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30 thoughts on “Torture Inquiry: AFP Interview”

  • Anonymous

    Unfortunately when I went to play this it said “this video contains content from afp, who has blocked it from display on this website”.

  • me in us

    The whole transcript:

    —

    MURRAY: I think that the most important question for the inquiry is, was there an official policy of obtaining intelligence by torture? Was this a policy which was agreed by ministers? That is absolutely the key, the key question.

    The biggest problem is the CIA. The American government is putting heavy pressure on the British government not to have an inquiry which exposes CIA’s involvement in torture.

    —

  • Anonymous

    If you click onto the picture in the video above three/four times in quick succession, it will take you to ‘you Tube’ and you can watch it there.

  • MJ

    I see you collect Folio Society editions. Very wise. They don’t fall apart and retain their value too.

  • Vronsky

    Looks like what news photographers call a ‘nostril shot’ – a deliberately unflattering image. It’s a very common practice and I could give many examples.

  • Paul Johnston

    Lot of hardbacks Craig, I can really only afford paperbacks, except for the really good stuff. Off topic but do you know a Matteo Fumagalli?

  • Duron

    The Mysterious Death of Dr David Kelly: Damning New Evidence Points to a Cover-up by Tony Blair’s Government

    by Miles Goslett and Stephen Frost:

    “… in his recently published book ‘The End Of The Party’, the political commentator Andrew Rawnsley (who has close links with the Labour high command) claims that Geoff Hoon, Defence Secretary at the time of Kelly’s death, was so furious about being removed by Tony Blair as Leader of the House of Commons in May 2006 that he wrote out a resignation statement.

    According to Rawnsley, ‘he planned to make a speech about the [David] Kelly affair that he told friends could trigger the instant downfall of the Prime Minister’.

    Frustratingly, there are no more details in Rawnsley’s book about what Hoon was referring to – but Hoon visited Dr Kelly’s widow shortly after his death and has never publicly denied this explosive charge.”

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19930

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Hypnotise Hoon, I say!

    This assumes, of course, that he has a consciousness. He certainly doesn’t seem to have a conscience.

    Interesting, Duron, and thanks for the link and info., that the one time in his working life as a minister, etc., that Hoon seems to have been prepared to tell the truth was in a fit of pique rather than because of any principled opposition to anything.

    Nonetheless, it is tantalising.

  • Mat

    Ooh, I think you just fell off Snoop Dog’s Christmas card list – what with that “East Side” gang sign at 0:39… 😉

    But seriously – what an odd cut…? Then again, AFP are very protective of their material – it looks as though they have spliced this clip from “stock” footage which they aren’t going to use in the final.

    I like the “controversial” label – there are few higher honours in France.

  • technicolour

    I saw that Guardian piece and thought hey, Craig, they’re joining you!

  • Clark

    Somebody,

    thanks for the Guardian link. Sir Richard Dalton’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry seems very important. His take is that Bush and Blair were ‘mistaken’ about Iran. I doubt it; I think Blair was just lying. Bush was probably doing his best to read from the autocue.

  • Jaded.

    I want to know where the female big cheese gets her hair done. Now Moat has been caught we won’t be treated to seeing her on the TV any more.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    The Murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh — ‘War on Terror’ Implications.

    A reliable source within the intelligence community has said that Britain’s secret service knew brief details of the Mossad operation to assassinate the Hamas commander in Dubai before the event. Israel had informed MI6 as part of an intelligence sharing agreement.

    William Hague as shadow foreign secretary at the time, also said that Britain must have known details of the ‘hit’ in advance.

    Since the ‘expulsion’ of an Israeli ‘diplomat’ who was not named the Coalition government and David Cameron have both been silent.

    Therefore I call on Britain’s senior judges to consider the wider implications of this collusion, on the ‘war on terror’ – with particular regard to the involvement of British secret services in rendition and torture.

    It is crystal clear that the interface between government and the intelligence services committee is flawed, absurd, vague and criminally deceptive, in that the government of the time were NOT told anything about this serious breach of passport security and use of methods to hide a murder such that it may have been judged as death by natural causes.

    I urgently call on our judiciary to invoke a public inquiry into this serious matter that seems to have been ‘swept under the carpet.’

