When Obama met China’s VP Xi Jinping – the US’ “human rights” lies [Globalreseach.ca]

Article’s original title: “Washington’s Insouciance Has No Rival”

by Paul Craig Roberts

Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?

According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with the Chinese leader-in-waiting.” The brave and forthright Obama didn’t let etiquette or decorum get in his way. Afterwards, Obama declared that Washington would “continue to emphasize what we believe is the importance of realizing the aspirations and rights of all people.”

Think about that for a minute. Washington is now in the second decade of murdering Muslim men, women, and children in six countries. Washington is so concerned with human rights that it drops bombs on schools, hospitals, weddings and funerals, all in order to uphold the human rights of Muslim people. You see, bombing liberates Muslim women from having to wear the burka and from male domination.

One hundred thousand, or one million, dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, a country with destroyed infrastructure, and entire cities, such as Fallujah, bombed and burnt with white phosphorus into cinders is the proper way to show concern for human rights.

Ditto for Afghanistan. And Libya.

In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia Washington’s drones bring human rights to the people.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prison sites are other places to which Washington brings human rights. Obama, who has the power to murder American citizens without due process of law, is too powerless to close Guantanamo Prison.

He is powerless to prevent himself from supplying Israel with weapons with which to murder Palestinians and Lebanese citizens to whom Obama brings human rights by vetoing every UN resolution passed against Israel for its crimes against humanity.

Instead of following Washington’s human rights lead, the evil Chinese invest in other countries, buy things from them, and sell them goods.

Has any foreign dignitary ever raised “a sensitive human rights issue” with Obama or his predecessor? How is the world so deranged that Washington can murder innocents for years on end and still profess to be the world’s defender of human rights?

How many people has China bombed, droned, and sanctioned into non-existence in the 21st century?

Will Syria and Iran be the next victims of Washington’s concern for human rights?

Nothing better illustrates the total unreality of life in the West than the fact that the entire Western world did not break out in riotous laughter over Obama’s expression of his human rights concern over China’s behavior.

Washington’s concern with human rights does not extend as far as airport security where little girls and grandmothers are sexually groped. Antiwar activists have their homes invaded, their personal possessions carried off, and a grand jury is summoned to frame them up on some terrorist charge. US soldier Bradley Manning is held for two years in violation of the US Constitution while the human rights government concocts fabricated charges to punish him for revealing a US war crime. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is harassed endlessly with the goal of bringing him into the human rights clutches of Washington. Critics of Washington’s inhumane policies are monitored and spied upon.

Washington is the worst violator of human rights in our era, and Washington has only begun.

Who will liberate Americans from Washington’s clutches?

Article link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29301

Repulsive progressive hypocrisy [Glenn Greenwald / Salon]

1) What used to be considered ‘liberal progressive’ is probably now something like neo-liberal, with the general trend of political degeneration towards the right;

2) Glenn is absolutely right about the consummate vileness of these Democrat-branded phonies; while in the US I witnessed these opportunistic parasites as they neutered and destroyed the US anti-war movement for the sole purpose of elevating the bankrupt Democrat wing to political power. – Zuo Shou

Feb 9, 2012

* Excerpted *

[Recent polls show that the "left wing" of the Democrat Party in the US overwhelmingly supports continued operation of Guantanamo Prison in Cuba, Obama's global assassination policy, and his escalating use of drones -- despite their use causing widespread death amongst innocents, including women and children.]

One of the reasons I’ve written so much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so remarkable to see…authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in the very same political movement — …progressives [sic]…

The Democratic Party owes a sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for enthusiastically embracing many of the very Terrorism policies which caused them to hurl such vehement invective at the GOP for all those years. And progressives who support the views of the majority as expressed by this poll should never be listened to again the next time they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President (it should be noted that roughly 35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose these Obama policies).

…I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus…When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has…shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving…

Full article link: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/

“US marines desecrate Afghan dead” – Urinating on corpses, documenting a war crime [World Socialist Website]

By James Cogan
13 January 2012

“…The act [of soldiers urinating on their victims] violates the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war, said Michael Newton, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. The conventions outlaw the desecration of war dead [yet there isn't even proof the corpses were combatants].

“The law of war has long made this a war crime in all circumstances during all types of conflicts – and we prosecuted people after World War II for situations like this,” Newton said…”
– from “U.S. vows investigation of incident with corpses” [USA Today]

A video published yesterday shows four US marines in Afghanistan urinating on the heads of three Afghan dead, joking among themselves as they desecrate the corpses. It will join the gallery of images that have provided a glimpse of the inhumanity and brutality with which American soldiers are led to treat the victims of US militarism — in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

A caption identifies the marines as members of “Scout Sniper Team 4” of the Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, which is based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

The 3/2 Marines were last in Afghanistan between March and September 2011, as part of the Obama administration’s “surge” of 33,000 additional US troops, and were deployed in the southern province of Helmand. At least three members of the unit were killed in Helmand in June and July last year. The weather conditions in the video suggest it was also shot during the summer months.

The video — which runs for barely 50 seconds — appears to have been consciously staged, rather than being the recording of a spontaneous act. The corpses, of men aged somewhere between 20 and 40, had been placed in a line. The marines faced the camera in a semi-circle so their desecration was obvious.

There are no AK-47s or other weapons in view that would indicate the dead Afghans were armed combatants. Instead, an overturned wheelbarrow suggests otherwise. The bare feet of one of the deceased are also visible. He had been wearing the sandals typical of a farmer, not the sneakers or boots preferred by insurgents operating in the rugged terrain of southern Afghanistan.

