Category Archives: The War Against Terror

Key 9/11 figure ‘beheaded Pearl’

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And then he flew a flying saucer – fuelled only by the power of CHEESE – all the way to Pluto, where he made merry with the happy band of six-legged elephants that inhabit the former planet for nigh on sixteen weeks.

But his cheese stocks, verrily were they low, and thus the mighty Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – genius of geniuses, more devious and plot-filled than the all-glorious Lex Luthor himself – did fly back through the solar system, pausing only to blow up Saturn (‘cos it looked at him funny, like).

Back on earth, he stole all the gold from Fort Knox, sank the Bismark, killed the Loch Ness Monster, ran a four-minute mile, excavated the Channel Tunnel, became Elvis Presley (the Vegas years, obviously), drank the Caspian Sea, had a fight with a cougar (that he had genetically spliced with the genes of a warthog), melted the polar ice caps, built the Great Wall of China…

But then it was bedtime and his mummy was cross that he’d been out all day, so he didn’t get any tea. Poor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed!

90 years ago today

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Ahhhh… Those were the days… And it all led to this:

“our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places.

Since the days of Midhat, the Turks have talked of reforms, yet do not the ruins and wastes of today testify the vanity of those promises?

It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when your ancestors gave to the world literature, science, and art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world.

Don’t you just love over-simplified historical parallels that make the current situation in Iraq look like even more of a mismanaged disaster?

(And now we return to our regular, Iraq-free broadcasts…)

Extraordinary rendition: the verdict

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Sorry – missed this yesterday… The [tag]European Parliament[/tag] has yet to vote on the final report following its investigation into CIA [tag]extraordinary rendition[/tag] flights in Europe, but finalised it is (and you can download it from the temporary committee’s website in umpteen different languages).

In short:

“It is implausible, on the basis of the testimonies and documents received, that certain European governments were not aware of the activities linked to extraordinary rendition on their territory… [it is] implausible that many hundreds of flights …could have taken place without the knowledge of either the security services or the intelligence service”

Quick and easy:

  • * 10 EU governments knew of the secret (and illegal) CIA flights, and lied to cover up their actions
  • * Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal and the UK criticised for lack of co-operation
  • * Also evidence of flights in Bosnia, Cyprus, Denmark, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Germany, Greece, Ireland, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Turkey
  • * Sanctions should be imposed against them
  • * More than 1,245 flights since 11th September 2001
  • * “in the majority of cases [these] involved incommunicado detention and [tag]torture[/tag]“
  • * “[there is a] strong possibility that some European countries may have received… information obtained under torture”
  • * EU foreign policy chief [tag]Javier Solana[/tag] criticised – “Mr Solana clearly knew more than he revealed to MEPs”
  • * Council of the [tag]European Union[/tag] (aka the Council of Ministers) criticised for lack of co-operation
  • * EU counter-terrorism co-ordinator Gijs de Vries: lacks credibility
  • * UK: 170 flights positively identified
  • * Former UK defence minister [tag]Geoff Hoon[/tag]: Criticised for lack of co-operation
  • * UK Foreign Office adviser Michael Wood: Shock expressed at his “torture’s OK, m’kay?” legal opinion
  • * Poland: Singled out for criticism, but no categorical proof of secret CIA prisons in the country

    • More: Deutsche Welle, the Independent, EU Observer, Former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, EurActiv

    The European Parliament’s Socialist Group (to which the UK’s Labour party MEPs belong….) has backed the report, the EPP-ED group has criticised it for being biased and inaccurate, so it may still not get through the European parliament without a fight. A lot of people in a lot of governments want this suppressed as much as possible.

    Not that they really care, of course – it’s not like anyone’s going to be able to force them to act on it…

    Another psycho dictator now no more

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    2006 – a good year for dead dictators, first Pinochet, now Saparmurat Niyazov, self-styled “Turkmenbashi” and president for life of Turkmenistan.

    He’s the one who renamed the months and days of the week after his friends and family,ordered an ice palace to be built in the middle of the Gobi Desert in the middle of August (just for the hell of it), renamed bread after his mother, re-wrote the country’s official history, re-invented the Turkmen alphabet, banned all recorded music, prohibited female newsreaders from wearing makeup on television, and ordered the closure of all libraries outside the capital, as countryside folk don’t read. He made George III look entirely rational, in fact. (Seriously – check out his Wikipedia entry…).

    Central Asia remains remarkably unstable post-USSR, and has been the focus of innumerable Western efforts to get in with the various ex-Communist dictators who run the “-stans”, thanks both to the vast mineral reserves of the region and the handy strategic position Central Asia occupies when you’re fighting a war in the Middle East.

    Turkmenistan is particularly strategically important for The War Against Terror – its southern borders run along Iran and Afghanistan, while most of its northern border is with Uzbekistan – former Western ally, now an ever more unstable and repressive regime. With no heir apparent after more than 20 years of Niyazov’s rule, anything could happen in Turkmenistan…

    (Registan has more – and will doubtless be worth keeping an eye on over the coming weeks as the uncertain aftermath unfolds, as will Neweurasia.net.)

    Update: More from Siberian Light, KZblog (which also has the really rather hilarious official announcement).

    Ireland and extraordinary rendition

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    The always tip-top Jim Bliss has a follow-up to my post of yesterday, with some intriguing points about the constitutional implications of the Republic of Ireland’s apparent involvement with secret CIA flights:

    “An independent neutral republic not only has a right, it has a duty, to regulate any foreign military traffic that crosses its border…. So that we are not complicit in acts inconsistent with our international obligations. If a US airforce plane lands in Shannon and it contains people snatched from the street by the CIA en route for torture in an Uzbek detention centre, the Irish authorities have an absolute legal obligation to detain that flight and prevent a crime against humanity.”

