Monday, February 13, 2006

The King supports US torture: Morocco is the CIA’s dustbin

MOROCCO IS ONE OF AMERICA’S PRINCIPAL PARTNERS IN THE SECRET “RENDITION” PROGRAMME

(THE SAME GOES FOR THE CRIMINAL 'CHRISTIAN' NEOCON 'GOVERNMENT' OF THE NETHERLANDS)

Revealed: the terror prison US is helping build in Morocco

Tom Walker Rabat and Sarah Baxter - The Sunday Times February 12, 2006

THE United States is helping Morocco to build a new interrogation and detention facility for Al-Qaeda suspects near its capital, Rabat, according to western intelligence sources.

The sources confirmed last week that building was under way at Ain Aouda, above a wooded gorge south of Rabat’s diplomatic district. Locals said they had often seen American vehicles with diplomatic plates in the area.

The construction of the new compound, run by the Direction de la Securité du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan secret police, adds to a substantial body of evidence that Morocco is one of America’s principal partners in the secret “rendition” programme in which the CIA flies prisoners to third countries for interrogation.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups critical of the policy have compiled dossiers detailing the detention and apparent torture of radical Islamists at the DST’s current headquarters, at Temara, near Rabat.

A recent inquiry into rendition by the Council of Europe, led by Dick Marty, the Swiss MP, highlighted a pattern of flights between Washington, Guantanamo Bay and Rabat’s military airport at Sale.

[Google: American "torture flights" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/c7pdu]

French intelligence and diplomatic sources said the most recent such flight was in the first week in December, when four suspects were seen being led blindfolded and handcuffed from a Boeing 737 at Sale and transferred into a fleet of American vehicles.

Morocco’s membership of a so-called “coalition of the willing” - [Coalition of the Killing - HR] - has led to tension within the kingdom, where Mohammed VI, 42, is trying to suppress a wave of Islamic fundamentalism, most powerfully expressed in the Casablanca bombings of May 2003, in which 12 suicide bombers — all of them Moroccan — killed more than 40 people.

More than 3,000 suspected radical Islamists have been arrested since, but some of the country’s higher-profile Al-Qaeda sympathisers have been released, including Abdallah Tabarak, a former bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden.

While much of the media is said to have been infiltrated by the DST, a few publications that dare to question official policy have accused the government of allowing Morocco to become “the CIA’s dustbin”.

Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary — who described Morocco and Tunisia* yesterday as “long-standing friends and constructive partners” in the fight against terrorism — is due to visit today. Among the topics expected to be discussed with officials is the opening of a new FBI office in Morocco.



Last Friday the country witnessed its first protests against the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. They were highly organised and controlled but created a sense of apprehension in the capital before Rumsfeld’s talks.

Morocco has an estimated 30,000 policemen for a population of 30m and many people seem scared of speaking to strangers. A Sunday Times reporter was photographed by men with mobile phone cameras at least three times last week but was never directly challenged.

“It’s like a web — they let you spin away and like that they believe they get more information,” said the French intelligence source.

The presence of minders made asking questions around Ain Aouda almost impossible, but at a restaurant adjoining a newly built mosque nearby, elderly men supping mint tea while they watched the African Nations Cup were clearly angry about the project.

“We’ve seen nothing but Americans for five months,” complained one wizened figure before being told by his friends to be quiet.

There are no public access roads leading to the site, which can be seen at the moment only from a bend above the Korifla Gorge. The secluded forest setting is similar to that of Temara, 10 miles to the north.

Moroccan officials refused to make any comment about Ain Aouda. A spokeswoman for the American embassy said she had no information about the new building. - [Lies! - HR]

Temara itself already has a fearsome reputation among former inmates. Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian-born Briton later sent to Guantanamo Bay, told Amnesty International that interrogators there cut his chest and penis when he refused to answer questions.

Mohammed said he was held at Temara for 18 months before being flown to another “black prison” in Afghanistan in January 2004, and then on to Guantanamo Bay.

It is not clear how many suspects are being questioned in Morocco. The French intelligence source said the four brought to the country in December were all believed to be “high profile” but gave no further details.

