Tag: Terrorism

BBC poll: One third support torture

A BBC survey in 25 countries on the usage of torture showed some depressing results. One third of those surveyed insisted torture could be used in prison on circumstances.

More than 27,000 people in 25 countries were asked if torture was acceptable if it could provide information to save innocent lives.

In Egypt, according to the poll, 65% voted against employing all sorts of torutre, while 25% saw it legitimate under “some circumstances.”

Egyptian citizen from Arish, Mohamed Sharif, tortured and sexually abused by police 2006

And surprise, surprise:

Israel has the largest percentage of those polled endorsing the use of a degree of torture on prisoners, with 43% saying they agreed that some degree of torture should be allowed.

You can read the full BBC report here.

Related link: Egyptian police abuse videos

Lawyer released after 14 years in detention!

Lawyer Mansour Ahmad Mansour has been finally released from prison after he spent 14 years in detention, Al-Masri Al-Youm reported today.

The lawyer was initially detained by State Security police on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of secular intellectual Farag Fouda. A court had cleared Mansour of the charges but, as with the case of thousands of other detainees, the interior ministry kept him in custody for 14 years using the powers decreed by Egypt’s notorious emergency law.

Related links:
Two more citizens tortured in Arish

Chain of Hatred

Forgotten victims of another war on terror

Recommended Book:
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam

War critic journalist murdered in Moscow

I read about this before I went to sleep last night, and sure put me in a bad mood.

To be honest, I never heard of the woman before the terrible tragedy happened. But the more I read about her, the more grief I felt.

Anna Politkovskaya

I spoke with a veteran American journalist friend of mine in Cairo, who covered the war in Chechnya and was based in Moscow in the 1990s. He knew Anna, and described her as “very, very brave,” he said. “Her coverage during the war was great, but more importantly her post-war coverage. She did many stories on the mass killings by Russians and their proxies, on atrocities against Chechnyan detainees… That made many in Moscow upset. They did not want to hear about this sort of thing… You know, in many ways, being a reporter in Russia is more dangerous that it is here in Egypt.” My friend then went on listing names of reporters killed by gangs or local government officials for pursuing stories about corruption or human rights abuses.

May she rest in peace…

Germany: Part of the US gulag?

This is very interesting…

New allegations are coming up regarding Germany being part of the US-run global gulag in the current “war on terror,” where Islamist suspects are flown around the world, held, interrogated and tortured in secret detention centers.

Guardian Cartoon by Steve Bell

In an interview I conducted last May with Islamist lawyer Montasser al-Zayat, he said Egyptian cleric Abu Omar was beaten up in a US base in Germany, following his kidnapping in Milan by CIA agents, but stressed his client was not interrogated there:

“He was handcuffed, and blindfolded with a piece of cloth. The plane had flown for about an hour and half, when it landed in unknown location. But he was sure it was a non-civilian place. And it was a very cold place. He felt he was taken to a hall of a vast space. They stripped him off his clothes, and dressed him in blue overalls. They took the blindfold off his face. He saw in front of him a big number of people, wearing special forces’ fatigues. They were all dressed in black, and masked, without exceptions. All of them were masked. They were carrying guns. Then, they wrapped his face, all of it, with a sticking bandage. It was very tight. He said when he arrived in Egypt, and as they took the bandage off, his facial hear, moustache and beard were plucked off his face. Before they board him on another plane, they photographed him in the overalls. ‘Then they wrapped my face with sticking bandage, and put me on another plane,’ he said.�

You also say he was beaten in that base which he thinks in Germany?
“I am a precise person, and that is why I enjoy credibility. I’m saying what my client is saying, and nothing more. He says ‘I was beaten.’ But he didn’t tell me how he was beaten. I assume this was to pacify him. In Egypt, he said, ‘I was tortured.’ There’s a difference that I can understand well. ‘Tortured’ is different from ‘beaten.’ In these places (Italy and Germany) he received punches.
“In the place where he thinks it was the American base in Germany, I’ll read to you what he said: ‘I was beaten. I found a number of persons, masked, dressed in special operations fatigues. They photographed me. They beat me. Then they put me in other clothes, and wrapped my face in a sticking bandage. And then, they took me and put me on board of a plane.’�

If it’s true terror suspects were held and interrogated in Germany, then the German intelligence must have been let in on what’s going on. It’s hard to imagine the US conducting such activities without “someone” at least in the German intelligence knowing about it, if not aiding the operation like in the Italians’ case.

The new allegations put forward by a British legal group representing Gitmo detainees is suggesting, however, the same base Abu Omar was held in might have been used for interrogating terror suspects like Khaled Sheikh Mohamed.

This is could well snowball into another political scandal, similar to the one that followed the disclosure that German BND agents aided the invasion of Iraq by supplying the Americans with coordinates of targets on the ground and Saddam’s plan to defend Baghdad, despite Berlin’s official anti-war position.

I book I recommend on extraordinary renditions of Islamist suspects is Stephen Grey’s:

Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program

… and welcome to Canada

arar_maher.jpg

A man got beaten into a false confession. The internal security agency lied to the government and to the public to cover up their brutality and incompetence. The government lied to the public to cover up their culpability. When the man complained, government officials told lies to the press in an attempt to discredit him.

Sure sounds familiar, but the country could come as a surprise: Canada.

