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US torture claims are unreliable: British lawmakers

July 20, 2008

Khaleej Times, July 19, 2008

(AFP)

LONDON – The British government should no longer accept US assurances that it does not use torture, a parliamentary oversight committee said on Sunday in a wide-ranging report looking at London’s human rights policy.

Ministers have previously taken at face value statements from their US counterparts, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, that Washington does not resort to such practices.

But the cross-party foreign affairs committee said that stance should be abandoned given admissions from the US director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, that “water-boarding” had been used on terror suspects.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told parliament on two occasions this year that the practice, which simulates drowning during interrogation, amounts to torture.

Miliband’s position has “serious implications” for government policy, the committee said in its 214-page Human Rights Annual Report 2007-8.

“We conclude that, given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future,” it added.

Britain is a signatory to a United Nations convention that prevents the extradition of suspects to countries where torture is used. If adopted, a change in approach could affect such transfers.

The committee also called for Britain to carry out an “exhaustive analysis” of US government interrogation techniques and seek guarantees about whether US flights carrying terror suspects used British airspace or airports.

Earlier this year, the United States admitted that two “rendition” flights landed on Diego Garcia, a British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean where there is a US air base.

Britain, whose policy is not to allow such transfers where there is a risk of torture, had earlier accepted assurances that its territory had not been used for the extra-judicial transfer of suspected extremists.

Such flights should not use British territory or airspace, even if no detainees were on board, the committee said.

Elsewhere, the committee urged an investigation into claims that six British nationals were detained and tortured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and interrogated by British security agents.

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Stephen Harper, Bush’s Last Yes Man?

July 16, 2008

Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

By ROBERT FANTINA | Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, 12 / 13 July, 2008

During the administration of Tony Blair as Prime Minister of Britain, he was sometimes referred to as the ‘Yankee Poodle,’ due to the constant and humiliating spectacle he made of himself with his obvious adoration of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Now, it seems, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has assumed Mr. Blair’s role. In no way is this more blatant than the shocking, tragic case of Omar Khadr.

Mr. Khadr is one of the inmates in the Cuban-based U.S. torture chamber known as Guantanamo. He arrived there from Afghanistan, where he was captured by U.S. soldiers in a house from which a hand grenade had been flung, killing a U.S. soldier. At the time of his capture and incarceration in that hell-hole, the American government evidently believed him to be an ‘enemy combatant.’ When captured, Mr. Khadr was fifteen years old.

It was apparently of no importance to Mr. Bush that Mr. Khadr was a minor at the time of his arrest, that at least one other ‘enemy’ soldier was alive in the building when Mr. Khadr was captured, thus making it at least ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that Mr. Khadr was guilty of throwing the grenade. Nor did it seem to matter that most nations believe children cannot be guilty of military crimes because they are not sufficiently cognizant to understand what joining the military means. It was enough for Mr. Bush that Toronto-born Mr. Khadr was fighting the U.S. in Afghanistan, and that his father is alleged to have helped finance al-Qaeda.

This week Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department detailed the torture that Mr. Khadr, a Canadian citizen, has received at the hands of the U.S. government. While it is no longer news that the U.S. tortures its prisoners, the Harper government’s response to this horrific victimization of one of its own citizens is news. Mr. Harper, when asked about the situation, demonstrated nothing but loyalty to Mr. Bush.

“The previous government took a whole range, all of the information, into account when they made the decision on how to proceed with the Khadr case several years ago,” said Mr. Harper. Like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the decision to crucify Jesus Christ, Mr. Harper said the decision to allow Mr. Khadr to be tortured was made by someone else. That may be the case, but Mr. Harper is now Prime Minister, and he can make a different decision.

What would it take, one might ask, to get Mr. Khadr released from Guantanamo and returned to Canada? What complex diplomatic channels would have to be navigated, what hoops jumped through, what concessions made by Canada? University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran has the answer: a single telephone call. Said Mr. Attaran:

“Without exception, every other leader of a Western country has got their citizens out of Guantanamo.”