Tom Walker Rabat and Sarah Baxter

[andend] - 2006 Times Newspapers - Url.: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2036185,00.html

* Tunisia - Related: I lived and worked there as a foreign correspondent from Nov. 1st, 1987, untill being declared 'persona non grata' and immediately forced to leave the country in 1996.

A week after I arrived, on 7 November 1987, coup general and president Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, the ruler of Tunisia, with american help took the power from old and ailing president Bourguiba. The country which is an american colony, had, and apparently still has, the biggest secret Middle East 'CIA Arabic training center' in coastal Sidi Bou Said, 17 kilometers from the capital Tunis. The 'school' is next door to the US ambassadors residence, and can be seen from the terrace during receptions. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/585dc

But the people don't like the regime of this military police state.

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

* "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992. - And here's why: 'George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography' - by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin - Chapter - II - The Hitler Project - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/57qxk

* What happened on 9/11? - We have been lied to! The PNAC racket killed the people. - What is happening to our world? - February 16-17, 2006 - Two workshops on 9/11 with professor Steven Jones (BYU) - at Arizona State University - More information on 9/11 at Url.: http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/

* The Top Ten American War Criminals Living Freely Today - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/dvudx

HR

RSF - Reporters Without Borders Caught with Their Pants Down

REPORTERS WITHOUT BRITCHES:

Reporters Without Borders Caught with Their Pants Down

ZNet - by Carolina Cositore

What’s in a name?

Feb. 12, 2006 - The assumption of the cachet Reporters Without Borders twenty years ago, in conscious parody of the then above reproach international humanitarian Doctors Without Borders, certainly lent Robert Menard’s group more  than a touch of automatic respectability from the get-go.
 
The appellation gave the group acceptance as an unbiased investigative human rights organization defending journalists all over the world. When honest reporting can bring threats, attacks, prison terms, and even death, such an organization is badly needed. Sadly, the true nature of Reporters sans frontières (RSF=French acronym) is far otherwise.

UNBIASED? NON-POLITICALLY AFFILIATED?

IGNORING  ANY AND ALL ANTI-JOURNALIST ACTIVITIES IN AREAS ALLIED WITH THE US

RSF does report on some discrimination against journalists, but in a very selective way, that is, targeting nations on the US State Department "hit list": Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc., while ignoring  any and all anti-journalist activities in areas allied with the US, and of course, never in the US itself.

[In The Netherlands only one 'journalists association' (NVJ) is allowed, and the neocons have formed it to fully support 'Reporters without Borders' and especially their CIA/Cuba subversions - This Dutch NVJ group of main$tream collaborators - they are NO journalists - has killed nearly all honest journalism in Holland. Most of them will end up in jail - because of their crimes against humanity - when laws are valid again in the country- HR]
 
For three examples of many to give the idea: RSF does not defend reporters in the Phillippines, which is the second deadliest nation for journalists after Iraq but is a strong ally of the US military. RSF completely ignores Mumia abu Jamal, a US reporter on death row and the object of support from "other" human rights organizations all over the globe. And in a recent interview, despite his very close ties with the Cuban-American community in Miami, RSF director Robert Menard claimed to be completely "unfamiliar" with the case of the Cuban Five. The Five, one of whom is a Cuban journalist, are serving life sentences in US prisons for infiltrating these Miami groups to prevent terrorist attacks on their homeland.1

MERCENARIES PAID TO WRITE AS DICTATED BY THE RSF

This denial ties into the major activity (time, money and propaganda campaigns) of RSF, which is defaming the Cuban Revolution, trying to prevent European tourists from visiting the Island, and serving as a news agency and defender for "dissident reporters". The latter, according to Nestor Baguer - founder of the Independent Cuban Journalist Association, their reporter of longest duration, and the main Cuban representative of RSF, who later revealed himself as a Cuban security agent - were "neither journalists nor dissidents"2, but mercenaries paid to write as dictated by the RSF, the US Interest Section in Havana, and Florida-based hate groups.
 
