(cross-posted at Huffington Post)
Dear Mr. Bush,
Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable. Let me remind you, Mr. Bush, of your words today:
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WASHINGTON, May 16 (OneWorld) - Antiwar veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took their case to Capitol Hill Thursday, baring their souls with stories of killings of innocent civilians, torture, and wrongful detentions.
“On several occasions our convoys came upon bodies that had been lying on the road, sometimes for weeks,” said Marine Corps veteran Vincent Emanuele, who served in al-Qaim near the Syrian border in 2004 and 2005.
“When encountering these bodies standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures, which was also standard practice when encountering the dead in Iraq,” he told the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which organized the hearing.
Emanuele also said that U.S. military personnel often took “pot shots” at cars passing by.
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By David Halpin
17 May 2008
David Halpin looks at the litany of crimes for which former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will have to account sooner or later.
On the same day the BBC reported that former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was to go on trial after five years in prison over the deaths of a group of Baghdad merchants in 1992, it was rumoured the former prime minister of Britain will be indicted for crimes against humanity. The list of charges is long and not confined to the many alleged crimes in Iraq. Mr Blair’s whereabouts are uncertain; he has been sighted occasionally in occupied East Jerusalem where he is acting as ?peace? envoy for the ?Quartet?. Most recently, he has been facilitating industrial zones for the employment of Palestinians and for the removal of a few of the over 500 Israeli Occupation Force roadblocks.
The charge list includes:
 Examination of this picture shows Ali Abbas was subjected to radiated heat |
Breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention from the time he became prime minister in 1997 until March 2003 during whichtime draconian sanctions were being applied to the civilian population of Iraq. These sanctions prompted the resignation of Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck who served as assistant secretaries-general of the UN. The former stated that the effect of those sanctions was genocidal. It was established that there was an excess mortality of babies and children of at least 500,000 between 1992 and 2003. This had to do with foul water, poor nutrition and deteriorating medical services, all of which were satisfactory before the sanctions took hold.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI is helping to get information from detainees and prepare terrorism cases against suspects at Guantanamo Bay, despite differences with the CIA over harsh interrogation techniques, the bureau’s director said on Friday.
But, in an appearance at the National Press Club, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller declined to say whether a single U. S. interrogation standard was needed to prohibit coercive tactics like waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning widely criticized as torture.
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By Jane Sutton
MIAMI (Reuters) - Charges against five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the September 11 attacks should be thrown out because they were improperly influenced by a Pentagon legal adviser, U. S. military lawyers said in documents filed on Friday.
Also on Friday, a U. S. military judge postponed the Guantanamo trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan, until July 21, to allow time to assess his mental competency.
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“Pre-flight cocktails” of dangerous psychotropic drugs were forcefully given to foreign detainees by federal employees during trips back to home countries, The Post’s Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest report today in the last installment of the four-part series into medical treatment provided to immigrants by the federal government.
The drugging of detainees without a medical justification is a violation of some international human rights codes. Included in many of the more than 250 cases the Post identified as improper are instances where detainees were given Haldol, an antipsychotic medication; Ativan, which is used to treat anxiety and seizures and is given to patients before surgery; and Cogentin, a muscle relaxant that works within the brain.
In an online chat this afternoon, Goldstein said that internal e-mails, memos and meeting minutes showed that employees of the Division of Immigration Health Services, the tiny agency that is responsible for foreign detainees’ care, “are worried about what is happening but feel unable to fix problems.”
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Washington and Tel Aviv vow to take ‘tangible action’ to prevent Iran from acquiring ‘nuclear weapons’, an Israeli spokesman says.
Israeli premier Ehud Olmert’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said on Friday that the diplomatic efforts to exert pressure on Iran to give up its uranium enrichment have so far been insufficient.
“It is clear that additional steps will have to be taken,” he continued.
“We are on the same page. We both see the threat… And we both understand that tangible action is required to prevent the Iranians from moving forward on a nuclear weapon,” said the Israeli spokesman.
