QUOTE(heart @ Jan 2 2005, 10:05 PM)
If you do not believe that Saddam was exactly as described, then I beg you to go talk to his population. The internet has finally opened in Iraq, and you can believe it, it's true. IF the people there even liked Saddam, then the Ba'athists that he supposedly treated well, and who are now kidnapping and beheading people along with Zarkawi (I DO believe the marines that found those torture chambers, a women's torso with head and arms chopped off, and Bigley's cage in Falluja) don't you think that when they have a high profile kidnappee they would be trying to get him set free? Even trying to get his leadership set free? But they aren't, are they? Implicit in that is acknowledgement that his own tribe doesn't even like him.
You speak about Iraqis' torture chambers in Fallujah... ok, you're right about this... but what about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and so on? I don't think this Administration has even a right to speak about human rights violation...
Just for example, this is a yesterday article on Washington Post:
QUOTE(Washington Post @ January 2 2005)
Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror SuspectsBy Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page A01Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.
The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions,
including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations.
"We've been operating in the moment because that's what has been required," said a senior administration official involved in the discussions, who said the current detention system has strained relations between the United States and other countries. "Now we can take a breath. We have the ability and need to look at long-term solutions."
One proposal under review is the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center into new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons would be operated by those countries, but the State Department, where this idea originated, would ask them to abide by recognized human rights standards and would monitor compliance, the senior administration official said.
As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense officials.
The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government believes have no more intelligence to share, the officials said. It would be modeled on a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among inmates.
"Since global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to be looking at solutions for long-term problems," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "This has been evolutionary, but we are at a point in time where we have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the long term?' "
The administration considers its toughest detention problem to involve the prisoners held by the CIA. The CIA has been scurrying since Sept. 11, 2001, to find secure locations abroad where it could detain and interrogate captives without risk of discovery, and without having to give them access to legal proceedings.
Little is known about the CIA's captives, the conditions under which they are kept -- or the procedures used to decide how long they are held or when they may be freed. That has prompted criticism from human rights groups, and from some in Congress and the administration, who say the lack of scrutiny or oversight creates an unacceptable risk of abuse.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House intelligence committee who has received classified briefings on the CIA's detainees and interrogation methods, said that given the long-term nature of the detention situation, "I think there should be a public debate about whether the entire system should be secret.
"The details about the system may need to remain secret," Harman said. At the least, she said, detainees should be registered so that their treatment can be tracked and monitored within the government. "This is complicated. We don't want to set up a bureaucracy that ends up making it impossible to protect sources and informants who operate within the groups we want to penetrate."
The CIA is believed to be holding fewer than three dozen al Qaeda leaders in prison. The agency holds most, if not all, of the top captured al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Zubaida and the lead Southeast Asia terrorist, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali.
CIA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner of the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean. The Washington Post reported last month that the CIA has also maintained a facility within the Pentagon's Guantanamo Bay complex, though it is unclear whether it is still in use.
In contrast to the CIA, the military produced and declassified hundreds of pages of documents about its detention and interrogation procedures after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. And the military detainees are guaranteed access to the International Committee of the Red Cross and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court.
But no public hearings in Congress have been held on CIA detention practices, and congressional officials say CIA briefings on the subject have been too superficial and were limited to the chairman and vice chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
The CIA had floated a proposal to build an isolated prison with the intent of keeping it secret, one intelligence official said. That was dismissed immediately as impractical.
One approach used by the CIA has been to transfer captives it picks up abroad to third countries willing to hold them indefinitely and without public proceedings. The transfers, called "renditions," depend on arrangements between the United States and other countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan, that agree to have local security services hold certain terror suspects in their facilities for interrogation by CIA and foreign liaison officers.
The practice has been criticized by civil liberties groups and others, who point out that some of the countries have human rights records that are criticized by the State Department in annual reports.
Renditions originated in the 1990s as a way of picking up criminals abroad, such as drug kingpins, and delivering them to courts in the United States or other countries. Since 2001, the practice has been used to make certain detainees do not go to court or go back on the streets, officials said.
"The whole idea has become a corruption of renditions," said one CIA officer who has been involved in the practice. "It's not rendering to justice, it's kidnapping."
But top intelligence officials and other experts, including former CIA director George J. Tenet in his testimony before Congress, say renditions are an effective method of disrupting terrorist cells and persuading detainees to reveal information.
"Renditions are the most effective way to hold people," said Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." "The threat of sending someone to one of these countries is very important.
In Europe, the custodial interrogations have yielded almost nothing" because they do not use the threat of sending detainees to a country where they are likely to be tortured.© 2005 The Washington Post Company Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer It's a complete hypocrisy: we speak about Saddam's crimes, when we violate at the same time every minimal human rights standard in our prison
QUOTE
The reason we allied with Saddam during the 80's? That even is questionable, compared with BILLIONS given to him by Russia and France, we gave him millions....in effect, we gave him 21 helicopters and some battlefield intelligence about Iranian formations. Why? Because Iran under Khomeini was (if this is possible) 69 million people compared to 39 million people and about 20% crazier than Saddam. That's all, and there is no other reason we supported him.
