'Shopped' son faces jail over gun

Taken from ITN, UK
20/06/2008

A teenager whose father called the police after finding a gun and bullets in his bedroom faces jail when he is sentenced later.

Paul Metcalfe, 19, from Nelson, Lancashire, pleaded guilty to possession of 11 cartridges and a blank firing handgun, converted to fire real bullets.

Despite being shopped by his 45-year-old father Neil, Metcalfe has forgiven him, believing it was the right thing to do.

He said: "Although I'm scared of going to prison, I feel dad saved me. I was angry with him at the time. Now I know why he did it and respect him for it."

Mr Metcalfe said: "How would you feel if you hadn't done that and then you came back home and found your son with a bullet hole in his head?

"You just have to realise that these are weapons - they are dangerous."

Metcalfe was "minding" the bullets and gun for another, unidentified individual, who has not been named, Burnley Crown Court was told.

He showed the ammunition to his sister's boyfriend and a neighbour - who told his father, who was living at another house after splitting from Metcalfe's mother.

When Mr Metcalfe went round to investigate, he found the bullets wrapped in a plastic bag on top of an airing cupboard.

"Sick with worry", Mr Metcalfe called police who then also found the gun hidden in a sofa bed and Metcalfe was arrested.

He told officers he was "looking after it" - after being put under pressure to do so, the court heard.

Metcalfe has not told police who it belongs to.

Possession of a handgun carries a mandatory five year jail term - but Metcalfe's lawyer, Hugh Barton, pleaded with Judge Christopher Cornwall to make an exception.

He said the five-year minimum term was "purely deterrent" but in this case it would not be a deterrent because Metcalfe has learnt his lesson.

Metcalfe has no previous convictions and was put under pressure and intimidated into minding the weapon, Mr Barton said.

In such a case five years would be "arbitrary and disproportionate", he added.

And he said a five-year term for Metcalfe could actually deter other people from informing police on their loved ones if they found a firearm belonging to their son or father.

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This is brilliant news that parents are taking the correct steps to not only protect their children but society. Only a few days earlier twin girls shopped their drunk mum after she nearly drove into their house. A breath test revealed she was about two and a half times the drinkdrive limit - 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath. Cox at first denied drink driving but changed her plea when she realised her girls would testify against her at Barnsley magistrates' court in South Yorks. So all round great news,we need more people to speak out and stop the disese that is ruining our society.

‘Vultures’ expose corruption

Hedge funds lift the lid on African deception

Taken from The Sunday Times, June 15, 2008
By Tony Allen-Mills

ON a spring morning in Paris three years ago, a young African oil executive went on a shopping spree. He spent £1,600 at Escada on the Avenue Montaigne, and £3,700 a few doors down at Christian Lacroix. A couple of weeks later he spent £4,000 at Ermenegildo Zegna and £3,200 at Louis Vuitton.

By the end of 2005, Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso had charged more than £112,000 to his personal Hong Kong-issued credit card, up from £64,000 the previous year.

Last August Mr Justice Stanley Burnton dismissed an attempt by Sassou-Nguesso in the High Court to suppress publication of his credit card bills. Last month he lost a related action in Hong Kong.

So why is Sassou-Nguesso such an embarrassment for several prominent British and French companies – not to mention the celebrities and politicians, among them Gordon Brown, who have argued so vociferously for poor African countries to be forgiven their international debts?

The answer has all the elements of a detective novel, complete with straw men, false noses, hidden bank accounts, and American bankers who have been derided as “vultures”, but who have managed to find out more about corruption in Africa than Scotland Yard and the FBI.

It is a story that leads from the oil-rich coast of western Africa to the gas-guzzling consumers of America and Europe, via a trail of government fraud and corporate deceit that successive UK judges have publicly condemned.

It starts with Sassou-Nguesso, the son of Denis Sassou-Nguesso, president of the Republic of the
Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries. Two-thirds of Congolese people subsist on less than 50p a day.

