UK Military Test Flying Israeli Drone Over Wales

Before the ash of doom cleared the flight schedules the ‘Watchkeeper‘ drone was successfully test flown on Wedenesday over Welsh skies (ht2 Mike)-

The UK tentacle of French arms giant Thales is delighted today to announce that its new “Watchkeeper” drone aircraft for the British Army has made its first flight in UK airspace. The machine first flew in 2008, above Israel, where the Hermes 450 it is based on is made.

The 20-minute Watchkeeper flight took place yesterday at the new ParcAberporth drone-drome in Wales, operated by controversial MoD selloff bonanza firm Qinetiq, which it is hoped will become a huge economic boon for Wales as the UK robocraft business booms in future. For now though, the main job it has is testing Watchkeeper.

The Watchkeeper itself is a modification of the Hermes 450 craft from Elbit of Israel, which the British Army is already using in Afghanistan under a lease deal with Elbit and Thales. Watchkeeper is superior to a basic Hermes 450, however, as it carries a ground-moving-target-indicator radar (developed with the help of Thales’ French operations) in addition to its electro-optical spyeye package.

The plan is for the British Watchkeepers and their engines to be made (or assembled, anyway) in Blighty. The aircraft will be put together at a company in Leicester called U-TacS, 51 per cent owned by Elbit – thus, Israeli-controlled. The UK engine-making factory will be fully Israeli-owned.

Apart from Thales’ I-MASTER Franco-UK radar, various other European components will replace the ones used by Israel in the Hermes 450. This process is described by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Thales as essentially endowing Britain with a new unmanned-aircraft manufacturing base boasting 2000+ well-paid, skilled British jobs. This is the main reason why it is taking years and costing hundreds of millions to field a fairly ordinary radar+EO surveillance aircraft.

So I guess there’s still a ways to go on BDS where the MOD are involved…(it’s almost as if the military and the UK government are not at the forefront of human rights, quick someone call the Decents and alert their superior moral senses, the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan may possibly not be about building creches). The base for this testing is the UAV centre at ParcAberporth (& Google map). Of course the skilled jobs are trumpeted and with little choice the fact it is making a living out of death does not get a look in, you can’t pay a mortgage with good intentions, thus capitalism marches on with its evil flying robots of death. Protests in 2004 against the site of course fell on deaf ears when corporate profit and political influence peddling in the war-on-terro era trumps all notions of…well morality-

“We are very unhappy at the proposal and we know many local people are also concerned about it,” said Rod Stallard, vice-chairman of CND Cymru yesterday. “It’s been stated by the US Navy that this type of aircraft will have an armed offence capability by 2015. We don’t think Wales should be used as the site for producing such an offensive weapon. To have public money pumped into something like this is ridiculous. We should be supporting local businesses, not giving public money to multi-national companies to produce killing machines. It’s not for rural Wales, or for anywhere else.”

Local resident Keith Haworth said there were a number of questions about the project that needed to be answered.

He added, “Wales may want to be seen as the new Celtic Tiger, but is investment in remote-controlled weapons delivery technology the face a peace-orientated nation wishes to present to the world?”

ParcAberporth was created under the auspice of the legendarily corrupt patronage machine/quango the Welsh Development Agency  which is now simply the Welsh Assembly Government’s Department of Economy and Transport and the privatised Qinetiq, which was sold off cheap to the Empire’s corporate war machine. Rod Stallard had it right ‘To have public money pumped into something like this is ridiculous. We should be supporting local businesses, not giving public money to multi-national companies to produce killing machines.’ Thankfully we have an election now where we can vote and change all that… oh I am funny.

Not A Mistake An Example

Vodpod videos no longer available.
Via Raed in the Middle: WikiLeaks Video: Exception or Example?

Laura Flanders with- Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films, who was in Iraq and visited the scene of the shootings just the day after they happened, and senior fellow at Peace Action, Raed Jarrar.

