Tag Archive for 'torture'

Australia and Abu Ghraib; a cosy relationship

Published on 5 July 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Years after this scandal exploded, we’re still receiving details on US allies being far too willing to excuse and defend abuses:

Secret Defence documents obtained under freedom of information laws show an Australian officer, Major George O’Kane, was far more deeply involved in the operations of Abu Ghraib prison when terrible abuses of prisoners occurred than previously revealed.

The documents, which include extensive interviews with Major O’Kane when he returned from Iraq in 2004, reveal that as a military lawyer embedded with the United States he was a primary author of the manual for processing prisoners in Iraq.

He also advised on the legality of interrogation techniques being used on at least one detainee. Major O’Kane was instructed to deny access to the Red Cross to nine ”High Value Detainees” during their January 2004 visit because the prisoners were undergoing active interrogation and, according to the US view, fell under the exemption of ”imperative military necessity”. This view was contentious.

After his return he told superiors he was aware of rumours that the US had ordered an internal investigation of Abu Ghraib and it had something to do with photos, though his knowledge does not appear to have extended beyond a conversation with a US officer who assured him it was being investigated.

Although Major O’Kane’s role was discussed at a Senate inquiry in May 2004, he was not permitted to give evidence because he was said to be too junior.

He also did not attend US congressional hearings into the abuse, despite the documents revealing that the Democrat leader, Nancy Pelosi, personally asked the then prime minister, John Howard, to allow him to attend.

…

As point man for the Red Cross during visits to Abu Ghraib, Major O’Kane saw highly critical Red Cross working papers alleging abuses at Abu Ghraib and drafted responses for the prison chief, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski.

Major O’Kane was also aware that the US was hiding a high-level detainee – dubbed ”Triple XXX” in the US media – from the Red Cross. This had been done at the direction of the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Even more sensitive was Major O’Kane’s involvement in a highly secret mission referred to in the documents as ”Operation Eel”.

This involved the transfer of a high-value detainee from the US warship USS Higgins, anchored in the Persian Gulf, back to Abu Ghraib on December 16, 2003. The timing is significant because it was near the time of the capture of Saddam Hussein. This week Defence denied Major O’Kane was involved in the transfer of Saddam. But the documents and other sources suggest the detainee might have been someone who helped pinpoint Saddam’s last hideout.

”Major O’Kane did not observe any abuse of the suspect who was manacled and hooded during the transport operation,” the Australian Eyes Only report says.

In December 2003 and January 2004, Major O’Kane was involved in negotiations with the Red Cross for access to Saddam.

Google head, fond of Chinese censorship, worries about Arab repression

Published on 29 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips:

The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.

Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television.

He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.

The internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring.

Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.
‘Completely wired’

Mr Schmidt said he believed the “problem” of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to “get worse”.

In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television”

“The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television.”

“If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he added.

Global dissidents may not want US openly backing them

Published on 13 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Promoting web freedom is a noble idea, especially since so many autocratic regimes and Western multinationals are working together to stop citizens accessing the glories of information on the internet.

But this idea is full of potential problems (via the New York Times), not least because Washington has a shocking record of supporting dictatorships at the expense of democracy and this won’t stop anytime soon. It’s called hypocrisy. Besides, being funded by the US to challenge US-backed regimes will likely end in tears, torture or worse:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

…

Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.

That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

NYT should call US torture by its proper name

Published on 16 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The New York Times has long refused to call American torture by its rightful name; torture. Why? Because government officials say it’s not torture and therefore it ain’t.

The paper’s Public Editor today publishes an examination of this putrid policy and argues that the editors should drop the pretense of worrying about the feelings and position of officials and simply be honest; if they want to be real journalists, of course:

The controversy over The Times’s use of the term “torture,” which was discussed two years ago by my predecessor, Clark Hoyt, has its roots in the newsroom’s aspiration to be impartial in a dispute that is both political and legal.

The Bush administration offered formal legal opinions that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” it authorized were not torture under United States law. The Times adopted the view that labeling these as “torture” in news articles could create the appearance of taking sides.

Journalistically, The Times’s reasoning went, it was better to use descriptive terms. At the time of Mr. Hoyt’s column, The Times’s preferred adjective was in the process of migrating from “harsh” to “brutal.”

Upstairs in the editorial department, meanwhile, things have been clearer and easier all along. “We made the decision early and relatively quickly: Waterboarding, specifically, has been considered torture for a long time,” said Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, referring to international protocols.

“The Bush people were going out of their way to redefine the word ‘torture.’ We felt that our using the word ‘torture’ was really important.”

The editorial department had the easier path: it could just weigh in with an opinion. In the newsroom, though, taking sides was the wrong thing to do. The result was that The Times, in the view of some, appeared to mince words.

Other news organizations took the same approach in their news columns. A study by students at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that The Times and The Los Angeles Times drastically shifted their treatment of waterboarding after 9/11, moving away from calling it torture after nearly a century of doing so.

…

Is there a path out of this wilderness? I believe so.

The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.

This approach avoids the appearance of mincing words and is well grounded in Americans’ understanding of torture in the historical and moral sense.

New Zealand soldiers possibly complicit in torture in Afghanistan

Published on 29 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

How many US or Australians are potentially equally responsible for caring too little about gross breaches of human rights?

Labour is adding its support to calls for an inquiry into claims Kiwi troops handed over Afghan prisoners to authorities who tortured them.

Journalist Jon Stephenson claimed on TVNZ’s Marae programme that NZ’s Special Forces in Afghanistan are “very involved in arresting prisoners and transferring those prisoners to Afghans, who are likely to torture them”.