The Sassou-Nguessos are no strangers to allegations of profligate spending. Their country, also known as Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from the bigger adjacent Democratic Republic of Congo, controls Africa’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves. It pumps crude at about 235,000 barrels a day, worth £5.8 billion a year at today’s record prices.

When Sassou-Nguesso senior visited New York for a recent United Nations summit, bottles of Kristal champagne popped as his entourage ran up a hotel bill of £169,000 – of which £100,000 was paid in cash. Yet he repeatedly claims his country is too poor to pay off its debts.

In May last year, when he was still chancellor, Gordon Brown said he was shocked that poor African countries were being pursued by international hedge-fund creditors seeking to turn a profit on old debt they had bought at a discount.

Brown demanded international action to protect Africans from so-called “vulture funds” whose pursuit of highly indebted countries was, he said, “nothing short of scandalous”.

It was a theme close to the heart of Bono, Bob Geldof and other anti-poverty campaigners who have turned African debt relief into a popular cause.

When Danny Glover, the Hollywood actor and activist, testified before Congress last year, he urged the American government to “follow the example of Gordon Brown . . . to stop vulture funds from devouring African economic progress”.

Yet the case of Congo-Brazzaville and its free-spending rulers offers a radically different perspective on debt relief, and who, exactly, is responsible for obstructing economic progress.

Earlier this year, in a little-noticed, out-of-court settlement, the Brazzaville government paid off its “vulture” creditors, thereby ending almost a decade of legal wrangling that stretched from Bermuda and the Virgin Islands via Paris, New York and Hong Kong to London’s High Court.

It was a startling surrender for a country that has spent much of the past 10 years dodging its creditors, ignoring court orders and pleading to join the debt-relief programme run by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Why give in to the vultures just as world opinion had clearly turned against the hedge funds?

My search for an answer started on the 35th floor of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper in mid-town Manhattan. This is the headquarters of Elliott Associates, a $10 billion (£5 billion) hedge fund that specialises in so-called “distressed” debt – the packages of national and corporate loans turned bad that are routinely sold by banks trying to tidy up their balance sheets.

“Our approach has always been to look for countries with a good prospect of re-negotiating debt,” Jay Newman, a senior Elliott portfolio manager, told me in the company boardroom overlooking Central Park. “We do not acquire the debt of countries that have no means to pay.”

In the late 1990s, an Elliott subsidiary named Kensington International purchased several packages of overdue Congo debt with a collective value of about $100m. It was a perfectly legal transaction and Kensington swiftly won a series of judgments in British and other courts ordering Brazzaville to pay up. The hedge fund’s attempts to initiate negotiations were ignored.

Thus began a game of cat-and-mouse across the world as Elliott’s team of private detectives and forensic accountants attempted to identify shipments of Congolese oil that might be seized and sold to repay the outstanding debts.

Armed with court-approved powers to subpoena witnesses and with search warrants, the Elliott team began a journey into the murky depths of the international oil trade. It would subsequently emerge in court that the Brazzaville government had established a network of sham companies (known in French as faux nez, or “false noses”) and bogus executives (“straw men”) in the hope of concealing their oil transactions.

The breakthrough came in 2005, when Elliott detectives discovered two consignments of Congo oil had been loaded on a vessel called the Nordic Hawk for sale to Glencore, a British company set up by Marc Rich, the Swiss-based trader. Glencore intended to sell the oil on to BP in what should have appeared as a standard and un-noteworthy industry transaction.

Kensington promptly applied to the High Court in London for injunctions to seize the proceeds of the Nordic Hawk consignments on the grounds they were fraudulently concealed sales by the Brazzaville government.

The transcript of Mr Justice Cook’s ruling, among hundreds of court documents reviewed by The Sunday Times, found that Denis Gokana, the head of the national Congo oil company SNPC, had set up a series of front companies and was in effect selling Congo’s oil to himself to disguise its true origins.

Somewhere along the way millions of dollars went missing, and the judge noted that an examination of the bank statements of one of Gokana’s companies “reveals that there was virtually no connection between the cash passing through its bank accounts and the sums it should have received for the oil it sold”.

Where the money went remains a mystery.

