12 thoughts on “CIA, MI6 Guilty in Two Extraordinary Rendition Cases – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. See UK Supreme Court Rejects Jack Goldsmith’s Interpretation of GC IV . . . Rahmatullah continues to be detained by the U.S. — illegally, as the U.K.’s highest court has now made clear.

  2. Thank you, Haver. Good opinion, web-site new to me.

    Isn’t it odd that governments go to great trouble (or so it seems) to negotiate EXTRADITION treaties between themselves which involve the LEGAL (that is, court-tinged or law-tinged) removal of people from one country to another and then turn it all on its head with RENDITION, a system of out-and-out kidnapping or kidnapping-with-permission-of-dark-unsupervised-agencies-without-names. The nations (including or especially USA and UK) which used to criticize the human-rights “violations” of USSR and Nazi Germany are now happily joining those (unfairly, it now seems) criticized nations (nations which were only looking after their own “security” after all! in the way now enthusiastically adopted by the USA and UK).

    1. I am guessing that extradition requires a plausible charge of some kind, some basis for detaining and extraditing. Extraordinary rendition is aimed at obtaining plausible charges through “interrogation.” Thereupon, I suppose, the detainee is charged, extradited (in effect) and tried, or freed or disappeared. Without countervailing power, nations like people do anything they want, witness Israel, the US, or the UK. I think the instability in the world in our time is due, in part, to the absence of any balance of power.

      1. Re: I am guessing that extradition requires a plausible charge of some kind, some basis for detaining and extraditing.

        The Geneva Conventions have been universally ratified and declared to be customary law that is binding on non-signatories. States can’t extradite individuals during an armed conflict on the territory of another High Contracting Party. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention provides that:

        Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.

        1. Interesting. So, Khaled al Masri could not have been extradited, as such. However, if he were charged with a crime, he could be tried. Again, extraordinary rendition perhaps aims at uncovering charges. I’m just trying to understand this stuff.

    2. I’m shocked that no one else has replied to Pabelmont’s insinuated claim that the US and UK violate human rights like Ussr and Nazi-Germany used to do.

      He even puts “violations” in inverted commas as if to say that the USSR and Nazi-Germany didn’t really violate human rights but there is only a sort of claim to this.

      The comparison is disgusting – violating on a small scale, while at war, is in no way even mentionable in the same breath as the atrocities (without inverted commas) committed on a massive scale by Stalin, Hitler and the cronies.

      Pabelmont, withdraw your comparison!

      1. I think P was trying to say that “security” is often a cover for extrajudicial activities on the part of all these governments, including the US and UK: I don’t think anything quantitative was implied.

      2. The UK did this, only when Blair was in charge.
        During that time, it appears to have arranged a rendition from Hong Kong, to Libya, for the benefit of the Libyans rather than the Americans, for which Libya does seem to have put money into the Windrush Limited Partnership (a structure almost unique to Blair’s business dealings) for “consultancy services”.

        No, it’s not the same as Hitler: Mr Hitler doesn’t appear to have solicited specific personal financial rewards in return for rights violations. But the abuses are so concentrated on the Blair era, and, usually, Blair and his closest advisors directly, that I find blanket condemnation flung at the country, or even the rest of the UK government, to be both ignorant and unfair.

        Blair needs to be tried, not for “crimes against humanity” but for simple, grubby, gutter-level fraud and theft. Putting him on the same page in the history books as Hitler, Stalin, Amin and Mitterand (he signed the orders to arrest and transport Jews while he was a Vichy minister), elevates Blair to a position of importance he only pretends to. He’s just a sodding thief and all the other grand, sky-high schemes and pretensions are put on so that nobody will realize that he’s just a sodding thief.

  3. Watching, breath-held, for compensation to be handed to jihadi extraordinaire Abdulhakim Belhadj. He makes such good use of resources, not least in Syria. Anyone who does not know about his career, I suggest checking.

  4. There’s a widely-held sentiment that the £2M of compensation which the UK government agreed in the Libyan case, (without actually admitting fault), should come from the pocket of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, rather than the taxpayer. This stems from the equally widely-held belief that his “deal in the desert” with Gaddafi was almost certainly engineered for his own financial benefit and not that of the British national interest.

    It could be argued, too, that paying this money “because the evidence to vindicate us cannot be produced in open court” is David Cameron’s way of blackmailing MPs into accepting his distinctly iffy plans for courts to hear evidence in secret.

    It’s hard to see anything worse for the public interest than Cameron attempting to use the disastrous outcome of one of Blair’s little self-enrichment schemes, to carry out some large-scale manipulation of his own.

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