Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s
immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public
record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a
federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who
these people were and how they died.
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“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International’s Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report “Jailed Without Justice” and said in an interview, “It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn’t believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren’t anything wrong.”
Series of violent attacks from left radicals in Berlin and Hamburg results in property damage.
* * * rush translation * * *
December 4. Supposed left radicals in Berlin have attacked the office of the federal criminal police as well as the offices of two members of the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament) CDU and SPD. According to the police nobody was injured. The culprits have not yet been apprehended with an office of the German federal police responsible for political crimes taking over the investigation. The Berlin party head of the CDU Frank Hankel called for the red-red Senate to fight the overflowing violence in the “capital of left extremism”.
Police officers in England and Wales have made arrests just to get people on to the DNA database, a retired police superintendent has claimed.
Israel’s Mossad espionage agency used Trojan Horse programs to gather intelligence about a nuclear facility in Syria the Israel Defense Forces destroyed in 2007, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported Monday.
According to the magazine, Mossad agents in London planted the malware on the computer of a Syrian official who was staying in the British capital; he was at a hotel in the upscale neighborhood of Kensington at the time.
The program copied the details of Syria’s illicit nuclear program and sent them directly to the Mossad agents’ computers, the report said.
Israel’s September 6, 2007, raid on the al-Kabir site in Syria’s eastern desert is said to have knocked out the country’s reportedly nearly-completed reactor.
Israel has refused from the beginning to comment on, confirm or deny the strike, but after a delay of several months Washington presented intelligence purporting to show the target was a reactor being built with North Korean help.
Der Spiegel further reported on Monday that prior to the strike, the IDF Military Intelligence unit, 8200, listened in on conversations between officials at the Syrian reactor and North Korean experts.
from: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125312.html
Hearing that the alleged Raj Rajaratnam-led insider trading ring was detected using wiretaps and that the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, plans to employ the same kind of electronic surveillance for future Wall Street investigations, we were momentarily seized with the geeky desire to know how these wiretaps are performed. Are agents sneaking into offices and homes in the middle of the night to bug phones?
The answer is both more mundane and more alarming. Prosecutors are using the FBI’s massive surveillance system, DCSNet, which stands for Digital Collection System Network. According to Wired magazine, this system connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It can be used to instantly wiretap almost any communications device in the U.S. — wireless or tethered. In other words, you and I have no privacy. The government can listen in on any call made in the continental U.S., although warrants are required.
Another government entity, the NSA, monitors essentially all electronic communications (including telephone and internet) carried on the OC-768 fiber backbone, according to Mark McCutcheon, software security architect at SecurEval Software Security Consulting. “There is zero effective oversight or control over who and what they surveil, least of all by the
judicial system,” McCutcheon says. “It’s orders of magnitude more fearsome than DCSNet.” As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties union for the digital world, puts it, “The U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.” The group has been trying to sue telecommunications providers such as AT&T for their participation in such “illegal surveillance” for several years.
The FBI’s DCSNet is sophisticated and expensive (one client alone is reported to cost $10 million). “It allows instant access to all cellphone, landline, SMS communications anywhere in the U.S. from a point-and-click interface,” Wikipedia says. “It is impervious to external attacks, as it runs on Sprint’s ‘Peerless IP network,’ run on a fiber-optic backbone separate from the internet…
“It is composed of at least three classified software components that run on the Windows operating system — DCS3000, DCS5000, DCS6000. The DCS3000 collects information associated with dialed and incoming numbers like traditional trap-and-trace and pen registers. The DCS5000 is a system used by the FBI unit responsible for counter-intelligence to target spies and terrorists with wiretaps [this is now being used on hedge fund managers and other Wall Street players]. The DCS6000 captures the content of phone calls and text messages for analysis.
“DCSNet has the capability to record, review and playback intercepted material in real-time. This real-time intelligence data intercept can be streamed out to mobile surveillance vans. Furthermore, with this system the FBI can track the rough location of targets in real-time using triangulation techniques and cell site information.”
The system is pervasive and hard to circumvent. Hedge fund managers have been quoted saying they will use less phone and email communication — the case against Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi is built on email correspondence obtained through Google — and instead will communicate more over lunch.
In an interesting side note, a federal judge ruled yesterday that jurors in the Bear Stearns case (in which Cioffi and Tannin are accused of making their portfolios sound much healthier than they were) will not be permitted to hear about one email, in which Tannin wrote, “I became very worried very quickly. Credit is only deteriorating. I was worried that this would all end badly and that I would have to look for work.”