So why does Mr. Harper not make that call? Why, when Mr. Bush ‘Yo Harper’d’ him at the G8 Summit this past week did he not request Mr. Khadr’s release? What is so frightening about a now-21-year-old young man who has experienced six years of unspeakable torture that Mr. Harper is willing to let him continue to suffer beyond comprehension at the hands of U.S. torturers? Why has every other Western nation rescued their citizens from Guantanamo, but Mr. Harper is content to let a citizen of his nation be tortured there?

Continued . . .

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Want to know if waterboarding is torture? Ask Christopher Hitchens

July 15, 2008
By Jon Henley and You Tube Video

Axis of Logic, July 7, 2008, 23:35

Editor’s Note: If this was the “water-boarding” experience of Christopher Hitchens after a minute or two, we can only imagine the torture to which prisoners are subjected to when “water-boarding” is conducted by US military thugs who are trained to hate Muslims and whose handiwork is not being video-taped. – Les Blough, Editor

Late last year, the writer, polemicist and fierce proponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq Christopher Hitchens attempted, in a piece for the online magazine Slate, to draw a distinction between what he called techniques of “extreme interrogation” and “outright torture”.

From this, his foes inferred that since it was Hitchens’ belief that America did not stoop to the latter, the practice of waterboarding – known to be perpetrated by US forces against certain “high-value clients” in Iraq and elsewhere – must fall under the former heading.

Enraged by what they saw as an exercise in elegant but offensive sophistry, some of the writer’s critics suggested that Hitchens give waterboarding (which may sound like some kind of fun aquatic pastime, but is probably best summarised as enforced partial drowning) a whirl, just to see what it was like. Did the experience feel like torture?

And amazingly, he has done just that. In August’s edition of Vanity Fair, you can read all about it, and see more photographs of the “wheezing, paunchy, 59-year-old scribbler”, his head hooded, being subjected to this most terrifying of ordeals by veterans of the US Special Forces.

So what did it feel like? Hitchens recounts how he was lashed tightly to a sloping board, then, “on top of the hood, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose … I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and – as you might expect – inhale in turn.”

That, he says, “brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, flooded more with sheer panic than with water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal” and felt the “unbelievable relief” of being pulled upright.

The “official lie” about waterboarding, Hitchens says, is that it “simulates the feeling of drowning”. In fact, “you are drowning – or rather, being drowned”.

He rehearses the intellectual arguments, both for (“It’s nothing compared to what they do to us”) and against (“It opens a door that can’t be closed”). But the Hitch’s thoroughly empirical conclusion is simple. As Vanity Fair’s title puts it: “Believe me, it’s torture.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/02/humanrights.usa

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RIGHTS: Ten Years On, Some Step Towards Justice

July 15, 2008

By Irene de Vette

ROTTERDAM, Jul 15 (IPS) – Human rights organisations all over the world will celebrate the tenth anniversary Jul. 17 of the adoption of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC is the first and only permanent international criminal tribunal to prosecute individuals accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“Our hope is that, by punishing the guilty, the International Criminal Court will bring some comfort to the surviving victims and to the communities that have been targeted,” then Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan said on the historic day in 1998. “More important, we hope it will deter future war criminals, and bring nearer the day when no ruler, no state, no junta and no army anywhere will be able to abuse human rights with impunity.”

After the Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago put the establishment of a permanent criminal tribunal, a wish that had long existed among the international community, back on the agenda. While ad-hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda were established, a Statute was drafted in 1994 and then adopted in 1998 as the Statute of Rome. It went into effect Jul. 1, 2002, when the required 60 states had ratified it. To date, there are 106 ratifications. Some countries have not signed, among them the United States, China, India and Israel.

Early July of this year, former Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba was transferred from Belgium to the ICC in The Hague, the Netherlands, to face multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Central African Republic. On Jul. 14, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo requested the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in connection with the ongoing violence in the Darfur region.

Continued . . .

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Marine’s graphic interview describes killing of prisoners in Iraq

July 12, 2008

Sgt. Jermaine Nelson, in a tape-recorded interview, says he and a fellow sergeant were ordered to kill the prisoners during a sweep through a Fallouja neighborhood in 2004.

