The above headline to an op-ed piece in The Independent has this by-line:
"The US and UK pay others to do what Saddam used to do to his jailed adversaries".
In a heard-hitting piece, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown takes the Brits, and especially their Foreign Minister, to task for not standing up to the US in being an accomplice in the torture of prisoners and the renditioning process:
"This is Britain’s position on torture: we ratified the UN Convention against it in 1988 and we then passed an Act of Parliament giving authority to the investigation and prosecution of torturers no matter where they cowered. But impressive as all this sounds, how precisely has it helped Binyam Mohamed?
Today, God willing, he will arrive back from Guantanamo Bay, the sunny Caribbean resort funded hitherto by the generous USA for the Mad Men of Islam who, we have been told for years, are the biggest danger to world peace. Mohamed’s doctors have found serious bruising, organ damage, acute injuries and emotional and psychological collapse.
His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith said: “What Binyam has been through should have been left behind in the Middle Ages.” His client is also suffering from malnutrition and stomach problems – which must be the result of a long hunger-strike, a silent protest which might have killed and released him. And our government is suffering from the discomfort of having to justify the immorality of the actions and that keep the global torture industry robust. Mohamed will not be received at the airport by a contrite Foreign Secretary, who has long obfuscated and denied any responsibility for all the bad stuff – unseen and unheard – that goes on around the world, ostensibly to combat Islamicist terrorism.
Recently Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said the UK Government had been forced by the US to suppress information on this case, a claim breezily rejected by the Foreign Secretary, an accomplished operator.
Yet the case against the government grows. I find that deeply depressing. For the two talented Milibands are, in other ways, good men whose father Ralph, a Polish-Jewish exile, was a left-wing academic with a consuming sense of justice. An opponent of the US Vietnam war, he condemned the “catalogue of horrors” perpetrated by the US “in the name of an enormous lie”.
"The US and UK pay others to do what Saddam used to do to his jailed adversaries".
In a heard-hitting piece, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown takes the Brits, and especially their Foreign Minister, to task for not standing up to the US in being an accomplice in the torture of prisoners and the renditioning process:
"This is Britain’s position on torture: we ratified the UN Convention against it in 1988 and we then passed an Act of Parliament giving authority to the investigation and prosecution of torturers no matter where they cowered. But impressive as all this sounds, how precisely has it helped Binyam Mohamed?
Today, God willing, he will arrive back from Guantanamo Bay, the sunny Caribbean resort funded hitherto by the generous USA for the Mad Men of Islam who, we have been told for years, are the biggest danger to world peace. Mohamed’s doctors have found serious bruising, organ damage, acute injuries and emotional and psychological collapse.
His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith said: “What Binyam has been through should have been left behind in the Middle Ages.” His client is also suffering from malnutrition and stomach problems – which must be the result of a long hunger-strike, a silent protest which might have killed and released him. And our government is suffering from the discomfort of having to justify the immorality of the actions and that keep the global torture industry robust. Mohamed will not be received at the airport by a contrite Foreign Secretary, who has long obfuscated and denied any responsibility for all the bad stuff – unseen and unheard – that goes on around the world, ostensibly to combat Islamicist terrorism.
Recently Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said the UK Government had been forced by the US to suppress information on this case, a claim breezily rejected by the Foreign Secretary, an accomplished operator.
Yet the case against the government grows. I find that deeply depressing. For the two talented Milibands are, in other ways, good men whose father Ralph, a Polish-Jewish exile, was a left-wing academic with a consuming sense of justice. An opponent of the US Vietnam war, he condemned the “catalogue of horrors” perpetrated by the US “in the name of an enormous lie”.
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