Judge Frederic Block ruled that the government’s search warrant filed with Google to obtain access to the e-mail was unconstitutionally broad and “did not comply with the Warrants Clause of the Fourth Amendment.”
from: http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/blog/archives/2009/10/how_prosecutors.html;jsessionid=3LRSDDPJJ1X3DQE1GHPCKHWATMY32JVN
America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.
Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.
Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa’s last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?
Move aimed at protecting Clinch River, already polluted by one billion gallons of coal ash
Nashville, TN — Ann Harris, 70, remembers growing up near the Clinch River in Tennessee, frequently swimming and fishing its waters with her family. For the past few decades, the river has changed drastically. Its once clear waters now look and smell like sewage, which led Harris to sell her ancestral home and move away eight years ago.
When Michelle Obama announced plans to plant an organic garden at the White House, nearly everybody thought it was a great idea. Everybody except for the pesticide industry. Representatives from a branch of the industry’s main trade association, CropLife America (CLA), wrote to the First Lady asking her to respect the role of “conventional agriculture;” they added in a separate note to supporters that the thought of the White House’s chemical-free vegetables made them “shudder.” But the public swipe at the president’s wife didn’t stop the administration from nominating senior CLA executive Islam “Isi” Siddiqui to a key post: chief agricultural negotiator for the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR). If confirmed, Siddiqui will be responsible for, among other things, negotiating international agreements governing the use of pesticides.
Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) — A coal-mine explosion in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang killed 42 miners and left 66 missing, Xinhua News Agency said on its Web site.
The explosion happened at 2:30 a.m. at Xinxing mine where 528 miners were working, the State Administration of Work Safety said on its Web site. Rescue efforts are under way, according to the statement.
The explosion destroyed the mine’s ventilation and communication system, making it difficult for rescue, China Central Television reported on its Web site.
China relies on coal to generate 80 percent of its electricity. A coal-mine explosion in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing on May 30 killed 30 workers and another coal- mine blast in Shanxi province on Feb. 22 left 74 miners dead, according to the government.
Xinxing mine, owned by Heilongjiang Longmei Mining Holding Group Co., has an annual production capacity of 1.45 million tons of coal, according to the statement.
China’s death toll from coal mine accidents fell 12 percent in the first seven months of this year from a year earlier after the government closed small pits to improve safety, according to Luo Lin, head of the State Administration of Work Safety.
–Jiang Jianguo. Editors: Sean Collins, John Chacko.
from: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aW2Vn7_VJ3eU&pos=9
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Two former county judges accused of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send juveniles to private detention facilities are partially immune from civil lawsuits, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled Friday.
The decision by U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo could make it harder for the people suing former Luzerne County judges Michael T. Conahan and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. to collect damages.
CHRISTMAS ISLAND: Deep in the jungle on this small island lost in the Indian Ocean, Australia’s new $370 million refugee detention center reaches its full power after its lights come on at dusk. Bracketed by rain forest, steep cliffs and the sea, it rises from the enveloping darkness and becomes visible from the island’s only inhabited corner, about 10 miles away.
The center — opened a few days before Christmas but now nearly full with refugees from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka — has come to symbolize what many call one of Australia’s defining fears: the arrival of boat people from Asia.
ISLAMABAD: Renewed pitched battles erupted around the Taliban stronghold of Sararogha with 28 militants and five soldiers killed in fresh clashes, as US drones, after a brief lull fired missiles targeting a hideout in North Waziristan killing five other insurgents.
LONDON: Britain is using genetic tests on some African asylum seekers in an effort to catch those who are lying about their nationality, drawing criticism from scientists and provoking outrage from rights groups. The United Kingdom Border Agency launched the pilot project in September amid suspicions there might be a large number of asylum applicants lying about their home countries. An agency spokesman said Britain was the only country using genetic tests in this way.
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MILAN: An Italian judge on Wednesday convicted 23 US and two Italian secret agents for the CIA’s kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003 under the covert “extraordinary rendition” programme.
The CIA’s Milan station chief at the time, Robert Seldon Lady, was sentenced to eight years in prison and the other Americans to five years, all in their absence in the landmark trial.
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WASHINGTON: Former US vice president Al Gore, who has campaigned relentlessly on green issues, is on track to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire” amid claims of profiting from the climate change agenda.