Perhaps the most memorable of these roles came during the Reagan administration, when Rumsfeld was named special presidential envoy to the Middle East. According to the Washington Post and others, Rumsfeld was a major proponent of the Reagan administration's support of Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein.
As a conciliatory gesture, the U.S. removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982, paving the way for Rumsfeld to visit Baghdad in 1983, about the midpoint of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war.
At the time, intelligence reports indicated the Iraqis were using illegal chemical weapons against Iran "almost daily." During several trips to Iraq, Rumsfeld told government officials that the U.S. would consider an Iraqi loss to Iran a major strategic defeat. In a personal meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983, Rumsfeld told the Butcher of Baghdad that the U.S. wanted to restore full diplomatic relations with Iraq.
In 2002, Rumsfeld tried to put a gloss on this meeting by claiming that he warned Hussein against using banned weapons, but that claim was unsupported by the State Department's notes on the meeting.
As a result of the openings created by Rumsfeld's diplomatic triumphs, U.S. companies were recruited and encouraged, both covertly and overtly, to ship poisonous chemicals and biological agents to Iraq, by the administrations of both Reagan and George Bush Sr.. Care packages to Saddam included sample strains of anthrax and bubonic plague, and components which would be used to develop nerve poisons like sarin gas and ricin.
QUOTE
We support Musharaf ONLY because the alternatives are 50 times crazier.
Are you sure ?
From Amnesty International 2004 Annual Report:
QUOTE(Amnesty International)
EgyptCovering events from January - December 2003Prisoners of conscience continued to be sentenced to prison terms. Thousands of suspected supporters of banned Islamist groups, including possible prisoners of conscience, remained in detention without charge or trial; some had been held for years. Others were serving sentences imposed after grossly unfair trials before exceptional courts. Torture and ill-treatment of detainees continued to be systematic. Death sentences continued to be passed and carried out.
BackgroundIn February, the state of emergency was extended for a further three years despite a campaign led by human rights organizations, political parties and civil society activists calling for it to be ended.
In April, Egypt ratified the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreement with the European Union (EU). The accord focuses on trade, economic integration, security and political relations, but also contains a legally binding clause obliging the contracting parties to promote and protect human rights.
In June, two new laws were passed. The first was to establish a national council for human rights. At the end of the year, the 27 members of the council had not been appointed by the Shura Council, Egypt’s Upper House, but they were expected to include representatives from human rights organizations. The second law restricted the scope of cases to be examined by state security courts and abolished the penalty of hard labour.
Between 1,000 and 2,000 alleged members of armed Islamist groups were reportedly released during the year. The Interior Minister presented the releases in the context of the public renunciation of past and present acts of violence, particularly by leading members of al-Gama’a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group).
Dozens of alleged members of the banned Muslim Brothers organization were detained in so-called preventive detention. By the end of the year, the majority had been released without being tried.
In the first half of the year, hundreds of people, including lawyers, journalists, members of parliament, academics and students, associated with the movement protesting against the war on Iraq were detained, the majority for participating in unauthorized demonstrations. Some were held for several weeks in administrative detention under emergency legislation. Many alleged that they were tortured or ill-treated in detention.
Freedom of expression and association restrictedLegal restrictions and government controls continued to limit the activities of political parties, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), professional associations, trade unions and the news media. The authorities maintained bans on several political parties imposed in previous years and party newspapers remained suspended.
People continued to be detained, tried and imprisoned in violation of their rights to freedom of expression and association. Prisoners of conscience included civil society activists and members of religious groups.
* A verdict scheduled to be announced at the end of the year in the trial before the (Emergency) Supreme State Security Court of 23 Egyptians and three United Kingdom nationals was postponed until 2004. The 26, all prisoners of conscience, were charged in connection with their alleged affiliation with Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party), which is not registered under Egyptian law. Several of the defendants were reportedly tortured or ill-treated following their detention in April and May 2002.
* In December, the trial of Ashraf Ibrahim and four other men opened before the (Emergency) Supreme State Security Court. At the opening of the trial, the four other men remained at liberty. Three of the men, including Ashraf Ibrahim, were charged with leadership of an illegal organization and faced up to 15 years’ imprisonment. Ashraf Ibrahim faced two additional charges. One of these – harming Egypt’s reputation by spreading abroad false information regarding the internal affairs of the country – related to information on alleged human rights violations given to international human rights organizations. The trial was continuing at the end of the year.
Human rights defendersNGOs continued to operate under the shadow of a restrictive law, passed in June 2002, which regulates their activities. From June, the Ministry for Social Affairs began announcing its decisions on applications put forward by existing and newly established NGOs for registration under the new law. Certain organizations were granted registration while others were reportedly denied it without adequate explanation. In some cases, those denied registration challenged the decision before the courts.
* In March, the Court of Cassation acquitted human rights defenders Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Nadia ‘Abd al-Nur of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies of all charges. They had been sentenced to seven and two years’ imprisonment respectively after previous trials. The main charges against them related to EUfunded projects aimed at promoting participation in elections.
Freedom of religion violatedPeople continued to be at risk of detention, trial and imprisonment in violation of their right to freedom of religion.
