Belmarsh detainee Mr OO
Late last week, in a landmark case in the US, Jose Padilla was found guilty of conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas, and will be sentenced in December, probably to life. The original charges of him as at the centre of a dirty bomb plot in the US had disappeared over the years since his arrest in a flurry of publicity in 2002. Last week little media focus was on the fact that after 43 months in solitary confinement in a military brig, including two year when he never saw his lawyers, Mr Padilla had lost his mind. Dr Angela Hegarty, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Colombia, interviewed him for 22 hours, with great difficulty, as he resisted her just as he had resisted his lawyers' attempts to represent him. Her report of what had happened to his mind during this period, when even his name was taken from him and he was called John Doe, is chilling.
Dr Hegarty is the very person needed just now by a Jordanian refugee in Belmarsh prison known as Mr OO.
His story has turned from sad and confusing to positively Kafkaesque. He has spent 20 months in Belmarsh without knowing of what the UK government accuses him, nor why they now want to deport him to Jordan - the very country he fled from 15 years ago, when the UK then accepted him as a refugee.
Reprieve calls for full investigation into Scotland’s role as host to CIA torture flights
Reprieve
Press release
23 Aug 2007
- New Reprieve research suggests CIA jets refuelled in Scotland over 100 times
- Six named individuals were transported to torture with the help of Scottish territory
- "Guantánamo Bay Express” used Scottish airports at least 50 times
- Scottish authorities deliberately misled by Polish aviation authorities and a CIA company with an office in Crawley, in the rendition of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed
"Commenting ahead of a meeting with Scottish Justice Minister Kenny Macaskill MSP, Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of Reprieve, said:
“Despite being availed of this information for over a year, the Westminster government and Scotland Yard have both been entirely derelict in their duty to investigate or prosecute. There is extremely serious evidence of systematic cover-up of transfers to torture, and nothing has been done to prevent this happening again in the future.
This shows that the Westminster government and the Metropolitan police cannot be trusted to take responsibility for investigating, prosecuting and preventing the use of Scottish territory and resources in torture and enforced disappearance.”"
As I said elsewhere,
New Labour are quite keen when it comes to terrorism carried out by others - but isn't so keen when it comes to its own terrorism and terrorism carried out by its owners, the US government.
In contrast to the acres of space devoted to the recent failed car-bombing at Abbotsinch - I wonder how much attention Murdoch's propaganda-news empire will pay to these terrorist atrocities committed at Glasgow Airport - involving kidnapping, torture, rape and murder inside America's secret underground network of worldwide terrorist-run gulags and concentration camps?
Some have refused to believe German folk who claimed they had no knowledge of Himmler's concentration camps and what was going on inside them, as well!
Posted by: joe90 | 23 August 2007 at 05:05 PM
I was going to say
that if you are a footballer in the Palestinian Football squad then forget it - the UK government won't allow you into Britian on a visit.
But if you are a Palestinian
who has been kidnapped and are due to be tortured, raped and murdered by American CIA Death Squads, then the UK will be more than happy to allow you into (and out of) Britian whenever its convenient.
Here is Reprieve's report -
SCOTTISH INVOLVEMENT IN EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION
Make's me proud I'm not British!
Posted by: joe90 | 23 August 2007 at 07:42 PM