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07JunBush’s Helpers

Britain was named today as one of 14 European countries which conspired with the CIA in the operation of secret flights delivering terrorist suspects for interrogation and torture.

A report from Swiss MP Dick Marty for human rights watchdog the Council of Europe says a group of countries acted as “staging posts” in the transfer by American authorities of men wanted for questioning.

They include Britain, Germany, Spain, and Turkey, who co-operated in the running of so-called “rendition” flights - the covert transport of prisoners for questioning in countries and territories where international law may be ignored by denying the existence of such sites, thus allowing the torture of captives to take place with no consequences for the CIA or any US official.

A preliminary report by Mr Marty earlier this year said European governments were almost certainly aware of the CIA’s secret prisoner flights via European airspace or airports.

Now, at the end of a seven-month inquiry, the final report says it is now clear that “authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities”.

Mr. Marty warns that the inquiry has still not established the whole truth.

But he condemns what he calls a “spider’s web” of US rendition flights as “utterly alien” to the concept of basic human rights.

Allegations that special American flights transported terrorist suspects to Europe to be questioned were first raised in the Washington Post November 2005.

The paper said the CIA had been running interrogation centres in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and Thailand, and that more than 100 people had been sent to the so-called “black sites” since they were set up following the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on America.

Mr Marty said his inquiry had identified the “rendition” of more than one hundred prisoners “affecting Europe”.

Mr Marty described the system as “the outsourcing of torture”, by relocating individuals for questioning in countries which do not necessarily follow human rights codes.

But his report has not delivered any firm evidence of the existence in any European country of secret CIA detention centres, said to have been set up since the 9/11 attacks.

However, it states: “It is now clear, although we are still far from having established the truth, that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities.”

And it emphases that suspicions remain of secret CIA detention centres in Romania and Poland - allegations both countries have denied.

Some European countries, while not actively involved in rendition flights, “ignored them knowingly or did not want to know”.

There were “corroborated facts” strengthening the presumption that landing points in Romania and Poland were detainee drop-off points near to secret detention centres, said the report.

Today Mr Marty, unveiling the details in Paris, commented: “Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not as yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe.”

Those elements warranted further investigation, he added.

Mr Marty said he used evidence from national and international air traffic control authorities, as well as sources inside intelligence services, including in the United States, to compile a detailed picture of a global system of secret detentions and unlawful transfers - including new analysis revealing what he called “rendition circuits”.

He named seven countries which he said “could be held responsible, in varying degrees, which are not always settled definitively, for violations of the rights of specific individuals”.

They were the UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Seven more colluded, “actively or passively”, in the detention or transfer of unknown persons.

Washington has never denied moving terrorist suspects to other countries for questioning, but does deny allegations of torture, and of deliberately picking centres in eastern Europe and beyond, outside the US human rights jurisdiction.

Mr Marty’s report is now due to be debated by the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly later this month.

The Assembly brings together 630 members of parliament from the 46 Council of Europe member states, which include all 25 EU member states.

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06JunHappy Doomsday!

According to a number of primitive beliefs and religions, today (6/6/06) is “Doomsday”, the End of Days, the Apocalypse, the day demons, devils, goblins, trolls, orks, gremlin, vampires and other republicans wreak havoc upon the planet in an epic fight to the death with good, slaughtering babies, mass destruction on a biblical scale with the earth splitting in two letting the magma beneath it to rise and flow to the surface, allowing Beelzebub himself to come forth in a reign of fire to eat your souls…..or not.

Usually the day following the pending “Doomsday” everything seems forgotten and the believers minds are reset for the next doomsday.

Witnessing the religious make fools of themselves is such a fun thing to do. :-)

Posted by admin in Religion. 1 Comment

05JunOh, by the way, those mysterious red cells might be aliens

alien particles

(PopSci.com) — As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well…aliens.

In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples-water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001-contain microbes from outer space.

Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600?F. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250?F.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.

Last winter, Louis sent some of his samples to astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleagues at Cardiff University in Wales, who are now attempting to replicate his experiments; Wickramasinghe expects to publish his initial findings later this year.

Meanwhile, more down-to-earth theories abound. One Indian government investigation conducted in 2001 lays blame for what some have called the “blood rains” on algae. Other theories have implicated fungal spores, red dust swept up from the Arabian peninsula, even a fine mist of blood cells produced by a meteor striking a high-flying flock of bats.

Louis and his colleagues dismiss all these theories, pointing to the fact that both algae and fungus possess DNA and that blood cells have thin walls and die quickly when exposed to water and air. More important, they argue, blood cells don’t replicate. “We’ve already got some stunning pictures-transmission electron micrographs-of these cells sliced in the middle,” Wickramasinghe says. “We see them budding, with little daughter cells inside the big cells.”

Louis’s theory holds special appeal for Wickramasinghe. A quarter of a century ago, he co-authored the modern theory of panspermia, which posits that bacteria-riddled space rocks seeded life on Earth. “If it’s true that life was introduced by comets four billion years ago,” the astronomer says, “one would expect that microorganisms are still injected into our environment from time to time. This could be one of those events.”

The next significant step, explains University of Sheffield microbiologist Milton Wainwright, who is part of another British team now studying Louis’s samples, is to confirm whether the cells truly lack DNA. So far, one preliminary DNA test has come back positive.”Life as we know it must contain DNA, or it’s not life,” he says. “But even if this organism proves to be an anomaly, the absence of DNA wouldn’t necessarily mean it’s extraterrestrial.”

Louis and Wickramasinghe are planning further experiments to test the cells for specific carbon isotopes. If the results fall outside the norms for life on Earth, it would be powerful new evidence for Louis’s idea, of which even Louis himself remains skeptical. “I would be most happy to accept a simpler explanation,” he says, “but I cannot find any.”

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