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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From The Jurist

The ongoing detention without trial of over 400 individuals in the US base at Guantanamo Bay has rightly been decried as an ongoing human rights scandal by everyone from Amnesty International to the Vatican. The recent hunger strike and now the suicides of three prisoners have however raised the issue of the medical treatment of the Guantanamo detainees.

Dr. David Nicholl, a neurologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, says that the recent hunger strike and now suicides by prisoners held by the US at Guantanamo Bay highlight the need to accord the detainees not just due legal process, but also ethical medical treatment…

Go here to read the full article.

From Amnesty International

Europe’s governments have repeatedly denied their complicity in the US programme of “renditions” ‘ an unlawful practice in which numerous men have been illegally detained and secretly flown to third countries, where they have suffered additional crimes including torture and enforced disappearance.

As evidence of this programme has come to light, however, it has become clear that many European governments have adopted a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ approach when it comes to rendition flights using their territory and that some states have been implicated in individual cases. These states include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Turkey and EU members Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK.

Without Europe’s help, some men would not now be held without charge or trial, in abusive conditions, in Egypt, Syria and Guant’namo. Without information from European intelligence agencies, some of the men may not have been abducted. Without access to Europe’s airport facilities and airspace, CIA planes would have found it harder to transport their human cargo. In short, Europe has been the USA’s partner in crime.

The impact on both the victims of renditions and their families has been devastating.

At the EU Summit 15-16 June in Brussels leaders of EU states must take a clear and public stance against renditions and at the EU-US Summit 21 June in Vienna they must ensure that the EU reiterate this stance with the USA.

To take action visit here

The following is a transcript of an unscripted talk given for the BUSH CRIMES COMMISSION at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. Spoken language often relies on inflection and even gesture, and when written down can look ungrammatical and even George Bush-esque!

BUSH CRIMES COMMISSION

CRAIG MURRAY

The Banality of Evil

MODERATOR: Our third witness this evening is Ambassador Craig Murray. Craig Murray was a career diplomat in the British Foreign Service. And as he will explain to you, his last position was the representative of Her Majesty’s government in Uzbekistan. And in that position some very disturbing documents began to cross his desk, which led him eventually to resign from the Foreign Service and to expose what was happening in that country and what the United States and the British governments’ attitude towards it was.

I give you Craig Murray.

(Applause.)

MURRAY: Thank you. Thank you very much. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be here in the United States. I agree wholeheartedly with various points that it’s very, very necessary to radicalize the current generation of students.

I’m not quite sure about the means that, you know, we need to radicalize the students. Let’s find an upperclass retired ambassador and send him on a speaking tour. It — it’s not automatically the way I’d do it. But, well, we’ll give it a go and see what happens.

I’ve never been to Boston before except for Boston in England. And I’ve never been in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before. I’m dead impressed by this facility. From here I can see two different clocks. One of them is only about 20 meters east of the other, and yet the technology can detect it’s 8:00 o’clock there and still 7:59 over there (laughter). I tell you, I’m bloody impressed. Quite remarkable.

I was the British ambassador in a place called Uzbekistan. This came at the rather premature end of my diplomatic career. I’d been a career diplomat for 21 years. I’d served in a number of positions, including some senior positions.

I was also an expert in Iraqi weapons procurement, having led the British effort on monitoring Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement during the early 1990s and during the first Gulf War.

I was posted to Uzbekistan, and I didn’t have that much idea where it was at the time I was posted there. In fact I was — I was a British deputy high commissioner in Africa in Ghana in Accra, and I received a phone call from the office. Said, “Craig, you’ve been promoted to ambassador.”

And I said, “Great.”

And they said, “In Uzbekistan.”

And I said, “Yes, uh –” (laughter), and I put down the phone, and I shouted to my secretary, “Christina, go buy an atlas,” to see where I was going.

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Scotland Against Criminalsing Communities (SACC) welcomes the publication today of the report by Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty on alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states. The report is scheduled to be debated by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 27 June. SACC joins with other peace and human rights groups in calling for vigils to be held at airports in the UK and the Republic of Ireland on Saturday 24th June to demand that our governments implement the recommendations made by Senator Marty and that governments and police forces take urgent action against torture and illegal detention.

While noting that the picture is still incomplete, Senator Marty documents a “global spiders web” of illegal activity. He particularly singles out Prestwick and Shannon as proven stopovers for aircraft involved in rendition and has been able to link specific visits of CIA-owned aircraft logged at these airports to specific instances of rendition. CIA-owned aircraft have also been logged at many other airports and, even if not involved in the transfer of prisoners, may be illegally providing logistical support for torture and kidnapping. We urge people to hold vigils on Saturday 24th June at any airports where illegal activity may have occurred.

Plans for vigils at Edinburgh and Prestwick airports have already been finalised; details of events planned at other airports will be announced in due course.

