torture – praag.org

Will John Brennan sink the Obama?

Just hours before he publicly responded last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee report accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of torture and deceit, John O. Brennan, the CIA’s director, stopped by the White House to meet with President Obama.

Ostensibly, he was there for an intelligence briefing. But the messages delivered later that day by the White House and Brennan were synchronized, even down to similar wording, and the larger import of the well-timed visit was hardly a classified secret: After six years of partnership, the president was standing by the embattled spy chief even as fellow Democrats called for his resignation.

Brennan, 59, who spent much of his career as an Arabic-speaking CIA officer, has been a central figure in Mr. Obama’s world since the beginning of his presidency.

Irritated advisers to Obama believe Brennan made a bad situation worse by battling Democrats on the committee over the torture report during the past year. Some who considered Brennan the president’s heat shield against the agency when he worked in the White House now worry that since being appointed director, he has “gone native,” as they put it.

Several Obama advisers said privately that Brennan made a mistake by letting the situation grow so toxic.

But in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Obama has forged with Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation’s war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency’s own struggle to balance security and liberty.

And the result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.

“He was a pretty good analyst. He was a bright guy,” said a former CIA officer of Brennan. “But he always had a reputation of sucking up to power and moving in the direction of power and not being able to exercise any independence.”

Brennan managed “kill lists” for drone strikes and could order air attacks in Yemen without getting further approval from the president. “Brennan’s control over his area was as complete as anyone’s control over anything in the White House,” another former senior official said.

He came to be identified with the escalation of America’s secret war in Yemen and the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was also an ally of those resisting more hawkish policies in Afghanistan and Libya, and advocated freeing wrongly held detainees at Guantánamo.

Last week Brennan became the agency’s prime defender, much to the chagrin of some of the president’s allies.

Source: NYT

Put Blair and Straw on trial for torture

By Craig Murray

Former British Ambassador To Uzbekistan

In the summer of 2004, I warned Tony Blair’s Foreign Office that Britain was using intelligence material which had been obtained by the CIA under torture. Two months later I was sacked as the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan on the orders of Downing Street, bringing to an end my 20-year diplomatic career.

When I then went public with the news that Uzbek territory was part of a global CIA torture programme, I was dismissed as a fantasist by Mr Blair’s henchmen. Now finally, a decade later, I have been vindicated by last week’s shocking Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Over 500 pages it details the CIA’s brutal abuse of Al Qaeda suspects, who were flown around the world to be tortured in a network of secret prisons. One of these was in Uzbekistan, where the US had an air base.

The CIA programme included both torture they conducted themselves and torture conducted for them by allies. Shamefully, the torture-by-proxy details remain classified to protect America’s gruesome ‘allies’.

The CIA were flying people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, usually via their secret prison at Szymany in Poland. The Uzbeks were doing the actual torture, sometimes with CIA members in the room.

Aside from the moral dimension, the Senate report confirmed my repeated view that intelligence gleaned from torture is useless. When I was Ambassador, one secret file I was sent contained CIA information which named a member of Al Qaeda. The man turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness.

In 2003, I attended a meeting at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), where I was told by officials that it was not illegal for us to use intelligence from torture as long as we did not carry out the torture ourselves. I was also told at the meeting that this intelligence was ‘useful’ – and that policy came directly from the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

I have a copy of a note signed by the Foreign Secretary’s private secretary which says that Mr Straw had seen the minutes of the meeting and thought it had been ‘handled well’.

I was specifically told by a very senior FCO manager that there was a deliberate policy of not writing down anything about this because there should not be evidence of the policy.

Meanwhile, the FCO was churning out speeches which claimed we opposed it. On July 22, 2004, I sent that telegram to Mr Straw complaining about the fact we were using intelligence material obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA.

His silence in response didn’t surprise me. I was gone soon afterwards. Strange then that when he sacked me – on the express orders of Mr Blair’s Downing Street, I was later informed – Mr Straw claimed to Parliament that the existence of a CIA torture programme was only ‘Mr Murray’s opinion’.

He claimed the Government knew nothing of any torture by the CIA, and still today denies knowing anything about it.

My career had been destroyed by leftist politicians who wanted to hide their complicity in human rights abuses.

To complete the process, they then trashed my reputation with smears: the stressful end to my first marriage, and the start of my relationship with my current wife, Nadira, found its way into the press in the most lurid terms. False stories about my drinking and fabrications about sleeping with prostitutes also appeared. All of this was to distract from the truth: that hundreds of British members of the security services, diplomats and civil servants co-operated with the CIA torture programme.

It is a terrible indictment of our society that I was the only person in a position of authority who was trying to stop it.

Now that I have been vindicated, it is time for a formal Government apology for the way I was treated. But it is not just past UK governments which were complicit in both the torture and the cover-up. For the past year, the British Ambassador in Washington and his staff have regularly been lobbying the US authorities not to reveal facts about the UK’s involvement in the CIA torture programme.

That lobbying has been successful, and is one of the reasons that most of the Senate report has not been published.

The British Government continues to cover up the truth even today. We should not forget that the climate of public and media opinion which made it possible for this US Senate report to be published at all was generated entirely by the work of whistleblowers. I was the first of these, but at least I remain at liberty: two subsequent whistleblowers – soldier Chelsea Manning and CIA agent John Kiriakou – are serving long stretches in prison.

Although it is in no way comparable to the horrifying abuses suffered by the torture victims, we truth-tellers have also been through hell.

