O what a tangled web we weave…

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

Lawyers from Reprieve, a legal charity that represents a number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including several former British residents, are calling on the committee to question US and British officials about the allegations. According to the organisation’s submission to the committee, the UK government is “potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention”.

Clive Stafford Smith, the charity’s legal director, said he was “absolutely and categorically certain” that prisoners have been held on the island. “If the foreign affairs committee approaches this thoroughly, they will get to the bottom of it,” he said.

Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP for Chichester and a campaigner against the CIA’s use of detention without trial, has also urged the committee to investigate. He said: “Time and time again the UK government has relied on US assurances on this issue, refusing to examine the truth of these allegations for themselves. It is high time our government took its head out of the sand and looked into these allegations.”

[snip]

The existence of the CIA’s black site prisons was acknowledged by President George Bush in September last year. He said al-Qaida suspects or members of the Taliban who “withhold information that could save American lives” have been taken “to an environment where they can be held secretly, questioned by experts”.

Mr Bush did not disclose the location of any prison, but suspicion that one may have been located on Diego Garcia, some 1,000 miles off Sri Lanka’s southern coast, has been building for years. The 2,000 islanders were expelled in the early 1970s after the British government struck a secret deal to lease the 37-mile long island to the US for use as an air and naval base. Any evidence uncovered by the foreign affairs committee pointing to the existence of a secret CIA prison on the island would be hugely embarrassing for ministers.

Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general who is professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia to detain suspects. In May 2004 he said: “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq.” In December last year he repeated the claim: “They’re behind bars…we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

[snip]

A prison of some sort is known to exist on Diego Garcia: in 1984, a review by the US government’s general accounting office of construction work on the island reported that a “detention facility” had been completed the previous December. British ministers have also disclosed that a building on the island was redesignated as a prison after the September 11 attacks.

Last June Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who investigated the CIA’s use of European territory and air space during prisoner operations, concluded in a report to the Council of Europe that prisoners had been held on the island.

Mr Marty, who later told the European parliament that he had received help from senior CIA officers, reported: “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.”

One possibility which the foreign affairs committee may explore is that suspects have been held on a prison ship off the coast of Diego Garcia. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, has said that he has heard from reliable sources that the US has held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean. There have also been second-hand accounts from detainees at Guantánamo of prisoners being held on US naval vessels. Article

Mm-hm. Too cozy by an order of magnitude.

US President George W. Bush certified Saudi Arabia as an anti-terrorism ally on Friday, weeks after a top US Treasury official sharply criticized the kingdom’s record.

[snip]

His memorandum came a little more than a month after the US Treasury undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Stuart Levey, charged that Saudi Arabia has failed to prosecute the bankrollers of terrorist groups.

Levey, the undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, told the US network ABC that not a single individual identified by the United States or the United Nations as a terror financier had been prosecuted by Saudi Arabia.

“If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,” Levey told the television network one day after the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Article

Noted from Nigeria’s oil region:

Shell Petroleum Development Company has reopened its Utorogu Gas Plant in Nigeria’s southern Delta state after shutting the plant last week due to a fire, The Punch newspaper reported Friday.

The plant’s shutdown resulted in the deferment of 300 million standard cubic feet of gas daily, and SPDC had to declare force majeure on gas supply to the national grid, as the fire damaged the 10-inch Utorogu-Ughelli gas pipeline that transports products from the plant.

Several people were reported killed and others were injured in the Oct. 12 fire while trying to steal condensate from the pipeline.

[snip]

In a related development, Shell said it has put out the last of the six fires on the Trans Niger Pipeline in Ogoniland in southern Rivers state.

It said the pipeline is a major facility that transports crude oil from SPDC’s and third party facilities to Bonny Terminal.

Shell says it has repaired the section of the pipeline that was damaged at Bodo in Ogoni, Gokana Local government area of the state, adding that the pipeline has been the target of repeated sabotage attacks, with nine incidents recorded so far this year.

Since January 2006, armed militants in the Niger Delta have kidnapped more than 250 local and foreign oil workers and destroyed oil and gas pipelines and other facilities. Article

Fascinating journey into the truly unkown.

…Dr Woodward is set to form part of a team of scientists on a mission to explore one of the last unchartered corners of the Earth.

They plan to spend five months working in sub-zero temperatures beneath nearly 3.5km of ice at Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica.

[snip]

They hope to learn more about what can survive in the harsh conditions of glacial lakes. The 35-year-old, of Witton Gilbert, near Durham, said: “Scientists would love to know what is living in these lake environments, and what this might tell us about possible life in extraterrestrial environments such as the frozen moons of Jupiter.

“There is competition to be the first team to explore a subglacial lake. A team from Italy would like to explore Lake Concordia and a team from Russia plans to extract water from Lake Vostok, the largest sub-glacial lake identified.”

[snip]

Dr Woodward said: “It is vitally important to identify suitable drill sites, and then to plan to conduct the access experiments in an environmentally-friendly way so as not to risk contaminating such pristine and isolated environments.”

More than 150 subglacial lakes have been identified in Antarctica, cut off from the outside world by thick caps of ice.

Any lifeforms will have had to adapt to complete darkness, a lack of nutrients and crushing water pressures. Article