Rowley (there a day afterwards) recounts that a survivor of the Apache attack died when troops ran over him virtually cutting him in half and both make the point this is not an aberration in spite of ROE but because of them. Also see Democracy Now-

these residents came and told me that the man who they drove over was alive, that he had crawled out of the van that had been shot to pieces and that he was still alive when the Americans drove over him and cut him in half, basically, with a Bradley or tank or whatever armored vehicle they were driving in.

Not breaking the rules but following them, thus all the counter spin is to hide the reality and conduct of the war. Also Glenn Greenwald on this and Obama’s assassination program and Chris Floyd- The Accomodationists: Memo to Liberals on the White House Death Warrants.

Easy

Go on, press the button, it’s easy. You’ve been trained in such a way that makes it very easy, that directs your libido into desiring the kill, to ‘Get Some’. And don’t worry, the acculturation in the Homeland is such that whatever you do you will be the Good Guy. And thus the cycle continues, mass murderers become respected and get the next bit of mass murder going. The counter narrative is already launched, that’s if it is even still on the news agenda and anyway they are censoring it for the sensitive folks back home. What then of the other side, when they’ve mown down your friends, family, given themselves medals and treat you like shit, gonna do something? You’ll have to realise that your act won’t reach the people in the Homeland, they won’t understand you as a human being who made a stand, who couldn’t take anymore who couldn’t live with the anger, grief and the need stop the pain in your head, you’ll be an insurgent, a terrorist, a fundamentalist. Heroes use $16 million gunships (that’s a stimulus to the economy, saving jobs, providing careers in science, engineering and psychology), when you improvise whatever you can get your hands on, that’s terrorism. And that act will stiffen the resolve of the righteous forces of freedom, they are protecting the folks back home from your violence. They’ll be parades for them, at your funeral a drone will Hellfire all your friends and family, I mean who else would go to the funeral of a terrorist than other terrorists? Get Some. And best of all, best of all even the caring sharing reasonable liberal journalists will deny the holocaust of deaths (especially the half a million starved children even before the WMD lies did their work), Lancet & Orb are verboten, because the Good Guys don’t do that even as they wring their hands. So war has not changed, it is series of unfolding atrocities and people who want a nice life will not get in too much of the way of that, it’s just not polite. Do your duty, don’t think too hard, value nice things that a nice salary will buy you and one day maybe when you hear rotors overhead, hope that your gang, your tribe are in the cockpit, so don’t go to protests, don’t pray to the wrong god, don’t resist an occupation that murders and tortures your friends and family. When they say they are Good Guys believe them and serve them, whatever they do to you, maybe they foreclose your home, or bulldoze your home, deny you medicine in a letter or at a checkpoint, because that’s freedom. Find the most powerful gang and join it and hope your life is not at the other end of a button push.

collateralmurder.com

Standing at the window

A farmer’s wife in Oxford shire

Glances at the clock; it’s nearly time for tea

She doesn’t see

The phantom in the hedgerow dip its wings

Doesn’t hear the engine sing

But in the cockpit’s techno glow

Behind the Ray Ban shine

The kid from Cleveland

In the comfort of routine

Scans his dials and smiles

Secure in the beauty of military life

There is no right or wrong

Only tin cans and cordite and white cliffs

And blue skies and flight flight flight

The beauty of military life

No questions only orders and flight, only flight

What a beautiful sight in his wild blue dream

The eternal child leafs through his war magazine

And his kind Uncle Sam feeds ten trillion in change

Into the total entertainment combat video game

And up here in the stands

The fans are going wild

The cheerleaders flip

When you wiggle your hip

And we all like the bit when you take

The jeans from the refrigerator and

Then the bad guy gets hit

And were you struck by the satisfying way

The swimsuit sticks to her skin

Like BB gun days

When knives pierce autumn leaves

But that’s okay see the children bleed

It’ll look great on the TV

And in Tripoli another ordinary wife

Stares at the dripping her old man hadn’t

Time to fix

Too busy mixing politics and rhythm

In the street below

UK Prioritises Killing Over Aid To Haiti

From SU–

Michael Burke:- The donors conference in New York has now seen pledges of $5.3bn in aid to Haiti.

