Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the "War on Terror"

Human rights groups and several public inquiries in Europe have found the U.S. government, with the complicity of numerous governments worldwide, to be engaged in the illegal practice of extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture.

The U.S. government-sponsored program of renditions is an unlawful practice in which numerous persons have been illegally detained and secretly flown to third countries, where they have suffered additional human rights abuses including torture and enforced disappearance. No one knows the exact number of persons affected, due to the secrecy under which the operations are carried out.




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EU agrees to back Palestinian unity government

European Union foreign ministers agreed on Friday to back a Palestinian national unity government being formed by President Mahmoud Abbas with the Hamas Islamist movement, despite U.S. misgivings.


"We agreed that we have to support the new Palestinian government. It's a very important turning point for the situation," Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema told Reuters."(EU foreign policy chief) Javier Solana told us in the platform there will be recognition by the new government of the treaty signed by the Palestinian Authority in the past -- it means recognize Israel as a partner," D'Alema said.

The EU and the United States have boycotted the Hamas-led government formed in March because it refused to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept past peace accords.Washington said on Thursday it saw no grounds so far to lift the embargo on contacts and aid.But many European governments are anxious to end the stand-off, which has contributed to aggravated poverty and lawlessness in the Palestinian territories.

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Ludicrous Diversion - 7/7 London Bombings Documentary

On the 7th of July 2005 London was hit by a series of explosions. You probably think you know what happened that day. But you don’t.

The police have, from the onset of their investigation, chosen to withold from the public almost every bit of evidence they claim to have and have provably lied about several aspects of the London Bombings. The mainstream news has wilfully spread false, unsubstantiated and unverifiable information, while choosing to completely ignore the numerous inconsistencies and discrepancies in the official story.

The government has finally, after a year, presented us with their official ‘narrative’ concerning the event. Within hours it was shown to contain numerous errors, a fact since admitted by the Home Secretary John Reid.

The government has finally, after a year, presented us with their official ‘narrative’ concerning the event. Within hours it was shown to contain numerous errors, a fact since admitted by the Home Secretary John Reid. They have continuously rejected calls for a full, independent public inquiry. Tony Blair himself described such an inquiry as a ‘ludicrous diversion’. What don’t they want us to find out?



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Senators defy Bush on tribunals

A US Senate committee has defied President George W Bush by approving legislation to set up trials for foreign terrorism suspects. The panel voted 15-9 to back the bill, which Mr Bush has vowed to block.






Ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell has backed Republicans opposing legislation sponsored by Mr Bush that would allow military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.Correspondents say the split within the party risks damaging its prospects in November's mid-term elections.

Four Republican senators joined opposition Democrats on the Armed Services Committee to approve their measure instead of the tougher bill put forward by the president.

The senators argued that Mr Bush's proposals would effectively redefine the Geneva Conventions to allow harsh treatment of detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba. The rebels include three prominent senators, John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham, who say Mr Bush's bill would do further damage to America's moral authority.

The three were joined by Mr Powell, who said in a letter that redefining the Geneva Conventions would put American troops at risk.

"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," Mr Powell said.

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' Beginning to doubt".... Politely put Mr Powell , The world began to doubt the moral basis of the fight against terrorism when the US invaded Iraq. Approving this legislation is a tiny step in the correct direction. Correcting the moral basis would certainly never happen under this administration. They have already shown the morality of their view and it is not morality at all under everybody Else's understanding. Damage limitation is obviously a good thing and I support this legislation. But let us not kid ourselves in to thinking that the problem is so narrow. Respect will only be returned when genuine morality is returned to the US government. For every step that the US senate makes , be assured that the likes of John Bolton will continue to undo that credit each and every time they opens their mouth.

US report on Iran branded dishonest by IAEA

The UN nuclear watchdog has protested to the US government over a report on Iran's nuclear programme it called "outrageous" and "dishonest" . In a letter, the IAEA said a congressional report suggested Iran's programme was more advanced than had actually been determined.


The agency also took "strong exception" to claims made over the removal of a senior safeguards inspector. The IAEA said the letter was sent to "set the record straight on the facts".

"This is a matter of the integrity of the IAEA and its inspectors," spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in a statement.

The letter, signed by a senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency, says the 23 August report by the US House intelligence committee contains "erroneous, misleading... information". It says the report was wrong to say that Iran had enriched uranium to weapons-grade level when the IAEA had only found small quantities of enrichment at far lower levels.