By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2008

CAMP PENDLETON — A graphic, vulgarity-laced interview in which a Marine described how he and two other Marines killed four unarmed prisoners in Iraq was played today during a preliminary hearing in the case.

Sgt. Jermaine Nelson, in a tape-recorded interview with a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent, said he and Sgt. Ryan Weemer were ordered by Sgt. Jose Nazario to kill the prisoners as the Marines swept through a neighborhood in Fallouja in late 2004.

Several minutes of the tape were played at the hearing for Weemer, who faces murder and dereliction of duty charges. Nelson faces similar charges, and Nazario faces manslaughter charges in federal court in Riverside.

Nelson told the investigator that Nazario told him, “I’m not doing all this [expletive] by myself. You’re doing one and Weemer is doing one.”

Nelson said that he watched in shock as Nazario shot a kneeling prisoner at point-blank range: “He hit the dude in the forehead, the dude went down and there was blood . . . all over his [Nazario’s] boots.”

Weemer then used his service pistol to shoot one of the prisoners, Nelson said. “He shot him and the dude was on the ground and rolling and [Weemer] was shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting.”

The case began when Weemer, who had left the Marine Corps, told a job interviewer from the Secret Service about the killings. The Marine Corps recalled him to active-duty so he could be charged.

Nelson and Weemer, in their interviews, said that Nazario ordered the killings after getting a radio message from a superior that ordered the Marines not to take time to process the prisoners according to the rules. The Marines were needed to support other Marines sweeping through the insurgent-held city, Weemer said in his interview.

A hearing officer, at the conclusion of the preliminary hearing, will recommend to Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland whether the case should go to court martial, be dropped or be handled through an administrative procedure.

After seeing Weemer and Nazario shot prisoners, Nelson said he lost his reluctance to join in the killings. “I said [expletive] and I shot my dude.”

Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times

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Bosnia remembers Srebrenica victims

July 12, 2008
Al Jazeera, July 11, 2008

Relatives of the massacre victims
are still seeking justice [AFP]

Some 30,000 Muslims from across Bosnia have gathered to remember the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and bury the remains of more than 300 newly identified victims.

The funeral ceremony for the 308 Muslims, who were among 8,000 killed in Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II, was held at a memorial site just outside the eastern town.

The remains of the victims, aged between 15 and 84, were exhumed from mass graves after the end of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war and identified by DNA analysis.

“It was so hard when they informed me that my father has been identified,”Vanesa Mehmedovic, who is to bury her father Mevludin, said.

“However, since he is not with us in a way, I’m glad that his soul will finally find peace,” she said.

Symbolic march

Almost 220 buses ferrying around 10,000 people converged on Srebrenica, while many more arrrived in other vehicles, organisers said.

The commemoration was held amid fears of possible anti-Muslim violence due to Bosnian Serb anger with a UN court’s decision last week to clear Naser Oric, the former commander of Muslim forces in Srebrenica, of war crimes.

Refik Dervisevic, a massacre survivor, arrived in Srebrenica late Thursday after taking part in a 100-kilometre “March of Peace”.

Some 2,000 people participated in the symbolic march from the village of Nezuk, near the eastern town of Tuzla, to Srebrenica, the route taken by many Muslims seeking to flee Serb forces.

“This is the third time that I am taking part in the march,” Dervisevic said.

“The first time I did not remember anything. I was just walking being haunted by thoughts.

“Last year I remembered the details from July 1995. I saw the place where I separated from my brother who was killed.”

So far some 2,900 Srebrenica victims have been buried at the memorial built in 2003.

Thousands of others are yet to be exhumed and identified in the area, where around 70 mass graves have been uncovered.

Act of genocide

Near the end of Bosnia’s war, Serb forces overran the then UN-protected enclave summarily killing some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The International court of justice and the UN war crimes tribunal, both based in The Hague, have ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide.

The alleged masterminds, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, are still at large.

“It’s a shame that 13 years after what has happened in Srebrenica and after the end of the war, Karadzic and Mladic are not arrested,” the Dnevni Avaz daily newspaper quoted John Williamson, the US war crimes ambassador, as saying.

“We will continue to urge the leaders in the region to do everything they can to make fugitives face justice and I’m sure that they will be arrested,” Williamson, who also attended the commemoration., said.

