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and hunted around for the article in question, and found it, marked "filed 03/08/2003" (I always tell my students of English not to use that number/slash format, since it means different things in the US and the UK - here it means the third day of the eighth month in 2003) and the article, by David Bamber and Rajeev Syal, contains this most shameful of statements:- Why would these guys probably not face trial in Britain? Well, apparently because a British trial requires evidence:-A Whitehall aide said: "The Prime Minister made clear to the president that it was unlikely the men would face trial in Britain and that it could be embarrassing if they were released on their return after the US had branded them as major players in a terrorist network." A few days back, while I was clicking around the Internet looking for material on Britain's new extradition treaty with the US, I found a piece dated 10 April 2003 about a Richard Egan.One senior Government official added: "The legal advice is that they could not be tried in Britain. Even to begin proceedings we would need statements and eyewitness accounts which we know we haven't got." This says:- Lofti Raissi is a guy whom the Americans tried to extradite from Britain in the aftermath of 9/11. However, he got a trial in Britain, and got off. There's an article on him in the British paper The Guardian dated Wednesday September 11, 2002.10 April 2003 In his own voice, Lofti Raissi says, in part:- From the above, it reads very much as if the guy's crime was being a flight instructor.No one, except my lawyers, has asked why this happened. No one has gone to the FBI and said: "Why did you lie about the video in which you said Raissi was filmed with one of the hijackers? Where is it now, and why can't we see it?" The FBI knows I wasn't the person they were talking about. I am a pilot, I instructed people to fly from A to B. What if I instructed those September 11 criminals without knowing it? The American who did instruct them, he was not investigated. It's discrimination and racism. In the aftermath of 9/11, I saw on TV at least one interview with a white American flight instructor who had been involved in training the 9/11 terrorists. The white American flight instructor was (understandably) pretty sick at finding out how he had been used, but nobody jumped up and claimed that he was a terrorist. I'm getting the feeling that the crime of which a bunch of the people in Gauntanamo are guilty is the crime of being a person of the wrong ethnicity in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lofti Raissi got a British lawyer and a British trial in front of a British judge who, according to the Guardian article, said "there was no evidence whatsoever to connect him with terrorism." Similar embarrassments may not happen in future because people whom the Americans want to extradite may not get a trial in Britain. The reason is that the British government has signed a bilateral extradition treaty with the USA allowing the USA to extradite British subjects from Britain without evidence being presented to a British court. The new bilateral extradition treaty was signed on 2003 March 31 in Washington by the US Attorney General John Ashcroft and the British Home Secretary David Blunkett. I have read that this treaty still needs to be ratified by the United States senate before coming into force. There's a discussion of this treaty at:- The precise text of the treaty is currently a secret but it seems clear from what has been made public that it does in fact permit the US to extradite people from the UK without presenting evidence to a court, and, furthermore, without matching powers over American citizens being given to the British government. From the web page linked to directly above, it seems that this secret treaty can become British law without the democratic process having much to do with it:- Below is a link to an earlier discussion of this subject on the zenvirus.com website complete with more links to external sources:-In the UK the treaty will become law through an arcane process known as "Orders in Council" as international treaties are agreed by the Privy Council (Cabinet Ministers automatically become PCs) in the name of the head of state, the Monarch. This procedure falls under what is called the "royal prerogative", that is where powers have never been passed over to parliament and Ministers exercise powers on behalf of the Monarch - a thoroughly undemocratic procedure. 2003 July 28 Monday. Section 58 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 August 05 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Today I wrote a very short story inspired by the ongoing guerilla warfare in Iraq, a flash fiction called "After My Sister Was Raped":- |
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After my sister was raped, we put her in the car and drove her through South Central Los Angeles, she in shock by then, not just from the violation but from the knife wounds.
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