The letter also said the report was wrong to suggest that the IAEA had removed Chris Charlier for not adhering to an alleged IAEA policy barring its "officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran.

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Judge: Saddam was 'not a dictator'

The chief judge in Saddam Hussein's trial has said the former Iraqi leader was not a dictator, but had only been made to seem like one by his aides.The controversial comments come a day after Judge Abdullah al-Amiri was accused of bias towards the defence.



During the court session, a Kurdish man recalled a 1989 audience with Saddam Hussein, which he had hoped would secure freedom for his jailed family.

The exchange between the judge and Saddam Hussein came after the testimony of Abdullah Mohammed Hussain. Saddam Hussein asked the 57-year-old witness: "Why did you try to meet me when you knew I was a dictator?"

"You were not a dictator. People around you made you [look like] a dictator," the judge said.

"Thank you," Saddam Hussein replied.

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I have a feeling that comment will not go down well with the West. Saddam was certainly a dictator as far as I am concerned. A dictator who was empowered and propped up by the West. But still a dictator.

Expect to see yet another Judge being removed/resigning from the trial shortly.

Syria Says US Behind Attack On Own Embassy

Senior Syrian government official have accused the US of being behind Tuesday's assault on its own embassy in downtown Damascus.






A Baath party official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told WorldNetDaily, "We in the government are 100 percent sure America was behind this attack, which is not the same as other attacks by Islamic groups."

He explained, "Only the Americans can succeed in carrying out an attack just 200 meters from President [Bashar] Assad's residence in the most heavily guarded section of Syria."

The official charged that Washington had orchestrated the attack to "prove Syria is filled with terrorists and to put us in a weak position" in order to extract political concessions. Following the attack, Bush administration officials said they hoped the incident had convinced Damascus of the dangers of Islamic terror and the need to cooperate with the West against the phenomenon.

The US and several of its European allies have repeatedly demanded over the years that Damascus close down the local offices and training camps of several organizations hostile to Israel and the West.

The identities of those who attacked the US embassy Tuesday have not been revealed. Three of the gunmen were killed by Syrian guards during the assault. A fourth was reportedly captured.

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Safe, but not "safe"

Chalmers Johnson once made a remark about the maddeningly contradictory statements of the Bush Administration. This video perhaps explains them.

U.S. lauds Syrian forces in embassy attack

U.S. officials praised Syrian security forces for thwarting Tuesday's attack on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus despite the usually tense relationship with the Middle Eastern country.

The Syrians killed three attackers and apprehended a suspect outside the embassy after a car exploded near the walls of the American compound, the Syrian Information Ministry said.


"I do think the Syrians reacted to the attack in a way that helped to secure our people, and we very much appreciate that," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said while visiting Canada.

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Nonaligned want terrorism redefined

Iran, Syria, North Korea and more than 100 other nations are pushing to broaden the world's definition of "terrorism" to include the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.




Converging on Fidel Castro's communist Cuba for a summit this week, members of the Nonaligned Movement complain of a double standard: powerful nations like the United States and Israel decide for the world who the terrorists are, but face no punishment for their own acts of aggression.

A draft of the group's joint declaration condemns "terrorism in all its forms," especially violence that targets civilians.

Terrorism should not be associated with any religion or nationality, says the draft. It singles out a favored phrase of President Bush in declaring that member countries "totally reject the use of the term 'axis of evil' by a certain state to target other states under the pretext of combating terrorism."

A Cuban official said sarcastically on Tuesday that the U.S. could one day accuse the entire Nonaligned Movement of supporting terrorism. "Reading some news reports ... I'm left to believe that the axis of evil is growing," said Abelardo Moreno, Cuba's vice foreign minister. "Soon, the (axis of evil) will be made up of 118 countries."

Cuba says the U.S. is particularly hypocritical in the case of a former CIA operative and Castro foe wanted in Venezuela in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner from Caracas that killed 73 people.

On Monday, as the U.S. sought global support for its response to the Sept. 11 attacks five years ago, a federal magistrate in Texas said Luis Posada Carriles should be released while he waits to be deported anywhere but Cuba or Venezuela, where the U.S. fears he could be tortured.

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UK minister to condemn Guantanamo

A Cabinet minister is due to denounce Guantanamo Bay detention centre as a "shocking affront to the principles of democracy", it has emerged. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, is expected to voice the most outspoken criticism of US terror policy yet made by a senior minister.


He will accuse the US of "deliberately seeking to put the detainees beyond the reach of the law in Guantanamo Bay".

