[Ssf] terrorized detainees

robin&amparo robin_amparo at tiscali.co.uk
Fri Dec 17 12:37:47 GMT 2004


> However, this is not ordinary British judicial procedure. In August,
> appeal court judges decreed that evidence extracted under torture was
> admissible in British courts, as long as British agents were not the
> ones doing the torturing. This followed an appeal by the detainees,
> involving a byzantine discussion of what could or could not be
> admissible evidence: if the torture was carried out by British
> officials, the evidence definitely could not be accepted by a British
> court, but what if they were simply present at the time of the
> torture, or knew it was going to happen? "For the victim of torture,"
> the Amnesty spokesman responds, "who cares if it was a British
> official or not?" A further appeal is scheduled to be heard at the
> House of Lords on October 4 to 7.
> 
> None of the detainees can understand why he has not at any point been
> questioned. This is in stark contrast to the detainees at Guantánamo,
> who are so regularly questioned that fresh interrogators are flown in
> to operate on three-month shifts. Louise Christian, who represents
> some of the British detainees at Guantánamo, says: "The US openly
> avow they are holding people at Guantánamo for intelligence purposes
> and are actively pursuing that, but the British authorities have
> decided that their detainees are a threat to national security, and
> are not holding them for intelligence purposes."


There are slight differences, true, between Guantanamo Base Prison and 
the british ones, but it is sad to think of the UK as a US satellite, 
following their mythological notion (American Superman) of good and 
evil, heroism, identification of Evil in one person or group, and 
isolation in a prison where evil has to be kept or destroyed. This is 
contrary to reason, to conscience and to scientific non-religious thought.



R&A






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