It is very strange to now hear Westminster politicians calling for a judicial inquiry into our involvement in rendition.

There has already been one, headed by retired judge Sir Peter Gibson. He started to gather evidence, and ordered the Foreign Office to give me full access to all the classified documentation on the subject from my time as Ambassador. Indeed, Gibson gave every appearance of being a man of integrity, appointed to lead an investigation into governmental wrongdoing.

It was therefore no surprise when the Gibson inquiry was cancelled and his duties handed to politicians on the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee. Incredibly, its members include Hazel Blears, one of Tony Blair’s Ministers at a time when the Government had a policy of using intelligence from torture. She is therefore investigating herself.

No wonder a source on the Intelligence and Security Committee told journalists last week that they would only scrutinise members of the security services, not the politicians who instructed them.

There is, at least, an ongoing Metropolitan Police inquiry, called Operation Lydd, into whether the criminal law was broken by Britons implicated in the rendition programme.

Complicity in torture is a crime in the UK. I have given sworn evidence to the detectives involved, who recently passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Astonishingly, at the CPS the dossier has been given not to the branch that deals with misconduct in public office, but to the counter-terrorism division. This focuses attention away from the crime of torture and on to the alleged criminal intentions of the actual victims of the crime they are supposed to be considering.

The police think it will all be quietly swept under the carpet by the CPS.

Recent scandals, such as the alleged cover-up of an Establishment paedophile ring, highlight the apparent impunity of our political class in the face of the honest forces of law and order.

We don’t need an inquiry into British complicity in torture. We need a trial. And it should be Tony Blair and Jack Straw in the dock.

Source: AP

Torture: CIA officials will walk free

From Russian roulette to power drills, shackling and other painful and humiliating “enhanced interrogation techniques”, the CIA crossed all lines. Yet despite evidence incriminating the officials, it is highly likely that the perpetrators will walk free.

Although a scandalizing U.S. Senate report over CIA practices has sparked calls for prosecution from human rights groups, chances of affiliated officials being brought to justice seem little as President Barack Obama stated that it is ‘time to move on’.

After the U.S. Senate released a detailed intelligence report criminalizing the Central Intelligence Agency, the UN and several human rights groups called for the prosecution of U.S. officials involved in torture practices.

However, with a black president and the justice department saying it will not press charges, the agents responsible for the violence are likely to go unpunished.

Obama’s top officials, as WikiLeaks cables revealed, secretly worked with GOP operatives to coerce other countries, such as Spain and Germany, to quash their investigations into the US torture of their citizens, and issued extraordinary threats to prevent British courts from disclosing any of what was done.

The Obama administration aggressively shielded Bush officials even from being held accountable in civil cases brought by torture victims, by invoking radical secrecy powers and immunity doctrines to prevent courts even from hearing those claims.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program in 2012.

This decision, the New York Times noted “eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA”.

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest announced on Wednesday that US President Barack Obama shares the US Department of Justice decision that no prosecutable crime had been committed by the CIA officers.

“The president [Obama] has confidence both in this [US] justice system and in the way it was deployed in this particular situation [CIA officers investigation],” Earnest said when asked if Obama accepts DOJ conclusion that there are no prosecutable crimes committed by the CIA.

Poland’s president admits he knew of CIA prison

Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski has acknowledged his country let the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) run a secret prison on its territory following 9/11.

Mr Kwasniewski had previously denied that Poland hosted a secret CIA prison.

A US Senate report into the CIA’s activities did not name the countries that hosted the prisons.

Mr Kwasniewski insisted he had not known about the harsh treatment used by the CIA interrogators.

But the European Court of Human Rights ruled in July that Poland had allowed the CIA to torture two al-Qaeda suspects at a secret detention centre in 2002 and 2003, when Mr Kwasniewski was president.

‘Secretive’
In an interview following the publication of the US Senate report, Mr Kwasniewski said Poland had agreed to strengthen intelligence co-operation with the US following the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

He said the Americans had been very secretive about the way they conducted their activities, which aroused suspicions among Polish officials.

“Poland took steps to end the activity at this site and the activity was stopped at some point,” Mr Kwasniewski told Radio TOK FM in Warsaw.

He said he had been unaware of the methods the CIA had used.

“These methods which are repulsive, which I do not accept, which are not justifiable, did not bring anything good. And that is the real catastrophe of the US, that is the real catastrophe of the CIA, that is the real catastrophe of George Bush.”

Prosecutors opened an investigation into the claims in 2008, three years after Mr Kwasniewski left office. The investigation continues and has yet to publish any findings.

The CIA has defended its actions in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US, saying they saved lives.

Key findings are:

None of 20 cases of counterterrorism “successes” attributed to the techniques led to unique or otherwise unavailable intelligence
The CIA misled politicians and public
At least 26 of 119 known detainees in custody during the life of the programme were wrongfully held, and many held for months longer than they should have been
Methods included sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, often standing or in painful positions
Saudi al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah was kept confined in a coffin-sized box for hours on end
Waterboarding and “rectal hydration” were physically harmful to prisoners, causing convulsions and vomiting

Source: BBC

Global demands for justice reaching ‘critical mass’

A report from the United Nations accuses past and current US officials of withholding details regarding which specific individuals were responsible for the nation’s policy of enhanced interrogation, known throughout the rest of the world as torture. While the illegal acts were approved at the highest level of the US government, the UN insists those responsible still must be tried for war crimes, and if convicted, imprisoned.

