Cry, Lady Liberty !: Countercurrents, Maryam Sakeenah

By Maryam Sakeenah

18 August, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Shortly after the disappearance of young Dr. Afia Siddiqui and her three minor children from Karachi in 2003, the American news channel NBC reported that she had been arrested in Pakistan 'on suspicion of facilitating money transfers for Al Qaeda.' Both Pakistani and US intelligence agencies, however, have since sworn an oath of silence over the issue. Senior Pakistani ministers have denied knowledge of her whereabouts. The Pakistani authorities have, however, insisted that Dr. Siddiqui 'was connected to Al Qaeda,' and that 'you will be astonished to know about her activities.' No evidence of these suspicious activities, however, has ever been shown the light of day.

Lord Nazir Ahmed, British MP, raised the issue in the House of Lords, highlighting the rampant human rights abuse the prisoner was subjected to. He held that this woman prisoner from Pakistan was 'physically tortured and continuously raped by the officers at the prison, to the extent that she had lost her mind.' Soon after, on July 6, British journalist and revert to Islam Yvonne Ridley who authored the book 'In the Hands of the Taliban', appealed to the Pakistanis to secure her release. She said: Today I am crying out for help – not for me, but for a Pakistan woman who you and I have never met, but she is our sister in Islam and she is in desperate need. She has been held in isolation by the Americans in neighbouring Afghanistan. As you know I was also held in Afghanistan, in prison for 10 days at the hands of the Taliban in September 2001. My story made international headlines, front page pictures and major stories on television. I was released on humanitarian grounds without charge even though I was guilty of entering the country without a passport or visa.But there has been not one word, not one paragraph about Prisoner 650 – the Grey Lady of Bagram … a murderous detention facility under the control of the US Military and intelligence services. I call her the Grey Lady because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her."

Yvonne Ridley quoted from former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Beg who authored 'Enemy Combatant', in which he recounts: "I began to hear the chilling screams of a woman next door. My mind battled with questions I was too afraid to ask. What if it was… my wife? Eventually I did agree to say whatever they wanted me to say, to do whatever they wanted me to do. I had to finish it. I agreed to be their witness to whatever. At the end of it all, I asked them, "Why have you got a woman next door?" They told me there was no woman next door. But I was unconvinced. Those screams echoed through my worst nightmares for a long time. And I later learned in Guantánamo, from other prisoners, that they had heard the screams, too, and believed it was my wife. They had been praying for her deliverance." Other detainees from Bagram have attested to the same. In an interview on TV, a former Bagram detainee confirmed he had heard a woman's screams, and also that he had seen her. He told that the other prisoners in Bagram had gone on hunger strike for six days to pressurize those in charge to stop torturing the woman. Yvonne Ridley continued: "Today I am making a demand that the US military hands over the Grey Lady immediately. We do not know her identity, we do not know the state of her mind, we do not know the extent of the abuse or torture. What I do know is that this would never happen to a western woman – what is wrong with the US military? Don't they value a Muslim woman, is her life worthless, does she not deserve to be treated with respect? In truth I don't think any of us with a conscience can rest until she is released. Sadly, she is not the only one."

Weeks later, due to the overwhelming media attention on the issue, a frail, battered, badly wounded and immobilized Dr. Afia Siddiqui was produced in a US court. Her Lawyer Elizabeth Fink stated: "She is complaining of abdominal pain. She understands she lost part of her intestine, and suffers from continual intestinal bleeding. She has been here, judge, for one week and she has not seen a doctor, even though they (U.S. authorities) know she has been shot." In view of the fact that Dr. Siddiqui had a serious wound in her abdomen and stitches all the way up her torso, the judge ordered that she must immediately be seen by a doctor. The explanation offered for the enormous and untreated bullet wound in her abdomen was that she had been 'allegedly trying to fire on a group of U.S. troops who had come to question her in an Afghanistan prison.' How a woman who could not even move, let alone walk, talk or even lift a gun shoot straight at an armed security officer defies any explanation. Ridiculously, the U.S. prosecutor told the court in an effort to explain, that this was 'a complicated situation,' and because of her 'alleged attack on an American officer', the decrepit woman was considered a 'high-security risk.' The US authorities pull a straight blank regarding the whereabouts and condition of Dr. Siddiqui's three minor children. There have been conflicting statements about whether they are alive and if so, where. While the unforgivable brutality inflicted on 'Prisoner 650' has been shamelessly justified on the grounds of her 'suspected involvement with Al Qaeda', no amount of 'logical discourse' or 'legal argument' can ever attempt to justify how and why her baby and two toddler sons have been 'punished.' So much for America's commitment to fundamental Human Rights and basic justice.

