YouTube Remove Tibetan Video showing torture and brutality – Caving in to Chinese pressure ?

Wednesday, March 25 2009 @ 11:36 pm GMT

http://www.tibetcustom.com/art…..2523363654

New claim of MI5 involvement in torture

Fresh allegations in the High Court this week will increase pressure on the Government to open a judicial inquiry into collusion between the CIA and British security services in torture during the “war on terror”.

Shaker Aamer, 42, the final British resident in Guantanamo Bay, claims that like Binyam Mohamed, he was tortured in American custody in 2002.

On Thursday the Attorney General took the unprecedented step of calling in Scotland Yard to investigate allegations that MI5 collaborated in the alleged torture of Mr Mohamed. Mr Aamer’s case is believed to be one of 15 similar new cases. In a legal claim against the Government to be lodged at the High Court this week, Mr Aamer’s lawyers allege that MI5 and MI6 were complicit in the torture of Mr Aamer.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n…..57047.html

This is the basic rationale for creating detailed “cover stories” for covert agents and the rehearsing of them and repetition of them under stressful interrogations. They must be believed, or at least the networks must be created that these can be maintained without shifting into other modes. In fact, one is likely to get false confessions. In fact, that confession might actually serve as the barometer for whether the torture has reprogrammed the individuals mind.

But one loses all the useful information, the details that might come out in a different sort of interrogation, if one uses torture. Everything becomes distorted. So if you need a detail about someone that al Zubaydah might have met he might say he knew saw them at “A”, when he was actually somewhere else. That can completely foil whole investigations.

Former State Dept lawyer Vijay Padmanabhan says – oops, yeah, there were a lot of innocent people at GITMO and yeppers, we tortured and rendered left and right, but never gets around to using the word crime in connection with the word torture that he does mention. Instead, he opts for “overreaction.” You know, like when a drug addict boyfriend beats his girlfriend’s crying baby to a pulp, – *overreaction* not crime.

Oh, and the good thing about the overreaction was that is was preceded by “robust” discussion. But if you don’t like “overreaction” he does also offer up “foolish” as an appropriate replacement for *criminal*

The other good news is that Padmanabhan says that we don’t have to worry about US Presidents authorizing torture, unless for some reason, the domestic and world environs end up not being “calm.”

“These are not things that I think any American president would have authorized had they been in a calmer environment,” Padmanabhan told AP in a telephone interview.

Kind of like saying Sadaam would never have gassed all those people if only he hadn’t been agitated by the war with Iran.

Not to discount the fact that Padmanabhan is finally getting around to saying something as un-, de-, mal- and mis-calming as, Yeppers, we had hundreds of innocent people at GITMO and the President was authorizing torture for them, it’s a bit hard to read his tsking on overreactions and foolishness, sans references to crime, and end up feeling that the discussions were all that “robust.”

It’s also interesting that he was involved in a lot of the repatriation negotiations for the inncents being returned. IIRC, those transfers involved having detainees sign off on waivers of torture claims. And I’ve already said my spiel on lawyers who would tender that kind of crap under the guise of it being a defensible instrument.

If I were an innocent person being kidnapped and tortured under a claim of Presidential perogative, I’d have to hope that the US legal system would have produced something very different than Mr. Padmanabhan to take part in the “robust” discussion over how much more and how much longer my kidnap and torture would include and continue. And some lawyer who would flat out say that making me sign a waiver of rights to pursue torture claims was NOT worth the paper it was written on and that it was degrading this nation and the rule of law to even offer up a pretense to the contrary.

OTOH, since we have Constitutional Scholar and President Obama also agreeing that a lack of calm is a valid defense against torture prosecutions, I guess I’d realize pretty damn quickly that I’d set my expectations way too high.

All in all, how can the torture leave you anything but proud?

Why Morocco? Did they want to see what razoring the cowering 19 yo (I still remember all the moving targets on ages of GITMO detainees, where it was finally discovered we had kids at LEAST as young as 13 and maybe as young as 11 there, and where the age on the rape/murder victim in Iraq started in the 20s only to end up eventually at 14-15, so I take the 19 with a grain of salt for now) might elicit? Did someone want to make sure the there was a more graphically sexual component of the teenager’s torture?

From way back, when there were discussions about Bush cancelling out parts of the EO on things like assassination, I said that one of the important provisions in that EO that he was also getting around was the one on human experimentation. The nuts and bolts are now what they have been for years – we bought people for experiments. You can pretty it up however else you want, but from the 13 yos to the 80 yos with walkers at GITMO to the black sites detainees (and we know there were more than the few that ended up at GITMO later) – we’ve used taxes from US citizens to pay for purchasing human beings for experimentation. It’s just creepy.

And one of the most important points they make about Noor al-Deen:

Deen was eventually transferred to Syria, but attempts to firmly establish his current whereabouts were unsuccessful.

emph added. Yeah, I bet they were.