In 2005, in response to global accusations of American war crimes, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed Resolution 2005/80. It created a special investigator for a period of three years and specifically empowered him to investigate the US-backed War on Terror. The first appointed UN investigator was Martin Scheinin of Finland. Currently, the UK’s Ben Emmerson is the lead investigator. And it’s Mr. Emmerson that has criticized both the Bush and Obama administrations for withholding evidence of war crimes.

The UN committee originally charged the special investigator with carrying out seven individual mandates. Six of the tasks revolve around developing a modern UN policy to work with US and NATO-backed forces to insure human rights are respected in the midst of their international war on terror. But one of the seven UN mandates, the one the US is accused of stymieing, reads (from the UN Human Rights Commission):

‘To gather, request, receive and exchange information and communications from and with all relevant sources, including Governments, the individuals concerned and their families, representatives and organizations, including through country visits, with the consent of the State concerned, on alleged violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.’

UN isn’t playing games with US and UK

After eight years of stonewalling and resistance by US and UK authorities, the UN special investigator addressed the world body’s Human Rights Commission publicly, demanding the two nations cooperate with the investigation.

Ben Emmerson, the lead special investigator, described to the gathered UN dignitaries a setting of self-approved legal immunity among US and UK national leaders. He called the two governments’ standing policy, “A policy of de facto immunity for public officials who engaged in acts of torture, rendition and secret detention, and their superiors and political masters who authorized these acts.”

In his speech before the UN commission, Emmerson described how African and Middle Eastern citizens and their governments are demanding the perpetrators be brought to justice. Many have watched their own national leaders arrested and charged with war crimes for virtually the same acts that US and UK officials are currently accused.

“Words are not enough,” UN investigator Emmerson remarked, speaking indirectly to Western leaders, “Platitudinous repetition of statements affirming opposition to torture ring hollow to many in those parts of the Middle East and North Africa that have undergone, or are undergoing, major upheaval, since they have first-hand experience of living under repressive regimes that used torture in private whilst making similar statements in public.”

Then, speaking specifically of those same Western regimes, Emmerson said, “The skepticism of these communities can only be reinforced if Western governments continue to demonstrate resolute indifference to the crimes committed by their predecessor administrations.”

Global demands for justice reaching “critical mass”

Marches and protests across the globe would seem to support Ben Emmerson and his team’s conclusions. However, Western officials have remained steadfast in their resistance to being held accountable. But the world may not wait much longer Emmerson suggests, “Calls for accountability are fast approaching a critical mass.” And moments prior to his condemning speech to the UN committee, the chief investigator is reported to have spoken candidly to the UK’s Guardian.

As quoted by ReaderSupportedNews.org, Ben Emmerson told the British news outlet, “In South America, it took up to thirty years before the officials responsible for crimes like these were held fully accountable. With the conspiracy organized by the Bush-ear CIA, it has taken a decade. But the campaign for securing the right to truth has now reached a critical point.”

In a separate report of the speech by RT News, the outlet quotes UN investigator Emmerson as explaining that one of the most glaring examples of CIA human rights violations are the agency’s secret ‘black sites’, “There is now credible evidence to show that CIA black sites were located on the territory of Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania and Thailand, and that the officials of at least 49 other states allowed their airspace or airports to be used for rendition flights.”

Emmerson went on to explain, “Despite this clear repudiation of the unlawful actions carried out by the Bush-era CIA, many of the facts remain classified, and no public official has so far been brought to justice in the United States.”

It’s apparent that the United Nations is serious about bringing US and UK public officials to trial for international war crimes related to torture and the West’s war on terror. But without the cooperation of the current governments of the two nations, UN human rights investigators will have a difficult time producing the evidence needed to do so.

Source: Whiteout Press

Throwing Republicans under the bus for torture?

The United States committed war crimes when they tortured prisoners of war and Iraqi civilian internees.

Although it is common knowledge around the world and in America, it was President Obama who admitted at a press conference that America tortured detainees after 9/11.

The President’s remarks came ahead of a soon-to-be-declassified Senate report about the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program”, a nicer way of saying “torture”.

In speaking about the CIA, the President said, “We tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. A lot of those folks were working hard and under enormous pressure, and are real patriots. But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong.”

Why are these torturers not being prosecuted? Torture is a war crime; it does not matter if people were patriotic, afraid, angry, or following orders, torture remains a criminal offence.

Former vice-president and convicted war criminal Dick Cheney’s daughter does not think torture is a violation of international law, and is furious at President Obama.

Ms. Cheney has asserted that President Obama’s statement about the Bush-Cheney torture program “was an amazing and stunning display of a president, a leader, a Commander in Chief who seems to take no responsibility for anything that’s happened on his watch.”

Cheney is angry because her father’s culpability in ordering torture will be officially exposed in the upcoming Senate report. For the record, George W. Bush was president from 2001-2009. In 2002 Barack Obama served as an Illinois State Senator until 2005 when he was elected to the US Senate.

President Obama included his own administration when he told a press conference a while ago that “we” tortured detainees.

According to Liz Cheney, “This president is an utter disgrace. He’s expending more time, more energy, more passion, more aggressive activity in targeting and going after patriots, heroes. CIA officers and others who kept is safe after 9/11. He’s lying about what they did, he’s slandering them, he went to Cairo and did it in 2009. Today he did it from the podium of the Oval Office. It’s a disgrace. It’s despicable.”

