Sunday, October 16, 2005

The Brits like torture, too

From the Sunday Herald, we learn that the British are joining the torture fun and not just looking through their fingers.
ON each stage of his journey, as he descended further and further into the gulags and torture chambers of the war on terror, Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi was shadowed by British intelligence. The British were there in Karachi when Americans interrogated him and Pakistanis tortured him; they were feeding questions to the Moroccan torturers who took a scalpel to his penis; they stood back and watched as he was dragged to an American torture chamber in Afghanistan and then to the gulag of Guantanamo, where he languishes to this day.

Al-Habashi is a perfect example of what happens to a person who has been subjected to “extraordinary rendition”. This process sees someone suspected of involvement in terrorism snatched off the streets, usually in a third world country, then flown around the world by the CIA to regimes which indulge in torture, to be questioned on behalf of the US.

Hundreds of these “rendition flights” come through the UK, and the payback for the UK is that British intelligence gets to question some of the suspects by proxy – the proxy usually being a Middle Eastern torturer.
The rest of the story is appalling, but this is what our tax dollars pay for.

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