Unfortunately, there is a long history of broken promises arising from international donor conferences. Maybe that is why Britain promised absolutely nothing at all.

The Times justifies the decision here, arguing that money is going to Afghanistan and Pakistan

In fact the NGOs estimate that around $7bn in aid is requirid immediately, simply to return the country’s housing and infrastructure to pre-earthquake level, let alone provide any real development assistance.

In attempting to justify the decision to provide no new funds at the conference, Mike Foster, the Overseas Development Minister, said that Britain had pledged £20 million for initial emergency relief and had donated £33 million going through the European Commission, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Mr Foster also said that Britain’s £29 million funding this year for the UN mission in Haiti although Britain is obliged to pay for these ‘peacekeeping operations’, which existed long before the earthquake. The displeasure of the donors was marked by a refusal to grant British officials speaking rights at the press conference that followed.

Reports indicate that the British Treasury has blocked any payments, even though the international development budget is said to be one of those ‘ring-fenced’ from cuts. Ring-fenced it may be, but it appears that in boosting payments to both Pakistan and Afghanistan it is increasingly a tool of foreign policy aggression. This combination of reduced aid to the needy and increased militarisation of the Aid budget is clearly a co-ordinated foreign policy decision, presumably taken by the press’s favourite Labour Leader, David Milliband.

Obama Admin Repeats Bush War Rhetoric To Justify Drone Assassinations

(AFP) – The US government for the first time has offered a legal justification of its drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, citing the right to “self-defense” under international law. The CIA attacks by unmanned aircraft in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere have sharply increased under President Barack Obama’s administration but have remained shrouded in secrecy, with some human rights groups charging the bombing raids amount to illegal assassinations. Broaching a subject that has been off-limits for official comment, State Department legal advisor Harold Koh laid out the legal argument for the strikes in a speech late Thursday, referring to “targeting” of Al-Qaeda and Taliban figures without mentioning Pakistan or where the raids are carried out.

The United States was in “an armed conflict” with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and its affiliates as a result of the September 11 attacks, Koh said, “and may use force consistent with its inherent right to self-defense under international law. With respect to the subject of targeting, which has been much commented upon in the media and international legal circles, there are obviously limits to what I can say publicly,” he told a conference of the American Society of International Law. What I can say is that it is the considered view of this administration — and it has certainly been my experience during my time as legal adviser — that US targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.”

The CIA would not comment on the speech, posted on the State Department website, but told AFP: “The Agency?s counterterrorism operations are conducted in strict accord with the law.” Rights activists and some legal experts charge the drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries, outside of a traditional battlefield, amount to extrajudicial executions that violate both international and US law.

Koh, a fierce critic of former president George W. Bush’s policies before he took his post, disagreed — saying a US ban on government sanctioned assassinations did not apply. Under US law, “the use of lawful weapons systems — consistent with the applicable laws of war — for precision targeting of specific high-level belligerent leaders when acting in self-defense or during an armed conflict is not unlawful, and hence does not constitute ‘assassination,'” he said. He also argued that the US government was not obliged to offer legal rights to the militant figures targeted in the strikes as the United States was at war and acting in self-defense.

Also, American Society of International Law Press release. Yes the only empire on Earth, that spends more than all other nations together on its military, with approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater)…is acting in self defence. Koh in 2002-

Still, some national security lawyers said the practice of drawing up lists of people who are subject to lethal force might blur the lines drawn by government’s ban on assassinations. That prohibition was first ordered by President Gerald Ford, and in the view of some lawyers, it applies not only to foreign leaders but to civilians. (American officials have said in the past that Saddam Hussein would be a legitimate target in a war, as he is a military commander as well as Iraq’s president.)

“The inevitable complication of a politically declared but legally undeclared war is the blurring of the distinction between enemy combatants and other nonstate actors,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale University and a former State Department official in President Bill Clinton’s administration. “The question is, what factual showing will demonstrate that they had warlike intentions against us and who sees that evidence before any action is taken?”

He’s a great lawyer, says whatever the guy paying him wants.