Prestwick – assemble Prestwick airport 12.30pm

Edinburgh – assemble Edinburgh airport 12.30pm. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and representatives of the Scottish Green Party and the Scottish National Party will be speaking at the vigil.

Updates on the planned vigils will be available at www.sacc.org.uk/rendition/

More information 07719822164 [email protected]

“…selling our souls for dross”

From the Financial Times

Europe’s foremost guardian of human rights yesterday painted a chilling picture of how more than a dozen European countries became part of a global “spider’s web” spun by the US to kidnap and transport outside the reach of the law suspects in the “war on terror”. Such lawless practices, including the outsourcing of torture to friendly despots, are spreading like a lethal virus.

They amount to a moral capitulation by liberal societies and a surrender of the rule of law in the face of jihadi totalitarianism. If we behave like this, what exactly are we defending?

The Council of Europe report, while not definitive, is devastating. Dick Marty, the Swiss legislator who led the inquiry, lacked the investigatory powers to compel and compile legally watertight evidence. But his dossier leaves no doubt about the archipelago of clandestine “black sites” run by the Central Intelligence Agency, of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, and of collusion by countries including the UK and Germany, Poland and Spain, Sweden, Turkey and much of the Balkans.

Many of the cases in the Marty report were known. But their presentation as a pattern called forth a storm of bluster and obfuscation from those implicated. The Bush administration is investigating how The Washington Post obtained classified information about clandestine CIA sites in eastern Europe last November. The Swiss are investigating the leak of an intercepted Egyptian government fax about the sites.

But rather than shooting the messenger they should look at the message the west is sending by betraying the values it urges on others, a hypocrisy in no way disguised by recourse to Orwellian legalisms such as “rendition”.

The purpose of this practice, the Marty report is careful to underline, is not to transport suspects across borders within a recognised legal process but “to place captured terrorist suspects outside the reach of any justice system and keep them there”.

The “ghost prisoners” of the “black sites” are now a grievance to be added to Guant’namo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. All this comes hard on the heels of news of a cover-up of an alleged US Marines massacre at Haditha in Iraq, and Pentagon attempts to excise Geneva Conventions protections for prisoners under interrogation from US army rules. It is getting hard to think of what more we can do to empower al-Qaeda.

We should not need to make the case against torture. It is morally depraved. It corrodes the society that condones it. It elicits largely worthless information. As Craig Murray, the UK envoy to Uzbekistan fired for denouncing Britain’s use of CIA-supplied information extracted in Uzbek jails, put it: “We are selling our souls for dross.”

Sandra Day O’Connor, the retired US Supreme Court justice, summed it up well when she said we “must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny”.

See also: We need to act against rendition

“Rendition is a degrading and dehumanising practice; certainly for its victims, but also for those who perform the operations. This simple realisation has become clear to me and my team as we have met with various people whose lives have been indelibly changed by rendition.”

Dick Marty has released his report on Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states. Extracts are given below. The report is scheduled for debate during the plenary session of the 630-member PACE in Strasbourg on Tuesday 27 June 2006.

On the US response to terrorism:

“While the states of the Old World have dealt with these threats primarily by means of existing institutions and legal systems, the United States appears to have made a fundamentally different choice: considering that neither conventional judicial instruments nor those established under the framework of the laws of war could effectively counter the new forms of international terrorism, it decided to develop new legal concepts. The latter are based primarily on the Military Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War against Terrorism signed by President Bush on 13 November 20013. It is significant that, to date, only one person has been summoned before the courts to answer for the 11 September attacks: a person, moreover, who was already in prison on that day, and had been in the hands of the justice system for several months4. By contrast, hundreds of other people are still deprived of their liberty, under American authority but outside the national territory, within an unclear normative framework. Their detention is, in any event, altogether contrary to the principles enshrined in all the international legal instruments dealing with respect for fundamental rights, including the domestic law of the United States (which explains the existence of such detention centres outside the country). The following headline appears to be an accurate summary of the current administration’s approach: No Trials for Key Players: Government prefers to interrogate bigger fish in terrorism cases rather than charge them.

This legal approach is utterly alien to the European tradition and sensibility, and is clearly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

On Guantanamo Bay:

“At Guantanamo Bay, on the island of Cuba, several hundred people are being detained without enjoying any of the guarantees provided for in the criminal procedure of a state governed by the rule of law or in the Geneva Conventions on the law of war. These people have been arrested in unknown circumstances, handed over by foreign authorities without any extradition procedure being followed, or illegally abducted in various countries by United States special services. They are considered enemy combatants, according to a new definition introduced by the American administration.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has strongly criticised this state of affairs: on 26 April 2005, with no votes against and just five abstentions, it adopted a resolution (1433/2005) and recommendation (1699/2005) in which it urges the United States Government to put a stop to this situation and to ensure respect for the principles of the rule of law and human rights.”