And yet, there are those who would jump in defence of this naked viciousness and barbarism, those sitting on high seats in prestigious offices of the great and mighty empire of the United States of America. Ms. Anne Patterson, US ambassador to Pakistan writes: "Ms. Siddiqui is accused of seizing a weapon and firing_ unprovoked_ on US personnel during questioning… At no time was Ms. Siddiqui mistreated or abused in any manner whatsoever… The United States has no definitive knowledge as to the whereabouts of Ms. Siddiqui's children… She is charged in a criminal complaint filed in New York with one count of attempting to kill US officers and employees, and one count of assaulting US officers and employees. If convicted, she faces a sentence of 20 years in prison on each charge."

After 9/11, the United States granted exclusive powers to the Executive to detain suspected terrorists for indefinite periods, denying judicial review of evidence on the basis of which a suspect is detained. The appalling truth, however, is that despite years of detention, the investigating authorities have utterly failed to produce any tangible evidence about involvement in terrorism, except for a minuscule percentage. The evidence found, however, in most cases, only proved that a number of detainees were being held without having any past record of links to terrorism, on the basis of mere suspicion.

With the issuance of John Yoo's famous 'torture memos', certain methods of torture for interrogation of suspected terrorists were also licensed. These "torture memos," advocate enhanced interrogation techniques. They attempted to make these war tactics acquire legality by refuting the Geneva Conventions altogether, so that violating them was no longer required. The government has authorized coercive interrogation methods publicly for non US citizens detained outside the US. For this purpose, the State has sent foreign terror suspects to locations outside the US where coercive interrogation (even involving torture in most cases) can be carried out. The US government holds an undisclosed number of detainees (presumably over 2000) at undisclosed locations. The CIA and FBI as a matter of course hand suspects over to foreign intelligence services for intensive interrogation. One US official was reported to have said, "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job."

In 2004, horrifying images from Abu Ghraib prisons in Iraq were released into the media showing humiliation and abuse of prisoners. Shortly after, similar information about widespread prison abuse at Bagram prisons in Afghanistan was revealed. It afforded a glimpse into the inhuman barbarity unleashed on suspects and detainees that had been going on unabated behind the scenes.

The fact remains, however, that the Geneva Conventions signed and ratified by the US prohibit torture of prisoners of war even if obtaining information can save lives. The evidence that torture has in fact been used in US prisons has steadily built up revulsion in the public mind regarding the USA's counter terror strategy and its unscrupulous conduct. President Bush, however, remained on denial amidst allegations of the use of torture: "The United States of America does not torture. And that's important for people around the world to understand."

Military lawyer Alberto J. Mora reported that policies allowing torture methods were officially handed down from the highest levels of the administration. ABC News reported on April 9, 2008 that "the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency."

According to the New York Times, "What happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration, but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations. The investigative file on Bagram showed that the mistreatment of prisoners was routine: shackling them to the ceilings of their cells, depriving them of sleep, kicking and hitting them, sexually humiliating them and threatening them with guard dogs -- the very same behavior later repeated in Iraq."

Steven C Welsh writes: "Under the Geneva Convention it is the United States as a nation which must confront its responsibility for the actions of the men and women representing it in its prisons."

The horrendous exposition of unabated use of the vilest torture on detainees, the latest of which that has come to light is the nightmarish tale of Dr. Siddiqui has left ugly, deep scars reaffirming the image of the US as a state not befitting of its gigantic role in world politics. With leadership comes responsibility. Abu Ghraib, Bagram and the suffering of Afia Siddiqui has taught us that the 'saviours' are no better than the 'terrorists' they fight. The gaping black hole of moral depravity at the heart of the War on Terror stands exposed. Perhaps uglier still is the façade of a superior civilization that the US chooses to put up, and to which Ms. Anne Patterson chooses to play along: "The US justice system is based on the abiding principle that defendants are innocent until proven guilty… We would encourage you to remain open-minded but skeptical of sensational allegations that have no basis in fact." Ms. Patterson's 'blind spot' towards the utterly miserable physical, emotional and mental state of Dr. Siddiqui who is as of yet legally unconvicted is only too obvious.

Prominent writer Bob Herbert rejects attempts at 'making over' the ugly face of the U.S like Ann Paterson has chosen to do: "... There is also the grotesque and deeply shameful issue that will always be a part of America's legacy -- the manner in which American troops have treated prisoners under their control in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no longer any doubt that large numbers of troops responsible for guarding and interrogating detainees somehow loosed their moorings to humanity, and began behaving as sadists, perverts and criminals."

