Evidence

MEPs pressing for Wikileaks Iraq torture follow-up at US summit

11 November 2010 - Euro-deputies on Thursday (11 November) called for a "transatlantic inquiry" into Iraqi torture cases described in US war logs published by Wikileaks and pressed EU leaders to follow up on the issue at a meeting with US President Barack Obama next week.

The European Parliament is "highly concerned over the recent serious allegations that torture has been condoned in Iraq" and demands an "independent transatlantic inquiry," a resolution adopted Thursday in the plenary reads. MEPs also call for this issue "to be raised in the context of the EU-US summit," which is set to take place on 20 November in Lisbon.

By Dave Lindorff

The three-decades-long murder case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has sat in solitary in a cramped cell on Pennsylvania’s death row for 28 years fighting his conviction and a concerted campaign by the national police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, to execute him, was back in court Tuesday, with a three-judge federal Appeals Court panel reconsidering its 2008 decision backing the vacating of his death sentence, on orders of the US Supreme Court.

November 10, 2010 - Don Bankosh stands next to the bathroom door in his bedroom and points to large holes he punched into it during a fit of rage several years ago.

He could have replaced the door. Instead, he keeps it damaged so he won't forget that day and others like it.

It is a daily reminder of his shame at that outburst, a warning to hold at bay the anger, fear, guilt and other effects of the post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, he acquired after nearly two decades as an Army helicopter medevac soldier rendering aid to casualties.

British officials say there is no evidence that waterboarding saved lives of UK citizens, as Bush claimed in his memoirs

• Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 November 2010 21.37 GMT

British officials said today there was no evidence to support claims by George Bush, the former US president, that information extracted by "waterboarding" saved British lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. In his memoirs, Bush said the practice – condemned by Downing Street as torture – was used in CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

He said Mohammed, below, was one of three al-Qaida suspects subjected to waterboarding. "Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States," he wrote.

It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction.

British counter-terrorism officials distanced themselves from Bush's claims. They said Mohammed provided "extremely valuable" information which was passed on to security and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly related to al-Qaida's structure and was not known to have been extracted through torture. Eliza Manningham-Buller,head of MI5 at the time, said earlier this year that the government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, but that the Americans concealed Mohammed's waterboarding from Britain. Officials said today the US still had not officially told the British government about the conditions in which Mohammed was held.

But we, veterans of other conflicts, do know at least one major reason, multiple tours. The others come from what they've lived through and until very recently the DoD, the previous administration, bush, and those congresses, republican, ignored. As well as the citizens of who refuse to pony up for the results of the wars they want and send us into.

Who We Now Shut Out

05 November 2010 - By definition, they’re the people nobody wants. Conflict, disaster, persecution and other crises uprooted about 43 million people from their homes last year. Many millions were displaced by conflicts directly linked to U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. But despite its historical promise of refuge to the world’s huddled masses, America keeps its humanitarian floodgates tightly guarded.

Recently, the Obama administration proposed an annual cap of 80,000 on refugees entering the U.S.—a generous number by international standards but a tiny fraction of the unrelenting wave of displacement.

UK troops tortured Iraqis 'systematically'

Nov 6, 2010 - Lawyers of over 200 Iraqi civilians have presented the High Court in London with “credible” evidence of their “systemic” torture and abuse by British forces.

The evidence showed that British troops tortured those incarcerated in "the UK's Abu Ghraib" by denying them food and water, depriving them of sleep and exposing them to mock executions at secret facilities, including one near Basra in southeastern Iraq.

The documents also revealed that prisoners were physically and sexually abused, kept in long-term solitary confinement, forced to kneel in painful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and subjected to electric shocks at the Basra facility run by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT) among others.

Nov 05, 2010 - He's accused of smuggling weapons from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and selling them to others here in the United States. On Friday, 33-year-old Navy SEAL Nicholas Bickle was ordered held without bail.

As Bickle's family and friends left his arraignment in federal court Friday, they refused to comment on the host of weapons charges the Coronado-based Navy SEAL now faces.

