8 December 2005
Steve Clemons reports today at
The Washington Note on a discussion he had with the journalist Yosri Fouda. Mr. Fouda has conducted extensive interviews with Khaled El-Masri, the victim of Bush administration kidnapping and rendition. As Steve Clemons recounts:
El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was kidnapped while vacationing by American intelligence agents. He was transported and "questioned" -- allegedly roughly -- by American authorities in Afghanistan.
Along the way, these investigators finally figured out he was innocent and reported back to CIA Director George Tenet. Tenet had him held ANYWAY for another two months. And then. . .you might ask, could it get worse? Well, yes.
We dumped him blind-folded in the deep forest, mountainous triangle area between Albania, Serbia and Macedonia. He had to walk out with no money, no identification.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001136.htmlPlease do what you can to ensure that the media and the US Congress ask Ms Rice to explain how it is that once El-Masri was known to be innocent he was left to perish in a dangerous wilderness. Since Ms Rice has claimed that the United States will do all it can to make amends for its misdeeds, she should be forced to address how the United States is going to enable El-Masri to recover from the cruel and unusual treatment Bush’s CIA administered to him.
Our America is being permanently tarnished by Bush and the neoconsters willful disregard for basic human rights and international law -- the case of Khaled El-Masri is but one more reason why.
If you have any doubt about the lasting consequences of the now extensive recognition of the damage Bush and the neoconsters have done you need look no further than
The Economist – Global Agenda for 7 December 2005:
America seeks, but fails, to quell the uproar in Europe over CIA shenanigansMs Rice’s aim was to reassure America’s European allies, still fuming over reports that their own airspace and territory had been used by the CIA for its covert operations, including secret prisons. Alas, such is the suspicion about America and its treatment of terrorist suspects following Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib that her hosts immediately scoured her meticulously crafted declaration for loopholes.
Worse, they found plenty of them. Ms Rice said, for example, that America does not use other countries’ airspace or airports to transport detainees to a third country where they “will be tortured”.
But the Convention Against Torture makes it unlawful to transport anyone to a country where there are “substantial grounds” for believing they might be tortured. Ms Rice refused to confirm or deny the existence of secret CIA prisons for interrogating terrorist suspects in Europe. It might compromise the success of intelligence, law enforcement or military matters, she explained. But, given her admission that detainees have been transported to third countries for interrogation, the presumption must be that undisclosed detention centres do exist—or have done in the past—where such interrogations take place. Why else place them outside America and keep them secret?
Much more at the link:
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5277867 Any attempt to deny the practice of rendition for the purpose of transporting a victim of Bush’s regime of terror to a place that permits torture will now have to overcome the existence of a Department of Defense ‘torture by proxy’ policy memorandum uncovered in the case of Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmad described today in the
Los Angeles Times: http://tinyurl.com/7d7ltI agree with John R Judis’ latest comments about you, Gov Dean, in his
New Republic OnLine article entitled
”IN DEFENSE OF DEAN.” To paraphrase, America ignores what you have to say at its own peril. I hope you have much more to say about Bush and the neoconsters’ illegal war of aggression on Iraq and their cruel crimes against humanity for which we now have an abundance of examples.
Our America is being permanently tarnished by Bush and the neoconsters willful disregard for basic human rights and international law, and it is time for every citizen to make a decision to stop them and bring them to justice.
"We the People ..." have reached the
"America, Or Not?" moment in the history of the Republic.