Abdul Malik Mujahid, understanding the degeneracy of a civilization represented through the horrors at US 'anti-terrorist' detention camps in an Islamic context, laments the loss of what Islam calls 'haya' in the West. 'Haya' implies an inner sensibility creating a sense of aversion from what is evil, obscene and indecent. It is a retraining influence that keeps the distinction between right and wrong, not letting it blur into a mishmash of confused morality. The Prophet of Islam (SAW) called it the 'distinctive feature of Islam.' Mujahid comments: "The photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners have stunned and disgusted the world. While such images shocked America, most Americans may not be able to comprehend what type of cultural threshold has been crossed in terms of dealing with Islam and Muslims. In a culture that sometimes values life less than honor, we have done the ultimate act of dishonoring people. May God forgive us. There certainly is a big cultural gap in the way people in the West deal with modesty and privacy of the body, and the way individuals in the Muslim world do, regardless of their level of Islamic practice. This Islamic sensibility of considering the human body part of a very personal realm is connected to the concept of honor, dignity and privacy. This should explain the deep pain, shock and horror over the nightmare of physical abuse and perverted sadism that went on in Abu Ghraib, (and that has victimized Dr.Afia Siddiqui and others like her). Unlike what some in America lead us to believe, no one hates America in the Muslim world because of democracy and freedom. It is the immorality of America (championed by Hollywood), along with American foreign policy which defines the conflict between the Westernized elite and religious elements in Muslim societies. Graphic images of this criminal behavior by some members of the most organized and educated army of the only superpower in the world are bound to become the most dominant images of this new "Crusade" in the collective psyche of Muslims."

ACTIVISM; Support Aafia Siddiqui, Bagram detainee

PRESS RELEASE: Aafia Siddiqui claims she was held by the US in Bagram for years

By Dazeylin

Categories: Angel/Attorney, Children, Detainee Abuse, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, Female Detainee, Ghost, Grey Lady of Bagram, Lies and War Crimes of the US Government, Sexual Abuse and Torture

PRESS RELEASE
Aafia Siddiqui claims she was held by the US in Bagram for years

Cageprisoners has received new information that Aafia Siddiqui was held for years in Bagram Airbase. According to her lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp,

“We do know she was at Bagram for a long time. It was a long time. According to my client she was there for years and she was held in American custody; her treatment was horrendous.”

Siddiqui’s claim is contrary to the heavily contested position of the US administration that she was detained in July by Afghan forces while attempting to bomb the compound of the governor of Ghazni. The US has previously denied the presence of female detainees in Bagram and that Aafia was ever held there, bar for medical treatment in July 2008.

Sharp also commented about Siddiqui’s current condition and in particular the gunshot wound she has received. Not having been given proper medical treatment for the wound, there is a real concern that it will become infected as it is believed to be septic. She is extremely weak and had to be wheeled into her legal visit.

Click here to read the rest of PRESS RELEASE: Aafia Siddiqui claims she was held by the US in Bagram for years

9th and 10th August have been chosen as the dates when collective action will be taken. Please help us in protesting Dr. Aafia's treatment and demand justice.

1) Make a phone call to the embassy of Pakistan and United States, Interior Ministry of Pakistan and your local representative.

2) Make phone calls on radio and television shows.

3) Ecourage your friends and family to take action.

4) Write letters demanding a speedy and fair trial that meets United States and International standards. Demand that Pakistan intervene on behalf of its citizens.

The dates of 9th and 10th August have been chosen to coincide with Dr. Aafia's court appearance.

These are our demands:

1) The Government of Pakistan and The United States government give details of how Dr. Aafia was treated.

2) Dr. Aafia's children to handed over to Red Cross so they can go back to their family.

3) A fair and speedy public trial, where the defense has access to all documents and resources (e.g. video footage, paper documents and recordings).

4) Dr. Aafia be compensated for the injustice that has been carried out on her and her family if she is found not guilty.


thank you for all your help.


Saad Rajput
Memorial University

Let's get HONEST about waterboarding and TORTURE

Warning From The Best - Must Read - chart below

By Dazeylin

Categories: Abuse, Detainee Abuse and Torture Tags: No Tags.

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: July 2, 2008

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

Related

Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War (pdf)

Documents Released at Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on SERE Tactics(pdf)

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”

Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”

The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interviePublish Postw that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”

The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.

Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment.

Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.

Rebuttal of "communist" assertion . . .

