Sunday, November 07, 2010

 

Why did Basi and Virk swear to their own guilt?

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BC Mary comment: These words are harsh. They're theatrical. But that doesn't mean there isn't a hard core of truth in what is brought forward here by a former editor of Financial Post Magazine. I recommend reading this with Basi, Virk, and Basi in mind and the question: why did they admit guilt in the BC Rail Political Corruption Trial when for all these years they have insisted they were only doing their jobs as their superiors asked them to do:

Stalin would have been proud

Joseph Stalin invented the show trial. Here [see the source: http://www.nationalpost.com/Stalinwould%20have%20been%20proud/3737862/story.html#ixzz14ZzSiC1O] an official in Moscow reads a denouncement against 21 men on trial for treason and murder in 1938.

Tony Keller
Special to the National Post
Oct. 28, 2010

In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization. They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. In the following years, as Stalin's purges picked up steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories, usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture. Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

On the main charge, "murder in violation of the laws of war" (a crime that doesn't appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.

Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan. He was the only survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an al-Qaeda position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes, shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that, just before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.

He then spent several months in the hellhole that was Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims -- credibly, given all that we know about what went on at Bagram -- that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above his head for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs, and sometimes forced to urinate on himself because he was not unshackled to go to the bathroom.

His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S. prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death. Ponder that for a moment.

He was interviewed about 25 times by this interrogator, Joshua Claus. Claus was also the interrogator for an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was chained to the ceiling and beaten to death in Bagram in 2002; Claus pled guilty to his involvement in the affair and received a five month sentence. In a lovely Orwellian touch, the U.S. government insisted that reporters covering Khadr's trial not name Claus, but instead refer to him as "Interrogator 1."

In Bagram, Khadr confessed that he had thrown the grenade that killed an American soldier. No one saw him do this, so his confession is really the only evidence of the act. Last summer, U.S. military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish ruled that the confession, despite the obviously coercive circumstances under which it was made, had been freely given, and could be used against Khadr in court.

This week, Omar Khadr was offered the following choice: plead guilty, or face two different routes to life in prison. He could go to trial, and thanks to a confession that would be laughed out of any real court of law, he'd probably be convicted. But even if the court somehow found him not guilty, the U.S. reserved the right to detain him indefinitely as an enemy combatant. The only sure way to get out of jail early was to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear.

On Monday, Khadr was even forced to cop to other crimes, including the killing of two Afghan soldiers, something he wasn't even charged with, and for which the prosecution appears to have had no evidence. And, in a nice touch that Stalin would have appreciated, Khadr appears to have also been forced to sign away his right to sue his jailors for the various forms of deprivation and abuse that he was subject to. In court on Monday, Col. Patrick Parrish repeatedly asked Khadr to confirm that he was agreeing to these terms willingly, that he really, truly, sincerely wanted to plead guilty all of his own accord. Khadr said yes. They could have told him to confess that he had simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he would have done it.

And so the Bush administration project of ridding the world of terrorism by means of torture comes full circle. The U.S. military and CIA, ordered to use force to extract information from detainees, something that violated not just U.S. military tradition but U.S. military law, had to come up with new interrogation techniques, and quickly. They turned to history, including copying communist coercion-based interrogation models, such as those that captured American troops had been subjected to during the Korean War.

The original communist torture techniques, which for a time inspired the standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not designed to elicit truth. They were designed to produce false confessions: That was the whole point. They were designed to force people to say what interrogators wanted to hear -- yes, I am a capitalist stooge, yes I am a Trostkyite, yes I am a terrorist.

And now Guantanamo's very first military tribunal has its first guilty verdict, thanks to those methods of coercion first perfected for the Soviet Bloc show trial. My God, what have we done? Somewhere in hell, Joseph Stalin is smiling.

- Tony Keller, a former editor of the Financial Post Magazine, is a visiting fellow at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation.


Source HERE.

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/Stalinwould%20have%20been%20proud/3737862/story.html#ixzz14ZzSiC1O

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Comments:
I don't see any immediate similarity--in the sense that i do not believe for a second that b/v/b were coerced to go along with this charade. Not a chance. These guys, our folks, were more-than-willing accomplices right from the git-go and forever thereafter. The only torturing going on...was...well, you get my point.

Advanced Monopoly Kapitalism has no trouble recruiting mercanaries to implement the a"G"enda. They quite literally choose to take the left hand path, and, in that way, become assets to be used on the great work. They are seduced, rather than coerced.

These guys are being given protection, albeit limited. They are not being shot for show. Consider who picked up their legal tab.

This was not a party purge. Not at all. It was a very limited hang-out, which was fully agreed to by all the parties involved. The Bazi Boys are players; they played along; and the Bigger Boys put the fix in with time. Dave Basi will likely be 'made' for going through this for the team.
 
Chinese Sneakers,

There's a sharp difference between being coerced ... and being offered "a deal you can't refuse".

But leaving that aside, I'd like to know what you meant by "our folks" in the line:

"These guys, our folks, were more-than-willing accomplices ..."

As you may know, I don't think in terms of parties, or "party purges" ...
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I used "our folks" in that sentence to refer to this present time and the prevailing circumstance in which we are participating here in b.c., where Gordon Campbell and Dave Basi and Ken Dobell and Peter Brown are flourishing; as opposed to the revolutionary reds under stalin in the 1930s, or the u.s. m.i.c. under both cheney and now obama.

I meant to use it in that sense, if you please.

And, it's good to know that you're not thinking in terms of parties. Didn't mean to step on your toes with that comment, though.

Still i stand unconvinced that Dave Basi had to be threatened in any way to plead out to this deal. This was rigged from the inside; and he knew how it was supposed to play out.
 
Chinese Sneaker$,

Have you seen Robin Mathews' column today?

The whole rotten issue has taken on a life and meaning all its own ... thanks for your input.
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BVB are guilty as sin. There is no debate. They admited their guilt. Get used to it. End of story.
 
Enjoy your bowl of PABlum Anon 3:14...with citizens like you, BC needs no more enemies.
 
Basi/Birk said, they were just following orders, they could have said no. BC people realize, anyone opposing Campbell loses their jobs. However, Basi/Virk said, if they kept their mouths shut, they would be taken care of. Boy was that ever right, De Jong saw to that. Basi/Virk were willing to sell their souls, to save Campbell's ass. They also sold their political careers, to the same devil. I wonder if, this applies to everyone else. You may steal from your neighbor, fraudulently sell his goods, and pay no penalty. All we need is a corrupt court, a corrupt judge and some brain dead witnesses, and we would be home free. This isn't the end of the story, there are those, who refuse to accept this corruption and miscarriage of justice. Good for them, I wish them every success.
 
Anonymous 1145am you are priceless.

Basi sold no such soul.

He had no soul to sell in the first place.

As for political careers, you have obviously forgot about that Basi also took a bribe from SunRiver Developerss?

That David Basi's Shawnigan Lake Home Was Busted For A Marijuana Grow-Op At The Same Time His Office Was Being Raided???

That the whole wire tap and Rail BC deal was learned after cops had wire tapped Basi to intercept calls from his cocaine cousin who was sent to jail for 9 yrs?

Remember BASI BOYS who signed up PHANTOM members?

And you have the gall to say Basi sold his soul????
 
Funy how the RCMP are all over the HST signatures, WHAT ABOUT THE PHANTOM MEMBERS BASI BOYS SIGNED UP?

Where were the RCMP when that scandal broke out?
 
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