Coming just days after an Afghan government investigation publicly accused the US military of torturing prisoners at the detention centre at Bagram Air Base, the public revelation of more abuses by American forces has provoked fury in the Obama administration. It underscores the criminality of the entire decade-long US occupation, again exposing the official lies according to which US forces are bringing human rights and democracy to Afghanistan.

Masses of people in America and throughout the world are appalled and horrified at these events, which expose the vast gulf between the imperialist policies of the ruling class and the democratic sentiments of the population.

On Thursday, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta denounced the actions of the marines as “utterly deplorable,” vowing to investigate. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her “total dismay”. The Marine Corps pledged an exhaustive investigation to bring the culprits to account.

By mid-afternoon, a marine officer at Camp Lejeune had leaked to the media that two of the participants in the video had already been identified. The headquarters of the US and NATO occupation force issued a statement describing the desecration as “inexplicable” and as the act of a “small group of US individuals.”

Such statements have become the thoroughly predictable response of the American political and military establishment to every exposure of depraved acts on the part of US troops throughout the so-called “war on terror”. Time and time again, they have been blamed on a so-called “isolated minority”, who are supposedly not representative of the military as a whole, let alone a reflection of the character of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq themselves.

Such apologetics have been thoroughly discredited by the stream of revelations of war crimes and atrocities carried out by US or NATO forces in the Middle East.

It is barely ten months, for example, since explicit photos and video taken in 2009 and 2010 were widely published that showed American troops in Kandahar province posing with Afghan corpses and body parts. Those actions were attributed to an alleged “kill team” in the Fifth Stryker Brigade, who murdered unarmed Afghan civilians for sport and mutilated the bodies to take trophies.

The cold-blooded execution of wounded insurgents in Iraq — captured on camera during the 2004 battle for Fallujah — and the hideous abuse by US military prison guards at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 were likewise blamed on “rogue” elements.

The reality, however, is that the crimes that have been publicly exposed are only the tiniest fraction of the murderous abuse suffered by the people of Afghanistan. The occupation is a predatory operation to impose a puppet state that will serve US imperialist interests in the resource-rich region of Central Asia. Like every colonial war before it, the forces waging it have used the most debased methods in an attempt to abuse, humiliate and terrorize the civilian population into abandoning resistance to occupation.

The mentality that pervades the US military, and which is inculcated into soldiers sent to the war, is that every Afghan is a potential enemy. The determined opposition of the Afghan people to the occupation is portrayed not as the outcome of their desire for freedom from foreign domination and oppression, but of religious fanaticism and irrationality that must be forcibly suppressed.

As in previous cases of military abuse, it seems the media will publicly vilify the rank-and-file troops involved in the desecration, but abstain from any commentary — let alone criticism — of the political and military establishment that created the climate in which this abuse took place.

The primary concern of the Obama administration over the publication of the video is most likely that a backlash among the Afghan population could disrupt its efforts to open up peace talks with a faction of the insurgency loyal to Taliban leader Mullah Omar…

Excerpted by Zuo Shou

WSWS full article: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jan2012/afgh-j13.shtml

USA Today full article: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-01-12/marines-taliban-corpses/52511346/1

The World War on Democracy [Globalresearch.ca]

by John Pilger

Jan. 19, 2011

[Excerpted]

…Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. …[It] is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

[The British genocide of Diego Garcia]…has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “it never happened even while it was happening”. Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy”. Since the Second World War, the US has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.

2. Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.

3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest…extreme jihadism…was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”, the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries”, wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.

Praise the Lord for all good things …

We blew their balls into shards of dust,

Into shards of fucking dust …

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: “momentous, spine-tingling”: the Guardian. “The American future,” wrote Simon Schama, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed …” The San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist saw a spiritual “lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet”. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and provide “support to the civil authorities”. In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society”, the theft of 84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax “legally” avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, “can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism”. Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain “in order to protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers…

Full article link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28753

Guantanamo by Numbers: Close America’s Concentration Camp [ACLU]

Excellent infographic summing up the human rights travesty of Guantanamo Bay:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28594

http://www.aclu.org/national-security/guantanamo-numbers

Protests against Gitmo Prison outside the White House [Prensa Latina]

Washington, Jan 9 (Prensa Latina)

Human rights organizations staged protests on Monday outside the White House against a decade of prison in the US Naval Base of Guantánamo, Cuba.

At least one hundred people have been staging a hunger strike since January 2 and carrying out other activities to denounce the injustice in Guantánamo, Bagram (in Afghanistan) and secret US prisons worldwide, ENews Park Forest commented.

The protests are part of the campaign “Ten Years is Too Much: National Action Day to Close Guantanamo,” scheduled to end with a gathering on Wednesday, January 11, at Lafayette Park, across the White House, according to organizers.

The civic action is organized by a coalition of groups including Witnesses against Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Religious Campaign against Torture and Amnesty International, among others.

Within cages as if they were in behind bars, black-hooded people in orange uniforms typical of the prisoners attract the attention of passers-by outside the White House these days.

“We have the intention to stay in these cages 24/7 until the agreed date,” said Beth Brockman, a human rights activist and mother of two children from Durham, North Carolina.

“We have declared January 11 as the Day of National Shame,” she said.

On that day, ten years ago, the first plane arrived in Guantanamo with 20 prisoners, and this new center of torture, abuse and indefinite detention started to operate,” she recalled.

The protest comes in the wake of the signing of the National Defense Law of 2012 by President Barack Obama on December 31, preventing the closure of the detention center and the transfer of prisoners to jails in US territory.

