Close Guantanamo now

Follow @JohnPlatinumG As the US/UK/NATO embark on another illegal war against ISIS the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay is still operating and still torturing Muslims who have had no trial. Emad Hassan has been held there since 2002. I have just received a letter in which he describes how his brother Abu was dragged from his cell by the FCE (Forcible Cell Extraction) team. What they did to him is diabolical. They broke one wrist and the other was badly swollen, applied strangulation techniques, kneed him in the back and left him in his cell unable to move his finger, hand or leg. “Every nerve, every vein, every muscle seems to be screaming with me” said Abu. Emad could not sleep. He has been held without trial and was told, seven years ago, along with Shaker Aamer that he had done no wrong. So why are these people being held in captivity by the torturing USA?

Reprieve http://www.reprieve.org/ desperately needs funds to take action against officers from the FCE team who did this dreadful deed. Force-feeding is still going on and people held in Guantanamo are worried that the world will forget about them. Please donate at the above link. Thanks.

Torture is in fashion

Follow @JohnPlatinumG At a time when the tortured chickens of UN and CIA rendition are coming home to roost Gulnara Karimova flaunts herself as a dedicated follower of fashion and yoga exponent. She is also described as a diplomat, executing the duties of a UN envoy, a screenwriter, oh, and a jewellery designer. Keeping active is an important feature in the life of a dictator's daughter. She has always been conscious about her image even though two years back she was described, thanks to Wikileaks cables, as the most despised woman in Uzbekistan.

Her father is the notorious Islam Karimov, who has pretty well set himself up as permanent president of Uzbekistan and all the speculation suggests she is most likely to follow in his footsteps if he retires, being labelled in one Russian blog as the Mafia Princess. Karimov became president in 1990 and has no opposition, since serious opponents tend to disappear without trace. He is friends with US power-mongers and feels as comfortable in the presence of George W. Bush as Hilary Clinton appears in Karimov's company.


Photo courtesy of Dominic Streatfeild's, A History of the World since 9/11, published in February 2011 (UK) by Atlantic Books, August 2011 (US) by Bloomsbury Press.

The issue of torture in Uzbekistan was raised by Craig Murray when he was ambassador there but because of our transatlantic allegiance it was thought better to get rid of Murray than bring Karimov to international justice. Karimov's human rights record is even worse than that of the United States. As well as the disappearances of his opponents he has been criticised for his regime's widespread use of torture and the exploitation of children in the cotton fields.

Yesterday, both in Strasbourg and the UK, two torture victims were compensated for their ordeals.£2.2 million pounds of taxpayers money was paid in compensation to Libyan dissident, Sami al Saadi, for being illegally rendered back to Libya to face torture under the Gadaffi regime when Tony Blair was still friends with Gadaffi, while from Germany, Khaled el Masri, was rendered by the CIA to Macedonia where in front of Macedonian police, who witnessed the scene, CIA operatives buggered, shackled and beat him. The European Court of Human Rights ordered Macedonia to pay him €60,000 (£49,000) in compensation and requested that the US must apologise and make a voluntary contribution to Mr el Masri. Anybody see a connection that two cases are concluded at the same time? It is not a coincidence. The vast sums are paid to keep names like Jack Straw, and his culpability, off the record. It is hush money!

Today I co-wrote with editorial input an article concerned with Sweden's rendition programme at the behest of the CIA, concentrating mainly on the cases of Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al Zery, who were extradited to Egypt where they were both imprisoned and tortured. In both cases the men were paid compensation of 3 million Kronors. Mr. Agiza spent 10 years in prison. We have British citizens, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, for whom this blog tried to prevent extradition, suffering in US supermax prisons because Theresa May extradited them to the US even though they had already spent unreasonable times in UK prisons without even being charged. They have done nothing wrong but in the US 98% of prisoners confess in plea bargains just to get a shorter sentence because of the harshness of conditions. It too is torture.

Back to Gulnara Karimov and her repressive regime backed by the US and UK. Thankfully not everybody is as complacent as the UK and US governments in seeking to end this human rights abuse. While Gulnara has been posting pictures of herself in suggestive Yoga postures on Twitter, and telling the world how she does not eat meat, only chicken and fish, Andrew Stroehlein has been questioning her country's record, as Uzbekistan's envoy to the UN, on torture, the Andijan massacre of April 2005, child labour, lack of freedom of expression and a whole host of other serious abuses that are not going to go away. So perhaps when she's meditating after her next Yoga session, she can meditate on some of those issues.

Why the UK has not extradited Julian Assange directly to the US

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In deference to its transatlantic master the UK government would dearly have loved to have banged Julian Assange on a plane to the United States where he would have been imprisoned and most likely, if not forgotten about, at least remembered less frequently, over time. Many commentators with an interest in the Assange story use this as an argument to justify his extradition to Sweden. The argument goes something like this. “If the UK wanted to extradite Julian Assange it would be easier to extradite him directly from the UK.” If this is true, why then was this option eschewed? There are several reasons.

First of all it is a myth to think it would be easier to extradite Assange from the UK. In the present climate Jack Straw and the UK security services are fighting behind the scenes to exonerate themselves from the extraditions authorised by them that enabled the rendition and torture of civilians emanating from Middle Eastern and North African countries. How many were sent back to their homelands where they were on the wanted list of the regime in power it is not yet possible to say. Rest assured, it is much higher than the one or two who are challenging Straw’s decision to have sent them back to be tortured. The fate of some may never even be known. It will be noted that Mr Belhadj and Mr al Saadi were living respectively in China and Hong Kong at the time of their renditions, and after their arrests and imprisonments they were tortured for years in Libya, before Blair’s love affair with Gadaffi came to an end; and NATO forces exploded a path to exploit the oilfields of Libya. This was the act which liberated Mr Belhadj and Mr al Saadi from prison.