New Zealand Defence Force rules, and international laws, say troops can not hand over prisoners to another country if there is evidence they will be tortured or mistreated.

“I have absolute confidence in the integrity of the SAS people themselves,” Labour leader Phil Goff told TV ONE’s Breakfast.

“What I have less confidence about is if prisoners are being handed across then what happens when they’re given to the Afghan authorities – they’re notoriously corrupt and notorious for ill-treatment of their prisoners.”

Goff was Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2002 when he said the SAS handed over 55 Taliban suspects to US and Canadian forces. He only found out about the incident five years later.

He said the prisoners had been handed over in good faith because the New Zealand forces did not have suitable facilities for keeping them.

“Subsequent revelations show the treatment of Afghan prisoners by those authorities was less than acceptable from our point of view.

“We did not take prisoners and hand them over for some time after that.”

What Wikileaks Gitmo files says about our Western “values”

Published on 28 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

My following article appears in today’s ABC The Drum:

The Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11.

An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack.

The result was hundreds of innocent men kidnapped and incarcerated without trial – a “legal and moral disaster”, according to The New York Times – and President Obama continues shielding torturers in the previous and current administrations. He has pledged to Look Forward and Not Back. The current President has merely extended the Bush administration’s indefinite detention regime for so-called terror suspects.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald unleashed necessary fury about this reality:

The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.

Yet this authoritarian impulse to believe untested claims by the US government is exactly what many in the media have been doing for years, repeating without question deliberately leaked intelligence files on the “worst of the worst” prisoners.

One local example is The Australian columnist Chris Kenny, failed Liberal politician and former chief of staff to former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During a Twitter conversation on Wednesday with Paul Barrett, a former Secretary of Australian Departments of Defence and Primary Industries & Energy, Kenny wrote, “You’re arguing to set free people who have murdered thousands” when Barrett asked why the US refused to conduct fair and open trials for individuals who had never faced justice.

In Kenny’s worldview, the American military has smeared hundreds of Muslims as terrorists and that’s good enough for him. The fact that the Wikileaks file shows the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees had no connection to September 11 or terrorism can be ignored.

This has been the default position of the vast bulk of the corporate press since 9/11. In Australia, especially the Murdoch press has smeared former Guantanamo Bay inmates David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. This continued with Downer who called both men “terrible, terrible people”, perhaps because he fears what an independent investigation may find in regards to his own government’s alleged complicity in their long incarceration.

Australian journalist Sally Neighbour published an analysis a few days ago that inadvertently undermined her own paper’s years of misleading reporting:

The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture.

What Neighbour conveniently omitted from her report were the journalists and editors who have dined for years on rehashing US government released propaganda against Hicks and Habib, including The Australian, and smearing them constantly. Clearly media accountability was not on the agenda for a decade of establishment stenography. Today’s Australian editorial begrudgingly acknowledges the torture suffered by Habib and Hicks but issues no apology for spending years accusing them both of terrorism.

Thankfully this week’s Sydney Morning Herald editorially called the treatment of Hicks and Habib by its rightful name, torture.

It took one of the world’s more diligent and un-embedded journalists on Guantanamo Bay inmates, Andy Worthington, to unpack the Wikileaks revelations and highlight the decade of ignoring legal precedent for the Cuban and American black hole down which countless men were tortured and housed.

Reading Worthington’s copious work over the years makes a reader wonder why more mainstream reporters didn’t investigate the prison camp with a very critical eye. Is it because, as a former Bush official said, too many US journalists wanted to be seen as “patriotic” and protect America’s “interests”. Truth came a distant third. Guantanamo Bay was a place where psychological experiments and torture was common-place.

But what of the latest Wikileaks revelations themselves which, for the record, should be seen as merely US official opinion rather than actual factual reporting? We learn that the US allowed a number of repressive country’s intelligence services access to Guantanamo Bay detainees, including officials from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

This highly prejudicial process was also committed by Australia during the Howard government when it emerged in 2005 that Chinese officials were allowed to interrogate Chinese asylum seekers in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre.

In the years after 9/11 (and also before), America was kidnapping terror suspects and sending them through extraordinary rendition to authoritarian states where these prisoners would be tortured for information. The latest Guantanamo Bay files confirm that Washington was also asking repressive regimes to assist them in identifying people as well as probably threatening their families back home.

The Wikileaks files detail America’s treatment of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj who languished without charge for six years in Guantanamo Bay. It can now be confirmed that he was only held in the prison camp because the Bush administration hated the Qatar-based news network and wanted to gain more information about its alleged connection to terrorism. It is a chilling warning to media companies the world over.

The response of the Obama administration to the latest document dump was typically Orwellian. The lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay were told, even after the mainstream press had widely disseminated the Wikileaks documents, that the files remained legally classified. The New York Times perfectly highlighted the issue:

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site.“Everyone else can talk about it,” Mr. Margulies said. “I can’t talk about it.”

Although Wikileaks itself was not a major focus of this release (only briefly, anyway), it again proved the power of the whistle-blowing website. Western news organisations were forced to collaborate with an organisation with a relatively small staff and budget. The obvious question remains; why didn’t The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Guardian receive the scoop with their own investigations?

If former US army soldier Bradley Manning was the leaker of this information – President Obama has already said Manning is guilty, undoubtedly affecting any potential trial – he has given the world an invaluable insight into a superpower’s tyranny; he is a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

ABCTV News24 on human rights in China, Gitmo torture and Sri Lankan war crimes

Published on 28 April 2011 in General, Interviews and Video. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I appeared last night on ABCTV News 24′s The Drum alongside ABC journalist Marius Benson and lobbyist Sue Cato (video here).

