Civil Liberties - new material (60)
01 May 2005
Snakes, beatings, sexual assaults; UK resident's shocking testimony of life in Guantanamo, Severin Carrell. Independent on Sunday 24.4.05, p4. This account is based on a document by Omar Deghayes, one of at least five British residents being held at the US "gulag" at Guantanamo Bay with the approval of the British government. His account describes repeated beatings and torture with electric shocks when detained in Pakistan and beatings (one of which caused him to be blinded in one eye) and the withdrawal of food, light and heat as coercive measures, in Guantanamo. Deghayes says that British intelligence officers interrogated him while he was held in Pakistan, adding to reports from other British Guantanamo detainees of MI5/MI6 collusion with the US abductors.
From My Lai to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh interviewed by Andrew Burgin and Matthew Cookson. Socialist Worker 4.6.05, pp.8-9. Hersh, who in 1968 exposed the US massacre at My Lai and in 2004 revealed the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, discusses the "cult" that has taken control in the US and expresses his fears for the future. He also touches on US "operations in north Africa" and the "democracy movement in the former central Soviet republics". On the invasion of Iraq he says: "This is a war against Muslims...It's a strategic war in which we have very little concept of what we're doing. We don't have an endgame. My country has declared war on people who are non-citizens. They are constantly diminishing the rights of non-citizens. They can be kicked out of the country for the most trivial offence."
Informe 2004, Movemento Polos Dereitos Civís, pp.101, available from: Rúa Miguel Ferro Caaveiro, 10, Santiago de Compostela 15707, Spain; and mpdc@movemento.org. This annual report (in Galician) on the activities of the MovementoPpolos Dereitos Civís (MPDC, Movement for Civil Rights) includes an overview of the association's activities in relation to civil rights in the north-western province of Galicia. It includes sections about freedom of information and censorship at a local level and especially in the cases of the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker (about which the MPDC filed a complaint before the European Parliament) and the 11 March 2004 bombings in Madrid, as well as systematically reporting developments in different fields of its activity, including privacy, political and trade union activity, education, linguistic rights, health, prisons and the environment. An in-depth assessment of the activities of the Galician political and judicial authorities, as well as the ombudsman, is included, with special reference to the complaints filed before these bodies by the MPDC (on issues such as illegal or disproportionate interventions against demonstrators by police officers, or the legality of video-surveillance cameras installed in the centre of Santiago de Compostela).
Africa's new best friends: the US and Britain are putting the multinational corporations that created poverty in charge of its relief, George Monbiot. The Guardian, 5.7.05. Timed to coincide with the G8 summit Monbiot discusses the "new consensus [that] denies that there's a conflict between ending poverty and business as usual" and maintains that "Justice...can be achieved without confronting power." He considers the roles of the Corporate Council on Africa ("the lobby group representing big US corporations with interests in Africa: Halliburton, Exxon Mobile, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Starbucks, Raytheon, Microsoft, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup and others") and a similar organisation in the UK, the Business Action for Africa group which held a summit in July. It was chaired by the head of Anglo-American, and speakers included executives from Shell, British American Tobacco, Standard Chartered Bank and De Beers. Monbiot concludes: "At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands. It seems to me th