This US prison in Cuba against the Cuban people’s will constitutes one of the promises unkept by President Obama, who had used it to win the favour of US electors four years ago.

Article link: http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=466574&Itemid=1

CIA prison exposed in Romania [World Socialist Website]

By Sybille Fuchs
12 December 2011

Journalists from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German television magazine “Panorama” have uncovered the location of one of the chain of notorious secret torture prisons run by US Central Intelligence Agency in Europe. The prison is situated in a residential area of the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

The prison in Bucharest began operations following the closure in 2003 of a similar torture centre in Poland. The prison was located in a building housing the Romanian National Registry Office for Classified Information (Official Registrului National al Informatiilor Secrete de Stat) authority. The transport of prisoners to the prison from Bucharest’s airport was carried out in inconspicuous minibuses.

The cells were located in the basement of the ORNISS building. The cells were mounted on springs in order to disorientate the prisoners, who were also subjected to sleep deprivation, water boarding, beatings or being forced to adopt excruciating positions for long periods of time. Former employees of the CIA told journalists that after the initial round of “interviews” the prisoners were given medical and dental examinations.

Some of the prisoners were held there temporarily prior to being switched and tortured in other locations or transferred to Guantanamo. The CIA’s code-name for the secret prison in Bucharest was “Bright light”. The centre was located at Mures Street 4. The prisoners held at the facility included Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of carrying out the attack on the US warship Cole in Yemen and now sits in Guantanamo where he faces trial by a military commission…

…The Romanian authorities established the ORNISS in 2002 by emergency decree in order to co-ordinate the state’s secret operations—in particular with NATO. Its head has the status of a cabinet secretary and reports directly to the Prime Minister. Officials must ensure that confidential information is treated according to NATO standards and only those responsible in each case have access to such information.

The authority was established at a time when Romania was seeking entry into NATO. An American in a high NATO position at that time declared, “The Romanians would have done anything for us.” The then Romanian President Ion Iliescu said that his country would behave as a de facto NATO member, and then in 2004 the country joined the alliance. In 2001 Iliescu had already signed a bilateral agreement with the US government which allowed the US military and civilians to carry out covert operations on Romanian territory.

The secret prison in the basement of the ORNISS building proved particularly useful because its employees are pledged to strict secrecy. Romanian parliamentarians responded to revelations concerning the torture cells by pleading ignorance and declaring that Romania had nothing to do with the matter.

Accordingly, journalists confronted a wall of silence when the deputy head of ORNISS, Adrian Camarasan, addressed them in a room adorned with the Romanian, NATO and European flags. When asked by a reporter if he had ever seen Americans in his premises, Camarasan answered, “No, no, I can no longer remember.” According to the Panorama report a spokesperson for ORNISS told the dpa news agency the reports were “pure speculation” .

The research by the journalists was conducted with great care. They reported that a source in the US intelligence community had described the location and the appearance of the former prison in Bucharest. The reporters made their own enquiries in Bucharest, located and photographed the complex and then showed their evidence to three of their informants in Washington. All three recognised the complex located near a railway line.

The prisoners who were taken to the torture chamber were completely disoriented. Their eyes were blindfolded and their ears plugged, leaving them with no idea of their location. The cells were partly constructed from prefabricated parts, and an arrow had been painted on the floor pointing in the direction of Mecca—a mocking concession by the torturers to the religious persuasion of their victims.

The existence of such torture prisons in Europe (“black sites”) was long denied by both the US and the countries involved, including Lithuania, Poland and Romania. After the attack on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001 the prisons were established as part of the “war on terror” in order to incarcerate so-called “valuable prisoners” who were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”—i.e., forced to make confessions on the basis of brutal torture techniques.

In 2009, the New York Times had suggested that one of the CIA prisons in Bucharest was located near the Interior Ministry building.

The Swiss newspaper SonntagsBlick in 2006 reported that secret prisons had also been established in the the former military base Mihail Kogalniceanu in the southeast of the country. The Swiss intelligence forces had intercepted a fax, which was the first proof of the existence of secret US prisons in Europe. According to the classified document, 23 Iraqi and Afghan citizens were interrogated at the Mihail Kogalniceanu base in Romania. Similar interrogation centres run by the CIA were established in the Ukraine, Bulgaria and Macedonia and Kosovo.

The Mihail Kogalniceanu military base had been used by the US since the Iraq war. When the newspaper asked the commander of the military base about the existence of such a prison he categorically denied any knowledge. The existence of CIA prison sites in Lithuania and Poland has been known for some years, but there had been no confirmation of such a facility in Romania. What was known was that so-called “rendition” flights by the CIA had transported “valuable prisoners” to Romania.

With regard to Europe, the “rendition” program is alleged to have been stopped by the Obama administration after he came into office in 2009. At least no new information about such flights have been released. Instead the Obama government has apparently shifted its emphasis to the targeted killing of their enemies by means of special forces and drones, rendering imprisonment and interrogation unnecessary.

Human rights organisations and journalists found ample evidence of the torture of prisoners following the conquest of Tripoli by the rebel forces backed by NATO. The complicity of European governments, including Romania, with these international human rights violations had already been uncovered by a special committee of the European Parliament in 2006 and its special investigator Dick Marty. Marty declared that at least 100 people had been transported by the CIA to various secret European locations, including Romania. Leading Romania representatives vigorously denied the claim.

The report of the Special Committee concluded “that the CIA was in several cases clearly responsible for the illegal abduction and detention of suspected terrorists in the territory of the Member States as well as special renditions, involving, in some cases, European citizens”.

