Two Important Activists 'Died' in US Custody This Month: Abu Anas al-Libi & Phil Africa

Our America: Two major, latest, crimes of our government.
http://newtrendmag.org/ntma1585.htm


Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqai'i, popularly known as Abu Anas al-Libi, died in US custody on January 2, 2015 - just 3 months after he was kidnapped in Libya in front of his Tripoli home by a team of US military, CIA and FBI agents [video: YouTube.com/watch?v=vY_TCwWg_aA ].

First, al-Libi was taken to a Navy ship for torture. Intelligence officials interrogated him for a week after his capture aboard the USS San Antonio in the Mediterranean, according to the Guardian. He was then indicted and transferred to a prison in New York City. Reports have surfaced that the US obtained evidence against him via a plea bargain from Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian army major who worked for the CIA and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.In 2000, Mohamed received a life sentence without parole after he pled guilty to five terrorist charges in connection with the embassy bombings.

Al-Libi pled not guilty in October 2014 to involvement in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He was supposed to go to court on January 12, 2015 to defend himself against the accusations. Instead, he was buried January 10 in Libya at a well-attended funeral.

'Adel Al-Masry, who was incarcerated alongside him in America said that our beloved father was maltreated from the moment he set foot in prison and was denied medical care, causing his health to rapidly deteriorate," stated his son, Ahmed Nazeeh al Ruqai'y .

A document filed in court by the Department of Justice said al-Libi "was taken from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a New York hospital due to sudden complications arising out of his long-standing medical problems." Despite the care provided at the hospital, the government claimed, his condition deteriorated rapidly and he passed away Friday evening. They mention an imam was present with him at the hospital. Could this imam lend more insight into what happened at the hospital? There is no question that foul play could have been involved.

A similar though unrelated mysterious death occurred in another US prison hospital the same week. On Sunday, January 4th, 2015, Phil Africa was secretly transported from his Dallas, Pennsylvania prison to Wilkes Barre General Hospital at the same time as MOVE members were attempting to visit him. At the hospital, he was held in isolation for 5 days and not even allowed to call his wife of 44 years, Janine Africa. Due to the hospital and prison receiving hundreds of phone calls in support from around the world, Phil was finally allowed to call Janine on Thursday, January 8th. She reported that he was heavily drugged, incoherent and couldn't even hold the phone to talk to her. On Friday, January 9th Phil was sent back to the prison infirmary. On Saturday, January 10th Ramona and Carlos Africa were granted permission to visit Phil in the prison infirmary. When they reached him he was incoherent and couldn't talk or move his head to look at them. An hour after they left, they got a call that Phil passed away.

"Inmates in the infirmary and others in the prison were shocked when they heard the news. They had witnessed his vigorous health for decades in the prisons, had just seen him stretching and doing jumping jacks six days earlier," reads a statement written by the family. "When Merle Africa died in prison on March 13th, 1998 the conditions were very similar. She had been one way in the prison, but within hours of being forced to go to an outside hospital she was dead."

Phil Africa was a member of the Black revolutionary group, MOVE, whose home was bombed in Philadelphia by the US government on May 13, 1985. Two of Phil's children died in the fire.

Al-Libi also lost one of his sons in the Libyan independence struggle. (Details unknown).

Al-Libi's wife, Umm Abdul Rahman, didn't deny that her husband had been an al-Qaeda member, who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. "My husband was affiliated with al-Qaeda a long time ago. But he was never a senior leader in al-Qaeda," she said. Later on he got involved with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, she said. "They had a common vision, a common cause, a common enemy, which was the Gaddafi regime and they wanted to overthrow this regime."

His commitment to the ousting of Libya's longtime dictator resulted in several years of imprisonment in poor conditions in Iran after the family fled Afghanistan.

Al-Libi was given asylum by the UK but was nevertheless frequently harassed by British police. His family home was raided many times, but he was never charged with any crime. A close friend, quoted by the Associated Press, said al-Libi's family had returned to Libya around 2011 under a policy introduced by Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, to promote reconciliation with regime opponents who gave up violence.