While China, we learn via Wikileaks, ignores Australia’s supposed concerns for human rights, I asked if Prime Minister Julia Gillard actually cared about human rights as there had been no public comments from her after this week’s Guantanamo Bay files on countless innocent prisoners tortured by the world’s super-power. US crimes are not abuses in the eyes of our political and media elites. The words “human rights” are used as a political weapon as opposed to being something to cherish. Gillard’s current trip to China is solely about trade and military ties. Can the media and politicians be honest about this, please?

We discussed the alleged medical experimentation in Guantanamo Bay and the doctors complicit in the process. Both David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have accused the US of doing this to them and yet we still don’t take their allegations seriously; how much did the Australian government know?

Finally, the UN report on war crimes in Sri Lanka during the country’s civil war (the massive allegations have unsurprisingly been denied by Colombo). The fact that up to 40,000 innocents may have been murdered by Sri Lanka (and far less by the Tamil Tigers) requires a robust and international trial. I called on Australia and the global community to back a transparent inquiry (a position supported by a Guardian editorial). Like the Goldstone report into Israeli and Hamas crimes, this latest UN investigation warrants the most serious response, despite China, the US, the West and Australia all likely to not show much enthusiasm.

Sadly, Canberra is more concerned about working with Colombo to stop poor Tamils getting onto boats and coming to Australia. So much for our priority ever being human rights accountability.

Vast majority of Gitmo prisoners were innocent and we shrug

Published on 27 April 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

God bless the US:

Where is media accountability for years repeating US lies over “terrorism”?

Published on 26 April 2011 in General. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Many in the Western media and political elites have spent years since 9/11 smearing a litany of Muslim “terrorists” because the US leaked selective information to friendly journalists and leaders. Serious questions were dismissed. The Murdoch press globally loved to hype bogus US claims about the “worst of the worst” at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. So to read today this, in Murdoch’s Australian by Sally Neighbour, is welcome but when will the self-analysis come, if ever? What of the countless articles sourced solely from US intelligence in the pages of the Murdoch media? Media needs to grow a memory, or the general public will treat you with appropriate contempt:

The secret files released by WikiLeaks on the two Australians formerly consigned to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp provide a unique and disturbing window into the quality of the intelligence relied on by the US to confine terror suspects in the prison camp supposedly reserved for “the worst of the worst”.

The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture.

The case against Habib is summarised in a memorandum marked “secret” on the letterhead of the Department of Defence Joint Task Force, Guantanamo Bay, dated August 6, 2004, and addressed to the commander of the United States Southern Command in Miami.

The document begins with a “detainee summary”, which is said to be based on Habib’s own statements but is full of factual mistakes. For example, it says Habib lived in “Meadowbark” (a misspelling of Meadowbank) in Sydney in 1980, when he didn’t arrive in Australia until 1982; that he later moved to “Greenwika”, apparently a reference to Sydney’s Greenacre; that he visited Egypt with his wife and children in 1986 when in fact they went in 1988; that he travelled to the US in 1992, which he did not; and so on. These could be dismissed as trivial slips except that this is a quasi-legal document that was used to justify Habib’s detention in Guantanamo for more than three years.

Wikileaks Gitmofiles show broad US criminality towards suspects

Published on 26 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

American attempts to understand post 9/11 world muddled and criminal

Published on 25 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

The evidence, via Wikileaks, just keeps on coming:

The documents also show that in the earliest years of the prison camps operation, the Pentagon permitted Chinese and Russian interrogators into the camps — information from those sessions are included in some captives’ assessments — something American defense lawyers working free-of-charge for the foreign prisoners have alleged and protested for years.

There’s not a whiff in the documents that any of the work is leading the U.S. closer to capturing Bin Laden. In fact, the documents suggest a sort of mission creep beyond the post-9/11 goal of hunting down the al Qaida inner circle and sleeper cells.

The file of one captive, now living in Ireland, shows he was sent to Guantanamo so that U.S. military intelligence could gather information on the secret service of Uzbekistan. A man from Bahrain is shipped to Guantanamo in June 2002, in part, for interrogation on “personalities in the Bahraini court.”

…

The documents make clear that intelligence agents elsewhere showed photos of Guantanamo prisoners to prized war-on-terror catches held at secret so-called CIA black-sites, out of reach of the International Red Cross. Notably the reports reflect that at times some captives faces were familiar to Abu Zubayda — whom the CIA waterboarded scores of times.

At times the efforts seem comedic. Guards plucked off ships at sea to walk the cellblocks note who has hoarded food as contraband, who makes noise during the Star Spangled Banner, who sings creepy songs like “La, La, La, La Taliban” and who is re-enacting the 9/11 attacks with origami art.

Wikileaks reveal how Hicks and Habib were abused in our name

Published on 25 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

The cases of two former Australian Guantanamo Bay prisoners, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, have received fresh oxygen after the release of their files by Wikileaks today. I’ve extensively covered them both over the years (Habib and Hicks) and one thing stands out; the sheer dishonesty of Western defenders of the policy and the callous brutality of American interrogators (physical or mental). Some details:

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib told Egyptian interrogators under “extreme duress” he planned to hijack a Qantas plane and had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks on the United States, according to newly-released WikiLeaks files.

The documents also allege fellow Australian Guantanamo detainee David Hicks was approached to become a martyr by al-Qa’ida’s number three in charge of military operations, but refused the invitation.

Mr Habib’s Guantanamo prisoner file appears to confirm he was tortured by Egyptian authorities in 2001, making a raft of “admissions” which he later recanted.

