Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Labels: Bush adminstration, global war on terror, international news, Iraq, news and current affairs, the torture presidency, torture, war crimes

Labels: Bill Kristol, global war on terror, neocons, President Barack Obama, the party of fear

Senior MPs said they intended to pursue ministers and officials over what they knew of his ill-treatment and why Britain helped the CIA interrogate him.

In a statement released shortly after he arrived in a US Gulfstream jet at RAF Northolt in west London, Mohamed said: "For myself, the very worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence."

Once inside the terminal building he met his sister for the fist time in more than seven years and in the most emotionally charged moment of the day they both cried and hugged.

Mohamed, a British resident, was released after several hours of questioning by police and immigration officials and was last night being looked after by his legal team.

Clive Stafford Smith, his lawyer, spoke of a "fantastic day" after the long campaign to free his client, who spent weeks on hunger strike being force-fed at Guantánamo and looked "incredibly skinny and very emaciated". Binyam was "extraordinarily grateful to be back in Britain", said Stafford Smith, who said he had "zero doubt" Britain was complicit in his client's ill-treatment.

"Britain knew he was being abused and left him," he said, referring to his secret abduction to Morocco where Mohamed says he was tortured. The lawyer also said his client was subjected to "very serious abuse" in Guantánamo.

Stafford Smith said that while his family was not vindictive they wanted the truth to be known. Mohamed hoped to be allowed to remain in the UK. "What we in Britain need to do is to make up for some of the things in the past and if the British government was, as I contend, deeply involved in the torture that Binyam had to go through, the least we can do is offer him his homeland," Stafford Smith said.

Labels: Bush adminstration, George W. Bush, Gitmo, global war on terror, Guantanamo, Obama administration, Pentagon, torture, war crimes

Cheney said the new administration must carefully assess the tools put in place to fight terror. "How they deal with these issues are going to be very important, because it's going to have a direct impact on whether or not they retain the tools that
have been so essential and defending the nation for the last seven-and-a-half years, or whether they give them up," he said.

Obama's team needs to look at the specific threats, understand how the programs were put together, and how they operate, the vice president said.

"They shouldn't just fall back on campaign rhetoric to make these very fundamental decisions about the safety of the nation," he warned.

Labels: bush administation, Dick Cheney, global war on terror, torture, worst president ever

Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.

In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect _ along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice _ "house Negroes."

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term "abeed al-beit," which literally translates as "house slaves." But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as "house Negroes."

The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.

Two racist twits in a cave: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri

Experts agree that the release of a new tape by Al Qaeda’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahri indicates that Al Qaeda feels threatened and is on its heels after Obama’s resounding victory. President-elect Obama’s diverse background, along with his pledge to reverse many of the policies and approaches of the Bush administration on issues such as detentions at Guantanamo, torture and the war in Iraq has served to dramatically improve America’s image, especially in the Muslim world. Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke explained, “Most of all, by returning to American values the world admires, Obama sets al Qaeda back enormously in the battle of ideas, the ideological struggle which determines whether al Qaeda will continue to have significant support in the Islamic world.” Having thrived on the decline in America’s world image, the impact of Obama’s victory provides a direct challenge to Al Qaeda’s negative depiction of the United States. Additionally, Obama’s emphasis on shifting US attention from Iraq to Afghanistan represents a direct physical threat to Al Qaeda’s leadership. America’s improved global image and the new administration’s focus on Afghanistan threatens Al Qaeda and has led to what experts see as a confused, racist, and off-kilter response reflective of an organization on the defensive.

... by indulging in divisive labels such as "House Slave" or "House Negro", Dr. al-Zawahiri has strayed from being merely disrespectful into being entirely disreputable and dishonorable. By playing the race card so quickly and so brazenly, al-Zawahiri may end up causing backlash against Al-Qaida in the very constituencies he is seeking to woo. It also invites the question, how is this a legitimate criticism coming from the senior leadership of Al-Qaida, which is dominated almost solely by Arab Egyptians and Saudis? Moreover, what would Malcolm X have thought of an organization, Al-Qaida, that at one time offered a higher salary to its Arab membership than its Black African adherents? One might imagine that the financial guru responsible for overseeing this inequitable arrangement -- Egyptian national Mustafa Abu al-Yazid -- would have been punished for his bigoted actions. In fact, al-Yazid has since been promoted to the number 3 position in Al-Qaida, right behind Dr. al-Zawahiri. This is hardly the type of image that Al-Qaida would like to see proliferate in critical regions adjacent to jihadi conflict zones in Somalia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania.

Kola Boof, 37, the Sudanese poet and novelist who claims to have once been bin Laden's sex slave, writes in her autobiography, "Diary of a Lost Girl," which is excerpted in the September Harper's: "He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen."

...Boof says bin Laden couldn't stop talking about his favorite singer and had lofty plans for her. "He said he wanted to give [her] a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives."

... But as much as bin Laden adored Houston, he was also dismissive of black women. "African women are only good for a man's lower pleasures," bin Laden supposedly said. "What need do you have for a womb?"