The report of the Special Committee asserted that the purpose of the special renditions was to ensure “that the suspects should not be subjected to a court of law.” The CIA “terror suspects were kidnapped by undercover methods, arrested and turned over…”

In 2006, US President George Bush admitted that the captured senior Al-Qaeda suspects were taken to other states. He avoided, however, identifying these countries, arguing this could cause enemies of America to take action against its allies…

Excerpted by Zuo Shou

Article link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/roma-d12.shtml

NDAA means war on Bill of Rights [Workers World]

By Sara Flounders
Published Dec 23, 2011 8:47 PM

Dangerous provisions inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (NDAA-2012) have created great alarm among civil liberties organizations, Muslim organizations, groups that defend anti-war activists and many activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement who have recently been targeted across the country.

The wording in the defense bill has created alarm because it is in explicit violation of basic rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and long considered untouchable, even in a time of rapidly growing political repression.

This article will examine the NDAA, investigate its relation to U.S. military expansion, look at the history of the Bill of Rights, and see how this can help point the way forward toward expanding rights and defeating repression.

* What’s in the NDAA? *

The controversial provisions in the NDAA grant the U.S. military authority to hold in secret and indefinite detention people deemed a threat to national security without recourse to counsel or a lawyer and without charges presented in a court of law or the right to a trial. Such police-state tactics have already been used against thousands of Muslim immigrants in the U.S. and around the world as part of the so-called “war on terror” since Sept. 11, 2001.

Across the U.S., press conferences, rallies and petition campaigns were quickly organized by a whole series of organizations on Dec 15. Ironically, passage of NDAA by a final conference committee representing both houses of Congress coincided with the 220th anniversary of the passage of the Bill of Rights on Dec. 15, 1791.

The bill’s provisions are an explicit violation of what is known as “habeus corpus,” the guarantee of the right to a hearing before a judge. They also violate the guarantee that the U.S. military will be kept out of all internal domestic areas. This is called “posse comitatus,” meaning the U.S. military cannot act on U.S. soil against U.S. citizens.

A statement released by the United National Anti-War Coalition sighted recent ominous national trends, including massive spying, entrapment and phony plots in the Muslim community, recent raids on homes of anti-war activists by federal agents and subpoenas to appear before federal grand juries, and the nationally coordinated, often violent police evictions of the Occupy movement around the country.

The statement also protested the refusal of the Chicago city government and the federal government to allow for peaceful protests when NATO and the G-8 countries come to Chicago in mid-May 2012 to hold summit meetings.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Coalition for the Protection of Civil Freedoms, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the International Action Center, the National Coalition to Stop FBI Repression, Occupy Wall Street, Muslim Peace Coalition and many other groups released statements and participated in organized protests and internet petition campaigns calling on President Barack Obama to veto the bill. This unified response is an essential first step in what is needed.

A veto is unlikely because the Obama administration requested the inclusion of this provision in the military budget bill, and has been actively involved in efforts to further restrict basic rights.

Unfortunately, many courageous civil rights organizations in attacking these reactionary provisions have made no mention or criticism of the NDAA itself. But highlighting this vital connection will help provide a perspective on how to fight back.

* Military breeds repression *

It is no accident that this assault on basic political rights long considered beyond the reach of government attack is part of the bill that funds the giant military machine. The military is the nut of the problem. This new unprecedented attack on civil rights at home cannot be seen in isolation to the ever-expanding role of the U.S. military on a global scale.

The NDAA is the annual bill that funds the bloated military. The U.S. military budget is already larger than the combined military budget of the rest of the world. The 2012 bill authorizes $554 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget and $115.5 billion for continuing the current wars and occupations. This appropriations bill funds 1,000 U.S. military bases in more than 150 countries around the world.

Other hundreds of billions of military expenditures hidden in the U.S. budget bring the war machine’s total cost to more than $1 trillion. This year’s NDAA further extends restrictions on the transfer of detainees out of Guantanamo, and it contains new threats and stricter sanctions on Iran.

The demonization and criminalization, spying and entrapment of the Muslim community, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, has been used to justify aggressive new wars of conquest and expanding military influence. Increasing the budget for police and prisons is the domestic reflection of the growing weight of the military.

The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq represents a significant setback for U.S. strategic plans. But as this NDAA confirms, the U.S. military is hardly closing down. U.S. wars and the threat of military action across the globe, invasions, subversion, sabotage, increasing drone surveillance, deadly surprise assaults, kidnapping, secret rendition and targeted assassinations are all treated as acts of defense and national security.

The Pentagon serves the interests of the corporate ruling class. It secures global markets, loots natural resources and subjugates the workers of each country to the capitalist owners of all production. Its mission is to destroy any opposition to this domination from governments and popular rebellions.

The bill signals that no concessions are on the drawing boards, only further repression.

* Bill of Rights & class struggle *

Many appeals to President Obama to veto this defense bill because of the new repressive provisions have glorified and idealized what the Bill of Rights is, what it stands for and how rights are secured and maintained.

The Bill of Rights was never a sacred document of grand wisdom arrived at by the “founding fathers,” as presented in popular myth and school history books. Nor was it just an academic debate between federalists and anti-federalists.

The Bill of Rights was from the very beginning a reflection of the early class struggle in the U.S. It was not part of the original Constitution drafted in 1787. That document was designed to protect the propertied classes, balance their competing interests and centralize the authority of the state.

These ruling-class elements were meeting in haste after a broad uprising in 1786 throughout New England of indebted small farmers against bankers and merchants known as Shay’s Rebellion.