Seventh Anniversary Of The Iraq Invasion

And as this video from rethink Afghanistan demonstrates the meek response and internalisation of propaganda is working, the first minute is concerned with US military casualties, then it turns to Iraq casualties and tremulously announces –At least 95,639 confirmed civilian deaths. History is written by the winners and it turns out they even get to rewrite what dissenting voices say. I know that they are after a wide US audience so deference for the imperial military forces and the civilian toll of the ongoing crimes have to be politely alluded to at best, but seven years on this does begin to indicate those who enacted this war will get to own the narrative. All helped by a hysterically embedded media, this by Barbara Plett is not much of a serious piece, it is a glorified film review of fugitive rapist Roman Polanski’s latest, but there is a telling passage-

The drama also has Adam Lang – holed up in a villa in Martha’s Vineyard – decide to stay in the United States for fear of arrest if he returns to Britain. Technically this is a feasible scenario. As a state that has ratified the Rome Treaty, Britain would be obliged to arrest anyone for whom the ICC had issued a warrant, although it had not yet for Mr Lang. The US has not ratified the treaty so it is not similarly obliged. However some legal experts are sceptical that Washington would protect such a high profile fugitive from justice, no matter how close an ally.

If Blair was ensconced in the US the White house would extradite him to face war crimes charges, she reports this expert opinion as if that would ever happen, bless. She also avoids mention of the crime of aggression and that a Chief Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz said-

“The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States, formulated by the United States, in fact, after World War II. It says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can’t use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, ‘Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they’ve found — then we’ll figure out what we’re going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq — which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter.”

And it is neither historically remarkable or psychologically surprising that  supporters and/or beneficiaries of slaughter deny the scale of the damage (beneficiaries are anyone still climbing upwards in their career who know it is best not to focus too strongly on deaths we cause as opposed to the evil ‘other’). There are people who deny the Holocaust, there are people who deny the death toll in Iraq, they are of the same ilk, quit whining and own your historical antecedence, you want good war, you have to hide bodies, real fucking simple. Deny the the best correlated figures of a million plus but know who you are making common cause with. There are 2.76 million Internally Displaced Persons and the figures for refugees who fled Iraq are complicated because of the necessarily scattered nature and multiple different countries reporting methods but the figure was 1,977,000-2,377,000(est.) one year ago, there is yet to be profound changes to their circumstances, in fact they are becoming worse.

Children of veterans with PTSD experience-

• Social & behavioral problems
• Emotional problems and secondary traumatization
• Problems may continue into adolescence

Iraqi adults & children themselves have massive rates of PTSD, depression and birth defects. Halliburton reported $3.1 Billion Gross Operating Profit last year, Blackwater/ XE and other mercenary firms of the privatised neoliberal war paradigm made…undisclosed total amounts often claimed to be classified, but Armor Group (Chairman former Tory Def Sec Sir Malcolm Rifkind now owned by G4S) made $3.7 million profit in 06,

Jeremy Scahill, 2007– Precise data on the extent of U.S. spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to obtain — by both journalists and elected officials–but some in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every tax dollar spent on the war goes to corporate war contractors. At present, the United States spends about $2 billion a week on its Iraq operations.

Politicians, commentariat & high ranking military & intelligence personnel who conspired on the lies to enable the war have seen their careers & personal wealth flourish, those who opposed, told the truth and still do… Well at least Craig Murray got to be played by Doctor Who on Radio 4. Likelihood that because none of the prosecutors of this war have suffered adverse legal or criminal sanction that they will do it again- 100%. History & business as usual.

Happy Anniversary.

Malalai Joya In The NYT

Lacking access to broadcasters and the media within Afghanistan means that her message “for women’s rights, for human rights, against injustice and occupation,” can be spread only by telephone, by clandestine meetings in safe houses and through a poster campaign.

The United States cited the status of women among reasons for its intervention in Afghanistan. Yet Ms. Joya, who taught girls in secret basement schools during the Taliban years, argues that the situation of women has not improved.

