United States exporting ‘tools
of torture’
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC Dec. 3— The administration of US President
George W. Bush is violating the spirit of its own export policy by
approving the sale of tools to countries known to use them to torture
detainees, according to a new report released by Amnesty International.
In 2002, US exports of electro-shock weapons and restraints that can
be used for torture amounted to some $14.7 and $4.4 million, respectively,
according to the report, titled “The Pain Merchants.”
Along with the sales of such equipment, Washington is also reported
to have handed over suspects in the “war on terror’’
to the same countries, the 85-page report said.
“Although torture is endemic in Saudi Arabia, Smith & Wesson
had no qualms about exporting approximately 10,000 leg-irons to Riyadh,
and, apparently sharing this lack of concern, the Bush administration
approved the sale,” said William Schulz, executive director of
Amnesty’s US branch, AIUSA.
“For decades, human-rights groups and the US State Department
have documented Saudi Arabia’s cruel use of leg-irons and shackles
to inflict torture and force confessions. With this shameful shipment,
we can expect the torture of religious minorities and peaceful protesters
to continue for years to come.”
The US is not the only exporter of such police and security-related
equipment that, while not lethal, can inflict severe pain and amount
to torture when used improperly, according to Amnesty. Worldwide,
some 856 companies in 47 countries either manufacture or market such
devices.
Indeed, Asian companies — particularly those in Taiwan, China,
and South Korea — dominate the electro-shock market.
“Just because security equipment may be described as ‘less
than lethal’ does not mean it cannot be abused, nor that it cannot
injure or kill,” said Brian Wood, Amnesty’s expert on crime-control
devices. “We are extremely concerned that in many countries devices
are being authorized for use on the population without sufficient
investigation of their effects on human rights.”
In recent years, the US government has taken steps — most importantly
the adoption of an export policy that requires licenses to sell or
ship electro-shock equipment to all countries except Canada —
to reduce the likelihood that devices manufactured here will be sent
to countries where they are used to torture or otherwise inflict harm.
Similarly, the European Commission (EC) has drafted regulations that
would ban the export from member states of equipment whose primary
practical purpose is torture — such as leg irons and stun belts
— and impose tight restrictions on the export of equipment that
may have a legitimate policing purpose but which could be used for
torture, such as electro-shock stun weapons and tear gas.
But the EC’s policy has yet to be adopted, while US license requirements
are not being seriously enforced, according to AIUSA, which noted
that in 2001 the government approved three sales of electro-shock
devices to Turkey, despite the State Department’s finding that
such weapons were widely used for torture there.
In one 2002 case, a 17 year-old schoolgirl who was detained for distributing
leaflets calling for the legalization of Kurdish education was stripped,
threatened with rape and tortured with electric shocks to her feet,
legs and stomach, according to Amnesty.
“The US needs to completely close the loopholes that have allowed
the re-supply of this technology to countries that torture,”
said Maureen Greenwood, AIUSA’s advocacy director in Europe.
She noted that
Reps. Tom Lantos and Henry Hyde are currently working on legislation
that places restrictions on crime-control exports to foreign governments
known to use torture.
Amnesty said it was also concerned about other “crime-control’’
weapons, such as sedative chemical incapacitating agents like the
one that killed more than 120 hostages when Russian security forces
ended a siege in a Moscow theater last year.
Amnesty also noted that new technologies, many of which are being
developed as part of the US “war on terror,” may also be
used to inflict torture and should be very carefully reviewed for
their possible abuse. These include radio-frequency weapons that may
induce an artificial fever; “stench chemicals;” taser mines
that could deliver a 50,000-volt shock to anyone within a certain
radius; and UV lasers that can ionize the air to also deliver an electric
charge.
Amnesty stressed that most of these weapons are not intended to inflict
torture but can be used to do so. “It’s possible to use
anything for torture,” the president of a US manufacturer of
electro-shock riot shields told Amnesty. “But it’s a little
easier to use our devices.”
A three-year-old study by the London-based group found that torture
has been reported in all but about 35 countries worldwide and that
there are more than 70 countries in which torture has been reported
to be widespread or persistent.
In more than 80 countries, including the United States, deaths have
been reported as a result of torture. In the US case, for example,
a man died after being “tasered” a dozen times, each time
with a 50,000 volt shock, by deputy sheriffs in Florida.
The US Department of Commerce last year approved licenses for exports
of discharge-type weapons, including electro-shock stun guns, shock
batons, and similar devices, to 45 countries, among them a large number
where the State Department has reported the use of torture against
detainees, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Honduras,
India, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia,
South Africa, Thailand, and Venezuela.
More than 60 US manufacturers sought licenses to export such equipment
during 2002.
AIUSA said it feared that some manufacturers actually ignored the
licensing requirement and shipped such equipment directly to the buyer.
Indeed, a recent investigative report in US News & World Report
found that several small companies freely advertise at various internet
websites how to circumvent exports rules for stun guns by, for example,
shipping parts separately.
Source: OneWorld.net
US fires Guantanamo defense team
By James Meek
Dec. 3— A team of military lawyers recruited to
defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was
dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled
against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian
has learned.
