Ignore the abuse - think of the oil
Didn't we base troops in Saudi Arabia before we invaded Iraq to replace their brutal regime? Maybe the troops should have stayed in Saudi?
From today's Washington Post
Briton's Tale of Torture Offers View of Saudi Justice
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 19, 2005; A20
SOWERBY BRIDGE, England -- During the first two months he was imprisoned, Sandy Mitchell alleges, his Saudi interrogators beat him every day. And even after he told them what they wanted to hear and confessed on television to a crime he insists he didn't commit, they were not finished.
They came to his jail cell one morning, he recalls, restrained him with ankle chains, handcuffs and a blue velvet blindfold and marched him to another room. When they made him kneel on the floor, he was certain he was about to be executed.
"It felt like an eternity -- I started thinking about the mistakes I made in my life and about my family, all these things that pass through your mind," he recalled, sitting in a pub in his native Britain last week. "Then I got this thwack on the back of my neck. I must have passed out for a few seconds. I thought I was dead. And when I came to, I heard them laughing."
The mock execution was only one of the types of torture Mitchell says he underwent during the 32 months he spent in Saudi custody charged with killing a fellow Briton in Riyadh. Mitchell says he was also punched, kicked, spat at, beaten on the soles of his feet with an ax handle and chained for nine days to a steel door frame in his cell. His interrogators threatened to arrest and torture his wife. After he confessed, he was sentenced to death at a 10-minute hearing.
Mitchell's story offers a view of the methods and mind-set of the oil-rich Middle Eastern ally of the United States and Britain. But he and his sister, Margaret Dunn, who traveled to Saudi Arabia five times to press for his release, also contend the British government put commercial and diplomatic interests above its duty to protect its citizens, leaving Mitchell and a half-dozen other foreign nationals to their fates.
Continues..
From today's Washington Post
Briton's Tale of Torture Offers View of Saudi Justice
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 19, 2005; A20
SOWERBY BRIDGE, England -- During the first two months he was imprisoned, Sandy Mitchell alleges, his Saudi interrogators beat him every day. And even after he told them what they wanted to hear and confessed on television to a crime he insists he didn't commit, they were not finished.
They came to his jail cell one morning, he recalls, restrained him with ankle chains, handcuffs and a blue velvet blindfold and marched him to another room. When they made him kneel on the floor, he was certain he was about to be executed.
"It felt like an eternity -- I started thinking about the mistakes I made in my life and about my family, all these things that pass through your mind," he recalled, sitting in a pub in his native Britain last week. "Then I got this thwack on the back of my neck. I must have passed out for a few seconds. I thought I was dead. And when I came to, I heard them laughing."
The mock execution was only one of the types of torture Mitchell says he underwent during the 32 months he spent in Saudi custody charged with killing a fellow Briton in Riyadh. Mitchell says he was also punched, kicked, spat at, beaten on the soles of his feet with an ax handle and chained for nine days to a steel door frame in his cell. His interrogators threatened to arrest and torture his wife. After he confessed, he was sentenced to death at a 10-minute hearing.
Mitchell's story offers a view of the methods and mind-set of the oil-rich Middle Eastern ally of the United States and Britain. But he and his sister, Margaret Dunn, who traveled to Saudi Arabia five times to press for his release, also contend the British government put commercial and diplomatic interests above its duty to protect its citizens, leaving Mitchell and a half-dozen other foreign nationals to their fates.
Continues..
posted by phylos @ 09:59
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