Critics of vulture funds say the pursuit of African debtors forces them to resort to unconventional measures to protect sovereign assets. Oxfam is among the charities to denounce vulture funds for “profiting from poverty”.

Undeterred by the “vulture” slurs, Elliott identified a new target. It decided to go after the middlemen. In 2005, Kensington filed a civil suit against BNP Paribas, the French bank, accusing it of conspiring with the SNPC “to divert oil revenues from the Republic of Congo into the pockets of powerful Congolese public officials, while at the same time protecting both the oil and oil revenues from seizure by legitimate creditors”.

BNP denied that its banking arrangements with the Congo were anything other than routine, but a New York judge rejected the company’s motion to have charges dismissed. The case was ultimately dropped as part of the settlement between Elliott and Brazzaville.

Kensington also went back to court in London, where it was attempting to obtain information and documents concerning a related pair of British companies, Vitol Services and Vitol Broking, and their dealings with Congo.

Elliott’s investigators had established that the Vitol companies had made substantial payments to Hong Kong accounts controlled by prominent Congo oil executives. Among them was Denis Christel, the president’s son, who was also head of Cotrade, SNPC’s trading arm.

Kensington argued before Mr Justice Gross of the UK commercial court in January 2007 that “the only credible explanations for these payments are that either they were made to assist Congo in hiding its assets, or they were made as corrupt kickbacks in return for valuable business”.

Vitol promptly startled the oil world by pleading the British equivalent of the Fifth Amendment – it did not want to testify for fear of incriminating itself.

The judge ultimately rejected the Vitol claim, and the case went to appeal. Despite extensive allegations of bribery and corruption detailed in court, no British police investigation has been launched. The Vitol case has also been dropped as a result of the Elliott settlement.

At first, Sassou-Nguesso shrugged off Elliott’s attempts to seize Congo’s assets. “If this is not robbery, what is?” the president once complained to Fortune magazine.

“Who is stealing from the poor?” He dismissed the hedge funds as “snakes in the ocean” and “thug gangsters” who hid in Caribbean tax havens.

Then Elliott’s trail led to Hong Kong, and to Denis Christel’s credit-card receipts.

These first surfaced publicly on the website of Global Witness, a London-based anti-corruption pressure group that has long been monitoring Congo. The group claimed in a 2005 report that the country’s main economic asset “has for too long been managed for the private profit of the elite rather than for the benefit of its entire population”.

The documents produced by Global Witness purported to show that at least part of Denis Christel’s personal expenditure had been paid for by an offshore company he controlled, Long Beach. The same company had received payments from sham oil companies set up by Gokana.

When Sassou-Nguesso went to court in London in August to make Global Witness remove the documents from its site, Mr Justice Burnton noted “it is an obvious possible inference that his expenditure has been financed by secret personal profits made out of dealings in oil sold by Cotrade. The profits of Cotrade’s oil sales should go to the people of the Congo, not to those who rule it or their families”.

The judge declined to suppress the documents. He concluded: “Once there is a good reason to doubt the propriety of the financial affairs of a public official, there is a public interest in those affairs being open to public scrutiny.”

Attempts to obtain a comment from the Brazzaville government were unsuccessful last week, but the president must have realised the spotlight on his family’s private affairs wasn’t going away.

The publication of the Hong Kong credit-card bills “made them get serious” about negotiating a settlement, a source familiar with the case said.

The terms of the settlement prevent Newman from providing details, but the question arises: Did the hedge fund really make a profit after all those years of expensive sleuthing around the globe?

In a newspaper article describing the Nordic Hawk affair, Newman likened the pursuit of Congo’s oil revenues to “a magical mystery tour”.

He said: “Far from being under control, as Bono and [others] would have us believe, corruption in Africa is out of control.

“Seasoned Third World bosses like President Sassou-Nguesso know all too well how to manipulate soft-hearted campus sensibilities and dysfunctional international financial institutions like the IMF.”

Last week Newman declined to address the profit issue, but had no regrets about his company’s approach. “It’s about the rule of law,” he said.

