Judge rejects Obama attempt to conceal Guantanamo force feeding tapes
Reprieve | October 27, 2015
A US District Court judge has rejected the Obama administration’s latest request to conceal tapes of detainees at Guantanamo Bay being force-fed.
Responding to the government’s request to reverse her order handed down in October last year – that the Guantanamo tapes should be released – Judge Gladys Kessler wrote that, “What the Government is really saying is that its classification system trumps the decisions of the federal courts as to the public’s access to official court records; in other words, the Executive Branch (in this case, the Military) purports to be a law unto itself.”
In her ruling today, Judge Kessler described the government’s request as ‘repetitive, speculative, and extremely vague.’ In August, the US government handed to the court censored versions of the tapes which show former detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab being force-fed. These tapes have been redacted to conceal the identities of those military personnel carrying out the procedure. However, lawyers at international human rights NGO Reprieve – who have seen the redacted versions – have raised concerns that the redactions, especially of sound, are so heavy that they render the tapes nearly incomprehensible. Reprieve lawyers have filed a motion challenging the extent of censorship; that motion is pending.
Today’s judgement means that the US government must continue litigation if it is to successfully conceal the tapes from the American press and public. Alongside lawyers for Mr Dhiab, 16 news outlets – including the New York Times, Associated Press and Guardian – have joined the legal filing seeking release of the Guantanamo tapes to the public on First Amendment grounds.
Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director and attorney for the Guantanamo detainees, said: “The Obama administration has dragged its feet for over a year to stop the American press and public seeing a single frame of these tapes. We’re glad the judge has denied the government’s request for a blanket cover-up, but a lot of problems persist – we expect the government to appeal this to the Supreme Court to stop people seeing the truth. Americans have a right to see what continues to be done in their name up to this day. The government should reduce its heavy-handed censorship of the footage, drop the appeals, and release the tapes immediately.”
Veto Corleone Already in White House
By David Swanson | War Is A Crime | October 23, 2015
President Barack Obama has vetoed a military authorization bill. Why would he do such a thing?
Was it because dumping $612 billion into a criminal enterprise just finally struck him as too grotesque?
Nope.
Was it because he grew ashamed of holding the record for highest average annual military spending since World War II, not even counting Homeland Security Department or military spending by the State Department, the Energy Department, the Veterans Administration, interest on debt, etc.?
Nope. That would be crazy in a world where pretense is everything and the media has got everyone believing that military spending has gone down.
Was it because the disastrous war on Afghanistan gets more funding?
Nope.
The disastrous war on Iraq and Syria?
Nope.
The monstrous drone wars murdering 1 vaguely identified person for every 9 innocents slaughtered?
You kidding?
Oh, I’ve got it. Was it because building newer, bigger, and smaller more “usable” nuclear weapons is just too insane?
Um, nope. Nice guess, though.
Well what was it?
One reason that the President provided in his veto statement was that the bill doesn’t allow him to “close” Guantanamo by moving it — remember that prison still full of people whom he, the President, chooses to keep there despite their having been cleared for release?
Another reason: Obama wants more money in the standard budget and less in his slush fund for the War on the Middle East, which he renamed Overseas Contingency Operations. Obama’s language suggests that he wants the base budget increased by more than he wants the slush fund reduced by. The slush fund got a piddley little $38 billion in the vetoed bill. Yet the standard budget is deemed so deficient by Obama that, according to him, it “threatens the readiness and capabilities of our military and fails to provide the support our men and women in uniform deserve.” For real? Can you name a man or woman in uniform who would receive a dime if you jumped the funding of the most expensive military in the history of the known universe by another $100 billion? The President also complains that the bill he’s vetoed did not allow him to “slow growth in compensation.”
Another reason: Obama is worried that if you leave limits in place on military spending in the “Defense” Department, that will mean too little military spending in other departments as well: “The decision reflected in this bill to circumvent rather than reverse sequestration further harms our national security by locking in unacceptable funding cuts for crucial national security activities carried out by non-defense agencies.”
