Tag: Pakistan

A British Court of Appeals has ruled against the Foreign Secretary David Milliband, that the British government can no longer refuse to disclose what MI5 knew about the torture of Binyam Mohamed while in US custody, according to an article published today in the Guardian UK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…

UK Foreign Secretary Milliband concured with the ruling only because of previous disclosures in a US Court, which would then preserve the “control principle” of one country doesn’t turn loose intelligence without the cooperation of the other, if they share intelligence.

“The foreign secretary spoke last night to Hillary Clinton. He stressed to her that the court had strongly supported the control principle and would have agreed with HMG [her majesty’s government] had it not been for the Kessler judgment in the US court last December, which had effectively disclosed the material in the seven paragraphs.

An MI5 officer known only as Witness B is being investigated by the Metropolitan police over his alleged role in questioning Mohamed incommunicado in a Pakistan jail.

Mohamed was detained in 2002 in Pakistan, where he was questioned incommunicado by an MI5 officer. The US flew him to Morocco, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, where he says he was tortured with the knowledge of British agencies.

The 7 paragraphs that the British Government were trying to hide are below, below the fold.  As noticed by commenters under another story at FDL, there are 2 dates.  The date in the Guardian story says 17 May 2002 in the first paragraph.  The date in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office dot gov dot uk site, has the date as 17 May 2001, with a disclaimer that “we have alerted the Court to a typographic error.”  

Oh, those pesky typos. What’s a year, here or there ?   ask Bush & Cheney.

Original article via Fightback:

In a Taliban dominated area of Pakistan a Marxist lawyer has defeated the candidate of the Islamic fundamentalists. In spite of a Fatwa being issued against him, comrade Ahad stood firmly on the ideas of revolutionary socialism and won the position of President of the Malakand District Bar Association.

By Kathy Kelly

January 19, 2010

I spent Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday in Washington, D.C. as part of the Witness Against Torture fast, which campaigns to end all forms of torture and has worked steadily for an end to indefinite detention of people imprisoned in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other secret sites where the U.S. has held and tortured prisoners.  We’re on day 9 of a twelve day fast to shut down Guantanmo, end torture, and build justice.

The community gathered for the fast has grown over the past week.  This means, however, that as more people sleep on the floor of St. Stephen’s church, there is a rising cacophony of snoring.  Our good friend, Fr. Bill Pickard, suggested trying to hear the snores as an orchestra, when I told him I’d slept fitfully last night.      

There is a young boy in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, in Pakistan, who also lies awake at night, unable to sleep.  Israr Khan Dawar is 17 years old.  He told an AP reporter, on January 14th, that he and his family and friends had gotten used to the drones.  But now, at night, the sound grows louder and the drones are flying closer, so he and his family realize they could be a target.  He braces himself in fear of an attack.

We’re told that we will be more secure if the CIA continually attack the so-called lawless tribal areas and eliminates “the bad guys.”

In late May and early June of 2009, while visiting in Pakistan, a man from the village of Khaisor, also in North Waziristan, told us about his experience as a survivor of a drone attack.  Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, mentioned that the people operating the drones and analyzing the surveillance intelligence have a word for people like him who managed to survive a blast and run away.  They are called “squirters.”  So, I suppose he would have been considered a squirter.  

This man, at some risk to himself, walked a long distance and took two buses to meet with us.  Because of travel restrictions, we would not have been allowed to visit him in North Waziristan. His village is so remote that there are no roads leading up to it.  Five hundred people live there.  Often, western media refers to his homeland as “the lawless tribal area.” One day, three strangers entered Khaisor and went to the home of vigil elders. For centuries, villagers have followed a code of hospitality, which demands that when strangers come to your door, you feed them and give them drink. It’s not as though you can point them toward a Motel 6 or a 7-11.  The strangers were welcomed into the home they approached and they left after having been served a meal.  They were long gone when, at 4:30 a.m. a U.S. drone, operated by the C.I.A., fired 2 Hellfire missiles into the home they had visited, killing 12 people, two of whom were village elders.  Children were dismembered and maimed.

Bill Moyers Journal: Education and Peace in Central Asia

January 15, 2010

Author and humanitarian Greg Mortenson, whose best-selling books Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools argue that education is the best way to peace in Afghanistan and across the Islamic world.

BILL MOYERS: Beyond his domestic woes, certainly the issue that has preoccupied President Obama the most since he took office is Afghanistan. The war he inherited from George W. Bush is now its ninth year and seems no closer to resolution. Almost daily, it seems, there are more stories of fighting in far off mountains, of suicide bombers killing CIA operatives, of drones raining bombs down on villages and killing innocent people. THE NEW YORK TIMES reports this week that unlike the past, when Afghanistan’s brutal winters would slow the violence for awhile, “both sides seem determined to make a larger political point by continuing to fight through the snow season.”

Hard sometimes to remember that this whole thing began in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden and his accomplices in the attacks of 9/11….>>>>>

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For better then a week now there have been reports that the Taliban were going to release a video of Pfc Bergdahl and than just silence till this morning.

This is just starting to hit the many outlets in many places, the AP seems to have released the video a few hours ago and others are picking up the story now as I refresh google search!

Purported Taliban footage of U.S. soldier

I want to start with great interview with Webster Tarpley  on Bonnie Faulkner’s show on KPFA. First a few things about Webster. He’s one of the more interesting minds (if you pardon that expression) writing and speaking about politics in the world. I’m impressed with erudition and he travels and knows the world very well. His flaw is that he builds a theory and then fits the facts to it. However, the theory he builds are very good and connect with the facts enough to make him very useful. He and Peter Dale Scott seem to understand what is going on as well as anyone. And Tarpley, who I disagree on a number of matters, did call the Obama fraud a fraud before anyone and thus I’m inclined to believe him — plus he wrote the definitive books on the Bush family and has put 9/11 in a firm historical context in his book 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.

If you listen to the interview you will see, as most of us here suspect, that we are not in Afghanistan to save Aghani women from harm or to bring democracy or even defeat the Taliban or even “get” Bin Laden and Al-qaida. It is much more interesting and complex than that.

I’ve always loved the little-known Maurice Hinchey, from New York State.

Back in 2005, I wrote about him in one of my very first Dailykos essays.     Here’s what he said then:

New York congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) delivered a fiery critique of the Bush Administration’s drive to war in Iraq, labeling the push part of a “conspiracy” to deceive Congress and occupy the country.

(snip)

Speaking of the four protesters who spilled their own blood at a military recruiting center, Hinchey said “what they were protesting was the conspiracy of the Administration of George W. Bush to bring about an attack and then an occupation of the country of Iraq, and as a result making the world a much more dangerous and difficult place than it was prior to those actions.”

“It is that conspiracy,” he added, “that conspiracy which has now been documented by among other things official British documents called the Downing Street Memo which are communications between the highest ranking officials of the British government – the head of the British Intelligence, the foreign officer, the prime minister himself.”

Hinchley’s remarks break ranks with most Democrats in Congress, who have been critical of the leadup and operations surrounding the Iraq war, but who have been loath to deliver stinging perorations. The New York Democrat said he saw the trial as somewhat Orwellian — a move towards curtailing speech.

“We do not want to see an end to this democratic republic,” Hinchey quipped. “We want it to be strengthened. We want it to go on forever. We don’t want it to be ended by people who are telling us, or who would like to tell us, what we can do and say and even think. But that’s what this Administration is engaged in.”

No wonder this guy doesn’t get any press.

But check out what he said today:

Rep. Hinchey: Bush ‘intentionally let Bin Laden get away’