According to a criminal complaint, the active-duty special warfare operator smuggled in more than 100 firearms from Iraq and Afghanistan and conspired to sell them with two others -- Richard Paul, 34, of Colorado and Andrew Kaufman, 36, of Las Vegas.

 

Interrogation techniques at 'Britain's Abu Ghraib' revealed

Video showing brutal mistreatment is submitted during high court proceedings brought by former Iraqi inmates

5 November 2010 - Evidence of systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as the UK's Abu Ghraib emerged today during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was informed that there is evidence detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT).

United States placed in human rights hot seat

Nov 5, 2010 - The United States has been defending its human rights record before the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council.

A 30-strong US delegation was grilled by more than 80 states on issues ranging from the Guantanamo detention centre to racial discrimination. Switzerland called for a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.

The US was the 136th UN member state to be scrutinised by allies and adversaries in the UN rights body, as the Obama administration opens itself up to a council that was shunned by his predecessor.

US Assistant Secretary of State Esther Brimmer, head of the high-level delegation, said she was honoured to present the first US Universal Periodic Review (UPR).

Lawyers sue for UK inquiry into Iraq abuse claims

November 5, 2010 - A group of Iraqis are suing for a broad U.K. inquiry into the torture and abuse they say they have suffered at the hands of British soldiers and interrogators.

Lawyers acting for more than 140 Iraqi civilians are challenging the British government's refusal to hold a public investigation into the treatment of detainees in British-occupied areas of Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. {read rest}

New CIA Report Says Fatal Shootdown of Missionary Plane Could Have Been Prevented

5 November 2010 - CIA officials caused the deaths of an American mother and child in a tragic plane shootdown above Peru, according to a blistering new report, by operating a counter-drug program outside the rules for six years and then lying about it to their superiors.

 

So this is the game they want to keep playin, just heard on the News they're going to try and do a Clinton on this Administration investigative hearings every week!! OK Now's the time for the DoJ to open up criminal investigations into the crimes of the bush administration and the republican congresses especially as to the Wars and especially Iraq, the Brits and others already have a ton of testimony to start picking from on what was going on here and there!! Way over time for Accountability as the World, and especially Iraqi's and Afgans, has been watching and waiting!!!!

Mitch McConnell Challenges Obama With Bold Speech

Staffordshire detective to lead Iraq abuse inquiry

November 02, 2010 - INVESTIGATIONS into allegations of abuse by British troops in Iraq will be led by a retired detective from Staffordshire.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) is expected to take two years to investigate dozens of allegations of mistreatment.

The team is led by retired detective chief superintendent Geoff White, the former head of Staffordshire CID, pictured right, and was set up in response to a number of claims of abuse of Iraqis by British personnel.

A full public inquiry remains an option, if IHAT uncovered "serious and systemic" abuse, Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey said yesterday.

Bush admits he approved waterboarding

In his new memoir, former president says his reply was "Damn right," when asked if CIA could waterboard detainee.

Nov. 3, 2010 - Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former President George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving waterboarding of CIA detainees, the simulated drownings that many legal experts say was illicit torture.

In his memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

The face of war (don't look!)

Nov 2, 2010 - A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities - as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war's horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.

Now for some Accountability in this Country, we can't keep on ignoring, others aren't!!!!

Clinton visits Cambodian genocide museum

November 1, 2010 - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed hope for accountability for atrocities committed by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime during an emotional visit to Cambodia's genocide museum.

A sombre-looking Clinton studied black-and-white photos of gaunt-faced prisoners on display, along with dozens of skulls of victims and paintings of people being tortured, during her visit on Monday.

She later described the tour of Tuol Sleng - the main torture centre of the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s - as a "very disturbing experience," but said she was impressed that Cambodia was confronting its dark history.