These techniques Did Not originate with the Communists:

The techniques were diagrammed and spelled out earlier, in Gestapo manuals (View a photocopy online of an original at GW University’s National Security Archives) produced in the 30’s, are identical (except for the sexual perversion) to all of the torture techniques used by the CIA (and who knows what other agents of the US gov) since the disastrous National Security Act was passed under Truman. The Gestapo’s favorite techniques (yielding terror and false confessions, not accurate info) included a combination of sensory deprivation (with or without sensory overload), self-inflicted pain (stress positions etc), environmental stress (hot, cold etc), sleep deprivation, controlled starvation, with or without asphyxiation techniques(such as water boarding). Remember the Abu Ghraib photos of thugs torturing with asphyxiation by sitting on the board sandwiched chests of their civilian prisoners. Many die from asphyxiation techniques. One of the few convictions for U.S. torture in Iraq was for the asphyxiation torture death of uniformed Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush (the heavy set officer that officially surrendered to Gen Schwarzkopf at the end of Gulf War I) who had turned himself in for questioning while the U.S. was holding members of his family. He had been water-boarded but died while tightly bound head-first in a sleeping bag. Celebrities and pundits, who undergo fake water-boarding, help to trivialize one of the worst tortures in history.

Through “Operation Paperclip”, the US secreted many Nazi war criminals to the US, not just rocket scientists, but sadistic torturers (among multiple other categories) so as to learn what they knew. It was therefore obvious from the very beginning (starting in 2001 at Bagram) to those with even a cursory knowledge of this history, that the 1st accounts coming out of Bagram air force base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and all the rest meant not just isolated, rogue or poorly trained soldiers being cruel but the top-down institution of the Gestapo’s techniques as the policy of the Bush administration. It has been reported in the last several months that Bush is now “rendering” and torturing 10’s of thousands of people on a world-wide network of prison ships. (He stole that idea from the British).

The Soviets had their own version of “Operation Paperclip” and learned from the Germans as well. The big joke after World War II was that the US could brag that “our German scientists are better than the your (the Soviets) German scientists”.

It is quite curious that those who should know better would claim that these techniques were studied scientifically and perfected by the fascists, not the communists. That is not to say that all of the powerful democracies (including the U.S.) have used torture (and terrorism) extensively for over a century. The U.S. killed and tortured the people of the Philippines by the hundreds of thousands at the turn of the last century.

No need to blame the Communists on this one.. Makes you wonder what the source of the story was.

Peace, JK

WAR CRIMES DOSSIER: Human Rights Watch links on Torture

U.S. Torture and Abuse of Detainees

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

Each day brings more information about the appalling abuses inflicted upon men and women held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. U.S. forces have used interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep—in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort, and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while incarcerated.

This must end. Torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices should be as unthinkable as slavery. U.S. Department of Defense officials have announced that certain stress interrogation techniques will no longer be used in Iraq. But President Bush should ban all forms of abuse during interrogation in Iraq and everywhere else that the United States holds people in custody. It is wrong in itself and leads to further atrocities.

Recent Reports and other Campagin Documents:

• "No Blood, No Foul": Soldiers' Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq
• Questions and Answers: United States Before the Committee Against Torture
• By the Numbers
• Q & A on Military Instruction Number 10
• Leadership Failure
• Getting Away with Torture?
• The Road to Abu Ghraib
• “Enduring Freedom:” Abuses by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan
• “Empty Promises:” Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard Against Torture

Focus Pages:

• Guantanamo Bay
• Military Investigations into Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody
• Preventing Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in U.S. Military and Intelligence Detention Facilities
• U.S. Condemnation of Interrogation Techniques Abroad
• "Outsourcing Torture"
• Torture and the Law
• Q&A: The Legal Prohibition Against Torture
• Military Contractors and the Law
• Prisoner Abuse: How Different Are U.S. Prisons?

Rick Hillier, Hamid Karzai, Stephen Harper, Dick Cheney, the CIA and NATO

I have more "dots" for those who truly have any interested educating themselves.

The news seems to suggest Hillier did not retire, but was squeezed out
by Harper who did not like Hillier stealing the limelight. No one is going to steal The Harper's great thunder!! No way!! and he's got the powers that be totally behind his corrupt little agenda - for now.

I've posted comment often on Linda McQuaig's book Holding the Bully's Coat.

Rick Hillier is a deeply evil man with extraordinarily advanced skills at selling an illegal war whose main purpose was to raised a trillion a
year for corrupt officials and military people and the armaments industry. He's more "compromised" than even General Patreaus.