Hope and Change, people! Here’s a full list of the areas in which Senator Bernie Sanders has expressed disagreement with President Obama’s preferences on military spending:
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Secrecy and Hillary Clinton
By Diane Roark | Consortium News | October 21, 2015
The system for classifying intelligence and other national security documents is broken in major respects. Increasingly, it is also manipulated to punish perceived critics or to protect agency reputations and high officials, both from adverse publicity and in the courts. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private rather than State Department email service illustrates many of these issues. Her experience stands in stark contrast to treatment of national security whistleblowers, as illustrated in particular by variance in National Security Agency (NSA) communications intelligence policies.
–Culpability. Former Secretary of State Clinton clearly and knowingly mishandled classified information. As a U.S. senator, security clearances were required for her membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2003 to 2009. Therefore, she knew the rules for handling classified information before she decided, at the outset when she became Secretary of State in early 2009, to use personal rather than secure email.
Hillary and Bill Clinton had suffered many political and public relations crises. She had already run for the presidency and likely would do so again. Rules for handling classified information were ignored, the effect being to hide records that could be used against her in a second presidential run.
It simply could never be argued plausibly that for four years, a person in the highest U.S. foreign policy slot had no classified or sensitive information in any business emails that she wrote or received – over 30,000 of them. This defies the definition of the job.
The State Department is a primary user and a significant generator of classified information that bears on the great majority of issues coming before the Secretary. The State Department is also a profligate designator of “Sensitive But Unclassified” information.
–Overclassification. It is widely admitted that the intelligence classification system suffers from systemic over-classification. President Barack Obama has acknowledged the problem, and one review group even stated that almost every item now labeled Confidential should be Unclassified. There is no penalty for playing it safe – or playing it political – by classifying at too high a level, but there are potentially severe repercussions for an individual who mistakenly classifies at too low a level, or who is known to mishandle or publicly reveal classified information.
It is most unlikely, however, that Hillary Clinton will fall victim to accusations that rely on improper overclassification. The State Department and White House, including President Obama himself, sought to protect her and to minimize the effects of her behavior.
The case is extremely high-profile, Democrats in Congress would attack any borderline classification, and a host of wellpaid lawyers would rise to her defense. Improperly classified items or those deemed Sensitive but Unclassified may be redacted from publicly released documents, but it is hard to imagine that Mrs. Clinton would be falsely accused of felonies.
Whistleblowers suffer a quite different fate. Intelligence agencies easily and repeatedly retaliate for the airing of their dirty laundry by accusing the whistleblower of improperly handling or revealing allegedly classified information. The Obama administration then prosecutes them under the Espionage Act, under which altruistic motivation is irrelevant and may not even be raised in court.
Former CIA official John Kiriakou revealed on television that post 9/11 torture was official U.S. policy, not just attributable to a few rogue agents. The CIA seethed, but the Justice Department would not prosecute. Unfortunately, Kiriakou erred in giving a reporter the business card of a man he thought had retired from CIA but was still an agent under cover. The agent’s name was not published, but CIA got its revenge when Kiriakou was indicted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981. Left penniless with over $700,000 in legal bills even before trial, Kiriakou finally accepted a felony plea bargain and went to jail.
Thomas Drake and this author went through proper official channels in 20012002 to protest NSA’s surveillance of U.S. citizens. Along with colleagues Kirk Wiebe, William Binney and Edward Loomis, they also reported to the Defense Department Inspector General the waste of money on NSA modernization.
After domestic surveillance leaked to the New York Times four years later, the five became primary suspects, partly because the IG improperly offered their names to the FBI. All were raided, but no evidence was found because, as the reporter later stated publicly, he had not then met or communicated with any of the five.
Nonetheless, Drake was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for possessing five Unclassified NSA papers that NSA retroactively classified. He was threatened with 35 years in prison unless he pled guilty, but heroically resisted. Pretrial hearings proved all the information in the documents had been declassified by NSA. After a yearsold interview record was orally falsified, this author was asked to plead guilty to felony perjury, but also refused.