In its latest high-profile information release, WikiLeaks has begun releasing 779 secret files from the United States’ notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

The 2004 files classified both Mr Habib and Mr Hicks as “high risk” detainees, with Mr Habib’s file alleging “violent behaviour” by him towards US guards.

Mr Hicks’ file describes him as a “compliant” but “deceptive”. He was held in “high regard” by other detainees, including senior al-Qa’ida operatives.

“The detainee is highly-trained, experienced and combat-hardened, which makes him a valued member and possible leader for any extremist organisation,” it says of Mr Hicks, who was returned to Australia in 2007 after being convicted by a US military commission of providing material support for terrorism.

In an analysts’ note on Mr Hicks’ file, it says: “Mohammed Atef, al-Qa’ida’s No. 3 in charge of military operations, approached detainee regarding his willingness to be a martyr, which the detainee declined.”

In his book, Guantanamo: My Journey, Mr Hicks tells how he left Australia in November 1999 and signed up with the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, to join “the freedom struggle in Kashmir”.

After he had completed a beginner’s training course, LET sent him to Afghanistan for further training.

He said he reluctantly did a beginners’ course and denied doing any terrorism-related training.

The September 11 attacks occurred a month after Hicks’s final course, when he was in Pakistan.

He went back to Afghanistan after leaving his passport behind, he said, and joined up to fight with the Taliban to defend himself as the US attacked the country.

Mr Habib, who plans to sue the Egyptian government over his detention and alleged torture, told interrogators in Cairo he was en route to hijack a Qantas plane when he was detained, and had information on his home computer on poisoning US rivers.

He also claimed to have trained six of the 9/11 hijackers in martial arts and how to use a knife disguised as a cigarette lighter.

Once at Guantanamo Bay, Mr Habib retracted the confessions, saying he lied to Egyptian interrogators.

Mr Habib was released without charge from Guantanamo Bay in 2005 and returned to Australia.

His file says he had “direct and personal access” to a senior al-Qa’ida official but his US interrogators said his real value to the hardline Islamist terror group was as an Australian organiser and operative.

It contains a note by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo that Mr Habib was regarded as a detainee of “high intelligence value”.

It says he refused to take a polygraph test.

US intelligence officials regarded Mr Habib as a high value asset for his knowledge of al-Qa’ida financing, safe houses, and its training and tactics.

They questioned whether he was a “money courier and terrorist operations facilitator”, given his extensive international travel.

“Among the questions that remain unanswered: how did he afford to travel as extensively as he did while being unemployed and having lost a great deal of money in the matter of his Australian government contract?

“What were the actual number of times he went to Afghanistan, Egypt and the US (records indicate that he entered the US prior to 1993).”

After being arrested in Pakistan, Mr Habib was “rendered” by the CIA to Egypt.

He has described being tortured there by beatings, cigarette burns, electrocution, fingernail removal and near-drowning.

Mr Habib has alleged that Australian officials were involved in his rendition and torture.

After being transferred from Egypt, Mr Habib spent four years in Guantanamo Bay before being released in January 2005.

Mr Habib was last year refused a new passport on the grounds that ASIO still considered him a threat.

His lawyers said the decision was ridiculous, and based on unproven claims.

Mr Habib’s case against Egypt’s new vice-president, Omar Sulaiman, is seen as a human rights test case of the post-Mubarak era in Egypt.

An Australian-led campaign to support David Hicks and clear his name today released the following statement in response to the Wikileaks revelations:

Media Release

Wikileaks file on David Hicks- The U.S.S. Pettiloo says it all.

The file released on the Wikileaks website only confirms the inaccuracy of information that has been released by the former U.S. administration to the public in relation to David Hicks. The incompetence of the interrogators to obtain reliable and factual information is clear- they failed get Mr Hicks’ name correct, where he was captured, or the name of their own Navy ship- even when utilising interrogation techniques tantamount to torture. Much of the inaccuracies in the file have been addressed in Mr Hicks’ book, however, following is a list for your convenience.

Ø  David Hicks’ middle name is Matthew, not Michael

Ø  Jama’at Al Tablighi is a peaceful Islamic organisation- this has long been confirmed

Ø  Mr Hicks has at no time flown to East Timor- to engage in hostilities, or otherwise

Ø  LeT was not listed as a terrorist organisation until 2002, long after Mr Hicks had been detained. The report confirms that no member of LeT had engaged in a terrorist act- they allege an intention, which there is no evidence of. As Mr Hicks explains in his book, LeT dissolved after 2001. The group that calls themselves LeT now is not the same group as it was over a decade ago as it is made up of different people.

Ø  Allegations of meeting senior al-Qaeda leadership- Mr Hicks explains in his book that did not hear the word al-Qaeda until he reached Guantanamo Bay- and this was from the mouth of an interrogator. Mr Hicks has not met any people by the names of Abu-Hufs or Mohammed Atef, and the U.S. has not provided any evidence of this.

Ø  Mr Hicks did not go to Bagram at all- Mr Hicks was captured by the Northern Alliance at a Taxi stand in Baglan on his way back to Australia. He was then sold to the U.S. for approximately US$5000.

Ø  There is no such ship as the Pettiloo- Mr Hicks was transferred to two U.S. Navy ships, the U.S.S. Bataan and the U.S.S Peleliu- what they failed to mention in this report was the 10 hour beatings inflicted on Mr Hicks and the other detainees, and the photos depicting Hicks naked with a bleeding wound on his head due to having his head rammed into the tarmac several times.

