Monday, February 09, 2009

Time To Tear The Roof Off Gitmo....

This is a truly terrible story and as it unfolds, I begin to understand why the British were so anxious to cooperate with the Americans in withholding the information surrounding this case to be used in evidence in a British court. On Friday Night, I listened to BBC4's radio broadcast of the highlights of the days Parliamentary Proceedings and heard the arguments for making the details known.
The upshot of the arguments was that perhaps the new American Administration might not find with holding the details of the case so important and allow it to go forward.
As it unfolds you realize what a horrid farce this truly is...

Last week, two British High Court judges ruled against releasing documents describing the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay. The judges said the Bush administration “had threatened to withhold intelligence cooperation with Britain if the information were made public.”

But The Daily Telegraph reported over the weekend that the documents actually “contained details of how British intelligence officers supplied information to [Mohamed’s] captors and contributed questions while he was brutally tortured.” In fact, it was British officials, not the Americans, who pressured Foreign Secretary David Miliband “to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution.” According to the Telegraph’s sources, the documents describe particularly gruesome interrogation tactics:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.

Another source familiar with the case said: “British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it.”

“It is very clear who stands to be embarrassed by this and who is being protected by this secrecy. It is not the Americans, it is Labour ministers,” former shadow home secretary David Davis said. But one unnamed U.S. House Judiciary Committee member told the Telegraph that if President Obama “doesn’t act we could hold a hearing or write to subpoena the documents. We need to know what’s in those documents.”

Mohamed remains at Guantanamo Bay and “is currently on hunger strike.” “All terror charges against him were dropped last year,” the Telegraph reported.

Now, in yesterdays Sunday's UK Mail the real details of the information that sent Binyam Mohamed into this nightmare are beginning to emerge. Under torture and interrogation, Mohamed told of an article he read on line in a satirical magazine called 7 Days. The article was originally published in Rolling Stone Magazine and was called,

How To Build An H Bomb

Written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the publication’s food editor, Rolling Stone journalist Peter Biskind and scientist Michio Kaku, it claims that a nuclear weapon can be made ‘using a bicycle pump’ and with liquid uranium ‘poured into a bucket and swung round’.

Despite its clear satirical bent, the story led the CIA to accuse 30-year-old Mohamed, a caretaker, of plotting a dirty bomb attack, before subjecting him to its ‘extraordinary rendition programme’.

During his eight-year imprisonment, Mohamed has allegedly been flown to secret torture centres in Pakistan, Morocco, an American-run jail known as the Dark Prison near Kabul in Afghanistan and, finally, to Guantanamo Bay.

Last week, the High Court ruled that the 42 intelligence papers must remain secret.
However, the judges insisted they had no choice because the Government had informed them of a ‘threat’ by the US to withdraw all intelligence co-operation with Britain if the papers were published by the court.

Mr Miliband was then forced to defend the claim in the House of Commons, insisting that the US needed ‘confidence that its secrets are safe with us’.

However, details of what Mohamed told his interrogators, unearthed by The Mail, are likely to cast further doubt on Mr Miliband’s stance.

The story which apparently led to Mohamed’s ordeal could not possibly have been used by a terrorist to build a nuclear weapon. The satirical article, published in Seven Days magazine, says its authors were given ‘three days to cook up a workable H-bomb. They did and we have decided to share their culinary secrets with you’.

It adds: ‘Not that Seven Days supports nuclear terrorism. We don’t. We would prefer to die from familiar poisons like low-level radiation, microwaves, DDT or food dyes, rather than unexpectedly, say as hostage to a Latvian nationalists brandishing a home-made bomb.’

The recipe is highly detailed and plainly ridiculous. The prospective bomb maker is instructed to transform uranium gas into liquid by ‘subjecting it to pressure’, adding: ‘You can use a bicycle pump for this.’

The instructions continue: ‘Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride.

‘Attach a 6ft rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes.

‘Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor. The U-235 – a uranium isotope which can be used to cause an explosive chain reaction – will have risen to the top, where it can be skimmed off like cream. Repeat this step until you have the required 10lb of uranium.’

Last night, Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, confirmed that the article was central to claims that his client was planning a dirty bomb attack.

‘Unclassified evidence corroborates Binyam’s claims that he was threatened – at the time the White House was obsessed by the idea terrorists had access to nuclear materials,’ he added. ‘Binyam said that he told them about a website he had once seen on the internet called How To Build An H-Bomb. He said that this was a joke but they thought it might be serious.

