Peace and Justice Post

 TwoCircles.Net,  April 22, 2011

Sanjiv Bhatt’s affidavit: main points

I am filing this affidavit to bring on record certain aspects concerning the enquiry/investigation being conducted by the Special Investigation Team (SIT), appointed by this Hon’ble Court.

I am a Post-Graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. After completing my post-graduation, I joined the Indian Police Service (IPS) in 1988 and was allotted to the Gujarat cadre.

I was posted as the Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence, State Intelligence Bureau, Gandhinagar, from December 1999 to September 2002. This was the post I was occupying at the time when the 2002 Gujarat Riots took place.

I respectfully state that owing to the post I was occupying in the State Intelligence Bureau, I came across huge amounts of intelligence and information pertaining to the events that had transpired prior to, as well as during the Gujarat Riots of 2002.

“Many serious incidents of communal violence, including the carnage at Gulberg Society, could have been easily prevented by firm and determined action on part of the Police.” [TCN Photo]On Narendra Modi:

The information and documentary evidence, which I have already shared with the SIT, can throw light on the real nature of events that led to the incident of burning of the S-6 Coach of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra on 27th February 2002 and the larger conspiracy and official orchestration behind the subsequent Gujarat Riots of 2002.

On being summoned by SIT for the first time in November 2009, I had provided the SIT with certain relevant information and documents, including original floppy discs containing the entire cell phone/cell-site records of Godhra Town for 26th and 27th February 2002; as well as the original print-outs of very important call records of certain high-ranking functionaries of the State for 27th and 28th February 2002.

I was present at the meeting called by the Chief Minister on the late night on 27.2.2002 and was personally aware about the instructions given thereat and the events that transpired thereafter. I had also provided the SIT with verifiable details regarding the on-going cover up operation; including the contemporaneous efforts made by high official of the State administration to undermine the proceedings of Writ Petition (Civil) No. 221 of 2002., which was pending before this Hon’ble Court in 2002.

Upon my request, the SIT provided me with a relevant portion of the transcript of my testimony, pertaining to the instructions given by the Chief Minister, at the conclusion of meeting helf on 27-02-200, where it was tried to impress upon him that the decision to bring the dead bodies to Ahmedabad and the BJP announcement of the supporting the VHP Bandh Call would definitely lead to outbreak of communal violence in Ahmedabad and across the state; and the Gujarat police did not have the manpower resources to deal with such a situation. The relevant portion of the transcript of my testimony, as recorded and provided to me by SIT, read as follow.

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AP – In this photo released by Inter Services Public Relations, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff …

ISLAMABAD – U.S. drones fired a volley of missiles into a militant-held Pakistani region close to the Afghan border on Friday, killing 25 people, Pakistani intelligence officials said. The strike came a day after Pakistan’s army chief denounced such attacks, and could further sour deteriorating relations between Washington and Islamabad.

Ten missiles hit a house in Spinwam village in North Waziristan, a region home to Taliban militants targeting American and NATO troops just across the border in Afghanistan, as well as international al-Qaida terrorists, three intelligence officials said.

Three children and two women were believed to be among the dead, they said. There was no way to immediately independently confirm that.

America has been regularly firing missiles into the border region for 2 1/2 years now, but does not formally acknowledge the CIA-run program. U.S. officials rarely comment on specific strikes but have said in general terms that they accurately hit militants.

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By Colum Lynch, The Washington Post, Thursday, April 21, 2011

Eranga Jayawardena/ AP – Sri Lankans walk past a billboard on President Mahinda Rajapaksa and a campaign slogans for people to join the protest against the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s expert panel proposals on the country’s civil war, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Thursday, April 21, 2011.

BBC News, April 22, 2011

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Amateur video purportedly showing large protests across the country

Protesters in Syria have reported 60 people killed by security forces – the highest death toll in five weeks of unrest against President Assad.

Demonstrators were shot when they gathered following Friday prayers, a day after the country’s decades-long state of emergency was lifted.

Many of the deaths reportedly occurred in the village of Ezra and in the Douma suburb of the capital, Damascus.

At least 260 people are said to have died since unrest began last month.

Protesters across the country chanted for the overthrow of the regime, Reuters news agency reported.

President Bashar al-Assad’s lifting of the emergency had been seen as a concession to them.

In their first joint statement since the protests broke out, activists co-ordinating the mass demonstrations demanded the establishment of a democratic political system.

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By Rupert Cornwell in Washington, The Independent, Apr 21, 2011

GETTY IMAGES

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has been a high-profile critic of Bradley Manning’s treatment

By Paul Bignell, The Independent, April 19, 2011

Reuters

A British Army soldier investigates a large fire near Basra’s Shuiba refinery

by Richard Falk, Foreign Policy Journal, April 22, 2011

Ever since it first struck the raw nerve of Israeli political consciousness, I thought it misleading to associate the Goldstone Report so exclusively with its chair, Judge Richard Goldstone. After all, despite his deserved prominence as an international jurist, he was the least qualified substantively of the four members of the mission. Undoubtedly, part of the intensely hostile Israeli reaction of their highest political leaders had to do with the sense that Goldstone as a devoted Zionist had been guilty of betrayal, even of ‘a blood libel’ against the Jewish people, because he seemed to be elevating his fidelity to the ‘law’ above that of tribal loyalties, and according to Tel Aviv he should never have been mixed up with such a suspect entity as the UN Human Rights Council in the first place.

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By Dolores Cox , Workers World, April 21, 2011

Mumia Abu-Jamal

It has been almost 30 years since the case of the internationally renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal officially opened in December 1981. In April 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Abu-Jamal’s appeal and returned it to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mumia Abu-Jamal now has a new legal team led by Christina Swarns, director of the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund; and Judith Ritter, professor and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Widener University Law School in Wilmington, Del. They will be directing their defense strategy to not only fight reinstatement of Mumia’s death penalty but also overturn his conviction.

On April 3 in New York City supporters and human rights activists gathered at the historic Riverside Church to meet and honor the new lawyers. The event was moderated by Suzanne Ross of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), with the room filled to capacity. The gathering was also video-streamed live worldwide.

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The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces — coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S. cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the dictatorship, in Madison towards defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called “the most strategically important area in the world” — “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment,” in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the U.S. intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding New World Order of that day.

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Desperate emails speak of ‘genocide’ as doctors who have treated injured protesters are rounded up

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, The Independent, Apr 21, 2011

EPA

Medical staff of the Salmaniya Medical Complex rush a victim of the clashes between security forces and opposition protesters to the hospital in Manama, Bahrain

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