And Boof writes that the 9/11 terror mastermind detested her hairstyle. "Why do you wear your hair braided?" he fumed, telling her that "only monkeys" did that.

Shoop shoop.

Labels: al-Qaida, global war on terror, President Barack Obama, racism

The decision came in the case of six Algerians who were detained in Bosnia after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and have been held at the military prison in Cuba for nearly seven years. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, a Bush appointee, ruled that five of the men must be released "forthwith" and ordered the government to engage in diplomatic efforts to find them new homes.

In an unusual move, Leon also urged the government not to appeal his ruling, saying "seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer" was long enough.

In the case of the sixth Algerian, Belkacem Bensayah, Leon found that the government had met its evidentiary burden and could continue to hold him. Bensayah's lawyers said he would appeal.

The landmark ruling is the first by a federal judge who has weighed the government's evidence in lawsuits brought by scores of detainees who are challenging their detentions. In June, the Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by the Algerians, that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to challenge their detentions in federal court under the legal doctrine of habeas corpus.

To review, Boumediene and his cohorts were picked up in Sarajevo on the tip of a single, anonymous person, and accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. enemy, and planning to go to Afghanistan to fight the Americans. Boumediene's case ultimately went to the Supreme Court, causing various right wing heads to 'splode:

Scalia got the ball rolling in his shrieky dissent yesterday, adopting almost word for word, the Fox News/right wing talk show formulation that "Americans will die" if our eternal detainees are allowed to challenge their endless detention in court.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board weighs in with its hysterical reaction today, directing their ire at Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Ronald Reagan appointee wrote the decision in the case of Boumediene v. Bush:

Justice Kennedy's opinion is remarkable in its sweeping disregard for the decisions of both political branches. In a pair of 2006 laws – the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act – Congress and the President had worked out painstaking and good-faith rules for handling enemy combatants during wartime. These rules came in response to previous Supreme Court decisions demanding such procedural care, and they are the most extensive ever granted to prisoners of war.

Yet as Justice Antonin Scalia notes in dissent, "Turns out" the same Justices "were just kidding." Mr. Kennedy now deems those efforts inadequate, based on only the most cursory analysis. As Chief Justice John Roberts makes clear in his dissent, the majority seems to dislike these procedures merely because a judge did not sanctify them. In their place, Justice Kennedy decrees that district court judges should derive their own ad hoc standards for judging habeas petitions. Make it up as you go!

Or not... More on Boumediene himself:

Lakhdar Boumediene, now 41, travelled to Bosnia with five other Algerian men during the civil war in the 1990s, and may have fought with Bosnian forces against the Serbs.

The six stayed in Bosnia, married Bosnian women, were granted citizenship and took jobs working with orphans for various Muslim charities.

In October 2001, the US embassy in Sarajevo asked the Bosnian government to arrest them because of a suspicion they had been involved in a plot to bomb the embassy.

The six men were duly arrested. But after a three-month investigation, in which the Bosnian police searched their apartments, their computers and their documents, there was - according to a report by the New-York-based Center for Constitutional Rights - still no evidence to justify the arrests.

Bosnia's Supreme Court ordered their release, and the Bosnian Human Rights Chamber ruled they had the right to remain in the country and were not to be deported.

However, on the night of 17 January 2002, after they were freed from Bosnian custody, they were seized and rendered to Guantanamo.

Since arriving in Guantanamo, the men have faced repeated allegations of links to al-Qaeda - but the embassy plot has never been mentioned.

• Habeas hysteria

Labels: Boumediene vs. Bush, Bush administration, global war on terror, Guantanamo, the party of torture, worst president ever

HOUSTON - Exxon Mobil reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion Thursday, the biggest quarterly profit ever by any U.S. corporation, but the results fell well short of Wall Street expectations and shares fell in premarket trading.

The world's largest publicly traded oil company said net income for the April-June period came to $2.22 a share, up from $10.26 billion, or $1.83 a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 40 percent to $138.1 billion from $98.4 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

... But investors expected even bigger profits Thursday, especially after Europe's Royal Dutch Shell reported a 33 percent jump in second-quarter earnings of $11.6 billion, which fell just shy of Exxon's own record earnings from 2007.

Shares fell 2 percent, or $1.68, to $82.70 in premarket trading.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — Royal Dutch Shell PLC reported a 33 percent jump in second-quarter profits Thursday, its biggest quarter ever at $11.6 billion thanks to high oil prices and the weak dollar.

The company earned $8.67 billion in the same quarter last year.

Shell said its selling price per barrel of oil was around $112, up from $64 a year earlier. That pushed earnings at its main exploration and production arm up 90 percent to $5.88 billion, despite a 1.1 percent fall in production to 3.05 million barrels of oil and equivalents per day.

Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer dismissed calls in Britain for a windfall tax on oil companies.

Britain's BP PLC reported this week that its profits jumped 28 percent to $9.47 billion in the quarter.

"If we do less investment there will be less supply for consumers" which would drive prices higher, Van der Veer said.

"The world needs energy."

Labels: Big Oil, global war on terror, the economy, war profiteers