Saturday Brunch

SUSPECT LINK aL QAEDA TO UK PLANE PLOT
This from AP…

ISLAMABAD: Detained terror suspects told interrogators that al Qaeda’s leaders approved a plot to blow up planes from Britain to the US, says a senior Pakistani intelligence agent.

REALLY? So just when I thought this whole ‘Terror Alert’ thing was just another convenient tug of the mass fear media lever to remove all those images of dead kids in Lebanon, out comes this claim of an al Qaeda connection from the Pakistani intelligence committee.

Am I missing something here?

One of the worst Human Rights abusers in the world, who routinely torture anyone and everyone, says that the men they have arrested have confessed an al Qaeda connection. Do you know what folks, if the Pakistani ISI had me tied down somewhere and were starting to stick things in me, I think I’d confess to just about anything including a fully fledged homosexual live in S&M relationship with Donald Rumsfeld. Hey, I’m not proud of that, but that’s what you get from tortured people, what you want to hear. The fact the Pakistani’s have tortured confessions out of people CAN NOT be counted as evidence of an al Qaeda link at all, what it shows is that almost a week into their inquiry into this ‘threat’ they only have the confessions of tortured men to bring us.

But don’t take my word on Pakistan’s human rights record, this is from their biggest ‘friend’ in the West, the US Department of State on Pakistan and torture….

“…The Constitution and the Penal Code prohibit torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; however, security forces tortured and abused persons, often to elicit confessions. Ordinary courts at times dismissed such confessions. Under provisions of the Anti-Terrorist Act, coerced confessions are admissible in Special Courts; however, police had not used this provision to obtain convictions.

Security force personnel continued to torture persons in custody throughout the country. Human rights organizations reported that methods used included beating; burning with cigarettes; whipping the soles of the feet; prolonged isolation; electric shock; denial of food or sleep; hanging upside down; and forced spreading of the legs with bar fetters. Officials from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) estimated 5,000 cases of police torture annually; the Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid Madadgaar Project recorded 1,101 cases of torture during the year. At times, torture resulted in death or serious injury (see Section 1.a.). For example, on January 2, police in Choti Zaireen village, Punjab, beat Saifullah Ghangle with a blunt object until he fell unconscious. Ghangla remained in a coma in Lahore at year's end. Five police officials were charged in the case but none were arrested. On November 21, Naddeem Latif died during torture in custody. Two police officials were arrested in the case and remained in detention at year's end. There were no new developments in the Rasheed Azam case from 2003, nor were any expected….”

….Now help me out folks, how come none of this was even mentioned in any of the news reports today on this al Qaeda link story? The mainstream media are accepting what they are being given without critically analyzing anything they are being fed.

Which is sad, because when we start to accept confessions from tortured men as justification for infringements of our civil liberties, that’s when we need an active media the most.