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War and Terror: 2 GOP-Appointed Judges Shame America
Monday, September 14 @ 16:17:16 UTC |  By Sherwood Ross
September 14, 2009
The federal Appeals Court decision to toss a lawsuit claiming contractors tortured detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison is what you'd expect from a tyranny.
The new ruling brushes off the charges by 212 Iraqis who said they or their late husbands were abused by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib. The suit charged private security firm CACI International Inc., of Arlington, Va., of crimes inside the Baghdad hellhole.
Yet in a 2-1 ruling, the D.C. Court of Appeals said CACI "is protected by laws barring suits filed as the result of military activities during a time of war," the Associated Press reported. This opinion was written by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, and supported by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a Bush appointee.
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War and Terror: If Obama Cedes Ground on Torture to Cheney, We'll All Pay a Heavy Price
Monday, May 25 @ 22:34:58 UTC | By acknowledging recent crimes while refusing to pursue the criminals, the president has made his position untenable
By Gary Younge
May 25, 2009 - The Guardian/UK
"Every government assumes deeds and misdeeds of the past," writes Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and the Holocaust. "It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors."
For Barack Obama this cuts both ways. Talented as he is, he looks much more so when compared with the man who preceded him. Just by showing up and stringing a few coherent sentences together, he embodies an improvement. To earn acclaim in these early months, he hasn't had to do anything good. He merely had to announce that he would stop doing things that were bad.
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War and Terror: The Strange Fruit of Torture
Tuesday, March 20 @ 09:24:49 UTC | The Confession Backfired
By Paul Craig Roberts, counterpunch.org
March 17 / 18, 2007
The first confession released by the Bush regime's Military Tribunals--that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D'Amato likens Mohammed's confession to those that emerged in Stalin's show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.
That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.
That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.
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War and Terror: Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America's war on terror
Tuesday, December 12 @ 09:29:54 UTC | In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront
By George Monbiot, The Guardian UK
December 12, 2006
After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.
Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen detained as an "enemy combatant", released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.
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Inside U.S.A.: CIA Torture Down the Memory Hole
Sunday, November 05 @ 12:55:55 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
According to the CIA's favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, the unitary decider "administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the 'alternative interrogation methods' that their captors used to get them to talk."
According to the government, these "alternative interrogation methods," actually brutal medieval torture techniques updated to include sexual humiliation, are "now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets" and any release of information about the systematic sadism of the state against largely innocent victims, especially released to the attorneys of the victims, "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage" to the torture and murder state, now a bestial leviathan with tentacles stretching around the world.
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War and Terror: Torture and White Phosphorus
Tuesday, December 13 @ 21:04:01 UTC | by John Chuckman, www.dissidentvoice.org
December 12, 2005
"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have to adapt."
-- Condoleezza Rice
I've previously charged Condoleezza Rice with having an appalling ignorance of history. I don't mean the kind of knowledge -- dates of battles, names and terms of treaties, etc. -- that earns a good grade on an exam. We know Condoleezza got good grades in school. No, I mean a deeper understanding of the economic, social, and moral forces of history and of the irrepressible role of truth despite the countless attempts to silence it.
Guerilla warfare, terrorism, and fanatical causes are not new to the 21st century, they are as old as human society, and governments have had many ways of dealing with them. This goes so far as governments changing around those regarded as terrorists and heroes, according to the needs of the time, much the way victors in a war define who were the good guys and bad guys.
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War and Terror: Sacred Terror
Friday, December 09 @ 22:55:52 UTC | By Chris Floyd, Moscow Times
The much-belated, poll-prompted outcry of a few U.S. elected officials against the widespread use of torture by the Bush administration -- following years of silent acquiescence in the face of incontrovertible evidence of deliberate atrocity -- is a welcome development, of course. But it has left an even more sinister aspect of Bushist policy untouched, one that likewise has been hidden in plain sight for years.
On Sept. 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of "lethal measures" against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an "enemy combatant." This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate "enemies" on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.
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Invasion of Iraq: Torture Under the Philosophical Guidance of Cheney
Thursday, November 24 @ 22:59:03 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
According to retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, the "philosophical guidance" of Dick Cheney is behind Bush's rape and torture gulag. "There's no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated—in the vice president of the United States' office. His implementer in this case was Donald Rumsfeld and the defense department," Wilkerson told the Times of India. Porter Goss, current Reichmarshall of the CIA (an appropriate designation for Goss, since the CIA was created by sadistic war criminals such as Klaus Barbie and Reinhard Gehlen), said Bush's medieval interrogators used "unique" methods to obtain "vital" information from abductees (one such "unique" method, passed down to Iraq's puppet police by British intelligence, consists of torturing civilians to death with electric drills, according to the Independent on Sunday).
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War and Terror: The U.S. abuse of prisoners
Thursday, November 10 @ 06:52:52 UTC | Robert Fisk on Torture: "We Have Become the Criminals...We Have No Further Moral Cause to Fight For"
Democracy Now speaks with veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk of the London Independent about the U.S. abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and rendition to other countries as well as the role of journalists in a time of war.
