‘An extraordinary story has just emerged from the human rights charity reprieve.org.uk who, as they say “help people who suffer extreme human rights abuses at the hands of the world’s most powerful governments”.
Their recently published report entitled Britain’s Kill List accuses the Conservative government of extreme deception of parliament and therefore all citizens of Britain and the world more widely. Officially, Britain has never had a so-called ‘kill list’ but David Cameron had to admit to a limited extra judicial assassinations programme a few months ago, which we reported. There was little establishment media coverage and even less public response. But no-one thought this programme was as extensive and broad as has just been unearthed.
David Cameron’s first speech as Prime Minister on May 11th 2010 falsely gave us some hope and can now only be seen as something as hypocrisy on steroids –
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed since doing this job, it’s how all the information about government – the money it spends, where it spends it, the results it achieves – how so much of it is locked away in a vault marked sort of ‘private for the eyes of Ministers and officials only …’ By bringing information out into the open you’ll be able to hold government and public services to account.”
Getting a little closer to the subject matter, last September, whilst on a three day visit to Bangladesh, the International Development Minister of the UK Desmond Swayne quite rightly said “Extrajudicial killings cannot be tolerated in a democratic country like Bangladesh”, stressing that all incidents regarding recent extrajudicial killings “should be investigated and the perpetrators should be brought to justice”. It should be noted his speech was made at the British High Commission in the capital.
David Cameron, his officials and senior military officers seem to be suffering from selective amnesia of such preachings both at home and abroad, particularly in the light of this latest revelation.
We at truepublica have posted a number of reports by Chris Cole from dronewars.uk on the scope and details of Britain’s unauthorized drone assassination program, which has been nothing short of mission creep at best going from eyes in the sky to an aerial death squad.
Reprieve’s report makes a stunning link though. It confirms that a British kill list does exist but is now not just afforded to terrorists overseas but combines them as targets with drug traffickers and others. The kill list is officially known as the Joint Prioritized Effects List or JPEL.’
