{"id":543,"date":"2006-02-17T23:13:40","date_gmt":"2006-02-17T22:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2006\/02\/17\/spectator_render_unto_dubya"},"modified":"2025-10-10T22:05:29","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T21:05:29","slug":"spectator_render_unto_dubya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2006\/02\/17\/spectator_render_unto_dubya","title":{"rendered":"Spectator: Render Unto Dubya"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Spectator<\/em>, a right-leaning political weekly magazine, has an article by Tom Walker (diplomatic correspondent for the Sunday Times) on how he attempted to investigate the "extraordinary renditions" of Muslim terrorist suspects to Morocco for obvious purposes, and how the country's security forces left them in no doubt that they were being followed around.<\/p>\n

Render unto Dubya<\/a> – you will need to subscribe, which is free; it goes into pay-per view after a week.<\/p>\n

\nIn Mohammed VI\u2019s Morocco, one learns not to ask questions about the shady world of the CIA \u2018ghost flights\u2019 that spook the military end of Rabat\u2019s Sale airport on a regular basis. They come, they go: the evidence, supplied by Eurocontrol, the European air traffic agency, is overwhelming. In one extraordinary sequence in July 2004 \u2014 four months after the Madrid bombings \u2014 a Gulfstream jet, registered N85VM, dropped in on the Moroccan capital three times in a week, shuttling to and from Washington and Guantanamo Bay.
\nAccording to local press reports, there have also been regular stopovers by CIA aircraft N313P \u2014 a Boeing 737 \u2014 and N379P, another Gulfstream.
\nFor their blindfolded and handcuffed passengers, life does not sound much fun. Binyam Mohammed, a 27-year-old British citizen born in Ethiopia and arrested in Pakistan by the Americans, claims to have been turfed off a CIA flight in Rabat in July 2002, after which he was entrusted to the tender care of the Direction de la S\u00e9curit\u00e9 du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan internal intelligence service. Their officers proceeded to chop at his penis with razors, according to Binyam\u2019s testimony to Amnesty International \u2014 and thus encouraged, he gave some dodgy evidence against Jos\u00e9 Padilla, a Madrid suspect, and has since been subject to reverse rendition to Guantanamo, where Clive Stafford Smith, the human rights lawyer, is trying to get to the bottom of his case.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Spectator, a right-leaning political weekly magazine, has an article by Tom Walker (diplomatic correspondent for the Sunday Times) on how he attempted to investigate the "extraordinary renditions" of Muslim terrorist suspects to Morocco...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-8L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42574,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions\/42574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}