Ø  As for the report stating that Mr Hicks ‘admitted’ to being a member of al-Qaeda- Any and all statements were obtained under torture, this is why he was not taken through a regularly constituted court. In the final Military Commissions hearing, David’s legal team submitted what is called the Alford Plea. This is a US based plea in which an accused person can agree to plead guilty whilst maintaining innocence. David has always maintained his innocence and strongly denies that he was involved with any terrorist organisations- he did what he had to do to come home.

Ø  The report alleges that Mr Hicks led in prayer and was held in high regard by other Guantanamo detainees- Mr Hicks cannot speak Arabic, and his knowledge of the religion would not qualify him to lead prayer. Some detainees thought that Mr Hicks was a spy, so any allegation that he was a leader is simply outrageous.

Ø  Any allegation that Mr Hicks was unruly or created disturbances is simply untrue. Former Guantanamo bay guard, Brandon Neely who was on the ground with Mr Hicks has confirmed this recently (link below).

Ø  As documents have revealed, detainees were forced to take medication and David was injected in the spine (see link below)

Ø  All charges that they quote in the document and the Military Commissions process were ruled as unconstitutional and illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even the final Military Commissions Act of 2006 has been replaced by President Obama due to the unfairness of the system, and the fact that it did not establish a legitimate legal framework.

Ø  The report alleges that if Mr Hicks is released, he would be a threat to the U.S. and its allies- Mr Hicks has been a free member of society for over three years, and has proven this to be completely false.

Mr Hicks has never been accused of hurting anyone, participating in, supporting, preparing for or knowing of a terrorist act. The final charge in the Military Commissions hearing was one count under the material support for terrorism charge- which was foreign to Australian and international law- that did not accuse him of personally supporting terrorism, rather, it was alleged that he supported an organisation that supported terrorism. Of note is the fact that it has never been proven that the camps he attended were in fact al-Qaeda. Mr Hicks has never gone through a fair trial process.

This document shows that even back in 2004, Mr Hicks was not suspected and/or accused of hurting any person, or involved in any terrorist acts. The Australian government has always maintained that Mr Hicks has not broken any Australian Law.

“…I objected strongly to the Military Commissions Act that was drafted by the Bush Administration and passed by Congress because it failed to establish a legitimate legal framework…”

President Obama comments on the 2006 Military Commissions Act

Further information:

Evidence of forced medication

For a copy of David’s interview about torture and interrogations

How America really feels about those chained in Guantanamo Bay

Published on 25 April 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

A place of torture, deprivation, lack of judicial oversight, a gulag and utterly deplorable. Welcome to the US empire:

Al-Qaeda terrorists have threatened to unleash a “nuclear hellstorm” on the West if Osama Bin Laden is caught or assassinated, according to documents to be released by the WikiLeaks website, which contain details the interrogations of more than 700 Guantanamo detainees.

However, the shocking human cost of obtaining this intelligence is also exposed with dozens of innocent people sent to Guantanamo – and hundreds of low-level foot-soldiers being held for years and probably tortured before being assessed as of little significance.

The Daily Telegraph, along with other newspapers including The Washington Post, today exposes America’s own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world’s most dangerous terrorists. This newspaper has been shown thousands of pages of top-secret files obtained by the WikiLeaks website.

The disclosures are set to spark intense debate around the world about the establishment of Guantanamo Bay in the months after 9/11 – which has enabled the US to collect vital intelligence from senior Al Qaeda commanders but sparked fury in the middle east and Europe over the treatment of detainees.

The files detail the background to the capture of each of the 780 people who have passed through the Guantanamo facility in Cuba, their medical condition and the information they have provided during interrogations.

Only about 220 of the people detained are assessed by the Americans to be dangerous international terrorists. A further 380 people are lower-level foot-soldiers, either members of the Taliban or extremists who travelled to Afghanistan whose presence at the military facility is questionable.

At least a further 150 people are innocent Afghans or Pakistanis, including farmers, chefs and drivers who were rounded up or even sold to US forces and transferred across the world. In the top-secret documents, senior US commanders conclude that in dozens of cases there is “no reason recorded for transfer”.

However, the documents do not detail the controversial techniques used to obtain information from detainees, such as water-boarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation, which are now widely regarded as tantamount to torture.

The Guantanamo files confirm that the Americans have seized more than 100 Al-Qaeda terrorists, including about 15 kingpins from the most senior echelons of the organisation.

The most senior detainee at the facility is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of Al-Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, who will face a military tribunal later this year after plans for a full-scale trial in New York were abandoned.

His 15-page-file discloses that he was plotting Al-Qaeda attacks around the world in Asia, Africa, America and Britain. It concludes: “Detainee had numerous plots and plans for operations targeting the US, its allies, and its interests world-wide.”

It adds: “Detainee stated that as an enemy of the US, he thought about the US policies with which he disagreed and how he could change them. Detainee’s plan was to make US citizens suffer, especially economically, which would put pressure on the US government to change its policies. Targeting priorities were determined by initially assessing those that would have the greatest economic impact, and secondly which would awaken people politically.”

It can also today be disclosed that:

*A senior Al-Qaeda commander claimed that the terrorist group has hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe which will be detonated if Bin-Laden is ever caught or assassinated. The US authorities uncovered numerous attempts by Al-Qaeda to obtain nuclear materials and fear that terrorists have already bought uranium. Sheikh Mohammed told interrogators that Al-Qaeda would unleash a “nuclear hellstorm”.