Section 1.7 of Executive Order 13526 governing classification stipulates that no information may be classified to conceal violations of law, inefficiency or administrative error; to prevent embarrassment; to restrain competition; or to prevent or delay release of information not requiring protection. This section is observed in the breach, as political considerations dictate.
For all the above proscribed reasons, unclassified parts of the NSA IG audit we requested are still withheld by NSA ten years after the audit was first published. Former NSA contractors Edward Snowden and John Kiriakou showed that illegal and unconstitutional activities were hidden from American citizens and others behind the veil of classification. For revealing material that never should have been classified in the first place, they are paying a very high price.
In Snowden’s case, many revelations about domestic surveillance still are treated as classified to keep them from U.S. voters, although every terrorist and every intelligence agency in the world has access to the documents and almost no ordinary person in any country of interest to the U.S. can function efficiently whilst avoiding NSA surveillance.
–Sensitive but Unclassified Material. Individual agencies claim an unsupervised right to withhold admittedly Unclassified information according to any criteria they see fit and for as long as they choose. In the Clinton email case, it is quite striking that not a word has been breathed about such Unclassified but Sensitive material. Her free pass in this respect is the envy of whistleblowers.
In our case, NSA initially refused to return any materials seized in the raids. When sued, NSA claimed that if a computer contained even one admittedly Unclassified document with material that had not been officially released by NSA, the Agency could retain and destroy the entire computer content. Courts eventually allowed NSA to keep such individual documents in their entirety and at their sole discretion, but required that others be copied and returned.
–With ordinary citizens or lower-level whistleblowers, Sensitive but Unclassified material is wielded as yet another weapon in the Executive’s arsenal of punishments. Even highlevel intelligence officials have had difficulty publishing their memoirs, partly because prepublication review agreements routinely allow an agency to withhold unclassified information.
Since the 1950s, most judges refuse to review allegedly classified or sensitive material even to determine that it does not fall under the commonsense prohibitions of Section 1.7 of the Executive Order on classification. The Executive Branch has also been famously successful in promulgating a “state secrets” doctrine to avoid or indefinitely delay court scrutiny of important civil liberties issues such as domestic surveillance. It is now known, however, that the original state secrets precedent wrongly invoked intelligence sources and methods to cover up Air Force culpability for a plane crash.
In the author’s case, even NSA’s grossly inconsistent classifications got a free pass. A document that was released to Kirk Wiebe as Unclassified was branded Top Secret Compartmented when found on the author’s computer. Confronted with this vast discrepancy, NSA alleged that it could neither confirm nor deny that the document had previously been released. It keeps no records of prior declassifications. Even in a related court case. Nor is it interested in an available system to compile and compare such records. But the judge let the classification stand.
Diane Roark retired in 2002 after 17 years on the professional staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and prior service on the National Security Council Staff, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and in the Intelligence section of the International division of the Department of Energy.
Russia Destroys The Greater Israel Dream
Plato’s Guns | October 19, 2015
The grand plan was going swimmingly. The concept of endless wars for Greater Israel was working and producing impressive results. Opportunistically, through aggravation of war after war, chunk by chunk of Arab land was usurped and the map of Greater Israel was slowly materializing. No matter the unstable chaos surrounding the State of Israel for the past seven decades, and no matter the undying Palestinian resistance and the violent Intifadas that erupted internally, the Zionist dream of Greater Israel remained consistently intact and was progressing unabated and unchallenged by anyone.
But dreams, by their diaphanous nature are easily interruptible – can easily turn into sudden nightmares. Indeed, dreams do, in the blink of an eye, simply end.
Nobody expected the Zionist dream to come to a sudden halt like this. Nobody. Nobody expected Russia, literally in the blink of an eye, to suddenly assert itself militarily in the Levant and in the process turn the Zionist dream into a geopolitical and existential nightmare. No further territorial expansions are even remotely possible now with Russia’s military presence in the Levant. The Russian army is in the Levant to stay and the Israelis know it. In the Zionist universe, it’s as if a mighty big-footed contender had suddenly appeared in the dream and instantly stepped on the Greater Israel map like it was a castle made of sand.
