (theatre of war) or the rights of individuals to live in peace and harmony when conflicts have been upper-most in human culture, shaping who and what we are.
Denile of –to quote a phrase “mans inhumanity to man” is inbedded in our psyche.
I don’t see America giving the native indians their land back or Australians giving the Aborigines their land.
So is there injustist in the world? yes. Do the bullies win? usually. What hope have we for the human race? Perhapes not a lot but that will not stop us trying.
The echoes in the cavern of live may make us think and ponder but it want stop it being a cavern.
I have friends who have been in war conflicts all over the world fighting for rights, ideals, freedom and the queens shilling but finished disillusioned later in live.
So whats the meaning of live then, ask monty python it’s the nearest answer yet (just a number)
The point I’m making is that it’s not one person or country that’s making the world what it is but the genetic building blocks that is humanity.
Freedom to condemn and bring to justice the people who brake the international laws are right to do so.
But let me leave you with this thought—If a nuclear bomb was planted in your country and it would kill millions and the person who put it their was captured. How far would you go to get the information you need.
Happy anti blogging
That depends…..what part of my country gets nuked?
david monaghan, I’ll give you credit you actually did a great job writing the most incomprehensible blog posting ever! I would reply if I had any idea what you were trying to say. Well good job I guess, mabey, sort of possibly.
Peace!
david monaghan says…
after thinking about israel’s history of false flags, and israeli americans’ wanting “a new pearl harbor“, and israeli desperation as they face peak oil, global warming and the imminent demise of their protector —not to mention the warnings we’re getting of more terrorist attacks, and the neocons’ yearnings for “another 9/11”…
well, considering all that, i guess it’s about time we started waterboarding perle, kristol, wolfowitz, abrams, podheretz, libby… maybe danielle pletka and meyrav wurmser, too… because we’re pretty sure israelis have planted little nukes in a few american cities.
i mean, if bibi thought 9/11 was “very good”, we have to assume that a few little nukes going off in american cities would be even better, especially seeing as how the project seems to need a little shot in the arm… at least according to these yahoos who want another 9/11.
and if the israelis havent planted little nukes in american cities, well… that’s just tough luck for the israeli american boys and girls we torture, isnt it?
not to mention the inconvenient fact that torture doesnt work..
My guess is that the next false flag op will be blamed on Iranian Americans. That way they can kill two birds with one stone, War with Iran and the internment of Muslim Americans in our nice new concentration camps. Torture doesn’t work, but the camps would we be a good place for the neo-con, zionist, murdering, anti-American scum. We have a nice one not far from where I live in Northern Michigan, It’s been nice and cold up here this year too. Sad to say but it’s much more likely to hold the innocent than the guilty.
Peace!
Well said, my arguement was one about the nature of man and a philosophical argument for living together
If you defend torture for the so called greater good of protecting your country so be it.
If you defend not getting the information at any cost and allowing the innocent to die then so be it
When difficult choices have to be made who realy wants to make them, it’s easier to blog and take the moral high ground.
You might be a neo-con,
If you defend torture to get false information and use it to kill the innocent.
If you defend torture to get a “terrorist” to say what you want them to so you can start a war.
If you defend war by saying oh well that’s just human nature let the boys have their fun.
If you kill a million innocent people and use 9/11 as an excuse.
That was fun. I’ll bet I could go on all day. Someone should do a “You might be a Zionist if” post.
Um.. Dave – first, your mangled cultural references. It was not Monty Python who reduced the meaning of life to a number, that was Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. In “Monty Python’s The Meaning of LIfe” they say “Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” I suspect you’ve either never read Adams or seen the Python movie, or if so for either, I think you need to review your sources because they are saying quite a bit more than your tortured references to them.
As to the ticking bomb nonsense – let’s take it at face value for a moment. If I’m a “terrorist” and I’ve planted a bomb big enough to blow up whatever city, killing any number of innocents – why would torture make me tell where it is? Why wouldn’t I just endure whatever you can dish out long enough to make sure the damn thing goes off? Or failing that, if I’m dedicated enough to go to all the trouble of planting a nuke – that is to say, years of planning and skulking about – and I just can’t take whatever devious torture Jack Bauer comes up with for me, why wouldn’t I just lie long enough to stall off and mislead the search until the thing explodes? Ultimately, “24” notwithstanding, the ticking nuke scenario is silly. It’s an adolescent justification for torturing people, and nothing more than that.
