LONDON - British officials announced yesterday that security and intelligence officers accused of colluding in the mistreatment of two suspected Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan would not face criminal charges as part of a long-running investigation of alleged complicity in the torture of detainees.
But a joint statement by the Crown Prosecution Service and Scotland Yard said a further investigation would be held into two separate allegations of so-called extraordinary rendition of unidentified suspects in Libya during the Moammar Khadafy era, saying they were “so serious that it is in the public interest for them to be investigated now.’’
Yes, the great stain on the West that is rarely talked about.
Some of the allegations were brought by Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a military commander for the rebels who seized power in Libya last year. He has said he was incarcerated and tortured in Libya starting in 2004 when he and his family were seized while traveling to Britain to seek asylum.
Well, yeah, but the British government was trying to secure access to Libyan oil for BP about that time.
The allegations date to a period when former Prime Minister Tony Blair had reversed decades of Western hostility to Khadafy after he renounced terrorism and gave up ambitions to acquire unconventional weapons.
And did you see what giving up the weapons did for Saddam and Khadafy? Invaded. When you don't give up the weapon like North Korea, not. I'm sure there is a lesson for Iran in there somewhere.
After the fall of Tripoli last August, journalists and human rights activists discovered a trove of what they believed were Libyan security service documents detailing evidence of Britain’s involvement in the rendition of Belhaj.
Bliar is a war criminal in more ways than one.
According to Britain’s Press Association news agency, which quoted Belhaj’s lawyers, one letter from a senior British intelligence officer to a Libyan counterpart described Britain’s role as “the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years.’’
The decisions announced yesterday appeared to ease some pressure on Britain’s security agencies, removing a threat of lengthy and potentially embarrassing court proceedings against officers of institutions that prefer to operate in secrecy....
The protracted saga, at one time involving up to 16 British citizens or residents who said they were victims of mistreatment, had tarnished Britain’s self-image as a land that formally repudiates torture and had strained intelligence cooperation with the United States.
They formally repudiate it. Informally, it still occurs.
It also inspired a continuing debate on the way detainees were treated in the campaigns against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the July 7, 2005, bombings in London.
To me there is no debate because those attacks were false-flag inside jobs perpetrated by the very agencies that are doing the torturing.
“The very making of these allegations undermined Britain’s standing in the world as a country that upholds international law and abhors torture,’’ Foreign Secretary William Hague said in November. The accusations involved MI5, the domestic security service, and MI6, the overseas intelligence agency.
Prisoners had alleged that British security and intelligence officers colluded in their mistreatment at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at secret locations in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Others said they were questioned elsewhere by interrogators using information that they alleged could only have been supplied by British agencies.
Like I said, it is an OPEN SECRET and yet NO WAR CRIMES TRIALS!
One of the most prominent former detainees was Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and resident of Britain, who was arrested as a terrorism suspect in 2002 after converting to Islam and traveling to Pakistan a year earlier. The CIA turned him over to Moroccan interrogators, who subjected him to brutal treatment including cutting his penis with a scalpel and then pouring a hot, stinging liquid on the open wound, he said.
See: Spies Not Like Us
He was sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2004, but the United States dropped all charges against him in 2008. He returned to Britain in early 2009 and became a symbol of the abuses that human rights campaigners alleged had taken place.
In a statement after yesterday’s announcement, Mohamed said there had been as “a pattern of massive complicity by UK bodies in criminality at the highest levels directed at other Muslim prisoners.’’
“My experience was not isolated,’’ he said, “it was part of a pattern.’’
In the joint statement yesterday, Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service said that members of MI5 “provided information to the US authorities to put to Mr. Mohamed, while he was being detained between 2002 and 2004, including at times when Mr. Mohamed’s precise whereabouts was not known to them.’’
But, the statement said, there was “insufficient evidence’’ to bring criminal charges “that any identifiable individual’’ supplied information “at a time when he or she knew or ought to have known that there was a real or serious risk that Mr. Mohamed would be exposed to ill treatment amounting to torture.’’
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So that is who taught them to do this:
"Torture, death common in Libyan prisons" January 27, 2012|By Liam Stack
CAIRO - Torture and death in detention have become widespread problems in post-war Libya, international humanitarian groups said yesterday, a troubling indication that some Khadafy-era abuses continue under the fractured rule of the country’s post-war interim government and regionally organized militias....
The majority of victims were Libyans believed to have remained loyal to the government of Moammar Khadafy during the nine-month conflict that led to his ouster, but some were sub-Saharan Africans. Africans from outside of Libya were often accused of being Khadafy mercenaries during the revolution.
Haven't really heard much about, have you?
Doctors Without Borders, a group that specializes in providing emergency medical care in conflict zones, said yesterday that it would suspend its operations in detention centers in Misurata, saying some of the 115 detainees it has treated for torture-related injuries since August have been returned repeatedly with more wounds.
“Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for further interrogation,’’ Christopher Stokes, the group’s general director, said in a statement. “This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.’’
Human Rights Watch said it had documented “ongoing torture’’ in Libyan detention centers in the past six months, said Sidney Kwiram, an investigator for the group, which has monitored prison conditions in Libya since February and in the western city of Misurata since April.
“Torture is ongoing and is used to force confessions or for punishment,’’ Kwiram said via telephone from Misurata.
That's how we got the 9/11 guys to "confess."
She said the persistence of torture was not so much a reflection of policy by the transitional national authorities as of the weakness of Libya’s institutions after nine months of war and four decades of Khadafy rule.
“In some cases, commanders here form their own fiefdoms, so it is not a matter of what the government is saying,’’ she said. “What matters is who is in charge of a facility. There are dotted lines between the national and the local levels, and they need to become undotted.’’
Refugees from the Libyan city of Tawergha told similar tales of torture and killing in interviews last month in an informal camp in Tripoli, the capital.
Tawergha was largely destroyed in September in revenge attacks by rebel fighters from neighboring Misurata, who accused its residents of participating in a bloody four-month siege of their town by Khadafy forces that killed more than 1,000.
Almost all of Tawergha’s 30,000 resident fled, but fighters from Misurata have continued to attack, detain, torture, and in some cases kill people from the town, even after they fled to other parts of the country, said refugees and activists.
Libya’s transitional government has struggled for months to exert authority, even in the streets of the capital, which is largely controlled by a patchwork of regional militias whose members defer to their own commanders, not government security forces....
In recent weeks the transitional government has faced mounting criticism over its stewardship of the country, with many complaining that its operations and budget are too opaque and that some members are tainted by links, real or imagined, to the Khadafy government.
But we won.
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