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"Fabricating Terrorism:" Victims of UK Injustice - by Stephen Lendman
Launched in October 2003, Cageprisoners is a human rights organization dedicated to raising the "awareness of the plight of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay" and other War on Terror victims. As a "comprehensive resource," six words explain its mission: "education, campaign, support, motivation, co-operation (and) prevention" for its efforts to educate the public, campaign for Guantanamo and other detainee repatriations or their asylum, and have prisoner rights guaranteed under international law, including humane treatment not to be:
-- tortured;
-- indefinitely detained;
-- disappeared; or
-- denied proper legal representation, due process, judicial fairness, and access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), medical personnel and families.
In April 2009, its report titled, "Fabricating Terrorism II: British Complicity in renditions and torture" followed its same-titled 2006 report. Part I covered 13 cases with evidence based on detainee testimonies, interviews with security service officials, and other research.
Part II updated it (including 16 other cases - 29 in all), focusing on Britain's claim to be a human rights leader. Stating it ratified the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) in 2003, its practices belie its commitment.
Prior to 9/11, Britain became complicit in America's War on Terror, and the worst of its crimes, including renouncing the rule of law, due process, and judicial fairness in persecuting innocent people, subjecting them to barbaric torture, other abuses, and long internments.
Muslims were targets of choice for their faith, ethnicity, prominence, activism, and at times charity. They've been singled out, hunted down, rounded up, held in detention, kept in isolation, denied bail, restricted in their right to counsel, tried on secret evidence and bogus charges, convicted in sham proceedings, then incarcerated as political prisoners for practicing Islam at the wrong time in America and Britain.
Targets were kidnapped, illegally detained, then extrajudicially disappeared to black sites, called extraordinary or irregular rendition, or the practice of forcibly transferring someone from one nation to another. The term is undefined in law.
Sourcewatch calls it "transferring or flying captured terrorist suspects from one country to another for detention and interrogation without the benefit of formal legal proceedings."
Others say it's "torture by proxy" in secret US or foreign black sites where anything goes and commonly does. According to the ACLU, current policies trace back to the Clinton administration, then were broadly expanded post-9/11 to Guantanamo, Bagram, Afghanistan, and facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, prison ships, and elsewhere. According to former CIA agent Robert Baer:
"If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. It you want someone to disappear - never to see them again - you send them to Egypt."
In 2005, the British All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition (APPG) was established to investigate charges of UK involvement, because "more likely than not (targets) may be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." Made up of a "cross party grouping of MPs and Peers from the British parliament," it calls the practice:
"a process by which a detainee is transferred from one state to another, outside normal legal processes (where they're held in) secret detention....for the purposes of interrogation, often in circumstances where they face a real risk of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment."
