Miliband Admits US Rendition Flights Stopped on UK Soil
Britain acknowledged today for the first time that US planes on “extraordinary rendition” flights stopped on British soil twice.
The admission came from the foreign secretary, David Miliband, who apologised to MPs for wrong information given by his predecessor Jack Straw and former prime minister Tony Blair.
Miliband said the government had recently received information from Washington that two flights - one to Guantánamo Bay and one to Morocco - stopped over at Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean.
“Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent US investigations have now revealed two occasions, both in 2002, when this had in fact occurred,” Miliband told MPs.
He said he had discussed the issue with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
“We both agree that the mistakes made in these two cases are not acceptable, and she shares my deep regret that this information has only just come to light,” Miliband said.
Gordon Brown, speaking in Brussels, said he shared “the disappointment that everybody has” about the rendition flights issue.
The prime minister told reporters: “We have just been informed by the United States of America about what has actually happened. The US has expressed regret for us not knowing about this issue. We share the disappointment that everybody has about what’s actually happened.”
There have been long-standing suspicions that the CIA has used one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, home to a large US military base, to hold suspects, although Miliband today assured MPs that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia.
Miliband has been told by the US that neither of the men in the rendition flight to Diego Garcia was British. One is currently in Guantánamo Bay and the other has been released.
The foreign secretary said an “error in the earlier US records search meant that these cases did not come to light”.
Reprieve, a legal charity that represents a number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, has in the past accused the government of cooperating with the US on extraordinary rendition - the practice of seizing terrorism suspects and interrogating them on non-US territory.
President George Bush acknowledged in September 2006 the existence of the CIA’s black site prisons. He said al-Qaida suspects or members of the Taliban who “withhold information that could save American lives” have been taken “to an environment where they can be held secretly, questioned by experts”.
Bush did not disclose the location of any prison, but suspicion that one may have been located on Diego Garcia, around 1,000 miles off Sri Lanka’s southern coast, has been growing for years.
The 2,000 islanders were expelled in the early 1970s after the British government struck a secret deal to lease the 37 mile-long island to the US military.
Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general who is professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia as a detention centre for suspects.
In May 2004, he said: “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram airfield, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq.” In December last year he repeated the claim.
The registration number of a Gulfstream executive jet has been linked to several CIA prisoner operations that flew from Washington to Diego Garcia, via Athens, on September 11 2002, soon after the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected planner of the September 11 attacks.
A European investigator said last year he had proof that Poland and Romania hosted secret prisons for the CIA in which it interrogated top al-Qaida suspects using methods akin to torture.
British police said they had found no evidence to support claims that CIA planes transporting terrorism suspects to face possible torture in secret prisons in Europe had landed illegally at British airports.
© 2008 The Guardian
How strange things are coming out after Blair is out of office. Samething will happen when Bush will be out of the Whit House. Things will come up and guess what, “whoops, we didn’t know that we were acting against the law, we are sorry that we killed a million people”(the CIA).
This goverment is an organized crime.
“”
He said he had discussed the issue with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
“We both agree that the mistakes made in these two cases are not acceptable, and she shares my deep regret that this information has only just come to light,” Miliband said.
“”
What they regret is that it has come to light and
that Diego Garcia was a stopover. No regrets about
the real crime - the rendition. Criminals.
This is only official confirmation for what we knew. I wonder how many more they aren’t admitting.
US is a habitual torturer and killer of innocent and weak and vulnerable victims.
Shame on those Americans who are proud of the country ruled by psychopaths, and celebrate the psychopathic cruelty of the American christian soldiers as patriotic.
Read:
“X-Rated Iraq: A Tortured Story”
by Captain Eric H. May, www.dissidentvioce.org, February 18th, 2008
The most fun thing? Definitely the women.
— American Soldier X
- “Bombs away over Iraq: Who cares?”
By Tom Engelhardt, www.atimes.com,
According to this story: “The US military said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds [8,600 kilograms] of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area.”
3. “After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.
Last week, defence lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant”, released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk – taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor (1).
“Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture”. The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
“The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he “does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.”(2) Jose Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.”
“The darkest corner of the mind,” by GEORGE MONBIOT, www.outlookindia.com, 26.12.2006.
4.Targeting Iraqis As “Big Game”
By Nick Turse
06 November, 2007
Tom Dispatch.com
What is especially strange here is that the so-called sovereign nation of the UK claims to not know that the US used a UK territory for torture flights, until the US accidentally released the information.
And, of course, we are assured, there were never US torture prisons on the Diego Garcia Island.
Since the Brits supposedly didn’t know about the torture flights, how do they propose that they know about the supposed absence of torture prisons?
Even as this story comes out, UK officials at a conference on banning cluster bombs, are trying to disrupt the ban on behalf of their US masters. See above:commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/21/7199/
“John Duncan, Britain’s Ambassador for Multinational Arms Control and Disarmament, said many cluster bomb users agree the uncontrolled use of the weapons was ‘not a tenable situation,’ but added a blanket ban was also unacceptable.