‘I am speculating but I think this news was sent up the line to the White House, which is when the paranoia kicked in. They authorised the “enhanced interrogation techniques” against Binyam, including the rendition. This is how they made their
huge mistake, thinking he was a major terrorist as opposed to a London janitor.

‘It explains why they took a nobody and subjected him to the worst torture of any US prisoner in the past seven years.’

It's time to tear the roof off of the American Terrorist Torture Program and expose it for what it is. A crazed system of panicked wimps participating in a series of systemized human rights outrages to placate the manipulated populace of a country traumatized to believe terrorists were going to blow up their shopping malls. This was a racist driven horror committed upon another human being for petty revenge. This is beyond an embarrassment, this is the utter cowardly collapse of human morality.


11 comments:

mud_rake said...

t's time to tear the roof off of the American Terrorist Torture Program and expose it for what it is. A crazed system of panicked wimps participating in a series of systemized human rights outrages to placate the manipulated populace of a country traumatized to believe terrorists were going to blow up their shopping malls. This was a racist driven horror committed upon another human being for petty revenge. This is beyond an embarrassment, this is the utter cowardly collapse of human morality.

I could not add one more word to what you have said here.

"Enough!" [as Obama would say]

Unknown said...

I couldn't agree more. I hope the reports of Obama's people not cooperating prove to be premature or unfounded. I pray that he can take America in a new direction. He promised he would.

Anonymous said...

Well, it appears that you Americans have elected "Dudley Appease the Right." Someone should inform the President that when he spoke of change it was not to mean "Le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose." Even consensus builders have to choose sides in a war.

microdot said...

Anonymous, let me guess?
You can't hide your accent.

microdot said...

I realize that there are a lot of people who want to comment on blogs, but don't have blogger identities.
I have a few friends in that position who leave anonymous comments, but I ususally know who they are or they identify themselves...
Then there are those who feel that dropping a line of anonymous sarcasm or an insult and then going away sniggling is some sort of meaningful discourse.
I have a formal designation for this act, is is called blog felching...or blelching for short and blog felchers are hereby considered a lower life form...
back in the pond, scum and please try to make an effort to evolve!

Anonymous said...

Well, aren't we the sensitive twit?
Strange you should speak of evolution at the time of Darwin's 200th anniversary...perhaps the words of another 200 year old luminary are more appropriate: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

Public forums are just that...your obsession with one's identity is a form of paranoia, which may explain your desire to hide away in the French hinterlands.

microdot said...

Look anonymous, you can be anyone you want to be. I support you, post away, but if you're going insist on being a cranky humorless snitwit, then you can go cheney yourself.

microdot said...

Okay, so you're not Dave, you have just become Little Mister Pissy Pants and that's your last comment here. buh-bye

Anonymous said...

I am appalled that you have resorted to censorhip...seems that you just want your toadies aboard. Isn't this the what George W. and his posse did initially before they got into full-time torture as the American sport of (wantabe) kings.

In the interest of liberty, please knock down that wall.

microdot said...

Look M.P. Anonymous, or dave or whatever you want to be called....
If you want to actually communicate with me, my gmail address is available throught this blog.
I have had many threats from jack ass trolls who have even threatened to "have me investigated and reported to Homelnad Security"...they have all been anonymous...
If you look at my comments on my posts, you will see that I am quite tolerant and willing to discuss my viewpoints and posts.
But, I find pointless pleas for attention from people who claim that this blog is a soapbox for their sniping attempts at sarcasm to be pretty damn pathetic.
I would like you to understand that I will not engage in a pissing war with you...okay? I'm sorry if I am not expressing myself in polite diplomatic terms, but you have only managed to present yourself as a self righteous bean bag throwing twit.
If you can justify the energy you have made me waste in reading and replying to your snits, perhaps we can communicate in a much more meaningful fashion, but if you persist in your sarcastic drivel, I will trash it with out batting one of my long langorous, limpidly sexy eyelashes....
The ball is in your court, you vain little toad.

Anonymous said...

I am sorry that you find our dialogue (Anglo-Franco-American)to be drivel and unworthy of your purple prose. (Well stated sir if slightly hyperbolic.) Ironically, I am in firm agreement with you on this particular post, although our approaches to its resolution are probably diametrically opposed.


Cheers for now.