In the course of its near-decade-long pursuit of Congo, Elliott has probably done more than any other national or corporate entity to expose corruption in Africa. It has identified the middlemen who facilitate corrupt payments; it has traced the money trail from British oil traders to luxury boutiques in Paris.

And where was Scotland Yard while all this mischief was being exposed? Brown’s response, a month before he became prime minister last year, was to “deplore the activities of so-called vulture funds”.

Compare that to the remarks of Brice Mackosso, a Congolese citizen who campaigns for transparency in the handling of the country’s oil wealth. “If it were not for these vulture funds we would not know any facts about the way our country’s wealth is being taken away,” he said.

In June last year, a consortium of three French anti-corruption groups filed a civil complaint in Paris alleging the ruling families of Angola, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville had acquired millions of euros worth of French assets that they could not have afforded on their official salaries.

The case was dismissed in November but not before a resulting police investigation accumulated hundreds of documents, including property titles, cheques, bank orders and invoices. Among them was evidence that earlier this year, the wife and son of Sassou-Nguesso bought separate flats on the same street near the Boulevard Saint-Germain for a total of £3.6m.

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I'd just like to say well done to the Hedge Fund teams and all those organisation that exposed these evil people - they had done a great job in exposing corruption of some of the richest people from one of the poorest countries in the world. When things like this happen you do wonder why international governments don't use powers to flush out these people. Maybe oil is the key word?

As for the UK government and international celebrates promoting Africa to be debt free so that it could have a fresh start - this is a good idea but we really do need to control those that exploit the countries from within.

Ethiopia committing war crimes - says HRW

Taken from Yahoo News, 12 June 2008
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, Associated Press

NAIROBI, Kenya - Ethiopia's government is committing war crimes in its military campaign against rebels in the Ogaden region, a rights group charged Thursday in a report that complained the U.S. and other Western governments have remained silent about abuses.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said Ethiopian troops are beating and strangling civilians, staging public executions and burning villages in Ogaden. It said the allegations were based on more than 100 eyewitness accounts.

An Ethiopian official denied the charges.

A State Department spokesman, Gonzalo Gallegos, said officials had not seen the report. He declined to comment generally about the insurgency in the Ogaden.

Washington looks to Ethiopia for help in the fight against Islamic extremists in East Africa, where al-Qaida has claimed responsibility for several attacks, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 225 people. Ethiopia is helping the U.N.-backed government in neighboring Somalia against Muslim insurgents.

"The silence of the U.S. government is not a silence based on ignorance," said Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. "They are ignoring the information available to them."

Ethnic Somalis have been fighting for more than a decade seeking greater autonomy in the desolate Ogaden, which is being explored for oil and gas. Ethiopian forces stepped up operations after rebels attacked a Chinese-run oil exploration field in April 2007, killing 74 people.

"The Ethiopian army's answer to the rebels has been to viciously attack civilians in the Ogaden," said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director for Human Rights Watch.

The group also said the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front has violated humanitarian law by conducting the oil attack and by setting land mines along roads. Ethiopia accuses the rebels of being financed by its archenemy, Eritrea.

Bereket Simon, special adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, denied all allegations in the report.

"It's not true," he said. "It's the same old fabrication."

Asked whether an internal investigation was planned, he said: "How can we investigate lies and innuendoes? How can we try to disprove lies by investigating?"

Gagnon chided Ethiopia's leading donors, including the United States, Britain and the European Union, accusing them of ignoring what is happening in Ogaden.

"These widespread and systematic atrocities amount to crimes against humanity," she said. "Yet Ethiopia's major donors, Washington, London and Brussels, seem to be maintaining a conspiracy of silence around the crimes."

Gagnon said Western governments and institutions give at least $2 billion in aid to Ethiopia every year.

"Influential states use many excuses, such as lack of information and strategic priorities, to downplay the grave human rights concerns in Somali Region," she said. "But crimes against humanity can't be swept under the carpet."