When the Constitution was originally drafted, any proposal to include any individual rights was overwhelmingly voted down. Land seizures, food riots, debt protests and enormous social ferment made it clear that a Constitution written by slave owners, merchants and land speculators would not pass without some rights guaranteed to significant section of the masses.

This was especially true because the masses were armed and in motion. The top 1% of 1787 — slave owners, plantation owners, wealthy merchants — made this belated and grudging concession after four years of intense political struggle in many of the newly minted states. They gave in because they were anxious to quickly organize a centralized federal state to deal with the growing assertion of grievances and rights by poor farmers facing ruin.

The first 10 amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. They include freedom of speech, assembly, press, religion; freedom from torture or cruel and unusual punishment; freedom from warrant-less searches, excessive bail, seizures or imprisonment; plus the right to trial by jury and protection from a standing army. From the beginning they were a contradiction to the Constitution that protected property.

Despite its progressive side, it is important to recognize that the Bill of Rights did not mean rights for all people. Most people in the South were kidnapped African slaves who could be bought, sold, branded, beaten or killed without any protection. Indigenous peoples were targeted for expropriation, removal or extermination. Women were considered the property of their husbands and were granted no rights or protections. Thus the amendments guaranteed rights to a small minority of white men who owned property and were the only ones allowed to vote or assured of having rights.

Every step forward in rights took enormous and often bloody struggles. The struggle for the abolition of slavery only began to be resolved by the Civil War. And 100 years later the monumental Civil Rights Movement struggled for decades for the right to vote and win formal equality.

Even when the rights to freedom of assembly, speech and trial by jury were assured, they did not exist for working people. It took strikes, shut-downs, plant takeovers to win the right to unionize. It took 80 years of marches and mobilizations for women to even gain the right to participate in political life.

It is important to remember this history of struggle to expand rights in order to understand how to push this fight forward today.

* OWS & fighting to expand rights *

Defending the right to freedom of speech, assembly and the press is important in the class struggle today — in order to have a voice to fight for the right to a job, the right to health care, the right to an education, the right to housing, the right to a safe and clean environment, and the right to oppose endless wars. Given the fabulous ability of technology to provide for all, these basic rights to a full life must be asserted, demanded and won.

But given the crisis of capitalism, all these basic human rights run counter to corporate survival.

Occupy Wall Street’s great contribution in this period of contracting capitalism is its focus on the 1% who have benefited from all government bailouts and policies at the expense of the 99%. This popular formulation is a leap forward in class-consciousness on a national scale. Occupy Wall Street has also found creative new forms of mass participation and inclusion. Though imperfect, they are a big step forward.

For these very reasons, the large legal and overwhelmingly peaceful protest assemblies that erupted across the country were threatening to U.S. corporate power, the police and the military, who want only fear and compliance and are driven to shut down all forms of activism.

On a national scale through the Department of Homeland Security, every major OWS encampment was targeted with mass arrests. HS coordinated local police attacks. Even Democratic Party forces, which had originally embraced OWS as an antidote to the Tea Party, complied with police crack-downs.

But the past three months of mass struggles since Sept. 17 confirm once again that the best way to push back reactionary provisions in the NDAA is to raise the level of resistance. Defend the courageous young OWS activists who have opened new political space, build solidarity with the Muslim community against the broad-scale attacks, and challenge racist police practices of stop and frisk. Unity, solidarity and resistance point the way forward.

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Article link: http://www.workers.org/2011/us/ndaa_1229/

The US is a Police State – Review of Andrew Kolin’s “State Power and Democracy” [Globalresearch.ca]

by Prof. John McMurtry

Nov. 9, 2011

* Excerpted *

*****************************
Global Research Editor’s Note

This article by Professor McMurtry had been commissioned by an academic journal called New Politics.

Upon receiving Professor McMurtry’s text, the editorial board decided to reject it: “We are sorry to inform you that the Editorial Board finds it inappropriate”.
*****************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Review of Andrew Kolin['s] State Power and Democracy (2011), New York: St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp.

Many readers may have thought the U.S. is “like a police state” – - think of the security dress down of everyone boarding a flight within the U.S. sphere of control. Political scientist Andrew Kolin goes far beyond hasty analogue. He argues with rich factual substantiation that the U.S is a police state all the way down – not only since the stolen elections and war state of George Bush Jr., but before and since in a cumulative throughline of bureaucratized despotism across borders.

Documented examples are reported in detail from 1950 on to disclose a record that is as systematic in suppressing public dissent as its client dictatorships elsewhere – albeit far more successfully kept out of public and scholarly attention. Since the electoral contests of, by and for the rich in America are proclaimed as “the leader of the Free World” in the ad-vehicle media many still watch and read, an example helps to clarify the reality not reported. When three nuns protested before the war-criminal bombing of Iraq in 2002 where no war crime was left undone, “they were arrested, handcuffed, left on the ground for three hours and then jailed for seven months before trial – - [for] sabotage and obstruction of justice” (p. 153).

Every step of their police repression was within the laws that had been concocted before and after 9-11, in particular by the provisions of “the Patriot Act” – with here as elsewhere the legislative title as integral to the Orwellian language of rule. The symbolic action of the nuns – painting blood on a missile silo – was in fact backed by international law against the “supreme crime” of non-defensive armed invasion of another country. Indeed their protest occurred just before the saturation bombing of civilian Baghdad which ended in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. But mass-murderous facts, citizen responsibility, moral courage and peaceful expression of the law of nations do not detain U.S. legal machinery. It is this legal machinery that Kolin focuses on to make his case that the U.S. is a police state.