Another report, incidentally, concluded the Bush/Cheney authorization of so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ of detainees in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was ineffective and yielded no critical intelligence. It might actually be the best indication yet that these detainees had nothing to do with 9/11.

President Obama admitted indirectly that America tortured detainees in 2011 when he told reporters that despite Republican presidential candidates praising war criminals who tortured prisoners, he believed, like international humanitarian agencies and the world court, that water boarding is torture.

In 2010 Dick Cheney admitted to authorizing torture, and just last March he told a sold-out crowd at American University he had no regrets and bragged that “If I would have to do it all over again, I would. The results speak for themselves.”

Cheney was lying, of course, and the Senate report will indeed say that the CIA torture was “ineffective and yielded no credible intelligence.”

Liz Cheney, a proud lesbian, nevertheless insists on calling her father a “hero”.

Cheney also said that despite being convicted of war crimes with Bush, Rumsfeld, and company, “the accusations he’s a war criminal for using torture are not true.”

The Obama administration has failed to prosecute anyone associated with the torture program, even though war crimes were prosecuted with extreme prejudice after World War II by the United States.

During war crime tribunals after World War II at The Hague, it was established that following orders was not a justification for torture.

America lost whatever standing it had in the world after Bush launched a regime-changing war against Iraq which left the country in ruins.

By throwing Bush, Cheney, and company under the bus, Obama and Democrats possibly hope to gain some of their lost moral standing and popularity after the Iraq disaster.

A large body of Democrats believe that while the Bush-Cheney cabal have already been convicted of war crimes in absentia, and they need to be arrested, sent to The Hague, and prosecuted for war crimes.

MPLA’s British handler dies

The British MI6 spy, Michael Wolfers, died in London at the start of a private dinner in one of London’s most exclusive clubs to celebrate the milestone 75th birthday of his close friend of 56-years’ standing, Lord Bragg, on October 15.

He was a devout Marxist for the Foreign Office in London.

Wolfers, working undercover as a journalist, left The Times in 1973 and in 1975 became an adviser on political and media matters to the MPLA in Luanda.

The MPLA was dominated by a network of well-educated, often prosperous whites, like Wolfers, working to end “colonial rule”.

Michael Wolfers, who never married, will be cremated at the Jewish cemetery in Golders Green, London, on Tuesday, October 21, 2014.

In the past two decades he had travelled widely as an election observer for the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Carter Center, monitoring polls in countries such as Rwanda, Bosnia, Madagascar and Togo.

Five years ago he had an apartment built in in Lomé, the capital of Togo, which he grandly named “Villa Wolfers”.

Lara Pawson recently challenged the superficial account of the violent repression by the MPLA in her book In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre, London: I.B.Tauris, 2014.

Pawson’s gripping study of the events of 27 May 1977 in Angola show the utter ruthlessness of the MPLA, advised by the likes of Wolfers.

Her meticulous account demonstrates the extreme ferocity of the MPLA response – the killings, torture, mass purges and also the way that personal scores were settled under the guise of purging the party of alleged “factionalists” and “racists”.

Most importantly, it shows how the killings of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 party members or supporters, the cloak of secrecy thrown over the events and their aftermath and the all-pervading fear that resulted, have helped maintain the dominance of a small clique and its clients within the MPLA and through the party’s hegemony over Angola and its resources.

The book starts with events the author witnessed in Luanda in 2000 and how people even two decades later or longer feared expressing open opposition because of the lessons of 27 May. The extent of the killings, torture, detentions and purges left an indelible mark on Angolan politics.

Wolfers was one of 16 guests savouring the first course at the men-only Garrick Club when an evening of celebration turned into one of horror.

Despite attempts by paramedics for more than an hour-and-a-half to revive him, he was declared dead before he arrived at St Thomas Hospital on South Bank, close to his home in Waterloo.

“We’d been close friends for 56 years,” Lord Bragg told a reporter from the Daily Mail. “He made close friendships. He was much loved. He was very highly regarded.”

Michael Wolfers was the product of exclusive and expensive primary and secondary education and was an outstanding scholar at Wadham College, Oxford University in the late 1950s.

It was there he met young Bragg who came from an English working-class background but who went on to become one of Britain’s best known media figures.

After an apprenticeship on a north of England newspaper, Michael Wolfers joined The Times and was that paper’s correspondent in various parts of Africa until 1973.

When in London, Wolfers was a familiar figure at Chatham House. He was fluent in Portuguese and several other languages and a well-respected authority on both the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique.

US Senate torture report vanishes

By Philip Giraldi

The crisis involving the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a Godsend to politicians, which is probably why the threat actually posed by the group is being hyped as it is while the White House and Pentagon continue to change the meaning of commonly used English expressions to enable the attacking of just about anyone anywhere. We are told that the United States will have a free hand in bombing Syria, an independent nation with which Washington is not at war. The Administration has warned that if Damascus attempts to defend itself from the air armada there will be consequences in the form of “retaliation,” suggesting that the US would be striking back after being attacked. Oddly enough, my dictionary suggests that it would be the Syrians who would be retaliating, but one supposes that in the Emerald City everything is not as it seems and certain words have little or no meaning.

The welcome distraction afforded by ISIS means that the issue of Gaza, which was recently devastated by the Israelis, has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, enabling Benjamin Netanyahu to steal still more land on the West Bank for new settlements. And remember MH-17? Still a whodunit and nobody cares anymore.