*The 20th 9/11 hijacker, who did not ultimately travel to America and take part in the atrocity, has revealed that Al-Qaeda was seeking to recruit ground-staff at Heathrow amid several plots targeting the world’s busiest airport. Terrorists also plotted major chemical and biological attacks against this country.

*A plot to put cyanide in the air-conditioning units of public buildings across America was exposed along with several schemes to target infrastructure including utility networks and petrol stations. Terrorists were also going to rent apartments in large blocks and set off gas explosions.

*About 20 juveniles, including a 14-year old boy have been held at Guantanamo. Several pensioners, including an 89 year old with serious health problems were incarcerated.

*People wearing a certain model of Casio watch from the 1980s were seized by American forces in Afghanistan on suspicion of being terrorists, because the watches were used as timers by Al-Qaeda. However, the vast majority of those captured for this reason have since been quietly released amid a lack of evidence.

*Bin Laden fled his hideout in the Tora Bora mountain range in Afghanistan just days before coalition troops arrived. The last reported sighting of the Al-Qaeda leader was in spring 2003 when several detainees recorded he had met other terrorist commanders in Pakistan.

Guantanamo Bay was opened by the American Government in January 2002 at a military base in Cuba. The establishment of the controversial facility required a special presidential order as “enemy combatants” were held without trial.

A series of controversial torture-style techniques were also approved to be used on prisoners and many foreign Governments, including the British, pressed for their citizens to be released. However, the files disclose that British intelligence services apparently co-operated with Guantanamo interrogators.

The New York Times also leads with the yarn:

The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune. In May 2003, for example, Afghan forces captured Prisoner 1051, an Afghan named Sharbat, near the scene of a roadside bomb explosion, the documents show. He denied any involvement, saying he was a shepherd. Guantánamo debriefers and analysts agreed, citing his consistent story, his knowledge of herding animals and his ignorance of “simple military and political concepts,” according to his assessment. Yet a military tribunal declared him an “enemy combatant” anyway, and he was not sent home until 2006.

…

The 20th hijacker: The best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantánamo was the coercive questioning, in late 2002 and early 2003, of Mohammed Qahtani. A Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Qahtani was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. His file says, “Although publicly released records allege detainee was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention,” his confessions “appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.” But claims that he is said to have made about at least 16 other prisoners — mostly in April and May 2003 — are cited in their files without any caveat.

The hypocrisy at the heart of Washington’s behaviour is the constant message sent by officials that the US is a country of laws. Witness Barack Obama recently accusing alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning of breaking the law, before he’s even faced any trial. Or the US backing countless Arab police states in the name of regional “stability”.

America makes it very clear to its various proxies who is the super-power and who is the client state. This has nothing to do with democracy, as Guantanamo Bay shows.

Australian officials witness to Colombo-led torture

Published on 23 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

In how many countries is this kind of thing happening? Anything to keep those asylum seekers away from our shores is clearly the idea, whatever the human rights cost:

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) has expressed concern over the conduct of security forces working in cooperation with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in Sri Lanka.

Two former Christmas Island detainees arrested by Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) after they were deported from Australia in 2009 claim to have been abused by members of the unit in the presence of an AFP officer.

Their lawyer, Lakshan Dias, says CID officers beat the men with wooden planks and threatened to rape their family members.

He says an AFP agent was visiting the CID headquarters in Colombo at the time.

“I was tortured. I was unable to pass urine for two days. I had unbearable pain in my body,” said one of the men, Sumith Mendis, 31.

The CID denies the allegations.

The AFP has been providing the CID with equipment, training and intelligence support in an effort to combat people smuggling in the area, as civilians attempt to flee Sri Lanka following the end of the country’s brutal 26-year civil war.

Mr Mendes and fellow ex-detainee Lasantha Wijeratna are being held at the country’s Negombo prison, charged with illegally attempting to flee Sri Lanka.

Prior to their imprisonment they spent more than seven months on Christmas Island after leaving for Australia on a fishing vessel in 2009.

They were arrested by Sri Lankan authorities in August 2010 after attempting to flee the country a second time.

The AFP strenuously denies witnessing the abuse but has confirmed one of its officers was in the building at the time.

“The AFP can confirm records indicate an AFP officer was present in the building on the day the offence was alleged to occur,” a spokesman told the ABC.

“At no stage did the AFP officer witness any mistreatment by CID officers of any persons held in custody.

“As part of the Sri Lankan legal process, all defendants appearing before court must first be examined by a judicial medical officer. The AFP has no knowledge of any concerns being raised.”

However, Amnesty International reported in March 2010 that the two men were hospitalised at the recommendation of a judicial officer.

According to the men’s lawyer, the AFP would have been aware of the abuses being carried out at the CID headquarters that day.

“There is no reason that the particular AFP officer [would] not have seen the interrogation and atrocities towards my clients, and my clients told me that they saw the AFP officer [witness] this interrogation,” Mr Dias said.

Egyptian legal system more responsive to torture than our own?

Published on 15 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was tortured by American and Egyptian officials post 9/11 and was smeared and shunned by the corporate press for years. He demands justice and deserves it. He talked to me about these issues in February, including the involvement of Egypt’s new Vice-President, Omar Sulaiman.

A few days ago I was contacted by an Egyptian human rights worker and lawyer looking to contact Habib directly to being proceedings in the post-Mubarak country. Things are moving quickly (and of course, not a peep about prosecuting Sulaiman in the US or Australia, as he was their nice, torturing bitch):

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib is suing Egypt’s new Vice-President, Omar Sulaiman, over his incommunicado detention and torture in Cairo in 2001, in what is shaping as an important human rights test case in the post-Mubarak era in Egypt.