This (fill in the blank yourself) Hillier must take a huge share of the blame for building Afghanistan up from non-existent to #1 world's heroin exporter -- a trillion dollars a year. 90% of the Karzai economy is based on heroin.

Hillier could easily have put a stop to it.

Many hope that Revenue Canada follows this drug lord like a hawk for the rest of his life. We hope that if he ever spends a penny of that heroin money I want him locked up for life.

Why? Because he acted as hit man for the planet's biggest heroin
dealer, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

Well if you still want to think that the Afghan war is about fighting for freedom and democracy, go ahead. By looking the other way you help the abuse exist - abuse that mainly falls on the heads of innocent women and children - orphans, wives of the maimed, the girls who are sold to make marriages to old men, young children being held in detention, children now forced into cities to beg, women who cry day and night ..

If you think places like Bagram should exist and Rendition take place - well, I reproach you.

If you think Canada is a bastion of freedom and democracy, I implore you to take a deeper look.

If you think there aren't gigantic offshore accounts for all these corrupt officials and the official drug dealers, then I point out you are in denial and it is SO.

Canoe.caMaxime-um damage
TheChronicleHerald.ca, Canada - 12 hours ago
If the Canadian foreign minister wanted to persuade President Hamid Karzai to replace the governor of Kandahar province, he certainly blew the sensitive ...
Afghan tribal leaders welcome Harper's pledge not to meddle Toronto Star
Karzai should replace Kandahar governor: BernieICTV.ca


I ran across these ever so enlightening urls while looking for a pic of Hamid Karzai

http://www.embassyofafghanistan.org/july2007newsletter.html

http://www.afghanemb-canada.net/en/news_bulletin/2006/march/20/index.php

This is my most favorite line of all!! --

American policy may sometimes be unsubtle and overly militarized, but large portions of the European political spectrum remain maddeningly passive. It's a failing that reverberates well beyond Afghanistan. On Darfur, today's most serious humanitarian crisis, Europe has been even more disengaged and timid than the United States. Afghanistan is as good a place as any for Europe to start backing its sensibilities with some mettle.

David Bosco is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.

See those human rights activists in socialist EU countries are to blame for ALL the genocide.

Get it?

a good round from today's news

Alleged Terrorist Labsi to Stay in Slovakia (Success!) Posted: 26 Mar 2008 10:37 PM CDT Kosice/Bratislava, March 13 (TASR-SLOVAKIA) - Slovakia’s Constitutional Court on Thursday decided on the suspension of the extradition of alleged terrorist Mustafa Labsi to his homeland Algeria, Labsi’s attorney Maria Kolikova has told SLOVAKIA. Kolikova welcomed the decision, calling it crucial for her client’s protection. “The Constitutional Court has proven to be an effective tool in the [...]

REPRIEVE RELEASES THE THIRD IN A SERIES OF SAMI AL HAJ PROTEST SKETCHES CONDEMNING US MILITARY ABUSE OF THE AL JAZEERA JOURNALIST Posted: 26 Mar 2008 09:25 PM CDT Reprieve is releasing the third in a series of protest pieces called Sketches of My Nightmare, inspired by the suffering of Sami al Haj. Mr. al Haj is an al-Jazeera journalist picked up covering the Afghan war and sent to Guantánamo Bay. He has been on hunger strike in Guantánamo since January 7, 2007. Sami al [...]

Lawyers contend US, Canada violated rights of Guantanamo detainee, seek interrogation details Posted: 26 Mar 2008 09:15 PM CDT Lawyers contend US, Canada violated rights of Guantanamo detainee, seek interrogation details The Associated Press Thursday, March 27, 2008 OTTAWA: The United States has violated international laws by holding a Canadian former child soldier at Guantanamo Bay, his lawyers told Canada’s high court as they sought to force the country’s intelligence service to provide details from their [...]

America’s Ruling Clique Posted: 26 Mar 2008 08:34 PM CDT Neoconservatives derive much of their political strength from the portrayal of big government as the enemy of the people: a belief that plays only too well in America . Big government is indeed the enemy of the people when it does not serve the people’s interests, or when it betrays them. Where the neoconservatives and the [...]

40% of aid to Afghanistan goes to consultants: report Tom Coghlan, The Daily Telegraph Posted: 26 Mar 2008 08:26 PM CDT KABUL - Nearly half the $15 billion in foreign aid given by Britain, the U. S. and other countries to rebuild Afghanistan since 2001 has been spent on consultants and contractors, according to a report by aid agencies released yesterday. The report by the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR), which represents 94 aid agencies, [...]

