www.paxmundi.info - Weblog

Click here to download .torrent file

Britain’s biggest ever alleged terrorist bombing occurred on July 7, 2005, during London’s morning rush hour while all eyes were focused on the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland.

Tony Blair, immediately, returned to Downing Street to pronounce that the attack was an act in the ‘name of Islam’. Later, that day at a meeting of the Government’s national emergency committee COBRA, London’s anti-terror police chief Andy Hayman stated he suspected suicide bombers.

The official story developed quickly, four British Muslims - Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Jermaine Lindsay, 19, and Hasib Hussain, 18 had travelled on a mainline train from Luton into King’s Cross Thameslink Station in London, each carrying a heavy rucksack of explosives and then blew themselves up using home-made explosives, killing 56 and injuring 700 on three Tube trains and a double-decker bus.

(more…)

Click here to download .torrent file

The film Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death tells the story of thousands of prisoners who surrendered to the U.S. military’s Afghan allies after the siege of Kunduz. According to eyewitnesses, some three thousand of the prisoners were forced into sealed containers and loaded onto trucks for transport to Sheberghan prison. Eyewitnesses say when the prisoners began shouting for air, U.S.-allied Afghan soldiers fired directly into the truck, killing many of them. Witnesses say US Special Forces re-directed the containers carrying the living and dead into the desert and stood by as survivors of the ordeal were shot and buried. up to three thousand bodies were buried in a mass grave.

(more…)

I have just watched a new documentary film called Torturing Democracy, The film made by Washington Media, which was produced and written by eight-time Emmy winner and National Security Archive fellow Sherry Jones

Reviewers have described the film as a “compelling example of video story-telling” that “delivers impressively on a promise to connect the dots in an investigation of interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody.”

A key revelation in the film is a previously unpublished December 2002 draft of “standard operating procedure” at Guantanamo which shows that interrogators there adopted their techniques directly from the survival training (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape or SERE) given to American troops so they could resist the worst of Communist gulag treatment.

The film is a very clear,  public relations exercise by members of the military and intelligence establishment to distance themselves from the bush administration’s legal fictions which legitimised their widespread use of  torture, kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment in clear breach of US law, and international agreements to which the US was a signatory including the Geneva Convention.

Featuring in depth narrative and harrowing accounts of their experiences by former Guantanamo inmates Moazzam Begg and Bisher al rawi as well as legal opinion from British Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith Director, Reprieve a Legal Rights NGO

For more information about the film see the companion website torturingdemocracy.org.for the film features key documents, a detailed timeline, the full annotated transcript of the show, and lengthy transcripts of major interviews carried out for the film. are hosted by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, the Web site will ultimately include a complete “Torture Archive” of primary sources.