Pointing to the 1920s, when Afghan women traveled to Turkey to study without head scarves or male relatives to accompany them, and to the 1950s, when Afghan women had professional careers, she said that the decline of women’s rights in her country was above all an issue of power.

Levels of domestic violence, rape, forced marriage and suicide make the condition of women today “worse than hell,” she says. For that she blames what she calls President Hamid Karzai’s “corrupt, misogynistic government and his circle of warlords” and on his appointments to Afghan courts.

Hamed Elmi, deputy spokesman for Mr. Karzai in Kabul, discounted Ms. Joya’s accusations. “The government is not corrupt, but we have some corrupt people in government — we try to identify and tackle the issue,” Mr. Elmi said by telephone.

He added that Afghanistan had made progress in involving women at all levels of government and that it could not be ascertained that there were warlords in Parliament since the courts had not proven them guilty. “We have an independent judiciary system,” he said. As for whether the government was misogynistic, he said simply: “She is wrong.”

Back in her homeland, Ms. Joya said, the NATO forces were perpetuating the repression of women by propping up warlords she described as interchangeable with the Taliban.

She called for the immediate departure of foreign troops, even if it would lead to more violence in the civil war. “It is better to leave us alone,” she said. “We will know what to do with our destiny.”

And Another White Terrorist

Ex Territorial Army made bombs and possessed the White Resistance Manual,

A firework containing a lightbulb, a plastic shell attached to a nine volt battery, an electrified wooden clothes peg, and a tub of aluminium powder were all found when officers searched his house in April last year. A polystyrene block painted black, which was designed to contain mercury, was also discovered, the court heard.

Three terrorist training manuals were uncovered on his computer – The White Resistance Manual, The Proper Anarchist’s Cookbook and an explorer’s handbook for Muslim extremists. The Army was called to evacuate his house, which he shares with his parents, and that of his neighbours.

Cartwright was arrested then let out on bail with an electronic tag two months later, but he was arrested again in October when police found similar devices at his house. However, it later emerged the items were missed by officers who conducted the original search.

The cops say-

Acting Detective Chief Inspector Chris Wilde, of Lancashire Constabulary’s Counter Terrorism Branch, said: “Although it became clear during the course of the investigation that Cartwright has no affiliations to any extremist or political groups or organisations or any particular cause or agenda, these were serious offences and we welcome today’s guilty pleas.

Joiner Justin Cartwright, 38, from Penwortham, made crude explosive devices at his home in Woodville Road, and downloaded several terrorist training manuals.

The defence argument ‘his purpose was to stop terrorists, and he hoped to start a business training security officers.’ Was ridiculed but no one tried to connect him to anything wider-

David Farrell QC, prosecuting, told the court Cartwright was “a fantasist” who was “plainly misguided and extremely foolish”.

He added: “What he was proposing was out of touch with reality. It had no place in the real world of close protection training. It was his fantasy world feeding his fascination with the military.”

Judge Anthony Russell told Cartwright: “I accept you have no connection with any terrorist organisation or extreme political organisation. The devices could have been used for some form of terrorist act and could have caused some harm and fear. You made them in your own home with no proper safeguarding for your family or the public.”

Now then would a non-white person having a document about Al Qaeda be seen as having no connection? No. But a militarily trained white man having a white supremacy tract and making IED’s to ‘stop terrorists’ no wider context to that is there-

The MoD has launched an investigation after a photograph of a soldier who had an offensive message written on his kit appeared in its official magazine. The serviceman’s left kneepad has “Get some P*ki” scrawled on it. His picture featured in Soldier magazine alongside a story about new rations for troops.

The picture was printed in January’s edition of Soldier, the magazine of the British army published for the UK armed forces by the Ministry of Defence. Officials airbrushed the online version, but thousands have already been put on sale, with 70,000 sent to serving British troops – many in Afghanistan.

PS. Although the BBC delightfully call photoshopping airbrushing still, that shows that the Army knew what was in the picture, now did they panic after a big print run so the mags were out there and pulping was deemed too costly (although the mag has to be laid out and so that picture got looked at and passed by someone), or did they happily have it out there but for the wider non army online audience they hid something they tacitly approved. No wider context.

