Greece urged to investigate MI6 torture link

[emad]

Helena Smith in Athens and Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday December 28, 2005
The Guardian


The Greek government faced mounting pressure last night to investigate claims that a senior MI6 officer masterminded the arrest and torture of Pakistani immigrants in Athens by local intelligence agents after the July 7 London bombings.

After a prominent weekly newspaper named the operatives allegedly involved at the weekend, the conservative government of prime minister Costas Karamanlis was confronting growing accusations of a cover-up. Yesterday, in a display of rare unanimity, Greece's political opposition called for the issue to be urgently debated in parliament.

"It seems that secret services were acting in a way that was not at all legal," Michalis Papayannakis, a former MEP and leading member of the Left Coalition, told the Guardian. "And, from what we know this is not the first time that this has happened. There should be an investigation."

The controversy deepened after the Greek investigative weekly, Proto Thema, revealed the identity of the M16 station chief in Athens who it said had plotted the operation on Greek soil.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1674303,00.html

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

1. Apparently his name is Nicholas Langman

who also appeared on the first internet list of alleged Mi6 peeps.

(And for the :tinfoilhat:ers out there, yes he's also the guy that Larouche has claimed had a role in Diana's death.)

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

2. double post

[dutchdemocrat]

3. Emad...

Always important to suss what's NOT being reported, as well as what is.

On the list of what's not currently being reported in the UK...

- the SIS station chief involved in the torture of Pakistani prisoners in Greece is NICHOLAS LANGMAN - as reported in the Greek magazine 'Proto Thema'.


-Langman is one of the SIS officers who were in Paris shortly before the Princess Diana car crash. In May 1999 he was named on a short list that was then swamped - complete with a sensationalist fanfare involving Robin Cook - by the release of a longer list. Not for nothing has Richard Tomlinson suggested that the longer list may have been put out by SIS itself. Langman had also, of course, been named on the affidavit that Tomlinson supplied to the French inquiry - a document that was potentially much more damaging to SIS than either of the 1999 lists.


-Moves were made to get Langman, along with Spearman and Dearlove, to testify to the French car-crash inquiry, but (surprise surprise) they managed to avoid doing so.


-A UK parliamentary inquiry into the current Greek allegations will be, if anything, even more of a stitch-up. I do sometimes wonder whether anyone actually fails to see through SIS's Ashdown-substitute called Menzies Campbell.


- Another thing that has hardly been reported at all in all of the recent media babble about torture (rendition, Greece, etc., not to mention Uzbekistan) has been the existence of a US torture camp on UK territory in DIEGO GARCIA. UK officials have been involved in the torture there too.