Since he abandoned mainstream politics following his defeat in the 2000 presidential polls against George W Bush, Gore’s personal fortune has risen from 1.2 million pounds to an estimated 60 million pounds, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
NEW YORK: Former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik pleaded guilty to a slew of charges in his high-profile corruption trial, a federal prosecutor said.
Kerik, who was New York’s head of police at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks, yesterday admitted to accepting $2,55,000 worth of renovations to his apartment from a construction firm angling for government contracts.
NEW DELHI: For the first time since they held talks with the Andhra Pradesh government in mid-2004, the Maoists have in a formal statement offered a ceasefire if the government dropped its pre-condition that the ultras lay down arms and abjure violence.
While ruling out accepting the demand that they must end violence, the Maoists said, “An agreement could be reached on by both sides on a ceasefire if Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram give up their irrational, illogical and absurd stand that Maoists should abjure violence.”
JAMMU: Kashmir’s biggest glacier, which feeds the region’s main river, is melting faster than other Himalayas glaciers, threatening the water supply of tens of thousands of people, a new report warned on Monday.
Experts say rising temperatures are rapidly shrinking Himalayan glaciers, underscoring the effects of climate change that has caused temperatures in the mountainous region to rise by about 1.1 ºC in the past 100 years. The biggest glacier in Kashmir, the Kolahoi glacier spread over just a little above 11sqkm, has shrunk 2.63sqkm in the past three decades, the study said.
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LONDON: The Arctic ice cap will disappear completely in summer months within 20 to 30 years, a polar research team said as they presented findings from an expedition led by adventurer Pen Hadow.
It is likely to be largely ice-free during the warmer months within a decade, the experts added.
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LONDON: Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini, credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism, was actually British spy agency MI5’s “secret agent”, de-classified documents have revealed.
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BEIJING: China on Thursday sentenced six more people to death over bloody ethnic unrest in its far-western Xinjiang region in July, bringing the total to 12 as it delivered harsh retribution over the violence.
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NEW ORLEANS – A white Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.
Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
DNA collection is expanding to individuals arrested or detained as state and federal law enforcement officials seek to solve more crimes.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) joined 15 states in April 2009 that collect DNA from individuals awaiting trial. In addition, the FBI will now collect DNA from detained illegal immigrants.
The US Pentagon’s latest version of bugging an enemy is the first wireless flying-insect cyborg- a remote-controlled beetle borg by University of California at Berkeley engineers – which can rise, hover and fly on command, guided by a radio receiver that relays signals to electrodes connected to the insect’s optic lobes and flight muscles, says Spencer Ornes in Discover magazine. Researchers recently demonstrated the bugbot at a conference in Italy. With the mind of a machine and the nimble body of an insect, it may be the perfect scout: inexpensive, expendable and strong enough to carry payloads, such as miniature reconnaissance camera.
Flying frying machine gives car a nasty burn
Vid US-based arms’n'airliners globocorp Boeing has released video of its aircraft-mounted ray cannon, the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) in operation.
Scottish detectives discussed secret payments of up to $3m made to witness and his brother, documents claim
Two key figures in the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber were secretly given rewards of up to $3m (£1.9m) in a deal discussed by Scottish detectives and the US government, according to legal papers released today.
The claims about the payments were revealed in a dossier of evidence that was intended to be used in an appeal by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.
Megrahi abandoned his appeal last month after the Libyan and Scottish governments struck a deal to free him on compassionate grounds because he is terminally ill with prostate cancer. Now in hospital in Tripoli, Megrahi said he wanted the public to see the evidence which he claims would have cleared him.
“I continue to protest my innocence – how could I fail to do so?,” he said. “I have no desire to add to the upset of many people I know are profoundly affected by what happened in Lockerbie. My intention is only for the truth to be made known.”
The documents published online by Megrahi’s lawyers today show that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) was asked to pay $2m to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who gave crucial evidence at the trial suggesting that Megrahi had bought clothes later used in the suitcase that allegedly held the Lockerbie bomb.
The DoJ was also asked to pay a further $1m to his brother, Paul Gauci, who did not give evidence but played a major role in identifying the clothing and in “maintaining the resolve of his brother”. The DoJ said their rewards could be increased and that the brothers were also eligible for the US witness protection programme, according to the documents.
The previously secret payments were uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which returned Megrahi’s conviction to the court of appeal in 2007 as a suspected miscarriage of justice. Many references were in private diaries kept by the detectives involved, Megrahi’s lawyers said, but not their official notebooks.