Tutu Calls Burma Election A ‘Charade’

In a message of encouragement to Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, South African Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu said he looks forward to traveling to Rangoon “to join you in your celebrations when you, my sister, are inaugurated as the true, freely elected leader of Burma.” Tutu addressed his fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate in an interview with The Irrawaddy, in which he also dismissed the planned 2010 general election as a “charade.”

Read the interview here. Also-

In the latest sign that this year’s vote will be neither free nor fair, Burma’s ruling junta has ordered censors to ban reports on new election laws and other controversial election-related issues, according to Rangoon-based journalists. “Soon after the election laws were announced, we interviewed members of various political parties to get their views on this subject,” said the chief editor of one Rangoon-based journal. “But when we submitted our reports to the censor board, we were told we couldn’t publish them.”

According to sources in Rangoon, a special body has been formed to oversee the work of the Press Scrutiny Board during the election period. The censor board must now submit draft publications to a “special security force” consisting of high-ranking officials, including Lt-Gen Myint Swe, who is close to junta head Sen-Gen Than Shwe.

And, funny how you don’t hear about the need to attack Burma innit?-

Burma’s ruling junta has finished construction work on three nuclear reactors in the country’s north and will soon be ready to put them into operation, according to military sources at the elite Defense Services Academy (DSA) in Maymyo, Mandalay Division.

The technology for Burma’s nuclear research project was provided by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (RFAEA), which agreed in May 2007 to help design and build a 10-megawatt light-water reactor using 20 percent enriched uranium-235 fuel.

However, the Russian agency has since distanced itself from the Burmese nuclear program. This has led to fears that the regime has turned to North Korea for assistance in achieving its nuclear ambitions.

Total Terror

It is impressive that the media is so cynical and hysteria so unremarkable that they can spin this as actually still terrifyingly dangerous with a straight face-

Al-Qaida seen eyeing less complex attacks on US
Now it appears that the group, which has prided itself on its ideological purism, seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and perhaps more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be that big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.

Exclusive- Al Qaeda calling you late at night and shouting Boo down the phone! Next Week- Totally None Existent Threat May Never Happen! What is our government doing to protect us from this!

Govt. Can’t Stop Covering Up Torture

It’s interesting this case also involves Moazzam Begg the focus of the recent campaign against Amnesty by Decent types.

The government will attempt today to have a case about torture heard entirely behind closed doors in a move that some lawyers say would extend secrecy to a new area of hearings, overriding ancient principles of English law. This morning a case will come before three appeal judges in London in which seven men are seeking damages against the government for mistreatment during what they say was their “extraordinary rendition” and torture facilitated by the British security services. The men include former Guantánamo Bay detainees Binyam Mohamed and Moazzam Begg. But the government is seeking to have the case held in secret, less than two weeks after the court of appeal ruled that seven paragraphs of secret evidence in the case of Mohamed should be made public.

Lawyers for the men say that if successful, the government’s application would extend closed proceedings into findings of fact in the civil courts for the first time.

The War On Children, Stranger Still

Daily Times Saeed Minhas:- ISLAMABAD: During efforts to trace Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s missing 11-year-old daughter Mariam, international organisations have stumbled upon nearly a dozen juvenile girls who have been languishing in several Afghan jails, sources privy to the search told Daily Times on Tuesday.

Not much is known about these girls, and most are referred to by the numbers allotted to them, just like Dr Aafia was. Sources said that during their visits to some of the jails, they requested the authorities to transfer these girls out of captivity to a safer place because the harsh environment in these prisons might “ruin their lives”.

Daily Times also learnt that DNA tests of three girls aged between 11 and 12 – who did not appear to be Afghans – were conducted in an attempt to find Mariam, but the tests came back negative.

However, sources said a number of international NGOs working on child trafficking and human rights, have been contacted by the Pakistani government to try and locate Mariam in other jails in Afghanistan. Islamabad has also contacted the Afghan government and the US CENTCOM to cooperate with the NGOs in this regard.

