Sarah Palin gets pranked
A Quebec comedy duo pranked Sarah Palin, convincing her she was speaking to French President Nicolas Sarkozy:
November 1st, 2008
Archive for November 1st, 2008
Reisner and Behnke on WHYY discussing psychologists and interrogations
The American Psychological Association’s Ethics Director, Stephen Behnke, and APA Presidential Candidate Steven Reisner were on NPR station WHYY in Philadelphia on Thursday, discussing the involvement of psychologists in US national security interrogations.
You can listen to it here. Stephen Behke has the first 13 minutes, then Steven Reisner comes on.
November 1st, 2008
Cheney endorses McCain-Palin
Another reason to vote against McCain: He’s been endorsed by the Vice President for Torture:
November 1st, 2008
Middle East Online reports accusation by an Iraqi MP of hundreds of US-Iraqi run secret detention facilities:
Iraq MP: 420 secret detention centres in Iraq
Al-Dainy calls on UN to investigate detention centres controlled by both Iraq government, US-led forces.
GENEVA – An Iraqi parliamentarian on Thursday called on the United Nations to investigate what he said were over 400 secret detention centres in the country controlled by both the government and US-led foreign forces.
Mohammad Al-Dainy told a news conference in Geneva there were at least 420 such places, some of them underground.
“These centres of detention are completely illegal. Nobody can visit them. Conditions there are much worse than in official prisons,” he said.
Al-Dainy said he met officials from the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and non-governmental organisations during his visit.
The ICRC said it has not yet reached an agreement with the Iraqi government on visiting prisons under their control.
“We only have access to three sites under the control of the Iraqi authorities,” spokeswoman Dorothea Krimitsas said.
November 1st, 2008
Did Bush Admin push false “dirty bomb” charges?
In yet another Guantanamo worse-than-farce development, a federal judge essentially accused Justice Department lawyers of using false accusations — “That doesn’t ring true; it rings hollow,” Sullivan said. “The government has never been concerned with acting expeditiously here” –to justify the kidnapping and rendition to Morocco and perpetual detention at Guantanamo of detainee Binyam Mohammed. Yesterday I posted a British report that Britain may indict CIA officials for Mr. Mohammed’s torture. This Washington Post article claims the British statements were ambiguous:
Motives of Justice Lawyers Questioned in Detainee’s Case
By Peter Finn and Del Quentin Wilber
A federal judge yesterday questioned the motives of Justice Department lawyers for withdrawing allegations linking a Guantanamo Bay detainee to a “dirty bomb” plot in the United States shortly before they were required to hand over exculpatory evidence to the defense.
“That raises serious questions in this court’s mind about whether those allegations were ever true,” said U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is overseeing a lawsuit brought by Binyam Mohammed, 30, a resident of Britain who is challenging his detention at the U.S. military facility in Cuba. Sullivan warned that “someone is going to rue the day those allegations were made” if it turns out that the government had evidence that they were unfounded.
The government said it stood by the allegations but had withdrawn them to expedite proceedings.
Despite that decision, Sullivan ordered the government to turn over any potentially exculpatory information related to the alleged dirty-bomb plot. That could force the government to account for Mohammed’s disappearance from 2002 to 2004.
Mohammed said the CIA rendered him to Morocco weeks after he was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002. His attorneys argue that the government’s allegations are based on confessions their client made after his detention and torture in Morocco, where, they say, he was slashed with razors.
“He parroted what his torturers wanted him to say,” said Zachary Katznelson, one of Mohammed’s attorneys. “All they have are Mr. Mohammed’s own words, and they were extracted at the tip of a razor blade.”
The government said Mohammed voluntarily confessed to a number of terrorist crimes, including the dirty-bomb plot, in 2004 at Bagram air base in Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay. The government has never acknowledged that he was in Morocco.
The dirty-bomb allegation was not pursued in the case of Mohammed’s alleged co-conspirator, Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen initially declared an enemy combatant but convicted in August 2007 on a lesser charge of providing material support for terrorism. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
A day before yesterday’s hearing, the United States turned over intelligence documents related to Mohammed that have been the subject of judgments by the British High Court. The British government discovered the documents in its files and declared them potentially exculpatory, but said it preferred they be handed over by the United States because they include classified material from U.S. agencies.
The U.S. government initially resisted, releasing only seven documents, but on Wednesday it turned over the 35 remaining ones. The British court strongly hinted that it would release them if the United States refused to do so.
British officials also told the High Court this week that the “question of possible criminal wrongdoing” in Mohammed’s case has been referred to the country’s attorney general for investigation. It was unclear from a letter to the British court whether the probe would focus only on the actions of British agents or could also charge U.S. officials.
The allegations against Mohammed are now essentially reduced to his having attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
“We have simplified this case to its bare essence,” Andrew I. Warden, a Justice Department lawyer, told Sullivan.