What is a police state? Kolin states no criterion, but it can be deduced as unlimited state power of armed force freely discharged without citizen right to stop it. Anyone who has lived in the U.S. or its client dictatorships may recognize the concrete phenomena, but what is featured in this account are the laws and directives which empower the police state norms. While the men at the top always proclaim their devotion to the defence of freedom as armed force assaults on domestic dissent and dissident countries increase, none have been found guilty of breaking the law or repressing freedom of speech or assembly. It is U.S. laws and policies which form the U.S. police state, the argument is, and they are continuously made to enable an endless litany of crimes against human life.

The sustaining concern of this work, however, is not to define ordering principles, but to track the bureaucratic trails of legally terrorist offices, directives, and channels. The result is a detailed history of the inner workings of the U.S. state which exposes the legal suppression of democratic speech and action (omitting the use of laws against harmless non-pharmaceuticals as lettres de cachet to imprison the poor and the rebellious by the millions). Beneath continuous corporate-state and media proclamation of America’s freedoms and simultaneous academic fear to expose the lines of despotism, this work largely succeeds in providing the procedural workings of the U.S. police state building both before, and dramatically after, the turning point of 9-11.

The manufacture of pretext imprinted in the very timing and naming of the high-tech destruction of the World Trade Center as “9-11”, and the fact that the Bush Jr. presidency needed a war or two to distract from its illegitimacy and to empower its program of “full spectrum dominance” are not, however, raised in this book. They remain unspeakable facts within the official conspiracy theory now normalized as fact. Yet this canonical theory of the 9-11 tragedy assumes the collapse of the fireproof steel-cored buildings into their footsteps near the the speed of gravity – an impossibility within the laws of physics – and the first legal question of any homicidal crime – cui bono, who benefits? – is erased from its record. So although this official story allowed all the post-9-11 police state legislation and unlimited powers Kolin focuses on, he avoids the pretext itself.

Critical attention is instead confined to the silencing of questions, alternatives and dissent by the legal machinery of repression justified by it. Such “institutional analysis” is favoured by America’s lead critics, and positivist social science rules out what is not so corroborated. The clear exception to this methodological silencing here is attachment of the descriptor “police state” to the U.S., and the legally well informed record of demonstration. The maze-like bureaucratization of operations of repression is not ultimately covert, Kolin shows, but sanctified by official policies and laws.

Kolin’s attention to dated laws, directives, offices, and machinations behind the spotlight and personalization of politics is a welcome re-grounding amidst the daily media kaleidoscope of ever-changing images and personalities. In contrast to the usual academic fear of ideological non-conformity, Kolin clearly summarizes at the outset: “In the latter part of the twentieth century, when mass movements for all intents and purposes were eliminated, what remained was for the most part was procedural democracy, which in a short period, would also be eliminated, to be replaced by a form of absolute power in which government had been made into a permanent police state. Much of this took place after the attacks of 9-11, during which the administration of George Bush in a very short time, was able to put in place many of the essential features of what is now an American police state” (p.2).

* U.S. Police State in Formation from the Revolution through Reagan to Bush-Obama *

Kolin goes back to the U.S. state’s foundation to find the dictatorial impulse. “The truth of the matter”, he says, “is that after the American Revolution there was thinking among economic and democratic elites that America had become too democratic, especially as mass democracy was expressing itself on the state level”(p. 3) – a view better known since a Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission Report made it famous centuries later. The Founding Fathers’ anti-democratic politics have been explored before by Michael Parenti, who blurbs for the book. For Kolin, it is “mass democracy” that frightens the dominant ownership class from the start because it threatens their ruling proprietary control. But this economic diagnosis is not pursued by Kolin . He conceives the motor force as “control over people and territory by the state in itself. This non-Marxian thesis is historically associated with theoretical anarchism, but is here conjoined to the idea of “mass democracy”, a motivating idea behind this work which is not given further definition…

…Desires of popular masses can be as overwhelmingly compelled to control people’s thought, action and dissent by force as state elites are, and they can be as driven to seize the territories of other people and to lord it over them via great majorities – as in the popular witch-hunts through American history and as, more broadly, age-old ethnic warfare and killing and enslavement of losing societies. Something deeper than the will of the demos to which it is accountable is required – rules to live by which protect and enable life itself. This may be the most fundamental gap in democratic [sic] theory.

* Annihilating Not Only Democracy, But Countless Lives and Life Supports *

For perhaps the majority in the U.S., loathing of government is a national pastime except for “our men in uniform” – that is, arms-laden American enforcers chasing, shooting and bombing designated enemies of America at home and abroad. Wars seem in fact very popular with the majority if they are not being lost, and public pillories and prisons for deviators from the American Way seldom lack similar support. Police state laws, the invasion of Iraq and so on seem to have been popular if they are successful. Yet Kolin’s work is more concerned to expose the state which is represented as the world leader in democracy while it rules by armed force, secrecy and terror and – especially since 9-11 – violently suppresses dissent in its own society. The inside mechanisms of legalist-bureaucratic rule not discussed or connected in the dominant media or political science are uniquely laid bare. There were many designated “enemies” from the beginning – from American Indians and genocidal laws against them to the FBI, Sedition, Alien and Espionage Acts of 1917-18, the CIA founding in 1947, followed by the Internal Security Act of 1950, McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee from 1957, and the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts of today. All of these legal mechanisms, he shows, have been structured to silence alternative thoughts and voices in the public sphere. When to be merely unAmerican brings life ruin to U.S. citizens and designation as “the enemy” can justify the saturation bombing of weaker societies, the derangement becomes clear amidst a sustained train of such abuses over generations.