Disgracing the concept of due process, U.S. President Barack Obama asserted at a press conference in Washington DC that al-Libi was behind the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. He "helped plan and execute plots that killed hundreds of people, a whole lot of Americans. We have strong evidence of that."US Secretary of State John Kerry boasted that "members of al-Qaeda ... literally can run but they can't hide." American lawmakers praised the military operation of the man's kidnapping.

His son Ahmed Nazeeh al Ruqai'y stated: "We will not forget. Neither will we get over what happened at the hands of the Americans, who prevented us from visiting our father and deprived us from seeing him."

How Djamel Beghal was used : Kouachi brothers' Mentor?

How torture is used to make "terror" connections.
http://newtrendmag.org/ntma1584.htm


[Editor's note: Imam Abu Qatada was cleared of all charges when Britain deported him to Jordan. The Jordanian court found no evidence to convict him. ]


Djamel Beghal is described by media as a "terrorist connected to the notorious Finsbury Park mosque" who regularly attended "hate preacher" Imam Abu Qatada's sermons in the late 1990s, when the mosque "was Abu Hamza's base." Once "Osama bin Laden's main European recruiter," Beghal is now being said to be the Kouachi brothers' "mentor." He is even accused by media of having recruited "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and the "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui. Beghal "is also said to have met one of Osama bin Laden's key deputies at the former Al Qaeda leader's base in Afghanistan," reports the UK Daily Mail. "The terror leader spent ten years in prison in France for planning attacks. He was only released in 2010."

Except that the truth is that he seems to actually be just a random guy that got kidnapped at the airport in Abu Dhabi in July of 2001. The Algerian immigrant to France, married to a Frenchwoman and father of four had made the decision in November of 2000 to move his family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan because they wanted to live in a Muslim country. In July 2001, Beghal was accompanying an ailing friend's family from Pakistan to Morocco, when he was inexplicably taken into custody and held for four years in pre-trial detention, during which time he was brutally tortured into falsely confessing to attacking the US Embassy in Paris. A team of doctors kept an eye on his vital signs to advise the torturers how much pain he could tolerate. They told him crazy stories over and over again.

"They wanted me to accuse Abu Qatada at any cost. They wanted me to accuse him of a military plot (bombing plan) or at least to make him responsible for the ideological and financial management of terrorist networks linking London to Kabul but also many other capitals in Europe, Africa and Asia," Beghal told Arnaud Mafille in a 2011 report by CagePrisoners entitled, "Djamel Beghal: British and French complicity in torture."

"He would insist with brutality to reveal the link between Abu Qatada and Osama bin Laden, whom they all called Abu Abdallah. He would also question me about Abu Hamza, the Egyptian Imam of Finsbury Park mosque in London... He was also interested in Sheikh Abdul Wahid. He presented him as the spiritual trainer for suicide bombers and the indoctrinator under the commandment of Osama bin Laden...

"Geographically, he interrogated me on what I knew about the projects of Muslims living mainly in London, Luton, Manchester and Leicester."

French intelligence officials had been tracking Beghal for almost a decade. He was a known activist with Takfir wal Hijra, which they defined as a splinter group from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Beghal continues, "I was offered a scenario of an attack in France without specifying the place but by citing the names of friends living in France I had never mentioned to them before... It was disturbing to hear those names from the mouth of Emirati and CIA agents. France was behind the scenes."

French Judge Brugui�re then offered a bargain to Beghal.

"He grabbed some documents, showing them to me from far, then, full of confidence, he proposed to recognize their contents, to sign them and hence to be saved immediately, as well as my wife and three children. He assured me that instead of being sentenced from 10 to 20 years, I would be sentenced to 5 years at most, and that later I would be released after two and a half years of detention.

