Were they lying then
Are they lying now
Are they not chronic and habitual liars?
As the cover-ups and lies and abductions and transcontinental trafficking to torture continued the British government came out this week saying they are sorry, disappointed and embarrassed. It stirs the Yank’s response to the Brit in The Third Man: "Is that all you say when someone dies! ‘Ah, that’s awkward’?"
What Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband did not reveal is what renditions are still going on and where; and why human rights abuse, the wholesale abduction of people on the manufactured charge of "terrorist" in a manufactured "global war on terror," is the accepted replacement for legal policing and prosecution, and open-to-the-public adjudication in international and domestic courts of law.
The apology by Britain in today’s press falls far short of active responsibility for six years of lawlessness and human rights abuse. Activist means a government is doing something right to counter the breach. Not simply hiding behind headline-grabbing half truths and denials. The British government said new information had come to light when United States officials recently reviewed their records. And this newly discovered information affirmed that U.S. planes "carrying out secret renditions of terrorism suspects [had] made two [previously denied] refueling stops on the British-ruled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia in 2002."
U.S. planes may or may not have made only "two" fueling stops. And they may or may not have made them only on an island territory of Britain—as opposed to London’s main airport. But what is patently false (aside from failure to acknowledge ongoing abductions) is that this information is new.
In the spring and summer of 2006 Deutsche Welle and other news outlets published critical findings on renditions by European Union lawmakers.
Claudio Fava led a European Parliament inquiry into allegations of abductions and dark sites and found that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had made more than "1,000 secret flights" transporting prisoners across European Union territory "in what have become known as extraordinary renditions."
After September 11, 2001, the report said, these "renditions" were "not rare, but a practice that was very well known and wide-spread geographically." And, Fava concludes, governments showed "incriminating inertia."
In a separate report for the Council of Europe, Swiss lawmaker Dick Marty found that "fourteen European governments had collaborated with the United States in the transport of terror suspects in ‘a spider’s web’ crisscrossing Europe to third countries, some of which practice torture."
Among the cooperating countries the report found that Spain, Turkey, Germany and Cyprus had provided "staging posts" for rendition operations while Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Britain had been stop-off points for CIA flights. "…Sweden, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Britain, Italy, Macedonia, Germany and Turkey were responsible, at varying degrees ... for violations of the rights of specific persons." And Britain "allegedly passed on information to the CIA about its citizens or residents who then faced rendition and possibly torture."
It is therefore implausible to suggest that Britain or any country was ignorant of (and in many cases not complicit in) the U.S. government’s "extraordinary rendition" operations.
A couple of Britons this week tried to be forthright and responsible. Edward Davey of the Liberal Democratic Party called "extraordinary rendition … ‘state-sponsored abduction’" and said his government must ensure that Britain had not been "used to ‘facilitate’ it."
Labor Member of Parliament and foreign affairs committee chairman Mike Gapes told his colleagues that the U.S. administration "has clearly misled or lied to our government, [which] has resulted in our government misleading... members of [the House of Commons]."
We are in a quandary. The absence of a free and unfettered Fourth Estate and honorable government officials means the lies and lawlessness and complicity in human rights abuse continue unabated. As the deputy chairman of Fava’s EU group said following a fact-finding meeting with U.S. State Department officials two years ago, we agree we need to fight terrorism but we do not agree "on the means to fight" it. Ending his U.S. visit, Germany’s Cem Özdemir reflected dejectedly: "It’s getting harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys."
Sources:
"UK apology over rendition flights" February 21, 2008: http://news.bbc.co.uk;"EU Lawmakers Complain of US Stonewalling on CIA Flights" May 12, 2006;"European Governments Aided in CIA Abductions, Says Report" June 7, 2006; "Report: European Secret Services Helped CIA Terror Transfers" June 27, 2006 http://www.dw-world.de/."EU Nations ‘knew of CIA prisons’" November 28, 2006: http://english.aljazeera.net
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February 28, 2008 Http://journals.aol.com/cwriter85/todaysmissingnews/ Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett, Writer, Independent journalist, Educator. Author of Missing News & Views in Paranoid Times (www.xlibris.com/bookstore). Cwriter85@frontiernet.net. ALERT: "The 'Great Writ' of habeas corpus is a fundamental right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. Two bills have been introduced in Congress that would restore habeas corpus rights - the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007 (H.R. 1415, S. 576) and the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act (H.R. 1416, S. 185). Urge members of Congress to cosponsor and support this vital legislation and spread the word in your community"- American Civil Liberties.