And some members of the new legal defense team remain deeply
unhappy with the trials, known as “military commissions,”
believing them to be slanted towards the prosecution and an
affront to modern US military justice.
Of the more than 600 detainees at the US prison camp at Guantanamo,
none has been charged with any crime, and none has had access
to a lawyer, although some have been in captivity of one kind
or another for two years.
But the US has repeatedly promised that at least some of the
prisoners will be charged and tried by military commissions,
an arcane form of tribunal based on long-disused models from
the 1940s.
When charged, a prisoner will be assigned a uniformed military
defense lawyer. The prisoners have a theoretical right to a
civilian lawyer, but the US has placed financial and bureaucratic
obstacles in the way of this.
A former military lawyer with good contacts in the US military
legal establishment said that the first group of defense lawyers
the Pentagon recruited for Guantanamo balked at the commission
rules, which insist, among other restrictions, that the government
be allowed to listen in to any conversations between attorney
and client.
“There was a circular that went out to military lawyers
in the early spring of 2003 which said ‘we are looking
for volunteers’ for defense counsel,” said the ex-military
lawyer. “There was a selection process, and the people
they selected were the right people, they had the right credentials,
they were good lawyers.
“The first day, when they were being briefed on the do’s
and don’ts, at least a couple said: ‘You can’t
impose these restrictions on us because we can’t properly
represent our clients.’
“When the group decided they weren’t going to go along,
they were relieved. They reported in the morning and got fired
that afternoon.”
The Pentagon’s recently set up Office of Military Commissions
denied the claim. “That is not true, never happened,”
said its spokesman, Major John Smith. “The military commission
is a tool of justice. I expect some of these individuals [on
Guantanamo] will plead not guilty, and will be represented zealously
by their lawyers.”
Yet the Guardian understands from a uniformed source with intimate
knowledge of the mood among the current military defense team,
six lawyers strong, that there is deep unhappiness about the
commission set-up.
“It’s like you took military justice, gave it to a
prosecutor and said, ‘modify it any way you want,’”
the source said. “The government would like to say we have
done these commissions before. But what happened after [the
Nazi cases] was the military justice system changed. What we
have done is stupid. It is, I would say, an insult to the military,
to the evolution of the military justice system. They want to
take us back to 1942.”
Two Britons, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abassi, are among the Guantanamo
prisoners that President George Bush has “designated”
for trial. The military defense lawyers in Washington are still
waiting for permission to fly to Guantanamo.
In an investigation into the Guantanamo prison camp, the Guardian
has also learned that a number of prisoners, thought to be between
two and five, are kept permanently isolated in a super-secure
facility within the main prison camp at Guantanamo, Camp Delta.
Source:Guardian (UK)
Global warming: melting ice ‘will swamp capitals’
By Geoffrey Lean
Dec. 7— Measures to fight global warming will have
to be at least four times stronger than the Kyoto Protocol if
they are to avoid the melting of the polar ice caps, inundating
central London and many of the world’s biggest cities, concludes
a new official report.
The report, by a German government body, says that even if it
is fully implemented, the protocol will only have a “marginal
attenuating effect” on the climate change. But last week
even this was thrown into doubt amid contradictory signals from
the Russian government as to whether it will allow the treaty
to come into effect.
Global warming already kills 150,000 people a year worldwide and
the rate of climate change is soon likely to exceed anything the
planet has seen “in the last million years” says the
report, produced by the German Advisory Council on Global Change
for a meeting of the world’s environment ministers to consider
the future of the treaty in Milan this week.
It concludes that the protocol must urgently be brought into force,
but only as a first step, insisting that “catastrophic”
climate change “can now only be prevented if climate protection
targets are set at substantially higher levels than those agreed
internationally until now.”
The report, written by eight leading German professors, says that
“dangerous climatic changes” will become “highly
probable” if the world’s average temperature is allowed
to increase to more than 2 degrees centigrade above what it was
before the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Beyond that level the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland
ice cap would begin gradually to melt away, eventually raising
sea levels world wide by up to 30 feet, submerging vast areas
of land and key cities worldwide. London, New York, Miami, Bombay,
Calcutta, Sydney, Shanghai, Lagos and Tokyo would be among those
largely submerged by such a rise.
Above this mark too, other “devastating” and “irreversible”
changes would be likely to take place. These include a cessation
of the Indian monsoon and the ending of the Gulf Stream, which
would dramatically worsen the climate in Britain and western Europe,
even as the world warms. Another risk is the so-called “runaway
greenhouse” where rising temperatures lead to the release
of huge reservoirs methane stored in permafrost and the oceans,
adding to global warming and starting a self-reinforcing cycle
that would eventually make the earth uninhabitable.
To avoid such catastrophe, the report says that industrialized
countries will have to cut emissions of greenhouse gases like
carbon dioxide by at least 20 percent by 2020, and by up to 60
percent by 2050. The Kyoto Protocol would at best cut them by
5 percent by 2012, and probably less, even if it were brought
into force and fully implemented.
In the meantime it looks as if global greenhouse admissions will
likely increase. Writing in The Independent on Sunday today, Michael
Meacher, the former environment minister, calculates that global
emissions of greenhouse gases could increase by 75 percent by
2020, “putting the world well on the way to doomsday.”
Source: lndependent (UK)
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