A British man spoke publicly for the first time yesterday to accuse MI5 officers of forcing him to confess to masterminding the July 7 bombings.

Jamil Rahman claims UK security officers were behind his arrest in 2005 in Bangladesh.

He says he was beaten repeatedly by local officials who also threatened to rape him and his wife.

Mr Rahman, who is suing the Home Office, said a pair of MI5 officers who attended his torture and interrogation would leave the room while he was beaten.

He claims when he told the pair he had been tortured they merely answered: ‘They haven’t done a very good job on you.’

Mr Rahman told the BBC: ‘They were questioning me on the July 7 bombings, showing me pictures of the bombers.

‘They showed me maps, terrains … they asked me to draw things out and write names next to pictures.

‘They threatened my family. They go to me, “In the UK, gas leaks happen, if your family house had a gas leak and everyone got burnt, there’s no problems, we can do that easily”.’

He says he eventually made a false confession of involvement in the July 7 bomb plots.

The extraordinary allegations will add to pressure on UK ministers to come clean over the way Britain’s intelligence agencies have been allowed to gather evidence around the world in the eight years since the September 11 attacks.

Jamil Rahman, a former civil servant from south Wales, is a British citizen who moved to Bangladesh in 2005 and married a woman he met there. He returned to the UK last year.

He said: ‘It was all to do with the British. Even the Bengali intelligence officer told me that they didn’t know anything about me, that they were only doing this for the British.’

Mr Rahman, 31, says he was released after three weeks but re-arrested and mistreated repeatedly over the next two years.

He described how two men he believes were British agents would leave the room for ‘a break’ while he was beaten.

They often asked: ‘We’re not torturing you, are we?’ and recorded his confirmations that they were not, he alleges.

‘The first time they tried to be friendly, they came in trying to show they were my friends, calm and relaxed, nothing wrong.

‘I tried to demonstrate my innocence. I thought this is wrong, because they were British I might get some justice.’

He added: ‘They showed me hundreds of pictures. Black, white, Chinese, bearded non-bearded, woman, man, young and old. Every time, they came for a new session, same pictures with new ones.

‘The main thing they wanted me to be is a witness against another British man in Bangladesh. They pressured me so much to be a witness against this guy in court.

Mr Rahman denies being a terrorist, although he admits attending meetings in Britain of the radical Islamist group al-Muhajiroun – claiming he later rejected their extremist ideology.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘We firmly reject any suggestion that we torture people or ask others to do so on our behalf.

‘Mr Rahman has made a lot of unsubstantiated allegations. They have not been evidenced in any court of law.’

Jamil Rahman is one of a number of former detainees who accuse the British Government colluded in their torture abroad.

His account echoes that of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, who said he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco with MI5’s knowledge.

The 30-year-old Ethiopian says he was beaten and deprived of sleep to try to make him confess to an Al Qaeda ‘dirty bomb’ plot, and his treatment is now the subject of an unprecedented police investigation into MI5’s conduct.

Source: Daily Mail

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Legal council tells concerned caller that American citizens must accept enforced shot in event of mass swine flu vaccination program

A member of the public who was concerned about a mandatory mass vaccination program in light of the swine flu pandemic called the Arkansas State Health Department for advice only to be told that mandatory vaccines were constitutional and could be enforced at gunpoint by the government if necessary.

The editor of the popular blog “Pissed Off Former Democrat” phoned the legal council at the Arkansas State Health Department to seek advice about obtaining waiver forms for a future mass swine flu vaccination program.

One of his main concerns centered around the fact that the company chosen to mass produce the swine flu vaccine, Baxter International, were recently caught in a scandal after it emerged they had sent out vaccines contaminated with the H5N1 avian flu virus to 18 countries from their Austrian branch. It was only by providence that the contamination was found after the batch was first tested on ferrets in the Czech Republic, before being shipped out for injection into humans. The ferrets all died and the shocking discovery was made.

Some Czech newspapers speculated at the time that Baxter was embroiled in a conspiracy to provoke a pandemic from which it would reap billions in profits from producing the vaccine to counter a bird flu outbreak.

As we have previously covered, the last time the government ordered a mass vaccination drive in response to a swine flu outbreak, the program had to be stopped short after the shots caused over 500 cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a severe paralyzing nerve disease. 30 people died as a direct result of the vaccinations.

During the phone conversation, the legal council discusses the potential of a future mandatory swine flu vaccination program and states, “That’s constitutional, there’s no doubt about it….mandatory vaccinations are legal under the Supreme Court….absolutely.”

The caller responds, “I’m an American and I have a legal right to make my own decision whether or not someone sticks a needle in me,” to which the legal council responds, “That’s not true….no.”

“As a lawyer you believe that I don’t have the right to deny a vaccination,” asks the caller,” to which the legal council responds, “Absolutely….I don’t know why you have a problem with that….mandatory vaccines are constitutional,” adding that it doesn’t matter about personal or religious objections.

The caller then asks how the mandatory vaccine would be enforced by law, “for example somebody sticking a gun in my face,” to which the legal council responds, “you could be held liable.”

The legal council at the Arkansas State Health Department cites the 1905 Supreme Court case of Jacobson v Massachusetts to argue that governments can force citizens to take vaccines.

Less than 50 years before, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court also ruled that black people were slaves - property of their slaveowners with no inherent rights whatsoever.

22 years after Jacobson v Mass., in Buck v Bell, the Supreme Court also ruled that people designated “feeble-minded” by the government could be sterilized.

The fact that the Supreme Court made a ruling over 100 hundred years ago saying the government could inject people by force doesn’t make it morally or constitutionally justifiable.

To stick needles in people at gunpoint by government decree is blatantly unconstitutional under any reasonable definition of basic human rights or the freedoms enumerated by the founders in the constitution itself.