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It is sad that the Ethopian regime does not get regular mention of their war crimes in the news (let alone from our politicians) - it seems that certain news pieces have a higher agenda than others. Another case where Oil is more important than people? or maybe a case like Israel where human rights crimes are ignored as Ethopia (like Israel) is a friend of the west. Looks like more double standards by the United States, Britain and the European Union.

US issues threat to Iraq's $50bn foreign reserves in military deal

Taken from Independent, UK
By Patrick Cockburn, 06 June 2008

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.

Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq's independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new "strategic alliance" with the United States.

The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July. Although it is in reality a treaty between Iraq and the US, Mr Bush is describing it as an alliance so he does not have to submit it for approval to the US Senate.

Iraqi critics of the agreement say that it means Iraq will be a client state in which the US will keep more than 50 military bases. American forces will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens and conduct military campaigns without consultation with the Iraqi government.

American soldiers and contractors will enjoy legal immunity.

The US had previously denied it wanted permanent bases in Iraq, but American negotiators argue that so long as there is an Iraqi perimeter fence, even if it is manned by only one Iraqi soldier, around a US installation, then Iraq and not the US is in charge.

The US has security agreements with many countries, but none are occupied by 151,000 US soldiers as is Iraq. The US is not even willing to tell the government in Baghdad what American forces are entering or leaving Iraq, apparently because it fears the government will inform the Iranians, said an Iraqi source.

The fact that Iraq's financial reserves, increasing rapidly because of the high price of oil, continue to be held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is another legacy of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein. Under the UN mandate, oil revenues must be placed in the Development Fund for Iraq which is in the bank.

The funds are under the control of the Iraqi government, though the US Treasury has strong influence on the form in which the reserves are held.

Iraqi officials say that, last year, they wanted to diversify their holdings out of the dollar, as it depreciated, into other assets, such as the euro, more likely to hold their value. This was vetoed by the US Treasury because American officials feared it would show lack of confidence in the dollar.

Iraqi officials say the consequence of the American action was to lose Iraq the equivalent of $5bn. Given intense American pressure on a weak Iraqi government very dependent on US support, it is still probable that the agreement will go through with only cosmetic changes. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the immensely influential Shia cleric, could prevent the pact by issuing a fatwa against it but has so far failed to do so.

The Grand Ayatollah met Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which is the main supporter of the Iraqi government, earlier this week and did not condemn the agreement or call for a referendum. He said, according to Mr Hakim, that it must guarantee Iraqi national sovereignty, be transparent, command a national consensus and be approved by the Iraqi parliament. Critics of the deal fear that the government will sign the agreement, and parliament approve it, in return for marginal concessions.

Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control

Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors

Taken from The Independent, UK
By Patrick Cockburn, 05 June 2008

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.

The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.

The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."

Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.

The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.

Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.

The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.

The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.

The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

Taken from The Guardian, Monday June 2 2008
Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.


An amphibious assault vehicle leaves the USS Peleliu, which was used to detain prisoners, according to the human rights group Reprieve. Photograph: Zack Baddor/AP

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were "disappeared" to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

"By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been 'through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them."

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, called for the US and UK governments to come clean over the holding of detainees.

"Little by little, the truth is coming out on extraordinary rendition. The rest will come, in time.

Better for governments to be candid now, rather than later. Greater transparency will provide increased confidence that President Bush's departure from justice and the rule of law in the aftermath of September 11 is being reversed, and can help to win back the confidence of moderate Muslim communities, whose support is crucial in tackling dangerous extremism."

The Liberal Democrat's foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: "If the Bush administration is using British territories to aid and abet illegal state abduction, it would amount to a huge breach of trust with the British government. Ministers must make absolutely clear that they would not support such illegal activity, either directly or indirectly."

A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, told the Guardian: "There are no detention facilities on US navy ships." However, he added that it was a matter of public record that some individuals had been put on ships "for a few days" during what he called the initial days of detention. He declined to comment on reports that US naval vessels stationed in or near Diego Garcia had been used as "prison ships".

