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Unchecked Arms Trade Fuelling Conflict, Poverty

October 13, 2008

UNITED NATIONS – With 1.3 trillion dollars spent every year on the world’s militaries, countries enmeshed in conflict are often flooded by weapons which are then turned against helpless civilian populations, say human rights organisations pushing for an international treaty to closely regulate arms sales.

[With 1.3 trillion dollars spent every year on the world's militaries, countries enmeshed in conflict are often flooded by weapons which are then turned against helpless civilian populations, say human rights organisations pushing for an international treaty to closely regulate arms sales.]With 1.3 trillion dollars spent every year on the world’s militaries, countries enmeshed in conflict are often flooded by weapons which are then turned against helpless civilian populations, say human rights organisations pushing for an international treaty to closely regulate arms sales.

“If a country is likely to be involved in warfare, then it is unjustifiable to sell arms. There must be regulation or control of arms — especially when the countries that are buying them are involved in a conflict,” Valentino Deng told IPS in an interview.Deng’s experiences formed the basis of Dave Eggers’s recent novel “What is the What”, which fictionalises the story of his life as a refugee of the Sudanese civil war. When Deng’s village was attacked and burnt down, he was separated from his family and fled on foot with a group of other young boys. On the journey to a refugee camp in Kenya, they encountered great danger and terrible hardships.

“I saw people being killed by aerial bombings and I saw villages burnt to ashes,” he told IPS. “I witnessed one of the incidents when a mother was killed and her young child was trying to breastfeed on the dead mother. At that time, I was wondering about one thing: who was supplying all these arms for war and conflict?”

The U.N. peacekeeping force’s former commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, General Patrick Cammaert, saw firsthand the futility of disarmament without controlling the supply of arms at the same time. “You had the feeling,” he said last year, “that you were mopping up the floor when the tap was open. One moment you disarm a group, and then a week later the same group has fresh arms and ammunition.”

A new report by Oxfam International reveals how irresponsible arms transfers undermine many developing countries’ chances of achieveing their development goals. Either these transfers are draining the governments’ resources or fuelling armed conflict, or both.

The international arms trade is also considered to be one of the three most corrupt businesses in the world, according to Transparency International, the leading global organisation monitoring corruption.

“What is clear is that if you want to achieve the development goals, with poverty reduction, improved health care and education, you need to control arms transfers, ” said Katherine Nightingale, author of the Oxfam report.

At least 22 of the 34 countries least likely to achieve the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals are in the midst of, or emerging from conflict, according to U.N. statistics. Oxfam notes that between 1990 and 2005, 23 African countries together lost an estimated 284 billion dollars as a result of armed conflicts, fuelled by transfers of ammunition and arms — 95 percent of which came from outside Africa.

An investigative report by Amnesty International last month found that clandestine gun suppliers, funded by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, have flooded Iraq with a million weapons since 2003.

Because of faulty or non-existent government tracking systems, many of those guns have gone missing, and some have turned up in the hands of insurgents, Amnesty said.

According to the Oxfam report, a comprehensive and effective international arms trade treaty must be agreed to ensure more responsibility and transparency. Existing international initiatives like the Geneva Declaration to address armed violence are simply insufficient, it says.

“In parts of Africa there are strong regional agreements. But this is not enough. Arms trade is a global industry. We want a global arms trade treaty to ensure that states are hold accountable for the processes of procuring arms. International regulations are far behind in this aspect, ” Nightingale told IPS.

Worldwide support for a global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) was reflected when 153 states voted in favour during the United Nations General Assembly in December 2006. And later this month, U.N. member states will meet again to consider further steps to move towards negotiations on an ATT.

In the run-up to these discussions, a few states, including China, India, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia and the United States, have been attempting to block, delay and water down proposals, advocates say. This could kill the treaty before real negotiations even begin and allow continued unchecked trade in arms, human rights organisations fear.