Guantanamo Bay, a gulag or concentration camp by any other name, has left a legacy of mistrust towards the United States and the way the US administers justice.  Its injustice has also been costly to the UK taxpayer. British citizens like Moazzam Begg were extradited on the instructions of the United States. As with Mr Belhadj and Mr al Saadi the arrest was made abroad, this time in Islamabad. Moazzam Begg, who witnessed two inmates at Bagram being beaten to death, or nearly beaten to death, was himself tortured and abused before his imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay.

Another whistleblower, who like Assange is a thorn in the side of authority, is the messianic Jew, Mordechai Vanunu. In 1986 Vanunu revealed to the Sunday Times Israel’s nuclear weapons’ programme having worked at the nuclear plant in Israel where the manufacturing process was facilitated. The full facts as to how he was arrested are sketchy but there was no known extradition request from Israel to the UK. Instead Vanunu was enticed to Italy where MOSSAD agents were lying in wait for him. He was arrested and spent 18 years in an Israeli prison, subsequent years under virtual house arrest, and still does not have the freedom to go where he wishes.

Jewish banking families, the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, call the tune for UK and US governments, and they are the real decision-makers. It was one of the Rockefellers who informed the late Aaron Russo that there was going to be an event which would lead to a new world order in the Middle East. It was also known that seven countries were to be destabilised to achieve this aim. Of those seven only Syria and Iran have not been fully destabilised yet. People like Mordechai Vanunu and Julian Assange, being opposed to such actions, do not fit in with these bankers’ dreams, so are taken out of circulation to stop them spreading further truths enabling the banking giants to complete their evil intentions.

To do things properly long-winded procedures have to be followed in this country. Despite its abominable human rights record the US has requested the extradition of UK citizens, nearly always of Asian extraction, including Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan (a poet and sufferer from Asperger’s syndrome), who Theresa May has pledged to hand over to her US masters. The US made requests for extradition six years ago in the case of Ahsan and even longer ago in the case of Ahmad. Both men have been in prison without a single charge being brought against them. Ahmad was beaten by UK police and awarded damages. Although their cases have gone to the European Court of Human Rights, and extradition has shamefully been endorsed by that court, their appeals have yet to be heard.

This is why neither the UK nor the US want to extradite Assange directly from the UK. It is much easier to ship him to Sweden on trumped-up charges, where he would be picked up by CIA agents, whisked off to the United States, and put in prison for a very long time. It would happen, as it did with Vanunu, very quickly. William Hague has almost certainly clandestinely agreed to this. When Assange sought asylum not only did Hague behave like a baby who had dropped his dummy, but made vague threats to storm the Ecuadorian Embassy. Hague has been repeatedly asked to guarantee that Assange would not be extradited from Sweden but the only guarantee Hague would give is that Assange would not be executed. Assange could see this coming and he pre-empted them.

How much of a puppet of the United States has the UK become? The US, where human rights have reached an all-time low, have a one-sided extradition agreement which enables UK citizens to be extradited to the US, without having to make any case against those citizens. Conversely the US would never − never ever − allow the UK to have one of its citizens extradited here. The whole Cameron, Hague, May outfit is a Muppet Show and it is very clear to whose tune they are singing and dancing.

To sum up, the examples cited above show that it is much easier to arrest somebody outside of the UK for extradition purposes than it is here.  This answers all those who make the argument: “If the UK wanted to extradite Julian Assange it would be easier to extradite him directly from the UK.”

JackStrawrdinary Rendition

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Jack Straw was, and is, the faithful servant of Tony Blair. When Tony gave Gaddafi the Blair-hug it was a new phase in British politics.

A missile had been fired into the back garden of 10 Downing Street and Blair had learnt something, although not a lot, about being on the receiving end of the attacks of which he had been so proud to inflict on others. The semtex had come from Libya via Ireland and it was getting too close to home. There was a change in foreign policy. Before his war on Iraq Blair had explained his position.

“Let me just deal with this oil thing because…the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It’s not the oil that is the issue, it is the weapons…”

After the Iraq adventure much of the population had come to realise what a liar Blair was, though there were still people who had craniums too thick to penetrate. Blair was not thick. While he did not mind how many Iraqi children died abroad, semtex going off in the back garden was not cricket. So he quickly went to ‘cut a deal’ with Gaddafi. Part of that deal involved the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, rendering people wanted by Gaddafi to Libya to be tortured and imprisoned.

Over the years the position changed with Libya. The oil deals cut by Blair were not lucrative enough. So another war became inevitable to get oil at a more preferential rate, that is, free. This change in policy meant that NATO countries colluded to create a Libyan Spring which meant supporting rebels who had been former enemies of Muammur Gaddafi. One of these, who is now trying to prove that Jack Straw signed the illegal rendition papers for him and others is Abdel Hakim Belhadj.

Jack Straw, known by some in Lancashire as ‘Bungalow Jack’ because he’s ‘now’t up top’ denies having signed any such papers and is currently under investigation by the Metropolitan Police. Of course those of us who know how British justice in the 21^st century works are under no delusions that justice will be seen to be done. 21^st century justice is the kind administered by the Hutton Inquiry over the death of Dr David Kelly. Last year an inquiry was set up into torture and extraordinary rendition: the Gibson Inquiry. Former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, was due to give evidence. However, all allegations were going to be investigated in secret and the chances of the general public getting to know more than the basics were slim. In the end the Gibson Inquiry was cancelled. That is how British justice works today. The same with ‘Bungalow Jack’. There will be an out-of-court settlement. Abdel Hakim Belhadj will be bought off by blood-money, Jack Straw will walk free, and that will be the end of it. But it ought to be the start of it.