"I asked him the content of those documents. I was shocked when he said that it acknowledged the preparation of an attack against the United States Embassy in Paris, adding that Osama bin Laden was the sponsor. It was also proclaiming my repentance and my acknowledgement that I had been misled by Al Qaeda, which would have, by the way, "sold" me to foreign secret services!"

Sylvie Beghal, wife of Djamel Beghal, insisting on his innocence, told UK human rights organization, CAGE that her husband "is being punished for something he didn't do."

"This isn't the first time Mr Beghal has been wrongfully accused. In 2005 an appeal court threw out an earlier conviction for his alleged involvement in a plot to bomb the US embassy in Paris as it had been reliant on a confession extracted under torture," reported CAGE.

"He has been placed in solitary confinement after all the false media coverage. He has nothing to do with the attack against Charlie Hebdo," said Mrs. Beghal. "The media is repeating false allegations which have been made against him for 14 years now."

Amandla Thomas-Johnson of CAGE, stated: "Djamel Beghal has never encouraged or carried out any act of violence and there is absolutely nothing that can link him to the attack. The narrative that Djamel Beghal is a 'radicalizer' is an old rumor without basis, its endless repetition causing endless problems to him and his family."

UN Exploits North Waziristan Genocide

650,000 Civilians Ousted from their homes by Pakistani army
NewTrendMag.org

On June 10, 2014 ten members of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan joined by Uzbek fighters took over the Karachi airport and engaged in a shootout which left 30 people including all of them dead. According to CNN, the TPP posted on their Facebook page:

"The biggest reason for attacking Karachi airport is because it serves as the biggest air logistics center supplying goods for the Crusaders' war in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the CIA got permission to use Pakistani airspace and airports in exchange for doing Pakistan the favor of assassinating a local chief with a Predator drone, even though he posed no threat to the US. “The CIA wanted access to airspace to conduct drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions, which that country had previously considered a breach of sovereignty. The two countries made a deal.”

In response to the airport attack, the Pakistani government launched “Operation Zarb-i-Azb” against North Waziristan five days later. The military warned the population via pamphlets distributed at local mosques. People had very little advance notice.

Hundreds of thousands of people and their animals marched from their homes in the blazing heat with few provisions. Children are dying of heat exhaustion on the side of the street.

"Poor people were walking on foot. They looked like a human sea, of youngsters and adults. Some people fainted, so people poured water on them to revive them."

“They have launched this operation just before the Holy Month, but these militants were living here for years. Why now?” a man named Khan lamented to a reporter.

Given the advance notice, the Taliban and Uzbek foreign fighters disappeared. The Pakistani government has been shelling North Waziristan with helicopters without actually fighting anyone. The families are the ones facing the hardship of travel.

"We could only manage to get ourselves out of Miranshah," one man told UNHCR staff, referring to the capital of the mountainous North Waziristan region. "We left all our belongings. The Pakistani government was bombing our villages."

The death toll of cattle is a crime in itself - 1.5 million cows have died because farmers were forced to leave them behind, or if they tried to bring them out of the war zone, the cows died of broken limbs or exhaustion along the way.

“I let all my 10 cows loose after they refused to come along,” said Gul Wazir with tearful eyes while remembering his animals he “loved like my children.”

Why would a government decide to evacuate an area but provide no food or water or transportation along the way? Why do they want the area “cleared out?” For what?

Many have sought safety in the Khyber-Pakhtunkwa province. A former refugee in Pakistan, Wali said: "We were assisted by Waziristanis during the 1980s, when we fled Khost [during the Soviet occupation]. They welcomed us and extended their generous support. It is now our moral duty and obligation to assist and help these needy families."

That is wonderful, but whose idea was it for Pakistan’s government to uproot an entire region of the country and then decide that it would be the UN’s duty to make sure the people don’t die? The US is said to have encouraged these bombings. Why?