Amnesty International, Oxfam, and others are now calling for the General Assembly to start a negotiating process during 2009 so that the international community can benefit from a legally-binding and universal Arms Trade Treaty by the end of 2010.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

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Amnesty accuses Spain of allowing CIA flights to Guantanamo

October 12, 2008

RINF.COM, Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Madrid – The human rights group Amnesty International (AI) on Wednesday accused the Spanish government of not having tried to prevent US flights transporting terrorist suspects to illegal detention centres across Spanish airspace.

At least 90 flights linked to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made stopovers at 15 Spanish airports, mainly on the Canary Islands, between 2002 and 2007, the Spanish section of AI said in a report.

About 200 people were taken to the US prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, on flights that took off from US military bases in Spain or crossed the Spanish airspace, AI charged.

The group urged the government to cooperate with an ongoing judicial investigation into the flights.

Other European countries allowed similar flights, AI conceded.

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Iran: End pressure on women’s rights defenders

September 2, 2008

Amnesty International, August 27, 2008

Women police beat peaceful demonstrators in Tehran, June 2006

Women police beat peaceful demonstrators in Tehran, June 2006

© Arash Ashoorinia

On the second anniversary of the launch of the Campaign for Equality on 27 August, Amnesty International is renewing its demand that the Iranian authorities cease harassing and imprisoning women’s rights defenders and to restrict their campaigning activities for the repeal of laws and policies which discriminate against women in Iran.

The Campaign for Equality is a network of individuals working to end legal discrimination against women. The campaign informs women of their rights, and is aiming to collect one million signatures from the Iranian public to a petition against discriminatory laws.

Two years into the campaign, women’s rights defenders are facing increasing repression as they try to take their demands for equal treatment to the broader population while the authorities continue to impose restrictions on their use of public space to carry out their peaceful and legal activities.

There are also worrying developments that seem to be further entrenching discrimination against women in Iran. In particular, a new Family Protection Bill passed in July by the Law and Legal Affairs Committee of Iran’s parliament not only fails to address discrimination against women in relation to marriage, divorce and child custody but, if passed into law, would also lift the condition requiring a man to get the permission of his first wife before taking a second wife. The bill still needs further parliamentary approval and to be agreed by the Council of Guardians, but it represents a very worrying trend.

Amnesty International is urging the Iranian government and parliament not to entrench discrimination but to move ahead with a package of reforms in order to end those laws and practices which continue to discriminate against women, who make up half of the population of Iran, and to deny them access to their human rights. Amnesty International is also urging the Iranian government to ratify, without reservation, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and to bring Iran’s laws and practices into conformity with this Convention.

Since the launch of the Campaign, Amnesty International has collected information on the harassment of the Campaign for Equality activists. They face threatening phone calls by persons identifying themselves as Ministry of Intelligence officers warning them not to hold planned meetings; they are prevented from organizing peaceful meetings or demonstrations and to date, the website of Campaign for Equality has been blocked on at least 11 occasions and filtering has extended to local sites of the campaign in several Iranian provinces.

Some campaigners have been sentenced or are facing charges for their peaceful campaigning for women’s rights and Amnesty International calls for such charges to be dropped and for their immediate and unconditional release of those serving prison sentences.

Amir Yaghoub-Ali was sentenced in May 2008 to one year’s imprisonment for collecting signatures in Daneshjou Park, Tehran in July 2007. He is currently free pending the outcome of an appeal against his conviction and sentence.

In June 2008 Hana Abdi, a member of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and member of the Campaign in Kordestan province and of the Azad Mehr NGO was sentenced to the maximum five years’ imprisonment, to be spent in internal exile after conviction of “gathering and colluding to commit a crime against national security.” Hana Abdi was summoned to the Prosecutors Office in August 2008 and was cautioned about passing news outside prison, if she does so she would be further charged with “propaganda against the state”.

Zeynab Bayzeydi, another Kurdish women’s rights activist was sentenced in August 2008 to four years’ imprisonment, and internal exile on account of her activities in support of women’s rights, which she has denied, except the one arising from her work on the Campaign for Equality.

