‘Opposition politicians and human rights
campaigners reacted with dismay Tuesday to British Defense Secretary John
Reid's call for international
laws, including the Geneva Conventions, to be redrawn to
ensure states could counter global terrorism and undertake military
interventions.
The threat of terrorism should
not be used as justification for a watering-down of fundamental human rights,
Liberal Democrats Shadow Defense Secretary
Nick Harvey warned.
Any suggestion that Britain
should endorse U.S. policies such as indefinite detention of terror suspects
and extraordinary rendition must be "emphatically rejected," he said.
Reid's remarks were described as
"dismaying" by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, while Conservative
parliamentarian Andrew Tyrie said his suggestions "beggared belief."
Alarm
At UK Call On International Law
meanwhile, Bush’s gangster
cabal continue to flout International Law at will …..
‘Human rights group Amnesty
International accused the United States on Wednesday of using front companies
to transfer individuals to countries where they have faced torture or
ill-treatment.
The fresh charges come after
months of allegations by campaigners who say the Central Intelligence Agency
transports terrorism suspects outside normal legal channels to countries where
they could be tortured under interrogation.’
US Uses Front Companies
for "Rendition"
but since when do little
things like war crimes worry the masters of the universe ….
‘During a March 26 appearance on the NBC program
"Meet the Press," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to
justify the invasion of Iraq this way: "We faced the outcome of an
ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had to be dealt with. Saddam
Hussein was a part of that old Middle East. The new Iraq will be a part of the
new Middle East, and we will all be safer."
But, in a new essay on April 3,
Parry points out that "this doctrine - that the Bush administration has
the right to invade other nations for reasons as vague as social engineering -
represents a repudiation of the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations
Charter's ban on aggressive war, both formulated largely by American leaders
six decades ago."
Parry flags the core of the
administration's maneuver: "Gradually, Rice and other senior Bush aides
shifted their rationale from Hussein's WMD to a strategic justification, that
is, politically transforming the Middle East." He concludes that
"implicit in the U.S. news media's non-coverage of Rice's new rationale for
war is that there is nothing objectionable or alarming about the Bush
administration turning its back on principles of civilized behavior promulgated
by U.S. statesmen at the Nuremberg Tribunal six decades ago."’
When War Crimes Are
Impossible
These blokes are nutty nuts!
Repeat from "these blokes are nuts" comment
Gus is flabbergasted... So, according to John Reid, the British "aggression secretary" we need to adopt barbaric behaviour to defeat "barbaric terrorism"? Where will it end? Would adopting barbaric ways entice a rising tide of sadism in our midst? This bloke's nuts!
and he's in charge of the war department... Brother!
Good on you, grannies...
From the Independent
Helen and Sylvia, the new face of terrorism
By Nigel Morris and Jonathan Brown
Published: 06 April 2006
Two grandmothers from Yorkshire face up to a year in prison after becoming the first people to be arrested under the Government's latest anti-terror legislation.
Helen John, 68, and Sylvia Boyes, 62, both veterans of the Greenham Common protests 25 years ago, were arrested on Saturday after deliberately setting out to highlight a change in the law which civil liberties groups say will criminalise free speech and further undermine the right to peaceful demonstration.
Under the little-noticed legislation, which came into effect last week, protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain will be treated as potential terrorists and face up to a year in jail or £5,000 fine. The protests are curtailed under the Home Secretary's Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
Campaigners expressed their outrage yesterday at Charles Clarke's new law, which they say is yet another draconian attempt to crack down on legitimate protest under the guise of the war on terror.
Read more at the Independent
in league with barbarians .....
‘"After four years of torture and rendition, you have
the wrong person in the stand," Muhammad said. Military documents spell
his name variously as Muhammad and Mohammad. The judge, Marine Col. Ralph
Kohlmann, told Muhammad it was the prosecutor's job to establish his identity
during trial.