Syria Now Home to a Million ‘Pillow Drivers’ Posted: 26 Mar 2008 08:12 PM CDT Inter Press Service By Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail* DAMASCUS, Mar 24 (IPS) - More than a million Iraqis in Syria cannot find work. For their idleness, they have come to be called the “pillow drivers”. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says there are at least 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria. If they seek [...]

Oscar winner plans Abu Ghraib photo site Posted: 26 Mar 2008 07:50 PM CDT Since Abu Ghraib first came to the world’s attention in 2004, nearly 300 photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse have been shown to the public. But soon an enormous archive of new material — including more than 1,500 other photos, unredacted court papers and interview transcripts — will be posted online by filmmaker Errol Morris, whose [...]

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN GUANTANAMO BAY

Jawad Asks for Justice and Fairness; Says Military Commission Trials Are Illegal

Reuters North American News Service

by Kevin Lanigan, Director of Law and Security Program, Human Rights First

[Editor's Note: this blog entry was written at Guantanamo Bay]

Two weeks ago, Attorney General Michael Mukasey visited Guantánamo for about six hours. Among other things, he met with prosecution officials down here, but he did not see any proceedings because none were in session. He should have been here yesterday.

On Wednesday, March 12, Mohammed Jawad, a young Afghan man, was arraigned on military commission charges enacted into law in 2006, accusing him of throwing a hand grenade into a vehicle carrying two U.S. Army non-commissioned officers and their Afghan interpreter, wounding all three of them. Jawad was 16 years old at the time of the alleged offense in December 2002. He has been in U.S. military custody ever since then—now for more than 5 years—first at the detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and then at Guantánamo.

We had heard rumors since the night before that Jawad’s arraignment might not happen. Still, we were told Wednesday morning that the arraignment would begin at 1 p.m. After going through the external security checkpoints and being in place by the appointed hour, three more hours passed with nothing happening, as the media representatives and the NGO observers sat outside at picnic tables, sheltered from the sun by a tarp.

Finally, at nearly 4 p.m., we were ushered through the final security checkpoint and into the courtroom for an arraignment that should have taken fifteen minutes, but actually took two hours. By the time we were seated, Jawad was already in the courtroom, dressed in his orange prison jumpsuit with his feet in chains, alternately holding his head in his hands and lying his head on his crossed arms on the table.

Marine Colonel Ralph Coleman, the military judge in Jawad’s case, began the proceedings by announcing that he had two things to put on the record. First, Coleman reported that Jawad had refused to leave his cell yesterday morning to come to the arraignment, describing at length his analysis of the military commission rules and the various steps he and others took to get Jawad to the courtroom. (After the proceedings were over, Army Colonel J. Michael Sawyers, Jawad’s detailed military defense counsel, told us that Jawad had to be forcibly carried from his cell). And second, Col. Coleman chided defense counsel for failing to have Jawad dressed in civilian clothes for court, so that no negative inference could be drawn from his appearance in prison garb.

Then Col. Coleman asked Jawad whether he accepted Col. Sawyers as his defense counsel. (This inquiry was interrupted when Col. Coleman realized that Jawad’s headset—through which the proceedings were to be translated into Jawad’s native Pashto—was not working. After replacing the headset, the proceedings began again). Col. Coleman explained to Jawad his right to counsel in these proceedings, in language very similar to what any regular viewer of our police procedural television shows would easily recognize. But Jawad, raised in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with no more than an elementary-level religious education, has never seen those shows. Col. Coleman repeated his explanation of Jawad’s right to counsel, asking again and again if Jawad would accept Sawyers as his attorney, if he wanted another military counsel detailed, if he knew a civilian attorney he would prefer, or if he wanted to represent himself.

Through the court interpreter, Jawad said he did not understand what Col. Coleman was saying, that he wanted no counsel and no trial, and that he had things to say that he wanted Col. Coleman and the journalists to hear:

I’ve been treated unfairly since my arrest. I’m innocent. I’ve been tortured. (See Human Rights First report entitled Tortured Justice). I’m a human being. I’ve not infringed anyone’s rights. What is being done to me is illegal. I was brought here illegally…When I was arrested I was only 16. I don’t know court. I don’t know a judge’s job…I’m very glad if these words get out today. I’m glad there are journalists to hear me. Before if I said anything it would not get outside my cell…Is it in the United States Constitution to be treated this way? I want justice and fairness. That is all I have to say.

