CIA offers Germany citizen back if they shut up about rendition
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
other press 
Saturday October 28, 2006 16:03
by R. Isible
Guardian UK fails to credit plane spotters, inymedia & swedish TV
Article in the Guardian appearing to draw largely on the work of a Guardian journalist that has published "Ghost Plane" (which claims that it was his articles which first revealed rendition flights 1 year ago) talks about Germany parliamentary report revealing how the CIA and Syria attempted to stop Germany revealing information about torture flights.
The article also fingers Prestwick as an "ask no questions" type of airport but doesn't mention that the reason a lot of this was exposed was because of widely dispersed, self-organised plane-spotters and anti-war activists (like Tim Hourigan and the others in Shannon) who kept logs and kept going even in the face of very extreme attempts be An Garda Siochana and the Airport Police to intimidate them. After a long period of doing this painstaking research (which initially revealed that US troops were transiting in huge numbers on their way to Iraq) it was later discovered (but at the latest in 2004 well before what the Guardian claims) that the CIA were using Shannon for their Gulfstream torture/rendition refuellings. At that stage the Swedish documentary team "Kallefakte" (sp?) got involved.
Comments (1 of 1)
Jump To Comment: 1Counterpunch carries an article written as an acceptance speech for a human-rights award by a man that was tortured in Syria after being "rendered" by the USA. Originally a Syrian, Maher Arar emigrated to Canada. The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) has been found culpable by the http://www.ararcommission.ca/ Arar Commission report (released in Oct 2006), which has made it reasonably clear that malicious, incompetent RCMP officers fed inaccurate information about one of their own citizens to US intelligence services. The Canadian government subsequently spectaculary failed to defend the rights of one of its citizens and he ended up being tortured in Syria.
So they put me on a private jet, which I found extremely strange. I was the only passenger on that, on that plane. Its a luxurious plane, with leather seats in it. My only preoccupation during this trip is how I could avoid torture. By then, I realized that they were exactly sending me to Syria for torture. And that became very clear to me. Then the plane flew to Washington from Washington it flew to Maine then to Rome, then from Rome to Jordan.
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