American Indians were rounded up and sent to death camps under legal orders, but that didn’t make it right or justifiable.

Hitler’s mistreatment of Jews, Gypsies, political dissidents, homosexuals and others who resisted government policies imposed during times of “emergency” in Nazi Germany was all perpetrated behind a thin veil of legality, but that didn’t make it right either.

As a member at the Prison Planet Forum points out, “Tyrannical evil loves to mask itself in the robes of righteousness, to justify itself with legal documents, to trample the very ideas of what Law and Right mean. Resisting that evil, rising against that tyranny, by saying No More. That is right.”

As we previously reported, Time Magazine has been preparing Americans to accept the idea of mandatory vaccinations, reporting on April 28th that a mass vaccination program is being readied to combat swine flu while also urging Americans to “trust that the government is working for the greater good” and to not resist draconian measures.

Listen to the phone call below.

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Arizona school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old girl when they strip-searched her on the suspicion she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The decision put school districts on notice that such searches are “categorically distinct” from other efforts to combat illegal drugs.

In a case that had drawn attention from educators, parents and civil libertarians across the country, the court ruled 8 to 1 that such an intrusive search without the threat of a clear danger to other students violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search or seizure.

Justice David H. Souter, writing perhaps his final opinion for the court, said that in the search of Savana Redding, now a 19-year-old college student, school officials overreacted to vague accusations that Redding was violating school policy by possessing the ibuprofen, equivalent to two tablets of Advil.

What was missing, Souter wrote, “was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear.”

It was reasonable to search the girl’s backpack and outer clothes, but Safford Middle School administrators made a “quantum leap” in taking the next step, the opinion said. “The meaning of such a search, and the degradation its subject may reasonably feel, place a search that intrusive in a category of its own demanding its own specific suspicions,” Souter wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter. “Judges are not qualified to second-guess the best manner for maintaining quiet and order in the school environment,” he wrote.

He said administrators were only being logical in searching the girl. “Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments,” he wrote. “Nor will she be the last after today’s decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school.”

The court’s virtual unanimity was in contrast to the intense oral argument that seemed to exasperate the court’s only female member, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She later said her male colleagues seemed not to appreciate the trauma such a search would have on a developing adolescent.

“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she told USA Today when asked about her colleagues’ comments during the arguments. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

But yesterday’s opinion recognized just that. “Changing for gym is getting ready for play,” Souter wrote. “Exposing for a search is responding to an accusation reserved for suspected wrongdoers” and is so degrading that a number of states and school districts have banned strip searches. The Washington region’s two largest school districts are among them.

Redding said the decision “feels fantastic.” She described herself as shy and “not a good public speaker,” but said the long legal battle “was to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else.”

The case, Safford Unified School District #1 v. Redding, began when another student was found with prescription-strength ibuprofen and said she received it from Redding.

Safford Middle School assistant principal Kerry Wilson pulled the quiet honors student out of class, and she consented in his office to a search of her backpack and outer clothes. When that turned up no pills, he had a school nurse take Redding to her office, where she was told to remove her clothes, shake out her bra and pull her underwear away from her body, exposing her breasts and pelvic area.

No drugs were found, and Redding said she was so humiliated by the incident that she never returned to the school. Her mother filed suit against the school district, as well as Wilson.

After years of legal proceedings, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit eventually ruled in her favor.

Justices based their view on the court’s warning in a 1985 case that, although school officials have leeway in deciding when searches of students are reasonable, the officials may not employ searches “excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.”

Lower courts have had trouble deciding when that standard applies, Souter wrote, so Wilson should not be held personally liable for the incident. The court ruled, though, that Redding’s suit could proceed against the school district.

Ginsburg and Justice John Paul Stevens criticized the decision to remove Wilson from the suit, saying he should have known the search violated Redding’s rights.

“Abuse of authority of that order should not be shielded by official immunity,” Ginsburg wrote.

Redding’s attorney, Adam Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the court made clear that strip searches would be used only in “extraordinary circumstances” and that “the justices saw what the general public saw: that these school officials overreacted and traumatized a young girl.”

Francisco M. Negrón Jr., general counsel for the National School Boards Association, said he was glad the court recognized that the school officials had acted “in good faith.” But he said the decision did not provide clear guidelines about how specific the accusation must be, or how dangerous the alleged drugs, before school officials employ such an intrusive search.

“I think there will be more litigation,” he said.

But many states and school boards, including some in the Washington area, are simply not allowing strip searches.

The policy in Fairfax County, for instance, specifies that “personal searches may extend to pockets; and to the removal and search of outer garments such as jackets, coats, sweaters, or shoes; and to items such as pocketbooks or backpacks.” In Montgomery County, officials with the Department of School Safety and Security said searches are limited to outer clothing and pockets. The “preferred method is self-search,” where a student is told what to remove, said school system spokeswoman Kate Harrison. A third person is always present for any search, she said.

Source: Washington Post

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Headline: Looking for Work? The National Guard may offer solutions

In the midst of an economic crisis, the Colorado National Guard is currently hiring 160 positions.

Most of the positions are part-time jobs requiring one weekend of service per month, and two weeks of annual training a year. This allow recruits to keep their civilian jobs as well as get paid training in other fields as well.

Jobs openings with the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard are also available across Colorado. Recruits are able to choose their careers as long as that position is open, according to guard officials.

“That is one reason the guard is so unique,” Captain Elena O’Bryan said. “You apply for a specific job, which is the job you want to do when you join the guard.”

Base pay is based on your rank and how long you’ve been in the service.Enlisted non-prior service starts at $172.60 per drill. Officers can expect to earn around $354.04 per drill.

Employees and their families are eligible for low cost health and life insurance benefits for being employed by the guard.

Source: KUSA

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