Miliband Tortured Over Grill As Obama Changes Only Himself
DAVID Miliband tortured over Grill. Or as Sky News puts it:
Miliband Grilled Over ‘Torture’
Foreign Secretary David Miliband is to be grilled by MPs over an allegation that the US “blackmailed” Britain to keep quiet over torture by threatening to withhold vital intelligence.
Tell us all or it vill be vorse for you Britisher:
Two senior judges said the US government had threatened to review its intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK if documents relating to alleged mistreatment of prisoners were released into the public domain.
The papers detail the treatment by the US of Ethiopian Binyam Mohamed, a former UK resident being held in Guantanamo Bay, who claims British agencies were complicit in his torture.
He says he was picked up in Pakistan, flown to Morocco, where he was allegedly tortured, and then given a free sunshine break in Cuba’s Guantanimo Bay.
He says the evidence against him was based on confessions extracted by torture and ill treatment – claims denied by the US.
He is expected to be returned to Britain in the coming months after charges linking him to a “dirty bomb” plot were withdrawn.
Torture:
He wrote: “One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony.
“They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists.
“In all the 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors.”
A million cuts on George Bush:
Barack Obama’s government was accused of “blackmail” after it emerged that America had threatened to withdraw co-operation in terrorist cases if a UK court ordered the disclosure of secret torture evidence.
In the first real test of the “special relationship” between Britain and the US since Mr Obama’s inauguration, MPs and human rights groups called for an inquiry into the case that concerns the treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed, still being held at Guantanamo Bay.
Obama must go. Give him the boot. Hell, give him the shoe:
Barack Obama began making his comeback Wednesday, apparently aware that he has all but lost control of the agenda in Washington at a time when he simply can’t afford to do so. Obama’s biggest problem isn’t Taxgate—which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can’t seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That’s a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party—the one we thought lost the election—is doing that.
(Via Instapundit and Andrew Bolt)
Binyam Mohamed is innocent, then. He’s on hunger strike:
Lieutenant colonel Yvonne Bradley, a US military lawyer who saw him last week, said: “He is just skin and bones. The real worry is that he comes out in a coffin.”
The AP reports:
The Saudi government acknowledged Wednesday that 11 men on the country’s most wanted list are former Guantanamo prisoners who went through rehabilitation, raising doubts about a program intended to counter extremist religious ideology.
President Barack Obama signed an executive order closing down the prison in Cuba on Jan. 22 — his second day in office — leaving nations scrambling over what to do with a potential flood of released detainees.
Some 133 of Guantanamo’s over 700 inmates were Saudi, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Gen. Mansour al-Turki, and 117 have returned to Saudi Arabia and been through rehabilitation programs.
“Besides the 11 people (on the list) who came from Guantanamo, there are still 106 people who have gone through this rehabilitation program and are doing okay,” he told The Associated Press…
It is in large part due to Saudi assurances of the effectiveness of these programs that most Saudis have been released from Guantanamo. Only 13 remain jailed there, according to al-Turki.
The Gitmo Bay Babes are auditioning for a place in your home.
Preventing calamities is one of the most important and least appreciated functions of government. When an evil is averted – perhaps as a result of insight, intensive effort, and administrative skill – the result is that nothing happens. It is easy, after the fact, for critics to ignore or deprecate the accomplishment. Political opponents may scoff at the effort as unnecessary, citing the absence of disaster as proof that the problem could not have been very serious to begin with.”
But what of trasparency?
Pledge:
Plus ca change…
Posted: 5th, February 2009 | In: Politicians Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