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Counterspin (5/16/08-5/22/08)
This week on CounterSpin: race, Wright and Barack Obama. You might have been tempted to think that the controversy over Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright ended back when Obama gave a long speech on race and his long association with Wright’s church. Or maybe you figured that when Obama gave another set of more forceful comments denouncing Wright, that might be the last we heard of all that. But the discussion of race in the Democratic primaries would suggest that there’s plenty more Rev. Wright chatter to come. Bill Fletcher will join us to share his thoughts about what the Wright controversy meant-and what purpose it seemed to serve for the corporate media. He is the executive editor of The Black Commentator website and is a former president of TransAfrica Forum.
Click here to read the rest of Bill Fletcher on Wright and Obama, Andy Worthington on Guantanamo
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
The United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002, according to a report filed by the Bush administration with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Although 2,400 of the juveniles were captured in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, only 500 are still held in detention facilities in that country. The administration’s report, which was made public yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union, says that most of the detained Iraqi youths were “engaging in anti-coalition activity.”
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WASHINGTON (AFP) ? Around 500 minors are currently detained by the US army in Iraq, as well as nearly a dozen juveniles in Afghanistan, a US civil liberties group revealed on Wednesday.
“Since 2002, the United States has held approximately 2,500 individuals under the age of 18 at the time of their capture … in Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan,” said a US government report for the UN children’s agency, made public by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“As of April 2008, US forces held approximately 500 juveniles” in Iraq, where “all detainees, regardless of age, are held by US forces as imperative threats to security at the request of the sovereign Iraqi government and pursuant to a UN Security Council Resolution,” the report said.
Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon confirmed the report was true but gave no further comment.
The number of minors in US detention in Iraq rose as high as 800 in 2007.
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Killing by the numbers
In 2007 elite U. S. snipers executed an unarmed Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. Have the insidious tactics that led to atrocities in Vietnam reemerged in Iraq?
By Mark Benjamin and Christopher Weaver
Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, an Iraqi vegetable farmer, walked down to the ramshackle pump house along the banks of the Euphrates. Each day at midmorning, he would start the seven-horsepower pump to water his crops.
Khudair passed through the tall grass and palm trees of his farm in Jurf as Sakhr, a predominantly Sunni area 30 miles south of Baghdad dominated by sprawling patches of farmland, irrigation canals and regular eruptions of lethal violence. Daytime temperatures had lately been over 115 degrees, and it was already sweltering as he crossed the 500 meters for the last time.
As Khudair approached the pump house on May 11, 2007, he stumbled upon a team of five sweat-soaked U. S. Army snipers, dazed with heat and fatigue, hidden in the grass of a small hill. It’s hard to say who was more surprised, the Iraqi or the American troops. The sniper on guard at the “hide” was so shocked to see Khudair wander up to his position that he froze for a moment, staring. Then he approached Khudair and pointed a 9 mm pistol at the farmer’s head.
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Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer winner for the Associated Press, uncovered abuses at the infamous prison months before the scandal really exploded. Why were so many others so slow to act?
By Greg Mitchell
(May 08, 2008) — Four years ago this month, as May unfolded, each day brought fresh horrors, images, or details about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. Pictures of shackled and hooded prisoners gave way to detainees on leashes, cowering before snarling dogs, or just plain beaten and bruised.
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Yipes, looks like McManchurian got a phone call……
Tim Reid in Washington and Francis Elliott
John McCain declared yesterday that within four years of being elected president he would have won the Iraq war, killed or captured Osama bin Laden, halted the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and introduced British-style Prime Minister?s Questions in Congress.
The Republican nominee-elect, setting out his stall for an election campaign against the Democrats, used an ambitious speech to define their differences and look back on his first term from the vantage point of 2013.
By January 2013 . . . the Iraq war has been won, Mr McCain told an audience in Columbus, Ohio, a key election battleground. Iraq is a functioning democracy . . . violence still occurs but it is spasmodic and much reduced. He said that most American troops will have been ?welcomed home? by then.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have both vowed to begin a withdrawal of troops if elected, a move Mr McCain has called reckless. Democrats have accused him of wanting to keep the US entangled in Iraq for 100 years. It is a misleading interpretation of remarks by the Arizona senator that he would be happy for the US to be in Iraq for a century but only in a noncombat role similar to the long-term American military presence in Japan, South Korea and Germany.