When these systematic attacks simultaneously annihilate life-serving advocacy and institutions at home and elsewhere, a more sinister and unidentified pattern emerges. Not only non-conforming speech and thought are repressed, but standing up for other people’s lives and life means becomes criminalized. An invisible war is waged on social conscience and defence of life itself. Indeed this is the unrecognized selector of what the U.S. police state invariably attacks inside and outside its borders – social movements and orders to enable the lives of citizens opposed to transnational private money sequencing to more. Consider here for immediate example what the police protected in New York in the Wall Street protests until world attention no longer allowed the savage beating to continue with the dominant media cheering it on. Government armed force did not protect the lives of citizens or their cause of life justice or real market businesses on the street. Armed protective attention was directed instead to Wall Street operations by barricades, long swinging truncheons, continuous special vehicles of service to the money-men, and moving lines of trap and assault of the citizens standing for “the 99%”. In the wider world, the seven-month U.S.-NATO bombing of Libya– not to defend citizens as pretended, but to bomb main cities and government capacities, seize control of the country’s wealthy financial assets and sub-soil oil fields – went on with hardly a voice of dissent. That it destroyed Libya’s social state of free healthcare, higher education and guaranteed subsistence in food, housing and fuel was never reported even by public broadcasters.

The U.S. state is in these ways structured not only towards total force and control. It is, more deeply, programmed to liquidate what serves the lives of people so as to grow transnational corporate profit for the few. Always however, there is a pretext of a demonic enemy that people are being protected from – “communism”, “subversives”, “Islamic militants”, “terrorists”, “violence-threatening protestors”, all with no criteria. Most warred upon by the U.S. state are societies’ social life support systems – including public water, electricity, health and living subsidies. Consider here the bombed former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya – not to mention trillions of dollars of defunding of U.S. social security itself to pay for private bank bailouts by public dollars. This is the deeper shadow side of the U.S. state and its global allies…

…Command over ever more external territory and peoples is always the direction. Permanent war is the omnibus vehicle of its advance, and mass mind control including by torture is a standard method, along now with serial murders across borders by drones. While seldom penetrating these generic principles of the global police state, Kolin follows the specifica of the inside workings of the legal-bureaucratic machine through many phases, acronyms and abhorrence of real democracy built into policies and laws. One better knows why the U.S. becomes a failed state when one sees the absolutist overriding of every attempt to bring it back into line with life-respecting values during the last half century. The Fulbright and Church Committees, the mass progressive movements of the 1960’s and 70’s, all come to nought until post-9-11 laws, terror and surveillance make the police state a formal affair, and what is not mentioned here, Congress increasingly degenerates into the best frontmen the banking, oil, weapons, med-insurance and pharma corporations can buy. The apogee of police state method follows – military tribunals in place of due process to deal with endless arrests for an open-ended charge of terrorism against people in their own countries, systematic rendition and torture against international laws, abolition of habeus corpus and all procedures protecting against false charge, simultaneous denial of legal standing as prisoners of war, and evidence kept secret without possibility of disproof. The legal limbo of the Guatanomo prison has helped to permit evasion of any accountability to the rule of law. After promising to eliminate it, President Obama did not.

If one ignores the blinkering out of the private transnational corporate-financial system behind ever more people and territory for natural resource, market, labor, and strategic exploitation without limit, the book is a treasure-trove of the U.S. state-machinery for undemocratic world rule. The despotic compulsion to intimidate, control and terrorize innocent and conscientious citizens across the world including within the U.S. is hard to deny in face of such organized evidence. Just about every horror story one has heard of U.S. state rule finds a reference here. Even Franklin Roosevelt (internment of Japanese citizens) and Robert Kennedy (greenlights to FBI spying and bugging without cause, including of M.L. King) are flagged. As for Bill Clinton, he led genocide of Iraqi’s social state, attack on social security at home, and refused to ratify the International War Crimes Court…

…Yet the economic level of the U.S. police state remains in the shadows. From the start, the founding of the U.S. was on the basis of protecting private wealth and its accumulation with no common life interest defined. It allowed the limitless seizure of Indian people’s lands and territories West of the Appalachians which George III had forbidden, and extended the unregulated rights of the private money power so fast and far that Thomas Jefferson himself warned that “banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The [money and credit] issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it belongs”. Over 230 years later, the problem is clearer as U.S. state rule by force and dictate becomes a visible dead-end. But as to whether the Wall-Street money power behind the state that predates the world is brought under control is a question not posed in this study. So far the first step solution of public-bank utilities and non-profit loans to government has been silenced wherever it is raised.

Full article link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27561

Secret interrogation policy confirms UK government’s complicity in war crimes [World Socialist Web Site]

By Stephen Alexander
12 August 2011

A secret interrogation policy document obtained by the Guardian is the latest in a growing body of evidence attesting to the war crimes of the previous Labour government.

Published on the newspaper’s web site last week, the document is entitled, “Agency policy on liaison with overseas security and intelligence services in relation to detainees who may be subject to mistreatment”.

It reveals that the Labour government permitted the UK’s security and intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, to interrogate detainees that they knew had been tortured at the hands of allied overseas intelligence services.

The document chillingly instructs UK agents to “balance the risk of mistreatment and the risk that the officer’s actions could be judged to be unlawful against the need” to extract information from prisoners.

Most damningly, it confirms that such actions were directly authorised by government ministers: “In particularly difficult cases … it may be necessary to consult Ministers … to ensure that appropriate visibility and consideration of the risk of unlawful actions takes place.”