“That doesn’t ring true; it rings hollow,” Sullivan said. “The government has never been concerned with acting expeditiously here.”
Mohammed’s habeas case was filed in U.S. District Court in 2005, about six months after he arrived at Guantanamo Bay. The government has been fiercely fighting scores of similar lawsuits filed in federal court by detainees at the facility challenging their confinement.
Besides obtaining government documents, Katznelson is also trying to interview a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who resigned citing ethical concerns; an FBI agent who investigated the dirty-bomb plot; and a suspected CIA operative who was on the flight that the defense says took Mohammed from Morocco to Afghanistan in 2004.
Sullivan set a hearing for Nov. 12 to hear Katznelson’s request.
November 1st, 2008
Robert Fisk on US blackamil to obtain innocents from Bosnia for Guantanamo gulag
There have been several new developments in the worse than farce that is Guantanamo. Robert Fisk discusses the six from Bosnia held at Guantanamo on likely false charges. Fisk discusses the blackmail used by the US to force Bosnia to turn over these men after they were found innocent in the Bosnian courts:
Scandal of six held in Guantanamo even after Bush plot claim is dropped
By Robert FiskNo evidence that men living in Bosnia plotted attack on Sarajevo embassy
In the dying days of the Bush administration, yet another presidential claim in the “war on terror” has been proved false by the withdrawal of the main charge against six Algerians held without trial for nearly seven years at Guantanamo prison camp.
George Bush’s assertion in his 2002 State of the Union address – the same speech in which he wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had tried to import aluminium tubes from Niger – was that “our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy [in Sarajevo].” Not only has the US government withdrawn that charge against the six Algerians, all of whom had taken citizenship or residence in Bosnia, but lawyers defending the Arabs – who had already been acquitted of such a plot in a Sarajevo court – have found that the US threatened to pull its troops out of the Nato peacekeeping force in Bosnia if the men were not handed over. According to testimony presented by the Bosnian Prime Minister, Alija Behman, the deputy US ambassador to Bosnia in 2001, Christopher Hoh, told him that if he did not hand the men to the Americans, “then let God protect Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
That such a threat should be made – and the international High Representative to Bosnia at the time, Wolfgang Petritsch, has also told lawyers it was – shows for the first time just how ruthless and unprincipled US foreign policy had become in Mr Bush’s “war on terror”. By withdrawing their military and diplomatic support for the Bosnian peace process, the Americans would have backed out of the Dayton accord which they themselves had negotiated. Then the Bosnian government would have lost its legitimacy and the country might have collapsed back into a civil war which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and involved mass rape as well as massacre. The people of Bosnia might then have endured “terror” on a scale far greater than the attacks of al-Qa’ida against the United States.
When the Bosnian court was preparing to release their six prisoners, Prime Minister Behman was informed that Mr Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had been personally briefed and the White House had decided that, if they were freed, US troops in the Nato Stabilisation Force in Bosnia would seize them, using “whatever force is necessary”. So, despite a three-month investigation by the Bosnian police, their clearance and a specific demand by the Dayton-established Bosnian Human Rights Chamber that they should not be forced to leave Bosnia, US forces seized all six, shackled and blindfolded them and put them on a plane to Guantanamo.
Mustafa Idir, Mohamed Nechla, Hadj Boudella, Lakhdar Boumedienne, Belkacem Bensayah and Saber Lahmar have remained there since, the only European citizens still in Guanatanamo. Five of their wives are still waiting for them in Bosnia along with 20 of their children, two of whom their fathers have never seen. Their case will be put to a habeas corpus district court hearing in Washington next week – the six will appear in a live transmission from Guantanamo – where their lawyers will point out that another critical charge has also been withdrawn by the US government.
The administration has withdrawn evidence given by a federal prisoner, Enaam Arnaout, against Boudella – that he trained at an al-Qa’ida camp in Afghanistan – when lawyers were about to discover that the US Justice Department had said five years earlier that an FBI interview with the man was “not reliable”.
Even stranger is that the six prisoners are claimed by the US to be “enemy combatants” when – with the dropping of the embassy bomb-plot charge – there is no evidence they have ever fought US troops or planned to attack US interests anywhere in the world. Part of the case against Bensayah involved the alleged discovery of a piece of paper at his home, bearing a telephone number for an al-Qa’ida operative, Abu Zubayder. “The Bosnian police couldn’t get this number to work in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” one of the prisoners’ lawyers, Stephen Oleskey, says. “Now we believe an announcement that the paper had been discovered was made before it was ‘found’.”
Mr Oleskey says Clint Williamson, the US war crimes ambassador, met Bosnia’s Prime Minister, Nicola Spiric, this week. “There’s only one reason he makes these visits,” he said. “To negotiate the return of people in Guantanamo.” The White House may intend to save itself further embarrassment by ending the torment of six more apparently innocent young men.
November 1st, 2008