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Hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture, a former SAS soldier said yesterday. Ben Griffin said individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and in Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay. (BREAK) He said he had not himself witnessed torture or mistreatment. But he added: "I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured."

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is bracing for a diplomatic backlash after conceding it used British territory to transport suspected terrorists on secret rendition flights despite repeated earlier assurances the U.S. had not. U.S. officials have sought to quell the fallout by apologizing to Britain for what they said was an "administrative error." The admission, however, may reopen a bitter debate between the United States and its allies over how the fight against terrorism should be conducted and compromise future cooperation. "Mistakes were made in the reporting of the information," said Gordon Johndroe, National Security Council spokesman for President...

A federal judge on Wednesday tossed out a lawsuit that accused a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA secretly fly terrorism suspects to overseas prisons to be tortured. U.S. District Court Judge James Ware ruled that national security could be jeopardized if the lawsuit was allowed to go forward. CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden had earlier invoked the government's so-called "state secrets privilege," which lets intelligence agencies bar the use of evidence in court cases that jeopardize national security. In public and confidential statements filed with the court, Hayden urged the judge to dismiss the lawsuit filed by...

Bush administration lawyers on Tuesday cited national security concerns in urging a federal judge to toss out a lawsuit accusing an airplane company of illegally helping the CIA secretly fly terrorism suspects to overseas prisons to be tortured. The American Civil Liberties Union sued Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. last year in San Jose federal court, accusing the Boeing Co. subsidiary of aiding the CIA in the "forced disappearance, torture and inhumane treatment" of five suspected terrorists in violation of national and international laws. The ACLU alleges that San Jose-based Jeppesen knowingly participated in the program by supplying aircraft, crews and logistical...

America has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States. A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it. The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities...

Its anti-war films may be aimed at Bush, but what they're really destroying is storytelling MARK STEYN | November 15, 2007 | A few months back, Peter Berg attended a test screening of his new film in California — not Malibu or Beverly Hills, but out in farm country. The Kingdom is about FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, etc.) investigating a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia, and finally, about two hours in, the star talent gets to kill a bunch of jihadists. As Entertainment Weekly described it, "the packed house went completely bonkers, erupting in cheers" —...

Bucharest and Brussels, 16 Nov. (AKI) - Romania, one two countries accused by Europe's top human rights watchdog of hosting secret CIA jails used to interrogate Islamist terrorism suspects, says it has written to the European Union executive denying the charges. The letter to the European Commission is a response to a request from EU justice and security commissioner Franco Frattini asking Romania and Poland - the other country implicated by the Council of Europe - for an explanation. A Romanian spokeswoman in Brussels, Doris Mircea, said that a committee of inquiry set up by the government concluded that the...

Excerpt - Washington - A Pakistani businessman suspected of playing a role in the 2002 brutal killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl died earlier this year, shortly after being interrogated by US and Pakistani intelligence, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Pearl, a Karachi-based correspondent for the Journal, was kidnapped on January 23 2002, and killed execution-style shortly after. The newspaper said Karachi businessman Saud Memon became a key suspect in the case because he owned a nursery where Pearl had been held captive. Citing an unnamed senior US law enforcement official, the report said Memon was interrogated by...

The wave of recent films set against the backdrop of war in Iraq and post-9/11 security has failed to win over film-goers keen to escape grim news headlines when they go to the movies, analysts say. In a break with past convention, when films based on real conflicts were made only years after the last shots were fired, several politically-charged films have gone on release while America remains embroiled in Iraq. Almost without exception, however, the crop of movies have struggled to turn a profit at the box-office and in many cases have received a mauling from unimpressed critics as...

LOS ANGELES - The wave of recent films set against the backdrop of war in Iraq and post-9/11 security has failed to win over film-goers keen to escape grim news headlines when they go to the movies, analysts say. In a break with past convention, when films based on real conflicts were made only years after the last shots were fired, several politically-charged films have gone on release while America remains embroiled in Iraq. Almost without exception, however, the crop of movies have struggled to turn a profit at the box-office and in many cases have received a mauling from...

