Council of Europe declares CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania

by Righteous Pragmatist Sat Jun 09, 2007 10:55

Your living in cloud cuckoo land if you believe that the US and Nato countries are going to sit on their hands while Islamic fundementalist godfathers plot attacks, recruit fanatics and kill innocent people throughout the world.

If possible these people need to arrest and charged with terrorist offences.

But in reality these charges are extremely hard to prove in civilian courts.

Meanwhile terrorists grow in power influence become more bold and daring and the threat to innocent people increases.

Governments are forced to abduct these people interrogate them and in some cases torture them to obtain information concerning their plots, the extent of their organisations and who are the members of their organisations.

If the freedom, physical health and lives of terrorists or terrorist suspects are the price that must be paid for the security of milllions of people throughout the world who are the targets of these murderous maniacs then so be it.

by Seán Ryan Sat Jun 09, 2007 15:41

Police in Britain today are claiming that no evidence exists to prove that the CIA flew planes carrying victims of kidnap in and out of British airports.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL0937622...70609

This is similar to the line taken by the Gardaí in Ireland. "No evidence."

It emerged last year in the final Ploughshares trial, that a Garda "investigation" into CIA flights consisted of the Gardaí asking for and receiving assurances from American flight crews (CIA).

The actions of the police on both sides of the Irish Sea and indeed the rest of Europe are evidence.

by Seán Ryan Sat Jun 09, 2007 16:32

Another report was published the day before the above report was published by the Council of Europe, this report was published by Amnesty International.

This report details the actions of six major human rights groups with regard to suspected kidnap victims of the CIA. Three of these groups have filed a lawsuit in the US federal Court under the freedom of information act, seeking disclosure with regard to "disappeared" detainees.

This report by Amnesty makes chilling reading. It alleges abuse by the CIA where even children aged as young as seven were dragged from their homes, detained for months and interrogated at length: "It reveals how suspects' relatives, including wives and children as young as seven, have been held in secret detention. In September 2002 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's two young sons, aged seven and nine, were arrested. According to eyewitnesses, the two were held in an adult detention centre for at least four months while US agents questioned the children about their father's whereabouts."

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=17367

by Seán Ryan Mon Jun 11, 2007 16:32

Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell called for the closure of Guantanamo yesterday. He said that it should be closed this afternoon rather than tomorrow.

He does not believe that the inmates should be released, he feels that they should be taken to the US an entered into the federal legal system. This might be easier said than done however, as prisoners in the US are afforded some rights and due process.

Powell wants the facility at Guantanamo closed simply as a cosmetic job, he feels that the Concentration Camp does not look well on the US's résumé. "Essentially, we have shaken the belief the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don't need it and it is causing us far more damage than any good we get for it."
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/06/11/po...tely/

Back in December of 2005 Powell defended Rendition and illegal detention facilities, when in an interview with the BBC he rapped European authorities for acting shocked and awed about the US's practices that violated the Geneva Conventions. "Well, most of our European friends cannot be shocked that this kind of thing takes place... The fact that we have, over the years, had procedures in place that would deal with people who are responsible for terrorist activities, or suspected of terrorist activities, and so the thing that is called rendition is not something that is new or unknown to my European friends."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4538788.stm

Is this a change of heart or a change of approach?

It's neither. It's pure propaganda. The American federal justice system cannot accomodate folks who have no rights. This is why rendition exists to begin with. If the federal justice system could have accomodated these poor people to begin with, rendition would never have needed to exist.

Seems to me that this propaganda has but one purpose: Guantanamo is about to be closed and the big fish are trying to avoid the hook that is about to be cast. A legal quagmire is about to be discovered and explored.

by Seán Ryan Tue Jun 12, 2007 18:03

The US federal appeals court ruled that the US could not use its anti-terrorism military laws to detain US residents on suspicion of terrorism without charge on US soil. This ruling arrived yesterday to confront GW Bush who's being left more and more isolated as the world wakes up to the fact that he's a war criminal.

This ruling had to do with the fact that the US have been holding Kahlah al-Marri (a US resident from Qatar) on US soil for suspicion of being an "al-Qaida sleeper agent ."

This ruling does not mean that Kahlah al-Marri will walk free. It means that he cannot be held indefinitely without charge. He must now be prosecuted, deported or held as a Grand Jury witness. Kahlah al-Marri has been held illegally since June 2003 in solitary confinement on a Navy brig stationed in South Carolina.

The court in part of its its ruling said "In the US, the military cannot seize and imprison civilians, let alone imprison them indefinitely."

It further stated as part of its ruling: "To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them enemy combatants, would have disastrous consequences for the constitution and country."

The last quote above is interesting as it seems to have failed to notice that the US has indeed held Kahlah al-Marri in this fashion, even though Kahlah al-Marri was a specific ingredient in the trial itself.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21895253....html