The SCCRC was unable to establish exactly how much the brothers received under the DoJ’s “reward-for-justice” programme but found it was after Megrahi’s trial and his first appeal in 1992 was thrown out.
A memo written by “DI Dalgleish” to “ACC Graham” in 2007 confirms the men received “substantial payments from the American authorities”.
The inspector claims the rewards were “engineered” after Megrahi’s trial and appeal were over, but said there was “a real danger that if [the] SCCRC’s statement of reasons is leaked to the media, Anthony Gauci could be portrayed as having given flawed evidence for financial reward.” Instead, he claimed, the reward was intended to ensure the Gaucis could afford to leave Malta and start new lives “to avoid media and other unwanted attention”.
However, the documents disclose that in 1989 the FBI told Dumfries and Galloway police that they wanted to offer Gauci “unlimited money” and $10,000 immediately. Gauci began talking of a possible reward in meetings with Dumfries and Galloway detectives in 1991, when a reward application was first made to the DoJ.
The evidence, which was due to be heard by the appeal court next month, also discloses that Gauci was visited 50 times by Scottish detectives before the trial and new testimony contradicting the prosecution’s claims that Megrahi bought the clothes on 7 December 1988 – the only day he was in Malta during the critical period.
In 23 police interviews, Gauci gave contradictory evidence about who he believed bought the clothes, the person’s age, appearance and the date of purchase. Two identification experts hired by Megrahi’s appeal team said the police and prosecution breached the rules on witness interviews, using “suggestive” lines of questioning and allowing “irregular” identification line-ups.
Two new witnesses also disproved the prosecution claim that Megrahi was in Gauci’s shop on 7 December, his lawyers said. Gauci said the area’s Christmas lights were not on when the clothes were bought. The current Maltese high commissioner to the UK, Michael Rufalo, then the local MP, told the SCCRC the lights were switched on on 6 December, raising further inconsistencies in the prosecution case.
It has also emerged that Scottish police did not tell Megrahi’s lawyers that another witness, David Wright, had seen two different Libyan men buying very similar clothes on a different day; evidence that psychologists believe may have confused Gauci and again clouded the prosecution case.
Dumfries and Galloway police said only a court could properly consider this material, and supported previous criticism of Megrahi’s decision to release his appeal papers by Elish Angiolini, the lord advocate. “We will not be taking part in any discussion or debate concerning the selective publications made by Mr Megrahi,” a statement said.
“We have nothing more to add other than to echo the lord advocate’s recent comments pointing out that Mr Megrahi was convicted unanimously by three senior judges and his conviction was upheld unanimously by five judges, in an appeal court presided over by the lord justice general, Scotland’s most senior judge. Mr Megrahi remains convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity in UK history.”
A spokesman for the US Department of Justice also refused to comment, since Megrahi had voluntarily withdrawn his appeal. He said: “None of the allegations in the SCCRC referral, or the grounds of appeal filed by Megrahi, were finally adjudicated by the Scottish High Court of Justiary (the appropriate judicial forum) because Megrahi withdrew his appeal before the court could rule. Consequently, the U.S. Department of Justice will not comment further on his aborted appeal.”
from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/02/lockerbie-documents-witness-megrahi
After complaints about American dominance of the internet and growing disquiet in some parts of the world, Washington has said it will relinquish some control over the way the network is run and allow foreign governments more of a say in the future of the system.
Icann – the official body that ultimately controls the development of the internet thanks to its oversight of web addresses such as .com, .net and .org – said today that it was ending its agreement with the US government.
The deal, part of a contract negotiated with the US department of commerce, effectively pushes California-based Icann towards a new status as an international body with greater representation from companies and governments around the globe.
Icann had previously been operating under the auspices of the American government, which had control of the net thanks to its initial role in developing the underlying technologies used for connecting computers together.
But the fresh focus will give other countries a more prominent role in determining what takes place online, and even the way in which it happens – opening the door for a virtual United Nations, where many officials gather to discuss potential changes to the internet.
Icann chief Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Washington insider who took over running the organisation in July, said there had been legitimate concerns that some countries were developing alternative internets as a way of routing around American control.
“It’s rumoured that there are multiple experiments going on with countries forking the internet, various countries have discussed this,” he said. “This is a very significant shift because it takes the wind out of our opponents.”
He added that the changes would prove powerful when combined with upcoming plans to allow web users to use addresses with names in Chinese, Arabic or other alphabets other than Latin. Many countries have lobbied for the shift in recent years, as the expansion of the web reaches out deeper into society and business.