He will make the comments in a speech in Sydney, Australia, on Wednesday.

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New Yorkers Faced the Fire in the Minds of Men

Always an interesting read, here's Slavoj Žižek on this year's 9/11 films:

On 9/11, New Yorkers Faced the Fire in the Minds of Men
Hollywood's attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise
by Slavoj Zizek

Two Hollywood films mark 9/11's fifth anniversary: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Both adopt a terse, realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity to them and most critics have praised their sober styles and avoidance of sensationalism. But it is the touch of authenticity that raises some disturbing questions.

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of "cognitive mapping" is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That's the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as "subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda". The result is that the political message of the two films resides in their abstention from delivering a direct political message. It is the message of an implicit trust in one's government: when under attack, one just has to do one's duty.

This is where the problem begins. The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.

The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Recall August's alert and the thwarted attempt to blow up a dozen planes on their way from London to the US. No doubt the alert was not a fake; to claim otherwise would be paranoiac. But a suspicion remains that it was a self-serving spectacle to accustom us to a permanent state of emergency. What space for manipulation do such events - where all that is publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves - open up? Is it not that they simply demand too much from us, the ordinary citizen: a degree of trust that those in power lost long ago? This is the sin for which Bush and Blair should never be forgiven.

What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the "happy 90s", the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war. But the problem is that the US is not in a state of war. For the large majority, daily life goes on and war remains the business of state agencies. The distinction between the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the same time a state of emergency.

When Bush celebrated the thirst for freedom in post-communist countries as a "fire in the minds of men", the unintended irony was that he used a phrase from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, where it designates the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: "The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses." What Bush didn't grasp is that on September 11, five years ago, New Yorkers saw and smelled the smoke from this fire.

The Other 9/11

Were the lives of those killed at the World Trade Centre more valuable than the innocents murdered in Chile's US-backed coup, asks Tito Tricot.

Our dreams were shattered one cloudy morning when the military overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Twenty-nine years later, at midday, Chile's's firemen sounded their sirens paying tribute to thousands of men and women who lost their lives without really understanding what was happening.

It was a moment of remembrance, not for the victims of the military coup, but for those killed at the World Trade Centre in New York. Sad as that might have been, it is even sadder that Chilean firemen have never sounded their sirens to remember our own dead. And there are thousands of them, including many children, who were murdered by the military.

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Declassified Military Documents Show How US Government Planned Terrorist Attacks Against its Own Citizens

As reported by ABC News, stunning military documents codenamed "Operation Northwoods" were declassified in recent years and show how in 1962, the top US military leaders planned an operation to create terror attacks against its own cities and kill US citizens.

The documents state that through the fabrication of false evidence, the US would blame Cuba and gain public support for an unpopular war against Castro. They included developing a fake Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, the use of airplanes, and much more.
For further details, the now declassified military documents are available at the National Security Archive of the George Washington University

Read the full fascinating article Here ( A must read)

What motivated the 9/11 Hijackers? The Hidden Truth

What motivated the 9/11 hijackers to attack the US?

US foreign policy bias for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and US government support for other oppressive regimes in the Middle East.

The 9-11 Commission held its twelfth and final public hearing June 16-17, 2004, in Washington, DC. On June 16 the Commission heard from several of the federal government's top law enforcement and intelligence experts on al Qaeda and the 9-11 plot. It was at this hearing that the question

"What motivated them to do it?"



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The 'claimed' video of Osama' with the'9/11 Hijackers ?

For those of you interested in the new aptly timed video release claiming to show Osama bin Laden meeting the 9/11 hijackers . It can be seen Here




What does not surprise me is that yet again the timing of this release seems to have more value to the Bush Administration than it does to Al-Qaeda.

New poll says most Canadians blame U.S. for 9/11 attacks

A majority of Canadians believe U.S. foreign policy was one of the root causes that led to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and Quebecers are quicker to criticize the U.S. administration for its international actions than other Canadians, a recent poll suggests.


Those conclusions are found in a newly released poll conducted by Léger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies.The poll suggests that 77 per cent of Quebecers polled primarily blame American foreign policy for the Sept. 11 attacks. The results suggest 57 per cent in Ontario hold a similar view.

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The Divide: 911 & The War on Terror

A musical tribute to mark the 5th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of september 11th 2001. On 911 a great divide began throughout the world... you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists.



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9/11 Omission Commission

Video documenting the the conflicts of interest of the 9/11 commission and the many distortions of their final report.



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