Daily archives: June 20, 2006

Bosnia confirms illegal handover of Algerians

 in Rendition by | View Comments

ISN SECURITY WATCH (Monday, 19 June 2006: 09.48 CET) ‘ Bosnia and Herzegovina formally has acknowledged to the Council of Europe that it allowed US forces to seize six Algerian-born men and transfer them to Guantanamo even after a local court acquitted them due to lack of evidence.

Bosnia is the only one of the council’s 46 members to acknowledge it had breached the European Convention on Human Rights by participating in an extrajudicial seizure of individuals by the US.

The Council of Europe’s human rights committee has accused more than 20 countries of colluding with the CIA’s controversial “extraordinary rendition flights” and secret prisons.

On 7 June, the committee released a report saying that “European states played an active or passive role in the network run by the CIA and were not unwitting victims of the operation.’

The report named Poland and Romania for running secret CIA prison. It also said Germany, Turkey, Spain, and Cyprus were “staging points” for illegal CIA rendition flights. Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy were named as being “stopovers” for flights involving the illegal transfer of detainees. The report named Sweden, Bosnia, Britain, Macedonia, Germany, and Turkey in connection to illegal CIA activities in relation to specific individual cases.

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The US embassy memo: Why the media silence?

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Yesterday we posted an article on the US Iraq Embassy memo, published by the Washington Post, that exposes the mis-match between Bush’s upbeat and misleading assessment and the grim reality on the ground.

Media Matters comments on the striking lack of covergae by mainstream media.

The memo can be read here(PDF)

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US military honoured in secret by Britian

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From The Observer

The government has been secretly awarding honours to senior figures in the US military and foreign businessmen with lucrative public sector contracts. The Observer has obtained a Foreign Office list detailing all non-British citizens who have been awarded honours since 2003 – the first time the complete three-year dossier has been released.

It has emerged that Riley Bechtel, billionaire boss of the US-based Bechtel Corporation, which has won big transport and nuclear contracts in Britain and made a fortune from the Iraq war, was secretly awarded a CBE in 2003.

This award has never been made public either by the British government or Bechtel. At the time Jack Straw, now Leader of the House of Commons, was Foreign Secretary. Although there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing, questions are being asked about whether the Foreign Office kept the awards quiet for fear of a political backlash.

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