RSF, in Menard’s own words in an interview in 2000, has always considered Cuba the priority in Latin America, even giving the country a lower ranking on its press freedom index than countries where journalists routinely have been killed, such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico.3

A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH VENEZUELAN MULTI-MILLIONAIRE MEDIA GIANT GUSTAVO CISNEROS

Although incurious about the fate of journalists in Venezuela before President Hugo Chavez, RSF was very quick to support the coup d’etat against him, of course it had to be as the coup was very brief. Menard’s group has since been outspoken against what it alleges to be anti-freedom of the press legislation in Venezuela, without evidently having read said legislation, and while incidently having a close relationship with Venezuelan multi-millionaire media giant Gustavo Cisneros.
 
Haiti is another example of the bias of this theoretically unbiased group. Menard denounced supposed "acts of repression" against local independent media under Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, while completely failing to notice aggressions by anti-government groups against journalists of Radio Solidarité and Radio Ginen.
 
Even in Iraq, where RSF does report deaths and kidnaping of journalists by insurgents, its "investigation" and subsequent whitewashing of the culpability of the US military in the death of the Spanish reporter-cameraman in the infamous Palestine Hotel attack outraged his family. The US tank operator admitted firing under orders from superiors, but RSF, whose interviewer was a personal friend of the officer giving the order, found the  shots were fired by "persons unknown". The journalist’s family asked RSF to withdraw from the case; a request it ignored.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

While Robert Menard may be personally obsessed with Cuba and other countries that the US frowns upon, he is certainly paid well for this obsession. As Jean-Guy Allard has admirably researched in detail, RSF receives the preponderance of its funding from organizations corresponding with the CIA, filtered directly or indirectly, such as USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, the US Interest Section in Havana, and Cuban-American anti-Cuba groups in Miami.4
 
Menard has also finally admitted his bond with Nancy Pérez Crespo, operator of the rabid anti-Cuba Radio Mambí in Miami, who receives funds from said US establishments.
 
World journalists are in dire need of a true unbiased human rights organization that will protect them no matter where they are attacked or by whom:

UNFORTUNATELY REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS IS NOT THAT ORGANIZATION.

CAROLINA COSITORE

[andend] - Story Url.: http://tinyurl.com/bhmdo

Footnotes:

1 Excellent source of information on Cuban Five at www.freethefive.org
2  Elizalde, Rosa Miriam and Baez, Luis, Los Disidentes,Editora Politica, La Habana, 2003.
3 Barahona, Diana, "Cuba’s Economy, Reporters Without Borders Unmasked", Counterpunch, www.counterpunch.org, 2005
4 Allard, Jean-Guy, Por Qué Reporteros sin Fronteras se ensaña con Cuba - El dossier Robert Ménard, Lanctot, Quebec, 2005.

Very related:

HR & REPORTERS WITHOUT HONOUR - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/7gz95

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

* "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992. - And here's why: 'George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography' - by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin - Chapter - II - The Hitler Project - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/57qxk

* The fake Dutch 'journalists Association' NVJ is one of those: Who first of all start shouting about 'conspiracy theory' and 'paranoïa' or similar, are always the evil INFORMANTS The paid INFILTRATORS which are afraid of being disclosed. They are the real Judas's - like the CIA/NED financed 'Reporters without Borders' - working for treacherous 'masters' - They are the 'Quislings' that must go to jail - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/clcjn

* P.M. - Compliant media - Hitler: An Officer and a Gentleman? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/3eepa

* 'Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one' — A.J. Liebling - The merciless engine of propaganda has been turned on: The infamous US 'Lie Factory' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8ncal

* Independent & FREE press in Kansas - Pls. read the 'Fightin' Cock Flyer' - Url.: http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/

* Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE WERE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm ] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

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Muslim Radical Defends Freedom of Speech, Deplores Europe’s Hypocrisy

Via the Url. in the title the informative links in the original story can be used.

HR question: WHAT HAPPENED TO:

"DO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO; AS LONG AS YOU DON'T HURT ANYBODY?