His words were echoed by the victims’ relatives.

“We are still fighting to prove to the world what has happened here while those who are the most responsible for the crime are being rewarded with freedom,” Munira Subasic, head of an association of Srebrenica mothers, said.

Srebrenica remains a part of the Serb-run entity of Republika Srpska, which along with the Muslim-Croat Federation makes up post-war Bosnia.

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This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe

July 11, 2008

Italy’s campaign against the Roma has ominous echoes of its fascist past, and the silence of our leaders is deafening

At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race – with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi’s new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies – Roma and Sinti people – whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.

The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy’s highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies were thieves”, rather than because of their “Gypsy nature”.

Continued . . .

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‘This is like apartheid’: ANC veterans visit West Bank

July 11, 2008

By Donald Macintyre in Hebron | The Independent, Friday, 11 July 2008

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Veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle said last night that the segregation endured by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories was in some respects worse than that imposed on the black majority under white rule in South Africa.

Members of a 23-strong human-rights team of prominent South Africans cited the impact of the Israeli military’s separation barrier, checkpoints, the permit system for Palestinian travel, and the extent to which Palestinians are barred from using roads in the West Bank.

After a five-day visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, some delegates expressed shock and dismay at conditions in the Israeli-controlled heart of Hebron. Uniquely among West Bank cities, 800 settlers now live there and segregation has seen the closure of nearly 3,000 Palestinian businesses and housing units. Palestinian cars (and in some sections pedestrians) are prohibited from using the once busy streets.

“Even with the system of permits, even with the limits of movement to South Africa, we never had as much restriction on movement as I see for the people here,” said an ANC parliamentarian, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge of the West Bank. “There are areas in which people would live their whole lifetime without visiting because it’s impossible.”

Continued . . .

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The FBI’s plan to “profile” Muslims

July 10, 2008

It’s unconstitutional, un-American — and it might hurt, rather than help, the FBI’s effort to stop real acts of terror.

By Juan Cole | salon.com, July 10, 2008


Opinion

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask “open-ended questions” concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person’s travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation.

The rumored changes have provoked protests from Muslim American and Arab-American groups. The Council on American Islamic Relations, among the more effective lobbies for Muslim Americans’ civil liberties, immediately denounced the plan, as did James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute. Said Zogby, “There are millions of Americans who, under the reported new parameters, could become subject to arbitrary and subjective ethnic and religious profiling.” Zogby, who noted that the Bush administration’s history with profiling is not reassuring, warned that all Americans would suffer from a weakening of civil liberties.

Continued . . .

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One out of five Iraqis is a refugee, U.N. says

July 10, 2008

Jawad Ghanim, Azzaman | uruknet.info, July 9, 2008

iraqi_refugees.syr.iraqborder.jpg


An international conference on the plight of Iraqis displaced in the years since the U.S. invasion says there is little hope at the end of the tunnel for millions of Iraqi refugees.

The conference organized by the Ministry of Immigration and attended by U.N. Refugee Agency estimated that about five million Iraqis are now refugees out of a population of more than 25 million.

Conference experts said more than 1 million Iraqis had fled the country in the four decades of the rule of former leader Saddam Hussein and his Baath party.

But the exodus surged in the violent years that followed the U.S. invasion of 2003.

Some experts described Iraq as “a nation on the move” with millions of Iraqis relocated by force.

They spoke of armies of internally displaced Iraqis – refugees in their own country – and highlighted the plight of millions who opted to leave to neighboring states.

The return of relative calm to violent areas like Baghdad for example was good news, the experts said.

But they added the government was doing almost nothing to help those willing to return.

When families escape a neighborhood, their property is not protected.

Many of those returning find their houses occupied by other families or turned into offices or barracks by rival militias.

A government decision calling on the security forces to compel individuals and political factions to evacuate property not belonging to them remains ink on paper.

The conferees found that despite public claims to the contrary the government has failed to honor commitments to help Iraqi refugees inside and outside Iraq.

The government had allocated nearly $2 billion for refugees but experts charged there was no sign that the money had reached the beneficiaries.

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