Maher Arar was picked up by US officials acting on intelligence ineptly gathered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (yep, the guys in the little red uniforms) while transiting the US on a Canadian passport and exported to Damascus for interrogation where (surprise!) he was tortured. After he returned to Canada and complained, as yet unnamed “government officials� started a campaign to smear him in the national press.

Here, however, the parallels to countries closer to the home come to an end. See, we know all this because an independent commission was set up under a judge—a judge who was going to get his full salary whether or not he came up with the real facts of the matter—and that commission was able to impel the testimony of a range of key players and make most of its findings known.

It’s unpleasant to be reminded that internal security operatives are a breed that transcends cultural and national identity, but here’s the silver lining: a willful, independent judiciary can be an effective counterweight. Something to remember next time there’s a demo outside the Judges’ Club.

9/11 in New York

I missed the much-debated debut of the ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11,” but I did go down to Ground Zero this morning to see what was going on there today.

It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny New York morning (unfortunately I didn’t have my camera). There were a lot of people walking around the perimeter of the area, and a lot of flowers and pictures had been stuck in the wire fences around it. The area itself is still nothing but a construction site, and looks little different from two years ago, last time I saw it. (Today’s New York Times has an article on the increasingly embarrassing saga of the reconstruction of the site). Loudspeakers were playing the voices of relatives reading the names and short message to those who died on 9/11. The majority of the voices were those of wives and girlfriends, often wavering and choking with emotion.

The first thing I saw as I came out of the subway station was a big banner that said “The USA DID 9/11.” Another banner said “PLEASE HELP US. The government has been hijacked by a group of ruthless criminals. 9/11 was just the beginning. Stop them now.” At the other end of the spectrum was a banner that read: “When the Left Says Peace, They Mean Surrender.”

I had come in part out of professional curiosity with the “9/11 truth” groups–groups that believe that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, carried out to give the administration a free hand to increase its powers and go to war around the world. I was told about 500 people had come to New York. There were certainly a few hundred walking around today, mostly wearing black t-shirts that read “Investigate 9/11.” I witnessed quite a few heated arguments between these people and others. Often the conversations would start out calmly, with people asking the demonstrators what they meant and trying to convince them that they were wrong. But gradually they would generally escalate into arguments. The 9/11 Truth people talked about things like Building 7 (which apparently collapsed on 9/11 without being hit by a plane), the fact that the steel in the WTC couldn’t have melted, the fact that no photos of the plane that hit the Pentagon are supposedly available.

People seemed both curious and troubled by what the demonstrators were saying. But they recoiled at the idea that 9/11 was a massive conspiracy. One man got upset when a 9/11 Truth organizer implied that there were actually no planes that day. “What about the people who died?” he wanted to know. “What about their relatives?” His interlocutor had no good answer, and could only repeat “I don’t know. It’s classified. They should unclassify it.” Finally New York police broke the argument up and told people to keep moving. Other 9/11 Truth people were more confrontational, telling people that questioned them that they were “talking nonsense” and unspooling a whole series of rapid-fire, pretty non-sequitur statements: “Did you know Bob Graham wrote the Patriot Act? Have you heard of the Reichstag fire? Or Operation Northwoods?”

While I was standing next to some very young 9/11 Truth demonstrators, a woman walked by and said: “Nazis! You don’t go to someone’s funeral and do this bullshit! Nazis!” “Please don’t say that,” said a young female demonstrator in a sad little voice.

As I left, a man walked quickly past me on his cellphone and said “It’s worse than a damn three-ring circus here.”

Motives of German train bombers

More information is coming out on the motives of the two train bombers that failed to blow up two regional trains in Western Germany about two months ago.

The head of the German Federal police, Jörg Ziercke, told the magazine Focus that – based on first interrogations of one the subjects who is held in Lebanon – the “initial detonation� for the plans was the publication of the caricatures of Prophet Mohammad in the German press.

“Youssef el Hajdib, who was arrested in Kiel, understood this as an attack of the Western world on Islam�, Ziercke is quoted as saying.

By accident, one of the bombers was later on discovered on footage of a local TV station that showed him during a demonstration in Kiel, a city in Northern Germany, in February, protesting the publication of the caricatures in German papers. On the footage, he is walking right next to the leader of the demonstration.

I find this interesting, as I have rarely read something on specific motives of Islamist terrorists beyond a general rejection of the West, as well as the specific events that radicalized them.

Ziercke adds that the death of el Zarkawi in Iraq on 7 June further encouraged the terrorists to carry out their plans.

Luckily, they didn’t manage to build their bombs (which didn’t explode anyways due to errors in their technical design) in time for the soccer world cup.

What can make you an enemy combatant

One detainee was judged a threat in part because he was a karate expert and had taught martial arts to Bosnian orphans, tribunal records show. He was also classified as potentially dangerous because he was familiar with computers. Another detainee was flagged because he had performed mandatory service in the Algerian army more than a decade ago, as a cook.

As if we needed more evidence that Guantanamo is useless, farcical and cruel, there comes this article in today’s Washington post that details how six Algerians were kidnapped from Bosnia in 2002 despite being completely exonerated by the Bosnian authorities for allegedly planning an attack on the US Embassy. Not a proud moment for the US government, which threatened Bosnia with the withdrawal of peacekeeping troops to have legally innocent men handed over to them.