    Of course, as pointed out before, under UN resolution 47/133 (and we all remember how seriously breaches of UN resolutions are taken by Bush and Blair, right?), both the UK and the US also have an absolute legal (and, indeed, legally-reinforced moral) obligation to detain such flights…

    Update: Davide also has more. The final report is being presented at a press conference this morning (though not voted on by MEPs until February), so perhaps the big boys of the proper press might get on to this at last…

    Update 2: the Lib Dems and SNP have today called for an enquiry into the British government’s involvement with the flights, as well as the official government line on using information extracted under torture.

    Extraordinary rendition update

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    For those still following the extraordinary rendition story, the secret CIA flights allegedly transporting prisioners from The War Against Terror, attention should be turned to Poland, where – according to the EU Observer – “a three day trip to Warsaw produced only vague, contradictory information from low-ranking officials”. Added into the mix are missing flight records, and great little snippets like

    “former Szymanow airport boss Jerzy Kos told Mr Fava that a suspect flight by Boeing 737 N313 on 22 September 2003 never landed at the airport, while a government official, Marek Pasionek, said the flight could not be inspected after it had landed at Szymanow ‘because it was dark.’”

    As this is all in the midst of Polish local elections, and the rest of the world still seems focussed on what’s going to be the new UK/US Iraq policy following the Republicans’ poor showing in the US midterms, there doesn’t seem to be too much attention being focussed on these rendition investigations at the moment.

    But, with only a few weeks to go and despite more than 60 hearings and hundreds of hours of investigations – as well as admissions from the US that these flights exist that directly contradict statements from various European government heads that they had no knowledge that such flights were using their airports – so far not a single piece of evidence of wrongdoing has been found, even though co-operation with such flights would be in direct contravention of umpteen treaty obligations to ensure that due legal process is followed when transferring prisoners from one’s own country to another.

    If something smells a bit fishy, it’s because it most certainly is. This Polish situation looks like it could well be only the most obvious example of Europe-wide collusion in a practice derided by the UN’s 1992 Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances as

    “an offence to human dignity. It is condemned as a denial of the purposes of the Charter of the United Nations and as a grave and flagrant violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… a violation of the rules of international law guaranteeing, inter alia, the right to recognition as a person before the law, the right to liberty and security of the person”

    Most importantly, of course, under Article 17.1,

    “Acts constituting enforced disappearance shall be considered a continuing offence as long as the perpetrators continue to conceal the fate and the whereabouts of persons who have disappeared and these facts remain unclarified”

    The situation in the UK also remains unclarified. However, were anyone to be able to discover any collusion between the British government and the CIA in the flights known to have used British airports, from the wording of the 1992 UN Declaration it would seem to place our dear overlords in definite breach of international law – whether the prisoners on board those flights went on to be tortured or not…

    Update: A very different take on this story has just appeared at Spiked, which seems to claim that the EU is using Poland as a scapegoat and is about to withdraw the country’s voting rights (something which, erm… is impossible without ejecting the country from the Union – I’d have expected a professor of international relations, even one from the University of Westminster, to have known that…) in an attempt to make it look like anyone cares. But, let’s face it, Spiked is hardly known for its insightful, impartial analysis…

    Obvious liberal blogger’s reaction to the Saddam verdict #3,456,789

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    Britain is supposed to be morally and legally opposed to the death penalty, so why is Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett expressing her support for the psycho ex-dictator’s imminent execution? Yes, the guy’s guilty (and guilty of far more than he was tried for), but how does this mesh with the Foreign Office’s own pronouncements on killing people convicted by courts of law – even courts less controversial than that trying Saddam?

    • “The UK has ratified Protocol 13 of the ECHR, banning the use of the death penalty in all circumstances, including time of war.”
    • “In 1998, the FCO set up a Death Penalty Panel including expert academic, legal and NGO representatives. The Panel helps the Government draw up strategies towards the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.”

    Not to mention

    “The international community has agreed that even the worst offenders at the Rwandan and Yugoslav war crimes tribunals cannot face the death penalty. Criminals must be brought to justice. But there are other means of doing this.”

    And then, of course, there’s the obvious dig about trials for Bush, Blair and the other “masterminds” (a misnomer if ever there was one) of the Coalition invasion and occupation, following Beckett’s wonderful statement that

    “Appalling crimes were committed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. It is right that those accused of such crimes against the Iraqi people should face Iraqi justice.”

    Was Saddam a supremely nasty, possibly actually evil bastard? No doubt about it. But – and again, entering utterly predictable liberal blogger territory here – if he’s been sentenced to death for the killing of just 181 people, who’s going to join him on the scaffold for the deaths of between 45,000 and 900,000 civilians since the start of the liberation process – between 250 and 4,970 times the number Saddam has been convicted of and sentenced to death for killing?

    Squaddies

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    Insanely busy again, but this annoyed me:

    “A newly qualified squaddie facing suicide bombers, snipers and rockets round the clock earns two thirds of a British policeman’s wage; in a combat zone the 16-hour watches give an hourly rate of £2.45 and in Helmand, getting off duty after 16 hours is often a pipe dream anyway – fighting goes on for days. After Reid gaily said that they could leave ‘without a shot fired’, and beetled off to insult the Home Office, they are fighting a confused war in the hardest conditions possible. On peanuts. Even the separation allowance of £6 a day only kicks in after 12 months. Oh, and they pay council tax on their barracks rooms back in Britain.”

    This utterly unrelated bit of nonsense, however, is just stupid.