According to CNN, talks between TTP and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif led nowhere. The government and the security forces found it impossible to accept TTP demands like enforcement of Sharia, withdrawal of the army from the tribal regions and a peace zone for itself. In retaliation for breakdown of government talks with the Taliban, the army began pounding Chinese Uyghur hideouts in the Waziristan mountains. Why not just give them states rights? Why punish the Uyghurs? It gets crazier.

So far this year, 54 of Pakistan's 83 confirmed polio cases have been in North Waziristan. Taliban militants banned vaccinations in the summer of 2012, denying UN access. Frustrated, the WHO made plans as early as February to be prepared “if anything happened.” They were immediately ready for action, despite official claims that they had no advance notice of Pakistan’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
The UN is using this upheaval as their glorious opportunity to circumvent local government. Dozens of checkpoints are set up along the roads where refugees are registered and then given drops of the oral polio vaccine. As of June 30, 468,000 individuals had been registered. Reportedly very few are refusing the vaccine. UN officials have already admitted the vaccination campaign is useless since multiple doses are required for immunity to take place. There is no central place in which to give vaccinations. Almost all the refugees have refused to reside in the government-run camp. However, UN officials are now using vaccination as an excuse to do door-to-door registration of all residents of areas where refugees are settling.

This is a very bizarre campaign considering the main way to stop the spread of disease has to be via basic water and sanitation. Huge numbers of people are living in close, dirty conditions creating perfect conditions for every kind of illness, the most commonly reported being upper respiratory infections and heat exhaustion.

Is the UN using Pakistan to unload outdated vaccines? Islamic organizations need to inquire whether these polio vaccines are the “killed virus” used in the West or if they are “live viruses” probably expired since the US stopped using them a decade ago.

British Government Arrests Activist Moazzam Begg

TMO 

Moazzam Begg, who was imprisoned at Guantánamo. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Former Bagram and Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg was re-arrested on February 26, 2014. On March 1 he was charged with training and aiding terrorists in Syria, to which he pleaded “Not Guilty.” Three other persons were similarly charged.

“All four arrests are connected,” said Detective Superintendent Shaun Edwards, “They were pre-planned and intelligence-led.”

Supporters in the London courtroom tweeted: “It was great to see  #MoazzamBegg again. Even under such circumstances he was smiling and looked well.”

Protesters gathered afterwards outside the West Midlands Police Headquarters, where Begg is imprisoned.

Begg was arrested the very next day after he published an article, “The real reason behind the confiscation of my passport” on the website of the human rights organization that he founded, CagePrisoners, which states:

“In the summer of 2012 I wrote about the first of my two visits to Syria to investigate leads into cases of British and American complicity in the rendition of terrorism suspects to the regime of Bashar al-Asad. This followed on from something I learned first-hand from CIA and US military intelligence agents who threatened to send me to Egypt or Syria if I failed to co-operate with them during my time in the Bagram prison.”

After his release, Begg began campaigning for prisoners detained at Guantanamo and others held in secret detention sites or who had disappeared after being rendered to countries like Libya, Egypt, and Syria, as part of his work for CagePrisoners.

“We conducted numerous investigations into recurrent reports of extreme torture carried out by the Syrian regime and discovered the complicity of the governments of the US, Canada, France, Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Britain. I was also constantly being invited to speak all over the world about issues pertaining to Guantanamo, torture, the rule of law and the war on terror… In July last year, I visited Syria where I met numerous former prisoners who had been held by the Asad regime as well as a few victims of US and UK rendition…

“A few months later, in October 2012, I was called by an MI5 officer who said they wanted to talk to me about my views on the situation in Syria after having read my article… At the end of the meeting I was assured by MI5 that my proposed return to Syria to continue my work would not be hindered, and it wasn’t. Subsequently, I travelled to Syria without incident… I am certain that the only reason I am being continually harassed – something that began long before any visit to Syria – is because CagePrisoners and I are at the forefront of investigations and assertions based on hard evidence that British governments, past and present, have been willfully complicit in torture.”