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    THIS IS WESTERN DEMOCRACY – deception!!

    be-tachbulot ta’aseh lekha milchamah

    ?’???’???? ????” ?? ?????”

    Amiri returns home, says US planned to transfer him to Israel

    TEHRAN, July 14 (MNA) ?” Shahram Amiri returned to Iran on Thursday morning to a hero’s welcome and was embraced by his family including his tearful 7-year-old son.

    Amiri, an Iranian nuclear expert, was abducted by CIA agents to the United States while on a Saudi pilgrimage 14 months ago. Amiri took refuge at the Iranian Interests Section in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington on Monday.

    Talking to reporters upon his arrival at Imam Khomeini airport in Tehran, Amiri said the U.S. intended to transfer him to Israel.

    Amiri said he was harshly interrogated and offered millions of dollars by the CIA to speak against Iran.

    Shahram Amiri shows victory sign upon arrival in Tehran

    He said in the first months of his capture he was put under intense psychological pressure by CIA agents. “In the first two months I was under the harshest mental torture.”

    “Americans told me that if I do not submit to their demands they will hand me over to Israel,” he explained. “Interrogators from the Zionist regime were present at some interrogation hearings.”

    He went on to say that “they wanted me to declare to media that I have defected to America on my own will… and carried important documents along with a laptop (with myself) that contained secret nuclear documents.”

    Amiri also said if Americans were right “why didn’t they allow me to have an open interview with the media… and why didn’t they ever announce my presence (in America)?”

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    July 15 (Xinhua) — An Iranian scholar who had gone missing for more than one year told reporters here Thursday he was kidnapped by the CIA and the abduction was part of the U.S. campaign to add political pressures to Iran.

    Shahram Amiri, 32, who arrived in Tehran early in the morning, told a news conference that he was abducted by CIA agents when he was on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in June last year.

    “I was abducted by the U.S. and Saudi Arabian intelligent service agents in front of my hotel in Medina city (in Saudi Arabia). I was transferred to an unknown place in Saudi Arabia. I was injected an got unconscious. Then they transferred me to the American soil with a military plane,” said Amiri, who worked at Iran’s Malek Ashtar University before went missing. Western media reports also said he has been identified as an employee of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, or the IAEO.

    He said that he was interrogated and tortured by U.S. and Israeli agents who wanted classified information about Iran’s nuclear projects from him.

    “In the first two months in the United States, I was subjected to the most severe mental and psychological pressures and tortures by the CIA interrogators,” said Amiri.

    He said that the Americans urged him to announce that he had carried a laptop containing information about Iran’s sensitive nuclear program.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    Extent of UK involvement in torture revealed in secret papers

    London, July 15, IRNA ?” The extent of the British government’s involvement in the illegal abduction and torture of its own citizens following the 9/11 attacks in the US have been revealed in secret documents.

    Among the most damning disclosures made during court proceedings brought by six former Guantanamo inmates are interrogation reports from MI5 security agents that betray the suffering of a British resident whom they were questioning at a US airbase in Afghanistan.

    Another startling document, according to the Guardian newspaper, is chapter 32 of MI6’s general procedural manual, entitled “Detainees and Detention Operations”.

    This was said to advise intelligence officers that among the “particular sensitivities” they need to consider before becoming directly involved in an operation to detain a terrorism suspect is the question of whether “detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation”.

    The disclosure come after Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced an inquiry into whether Britain has been complicit with torture despite repeated denials by the previous Labour government.

    The Previously secret papers include a number implicating former prime minister Tony Blair’s office, including overruling Foreign Office attempts to provide consular for his return to the UK with the result that he was “rendered” to Guantanamo.

    The Guardian reported Thursday that the documents also show that the Foreign Office decided in January 2002 that the transfer of British citizens from Afghanistan to Guantanamo was its “preferred option”.

    In the court proceedings, the government has been responding to disclosure requests by maintaining that it has identified up to 500,000 documents that may be relevant, and says it has deployed 60 lawyers to scrutinise them.

    Many of the documents requested by lawyers remained to be handed over with so far only 900 papers disclosed, and these have included batches of press cuttings and copies of government reports that were published several years ago.

    “Together they paint a picture of a government that was determined not only to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States as it embarked upon its programme of “extraordinary rendition” and torture of terrorism suspects in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but to actively participate in that programme,” the Guardian said.

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