Back here at home, the dispute over the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture, a hot button issue earlier this year, has also benefited, largely disappearing from sight. The meticulously researched Senate report, covering 6000 pages and including 35,000 footnotes, apparently concluded that torturing terrorist suspects was not only illegal under the United Nations Convention on Torture, to which Washington is a signatory, it was also ineffective, producing no intelligence that was otherwise unobtainable.

Since a “forgive and forget” forward-looking White House has already indicated that no one will ever be punished for illegal actions undertaken in the wake of 9/11, why is the torture issue important beyond the prima facie case that a war crime that was authorized by the highest levels of the federal government? It is important because of its constitutional implications and its impact on rule of law in the United States, which is again being flouted by the Administration in its rush to “destroy” ISIS, which is little more than a terrorist group du jour being exploited to terrify the American public. The constitutional issue, in its simplest terms, is that the CIA works for the president and when it operates without legally mandated oversight by the legislative branch and judiciary it does so in defiance of separation of powers, making the Agency little better than a secret army run by POTUS.

The inability of the Senate Committee to compel the Agency and White House to come up with an acceptable draft of its report and agreement over what parts of it can be made public is also important because it reveals that the best the US Congress can do to oversee the country’s intelligence agencies is not very good at all. The past 22 months of delay in the report’s release have demonstrated that the intel community, with the support of the White House, can stonewall any issue until the cows come home.

The latest account of the head butting between the Agency and Congress reveals a bad working relationship between the Senate and CIA while also suggesting that Langley is again closing ranks against its critics. At a top secret behind closed doors meeting on September 9 th Agency Director John Brennan refused to divulge who at CIA authorized the actual intrusion into the computers being used by Senate staffers to compile their report. Brennan would also not address what the presumed legal authority to do so was. A shouting match with several Senators, all Democrats, ensued with several Senators demanding to know how Brennan could refuse to answer their questions.

The Agency had initially contended in its defense that the computer search was motivated by the alleged accessing and removal of restricted CIA reports by the Senate staffers, but it is no longer making that claim. Brennan reportedly refused to answer the two questions posed by the Senators because he did not want to “compromise” the ongoing investigations by the Justice Department and the CIA Inspector General into the computer hacking, but the committee felt he was stonewalling over questions that invited a relatively simple response. If he did not know the answers he could have said so. It might also be noted in passing that the two investigations are hardly independent, one being conducted in house by CIA and the other by a highly politicized Attorney General who will be inclined to protect the president.

CIA has also been working on its own rebuttal of the Senate report which is intended to demonstrate that torture actually worked and that no one at the Agency broke any laws. It is also reportedly seeking to redact major sections of the sixty page summary, which is the part most likely to see the light of day, an effort, which, if successful, will likely make the end product largely unreadable. It would probably also avoid including any blame or suggestion of “mission failure” which would be damaging to broader Agency political interests.

There also has been some speculation that the CIA would like to drag out the process in hopes that the Republicans will take control of the Senate in November, making any release of any part of the report unlikely. The White House has been brokering the review process between the intelligence community and Senate but has been largely mum about its preferences. It would likely want the report to remain classified or in limbo as its release might increase pressure on President Barack Obama to do something about criminal activity that might be revealed, which would be politically dangerous ground.

CIA has also welcomed back former Director George Tenet to help in crafting its own rebuttal report that it hopes will exonerate it from any blame, or at least point the finger elsewhere. Tenet was in charge of the Agency when the torture took place, so on one hand he would be a logical choice to craft a defense though on the other hand he would be keen to conceal any direct role on the part of himself and his accomplices, if only to preserve what remains of their reputations since there is no chance that any of them will be going to jail.

Let’s review who George Tenet is. He is a Greek American from Queens who never was an actual spy or analyst but made his way upwards in the intelligence community through a series of staff positions in Congress. As senior staffer for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he got to know many important politicians. George could talk the talk in an affable way with Bill Clinton, who eventually named him Director of Central Intelligence in 1997, and then went on to discuss baseball minutiae with George W Bush, cementing his tenure with the new Republican administration. Tenet also presided over 9/11, which was a bit of an embarrassment for the Agency. He later utterly destroyed his own credibility when he declared that making a case for war with Iraq was a “slam dunk” before misleading both the United Nations and Secretary of State Colin Powell about the threat posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Tenet later retired into some well remunerated directorships before writing a book called At the Center of the Storm which reportedly earned him an advance of $4 million while demonstrating clearly that he is a great American hero.

So George will be reviewing what George did when he was good ol’ George DCI. When I was with the government I once served in a foreign city where a new United States Consul General’s residence was being built. It was so poorly constructed that there were holes in the ceilings and water running down inside the walls but the State Department Admin officer who was responsible left post before the project was completed. He came back a year later, after complaints, as the inspector to review the project. He determined that everything was just fine. That is sort of like putting George in charge of investigating George, but if the ISIS thing continues to pick up steam everyone in the media and among the public will in any event forget that there was ever a Senate torture report. In intelligence slang, it will “be disappeared.”

Of English moral hysteria and student pranks

South Africa is apparently experiencing another tedious outburst of moral outrage about an innocuous case of “blackface” put on by two women students at the University of Pretoria for a 21st-birthday party.

I try to keep the mass media at a safe distance and therefore do not listen to radio, watch TV or buy any newspapers. The internet is a more clinical way of accessing information without background shrieks, unless it is YouTube. Yet, judging from responses on Twitter, there is some hullabaloo going on and the two students have now been “charged” by the university and will be subjected to a disciplinary hearing. They could face expulsion or some other form of punishment.

