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Germany uses foreign torture intel, report says
Published: 29 Jun 10 08:01 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100629-28165.html
Germany, along with Britain and France, uses foreign intelligence obtained through torture in the fight against terrorism, a new report from Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.
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The use by three heavyweight European powers of information from secret services in countries that routinely rely on torture was damaging the reputation of the entire European Union, said the rights group.
"Berlin, Paris and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, Western Europe researcher for HRW.
"Taking information from torturers is illegal and just plain wrong."
The report, entitled "No Questions Asked: Intelligence Cooperation with Countries that Torture," found that , "The actual practices of these leading EU states contradict the EU's anti-torture guidelines, which make eradicating torture and ill-treatment a priority in its relations with other countries.”
The use of such intelligence obtained under questionable circumstances "damages the credibility of the European Union," added HRW.
Intelligence services in the three countries lack detailed instructions on how to assess and respond to information from countries that torture, said the rights group.
Torture-tainted information has been used in criminal proceedings in France and Germany, despite domestic and international rules banning the use of such evidence in proceedings, said HRW.
"France, Germany, and the UK can engage in necessary intelligence cooperation without undermining the global torture ban," said the rights group.
"To do so, they must make genuine inquiries of countries that provide information to determine whether torture was used to obtain it."
AFP (news@thelocal.de)
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Your comments about this article:
Go ahead and play nice Europeans, then when your soldiers get their butt kicked or civiliand get blown up in your cities, who are you going to blame?
Something tells me that those maniacs don't just come clean with valuable info when asked polietly.
However, in the movie Resevoir Dogs, Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn) says
"You beat on this (guy) enough, he'll tell you he started the Chicago fire. That don't necessarily make it so!"
I do think there is some truth to that.
I'm also interested in reading their comments on how the countries named in the article are not bound by the Geneva Conventions' prohibition of torture. I suspect their arguments will be a creative as they will be inflammatory.
May you live in interesting times.
99.99% of the time, no form of torture is necessary to get the info. that the good guys need.
.01 % of the time, some form of torture is necessary to crack an idiot who would rather kill 200 innocent kids than provide any information. If it didn't work, no one would use it.
Get out of your playpens and into the real world. These fundamentalist Muslim nuts are coming to spread their fundamentalism, regardless of whether you have soldiers overseas or not. You can either use every tool available to you to defeat them, or you can play the moral dummy and risk watching the next hijacked airplane land in the Marienplatz. Your choice.