Cairo lawyers acting for Mr Habib have notified the Egyptian Attorney-General they are launching proceedings against General Sulaiman, who heads Egyptian intelligence, along with the country’s former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, and Jamal Mubarak, the son and lieutenant of former president Hosni Mubarak, who resigned amid anti-regime protests in February.

A summary filed by the Cairo lawyers says Mr Habib was detained without charge for six months and subjected to “the most horrible torture methods” including electric shock, cigarette burns, attack by dogs, sexual violation and water torture.

The documents allege some of Mr Habib’s interrogations were conducted personally by General Sulaiman, who has been Egypt’s intelligence chief since 1993, and that torture occurred in the presence of Jamal Mubarak, who was a senior official in the ousted regime.

The lawyers have petitioned the Egyptian Attorney-General to have the country’s embassy in Canberra arrange for Mr Habib to travel to Cairo to give evidence.

Mr Habib does not have a current Australian passport as he is still deemed by the security agency ASIO to be a security risk. He told The Australian he had asked the federal government to issue temporary travel documents to enable him to travel to Egypt to testify, but was awaiting an answer.

Majority of US youth back torture

Published on 14 April 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Ten years after 9/11, one of the shameful legacies:

A new study by the American Red Cross obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults.

Torture has been around as long as there have been wars, but media coverage of enhanced interrogation techniques has risen the visibility of torture since the attacks of September 11. Could the generation who came of age since the towers fell have a different notion of what’s acceptable in a time of war? “Over the past 10 years, they’ve been exposed to many new conflicts,” says Isabelle Daoust, who heads ARC’s humanitarian law unit. “But they haven’t been exposed to the rules.”

The reasons may be even more nuanced than that—a combination of social and political factors new to the national conversation since the Bush administration claimed that today’s enemy was different from the ones we’ve fought in the past. Intelligence attained through controversial interrogation techniques, Bush’s lawyers at the Department of Justice argued, may be the only way to save American lives. A 2006 dossier detailing the U.S. government strategy to combat terrorism described the difficulty of pursuing new enemies who constantly “evolve and modify their ways of doing business.” As a result, the document suggested, the military would have to evolve its understanding and treatment of the enemy.

Legal scholars see societal influences that may be responsible for de-stigmatizing torture, including increasingly graphic media. “I think it suggests the national conscious is becoming more and more corroded and more accustomed to the violation of fundamental principles of human rights and international law,” says Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, who blames programs like 24 that trivialize serious issues. (Tribe, along with nearly 300 legal colleagues, sent President Obama a letter last month decrying the prison conditions of Bradley Manning, the army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.)

The best way to taint Libyan “democracy” push

Published on 7 April 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , .

This doesn’t sound like a disaster waiting to happen at all. No, it’s wonderful idea to get mercenaries to train Libyans in the art of killing and fighting:

Britain is to urge Arab countries to train the disorganised Libyan rebels, and so strengthen their position on the battlefield before negotiations on a ceasefire, senior British defence sources have indicated.

The sources said they were also looking at hiring private security companies, some of which draw on former SAS members, to aid the rebels. These private soldiers could be paid by Arab countries to train the unstructured rebel army.

In what is seen in effect as the second phase of the battle to oust Muammar Gaddafi, it is now being acknowledged that the disorganised Libyan rebels are not going to make headway on their own. Nato member countries are looking at requesting Arab countries, such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, to train the rebels, or to fund the training. Qatar and the UAE are already involved in the Nato-led no-fly zone.

Some cabinet sources said that another Arab country that might be willing to train the rebels is Jordan. They are thought to have the best-trained officers, and are possibly the best army in the region, one Cabinet source said. The training of the Libyan rebels might take as long as month to turn them into an effective force capable of holding ground, and organise flanking manoeuvres. A source said: “They’re not advancing, they’re just driving up the road, and when they see guns drawn they turn round and go back again.”

Let’s not forget that Jordan assists in the US-backed training of Palestinian Authority forces. In a new Human Rights Watch report, they are accused of abusing and torturing journalists in the West Bank.

Slamming US occupation of Afghanistan is too biased for Murdoch

Published on 5 April 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Here’s a non-story to fill the pages of the Murdoch Australian.

I appeared on ABC TV News24′s The Drum last week and discussed a variety of issues, mostly foreign affairs. On most nights the show has a range of guests, usually from the soft left to the soft right, and a number of more strident commentators somewhere else on the spectrum. I’d like some more punchy guests myself more often but there you go.

So this piece in yesterday’s Media section of the Australian is a typical non-story framed as my thoughts (and others on the panel) as evidence that the show (and ABC in general) is utterly unbalanced and skews to the left. Please. It was one night with certain guests, no more or no less. And note how there’s apparently something wrong with me talking about the brutality and immortality of the US mission in Afghanistan.

Using Gerard Henderson as a reliable critic on such matters is akin to asking George W. Bush how much he knows about torture in Abu Ghraib (ie. bugger all through willful ignorance):

The age-old problem — how to achieve balance on the ABC’s current affairs panel shows — is again in the spotlight, after a particularly egregious episode of The Drum last Thursday that featured three panellists and a host, all in furious agreement with one another on a range of policy matters.

The executive director of The Sydney Institute, Gerard Henderson, addressed the matter in his Media Watch Dog column on Friday.

He has also raised questions about the make-up of tonight’s Q&A on the ABC, saying the balance is firmly stacked to “the fashionable, soft-Left opinion”.

The Drum last Thursday was hosted by Tim Palmer, with guests Fran Kelly, Antony Loewenstein and Chas Licciardello from The Chaser.

