The state's dirty work

Important truths about the British state are reaching the light of day, thanks to campaigners and ordinary citizens. The Metropolitan Police and the secret forces of security agencies MI5 and MI6 are being more and more exposed, not only as guilty of brutality, but of cynical lying to cover-up disguise their activities.

When last week’s anti-G20 demonstrations saw a middle-aged man die, the police claimed this was due to Ian Tomlinson suffering a heart attack from natural causes. But they are now are under fire following revelations that  47-year-old newspaper seller Tomlinson did not “die of natural causes”. Eyewitnesses, including an experienced freelance photographer, say they saw Tomlinson suffer grievous blows to the head from a police baton which caused him to fall and hit the pavement hard. 

The same Metropolitan Police will be investigating evidence that security and intelligence agencies M15 and M16 colluded with the CIA in the inhuman treatment and secret rendition of British citizens who were kidnapped, tortured and sent to the Guantanamo Bay camp. 

A 55-page dossier released by Cageprisoners called “Fabricating Terrorism II: British Complicity in Renditions and Torture” is now in the hands of the Met. It concludes that there were “systematic violations of international law perpetrated by the British authorities in relation to a) illegal rendition or torture flights which have been, and are using British airspace and airport facilities and b) the role of the intelligence services in gaining information knowingly obtained from torture, and from passing on intelligence of a dubious nature to other countries' intelligence services which forms a basis for the detention, abuse and torture of detainees.” 

The Cageprisoners’ report shows how Farid Hilali, a Moroccan man who had been living in Britain and was initially detained in 1998-1999 in the United Arab Emirates, was tortured. This was two years before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, which were given as the reason for the US-UK “war on terror”. Hilali claims the British gave "direct orders" to torture him, and that a British official was present when he was mistreated. 

Naturally, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) claims that it takes allegations of mistreatment or torture "seriously", saying in a statement: "The UK's position on torture is clear. We abhor torture. We don't participate, solicit, encourage or condone it. We unreservedly condemn extraordinary rendition for torture."   

The FCO’s claim is ludicrous given the fact that not only Binyam Mohammed’s own testimony, Cageprisoners’ reports, and European Union and other investigations have shown categorically that the UK intelligence agencies were involved in what Asim Qureshi, who drew up the report, describes as “a subterranean system of kidnappings”, where prisoners are “ghosted to ‘black sites’, suffering abuse and torture”. 

Human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, in a foreword to the Cageprisoners’ report, has denounced the official secrecy, saying: “There will be and is already a continuous assertion by the Government that any issue that relates to the Intelligence Services . . . should not see the light of day in normal courts, but should be confined to special courts and/or the evidence should be heard in secret.” Peirce concludes that “the reality of guarantees of human rights does not come from the top down, but has to be fought for, generation by generation”, and that the secret state should be held properly and publicly to account. 

Too right, Gareth. Speed the day. But it certainly won’t happen by the existing state investigating itself. Achieving a new democratic state in place of the authoritarian, undemocratic state we live under now, has to be our aim.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary 

Torture on New Labour's hands

With the expected arrival back today of Binyam Mohamed, the young British resident held for four years in the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp after his “rendition” by American forces in Pakistan, New Labour’s complicity in his torture has become blindingly clear. 

In past years, rogue soldiers, lawyers and whistleblowers have gone public to detail kidnapping, interrogation, physical and mental torture carried out in secret prisons around the world – and how European governments have connived in “rendering” suspects from country to country in their “war on terror”. 

What has been less widely known is the connivance of the British secret services and government in these illegal acts of barbarity. But now the evidence is pouring in thick and fast and New Labour will have trouble wriggling out, even though Foreign Secretary David Miliband claims that the UK does not condone torture. 

Clive Stafford Smith, the courageous lawyer who has represented Binyam, notes: “The fact that British intelligence was being used by torturers doesn’t in itself prove that the British knew torture was going on. But, given what we now know, they are at best pleading guilty to an unbelievable lack of curiosity”.   