The Foreign Office referred to David Miliband's statement last February admitting to MPs that, despite previous assurances to the contrary, US rendition flights had twice landed on Diego Garcia. He said he had asked his officials to compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

CIA "black sites" are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

In addition, numerous prisoners have been "extraordinarily rendered" to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

Cyclone Nargis: one month on, US accuses Burma of criminal neglect

Extracted from Guardian, UK, Monday June 2 2008
By Matthew Weaver and agencies

The US has accused the Burmese military government of "criminal neglect" in its response to Cyclone Nargis, after it was claimed that aid had still failed to reach 200,000 people, a month after the disaster struck.

The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said he would make a decision within "a matter of days" whether or not to withdraw US navy ships from the Burmese coast. They had been mobilised to coordinate aid deliveries.

"It's becoming pretty clear the regime is not going to let us help," Gates told reporters in Singapore.

Asked if the military junta was guilty of genocide in its response to the disaster, Gates said: "This is more akin, in my view, to criminal neglect."

The Burmese junta responded by insisting its response to the disaster had been "prompt".

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Mr Gates and many politicians around the world have been very critical about the response to aid by the Burmese regime. The Burmese government have not been perfect but understandably been taking their time and only trusting countries that they know will not occupy them. Having American warships hovering close to their country wouldn't make any country feel secure. This brings me to my main point about Gates's comments.

Wasn't there a regime in North America (a couple of years ago) who refused any help from Cuba (who wanted to give them 1000 doctors to treat victims of the hurricane) - instead they let the people starve and rot. Help did not arrive for a long time, the President hid in his luxury home whilst people started looting and killing people for food and resources - yes, welcome to the richest country in the world. Maybe George Bush doesn't like black people? Hurricane Katrina was a very bad experience but shows that even the wealthiest countries in the world can be on their knees against mother nature. I pray that we don't have any more of these natural disasters.

Burma United States

Mother turns in sons to police for blinding man in drunken assault

This is a beautiful story that I came across from the UK...

Taken from Telegraph, UK, 30/05/2008
By Laura Clout

A mother turned in her own sons to police after they boasted of carrying out an unprovoked assault which left a father blind in one eye.

Carol Saldinack said she felt compelled to make the "agonising" decision after learning of the role her sons Luke Newman, 27, and Oliver Clark, 24, played in the violent attack on 36-year-old Marc Parkinson after a night out drinking.

The 51-year-old, who lives in Norfolk, said she has no regrets despite being ostracised from her family and subjected to threats, and she urged others to follow her example.

The pair, along with 25-year-old Benjamin Hammond, were jailed for two years at Chichester Crown Court last week for grievous bodily harm.

The group had been drinking in Chichester, West Sussex, in June last year when they launched the unprovoked attack on Mr Parkinson outside a takeaway restaurant.

The company director, who has two children, was left with a detached retina, extensive cuts and bruising, a perforated eardrum and bruised ribs. He is now blind in one eye, his business has folded and he has been forced to sell his home to pay off debts.

Mrs Saldinack, who has six children, told the Daily Mirror she was trembling with nerves as she picked up the telephone to call police, after hearing that her sons had bragged about the attack.

She said: “Luke was apparently walking around with a newspaper report of the attack as if it was a trophy. I felt angry, appalled, shocked and sickened.

“All I could think was 'this man might die, my sons could be killers’. In minutes I rang police and said: 'About the fight in Chichester, I know who's responsible’.”

The pair’s homes were raided by police the following day and the they two were later identified by witnesses in line-ups.

Despite now living in fear from threats, Mrs Saldinack insisted she has no regrets and said others in her situation should do the same.

“I’d urge anyone who finds themselves in this situation to search their own heart and do the right thing”, she said.

“Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends - someone always knows who’s responsible for things like this. They need to come forward.

“Think of the victim’s family and their hell. If you feel you can cope with the consequences, speak up and tell the truth.”

Mr Parkinson thanked Mrs Saldinack, telling the newspaper it was a “brave thing” to do.

Detective Inspector Jim McKnight of Sussex Police said: “The call we received in this case obviously helped in the investigation. However, there was strong evidence, including forensics, which led to the convictions.

“We would always seek to support and protect individuals who provide us with information in difficult circumstances.”