Russia is not a declared enemy of Israel. Russia did not squelch The Greater Israel dream on purpose. The destruction of the Zionist dream is the result of an unintended consequence that purely serves the regional and global interests of Russia. Happenstance that the Zionist dream was in the way of Russian ambitions, that’s all. Dog eat dog world.
But what are Russia’s interests in lassoing the Levant?
Well, first, Putin intends to re-fulfill the old Russian dream of establishing sizable military foundations and bases in the ‘warm waters’ of the world, in the Mediterranean, to be more precise, in order to pivot and project power westwards with practical ease. And also, to use Mediterranean naval bases as a first line of defense against a Western creep towards its own territory. Russia’s growing military presence in Syria is a matter of “national security”, Putin has declared several times over. Establishing multiple bases in the Mediterranean has not been possible for Russia to do since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when it lost the Middle East chess game to America, symbolized by Egypt, a major Soviet client at the time having its Soviet military hardware devastated by Israeli-operated, made-in-USA weaponry. Russia today considers its growing presence in Syria to be a most vital geopolitical maneuver for re-establishing a seat of power again in the Middle East, in tandem with its progress into future Superpowerdom. In the current uncontrollable chaos of the Levant, this is an ambition that Russia must begin implementing immediately, lest the region falls dangerously under ISIS and Zioconism, making it thus harder for Russia’s old dream to be realized.
Secondly, Putin sees the cloth of American Empire as fast fading, especially in the Middle East, and he’s taking advantage of this: putting forth a challenging proposition to the American Emperor. Yes, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, a man considered to be a cold-blooded realist, is aware of America’s weaknesses, but he’s also aware of its current strengths and he is in Syria as a power salesman – he’s in Syria to make a deal with Empire Americana. Respectfully, but firmly, he is pitching to Empire: ‘Look, you remain supremely powerful, but you are hemorrhaging in the Middle East and the situation is now critical. You cannot afford a new large-scale war in the Middle East that may or may not reassert your hold on the region; and you have lost all your proxy wars there as well – there are no more black-clad joker cards in your deck. You cannot continue on this disadvantageous path, you cannot stand still either and you also cannot withdraw from the region. All these are strategically inferior options and will not stop the bleeding of your powers. The only way out is through pragmatism. The only remedy is to share control of the Middle East with us, Russians. We have together shared power in the Middle East under the shadow of the Cold War and yes it created dangers and complexities for both our countries in the past. But today is different: there is no official Cold War between us and so our new partnership can only serve to strengthen us both’. This, dear reader is Russia’s diplomatic speak, received with quiet relief by the White House and cussed and scorned by the Ziocons in DC. Simplified, Putin is in Syria and his realist message to America is: ‘Share the Middle East with us now or we both fall in the future’. And it looks like Obama has quietly taken heed, in the interest of Empire and realism and not out of cowardice or submission to Putin. Obama’s problem is that although he begrudgingly agrees with Putin’s analysis and remedy, he cannot be seen to be supporting it in public because the Neocons would immediately set the dogs of treason on him, bogging him down with political obtrusion and smear campaigns in his last 15 months of power – possibly damaging his party’s winning chances at the next elections.
Thirdly, in my opinion, Russia is in Syria also for the purpose of redressing Russian military image and history. After the devastating defeat of the Soviet Union at the hands of the American-backed Afghani Mujahedeen, and considering the profound nationalism that Russian society feels especially towards its military institutions, it behooves any modern Russian leader thus to conceive and create a military victory against a modern version of the same old enemy who had previously defeated them – a military morale-booster both for the Russian populations and for the history books. A utilization of the sentiments of the ‘comeback kid’ for mass consumption so as to boost levels of nation devotion. Russia, being the largest nation in the world, landmass-wise, it has to regularly make grand spectacles and gestures in the name of national unity enhancement. Killing Takfiri terrorists in Syria, nay smashing them to smithereens with Russian Air Power is an opportune event to balance out and positively update Russian history books.