South Africa has slid so far down into an abyss of sadism, crime, murder and rape that it seems entirely risible that anyone should care about how white students make up their faces at a fancy-dress party. Yet, as one of the zealous anti-racists in Johannesburg, Gillian Schutte, once intoned in desperation: “Where is the outrage?”

Indeed. We need outrage to distract us from our abject failure as a society and even the increasing signs of a failed state in what used to be called the “Republic of South Africa”. Hardened and jaded by armed robberies, shootings in broad daylight, car hijackings, murder and torture of farmers, endemic corruption and the highest incidence of rape on the planet, the average South African – black or white – could hardly care about the latest student prank in Pretoria.

Yet the media and academic elite, in their slavish imitation of American political correctness, have to have their outrage and moral hysteria. There is something particularly British about moral hysteria which I suppose one could trace back to the time of Cromwell’s puritanical rule and which Fleet Street still has on tap whenever the United Kingdom has to rally public opinion behind another BP or Shell oil war somewhere.

It is certainly ironic that these days British moral hysteria is often projected towards Russia where once the rigours of communist zeal held sway. I was surprised to learn that anti-Semitism in the USSR carried the death penalty. As I do not know any Russian, I could not tell you which words merited a bullet in the head. Were it not for the fact that the death penalty had been abolished in 1994, one could well imagine how “racism” or politically incorrect utterances might soon become a capital offence in South Africa.

Thus South Africa gets its propensity for anti-racist outbursts from both Britain and the ex-USSR where many of the post-1994 leadership spent their formative years. Also, the Marxist-Leninism of the USSR has migrated to the USA in the form of so-called “cultural Marxism” which is the staple at most American universities, slavishly imitated by our local campuses. As Paul Craig Roberts put it recently in one of his sharply-worded commentaries on US-UK war-mongering:

If we are honest and have the strength to face reality, we will realize that the Soviet Union did not collapse. It simply moved, along with Mao and Pol Pot, to Washington and London.

In 1934 or so, shortly before the University of Pretoria completely abolished tuition in English in favour of Afrikaans, a Union Jack was burnt in front of the Old Arts Building by a young poet, WJP Erlank, who wrote under the pen name Eitemal. The English press was outraged, leading to his expulsion as a student but he instantly became an Afrikaner hero.

How the tables have been turned! It is certainly indicative of Afrikaner powerlessness that an English-speaking student, Thorne Godinho of the liberal DA’s youth movement DASO on the campus, was able to engineer the current outburst by publishing the photograph of the two Afrikaans girls dressed up as black servants on Facebook and get the university to punish them. If you want to know the meaning of “kowtow”, just watch today’s Afrikaans university administrators in action.

In more senses than one, Afrikaners find themselves completely at the mercy of latter-day zealots who are endlessly beating their quasi-religious precepts about race and racism into them. The slightest semantic or symbolic deviation is immediately punished and the guilty ones pilloried or subjected to a witch-hunt that will ruin their careers or “shame” them for years to come. It was the case during the so-called “Reitz 4” incident, as well as earlier this year during the photographing of a women’s residence initiation ceremony in Potchefstroom where for one split second and from a certain angle it could resemble a Nazi salute. Now the University of Pretoria is experiencing the same spate of orchestrated “outrage”.

Mr. Ponty Thuynsma, 76, in hospital. Photo: Lisa Hnatowicz, Beeld — Mr Ponty Thuynsma, 76, in hospital. Photo: Lisa Hnatowicz, Beeld

Over the past few days an elderly Afrikaner, Koos Jonker, was literally beaten to death by blacks near Ellisras. In a separate incident, Mr. Ponty Thuynsma was tortured with a hot iron and made to drink petrol in his home east of Pretoria. Thuynsma had to be admitted to the intensive care unit of the Wilgers hospital (see picture). However, these murderous, sadistic incidents pale into insignificance next to purely linguistic or symbolic transgressions of the dominant anti-racist theology committed by Afrikaans students.

In the USA, African Americans have been endowed with a special “minority” status akin to a sacerdotal class with special privileges protecting them against public criticism. As a special caste they also need to be treated with above-average respect. All of this dogma has been imported wholesale into South Africa, where blacks form a majority. Declaring the majority, who already has a monopoly on political power, in need of special protection and beyond criticism or occasional mocking quickly leads to a Soviet-style totalitarian society.

There is increasing censorship and after this latest “blackface” incident, some people think that the movies of comedian Leon Schuster should be banned as he often dons blackface and imitates black slang and speech patterns.

It is also beyond my comprehension how the South African “nation” as it has been defined, can be so criminal and morally depraved, yet at the same time given to an acute sensitivity or what we call in Afrikaans kleinserigheid, touchiness. Logically, the same rapist or murderer who finds torture acceptable conduct, would object to a white girl in “blackface” or someone using a term that is ethnically off-colour.

Of course, in the media and the universities there is an entire language and thought police force waiting to denounce anyone who deviates from their increasingly puritanical norms. By force of “outrage” and moral hysteria, they impose their contradictory values on us. Everyone who does not agree with them is vilified as a “Nazi”, “fascist”, “racist”, “white supremacist”, “sexist”, “homophobe” or other label within their impoverished catechism.