While the issue reached critical mass in emerging economies such as China, it is not the only country that has lobbied for a change. Earlier this year European officials said that they did not think it was proper for America to retain so much control over the global computer network.
Viviane Reding, the EU’s commissioner for information society and media, said she was pleased that Washington chose to make the shift.
“I welcome the US administration’s decision to adapt Icann’s key role in internet governance to the reality of the 21st century,” she said. “If effectively and transparently implemented, this reform can find broad acceptance among civil society, businesses and governments alike.”
Meanwhile Nominet – the British organisation that handles the day-to-day running of .uk domain names – said that Icann had started a trend for companies with internet influence to appear more open and accountable.
“Putting public interest first will also be a focus for the UK internet community over the coming months as there is growing support for Nominet to develop more of a public interest role,” said Nominet’s chief executive, Lesley Cowley.
The new agreement comes into force immediately. It replaces the old version which had been in place since 1998 and was scheduled to expire today.
Beckstrom suggested that bringing more countries to the table was the best way of ensuring the long term future of the internet.
“We’re more global, period. The chances of the internet holding together just went up, the cohesion just went up,” he said. “We expect more active involvement from governments, a higher level of participation from many governments and we’re already hearing about more governments joining the team… This was, ironically, a power move from the US.”
from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/30/icann-agreement-us
The Ministry of Defence was accused today by three high court judges of “lamentable” behaviour and “serious breaches” of its duty of candour over the failure to disclose crucial information about allegations of murder and ill-treatment by British soldiers in Iraq in 2004.
In a withering attack, they damned the ministry’s chief witness – the deputy head of the military police – as lacking all credibility. They described his evidence to the court as “seriously flawed”.
The MoD’s failure to conduct a proper investigation of its own into the allegations has forced Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, to hold an independent public inquiry, the high court heard.
The MoD has already been forced into a public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa while in the custody of British soldiers in Basra in 2003. Yesterday’s case relates to allegations that an Iraqi named al-Sweady was murdered and others ill-treated after they were taken prisoner at a British base near Majar al-Kabir, north of Basra, in May 2004.
The Iraqis’ lawyers demanded a public inquiry under the Human Rights Act, saying the original military police investigation into the claims was inadequate. The police, officials and ministers resisted the demand and withheld vital information in attempting to do so, the court heard.
“We are forced to the conclusion that the approach of the secretary of state to disclosure in this case was lamentable,” Lord Justice Scott Baker, Mr Justice Silber and Mr Justice Sweeney ruled today.
They said that when he was armed forces minister earlier this year Ainsworth signed a demand for a gagging order even though the information he sought to suppress had already been published. The matter caused the judges “very considerable concern”, they said.
Over more than eight months, “the secretary of state’s agents had simply failed for no good reason during that lengthy period to carry out these critically important and obviously highly relevant searches [for documents]“, the judges added.
They singled out Colonel Dudley Giles, deputy provost marshal – deputy head of the military police – for “lamentable disclosure failures”. Asked why he had not referred in his witness statement to a document stating that the soldiers had detained between 10 and 12 Iraqi detainees, Giles replied that he did so to avoid prejudicing any future prosecution.
“When this assertion was examined, it became obvious that it was wholly without foundation,” said the judges.
Wrong, too, they said, was the colonel’s assertion that there was a six-day delay before the initial investigation into the claims got under way.
The evidence showed that the investigation was blocked for a month “thereby resulting in a crucial loss of vital time and investigative opportunity”.
That was something Giles either did know or should have known to be the case, said the judges, adding that any court hearing evidence from him in future should do so “with the greatest caution”.The MoD has already had to pay out £1m in costs in hearings estimated to have cost more than £2m.
In court the judges made it clear they shared the concerns of Rabinder Singh QC, for the Iraqis, that the MoD would “blackslide” on a commitment to hold an independent public inquiry into the incident, which happened after a fierce gunfight nearby between British troops and insurgents.
James Eadie QC, for the MoD, assured the court that Ainsworth agreed to an inquiry, though he said that did not mean the defence secretary accepted that “there may have been murder or ill-treatment in the manner alleged”.
The court will reconvene in two weeks’ time to discuss the inquiry’s terms of reference and which judicial figure will chair it.
The court heard earlier that the Met declined to investigate the allegations, saying it was “not feasible”.
Scott Baker replied: “That puts the cart before the horse.” The Met’s conclusion was “frankly not good enough”, he added.
from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/02/ministry-of-defence-shamed-iraq