Yes, the Russian military buildup in Syria, especially in marine and air power, now looks to be, relatively speaking, permanent. And this is what is causing Israel and its Ziocon friends in Washington sleepless nights and hectic, nefarious group-brainstorming sessions. They know that the dream of a Greater Israel cannot be realized with Russia dominating the skies and waters of the Levant. This is the current and silent inescapable reality. This is the wall that suddenly sprung up and instantly separated Zionists from their beloved Greater Israel dream. Because of a ‘wall’, the dream is now impossible.
Some would call this, poetic justice.
The ‘dream destroyed’ being the current unspoken reality, Israel is left with no expedient and transforming choices. It cannot go to direct war with a more powerful Russia and win back domination over Levant skies and waters. It couldn’t even defeat Hezbollah who lack any form of Air Power back in 2006. And more frustratingly for Israel, it cannot blackmail, coerce or buy President Putin either. Moreover, presently under the leadership of Obama, it is clear that America is not prepared to go to direct war with any nation, let alone Russia, on behalf of Israel. The current architects of expansionist Zionism are at a complete and utter loss to recognize all these chokehold factors – blood is draining from their faces. No more meetings over what Arab country to genocide next so as to steal more land and resources, the issue now is not when and how the Zionist dream can be finally fulfilled, but how to safely bring the corpse-dream back from the dead without anyone noticing.
Alas, there are no clever Zionist ideas on the architects’ table. They are truly and absolutely in utter speechless shock.
And what compounds this hectic catatonia that the Zionist Sensei are currently experiencing is the fact that they know that Israel’s global credibility is at its lowest ever, and that sooner or later, the international community – seeing Israel’s geopolitical weakness – will start pressing hard, even imposing the 2-State solution on Israel, based on the 1967 borders. This is the double nail in the Greater Israel dream coffin. Not only will Israel be unable to expand territory, but it will also be forced into giving up territory currently under its (illegal) control. Something that the Israeli public are psychologically not prepared for, nor is there any political will in the Israeli halls of power to do so either.
Observations of the behaviorism of Zionists tell us that what they cannot change, they usually endeavor to spoil. And the only thing they are still capable of doing is spoiling it for Arabs. They will undoubtedly attempt to expand the current regional conflicts into another one hundred years of Arab on Arab wars. This is a given – they breathe to spoil life for their Arab neighbors. And we also observe that when Zionists are not willing or able to go to war, they usually endeavor to send other capable and willing nations to war on their behalf. But as noted a few passages above, this is currently impossible under the Obama administration. The dream of Greater Israel remains smashed.
What to do then? What is the ultimate solution? Would Israel prefer that America directly and militarily confront Russia in the Levant? I call it a yes. Even at the cost of causing World War Three? Yes. Even at the risk of igniting a nuclear war? Yes.
Yes, yes, and a triple yes. The global Zionist congress pathology shows every indication of this. ‘The tribe above all’ is their core belief. They are Masadian-ISISians in suits with basements full of nukes. Their narcissistic intentions are always clear – their motives and maneuvers are never to be trusted.
We are currently at a very serious and sobering point in the fast-evolving dramas taking place in the Levant and the Middle East at large. Everyone concerned is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the unknown. This alignment of overwhelming unknowns is rare in history. The geopolitical stress and distress levels – despite the equalizing Russian presence in the Levant – remain excruciatingly high for all parties concerned. All actors have so much to lose with a single wrong move. A cluster of unknowns is forcing everyone into extreme caution. Hesitant steps are made then quickly unmade. If you were to privately ask Obama or Putin what would happen to the world the day after a war between their two nations ignites, they would both be likely to look you somberly in the eye and say, ‘I don’t know’.
The unknown is upon us and we are upon the unknown.
For now, Zionist masterminds plan on keeping the death of the dream of Greater Israel a secret, in the hope that the next American president would be more malleable and more reactionary than Obama. They will be quietly biding their time and hoping that the next President of America would be more Zionist that Theodore Herzl. More ideologically violent than ISIS and Tarantino. Hoping against all hope that the tiny state of Israel would survive a Word War Three catastrophe with little damage inside its boundaries. Hoping against all hope that the Arab world surrounding Israel, all of it would literally be bombed back into the stone ages, while Israel continues to be the hi-tech bride of the Middle East. Hoping against all hope that Russia would again be defeated by America in the Middle East – just so that Israel can again dominate the skies and waters of the Levant, allowing it thus to revive the corpse of the Greater Israel project. Hoping against all hope that igniting World War Three would actually solve all of Israel’s problems.