In a discussion about the US army “kill team” soldier Corporal Jeremy Morlock, who murdered civilians and has been sentenced to 24 years jail for the crime, Loewenstein said he had decided “this sort of stuff is common”.

“It’s part of how . . . the only way you can get through a day (is) to see the enemy as towelheads . . . these images sadly are far more common than we like to believe,” he said of reports that rogue psychopaths had murdered a teenage boy and cut off his finger as a trophy.

Loewenstein said there were “massive, huge suicide rates” among US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The discussion of Tony Abbott’s welfare proposals was also all one-way.

Henderson addressed the issue in a segment of his Media Watch Dog column that analyses ABC chairman Maurice Newman’s suggestion that there is

a “group-think” ethos in the public broadcaster.

Henderson told Media yesterday that “you would never have an occasion where there were three people with a conservative outlook on The Drum. It would never, ever happen.

“They simply do not understand that there are people with a plausible, defensible, reasonable opinion that is an alternative to the soft Left opinion they all have.” Henderson said he had never been on The Drum, and had only once been invited on Q&A.

Miranda Devine, who writes for The Daily Telegraph, owned by News Limited, publisher of The Australian, has twice been invited but the audience brayed whenever she spoke.

“As a rule, the ABC presents fashionable, Left-wing opinion, which would be fine, as long as there was some balance,” Henderson said.

Obama defenders find ways to justify use of arms here and there

Published on 29 March 2011 in General and Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The New York Times, being an establishment paper, unsurprisingly backs Barack Obama’s military intervention in Libya.

Much more revealing, however, is this interview with Samantha Power, a senior director on the National Security Council.

I truly wonder if she believes the words she’s telling Politico:

Obama “has used his pulpit and a number of speeches … to kind of clear the brush that had gathered around the norms in previous years, rehabilitating some of the principles and cleaning up some of the associations,” she said, referring to international values of democracy and human rights.

“The words ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ have come to acquire meaning and content that Barack Obama and his administration provided,” she said.

“His success in rehabilitating those norms or providing that ocntent has actually made it easier for other governments to stand with us,” she said. She didn’t refer directly to the coalition now battling the Libyan government.

One of the key elements of this “clearing of the brush,” she said, had been “recognizing that human rights had to begin at home, and that his task and the Administration’s task was to strenghten the power of our example.”

She cited Obama’s torture bank, his “return to the Geneva Conventions, and his push to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

“He also renounced the imposition of democracy by military force,” she said.

Power also made the case that the American decision to return to the United Nations Human Rights Council — a venue disliked by the U.S. for its focus on criticism of Israel — has paid off in the Libya crisis with the Council’s expulsion of Libya.

There are really few examples where the Obama administration has seriously changed policies from the Bush years. Look at Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, warrant-less wire-tapping in the US, continuation of Guanatanamo Bay and military commissions for “terror suspects”, no accountability for torture and the list goes on.

Judge Obama on his actions not pretty words.

Assange: internet can liberate and/or imprison

Published on 16 March 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

He’s right (though probably exaggerates the influence of Wikileaks in the Arab revolutions):

The internet is the “greatest spying machine the world has ever seen” and is not a technology that necessarily favours the freedom of speech, the WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, has claimed in a rare public appearance.

Assange acknowledged that the web could allow greater government transparency and better co-operation between activists, but said it gave authorities their best ever opportunity to monitor and catch dissidents.

“While the internet has in some ways an ability to let us know to an unprecedented level what government is doing, and to let us co-operate with each other to hold repressive governments and repressive corporations to account, it is also the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen,” he told students at Cambridge University. Hundreds queued for hours to attend.

He continued: “It [the web] is not a technology that favours freedom of speech. It is not a technology that favours human rights. It is not a technology that favours civil life. Rather it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen. Or, on the other hand, taken by us, taken by activists, and taken by all those who want a different trajectory for the technological world, it can be something we all hope for.”

Assange also suggested that Facebook and Twitter played less of a role in the unrest in the Middle East than has previously been argued by social media commentators and politicians.

He said: “Yes [Twitter and Facebook] did play a part, although not nearly as large a part as al-Jazeera. But the guide produced by Egyptian revolutionaries … says on the first page, ‘Do not use Facebook and Twitter’, and says on the last page, ‘Do not use Facebook and Twitter’.

“There is a reason for that. There was actually a Facebook revolt in Cairo three or four years ago. It was very small … after it, Facebook was used to round-up all the principal participants. They were then beaten, interrogated and incarcerated.”

Assange said that cables released by WikiLeaks played a key role in both fomenting unrest in the Middle East and forcing the US government not to back former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Assange said diplomatic cables concerning US attitudes to the former Tunisian regime had given strength to revolutionary forces across the region.

“The Tunisian cables showed clearly that if it came down to it, the US, if it came down to a fight between the military on the one hand, and Ben Ali’s political regime on the other, the US would probably support the military.”

He continued: “That is something that must have also caused neighbouring countries to Tunisia some thought: that is that if they militarily intervened, they may not be on the same side as the United States.”

Assange, who is appealing against his extradition to Sweden on alleged sex charges, said the WikiLeaks releases had also forced the US to drop their tacit support of Mubarak.

“As a result of releasing cables about Suleiman [the vice-president of Egypt under Mubarak], the US and Israel’s preferred option for regime takeover in Egypt, as a result of releasing cables about Mubarak’s approval of Suleiman’s torture methods, it was not possible for Joseph Biden to [repeat his earlier claim that Mubarak was not a dictator]. It was not possible for Hillary Clinton to publicly come out and support Mubarak’s regime.”