Women’s rights defenders in Iran describe a climate of increasing repression and restrictions on public space for them to carry out their peaceful, legal activities.

In an interview with Amnesty international, Sussan Tahmasebi a founding member of the Campaign for Equality explained:

“We are forced to hold our meetings, trainings and seminars in our homes, but the security forces have worked hard to prevent us from even holding meetings in our own homes, meetings have been broken up and members have been arrested.”

“Nearly 50 were arrested and charged with vague security charges, such as endangering national security, or spreading of propaganda against the state.”

In the year of the 10th Anniversary of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which affirms the protection of human rights defenders from violence or threats as a result of their work, Amnesty International is urging the Iranian authorities both to protect human rights defenders and value the work they do. The organization is also calling for the immediate release of all prisoners of conscience, including activists in the Campaign for Equality who are currently detained.

Read More

Iran: End pressure on women’s rights defenders campaigning for an end to discrimination (Public Statment, 27 August 2008)

Iran: Women’s rights defenders defy repression (News, 28 February 2008)

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RIGHTS: Treaty Languishes on State Terror

September 1, 2008

By Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 30 (IPS) – They have vanished, but are not forgotten. Whether they have been killed or are being kept in secret, dark, and unknown prisons, their relatives, family members and human rights activists want to know.

In marking the 25th International Day of the Disappeared on Aug. 30, rights activists in a number of countries across the world are holding rallies and sit-ins to press their governments for immediate ratification of the U.N. Convention against Enforced Disappearance.

The 2006 treaty was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in December 2006. It has been signed by 73 nations, but not ratified. So far, only four countries — Albania, Argentina, Mexico and Honduras — have ratified it.

“Enforced disappearance”, according to the treaty, is the “arrest, detention, abduction by agents of the state or by persons, groups or persons acting with the authorisation, support or acquiescence of the state, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.”

The treaty contains an absolute prohibition on forced disappearances in both peacetime and wartime, and enshrines measures such as the registration of detainees, their right of access to a court and the right to contact their lawyers and families.

Recently, the U.N. Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances reported over 41,000 pending cases across 78 countries. Since its creation in 1980, the Geneva-based group has submitted more than 50,000 individual cases to governments in more than 90 countries.

According to the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International, the worst national statistics referred to the Working Group last year were in Sri Lanka, where 5,516 people are currently registered as disappeared, and 30 new urgent action cases were identified in relation to alleged disappearances.

The Working Group and the Day of the Disappeared started at a time of mass disappearances during authoritarian rule in Latin America. Experts on international human rights laws note that today, disappearances tend to occur in nations suffering from internal conflict.

The group has documented a number of cases. To cite an example, Jorge Alberto Rosal Paz “disappeared” in Guatemala on Aug. 12, 1983. The 28-year-old agronomist was kidnapped by armed military personnel in a jeep, while driving between Teculutan and Zacapa. He was never seen again.

When he “disappeared”, Jorge Rosal was married and had a daughter. His wife was expecting their second child. It is believed he had no political or religious affiliations. Despite reported sightings of him in detention after his kidnapping, the Guatemalan authorities denied all knowledge of what had happened.

According to Amnesty International, Jorge’s family took his case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In 2000, the Guatemalan government issued a statement acknowledging its institutional responsibility in Jorge Rosal’s case and others. In 2004, a settlement was reached between the state and Jorge Rosal’s family.

The rights group says in the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of people have become victims of enforced disappearances around the world. Their family members and friends are still left without any knowledge of their fate.

The Day of the Disappeared was started in 1983 by the Latin American non-governmental organisation FEDEFAM (Federación Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos) at a time when disappearances arose from authoritarian governance by military rulers.

But, as human rights researchers point out, enforced disappearances are taking place in all parts of the world. In September 2006, U.S. President George W Bush publicly acknowledged that the CIA was running prolonged incommunicado detention in secret locations. This practice has involved governments around the world.

Those being held in secret locations have no clue about where they are and what is going to happen to them. It is feared that most of them are at risk of torture and death. Bush reauthorised the programme in 2007.