Muslim Radical Defends Freedom of Speech, Deplores Europe’s Hypocrisy
[Robert Fisk: Don't Be Fooled, This Isn't an Issue of Islam versus Secularism.]*

by Paul Belien, Editor of 'The Brussels Journal'

The only trouble with the Europeans' defence of freedom of speech is the fundamental hypocrisy of secular Western Europe. That is the opinion of Dyab Abu Jahjah, the Brussels-based leader of the Arab-European League. On his website he writes:

''I do not believe in red lines, and I do not believe that anything should be above the freedom of human expression. I know that most Arabs and Muslims would disagree with me on this point, but this is not what bothers me, what bothers me is that most Europeans don't realize that they also disagree with me.

Europeans think that freedom of speech is guaranteed in Europe, and that they are defending it against Islamic pressure. This is a view that is widely propagated and defended by groups from across the political spectrum. Reality, however, presents us Muslims living in Europe with another experience. Muslims and others in Europe can not say everything they often want to say and they risk being arrested and prosecuted if they do. Muslims and other religious people can not express their disgust from homosexuality and clearly state that they believe it's a sickness and a deviation without being persecuted for being homophobic.''

Mr Jahjah certainly has a point here. Not only Muslims are not allowed to voice all their opinions. Only last week the French parliamentarian Christian Vanneste was sentenced in court to a heavy fine because he had stated that "homosexual behaviour endangers the survival of humanity" and that "heterosexuality is morally superior to homosexuality." Earlier last month a majority in the European Parliament called for sanctions against Poland and the Baltic states because their governments are said to be "homophobic."

In the Netherlands access to certain jobs in the civil service is effectively denied to anyone religious (be it Christian or Muslim) who refuses to participate in concluding same-sex marriages. - [HR: in The Netherlands - with a political party in the neocons abiding Parliament, still refusing women equal rights - the constitutionally guaranteed 'Freedom of Speech' has become non-existent at present, and all honest and thus critical journalists/reporters are either 'blacklisted' or dead.] - And the EU wants to force doctors to perform abortions and euthanasia because, it says, the right to conscientious objection is not "unlimited."

A Moroccan sent us a note this morning about the Danish cartoon affair:

''This kind of things won't really be bad for the islam because when something is good right and honest it will go on no matter what, even if they keep fighting it more and more. I think that Muslim people gave to that event more than it should. They could just ignore that kind of thing because it's not really official first and second because it's said by a country that has all kind of bad things (homosexuality/living without any goal in life and afterlife). But I'm happy that this kind of thing happened after all because that will just let people hear and know more about who is mohammed and what did he did to humanity and that he offered his life to serve Allah. He was completly saint and that's the same for all people that believe in him and follow his road. Life for them is only a station that we have to wait in it a bit till going to the other side and go on.''[ ]

Yesterday, a Turkish Muslim wrote us:

''I am Muslim and proud of being muslim. Holly Mohammed is one side; and We never never use any bad word against to Holly Jesus Christ. Because of We accept him as a Holly prophet too. So Please look at the Denmark. They shows that Mohammed married many times. This not true. One thing is true and all the world knows that a man can marry with a man in Denmark, Holland and Norway. They lost their heart and mind.'' [ ]

In their remarks these Muslims (whether they are representative for the majority of Muslims is another matter) are putting their finger on what the American theologian George Weigel calls "Europe's problem. Europe is dying because it has lost the cult at the heart of its culture. As a result "a venerable culture is being effaced by a vacuous secularism" (Niall Ferguson) while at the same time the religious vacuum left by the demise, or suicide, of Christianity is being filled by another religion ‚ with religious prohibitions, such as the taboo on depicting Muhammad, that are totally alien to Western civilization.

Americans watch in amazement* at what is happening in Europe today, but Western civilization, with its freedom of expression, has long died on the Eastern side of the Atlantic. One of the few freedoms left in Western Europe was the freedom to mock religion. Now that this freedom is under attack from Muslim fanatics we realize that this is not the first barrier that needs defending against totalitarians, but in fact the last remaining one. The other barriers have all been abandoned ‚ without a fight.