A touch fantastical? Maybe not.
This is what happens when tribal madmen dream.
Obama to keep 5,500 troops in Afghanistan beyond 2016: Officials
Press TV – October 15, 2015
The US president will keep 5,500 of US troops in Afghanistan when he leaves office in 2017, according to senior unnamed Obama administration officials.
US President Barack Obama had originally planned to withdraw almost all US troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year. He just wanted to keep a small, embassy-based military presence in the Asian country.
But the Pentagon has been arguing for months that Kabul needed additional US military presence in order to defeat a resurgent Taliban movement.
The United States should deploy more troops to Afghanistan because local forces are not yet ready to take on Taliban militants, US Army General John Campbell has said.
Campbell, the commander in charge of the US-led military coalition in Afghanistan, made the remarks during a hearing before a US Senate panel last week.
President Obama is expected to announce the changes on Thursday morning during a news conference at the White House.
The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but after 14 years, the foreign troops have still not been able to establish security in the country.
The “A” Word That Terrifies Washington
War crimes are for losers
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • October 13, 2015
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has declared that there will be a thorough investigation of the recent U.S. destruction of a hospital in Afghanistan that killed 22, including 12 of the medical staff, with more than thirty still missing in the rubble. The hospital, run by Geneva-based Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), had informed the U.S. headed international military force of both its location and its activities in order to avoid becoming a target for either side in fighting around Kunduz but that apparently was not enough. The U.S. military command in Afghanistan approved the bombing, which reportedly included multiple attacks from a C-130 gunship and lasted over half an hour, though there is some confusion over what constituted the “threat” that was being responded to, MSF claiming that there were no Taliban militants anywhere near their building either using it for shelter or as a firing point. Both MSF and some senior United Nations officials regard the attack as a war crime. President Barack Obama uncharacteristically apologized for a “mistake” though he took pains not to blame the U.S. military.
Ashton might be a brilliant physicist but he has never been a soldier in spite of his long service in the Department of Defense. I don’t doubt his good intentions when it comes to declaring United States government willingness to let the chips fall where they may but he has no idea what he is up against. The uniformed military will stonewall, run circles around him and work hard to construct a narrative that ultimately blames no one but the Afghans for what happened. In the unlikely event that they fail in that, a soldier at the low end of the process will be punished with a slap on the wrist to demonstrate that military justice works while pari passu protecting the senior commanders. And the report will not even appear until long after Kunduz is forgotten. At that point Congress and the White House will have no stomach for going after our valiant warriors so the buck will ultimately stop with a toothless report that accomplishes nothing at all.
The Secretary of Defense, who reportedly had a dual major at Yale that included medieval history, might well consider the historical precedents for his initiating an investigation. He should appreciate above all that the “A” word that must never be spoken inside the United States government is “accountability,” which is by design as the government must never be made to look bad. Without demanding accountability even meticulous investigations into possible war crimes have no meaning and are literally not worth the paper they are written on.
Carter’s historical review might well start with the massacre of more than 500 civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam War, which was only investigated by the army after journalist Seymour Hersh got hold of the story, leading to the current practice of embedding journalists to control the narrative. More recently there was Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison operated by U.S. forces and intelligence agencies in 2003. Systematic physical abuse of prisoners was widespread, to include rape, anal penetration with foreign objects, being hung from hooks, and even murder. Much of the evidence for the abuse was documented by photos and videos made by military personnel who supervised the process. The “enhanced interrogation” procedures used were sanctioned by Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces, and were also endorsed by memos from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The White House maintained that the Geneva Conventions protecting prisoners and the International Convention Against Torture, to which the United States was a signatory, did not apply in Iraq.