Robert Fisk, chief Middle East correspondent for the London Independent. He is author of several books. His latest is "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East."
***
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Robert Fisk, author of The Great War for Civilization, long-time veteran war correspondent. Your response, from Algeria to the White House?
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Invasion of Iraq: Captain Courageous
Friday, September 30 @ 20:35:57 UTC | By Chris Floyd, Moscow Times
Quietly, firmly, relentlessly, the good captain laid out the list of atrocities committed at the order of the enemies of freedom: "Death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment."
A catalogue of depravity, all of it designed -- with diabolical sophistry -- by self-exalted men cloaking their violent perversions with sham piety and righteous sputum. This was terrorism on a grand scale, chewing up the innocent and guilty alike.
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War and Terror: Infinite Injustice
Friday, April 01 @ 13:46:20 UTC | By Chris Floyd, themoscowtimes.com
Today we take up the case of Murat Kurnaz, one of the thousands of innocent captives held illegally in the belly of the new American beast: U.S. President George W. Bush's deadly global gulag, where homicide and torture are quite literally the order of the day.
Kurnaz, a German national of Turkish descent, was grabbed from a bus of Muslim missionaries in Pakistan in October 2001, when Bush was getting his first taste of unbridled blood-and-iron power. Although Kurnaz was far from the battlefield in Afghanistan, he was of course guilty of being one of those swarthy Koraniacs, so he was shoved through the beast's guts before ending up in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, The Washington Post reported.
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Invasion of Iraq: President Authorized Abu Ghraib Torture, FBI Email Says
Tuesday, December 21 @ 23:23:43 UTC | by NewStandard Staff
Among a new batch of documents rights groups have forced the gov't to release, a Bureau communication refers to a presidential Executive Order endorsing some forms of torture witnessed at Iraq prison.
Repeated references in an internal FBI email suggest that the president issued a special order to permit some of the more objectionable torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prison facilities around Iraq. The email was among a new batch of FBI documents revealed by civil rights advocates on Monday. Other documents describe the initiation of investigations into alleged incidents of torture and rape at detention facilities in Iraq.
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Invasion of Iraq: The Americans are sowing dragons' teeth in Iraq
Wednesday, November 17 @ 23:55:40 UTC | By Chris Bellamy, Independent UK
For every Iraqi killed, there are sisters, brothers, wives, parents and children now committed to a blood feud
A frightened, tired and shell-shocked young US Marine, concerned that a wounded Iraqi left behind in a mosque might be lying on a compression mine, clutching a hand grenade or concealing a pistol, makes a split-second decision and allegedly shoots him in the head. The Marines have lost many people to insurgents feigning death or surrender in this way.
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Invasion of Iraq: Global Eye: Hard Reign
Friday, July 23 @ 21:41:51 UTC | By Chris Floyd, themoscowtimes.com
The dictator walked into the prison courtyard, his entourage of government officials and foreign bodyguards scurrying around him. A crowd of policemen had gathered there to hear the Leader speak. Under the blinding fury of the desert sun, he ordered them to strike without mercy at the enemies of the state -- and to fear no retribution should their zealotry devour the innocent with the guilty. He would shield them from the law, he said.
Then the entourage came upon seven prisoners, bound and blindfolded, lined up against a wall. These are terrorists, the interior minister declared. "They should be killed on the spot!" The Leader nodded, his great jowled face set in a grim mask. "They deserve worse than death," he said, before pulling the pistol from his belt. He shot each man in the head, moving down the line quickly, efficiently, with the practiced motions of an old assassin. In a moment, six lay dead on the burning dust; the seventh, who'd struggled against his bonds in the tumult, fell mortally wounded beside them.
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Invasion of Iraq: When is Prisoner Abuse Racial Violence
Tuesday, May 25 @ 16:22:13 UTC | by Sherene Razack
May 24, 2004, www.zmag.org
My stomach contracts and I feel a deep chill in every pore of my Brown skin when I see the prisoner abuse photos. I know that this is about racism. So why are so many publicly reluctant to say so? Or is it that we can't get our words into print? Only a few people have noted that the photos remind them of prison abuse and police brutality of Black and Brown men in North America, and of American military and covert operations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Vietnam and elsewhere. Most of these writers are non-Western with the notable exception of Washington Post staff writer Phillip Kennicott.
Not mincing words, Kennicott maintains that "these pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished." Using the words of Aime Cesaire, Kennicott actually names the abuse "race hatred." The Egyptian writer Ahdaf Souief declares that the abuse reflects the "deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the third world generally." John Pilger calls it "modern imperial racism. " Recalling Vietnam, and the way that the My Lai massacre is remembered only as a rare incident of exceptional violence, Pilger predicts that prisoner abuse in Iraq will come to be seen the same way, as exceptional and unconnected to the national project of dominating racially inferior peoples. Two weeks into the scandal, the exceptional violence argument rules the day and the word racism is not even uttered as a possible contributing factor. Full Article
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