[I am grateful to Sharyn Bovat for drawing my attention to an article by Andrew McKillop headed Torture, Terror And Elite Schizophrenia In The UK published on 16 December on The Market Oracle website. The following is a brief extract:]
The BBC excelled itself in the bizarre quest of justifying torture (even revelling in its use), while stoutly telling viewers and listeners that "we don't do that here". BBC News TV's first response and reaction to the Senate report included a 30-minute special report in peak viewing time "with data compiled by the BBC itself" on its claimed tally of Islamic terror deaths around the world in the month of November. The total was a suspiciously exact 5042 and Iraq and Nigeria topped the "goal average' of dead the BBC registered in, or concocted for, third-place Afghanistan. But curiously enough, Syria wasn't even mentioned. Not a single terror war death happened in Syria in the whole of the month of November 2014 - despite all the terror war funding by the football-loving and hotel-buying Arab Gulf petro-states which are "moving towards democracy"! My oh my.
Scarcely 3 days later however, by Sunday 14 December the British mainstream media's tone had dramatically changed. The previous propaganda blitz cracked asunder. Suddenly the UK's elite-serving mainstream press was asking in a stern way: "How much did the UK government know?", and what bits of the Senate report were "redacted" to censor details of active British participation in CIA torture since the years 2001-2004? It was now urgent to know. Three days before, there was no such thing as UK complicity in American torture!
One likely or probable reason for this "sea change" includes the fact that the bulk of UK complicity and aid to CIA torture and "extraordinary rendition" or kidnapping followed by torture, was decided under a Labout government headed by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw, in which Labour Party leader Ed Miliband's brother was Foreign Secretary for a while. The true blue press and media, like the BBC can therefore rally to support the clean-fingernailed English Conservative party by suddenly trumpeting the horrors of UK complicity in US torture. You can trust the media!
Extraordinary rendition, as its tastefully called, was firstly described as "not in any way really concerning the UK", give or take a few isolated cases, such as the botched and bungled Abdul al-Megrahi Lockerbie bombing farce, in which al-Megrahi was released early on "compassionate grounds" to prevent his appeal being heard, where his Scottish lawyers would have produced devastating proof that the prosecution had used completely tainted and false testimonies, including purchased testimonies, and completely false material evidence invented by "you guess who".
[RB: Extraordinary rendition was not involved in he cases of Megrahi and Fhimah. Nor was extradition. They voluntarily surrendered themselves for trial. But I have no quibble with the rest of the account.]
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