I almost wrote “secular catechism”. But there is nothing secular about it and its acolytes certainly do not subscribe to the values of the European Enlightenment. Tolerance and freedom of speech are not part of their belief system. It is a real religion with a fairly simple dogma and enough zealots to patrol the boundaries of our words and our actions. They do not countenance any form of heresy and at best will allow “sinners” to repent and submit to a programme of re-education.

Or “discipline”, that Leninist word for those deviating from the party line.

However, the strategic thrust of the current campaign around the Afrikaans universities is to oust the last remaining Afrikaners from those institutions so that they may be entirely controlled by English cultural Marxists. In its wisdom, the ANC government has decided that “South Africa needs more PhDs” and is throwing money at the problem. So apart from serving the “Red Church” as Albert Camus called it, one may also eject some hapless Afrikaner academic from his post amid rising incomes in the tertiary-education sector. Hence the witch-hunts against dissident students and lecturers at all the Afrikaans universities.

In the nineteenth century, anglicisation in South Africa was justified by British imperialism; now it is based on race and political correctness. Signs of “racism”, as defined, detract from the language and cultural rights of Afrikaners and even their access to tertiary education.

Until the final victory of Sovietised English over Afrikaans is trumpeted in South Africa, the semantic war is bound to intensify. We might as well all put on “war paint”; if that can still be said without causing offence to native Americans.

Zim crimes ruling a ‘landmark decision’

A court ruling that the SA Police Service (SAPS) can investigate alleged Zimbabwean crimes against humanity was described as a landmark decision on Wednesday.

“The court’s decision makes it clear that South Africa has a legal obligation to investigate the perpetrators of international crimes wherever those crimes were committed,” said Priti Patel, deputy director of the SA Litigation Centre (Salc).

Salc said the finding by the Supreme Court of Appeal earlier in the day was a landmark decision for local and international justice.

Salc and the Zimbabwe Exiles’ Forum (ZEF) brought the case to the South African courts.

Patel said the ruling confirmed that the dispensing of international justice was not restricted to international forums.

“It commits the South African authorities to play their part in ensuring that torturers and other international criminals are held accountable for their actions.”

Salc submitted a document to the National Prosecuting Authority in 2008 containing evidence of the alleged involvement of key Zimbabwean officials in perpetrating crimes against humanity in relation to the torture of opposition party members in March 2007.

They wanted the NPA and the SAPS to initiate an investigation into the alleged crimes. The NPA and the SAPS refused to investigate and Salc and the ZEF appealed to the high court. It found in Salc’s favour.

The SAPS and the NPA appealed against the finding to the Supreme Court of Appeal.

The SCA held that the SAPS was empowered to investigate alleged human rights violations in Zimbabwe.

The court dismissed the appeal of the national police commissioner and national director of public prosecutions in the matter.

The SCA rejected the police’s submission that crimes against humanity were deemed to have been committed only once the perpetrators set foot in South Africa.

The court held that the police could investigate, irrespective of whether the alleged perpetrators were in the country.

It further found that, under international law, the SAPS was obliged to initiate an investigation into the alleged offences.

The court found that, on the police’s own version, there was enough evidence to initiate an investigation. This included determining whether the alleged perpetrators were in South Africa.

“No doubt, in conducting that investigation, the police will consider issues such as the gathering of information in a manner that does not impinge on Zimbabwe’s sovereignty,” the judgment read.

The court said it could not tell the police how to investigate such issues. – Sapa

Appeal Court orders South Africa to investigate torture in Zimbabwe

South Africa’s top appeals court on Wednesday ordered the police to investigate Zimbabwean officials who are accused of carrying out torture in the neighbouring country.

The case was brought before the Supreme Court of Appeal following allegations of torture of opposition party members in March 2007 in Zimbabwe.

The allegations include charges of water-boarding and electrical shocks being applied to the genitalia of activists opposed to long-serving President Robert Mugabe.

“This decision is really significant and is very much a precedent,” said Priti Patel, the deputy director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC), which had filed the suit.

“The court’s decision makes it clear that South Africa has a legal obligation to investigate the perpetrators of international crimes wherever those crimes were committed,” she said.

According to SALC, the suspects visit South Africa, and therefore the government had an obligation to investigate the allegations.

The South African National Prosecuting Authority had claimed before the court that it was not required to investigate the alleged perpetrators because they were not presently in the country, but this was rejected by Judge Mohammed Navsa.

The NPA can still appeal the decision to the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest court.

Mugabe, who won elections this year to extend his 33 years at the helm of Zimbabwe, has denounced the attempts to investigate the 17 officials accused of torture as an assault on his country’s sovereignty.

An investigation could strain relations between the two countries. – dpa

Shongweni murder of elderly couple ‘nasty’

A Shongweni South Coast KZN journalist quotes the neighbour who discovered the tortured bodies of the elderly white couple John and Hester Noble: “What these people did was nasty. How can anyone torture old people like that?”

“Police reservist and neighbour of murdered couple John and Hester Noble, Dave Leslie, described the murder as the “worst [he] ever encountered”.

“Leslie, who owns wedding venue Stonehaven Castle in Shongweni, was the first person on the scene and said the community is shattered over the gruesome murder. He said he was called by neighbours to investigate after the couple didn’t answer the door when the gardener and the maid arrived for work.

“I forced my way inside the gate and when I got to the garage, John was lying there strangled with a wire.

“I then looked for his wife and found her in their bedroom strangled with her oxygen pipe.” Leslie said she had suffered from emphysema for months.