Last month, British police confiscated his iPad, which contained his report. Three weeks later the British government confiscated his passport stating that his previous visits to Syria had constituted involvement in terrorism. Cageprisoners’s media officer, Cerie Bulliyant states that “the timing [of his arrest] coincides with the planned release of a CAGE report on Syria and a major news piece that was due to be televised soon.”

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain write: “Crucially, it appears that Begg was given explicit permission to take this trip to Syria by Britain’s MI5… That’s all independent of the bizarre spectacle of charging someone with “terrorism” offenses for allegedly helping rebels which the US government itself is aiding and for whom intervention was advocated by the US president as recently as last year.”

Ghaliyaa Haqq, editor of Free Detainees stated that she is dismayed by Begg’s arrest:

“What would bring even more dismay would be the silence of the human rights community and the Ummah itself. We can’t let that happen! Remember, this is a man who spent nightmarish years in Bagram, and Guantanamo.  He was terribly abused, yet when he was finally released – did he go off with his family and live the rest of his life in peace? NO!  He is not the sort of man who could do that – he could never ignore his brothers and sisters undergoing terrible struggle and injustice. So he didn’t.  We can’t either – we cannot let this happen to him again.”

Asim Qureshi, Research Director of CagePrisoners said: “We are disgusted that Moazzam Begg is being retraumatised with the same guilt by association accusations that resulted in his unlawful incarceration in Guantanamo Bay.  We fully support our colleague and see his arrest as politically motivated and as part of a campaign to criminalize legitimate activism.”

UK-based human rights investigator Nawaz Hanif told The Intercept: “The arrest of Moazzam Begg under British anti-terror laws is… utilizing vague terror allegations to stifle investigations into abuses of power….It is pertinent to ask British authorities why Moazzam is being arrested a day before his report on torture and rendition is to be released, and over a year since he last stepped foot in Syria.”

In a statement CAGE said, “This arrest forms a part of the general approach by the UK security agencies which considers any travel to Syria as suspicious. There has been a concerted campaign of harassment against Muslim individuals and charities who get involved in supporting the victims of the Syrian crisis. We do not accept involvement by Moazzam Begg in any form of terrorism. He is simply one of many individuals and charities involved in Syria being viewed with suspicion in an effort to send a message to the wider Muslim community that working in Syria is a no go area for them.

“Moazzam is a leading figure internationally on issues relating to due process and human rights. His advocacy on behalf of the Guantanamo Bay detainees has been recognized across the world, resulting in government’s accepting detainees who could not be returned to their countries of origin. We are also concerned that the Police and the security services are using the wide scope of terrorism laws, and applying them in Syria to set precedents that will make legitimate activity unlawful in future.”

“Everything is terrorism and for those who fear losing their jobs and government funding, terrorism is everything. It is time to change the narrative,” wrote Begg in January of 2014.

In his last Facebook update, posted just hours before his arrest, Begg wrote: “Sometimes knowing too much can be a curse.” 

Holding Gov’t Hostage?

February 13, 2014 by TMO 

A picture of Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), is seen on a computer screen displaying a page of a Chinese news website, in Beijing in this June 13, 2013 photo illustration. REUTERS/Jason Lee

Edward Snowden is best known for revealing to the public how intensely the US government is spying on its own citizens. But even more interesting is how he used this surveillance capacity to collect government information.

According to a classified briefing for members of Congress that took place on February 5, 2014, Snowden has compiled a huge phone book of absolutely every employee and official of the entire US Government that includes the names, home addresses, unlisted personal home telephone and personal cellular phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers of every person involved in any way, with any department of the US government. The files include elected officials, Cabinet appointees, judges, police officers, every government contractor and all employees of that contractor, reports TRN.

Snowden obtained the personal information of every bank corporation, their operating officers and their Boards of Directors, including all current and former members of the Federal Reserve; all personal information about anyone holding any type of government license including lawyers, stock brokers and commodities traders; and all the personal information of every non-bank corporation in the US, including their operating officers and Boards of Directors.