On Secret CIA prisons in Europe:

“This was the news item circulated in early November 2005 by the American NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Washington Post and the ABC television channel. Whereas the Washington Post did not name specific countries hosting, or having allegedly hosted, such detention centres, simply referring generically to ‘eastern European democracies’, HRW reported that the countries in question are Poland and Romania. On 5 December 2005, ABC News in turn reported the existence of secret detention centres in Poland and Romania, which had apparently been closed following the Washington Post’s revelations. According to ABC, 11 suspects detained in these centres had been subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques (so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’) before being transferred to CIA facilities in North Africa.

It is interesting to recall that this ABC report, confirming the use of secret detention camps in Poland and Romania by the CIA, was available on the Internet for only a very short time before being withdrawn following the intervention of lawyers on behalf of the network’s owners. The Washington Post subsequently admitted that it had been in possession of the names of the countries, but had refrained from naming them further to an agreement entered into with the authorities. It is thus established that considerable pressure was brought to bear to ensure that these countries were not named. It is unclear what arguments prevailed on the media outlets in question to convince them to comply. What is certain is that these are troubling developments that throw into question the principles of freedom and independence of the press. In this light, it is worth noting that just before the publication of the original revelations by the reporter Dana Priest in early November 2005, the Executive Editor of the Washington Post was invited for an audience at the White House with President Bush.”

On the US rendition programme:

“Rendition operations have escalated in scale and changed in focus. The central effect of the post-9/11 rendition programme has been to place captured terrorist suspects outside the reach of any justice system and keep them there. The absence of human rights guarantees and the introduction of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ have led, in several cases examined, as we shall see, to detainees being subjected to torture.

The reasons behind the transformation in the character of rendition are both political and operational. First, it is clear that the United States Government has set out to combat terrorism in an aggressive and urgent fashion. The executive has applied massive political pressure on all its agencies, particularly the CIA, to step up the intensity of their counter-terrorist activities. According to Scheuer, ‘after 9/11, we had nothing ready to go ‘ the military had no plans, they had no response; so the Agency felt the brunt of the executive branch’s desire to show the American people victories’33.

Second, and more importantly, the key operational change has been the mandate given to the CIA to administer its own detention facilities. When it takes terrorist suspects into its custody, the CIA no longer uses rendition to transport them into the custody of countries where they are wanted. Instead, for the high-level suspects at least, rendition now leads to secret detention at the CIA’s so-called ‘black sites’34 in unspecified locations around the world. Rather than face any form of justice, suspects become entrapped in the spider’s web.

In compiling this report, members of my team and I have met directly with several victims of renditions and secret detentions, or with their families. In addition, we have obtained access to further first-hand accounts from victims who remain detained, in the form of their letters or diaries, unclassified notes from their discussions with lawyers, and official accounts of visits from Embassy officials.

Personal accounts of this type of human rights abuse speak of utter demoralisation. Of course, the despair is greatest in cases where the abuse persists ‘ where a person remains in secret detention, without knowing the basis on which he is being held, and where nobody apart from his captors knows about his exact whereabouts or wellbeing. The uncertainty that defines rendition and secret detention is torturous, both for those detained and those for whom they are ‘disappeared’.

…it must be stated that to date, the following member States could be held responsible, at varying degrees, which are not always settled definitively, for violations of the rights of specific persons identified below (respecting the chronological order as far as possible):

– Sweden, in the cases of Ahmed Agiza and Mohamed Alzery ;

– Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the cases of Lakhdar Boumediene, Mohamed Nechle, Hadj Boudella, Belkacem Bensayah, Mustafa Ait Idir and Saber Lahmar ( the ‘Algerian six’) ;

– The United Kingdom in the cases of Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna and Binyam Mohamed ;

– Italy, in the cases of Abu Omar and Maher Arar ;

– ‘The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, in the case of Khaled El-Masri ;

– Germany, in the cases of Abu Omar, of the ‘Algerian six’, and Khaled El-Masri ;

– Turkey, in the case of the ‘Algerian six’.”

From Scoop (Wednesday, 7 June 2006)

Scope of Bush Crimes Shocking

Over the last two months, teams from the Bush Crimes Commission have fanned out across the country, speaking to audiences on 16 campuses, including Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, M.I.T., U. of Chicago, and U.C.L.A.* We now have plans for major events in the fall, that will, with your help, continue to spread the testimony from the Commission and its findings.

In city after city, students, faculty, and community members were all moved by first-hand accounts of the crimes being committed in our name. Some of the key witnesses who testified had themselves been participants or eye-witnesses to these events who could no longer be silent. These included Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former commander of all prison facilities in Iraq; Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan; Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst who recently took on Donald Rumsfeld at a public program in Atlanta; Ann Wright, former U.S. diplomat in Kabul; Daniel Ellsberg; and many more.**

These programs gave students a sense of the scope of the shocking crimes being committed by this regime, and called them to action: to change the terms of debate on their campus and society as a whole. For once people grasp the enormity of these crimes, they cannot but feel an obligation to make them stop and to ensure that they never happen again.

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