Jawad said that, as a child, he read in books and newspapers of the American government’s criticism of Taliban cruelty in Afghanistan, and that the Taliban would kill and imprison people without trial and did not respect human rights. But Jawad also said that he was arrested by the Americans more than five years ago with no trial, and that, while he was held in Bagram, Americans killed three Afghans in custody there. (See Human Rights First report entitled Command’s Responsibility, and description of the movie Taxi to the Dark Side).

During the course of this statement by Jawad, Col. Coleman tried to continue questioning Jawad about acceptance of counsel, but also gave him some leeway to say what he wanted. In the end, Jawad essentially shut down, saying he had a terrible headache, refusing to accept Col. Sawyers or any other military counsel, saying he knew no civilian lawyer to take his case, and saying he did not want to represent himself and did not want a trial. Col. Coleman told Jawad that the proceedings would continue nonetheless and ordered Col. Sawyers to continue as Jawad’s counsel for the time being.

After the prosecutor, Army Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, read a summary of the charges, Col. Coleman asked Jawad for a plea. Since entering any plea would cut off the defense’s right to file certain motions under commission rules, Sawyers said they would enter no plea. Thus ended the arraignment.

After the arraignment, Col. Coleman considered a request for excusal by Col. Sawyers. Some observers predicted this request was based on Jawad’s unwillingness to be represented by a uniformed U.S. military lawyer—a not-uncommon situation in Guantánamo. But this was different. The military commissions’ defense office, it seems, is relying increasingly on reserve officers called to active duty on one-year orders. Sawyers—who has met with Jawad numerous times over the last five months and even traveled to Afghanistan to help prepare the defense—leaves active duty and returns to civilian life on March 18, when he will no longer be able to serve as Jawad’s counsel. This is yet another variable in a military commission system that is being made up along the way.

Attorney General Mukasey should have seen all this. When he was here in February, he reportedly focused on preparations for the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other “high value” detainees. But what we saw yesterday was an inherently limited system, not well equipped to deal even with predictable issues arising at the simplest stage of the proceeding. Depending on your perspective yesterday, you might have viewed Jawad as keenly aware of his audience or obviously damaged by five years of isolation and abuse. Either way, it is hard to conceive of this military commissions system being able to cope effectively anytime soon with the “high value” detainees.

also see:

Abuse allegations from U.S. prison in Afghanistan cast shadow over 3 Guantanamo hearings

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20080314-1345-guantanamo-bagramsshadow.html

as well as:

http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/346379

http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=83320

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/03/13/i_m_a_human_being_young_guantanamo_priso

Afghan Prision looks like another Guantanamo

As Elisa Massimino at Human Rights first said in the House Judiciary Committee hearings in December about the US enforcment of Geneva, the policy has been to:

"Punish the moneky and let the organ grinder go"

Any wonder WHY the US can continue to get away with human rights violations and the demoralization of those who CARE about them?

When does Michael Mukasey FINALLY recuse himself and appoint a Special Prosecutor?

Today is the very first day that I "twigged" why his nomination, which came as such a suprise to me back then (wrote about it on OpEd News and did a lot of networking to express my HUGE concern) , was such a necessary step for the Bushistas. They use him as a sort of unimpeachable source of legal AUTHORITY.

Well, today I say this in black and white. I hold Michael Mukasey PERSONALLY responsible for the ongoing human rights violations AND for the suffering he causes others when it absolutely not necessary.

Are you listening at all, CONgress? Are you??? It is YOUR responsibility to uphold the Constitution and follow international treaties and obligations when the Executive Branch refuses to do so.

As for David Addington&Co, your legal obligations are NOT to the Republican party but to your nation. Paraquay won't look so good AFTER you figure out there is nowhere to run or hide.

Veeger

RIGHTS: Afghan Prison Looks Like Another Guantanamo
By William Fisher

A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar was allegedly chained to the ceiling of his cell. He later died in custody.

NEW YORK, Jan 14 (IPS) - As the world marked the sixth anniversary of the arrival of the first orange-jumpsuit-clad prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, human rights groups are attempting to focus public and congressional scrutiny on what some are calling "the other Gitmo".

It is a prison located on the U.S. military base at base in the ancient city of Bagram near Charikar in Parvan, Afghanistan. The detention centre was set up by the U.S. military as a temporary screening site after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban. It currently houses some 630 prisoners -- close to three times as many as are still held at Guantanamo.

In 2005, following well-documented accounts of detainee deaths, torture, and "disappeared" prisoners, the U.S. undertook efforts to turn the facility over to the Afghan government. But thanks to a series of legal, bureaucratic and administrative missteps, the prison is still under U.S. military control. And a recent confidential report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has reportedly complained about the continued mistreatment of prisoners.

