I like watching Star Trek – I particularly like Enterprise.
It’s fantasy of course – all those evil #alien# b’stards (especially in the second series) wanting to do so much harm. They’re such evil b’stards.
Star Trek is – of course – science-fiction, but could it be that such evil b’stards on Earth were doing same same[question mark].
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/10/jack-straw-torture-libyan-dissidents
Former foreign secretary named in legal documents concerning Gaddafi opponents held after MI6 tip-offs
Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and Sir Mark Allen, a former senior MI6 officer, have been cited as key defendants in court documents that describe in detail abuse meted out to Libyan dissidents and their families after being abducted and handed to Muammar Gaddafi‘s secret police with the help of British intelligence.
The documents accuse Straw of misleading MPs about Britain’s role in the rendition of two leading dissidents – Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi – and say MI6 must have known they risked being tortured. They say British intelligence officers provided Libyan interrogators with questions to ask their captives and themselves flew to Tripoli to interview the detainees in jail.
They recount how Belhaj was chained, hooded, and beaten; his pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, punched and bound; how Saadi was repeatedly assaulted; his wife, Ait Baaziz, hooded and ill-treated; and their children traumatised, as they were abducted and jailed in Libya following tip-offs by MI6 and the CIA in 2004.
Belhaj and Saadi were leading members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which opposed Gaddafi. Belhaj became head of the Tripoli Brigade during last year’s revolution and is a leading Libyan political figure. They are suing Straw, Allen, MI6, MI5, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and the attorney general, for damages for unlawful detention, conspiracy to injure, negligence, and abuse of public office. It is believed to be the first time such action has been taken against a former British foreign secretary.
The court documents, served by the law firm Leigh Day and the legal charity and human rights group, Reprieve, allege:
• MI6 alerted Libyan intelligence to the whereabouts of Belhaj and his family. They were held in Malaysia and Thailand and flown to Libya in a CIA plane.
• The CIA and MI6 co-operated in the rendition of Saadi and his family from Hong Kong to Libya via Thailand.
• Straw and his co-defendants knew that torture was endemic in Gaddafi’s Libya.
• British intelligence officers sent detailed questions to the Libyan authorities to be used in Belhaj and Saadi’s interrogations.
• Straw did not tell the truth when he told the Commons foreign affairs committee in 2005 that Britain was not involved in any rendition operations.
• Evidence by Sir John Scarlett, the head of MI6, to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) in 2006 that his agency did not assist in any rendition to countries other than the US or the detainee’s country of origin was incorrect and misleading. Bouchar is Moroccan, and Baaziz is Algerian, and neither had been to Libya before their abduction.
• Evidence by an MI5 witness to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission about the renditions was untrue and misleading.
• According to the US flight plan rendering Belhaj and his wife to Libya, the plane would refuel at the American base on the British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia. If it had done so it would contradict assurances made to MPs by the former foreign secretary David Miliband. Referring to the coalition government’s plans for secret courts, Khadidja al-Saadi, who was 12 when she was abducted, said: “I tried writing to Ken Clarke [former justice secretary] about my case – I told him that having a secret court judge my kidnap was the kind of thing Gaddafi would have done.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/22/uk-support-cia-rendition-flights
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Evidence gathered by The Rendition Project – an interactive website that maps thousands of rendition flights – highlight 1,622 flights in and out of the UK by aircraft now known to have been involved in the agency’s secret kidnap and detention programme.
While many of those flights may not have been involved in rendition operations, the researchers behind the project have drawn on testimony from detainees, Red Cross reports, courtroom evidence, flight records and invoices to show that at least 144 were entering the UK while suspected of being engaged in rendition operations.
While the CIA used UK airports for refuelling and overnight stopovers, there is no evidence that any landed in the UK with prisoners on board. This may suggest that the UK government denied permission for this. In some cases, it is unclear whether the airline companies would have been aware of the purpose of the flights.
Some 51 different UK airports were used by 84 different aircraft that have been linked by researchers to the rendition programme. Only the US and Canada were visited more frequently. The most used UK airport was Luton, followed by Glasgow Prestwick and Stansted. There were also flights in and out of RAF Northolt and RAF Brize Norton.
The CIA’s use of UK airports was first reported by the Guardian in September 2005. Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, dismissed the evidence, telling MPs in December that year that “unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States … there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition.”
Straw told the same MPs that media reports of UK involvement in the mistreatment of detainees were “in the realms of the fantastic”. Documentation subsequently disclosed in the high court in London showed that Straw had consigned British citizens to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba after they were detained in Afghanistan in 2001. …
“On behalf of the Labour Party, I want to thank him for his nearly 35 years service as an MP, his achievements in government and his eloquence and wisdom.”
He added: “He has been a great friend and loyal supporter to me during my time as leader. It is a measure of the man that I know the same would have been said by the six predecessors of mine under whom he served. He is Labour through and through, and always displayed this in his words and deeds.
“He will be sorely missed but I know he will continue to serve our country in many different ways.”
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/25/leaked-memos-gchq-mass-surveillance-secret-snowden
The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a “damaging public debate” on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes, classified internal documents reveal.
Memos contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the agency’s long fight against making intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately defeated by the UK’s intelligence community.
Foremost among the reasons was a desire to minimise the potential for challenges against the agency’s large-scale interception programmes, rather than any intrinsic threat to security, the documents show.
The papers also reveal that:
• GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone “well beyond” what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies’ mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.
• GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissable in court.
• GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with “press handling”, including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24674247
The salary bill for ministers’ special advisers has risen by £1m in the last year, according to official figures.
So-called “Spads” are appointed by ministers to provide political advice over and above the impartial work carried out by civil servants.
The Cabinet Office put the increase down to the “unusual” pressures caused by coalition government.
But Labour said David Cameron’s pre-election promise to limit the number of special advisers was in “tatters”.
A leap from 85 to 98 in the number of special advisers – who work directly to ministers and often speak for them – contributed to a 16% rise in the total wage bill in 2012-13.
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Cameron today lied about losing count of terrorist plots foiled by UK intelligence agencies spying on us and that Snowden and the Guardian had put so many lives in danger and made it so much harder to prevent terrrorists blowing up our familes. What bullshit, eh?
Speaking at a press conference in Brussels on Friday afternoon, the prime minister said the information leaked by Edward Snowden and published by The Guardian and other newspapers had damaged national security and endangered the lives of the public.
He said the leaks had made it “a lot more difficult to keep our countries and our people safe” from terrorists who “want to blow up our families”.
Cameron said as prime minister he could not afford to have a “la-di-da, airy-fairy” view of the work of the intelligence agencies and had “lost count of the plots” that MI5, MI6 and GCHQ had foiled.
However the prime minister repeatedly dodged questions about what Britain did or did not know about the intelligence activities of the United States, including accusations that the Americans had tapped German chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
The airy-fairy is a reference to blind old Fascist cnut Blunkett’s shortsighted Fascist ranting here when he wanted to lock people up indefinitely without that little formality of an airy-fairy trial.
As far as I can tell the “la-di-da” is original Cameron. He may have been inspired by television for infants. La-la Da-da.
I’ll have to see if I can dig something out about the UK government spying on anti-war protesters [later correction: protesters should read activists] and inciting their murder, etc. I’ve been meaning to look for it for a while.
La-la Cameron. La-la