It is believed the intruders were in the house between 9pm and and 1am.”What these people did was nasty. How can anyone torture old people like that? If they wanted to rob them they should have tied them up, taken whatever they wanted and left,” Leslie said.

Leslie described the deceased as a loving couple who went out of their way to help others.”The couple lived alone. Their family is in Cape Town and Australia and we have notified them,” said Leslie.

Police recovered the couple’s abandoned car. No arrests have been made in connection with the attack and murder. – looklocal.co.za

‘Torture, murder of gay man not linked to other gay murders’

“I told (the court) that as a family we were prepared to forgive them. It will help give us closure,” said Anchen Jooste about the two men who had been sentenced for the brutal murder of her gay brother, Barney van Heerden.

Van Heerden was found strangled in his home in September 2011, his head wrapped in tape and his body beaten. This was after he had invited into his home three black men who were later accused of robbing and murdering him.

Van Heerden’s murder was the first case identified by The Star in what police believe is a series of killings of gay men in Gauteng and the Western Cape.

In November last year, police told the media about their theory that the killings were perpetrated by a gang targeting gay men.

But after a year of investigations, police have been unable to forensically link the trio to any of the other crimes.

Earlier this month, one of the men responsible for the crime, Maxwell Nyathi, turned State witness. He told the Johannesburg High Court sitting in Palm Ridge how he, Mthokozisi Ndlovu and Bheki Maseko had wangled their way into Van Heerden’s home before robbing him. They allegedly left him bound with duct tape around his face and head, causing his death.

Last week, Jooste, who had attended the entire trial, saw Ndlovu and Maseko each sentenced to 20 years for the murder and another 10 years – to be served concurrently – for the robbery. She said it was a cathartic experience, but that she would fight if the pair tried to apply for parole.

“They deserve at least 20 years for what they did,” she said.

Jooste said she approached the men after the sentencing, specifically to speak to Maseko, who had told the court that he had known Van Heerden for some time before the murder.

She asked him about how he had met her brother and what their relationship had been like. Apparently, Van Heerden had wanted to help Maseko to pay for his university tuition.

“His facial expression showed he had cared for Barney,” said Jooste, who said the emotion after this confrontation was overwhelming.

Judge George Maluleke’s judgment had upset Jooste.

The judge had said that an almost middle-aged man associating sexually with 22-year-olds was playing “a dangerous game”.

He also suggested the three men were prostitutes being solicited by Van Heerden, which Jooste said was unlikely.

But the grieving sister said she wanted the senseless murder to have meaning. She wants to donate one of Van Heerden’s properties to a gay rights organisation for use as a safe house for teenagers kicked out of their homes after coming out of the closet. – IOL

Forced to watch as partner bludgeoned by black attackers

Beth Bucher was forced to watch as her partner Dan Knight, a timber harvester, was bludgeoned to death by black attackers with hammers at their Underberg home this week.

In an exclusive interview, Bucher recounted the events of Thursday night when Knight, her partner of 18 years, was violently killed on the eve of his 56th birthday.

“They started beating Dan on the head with the hammers and as he cowered, one hit him hard on the back of the head with a monkey wrench… he groaned and slumped to the floor as they kicked him,” she said.

The incident has rocked the farming community at the foot of the Southern Drakensberg.

Bucher, 59, who has since moved to family in Durban, said they were about to have dinner when five men burst into their home.

“We were in the bad habit of eating dinner on our laps in the lounge and catching up with one another on the events of the day. As we were speaking five men wearing balaclavas and dark clothing burst through the back door which had been closed, but not locked.

“They ran through with their guns and some were carrying hammers, one of them was carrying a huge monkey wrench.”

She said that she was bound before they attacked Knight.

“They pulled Dan off the couch on to the floor and starting hitting him and kicking him. They pushed me back into an upright position and one held my head still and the other forced my eyes open and they made me watch.

“They started beating Dan on the head with the hammers and as he cowered, one hit him hard on the back of the head with a monkey wrench. He groaned and slumped to the floor and they began to kick him. They kept shouting at him demanding money. He couldn’t speak properly because they had broken his jaw and he mumbled that we didn’t keep cash, but he would write them a cheque for R20 000,” Bucher said.

“They hit him again in the face with the hammer reducing it to a bloody pulp,” she said.

As Knight took his last breaths, the intruders ransacked the house and took anything of value.

Bucher was locked in a bathroom after her assailants had tried to suffocate her with a surgical glove.

“I climbed out of a window and ran around to Dan. They had beaten him so badly that his face was unrecognisable and one had hit him so hard with a wrench that his skull was fractured and part of his brain matter had spilled on to the carpet where he lay. I put my hand near his mouth and there was no breath and I knew he was gone,” she said.

Bucher believed the men had been employees of one of Knight’s subcontractors.

“I recognised the gloves they were all wearing as the same that he bought for all of his staff. We had bought them two weeks before,” she said.

“I want them to suffer the same fate that Dan did. They must feel the pain that they inflicted on an innocent man. How people can do that to someone is unthinkable.

“Dan was an amazing man and there was no one who disliked him. He was loving and selfless and very protective of me and my children even though they were not his own. I don’t know what we will do without him,” she added.

A source close to the investigation confirmed that one of the vehicles that was stolen had been recovered. The driver fled when he was confronted by police.

Police spokesman Colonel Jay Naicker confirmed the incident but said no arrests had been made. – Sunday Tribune