The “thorough investigation” of the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib resulted in courts martial of a number of low ranking servicemen and women, only two of whom received short prison sentences. At the higher levels there were only administrative penalties and the demotion of General Janet Karpinski, who was in charge of all the prison camps in Iraq. Karpinski has insisted that she was scapegoated as the command structure above her had explicitly authorized the interrogation techniques.
An after-the-fact Pentagon ordered review of the prison and its procedures conducted by Major General Antonio Taguba concluded “That between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” For his pains, Taguba was himself investigated after the report was leaked to the public. He observed “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.” He was subsequently ordered to retire, a typical response of punish the messenger whenever the Pentagon decides that it has been embarrassed.
The White House denied and later sought to downplay the Abu Ghraib story. In 2004 President George W. Bush finally apologized after the evidence of war crimes became indisputable, saying that he was “sorry for the humiliation.”
CIA interrogators, as well as Israeli “advisers,” were also involved in the torture program at Abu Ghraib and reportedly killed at least one prisoner. But the Agency simultaneously had its own show running at a network of “black site” secret prisons in Europe and Asia, some of which were operating under the same procedural rules on “enhanced interrogation” that prevailed in Iraq. Prisoners were waterboarded, which simulated drowning, sometimes repeatedly. At least one prisoner died from freezing to death and others were subjected to “rectal rehydration.” The interrogators were advised that only procedures leading to “organ failure” were prohibited.
Jose Rodriguez, at the time CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, ordered destroyed the video tapes that had been made of many of the interrogations, arguing absurdly that they could be used by enemies of the United States to identify the interrogators. He was more motivated, one should assume, by protecting his own circle of senior officers by destroying the evidence, which one might consider a successful outcome from his point of view.
The December 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee’s report reveals that no CIA officials have ever been reprimanded or held accountable in any way for using torture to interrogate detainees: “CIA officers and CIA contractors who were found to have violated CIA policies or performed poorly were rarely held accountable or removed from positions of responsibility. CIA managers who were aware of failings and shortcomings in the program but did not intervene, or who failed to provide proper leadership and management, were also not held to account [and] accountability recommendations were overruled by senior CIA leadership. As detailed in the study, there was no accountability for personnel responsible for the extended detention of individuals determined by the CIA to have been wrongly detained.”
Subsequently, the only known CIA participant in the “enhanced interrogation” regime to be punished was John Kirakou, imprisoned after exposing the existence of the program in 2007.
George W. Bush, even defended the interrogations in advance of the Senate report’s release last year, calling the CIA officials connected to it “patriots.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who pledged that if he had to do it all over again he would, reviled the report as “full of crap,” a “terrible piece of work” and “deeply flawed.”
More recently, a gaggle of retired senior CIA officials, most of whom were participants in the torture program, produced their own response to the Senate allegations. It is a short book called Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Programs.
The CIA’s response goes something like this: the Senate report on torture was written by Democrats who were out to get the Agency and is therefore little more than a partisan hatchet job that targeted some senior officers. The book includes multiple assertions that the senators and their staffers willfully ignored things like “context,” which means that anything was permissible as everyone was terrified that a terrorist group based in Afghanistan was about to existentially threaten the United States.
As some of the book’s co-authors, to include former Director George Tenet, his deputies John McLaughlin, Jose Rodriguez, and Mike Morell, as well as the current Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan, were part and parcel of the process approving and implementing the enhanced interrogation procedures, one would have to believe that they have a lot to answer for. But instead of accountability we now have a book sugarcoating how and why the United States chose the dark side, a book written in expectation that a considerable hunk of the public will continue to believe that torture not only works but also that it is perfectly acceptable when a nation is “under stress” as it was after 9/11.
Both the public and the authors would prefer not to consider that opening the door to torture as official policy provides justification for Washington’s actual enemies to do the same when they capture a U.S. citizen, something that every American traveler abroad might consider before setting out. And one might also marvel at a book by the CIA (which reviewed and approved the text) propagandizing its point of view on torture, something that is illegal as the Agency is forbidden from seeking to influence domestic opinion in the U.S.