If I take at face value your argument (as well as I can make it out) that it’s just a fact of life and only human nature to torture or do violence, then why obey any law except physical restraint? If I want to do something and there’s no one who can stop me, why not just do it? If that question intrigues you, may I recommend for you the works of Marquis de Sade. Particularly “Juliette” if you are the religious type, or “The 120 Days of Sodom” if you are a Jack Bauer fan. I suggest these in all seriousness. “Juliette” explores morality vs religion while “120 Days..” explores morality vs criminality. Despite their reputation, these are serious books and not for the faint-hearted. You might look at Pasolini’s “Salo” if you have less time to research your fears, however it also is not for the faint-hearted. Neither is facing up to your fears, actually.
I understand that it’s easy to be frightened in these times – you seem frightened yourself. But the reality is that those who are doing the frightening are part and parcel of a power-hungry state apparatus that has far more to gain from your fear than they do from your feeling of safety and contentment.
Didn’t they show mathimatically that there are no Humans in the Universe in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? It went something like: sense there is at any one given time a finite number of Humans on Earth and an infinate amount of planets you would simply devide the number of planets (an infinate number) by the finite number of humans and it would be as close to mathimatically possible to zero as you can get.
Peace!
yeah, same difference – that anti-nihilist joker!
That’s of course if your trying to find out how many humans there are per planet in the Universe.
Marko, Douglas Adams is great I like the Monty Python series as well. Many of the Brittish comedies were fabulous. Here in the US I always thought that George Carlin and Lenny Bruce were brilliant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCmfEWDU7pQ
Peace!
Thanks for the clip Brad – nothin’ scares the powers that be more than authentic life!
That was the most bizarre and convoluted thing I have ever read on antiwar.com.
Sadistic, psychopaths. The inmates have taken over the asylum….and we’ve allowed it to happen….
Americans….they do this sort of evil in our name…..
The blowback is going to be a nightmare……
I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened.
I seriously think that the purpose of the so-called Global War on Terrorism is to create a clash of civilization. The dream of the proponents of the clash will never be fulfilled because the Muslim nations are too weak to respond.
Hyphotetical speaking,It is a right time to prove Israeli accusation that Iran not far away building a nuclear bomb, maybe(a briefcase bomb) with the help of Pakistani scientist a bit of help from Putin he is pissed off with missile shield in Poland so would it be a convenience to Jewish agent plant the bomb and one of the American city that is Jewish population is not so great(acceptable collateral damages)and easily and believable that Iran had a hand on that.With that force to USA allow Israel to attacked IRAN with the new prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Devil say that is going to happen.
Things will not get better in America until Americans take a stand. The other night, I attended a fund raiser for the local library where I live. The group leadership for some strange reason felt that any group of citizens meeting publicly needs to invoke God’s blessing on the event and that it also better make a pledge of allegiance to our flag. I stood but would not utter a word. My friend, whose courage surpasses mine, sat through the whole ordeal. Someone asked me about my behavior and expressed disgust at my brave friend. I said that when we closed Guantanamo and left Iraq/Afghanistan, I would regain my voice and, maybe, my friend would regain use of her legs.
Create hardened enemies and then provoke them to action based on the hatred created. At this point, rush in to “defend” the public and provide “security” from the enemies created by those offering the defense and security. When the chumps loosely referred to as “christians” and “citizens” fall in line, as the majority always will, the road to tyranny has been paved.
We are now on that paved road with tyranny being the terminal stop.
“One would think that the experience with the “cakewalk†in Iraq would make the US hesitant to attempt to occupy Afghanistan, an undertaking that would require the US to occupy parts of Pakistan. The US was hard pressed to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq. Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan?
One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment. Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02092009.html
Printing massive amounts of Federal Reserve Notes = hyperinflation = economic draft? Sounds about right to me. If this is the case and it’s part of the plan than we have obviously decided that it’s time to say the Hell with production. Lets just use our military to plunder. I wonder how Russia and China will take this? China could lose a billion people and still not be forced to it’s knees, and if any country has shown an ability to suffer huge losses it’s Russia. The Bear might have been hibernating but it’s waking up now.
It’s obvious that “our” Rulers love to use fear to get what they want even if they are to ignorant to even know what that is. However, they scare me a whole lot more than some terrorist. Living where I do I’m more likely to be attacked by a dangerous chipmunk than a “terrorist”. It’s time to make a stand or start stocking up, I’m finding it easier to stock up than to make a stand, but I live in the country and don’t owe the bank a dime.
Peace!
excellent points altogether, you simply won a new reader.
Such a great topic i love you ideas..