After the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in Iraq in February 2004, the Bush administration ordered a number of investigations and reviews of its detention and interrogation practices.

The leaked reports of the probe by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba and Maj. Gen. George Fay, among others, documented the existence of so-called “ghost detainees,” who were held in secret and moved around the prisons where they were being held to hide them from visits by Red Cross members.

In scrutinising the Bush policy on secret detentions, the Amnesty International identifies Pakistan as one of the chief collaborators. The rights group says that in that country there are many cases of enforced disappearances linked to the so-called U.S. war on terror.

The group also points to Iraq as another major source of concern regarding the issue of enforced disappearances. The Asian Federation against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) says this Saturday, family members of the disappeared will gather in Baghdad to give public testimonies of what occurred to their relatives.

“Aug. 30 is very important for the families of the disappeared,” said Mary Aileen Bacalso, the secretary-general of AFAD. “It is the day wherein the families can collectively honour their memory. It is an insistence of their moral and spiritual presence despite their physical absence.”

Events are being organised in more than 20 countries to pay respect to disappeared persons as well as to campaign for the new convention on enforced disappearances. Among those countries are Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, Nigeria, Morocco, Belarus, France, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and Spain.

(END/2008)

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The Dark Side Of The “Free World”

August 31, 2008


By Rob Gowland | Information Clearing House

The book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, published in mid-July, is written by US journalist Jane Mayer, whose specialty is writing about counter-­terrorism for The New Yorker.

The book has particularly peeved the CIA and its boss in the White House for, apparently, Ms Mayer has had access to a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross issued last year labelling the CIA’s interrogation methods for “high-level Qaeda prisoners” as “categorically” torture. In consequence, the Bush administration officials who approved these methods would be guilty of war crimes.

The book says the Red Cross report was shared with the CIA, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It would not be the first time of course that US authorities (civil, intelligence or military) have indulged in or turned a blind eye to torture or other forms of horrifying brutality.

One thinks of their blood-soaked activities to thwart the former Communist Resistance leaders from gaining political power in Western Europe after WW2, or their even more bloody destruction of democracy in Guatemala or Chile, El Salvador and pre-Castro Cuba.

The many atrocities by US forces in Korea and Vietnam were far too numerous to be the work of “rotten apples”; they were clearly the result of US government and military policy, just like the actions of the US military in charge of the Abu Graib prison in Iraq.

A society that bases itself on force and brutality, on state terrorism, while simultaneously indulging in the most hypocritical lip-service to the ideals of humaneness and justice, cannot but find excuses for torture.

Only last year or the year before, Amnesty International — an organisation not noted for being hostile to the USA — stated that the procedures in many US civilian jails amounted to torture. Military prisons operated by the US in other countries must surely be hell on earth.

Red Cross representatives were only permitted to interview high-level “terrorist” detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Until then, while the prisoners were being “interrogated” in the CIA’s secret prisons, the Red Cross was not given access to them.

It is now well known that these secret prisons are located in US client states, some in Eastern Europe where anti-Communist regimes are all too willing to co-operate with their US backers, and some in states like Egypt that are equally dependent on US support. Significantly, they all practice torture.

We have all seen the images from Guantánamo Bay of prisoners, shackled and manacled, stumbling along with a guard on either side. But all the time, the particularly frightening threat hangs over them of being taken from there and returned to one of the secret prisons away from any prying eyes.

In testimony to the Red Cross, Abu Zubaydah, the first major Al Qaeda figure the United States captured, told how he was confined in a box “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the foetal position” and was one of several prisoners to be “slammed against the walls”.

The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were water-boarded, a form of torture in which water is poured in the nose and mouth of the victim to simulate the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

The Pentagon and the CIA have both defended water-boarding on the same grounds: “because it works”, the torturer’s classic justification. Jane Mayer’s book says Abu Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he had been water-boarded at least ten times in a single week and as many as three times in a day.

The Red Cross report says that another high level prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the attacks of September 11, 2001, told them that he had been kept naked for more than a month and claimed that he had been “kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room”.

