Glenn Greenwald has more on this story:
Earlier this week, the truly intrepid investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill published in The Nation one of the most significant political exposés of the year. Entitled "the CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia," the article documented that the CIA uses and effectively controls a secret prison in Mogadishu, where foreign nationals who are rendered off the streets of their countries (at the direction of the U.S.) are taken (along with Somali nationals) to be imprisoned with no due process and interrogated (by U.S. agents). Although Somali government agents technically operate the facility, that is an obvious ruse: "US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners" and are "there full-time," Scahill reported. On Democracy Now on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it has no knowledge of this secret prison.
This arrangement, as Scahill told me yesterday, is consistent with standard Obama administration practice: "they continue even the most controversial Bush terrorism policies by having some other government technically operate it so they can keep their fingerprints off it."
Indeed, the administration has even resorted to this playbook by using "torture by proxy" -- as we saw when the Kuwait government, with at least the complicity if not direction of the U.S., detained and beat American teenager Gulet Mohamed during interrogation sessions.
Just yesterday, a federal judge "reacted skeptically" to the Obama DOJ's demands for dismissal of a lawsuit (on secrecy grounds) brought by an American citizen imprisoned for four months in Africa, where "U.S. officials threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm unless he confessed to ties with al-Qaida in Somalia." [emphases added]
4 comments:
I believe all of it. Obama is just a progressive-seeming foil for the same government we've had for 30 years; nothing has changed. Did we even really kill Osama? Americans are fed a story to enhance "patriotism" and we buy it, lock stock and barrel, just like 911.
Higher levels of technology have allowed us to be even more duped.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to be an american, but there is a lot wrong in government, from the top down. When and how will it be fixed, who knows. For now we all live in a state of only being aware of what our government allows us to be aware of thru state controlled news outlets, some right, some left. I'm 45 years old and I imagine it will not be in my lifetime that this situation improves, unless the whole house of cards collapses, then someone will reorganize the world powers and the media, it may be an improvement or just another version of big government lies.
We teeter on the precipice now, but it will take years for the situation to degrade enough for truths to be told.
Off topic: Need a job? TEPCO's looking for some new talent.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/tepco170711.html
Someone is smoking some really good stuff here.
Where does this stuff come from? Who the heck is writing this?
Post a Comment