In contemporary Germany homeschooling Baptists lose parental authority over their children and are jailed on the basis of a bill introduced by Adolf Hitler in 1938. In the Netherlands Reader's Digest's "European of the Year" Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants all religious schools abolished and demands the defunding of a Calvinist party because this party does not put forward women candidates for election. In Finland the government is toying with the idea to no longer issue permits for private schools. In Belgium the country's largest party was effectively banned by the Supreme Court in November 2004 for publishing texts which, though the court admitted they were not necessarily untrue, were said to have been published with "an intention to contribute to a campaign of hatred."

THE RIGHT TO TELL TRUTHS

We are all Danes now, defending the right to satire. But the right of parents to educate their own children according to their own beliefs has long disappeared. So has the right to elect the politicians one wants and the right to tell truths when the government has decided that you are telling them with a wrong "intention." And gone also is the right not to have to participate in actions that are against one's conscience.

In America people are free to say and think whatever they like, however offensive this may be to others. In Europe this right no longer exists. As Mr Jahjah says:

People in Europe are not allowed to do a free historical examination of the Second World War and the holocaust and freely express an opinion on it that is different than the dominating dogmatic line. Any attempt to have deviant historical examination of the holocaust will earn you the title of revisionist, anti-Semite and a jail sentence.

He continues with an anti-Jewish diatribe, before concluding:

Yes Arabs and Muslims are uptight when you touch their religious and national symbols, but Europe had made of political correctness and the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion and is even more uptight when you touch that. Europeans might not respect their flags, and they might laugh with Jesus and Mary but if you touch their new religious symbols, they will bombard you with indignation and persecute you in the best European inquisition tradition.

I am for the absolute freedom of speech everywhere, and that's why I call upon every free sole among Arabs to use the Danish flag as a substitute for toilet paper. To illustrate every wall with graffiti making fun of everything Europe holds as holy: dancing rabbis on the carcasses of Palestinian children, hoax gas-chambers built in Hollywood in 1946 with Steven Spielberg's approval stamp, and Aids spreading fagots. Let us defend the absolute freedom of speech altogether, wouldn't that be a noble cause?

Mr Jahjah's attacks on the Jews are repulsive. He is a Muslim radical, whom we quoted during last November's riots in France as saying:

"We [Muslim youths in Europe] reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don't believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I'm in my country, not the country of the [Westerners]."

But he asks a question one should ponder: Is it possible to defend freedom of speech if one does not restore "absolute freedom of speech altogether?" As the great 20th century American journalist H.L. Mencken (who by the way was very critical of religion) said:

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

Europe failed to stop oppression at the beginning. French and German Google are censored to exclude American white supremacist websites such as American Renaissance (look here for a comparison between google.com, google.fr and google.de).

The Belgian revisionist Siegfried Verbeke has spent time in jail in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, where he is now awaiting trial for denying Hitler's crimes.

How consistent is this when the same judicial authorities are applying Hitler's laws to jail Christian parents?

Mr Jahjah would call it hypocrisy.

PAUL BELIEN

[andend] - Paul Belien is the editor of The Brussels Journal. Paul can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

Feb. 3, 2006 - This page printed from Url.: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/brussels020306.htm

RELATED:

FPF: There's NO 'Freedom of Speech' in the US or it's colonies either - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/bm2yj

ROBERT FISK ''Those Danish Cartoons - Don't Be Fooled: This Isn't an Issue of Islam versus Secularism.'' - Url.: http://counterpunch.org/fisk02062006.html

Top US Journalists Speak on 9/11 - Internet and Media Censorship - Url.: http://rense.com/general69/top.htm

Rev. Ted Pike: ''Crackdown on holocaust reductionists: omen of coming persecution of christians.'' - Url.:
http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/crackdown.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

* "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992. - And here's why: 'George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography' - by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin - Chapter - II - The Hitler Project - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/57qxk

* P.M. - Compliant media - Hitler: An Officer and a Gentleman? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/3eepa

* "People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back." - 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9cyeq

* 'Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one' — A.J. Liebling - The merciless engine of propaganda has been turned on: the infamous US 'Lie Factory' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8ncal

* Independent & FREE press in Kansas: Do read the 'Fightin' Cock Flyer'! - Url.: http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/

* Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE WERE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm ] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

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