If Tokyo Rose were alive today, she wouldn't get jail time - she'd get a three-picture deal. Throwing all caution and fiscal sanity to the winds, the Hollywood establishment is releasing a slate of anti-war films that do violence to the cause of American victory - and to the art form of film. Art is best served by an open competition of ideas. When only the anti-war left is allowed to make films in Hollywood and pro-American voices are excluded, the result is movies that are ideologically rigid, morally shallow and creatively sterile. Is it any wonder that recent anti-war...

Bella to Anti-War Movies: Show Me the Money!The independent pro-life film trounced Hollywood's anti-war movies in per-theater revenues, in spite of hostile mainstream media reviews.You won’t see this fun movie fact in any mainstream media outlets, but the little pro-life movie Bella, which just opened, beat the socks off of several anti-war/anti-American movies in opening weekend per-theater revenues. This despite the fact that Bella was panned by critics in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Variety and other mainstream outlets.(For an interesting article on how movie critics inject their politics into reviews, click here.) Here’s the breakdown. Bella opened...

Reese Witherspoon can't be pleased with the performance of her new movie "Rendition." It is a colossal bomb and will disappear as quickly as one of the movie's characters, courtesy of the evil CIA, of course. Once again, Hollywood is on a "let's make America look bad" binge. This is directly caused by loathing for the Bush administration, which the entertainment left sees as a combination of the Third Reich and Emperor Nero. Thus, a series of earnest "America is a human-rights violator" films are coming to a theater near you, and the odds are you will ignore them. Good....

UNITED NATIONS - A U.N. human rights expert is calling on the United States to prosecute or release suspects detained as "unlawful enemy combatants" and to move quickly to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Martin Scheinin, the U.N.'s independent investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, said in a report released Monday that he's concerned about U.S. detention practices, military courts and interrogation techniques. He urged the U.S. government to end the CIA practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects are taken to foreign countries for interrogation. Scheinin said he was also concerned about what he...

Critics have labeled the new movie “Rendition” a “political thriller.” Whether it thrills or not is subjective. But “political”? Absolutely. It’s merely the latest in an unbroken series of major films about the war on terror that range from those seeking to assure us that Islamist terrorism isn’t the threat we might think, to those depicting the terrorists as no worse than those who fight them — and by implication the American people as a whole. In 1942, Hollywood went to war. It began pumping out countless movies designed both to entertain the public and bolster its will to fight....

It doesn't matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera — audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall's surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films. Both "In the Valley of Elah" and, more recently, "Rendition" drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn't bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's wider war on terror."Rendition," which features three Oscar winners in key roles, grossed $4.1 million over the weekend in 2,250 screens for a ninth-place finish. A re-release of "The Nightmare...

5 Myths About Rendition (and That New Movie) By Daniel Benjamin Saturday, October 20, 2007 With hearings in Congress, legal cases bouncing up to the Supreme Court and complaints from Canada and our European allies, the issue of rendition is everywhere. There's even a new, eponymously titled movie in a theater near you, starring Reese Witherspoon as a bereft wife whose innocent husband gets kidnapped and Meryl Streep as the frosty CIA chief who ordered the snatch. Like most covert actions and much of the war on al-Qaeda, the practice is shrouded in mystery -- and, increasingly, the suspicion that...

I was watching TNT a few days ago and a commercial for a new movie called "Rendition" was shown. It starts by showing a man being approached by what looks like a female police officer, then getting grabbed by two men and having a black hood thrown over his head. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see this is another "America is becoming a fascist country" jab at the War on Terror. Here's a wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_%28film%29 Here's the official website: http://www.renditionmovie.com/

Hollywood bankrolls another anti-anti-terrorism dog... Today I've seen repeated television ads for a new, as-yet-unrated movie called "Rendition" (the title tells you everything you need to know, of course). It stars Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Meryl Streep. From the ads, I deduce that lovely blonde Witherspoon is married to a strikingly handsome, swarthy guy—a total innocent, no doubt, who may belong to a purely peaceful religion. Apparently, this completely innocent swarthy fellow gets snatched by obviously evil U.S. government-types (Streep et. al.) who render him to a foreign country where he is held without charge and, most shockingly, not...

Have the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 put a lasting dent in civil liberties? The first of a series begins this week with a look at torture IN EVERY war, information is a weapon. In a “war against terrorism”, where the adversary wears no uniform and hides among the civilian population, information can matter even more. But does that mean that torture can sometimes be justified to extract information? The answer in international law is categorical: no. As laid down in treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and...