A New York Times article on the report says the prisoners considered the “most excruciating” of the methods was being shackled to the ceiling and being forced to stand for as long as eight hours. This is a well-known torture technique that has severe physical effects on the victim’s body.

According to The New York Times article, eleven of the 14 prisoners reported to the Red Cross that they had suffered prolonged sleep deprivation, including “bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds 24 hours a day”.

The New York Times reported that a CIA spokesman had confirmed that Red Cross workers had been “granted access to the detained terrorists at Guantánamo and heard their claims”.

The same CIA spokesman said the agency’s interrogations were based on “detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice” and had “produced solid information that has contributed directly to the disruption of terrorist activities”. There’s that justification of torture again.

Bernard Barrett of the International Committee of the Red Cross declined to comment on the book when asked by The New York Times. He did not deny any of the book’s claims, but regretted “that any information has been attributed to us” because, it seems, the International Committee of the Red Cross “believes its work is more effective when confidential”!

He went on to say: “We have an ongoing confidential dialogue with members of the US intelligence community, and we would share any observations or recommendations with them.”

So that’s OK then.

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U.K. Government Must Provide Information About Rendition, Disappearance and Torture, Urges Amnesty International

August 30, 2008

CommonDreams.0rg

WASHINGTON – August 29 – Amnesty International today called on the government of the U.K. to give the lawyers for Binyam Mohamed, a former U.K. resident imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, information which it holds and which might help him to show that he has been a victim of torture and other ill-treatment in the U.S.-led program of renditions and secret detention.

“Providing this information would be a first step towards accountability for the U.K.’s involvement in the U.S. program of rendition and secret detention, as well as in the torture and other ill-treatment of terrorist suspects,” said Halya Gowan, a spokesperson on Europe at Amnesty International.

Binyam Mohamed was arrested at Karachi airport in April 2002 and transferred to U.S. custody three months later. In July 2002, he was transferred on a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-registered plane to Morocco, where he was held for about 18 months. There, Binyam Mohamed reports he was tortured, including having his penis cut by a razor blade. He was allegedly subjected to further torture after his further rendition to the “dark prison” in Kabul, Afghanistan, in January 2004. After five months, he was transferred to the U.S. airbase in Bagram, and suffered further alleged ill-treatment there. Binyam was transferred in mid-September 2004 to Guantanamo where he has remained ever since.

“Statements that Binyam Mohamed made in the course of his unlawful detention will form the basis of charges against him if he is tried before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay – a trial which would be unfair, and could involve charges which could be punishable by death. Any information the U.K. authorities have which relates to violations of his human rights or could affect Binyam Mohamed’s defense should be disclosed to his lawyers without any further delay,” said Gowan.

Following last week’s ruling by the High Court of England and Wales, that the United Kingdom has a duty to disclose this information to lawyers for Binyam Mohamed, today the High Court postponed its decision on an application made by the U.K. Foreign Secretary to be allowed to withhold this information. The Foreign Secretary claimed that its disclosure would damage the U.K.’s intelligence-sharing arrangements with the United States, and thus threaten the United Kingdom’s national security. The Foreign Secretary has been given another week to provide the court with a fuller explanation for continuing to withhold this information.

Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers need the information now, before a decision is taken about whether he should be tried by a military commission in the United States. It is essential to their claim that the information on which the charges against him are based was improperly obtained.

Recent revelations of secret detainee transfers through Diego Garcia, and around the Untied Kingdom’s involvement in the rendition and secret detention of U.K .residents Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna, show that the United Kingdom can no longer hide its involvement in these human rights violations.

“Secrecy with the excuse of protecting diplomatic relations can no longer be used to justify the failure to investigate the involvement of U.K. agents in human rights violations,” Gowan said.

Amnesty International calls on the U.K. authorities to immediately instigate a genuinely independent and impartial public inquiry into all allegations of U.K. involvement in the renditions program.