“’Some cluster munitions don’t cause unacceptable harm and should not be covered - so we need to keep a balance between the military requirement and the humanitarian requirement,’he said.”
The Brits parroted the US line because the US did not even bother to send its own representative to bleat its own lies.
If the Blair government was a “poodle,” for the US administration (which it was), the Brown government is, oh well…a Yorkshire Terrier.
“Good-boy. Good-boy, y’all.”
Is there a single politician on the face of the Earth that has a modicum of honesty, pride, self-respect or belief in her/his own nation and government?
It seems that the right-wing crazies got it right about the totalitarian world government. They just got the headquarters location wrong. It is not in the UN building in New Yawk Citah, it is in the Pentagon and White House in Washington, DC.
‘We both agree that the mistakes made in these two cases are not acceptable, and she shares my deep regret that this information has only just come to light,” Miliband said.’
once again criminals hide their criminal actions behind the ‘M’ word….And hope no one will bother to take them to court.
Blair was a lap dog for Bandar Bush, Saudi Prince Bandart. When it came out that Bandar received $1 billion bribe from a British arms dealer, he threatened to withhold information on terrorists from Britain. He even suggested that there would be terrorist attacks.
That’s known in mafia ciricles as a protection racket.
The Blair government then interfered with the investigation of the bribe actitvity under the guise of state secrets.
Bandar like all good Bushes is a criminal.
And a terrorist.
Another revelation from an UK government that definitely should have known better. That Blair PLC cooperated with Dubya, Cheney, & Co. and willy nilly surrendered their sovereignty is shameful and pathetic at the same time.
Give Diego Garcia back to the Diego Garians..and kick the UK out of the EU
So DEEPA — do we need to re-visit the Magna Carta and add rights of habeas mens mentis to go along with habeas corpus ?
Literally “where is the mind” (mens mentis), along with “where is the body” (corpus), for the constabulary’s legal compunction (mandate) to provide prima facie (on the face of it) evidence prior to any legal seizure of one’s person or belongings.
Anyone who believes that there were only two flights must also believe Bush when he said that we only water boarded three detainees. They shamelessly continue to try and sell us bridges that cross over rivers of deception.
And when will Diego Garcia be returned to its true owners?
Only the tortured torture. The Commander in Chief used to insert firecrackers into the rectums of frogs-need I say more?
“The 2,000 islanders were expelled in the early 1970s after the British government struck a secret deal to lease the 37 mile-long island to the US military.”
This story is outrageous on so many levels.
I know it focuses on illegal redition but I cannot help but comment on the (continued) imperialistic policies of white governments and their need to acquire, annex, territorialize and, in plain words, STEAL the land and lives of indigenous peoples.
How do these people sleep at night; knowing they so easily “expelled” the native people that had lived there for centuries.
And they worry about the growing Latino population in the US. They should. The day will come when the evil power stucture of invasion and conquest will end.
I don’t want to hear about ‘disappointment’. I want to hear who’s going to prison and for how long.
If I rob a bank, I doubt I’d get off with no punishments just because I said ‘it was a mistake, sorry.’
But then again, there’s a different law for these sorts. That’s one of the things the American Revolution was supposed to correct.
“Is there a single politician on the face of the Earth that has a modicum of honesty, pride, self-respect or belief in her/his own nation and government?”
Chavez comes to mind. I’d add Fidel, but he just retired.
This sounds like partial truth to me. There was a cover story for the flights given to the Brits to keep them from snooping into the flights. That was a lie. If someone visited my house with this big of a lie they would be denied future access without complete inspection.
I bet they at some level of spy knew EXACTLY what was happening. This is the fall back lie, in case they got caught.
I always think of the JFK assassination. Not enough heads rolled after he was shot and Oswald roamed around an awful lot without visible means of support. The current story could be true, but I think secrets and incompetence of powerful people at least must be somewhere. I don’t believe in accidents and coincidences.
911 is even worse - every theory indicates some kind of conspiracy and massive incompetence at least in several government agencies. Why was there not massive firings? I would have fired whoever was in charge of several agencies before 912. My thinking is that the real screw ups (or conspirators) were Bu$h the inferior’s contributors and benefactors.
International secret services work together in torture scenarios just like they do in false flag terrorist operations (Gladio in Europe post WWII, 9/11 in the US, etc.)
I have been tortured and what is going on in local police departments (group-stalking operation assistance), FBI, CIA and military ‘intelligence’ agencies in targeting (including slander campaigns, planting of evidence, etc.) civilians is not even being hinted at in these sorts of ‘exposes’.
This is a fully-weaponized (including psychotronics), globally-operative, military police state with total surveillance and invasive (manipulative) capability for nearly everyone.
Stalking/harassment scripts, pirating, kidnapping, rape, surreptitious drugging, hypnosis, all sorts of torture including sensory deprivation, murder… are all well-honed and coveted pastimes of a power-drenched, totally unaccountable, bored, moronic and insatiable elite.