“He stole everything — literally everything,” a ranking DOD official told the Daily Caller.

Snowden has made it known that if he is arrested, if he vanishes, or if he dies from any cause whatsoever, ALL of the information in his possession will be published publicly.

Snowden used nothing but the inexpensive and widely available Webcrawler software to explore the NSA agency’s networks. Web crawlers, also known as spiders, move from website to website, following links embedded in each document, and can copy everything they encounter. According to the Guardian, Snowden is believed to have accessed about 1.7 million documents.

Copies of his encrypted data have already been distributed to more than 1,200 web sites around the world. Those sites have agreed to conceal the information until such time as contact with Snowden is “lost.” Once contact is lost, the sites have been told they will receive the Decryption keys via CD ROM, E-mail and P2P / Bit-Torrent file transfer. Once the decryption keys are sent, the sites have been instructed to wait a specific amount of time to confirm Snowden’s disappearance, arrest or death and upon expiration of that time period, to publish the decrypted materials. TRN reports:

“Making the situation all the more dire for the government is that Snowden has made clear he will release some of the information under certain “other” circumstances. For instance, if Martial Law is declared in the US or if any elections are canceled for any reason, all the government employee info goes out. If an economic collapse takes place, all the Banker/Stock Broker/Commodities Trader information goes out. If Corporations start hyper-inflating prices, all the information about them, their officers and Board of Directors will go out.”

Sources say the material Snowden copied includes information, possibly personnel names, on the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, such as the National Reconnaissance Center and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which operate US image-producing satellites and analyze their data.

“Snowden literally has the most powerful people in the United States in an inescapable stranglehold. If any of the things articulated above take place, everyone throughout the country will know exactly who to blame and exactly where they live. One can only speculate that under the right conditions, it might not be long until those responsible for the problems of our country, faced consequences for their actions.”

The damage would be “of biblical proportions,” a US official said.

Yet, why should Americans have to wait until a calamity for such basic information to be published? The names of government servants should legally be considered public record, as a matter of course. Why do our unelected public servants feel so threatened about the idea of the American people knowing who they are and where they live? How many of them are acting in bad faith? Just knowing that we know who they are might cause “them” to behave.

Americans live under a shadowy rule where we don’t know who is who, or who is making the decisions. If you are a banker and you wanted to for example make money from insider trading related to 9/11, the public should know your name and address, so that the authorities know where to go to arrest you and question you to the extent of your pre-knowledge about that crime – and if they don’t, so the public can picket in front of your house until they do!

Snowden is being called a traitor and a spy but he has simply collected information. Snowden himself did not do any spying, he just had access to the information that the NSA had already collected, as part of his job as a system administrator whose job it was to maintain, reprogram or repair the software.

Snowden said he “clearly and unambiguously acted alone, with no help from anyone, much less a government.”

Michael Ratner writes in the Guardian that “the focus on Snowden’s singular case seriously deflects from the fact that the Obama administration has been a nightmare for whistleblowers and truth tellers, and that several others currently in prison or in exile deserve the same clemency or clear assurances they will not be prosecuted.”

Ratner believes that “all of these truth tellers exposed or published documents exposing government misdeeds and crimes. All of the disclosures were of information that was valuable to the public debate of US war tactics, intelligence gathering and privacy concerns, with no documentable damage to national security interests… Manning, Assange, and Hammond all did their civic duty by disclosing information on government overreaching. They all exhibited great moral courage in doing so. And they all deserve far more than unfair imprisonment and exile for the service they have done for the American people and for people all around the world.”

Among the unpublished material which Snowden acquired from classified government computer servers are documents reportedly containing the names and resumes of employees working for NSA’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

U.S. and British authorities say they are focused more on dealing with the consequences of the material he has released than trying to apprehend Snowden.

“All I can say right now is the US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me,” Snowden said on June 17. “The truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”

Meanwhile the NSA is continuing to improve upon how effectively it spies on Americans.