Stafford Smith says that the UK government is suppressing evidence of torture. “Every essential of Binyam’s story [torture in Pakistan at the behest of the US authorities, rendering to Morocco and more torture, imprisonment in Bagram air base, Afghanistan, isolation in Gitmo, etc] has been corroborated,” Stafford-Smith says. “We have slowly dragged the torture documentation from unwilling governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet virtually none of these documents have been made public.” 

A month after Mohamed’s seizure on April 10, 2002, a British agent came to see him in Pakistan, allowed in by his American captors. The agent B encouraged Binyam to co-operate with his captors, and assured him that the British would look into his case. What Mohamed did not know was that the Americans had already shared a number of documents with the British. “These included admissions by American agents that they were torturing Binyam. Yet Agent B did not even ask him how he was being treated. Binyam was then rendered to Morocco,” says Stafford Smith. 

“He told me that his darkest point came one morning in Morocco. For the four months after Agent B’s visit, he waited for the British cavalry to appear. It was a mirage. Marwan, his Moroccan torturer, came into the interrogation room with questions and photographs that had clearly been provided by the British.” 

Stafford-Smith’s account is powerfully corroborated by the respected US organisation, Human Rights Watch (HRW). Despite detailing its concerns to the UK government as far back as last October, HRW has received no response. New Labour was clearly in a crisis at that time, as the attorney general had to decide whether there was to be an investigation into the treatment of Mohamed by British spooks.

HRW investigator, Ali Dayan Hasan led an investigation based in Pakistan, the results of which will be published in March. Sources within the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) provided “confirmation and information” that British agents colluded in the interrogation of terror suspects. These were not maverick elements, Hasan says, but “a significant number of UK agents”. He has collected evidence that M15 questioned at least 10 British citizens after they had been tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents. The HRW cites the case of Rangzieb Ahmed from Rochdale who had three of the fingernails of his left hand removed. Ahmed was later convicted of being a member of al-Qaida at Manchester Crown Court without the jury being told about this. 

Despite the phasing out of Guantanamo, there are still 1,100 prisoners being held beyond the rule of law in Bagram air base in Afghanistand, where they have no human rights whatsoever, a position confirmed by the Obama administration at the weekend. Thousands more languish in secret prisons in Iraq, Dijoubti, on prison ships, or are held by US proxies in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. Voiceless human beings, rendered, tortured and victims of the Anglo-American “war on terror”. 

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

 

GlobalTorture.com

You might have imagined that recent media exposure of the CIA’s worldwide programme of torture and rendition flights has curbed what the European Parliament has called illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. But in fact the CIA has simply moved its operations from Poland and Romania to other countries and continues to work closely with repressive regimes around the world, including those in North Africa.

Evidence of one CIA interrogation and torture centre surfaced two days ago in the form of a letter from Ramzi Bettibi, a Tunisian prisoner. It is published on a blog site. “This is a call from my imprisonment” Bettibi writes. “It’s a call to the world to save me from imminent danger to my safety. At the end of last April, I was transferred to another prison located 15 minutes driving from my previous Bizerte Civil prison. I was totally shocked when I found myself in a secret CIA detention where other detainees also were held in containers."

Ramzi is serving a four-year sentence at Bizerte, 65 kilometres from Tunis, for copying, onto a forum board he moderated, an online statement from a group threatening terror attacks if former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon attended the World Summit on the Information Society that was held in Tunisia in 2005. Ramzi Bettibi was arrested on 15 March 2005 at the internet café where he worked.

Sami Ben Gharbia, Advocacy Director at Global Voices, describes how Bettibi’s letter was smuggled out of a secret detention facility near Bizerte city, where he has been interrogated by CIA and French-speaking agents about his alleged ties to Jihadist groups in Iraq and online activities.

Bettibi’s letter offers the first concrete evidence of the existence of such facility in Tunisia. It also details the prison’s possible location and the identities of some of the prisoners who are being interrogated and held clandestinely. Ironically, the letter was written on June 9, one day only after the publication of the second report Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states adopted by the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.

“I was interrogated by a French-speaking person about my online relationship with Iraqi Jihadist groups. I mentioned to him that his information is totally not accurate and I’m a free speech prisoner. I also told him that HRW, Amnesty, and many other organizations have talked about my case. The American interrogator so surprisingly yelled at the Tunisian officers. They assaulted and threatened me with fabricating a story of my attempting to escape from prison. They also threatened to relocate me to another secret prison if I talked to my family about what I saw.