* In February, the (Emergency) State Security Court for Misdemeanours sentenced six people to six months’ imprisonment for “contempt of religion” in connection with holding private religious gatherings and advocating modifications to basic Islamic rules. The five men and one woman had been tried by the same court in March 2002 and were acquitted. Two other men, Amin Youssef and Ali Mamdouh, who were originally tried with the six and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment each, were not included in the retrial ordered by President Mubarak.
Trials in connection with alleged sexual orientationDozens of men suffered discrimination, persecution and imprisonment solely in connection with their actual or perceived sexual orientation. Many of those arrested alleged that they were tortured or ill-treated in detention. Although same-sex relations are not explicitly prohibited under Egyptian law, men continued to be sentenced on the charge of “habitual debauchery”, which is applied to consensual sexual relations between adult men.
* In June and July, 14 men had their sentences reduced on appeal from three to one year’s imprisonment. This was the final stage of the retrial, ordered for 50 men by President Mubarak in July 2002, in the case of 52 men tried in 2001 in connection with their alleged sexual orientation.
Several men were detained and tried after they agreed to meet men contacted through the Internet who turned out to be security officers or police informants.
* In February, Wissam Tawfiq Abyad was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment after meeting a man, later believed to be a security officer or police informant, he had contacted through an Internet website for gay men. Private electronic conversations held on the Internet were used as evidence against him.
Unfair trialsDozens of people faced trial before exceptional courts, such as state security courts, established under emergency legislation. They were charged with a variety of offences, including membership of illegal organizations, contempt for religion, espionage and corruption. The procedures of these courts fell far short of international standards for fair trial.
* In February, Nabil Ahmed Soliman was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by the (Emergency) Supreme State Security Court in Cairo, which denies defendants the right to a full review before a higher tribunal, on charges of membership of an illegal organization in connection with his alleged affiliation with the armed Islamist group al-Gihad (Holy War). His trial took place after he was deported from the USA to Egypt on 12 June 2002 following a request by the Egyptian authorities on the basis of his alleged affiliation with al-Gihad.
Torture and ill-treatmentTorture continued to be used systematically in detention centres throughout the country. Several people died in custody in circumstances suggesting that torture or ill-treatment may have caused or contributed to their deaths.
Torture victims came from all walks of life and included political activists and people arrested during criminal investigations. The most common torture methods reported were electric shocks, beatings, suspension by the wrists or ankles, and various forms of psychological torture, including death threats and threats of rape or sexual abuse of the detainee or a female relative.
* Ramiz Gihad was among six men detained in connection with a demonstration against the war on Iraq held on 12 April outside the Egyptian Journalists’ Union in Cairo. They were reportedly held incommunicado for between two and 10 days at the State Security Investigations headquarters in Lazoghly Square, Cairo. Ramiz Gihad alleged that he was beaten, slapped, kicked, suspended and subjected to electric shocks.
Inadequate investigationsIn the vast majority of cases of alleged torture, no one was brought to justice because the authorities failed to conduct prompt, impartial and thorough investigations. However, some trials of alleged torturers did take place, but only in criminal, not political cases, and generally only after the most serious incidents, usually where the victims had died.
* In June, four police officers were sentenced on appeal to a suspended sentence of one year’s imprisonment in connection with the case of Farid Shawqy ‘Abd al-‘Al, who died in al-Muntaza police station in 1999. An autopsy had found injuries on the body consistent with punching and beating with a stick, including on the soles of the feet (falaqa).
* In November, the trial of seven police officers opened before Alexandria Criminal Court in connection with the arrest, detention and torture of school bus driver Muhammad Badr al-Din Gum’a Isma’il in Alexandria in 1996.
Extraditions and abusesThe authorities reportedly requested the extradition of Egyptian nationals from several countries, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran and Uruguay. As a result, some people were threatened with extradition or were forcibly returned to Egypt, where they were at risk of human rights violations, including torture or ill-treatment.
* On 7 July, the Uruguayan authorities forcibly returned Al-Sayid Hassan Mukhlis to Egypt following an extradition request by the Egyptian authorities. He was reportedly held incommunicado at the headquarters of the State Security Investigations in Cairo where torture has been frequently reported. Al-Sayid Hassan Mukhlis’ extradition was sought for his alleged involvement in human rights abuses committed by al-Gama’a al-Islamiya.
Source:
http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/egy-summary-eng The people of Egypt will remember it forever... if we support such evil regimes, we should expect a reaction sooner or later... every action has a reaction... remember what's happened... we've supported evil regimes during the Cold War, and we've created even worse regimes... Talibans was created with CIA moneys, throught Pakistani ISI, and all of us have seen September 11th the result of this enormous error... but we're continuing on the same road, we have not learned anything from this...
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Everyone in Iraq that I talk to is furious he has better food than they do, furious he has electricity and reading material, furious that he has medical check ups and treatment for his piles and things like that. Have no concern for Saddam Hussein....it's not THIS administration that invented HIM, he has been a known evil for 30 years.
Known evil for 30 years? Say it to Rumsfeld :D