The UK government is known to cooperate with regimes notorious for torture—including the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. But the guidelines allow UK officers to proceed with interrogation on basis of verbal “caveats” or “assurances” that their intelligence agencies will “eliminate or minimise the risk of mistreatment”.

The policy contravenes the United Nations Convention against Torture, which requires signatory states to make torture a criminal offence, including instances of attempted torture and “an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.”

The interrogation policy revealed last week is the original drawn up by the Blair Labour government in 2002 to allow British intelligence to question prisoners in Afghanistan that they knew had been submitted to torture and abuse by the CIA. Following the invasion of Iraq, the policy was rewritten in 2004 and again in 2006, establishing it as a “formal” and “comprehensive” policy for the interrogation of overseas detainees, “including comprehensive legal advice to all officers”.

The criminality of the Labour government is further compounded by repeated lies and evasions with regard to the details and implications of the policy.

When the Guardian first became aware of the policy over two years ago, a spokesman for then Prime Minister Tony Blair denied precisely those criminal activities permitted by the secret policy, stating: “Tony Blair does not condone torture, has never authorised it nor colluded in it at any time.” Blair, along with the former home secretary, David Blunkett, and former foreign secretary Jack Straw have repeatedly refused to reveal whether they had knowledge of detainees being tortured as a result of the policy.

On June 16, 2009, speaking before the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee, David Miliband fraudulently proclaimed, “We would never procure intelligence … through torture. We would never say to another intelligence agency ‘Please get us information about X’ and … abandon our legal and ethical commitments in respect of how you find that.”

It is exactly such heinous criminality that Miliband worked systematically to conceal from the public as foreign secretary between 2007 and 2010. Miliband refused to release either the pre-2004 documents or later versions, arguing that to do so would “give succour to our enemies”.

In the case of Binyam Mohamed, a victim of extraordinary rendition who sued the UK government for complicity in his torture at the hands of the CIA and other overseas agencies, Miliband unsuccessfully mounted legal proceedings in an effort to suppress incriminating sections of the judge’s findings. When he was released from Guantánamo Bay in February 2009, without charge, Mohamed alleged that MI5 had provided questions and information to his American torturers.

Similarly, in the case of Shaker Aamer, the last remaining British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, the foreign secretary disregarded the ruling of the British High Court and refused to request the release of documents pertaining to his mistreatment, held by the US authorities. Aamer alleges that he was tortured in the presence of an MI5 officer.

On September 21, 2010, the Guardian revealed that MI5 and MI6 officers had consulted Miliband in line with the secret policy. According to British intelligence sources, “Officers from MI5 are understood to have sought similar permission from a series of home secretaries in recent years.”

A number of other former Guantánamo detainees had begun civil proceedings against the UK government over alleged complicity in torture at the hands of a variety of allied intelligence agencies, including those of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Dubai. In order to limit exposure of its war crimes, Labour pursued an out-of-court settlement, paying out a total of around £12 million in compensation over the past five years. It is thought that when all 16 former detainees are compensated the total will reach £14 million.

The publication of the secret interrogation policy comes on the back of a series of exposures revealing that the British Armed Forces have routinely carried out officially sanctioned torture.

In July 2010, on the basis of evidence presented on behalf of over 100 Iraqis, a preliminary high court ruling found, “There is an arguable case that the alleged ill-treatment was systemic, and not just at the whim of individual soldiers”. Last October, the Guardian leaked interrogation technique training manuals for use by British military personnel in Iraq. They detail “threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness” and sleep deprivation. They recommend that prisoners be “conditioned prior” to interrogation to instil “anxiety/fear”, “insecurity”, “disorientation” and “humiliation.”

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat claims to have amended the formerly secret interrogation policy to give “greater clarity about what is and what is not acceptable in the future”. The changes, however, are only cosmetic.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has said that the new guidelines are still in breach of international law, in that they do not prohibit intelligence officers from “aiding and assisting” allied agencies engaged in inhuman or degrading treatment. The policy still “allows intelligence officers to rely on assurances from foreign states” that a prisoner will not be mistreated, while giving them the “erroneous expectation that they will be protected from personal criminal liability”.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition is now seeking to conceal the war crimes of the Labour government, as it is fully determined to advance the predatory militarist and colonialist strategy begun by its predecessor in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for which it has now opened up another front in Libya. Antidemocratic methods such as torture, abduction, extraordinary rendition, extra-judicial assassination, and the denial of due process flow from these illegal wars.

Along the same lines as the Chilcot inquiry—set up by the Labour government to whitewash its role in launching, in alliance with Washington, a premeditated and illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003—the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government has launched another toothless inquiry headed by none other than Sir Peter Gibson, the Intelligence Services Commissioner since 2006.

The inquiry will investigate the allegations of 12 former Guantánamo Bay detainees that the UK government colluded in their torture. It will have no legal powers to initiate the prosecution of the accused. The victims and their lawyers will not be able to identify the accused intelligence officers or cross-examine their accounts, meaning they will essentially be taken at their word. The great majority of evidence will be heard behind closed doors while the government will maintain authority over what is published in the final report.

Ten leading human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Reprieve, and Human Rights Watch, along with the lawyers representing the 12 former detainees, have boycotted the inquiry. A letter, jointly addressed to the inquiry by a coalition of human rights groups, makes clear that the investigation does not comply with international law. It states that “European Court of Human Rights case law” requires that an investigation “into allegations of torture be independent, impartial, subject to public scrutiny, and include effective access for victims to the process.”

The Gibson inquiry fulfils none of these stipulations.

Article link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/tort-a12.shtml