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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
9/11
This is a US torture camp
Vikram Dodd
Friday January 12, 2007
The Guardian
Evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo is overwhelming - and it hasn't
made anyone safer
It would be the ideal spot for a beachside birthday party. Surrounded by
a turquoise sea, palm trees and white sand, the US detention camp at
Guantánamo Bay in Cuba was five years old yesterday. Tony Blair calls it
an "anomaly", but the evidence is overwhelming. Camp Delta, which still
houses 470 men never convicted of any crime, is a torture camp. That
should be the starting point of any debate about what is acceptable in
the west's fight with Islamist extremists. More than 750 men have passed
through the camp, with nearly half being released. Many prisoners, past
and present, have given consistent and repeated testimony of serious
abuses and ill treatment. There is also significant evidence from US
officials and government documents of widespread abuse at the camp.
The British detainees known as the Tipton Three allege they were
repeatedly beaten, shackled in painful positions for long periods and
subjected to sleep deprivation. They were also subjected to strobe
lighting, loud music and extremes of hot and cold - all meant to break
them psychologically. Other detainees have suffered beatings, sexual
assaults and death threats. At least one man has been "water boarded" -
tied to a board and placed under water so that he had the sensation of
drowning.
According to the Red Cross, the regime at Guantánamo causes
psychological suffering that has driven inmates mad, with scores of
suicide attempts and three inmates killing themselves last year.
Even US officials are shocked. Last week FBI documents revealed that an
inmate's head had been wrapped in tape for quoting from the Qur'an.
Another was humiliated for his religious beliefs and "baptised" by a
soldier posing as a Catholic priest. The documents show FBI agents saw
26 instances of abuse in their time at Guantánamo. The FBI is highly
sceptical about alleged confessions gained by its military colleagues. A
May 2004 FBI memo branded intelligence gained from "special techniques"
as "suspect at best". Indeed, one of the Tipton Three confessed to being
in a video shot at an Afghan terror camp alongside Osama bin Laden - in
fact, at the time he was working in an electronics store in the
Midlands.
But the US should not shoulder all the blame. Some of the material from
Guantánamo has been used by Britain's counter-terrorism agencies. In
June 2003 Tony Blair told the Commons: "Information is still coming from
people detained there ... That information is important." George Bush,
his aides and the US military define what they have been doing as a
special programme using special measures: their position appears to be
that as long as blood is not drawn, it is not torture.
One official investigation found an inmate had been sexually humiliated
and forced to perform dog tricks on a leash. It said the conduct was
"abusive and degrading" but not torture. In a UK court hearing over
Guantánamo, a senior British judge, Mr Justice Collins, declared:
"America's idea of what is torture is not the same as ours." A UN report
has confirmed evidence of torture, and Amnesty International has
declared Guantánamo "the gulag of our time". Guantánamo is not the only
US torture camp. Bagram in Afghanistan has been dogged by stories of
abuse, and there are secret US prisons around the world where it is
widely feared new horrors are occuring.
Human rights have been traded away in Guantánamo in the hope of gaining
security, and it has not worked. One of the US's founding fathers,
Thomas Jefferson, stated: "He who trades liberty for security deserves
neither and will lose both." Adorned on the walls of the Guantánamo camp
is its mission statement: "Honour-bound to defend freedom". After five
years of Guantánamo, do you feel any safer?
· [EMAIL PROTECTED]
source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1988677,00.html
===
9/11
U.S. Has Lost Credibility On Rights, Group Asserts
By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 12, 2007; A10
The advocacy group Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Washington's
once-powerful role as a prime defender of human rights had effectively
ended because of arbitrary detentions and reports of torture since the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the group urged the European
Union to step up as a leader of the cause.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, released the
group's World Report 2007, an assessment of last year's global human
rights practices, by saying that the counterterrorism record of the
United States over the past five years has tarnished its credibility as
an influential moral voice.
He listed several practices he said were being used by the Bush
administration in its fight against terrorism, including torture,
arbitrary detentions, allowing CIA interrogators to use coercive
techniques and the unsupervised handling of so-called enemy combatants
held in other countries.
"This catastrophic path has left the United States effectively incapable
of defending some of the most basic rights," Roth said in the report,
released on the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees
at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Roth said Sudan, where the people of the western Darfur region are
subject to mass murder, rape and forcible displacement, finds it easier
to resist an international protection force because of the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq.
"The trend is bleak, but not irreversible," Roth wrote in an
introduction to the report, saying it was up to the new Democratic-led
Congress to repudiate past abuses, press for policy change and seek
accountability.
The report listed the governments of North Korea, Burma and Turkmenistan
as "repressive" and as imposing "enormous cruelty" on their populations.
Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam remain closed dictatorships. Russia and
Egypt are cracking down on nongovernmental organizations, while Peru and
Venezuela are considering the same path. Iran and Ethiopia are silencing
dissidents with impunity, the report said.
The report's introduction lamented the poor performance of the new U.N.
Human Rights Council and called it hardly an improvement over its
predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights. Though the council's
central duty is to pressure highly abusive governments to change, it
"has so far failed to criticize any government other than Israel," in "a
mockery of the high principles of its founding."
With Washington's voice diminished, the E.U. should be the strongest and
most potent defender of human rights, Roth said, but as the group seeks
consensus among its enlarged membership, its impact on the world stage
is much less than its potential.
"We are looking for a powerful actor. The Europeans say all the right
things, but there is no sense of immersion, no sense of duty," Roth said
in an interview Wednesday. "When you have 27 members, how do you decide
on common policy?" He also criticized Europe's role in the rights
council as being "too micro-tactical and one of a micromanager worried
with changing words here and there rather than being effective."
Roth also said the E.U.'s current system of a six-month rotating
presidency hampers the group's effectiveness.
"Human rights work is about sustained follow-up. You come back and you
come back until you get someone or a country to change its behavior,"
Roth said. "When you have this rotating blur of presidencies . . . it is
a recipe for failure. The most reluctant member determines E.U. policy,
so the whole is less than the sum of its parts."
source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/01/11/AR2007011101658_pf.html
===
-muslim voice-
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