The ICRC report is said to cite massive overcrowding, "harsh" conditions, lack of clarity about the legal basis for detention, prisoners held "incommunicado", in "a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells," and "sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions." Some prisoners have been held without charges or lawyers for more than five years.

According to Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),

"Bagram appears to be just as bad, if not worse, than Guantanamo. When a prisoner is in American custody and under American control, our values are at stake and our commitment to the rule of law is tested."

She told IPS, "

The abuses cited by the Red Cross give us cause for concern that we may be failing the test. The George W. Bush administration is not content to limit its regime of illegal detention to Guantanamo, and has tried to foist it on Afghanistan."

The problems at Bagram burst into the headlines in 2005, after the New York Times obtained a 2,000-page U.S. Army report concerning the deaths of two unarmed civilian Afghani prisoners guarded by U.S. armed forces in 2002.

U.S. military officials in Afghanistan initially said the deaths were from natural causes. Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, the commander of allied forces in Afghanistan at the time, denied then that prisoners had been chained to the ceiling or that conditions at Bagram endangered the lives of prisoners.

But after an investigation by The New York Times, the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides. The prisoners were chained to the ceiling and beaten, causing their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners" deaths were homicide.

Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Last fall, Army investigators implicated 28 soldiers and reservists and recommended that they face criminal charges, including negligent homicide.

The U.S. military has spent more than 30 million dollars to build an Afghan prison outside Kabul that meets international humane treatment standards and has trained Afghan guards.

But the number of detainees keeps growing, due to the intensifying combat in Afghanistan. One result is that there is room for only about half the prisoners the U.S. originally planned to put in the new detention center.

Efforts to transfer Bagram's 630-plus prisoners to Afghan control have run into myriad other problems. First, there were turf battles between the different ministries of the Afghan government. Then Afghan officials rejected pressure from Washington to adopt a detention system modeled on the Bush administration's "enemy combatant" legal framework, with military commissions such as those at Guantánamo.

The ACLU's Shamsi says that, "While conditions at Bagram have improved, at least since the universal revulsion at the revelations of Abu Ghraib and Congress' passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the tragic mistakes of the past may be in danger of repetition."

She also raises the possibility that there may be prisoners in Afghanistan who are not "Department of Defence detainees", as one Pentagon official has referred to them, but are instead held by the CIA or another civilian agency.

"We know that the CIA was holding "ghost prisoners" -- prisoners held in secret, hidden from the Red Cross -- at a secret facility called the 'Salt Pit' in Afghanistan," Shamsi says. She notes that the administration has never renounced the CIA's illegal secret detention and interrogation programme that President Bush revealed in September 2006. She adds concern that Special Operations forces may not be following Department of Defence directives on the registration of prisoners.

According to Shamsi, "It is clear that another lesson from the torture scandal seems to have been ignored: different rules for different agencies and different prisoners are an invitation to abuse."

The situation at Bagram has been largely overshadowed by the continuing controversy surrounding Guantanamo. Just last week, a U.S. appeals court ruled that four former Guantanamo prisoners, all British citizens, have no right to sue top Pentagon officials and military officers for torture, abuse and violations of their religious rights. The four who brought the lawsuit were released from Guantanamo in 2004 after being held for more than two years. The suit sought 10 million dollars in damages and named then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 10 military commanders.

The men claimed they were subjected to various forms of torture, harassed as they practiced their religion and forced to shave their religious beards. In one instance, a guard threw a Koran in a toilet bucket, according to the lawsuit.

The appeals court cited a lack of jurisdiction over the lawsuit, ruled the defendants enjoyed qualified immunity for acts taken within the scope of their government jobs and held the religious right law did not apply to the detainees.

Eric Lewis, the attorney who argued the case for the detainees, vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when a court finds that torture is all in a days' work for the secretary of defence and senior generals," Lewis said.

Another attorney for the plaintiffs, Michael Ratner of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, expressed disappointment that the appeals court failed to hold "Rumsfeld and the chain of command accountable for torture at Guantanamo."

Guantanamo and Bagram have been virtually ignored by candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination. One exception is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who acknowledged that Guantanamo has become a damaging symbol for the United States and is "not in our best interests".

President Bush has said he would like to close Guantanamo, but has taken no action to do so. In June 2007, Bush's former Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo -- not tomorrow, this afternoon," explaining that "we have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open."

And Defence Secretary Robert Gates has reportedly pushed to close the facility because he felt it had "become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantanamo would be viewed as illegitimate."

(END/2008)