* Case filed by Swab Sher, states that APA Landi Kotal ?illegally? detained his mentally-ill brother after his release by NATO forces in Afghanistan
By Akhtar Amin
PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Tuesday issued notices to the Landi Kotal Assistant Political Agent (APA) and NWFP advocate general in a habeas corpus petition seeking the release of a mentally ill citizen. The man was arrested under Section 40 of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) after he was released by NATO forces in Afghanistan.
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michelle shephard national security reporter
Canada’s parliamentarians say the country’s international reputation is taking a beating over the case of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr.
They just don’t agree on the cause.
Conservative MP Jason Kenney continued to lash out at Liberal Senator Romeo Dallaire today, demanding an apology for his statement that likened the handling of the Khadr case by the U. S. and Canada to the actions of terrorists.
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Court filings shed light on the role Islamabad and U. S. agents played in five-month delay of al-Qaeda suspect’s return flight to Toronto
Canadian officials privately complained they were sandbagged by the Pakistani government’s last-minute reneging on a deal to place al-Qaeda suspect Abdullah Khadr on a June, 2005, flight back to Canada - five crucial months before he was allowed to return to Toronto, only to be rearrested on a U. S. warrant.
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The Pentagon?s decision to drop war-crimes charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged ?20th hijacker? in the 9/11 attacks, again underscores the consequences of the Bush administration?s descent into torture and other abusive treatment of ?war on terror? detainees.
If al-Qahtani?s case had gone forward, the U. S. government would have been forced to reveal its own violations of the Geneva Convention, anti- torture statutes and the laws of war, according to lawyers representing al-Qahtani.
?All of the [incriminating] statements Mohammad al-Qahtani made or is alleged to have made were the result of torture or made under the threat of torture and that is in my view why the government decided to dismiss his case at this point,? said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York.
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Excuse me, I’m confused.? WHY do we have to send these children to prison to provide schooling to them again?? -LGR
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| A class of juvenile detainees take notes during the Civics course at Dar al-Hikmah or “House of Wisdom” juvenile education center, located on Victory Base Complex in western Baghdad. Civics is the newest of the classes taught at Dar al-Hikmah, which also offers Arabic, history, science, geography and math. Department of Defense photo by Spc. Brandon Hubbard. (RELEASED) |
CAMP CROPPER, Iraq - Sixteen students of the Dar al-Hikmah juvenile education center, or “House of Wisdom,” completed the school’s first civics course May 1, and their teacher could not have been happier with their performance.
During the 10-day civics course, students are taught a basic understanding of the importance of family, national service, Iraqi citizenship and the composition of the Iraqi government.
“The program is very, very important to [detainees] at this age,” said “Mohammed,” the primary Iraqi instructor of the Civics class.? “I saw this after the first group.”
Although initially skeptical of the students’ ability to grasp the course’s social and governmental concepts in a short period of time, Mohammad said? the results of the course’s examination shocked him
“They knew all the answers,” he said.? “Even students who needed help reading or writing answered correctly.”
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Please note: This could spell disaster to the Sunni Muslims of Iraq. If Sadr’s Shiites take over these prisons, it could mean nothing short of genocide for the Iraqi detainees… -LGR
BAGHDAD (AP) - In the eyes of Iraqi justice, Yahya Ali Humadi is a free man.
To the U.S. military, he’s another of the detainees in yellow jumpsuits held at the sprawling Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.
Humadi _ ordered released nine months ago after an Iraqi judge dropped all charges _ now spends his days in a legal limbo. It’s one that has confronted and confounded thousands of other Iraqis since 2003 who have been freed by their nation’s courts but remained in U.S. custody.
I don’t know why the U.S. army brought him to an Iraqi court, if they intend to keep him for an unlimited time,? said Humadi’s lawyer, Samiya al-Baghdadi.
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The U. S. is holding more Iraqis in prison than ever before—24,700—and is expanding its facilities to accommodate another 10,000, according to a reliable published report. Unfortunately for them, most of those detained are being held illegally.
In addition to the U. S. detainees, the Iraqi government is holding 26,000 more Iraqi prisoners, bringing the combined total of Iraqis behind bars to nearly 51,000.
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