“Things didn’t stop at that. They returned two weeks later. Tunisian state security officers cuffed me and an American security officer asked me about my role in ALSAHAB (Al-Qaeda’s media agent). He also questioned me about the ALIKHLAS website and Alansar online forum. They gave me two documents to pick from. The first is my death certificate and the second is my release certificate. They also threatened me to hurt my brother.”

On the day that Bettibi’s desperate appeal surfaced on the Internet, the CIA declassified nearly 700 pages of secret records detailing its illegal activities during the cold war. They are now published on the CIA’s own website. They include a collection called the “family jewels”. Buried in these internal documents is clear evidence that CIA Director Allen Dulles personally approved the agency’s plot to assassinate Castro in 1960 and 1961.

Although the documents are publicly available on the CIA’s website, it has chosen to keep scores of pages partly or totally blacked out. Although the CIA is legally forbidden to spy within the USA, Richard Ober, head of the Special Operations Group and deputy to James Jesus Angleton, former chief of counterintelligence, directed Operation CHAOS, which spied on racial, anti-war and other protest groups inside the United States. Many sections relating to Ober remain blacked out. Inside and outside the US, the CIA continues to operate in close association with secret spy agencies in the UK and elsewhere. Let us take note.

By Corinna Lotz, AWTW secretary

Rendition: lies and their liars

Who would you rather believe when it comes to "extraordinary rendition" – the British government and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) or the respected human rights body, the Council of Europe (CoE)? New Labour’s denial that British airports were used by the CIA for refuelling en route to torture camps is worthless. ACPO’s endorsement only shows that the police are lying too on behalf of their paymasters. The ACPO statement has been described as "miraculous" in its timing, for it appeared just as a CoE report was published showing how the CIA ran torture prisons in Poland and Romania after 9/11, with Britain providing support by allowing the agency’s planes to land at military and civilian airports. ACPO’s spin on behalf of New Labour is flatly contradicted by recent events. On 2 June a plane repeatedly linked to CIA torture flights was spotted at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk. Watching aviation experts said the aircraft, piloted by crew clad in desert fatigues, was immediately surrounded on the runway by armed American guards. Its registration number identifies it as a plane which the European Parliament says has been involved in "ghost flights" to smuggle terrorist suspects to torture camps around the world. The American Federal Aviation Authority lists the plane as being operated by two companies, Aviation World Wide Services and a sister company, Presidential Airways. These are shell companies operating as subsidiaries of Blackwater USA, "an important contractor for the CIA and the US military", according to the European Parliament. A recent book on Blackwater by American author Jeremy Scahill, described the company as the world's "most secretive and powerful mercenary firm". It was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a fundamentalist Christian millionaire.

The CoE dossier, compiled by Swiss senator Dick Marty, said the US had used Britain's help to establish a "global spider's web" of jails and airports to pursue a war on terror without rules. So-called US "high-value" detainees (HVD) were held in secret CIA detention centres in Poland and Romania between 2002 and 2005. It describes in detail the scope and functioning of the US’s HVD programme, which it says was set up by the CIA "with the co-operation of official European partners belonging to government services". A secret agreement between the US and NATO allies in October 2001 provided the framework for the CIA to do its dirty business in Europe. The programme "has given rise to repeated serious breaches of human rights", the report by the CoE’s parliamentary committee declared, including the torture of detainees. The report said that only Bosnia and Herzegovina and Canada, a Council of Europe observer state, had fully acknowledged their responsibilities with regard to the unlawful transfers of detainees. Marty said: "The fight against terrorism must not serve as an excuse for systematic recourse to illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. I hold this view not only because methods of this nature conflict with the constitutional order of all civilised countries and are ethically unacceptable, but also because they are not effective from the perspective of a genuine long-term response to terrorism." His report, which is worth reading in full, contrasts with the statement from the British Foreign Office, which said: "We have been through the records, and there is no evidence of detainees being rendered through the UK since 1997." Who would you rather believe?

Paul Feldman, communications editor