A written account of his capture
provided to The Associated Press by Muhammad's civilian lawyer, Clive Stafford
Smith, details the detainee's allegations of torture while "directly or indirectly"
in the custody of the United States. He alleges, among other things, that he
was sliced with a scalpel and given mind-altering drugs.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
said last month the United States does not transport terrorism suspects to nations
where it is likely they could be tortured, a practice known as extraordinary
rendition.
Human rights groups say the
United States carries out extraordinary renditions to outsource torture.
The American Civil
Liberties Union last week asked the UN to investigate.’
Detainee
Says He Was Tortured by Moroccans
the danger of being too liberal .....
‘In 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales passed on to Bush a memorandum on torture by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). As noted by constitutional scholar Sanford Levinson: "According to the OLC, ‘acts must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture… physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.'" Levinson goes on to say that in the view of Jay Bybee, then head of the OLC, "The infliction of anything less intense than such extreme pain would not, technically speaking, be torture at all. It would merely be inhuman and degrading treatment, a subject of little apparent concern to the Bush administration's lawyers."
Gonzales further advised President Bush to effectively rescind the Geneva Conventions, which, despite being "the supreme law of the land" and the foundation of contemporary international law, contained provisions Gonzales determined to be "quaint" and "obsolete." Rescinding the conventions, he informed Bush, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." Passed in 1996, the act carries severe penalties for "grave breaches" of the conventions: the death penalty, "if death results to the victim" of the breach. Gonzales was later appointed to be attorney general and would probably have been a Supreme Court nominee if Bush's constituency did not regard him as "too liberal."’
War Crimes in Iraq
terrorising the law .....
‘On Dec. 30, President Bush signed into law the Detainee
Treatment Act, which says "no court, justice or judge shall have
jurisdiction to hear or consider ... an application for a writ of habeas corpus
filed" for a Guantanamo Bay detainee. A writ of habeas corpus allows a
prisoner to contest the legal basis for his detention.
The new law also says courts
cannot hear "any action against the United States or its agents"
relating to Guantanamo Bay detainees. The law gives only the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit narrow oversight powers.
Critics say the Bush
administration's move to curtail the judiciary's oversight of the military
tribunals threatens American principals.
"The administration is
trying to take the war on terror outside the rule of law. The rule of law is
the most sacred standard we hold as American norms," said Margaret
Satterthwaite of New York University School of Law and faculty director of its
Center for Human Rights and Global Research.’
Shadow Falls Over US
Military Tribunals
from the fascist in chief .....
‘The Bush White House also asserted that the
September 2001 “Authorization to Use Military Force” resolution passed by
Congress after 9/11 entitled Bush to tap Americans’ phones. But if the
authorization actually entitled the president to do whatever he thinks
necessary on the home front, then Americans have been living under martial law
for the last four and a half years.
At this point, Americans can only
guess which laws Bush feels obliged to obey. According to Newsweek,
Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel,
recently informed the Senate Intelligence Committee that Bush could order
killings of suspected terrorists within the United States.
Americans cannot expect to have
good presidents if presidents are permitted to make themselves czars. The
“unitary executive” theory is simply another in a long series of intellectual
cons crafted to trample freedom. The sooner that it is tarred and feathered and
ridden out of Washington on a rail, the safer Americans’ remaining rights will
be.’
Bush’s Bogus Theory of
Absolute Power
those pesky courts again .....
‘British government Ministers may now
"hesitate" before using anti-terrorist powers against suspected
extremists after a court ruling against control orders, a security watchdog
said last night.
Lord Carlile, the government's independent
assessor of terrorism laws, gave his view after a High Court judge in London
ruled that ministers' powers to put accused terrorists under house arrest
contravene human rights laws.
The Home Office has vowed to appeal against the
ruling on control orders, which would tear a hole in the government's
anti-terrorism legislation if upheld by a higher court.
The case concerns the orders currently imposed
by ministers on a dozen men, British nationals and foreign citizens, whom the
security services assess to pose a threat to the UK.’
Terror Law In
Disarray After Judge's Ruling