Tuesday - May 23, 2006

Amnesia Attacks Britain

Ahhh, it does my heart good to see Amnesia International attacking sombody else besides the US. It’s too bad they decided to attack Britain though. Why do these jerks at AI persist in annoying the good guys while ignoring the real asshats like Cuba, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Indonesia, North Korea, etc.? All they’re accomplishing is making a nuisance out of themselves. Why don’t they go to North Korea and demonstrate outside Kim Jung Il’s residence. I’m sure “Dear Leader” will be glad to hear their complaints. After all, he’s “so ronery” ....

Amnesty International Attacks UK Over Torture
_{May 23, 2006}

(BBC)—The UK has damaged fundamental human rights by trying to undermine the ban on torture and the independence of judges, says Amnesty International. The group’s annual report attacks the government for trying to deport terror suspects to nations which use torture. And it welcomes a Lords ruling that evidence that might have been obtained by torture cannot be used in UK courts.

Amnesty’s Irene Khan said, of using torture to fight terrorism: “You cannot extinguish fire with petrol.” The governments says it does not use evidence it knows or suspects has been obtained through torture overseas. But Amnesty fought a court battle last year over how far the government must go to show improper methods had not been used.

Kate Allen, Amnesty’s UK director, said the world’s leading democracies would surrender the moral high ground if they entertained the use of torture or “outsourced” torture as the Americans were doing. Amnesty director Ms Khan attacked the UK for signing deals with countries such as Jordan, Libya and Lebanon to deport terror suspects without fear they would be tortured or killed.

She asked people to look at the human rights records of such countries and decide “whether these diplomatic assurances are worth the paper they are written on”. Amnesty is pressing the US to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and reveal the details of its secret prison camps elsewhere. It also wants European Union nations to do more to investigate claims that the CIA is flying suspects through their airspace to countries where they could be tortured.

The Amnesty report, which covers 150 countries, attacks the “duplicity and double speak” of the war against terror. The campaign is also proving a distraction from key human rights abuses, it claims. In its verdict on the UK, the report says: “The government continued to erode fundamental human rights, the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, including by persisting with attempts to undermine the ban on torture at home and abroad...”

Ministers have also tried to introduce measures which are odds with human rights law at home and internationally, it says. Counter-terror measures led to serious human rights violations, it argues, and there was widespread concern about the impact of these measures on Muslims and other minority communities. The report also says the UK has broken human rights laws through its role in detaining 10,000 people without charge in Iraq.

UK officials sat with US and Iraqi officials on the boards which review the cases of all those interned by multi-national forces in Iraq. Amnesty says most of the people are detained by US troops but at the end of October the UK was itself holding 33 “security internees” without charge or trial.

- More nail-biting from Amnesia International at the BBC...

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/23/2006 at 02:03 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Stoopid-People •  
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