B. Mcpherson
Strasbourg. The European Human Rights Court has rendered its verdict. The US, Central Intelligence Agency is guilty of the crime of torture in the case of Khalid el-Masri, a German citizen. This is the first time that such a judgement has been passed.

This sordid tale of kidnapping, torture and blatant disregard for human rights began to surface in 2005 when The Guardian ran a bizarre story about a man wandering near the Albanian border who claims he doesn’t know where he is. He has a passport that shows he is a German citizen but has no entry stamp for Albania. He is carrying a suitcase but wandering a mountain trail near Macedonia. He claims that he was kidnapped and tortured, sent to Afghanistan, imprisoned there and then brought back to Europe and dumped at night in the mountains.

It would have been easy to dismiss his claims as the ravings of a disturbed person, but the Germans took his story seriously enough to take hair samples to test. The technology is advanced enough to pinpoint where a person has been.

The former car salesman and father of six tells the harrowing story of taking off for a weekend alone and ending up in the middle of a nightmare. Then being ‘dumped’ in the mountains months later when the torturers discovered they had kidnapped the wrong person.

In the meantime his wife and four children returned to Lebanon thinking him dead or deserted. He brought them back to Germany after locating them.

May of this year saw news that the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg would hear el-Masri’s case.  In a historical judgement, all 17 judges pronounced the CIA guilty. They also went on to demand a large fine from the republic of Macedonia for their collusion in this rendition.

"Needless to say that this ruling is a victory and a landmark decision as for the first time methods used by the CIA are clearly described as torture, which is very promising for other victims that might seek compensations and send an important signal to the US authorities. However Macedonia does not seem to be the big fish in this Kafkaesque story and is only the sidekick of greater powers. When will they be held accountable for their actions?" Cage Prisoners

That truly is the question. When will Madame Justice prevail?

B. McPherson

Dick Cheney, vice-president under the Bush administration received a new heart. Some would say that it is the first one for him. Cheney has had cardiac problems for many years and at age 71 has made it to the top of the list for a heart transplant.

There are many people on waiting lists for replacement human organs. The problems are twofold. A donated organ needs to be a close match to the recipient and there are more people needing replacement organs than donors. Obviously the donor of a heart is deceased.

In order to maintain the new organ, recipients must take immunosuppressant drugs for their lifetime. Sometimes, in spite of tissue matching the host body rejects the new organ.

The first human to human heart transplant was performed by South African Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967. The patient lived only 18 days after surgery. When cyclosporine was isolated in the 70s the picture for survival improved dramatically. With ongoing improvements in medications and technology, the transplant patient can expect to live another five or more years.

Cheney has been a most controversial character in the “War on Terror” defending the use of torture at Guantanamo offshore prison. Human Right Watch has called for the investigation of those who authorized and engaged in torture such as waterboarding.

“In 2005, Human Rights Watch’s Getting Away with Torture? presented substantial evidence warranting criminal investigations of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet, as well as Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top US commander in Iraq, and Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”Human Rights Watch

Perhaps even more troubling is the relationship between the Halliburton corporation and Cheney. 

B. McPherson
Long time prisoner at Gitmo prison, Majid Khan, has pleaded guilty to all charges against him. He has been held in the offshore American prison since 2003 and was considered a high value prisoner. In exchange for a promise that Khan will be released sometime, he has agreed to talk about all he knows about al-Qaeda operations.

“Prosecutors said Khan plotted with the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to blow up fuel tanks in the US, to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, former Pakistani president, and to provide other assistance to al-Qaeda.” Al Jazeera

In spite of having confessed to crimes and agreeing to provide information about his and other’s terrorist activities, he will not know until 2016 what his prison sentence will be. It could range from a minimum of 19 years to 25. There is, of course, no guarantee that the American jailers will ever free Khan. Guantanamo is a “black” prison which means that inmates have no rights.

A Canadian, Omar Khadr, was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan when he was about 15. He spent years at the offshore prison in Cuba. He struck a deal to be released to a Canadian prison within a year if he would confess to killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. More than a year later he remains in Gitmo.

This January marks a ten year anniversary of Gitmo. There have been allegations of torture and murder of the unfortunates incarcerated there. Some people caught up in the anti-terrorism fervor that hit the US after 9/11 were ‘sold’ to the military for rewards and later found to have no connection at all to terrorist activity.

American president Obama campaigned on a platform that would close the offshore prison by 2010. Not only has Obama failed to close the facility, he has allowed the resumption of military tribunals. Obama has gone even further in signing a bill that exposes American citizens to seizure without warrants and suspends the rule of habeas corpus. The most recent example of creeping repression in the USA is the new bill that provides for the arrest of protesters if they demonstrate(peacefully) when a government official is present(whether they know it or not).

American citizens working and living within their own country are now subject to the National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) which suspends their civil rights. I wonder how many shoppers at Walmart or dining at McDonalds are aware that they can now be ‘disappeared’ just like in those other totalitarian states.

"No president," said the ACLU, "should have the power to declare the entire globe a war zone and then seize and detain civilian terrorism suspects anywhere in the world---including within the United States---and to hold them forever without charge or trial." Global Research