Mariam is the second child of Dr Aafia and was only three-and-a-half-years old when she, her five-year-old brother Ahmed, six-month-old baby brother Suleman and their mother were picked up from outside their Karachi home by US Marines and local police in 2003, according to Dr Aafia’s friends and family members.

Following the verdict of a US jury in the Dr Aafia’s case, Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to US, has personally apologised to the family for the unfortunate decision and has promised to recover the missing child, family sources said. They also revealed that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani had also said that he would see to it that Dr Aafia spent her prison time in Pakistan.

But various legal experts and officials of the foreign and interior ministries have now confirmed that in the absence of a prisoner exchange treaty between the US and Pakistan, bringing Dr Aafia back would only be possible on ‘humanitarian grounds’, provided the US agreed to the request.

Diplomatic sources have also told Daily Times that her repatriation would only be possible if Dr Aafia agreed to maintain her silence and issue no statements regarding her arrest and subsequent treatment during captivity in Afghanistan and US. They held that since the issue had become very sensitive for both the US and Pakistan, certain UK lobbyists had stepped in to ask the US to repatriate Dr Aafia to serve out the rest of her prison term in Pakistan. These mediators have also assured that she will maintain her silence while in Pakistan and there would be no cause for embarrassment for any concerned party. Ironically, these sources also revealed that throughout the Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s trial, Pakistan never officially asked for her release or repatriation to Pakistan, and that even now, Pakistan has to officially seek her repatriation before the current US administration starts thinking about it.

So almost a dozen 11-12 year old girls in Afghan jails who are not Afghans, a UK lobbyist (our spooks, our govt?) ensuring she stays silent as to her treatment and the missing five years (and if as some claim she was free those 5 years why do they need her to be silent? Only adds up if she was in a ghost site, if she was the Grey Lady of Bagram or working for us). Yeah nothing to see here, move along…

Evil Terrorist Still At Large

Margaret Thatcher– Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. She would have nothing to do with him or his African National Congress, a “typical terrorist organisation”.

US president Ronald Reagan opposed a 1986 congressional resolution calling on South Africa’s apartheid regime to release Mandela and recognise the African National Congress.

In the ’80s, the “moral clarity” of Thatcher and Reagan helped the apartheid regime convince most white South Africans they were in a “terrorist war”, involving a “total onslaught on civilised values”. Since the terrorists didn’t play by the rules, nor could the state if it was to defend its citizens. The crucial conclusion, one that resonates loudly through the smoke and fury and fear of the contemporary “war on terror”, was that this justified an extraordinary distortion of the rule of law: it no longer applied equally to everyone.

No way in today’s world would Decent Anglosphere figures demonise millions of people as terrorists to pursue their own agendas, justify torture and wars of aggression, couldn’t happen, we’ve made progress.

Whatever the sentence Your Worship sees fit to impose upon me for the crime for which I have been convicted before this court may it rest assured that when my sentence has been completed, I will still be moved as men are always moved, by their conscience. I will still be moved by my dislike of the race discrimination against my people. When I come out from serving my sentence, I will take up again, as best I can, the struggle for the removal of those injustices until they are finally abolished.

-Nelson Mandela

White House Maintain Their Side Of The Cover Up

A spokesman for President Barack Obama acknowledged that the UK remained a key partner in the fight against terrorism. He added: “We shared this information in confidence and with certain expectations.

“As we warned, the court’s judgment will complicate the confidentiality of our intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK, and it will have to factor into our decision-making going forward.”

In a defeat for the British government, the Court of Appeal on Wednesday ruled that a seven paragraph account of the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, in Pakistan in 2002 should be published.

David Miliband, foreign secretary, opposed publication of the information, because he said it would make it harder for the US intelligence agencies to work with their British counterparts. Mr Miliband told MPs that he had spoken to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the judgment. “It has been followed carefully at the highest levels in the US system with a great deal of concern,” he said. “We will work carefully with the US in the weeks ahead to discuss the judgment and its implications.”

TomDispatch- Nick Turse: America’s Shadowy Base World

Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces.  Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns.  Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year.

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