October 28, 2010 - Yesterday, Ban Ki Moon visited the UN-backed tribunal that is trying Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes against humanity committed under their rule from 1975-79. Over 2 million people were believed to have been killed by the paranoid and brutal regime.In 2006, the “Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed During the Period of Democratic Kampuchea” (A.K.A. the Cambodia Tribunal) opened for business. {read rest}

 

By Dave Lindorff

When I lived in China back in the early 1990s, it was entertaining to read the Chinese newspapers, all of them state-owned. In them, China’s government was always making excellent decisions, the economy was always improving, the leaders of other nations were always praising China’s leaders, and the economic “reform” initiated by that wise elder statesman Deng Xiaoping, was producing a miracle rebirth of the nation.

U.S. can't untangle billions in Bush-era Afghan spending

October 27, 2010 - The U.S. government knows it's awarded nearly $18 billion in contracts for rebuilding Afghanistan over the last three years, but it can't account for spending before 2007.

Thousands of firms received wartime contracts, but the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction found it too difficult to untangle how billions of additional dollars had been spent because of the U.S. agencies' poor recordkeeping.

"Navigating the confusing labyrinth of government contracting is difficult, at best," the inspector general says in a report that was released Wednesday.

The finding raises doubts about whether the U.S. government ever will determine whether taxpayers' money was spent wisely in Afghanistan.

Heard any mention from this so called TEA party, those espousing, their spokespersons {cons,grifters,propagandist.........}, their candidates, those reporting on them and their extremist idea's and no policy idea's, Demanding 'Sacrifice', Finally, by the people of this Country as to the Veterans of Wars they've created the past destructive decade, as well as the rest of us Veterans, as they claimed and still do 'support' for our troops, including veterans among them, Me Neither!

If those who still call themselves republicans have managed to extend on the brain dead population of this country, quickly forgetting their two wars of choice and the emptying of the treasury, and even just win seats in congress the only thing left for this Country to do is Finally hold those Accountable for the already proven crimes against humanity and more, including those congressional republicans who walked in lock step with the previous administrations wants! Everything else related to this Country moving forward will be Stopped dead in it's tracks, what the World Community has sought is the only thing left, Accountability!!

UN official calls for ''full investigation'' into US torture

By Dave Lindorff

A victory for the government in a federal court in New York City Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has issued a summary judgement saying that the government may keep that information secret.

The lingering question is: Why does the US government so adamantly want to hide information about where captives were first taken into military custody, their citizenship, the length of their captivity, and the circumstances under which they were captured?

Terror suspect gets victim status in Polish probe

27 October 2010 - Polish officials investigating a now-shuttered secret CIA prison in this country have given a Saudi terror suspect victim status, a legal advance in the detainee's effort to show he was mistreated by interrogators, officials said Wednesday.

Legal experts said Poland's move to grant the status of victim to Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri recognizes the validity of his claims even as U.S. courts have refused to allow cases involving rendition to move forward for national security reasons.

26 October 2010 - The Berlin-based watchdog monitors perceived corruption and has published its annual report, based on a poll of businesses and people in 178 nations.

The worst country is Somalia, followed by Burma, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore tie for top place as the world's least corrupt countries, with the UK 20th.

'Good governance needed' {read rest}

 

Tony Blair summoned back to Chilcot inquiry into Iraq war

Members of panel are believed to be concerned about damaging and conflicting evidence revealed since former PM's last appearance

26 October 2010 - Tony Blair is to be summoned back to the official inquiry into the Iraq invasion in light of damaging and conflicting evidence revealed since he appeared as a witness in January.

Members of the Chilcot inquiry are believed to be concerned about evidence in documents released in July showing that the former prime minister was warned by his government's chief law officer that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal the day before he privately assured George Bush he would support US-led military action.

Joining the ranks of the 'enemies', we the 'civil' societies. those we condemn, and use as reason to invade, as we practice and enhance same, against the laws we wrote on the international stage as well as the domestic!!

UK military interrogation manuals discovered

Exclusive: Methods devised in secret in recent years may breach international law

25 October 2010 - The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

By Dave Lindorff

As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former Constitutional law professor, he knows better.

This president’s moral nadir was hit yesterday, when he allowed a military tribunal based at Guantanamo to pressure Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured, gravely wounded, and arrested at the age of 15 in Afghanistan, and held at at Guantanamo now for nine years, to plead guilty to murder.