BACKGROUND

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, claims that he was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The detainee claims that statements he made–which, as the High Court affirmed, will form the basis of evidence against him if he is tried by a military commission -were the products of his unlawful detention, torture and ill-treatment.

In August 2007, after a sustained campaign by human rights activists and lawyers in the United Kingdom, the U.K. government requested the release from Guantanamo Bay a number of former U.K. residents, including Binyam Mohamed. Although three men were returned in December 2007, the U.S. authorities refused the request for the release and return of Binyam Mohamed. The U.K. authorities say that they are continuing to request the release and return of Binyam Mohamed.

The U.K. government has disclosed the information that it holds about Binyam Mohamed to the U.S. authorities; and the U.S. authorities have given the U.K. a promise that this information will be given to Binyam Mohamed’s military lawyer in the event that his case should be sent for trial before a military commission. But to date neither the United Kingdom nor the United States has disclosed that information–relevant to the rendition of Binyam Mohamed and his subsequent treatment in detention–to his lawyers.

Amnesty International believes that the military commission procedures at Guantanamo Bay are fundamentally unfair, and has called for the military commission system to be abandoned, and for all those still held at Guantanamo Bay to be released or given a genuinely fair trial before federal civilian courts without delay.

For more information, please visit Amnesty International’s website at www.amnestyusa.org or contact the AIUSA media office.

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Denying the undeniable: Enforced disappearances in Pakistan

August 3, 2008

© Amnesty International.”Amina Masood Janjua holding the photo of her “disappeared” husband in September 2006.

Amina Masood Janjua holding the photo of her “disappeared” husband in September 2006.

© Amnesty International.

>Protests against enforced disappearances, Pakistan

Protests against enforced disappearances, Pakistan

© Private

Amnesty International, July 22, 2008

“For us relief is only when our loved one is safe and sound standing freed before us. […] I believe that my husband Masood is held only three kilometres from my home, yet he continues to suffer unknown ill-treatment and we, his wife, his children and his very old parents cannot even see him. They [the new government] must act now to bring them back immediately.”
– Amina Masood Janjua, July 2008

The last time Amina Masood Janjua saw her husband, Masood Janjua, was on 30 July 2005 when he left home to meet his friend Faisal Faraz. Pakistani security forces apprehended both men on that day while on a bus journey to another city.

Since then, Pakistan’s government has been holding them in secret without charge or trial, repeatedly denying any knowledge of their whereabouts despite eyewitness testimony as to their detention.

Masood Janjua and Faisal Faraz are among hundreds of victims of enforced disappearance in Pakistan, including children as young as nine and ten years old. Many of them were detained after the attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, their detentions justified in the name of the US-led “war on terror”.

The practice, rare before 2001, then spread to activists involved in pushing for greater ethnic or regional rights, including Baloch and Sindhis.

Despite undeniable evidence, the government of President Pervez Musharraf consistently denied subjecting anyone to enforced disappearances.

In the report Denying the undeniable, enforced disappearances in Pakistan, Amnesty International uses official court records and affidavits of victims and witnesses of enforced disappearances to confront the Pakistani authorities with evidence of how government officials obstructed attempts to trace those who have “disappeared.”

New government brings opportunity for change
The report urges the newly elected government of Pakistan – which has pledged to improve Pakistan’s human rights record – to end the policy of denial, investigate all cases of enforced disappearance and hold those responsible to account.

“By holding people in secret detention the government of Pakistan has not only violated their rights, but also failed in its duty to charge and try those suspected of involvement in attacks on civilians”, said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific director.

Crucially, Pakistan’s new government must reinstate deposed judges who had previously been investigating disappearance cases and were deposed by President Pervez Musharraf when he imposed a state of emergency in the country in November 2007.

Complicity of other governments
The report also calls on other governments – most notably the USA – to ensure that they are not complicit in and do not contribute to or tolerate the practice of enforced disappearance in Pakistan.

Many of those unlawfully held at the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, and those who have been held in secret CIA custody were arrested in Pakistan. Others were unlawfully transferred from Pakistan to countries where they faced torture and other ill treatment.

Many people who have been secretly held in detention centres in Pakistan say they were interrogated by Pakistani intelligence agencies, but also by foreign intelligence agents.

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US ‘held suspects on British territory in 2006’

August 3, 2008

Terrorist suspects were held by the United States on the British territory of Diego Garcia as recently as 2006, according to senior intelligence sources. The claims, which undermine Foreign Office denials that the archipelago in the Indian Ocean has been used as a so-called ‘black site’ to facilitate extraordinary rendition, threaten to cause a diplomatic incident.

The government has repeatedly accepted US assurances that Diego Garcia has not been used to hold high-ranking members of al-Qaeda who have been flown to secret interrogation centres around the world in ‘ghost’ planes hired by the CIA. Interrogation techniques used on suspects are said to include ‘waterboarding’, a simulated drowning that Amnesty International claims is a form of torture. But now the government’s denials over Diego Garcia’s role in extraordinary rendition are crumbling. Senior American intelligence sources have claimed that the US has been holding terrorist suspects on the British territory as recently as two years ago.

The former intelligence officers unofficially told senior Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón that Mustafa Setmarian, a Spanish-based Syrian accused of running terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, was taken to Diego Garcia in late 2005 and held there for months. The Spanish are trying to locate and arrest Setmarian for separate terrorist offences.

It is thought that more than 10 high-ranking detainees have been held on Diego Garcia or on a US navy vessel within its harbour since 2002. The suggestion, if true, is acutely embarrassing for the British government which has admitted only that planes carrying al-Qaeda suspects landed on Diego Garcia on two occasions in 2002.

However, a former senior American official familiar with conversations in the White House has also told Time magazine that in the same year Diego Garcia was used to hold and interrogate at least one terrorist suspect.

The Council of Europe has also raised concerns that the UK territory has been used to house detainees. Earlier this year Manfred Novak, the United Nations special investigator on torture, told The Observer he had talked to detainees who had been held on the archipelago in 2002, but declined to name them.

The human rights group Reprieve said it believes most of high-level detainees captured by the US have been rendered through Diego Garcia at one time or another. These include Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi accused of being one of al-Qaeda’s top strategists, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly the mastermind behind 9/11.

‘We are confident high-value prisoners have been held on Diego Garcia for interrogation and possible torture,’ said a Reprieve spokeswoman. ‘We now have sources from the CIA, the UN, the Council of Europe and a Spanish judge who will confirm this.’

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Amnesty claims its website is being blocked

July 29, 2008

RINF.COM, July 28, 2008

JOURNALISTS working from the Olympics press centre in Beijing are unable to access amnesty.org, the Amnesty International website, the organisation claimed today.

A number of other websites are also reported to have been blocked, they claimed.

It comes as Amnesty International prepares to launch a new report evaluating the Chinese authorities’ human rights performance in the run-up to the Olympics.

It is embarrassing to the International Olympic Committee, who had highlighted the loosening of restrictions on foreign media in China as an example of an improvement in human rights brought about by the hosting of the Olympics.

Earlier this month Jaques Rogge, the IOC President, had claimed that “there will be no censorship on the internet.”

“The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises” is due to be published online today at 21:00 GMT, Tuesday 29 July at 05:00am Hong Kong time.

It is the follow-up to “China: The Olympics Countdown: Crackdown on Activists Threatens Olympic Legacy” which was released in April this year, the new report claims to show that there has still been little progress towards fulfilling the Chinese authorities’ promise to improve human rights, but rather continued deterioration in key areas.

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Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?

July 27, 2008


By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, July 25, 2008

“On October 21,1948 the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs.”
– Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History


I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.

Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: “I am a Zionist.” Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.

Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.

Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.

Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer’s recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel’s opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: “The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality.”

Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history’s great killers, disputed the facts: “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

Golda Meir’s apology for Israel’s great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na’im Ateek’s description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.

In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.

In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.

The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as “visitors in their own city.”

Continued . . .

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