Only in the United States would a book justifying torture written by a group of former senior government officials be taken seriously enough to find a readership or publisher, which is something that Ashton Carter should perhaps consider before he launches his investigation. No one was held accountable for what were indisputably war crimes committed with the complete approval of the U.S. government going all the way up to the White House level. And today many of the perpetrators are regarded as heroes.
As it is a given that no senior official or officer in the United States government will ever be held responsible for anything, instead of calling for an investigation Ashton Carter might just as well respond “Sure we bombed that hospital. What are you going to do about it?” Or even better “Accountability? That’s just a word that begins with ‘a.’”
Obama Third President in a Row to Oversee Attack on a Hospital
By Steve Straehley | AllGov | October 12, 2015
When the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was attacked on Oct. 3 by a U.S. AC-130 gunship, it was not a unique event. Hospitals have come under fire during conflicts presided over by the two previous presidents as well as Barack Obama.
The Geneva Convention, to which the United States is a signatory, prohibits the targeting of hospitals. “Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict,” according to the treaty.
After the Kunduz attack, U.S. officials at first said Afghan forces had been taking fire from the building. Obama later apologized for the attack in which 22 patients and staff members were killed. Médecins Sans Frontières has called the attack a war crime and wants an independent investigation.
Hospitals also came under fire during the Iraq War under the George W. Bush administration. U.S. planes bombed a Baghdad maternity hospital in 2003, according to ThinkProgress. Several people were killed in the attack and 27 injured.
Nor were hospitals safe under Bill Clinton’s watch. NATO forces bombed a hospital in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1999, killing four. Technical problems were blamed for the attack. Also that year in Nis, Serbia, NATO dropped cluster bombs on an outdoor market and neighboring hospital, killing three in the hospital.
In 1993, U.S. and Turkish forces bombed the largest hospital in Mogadishu, Serbia, where Médecins Sans Frontières was working. Three patients were killed. The United Nations said the hospital was attacked because it was being used as a hideout by forces loyal to Gen. Mohammad Farah Aidid, the Somali military commander who had taken over the government in a coup.
Photo: Médecins Sans Frontières
Obama Boots Syrian Peace Chance
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 6, 2015
President Barack Obama is turning his back on possibly the last best chance to resolve the bloody Syrian war because he fears a backlash from Official Washington’s powerful coalition of neoconservatives and “liberal interventionists” along with their foreign fellow-travelers: Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf sheikdoms.
The route toward peace would be to collaborate with Russia and Iran to get Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to accept a power-sharing unity government that would fairly represent Syria’s major religious and ethnic groups – Christians, Alawites, Shiites and moderate Sunnis – along with a commitment for free, internationally monitored elections once adequate security is restored.
But for such an arrangement to work, Obama also would have to crack down aggressively on U.S. regional “allies” to ensure that they stopped funding, supplying and otherwise assisting the Sunni extremist forces including Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State (or ISIS). Obama would have to confront the Sunni “allies” – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – as well as Israel.
His pressure would have to include stern action aimed at the global finances of the Gulf states – i.e., seizing their assets as punishment for their continuing support for terrorism – as well as similar sanctions against Turkey, possibly ousting it from NATO if it balked, and a withdrawal of political and financial support for Israel if it continued helping Nusra fighters and viewing Al Qaeda as the “lesser evil” in Syria. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia and Israel.”]
Obama also would have to make it clear to Syria’s “moderate” Sunni politicians whom the U.S. government has been subsidizing for the past several years that they must sit down with Assad’s representatives and work out a unity government or the American largess would end.
This combination of strong international pressure on the Sunni terror infrastructure and strong-arming internal players in Syria into a unity government could isolate the Sunni extremists from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and thus minimize the need for military strikes whether carried out by Russia (against both Al Qaeda and ISIS) or the U.S. coalition (focusing on ISIS).
And, the arrival of Russian military support for the Assad government – as well as the increased backing from Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah – represented the moment when the prospect for peace was brightest, whatever one thinks of those various players. However, instead of working with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, President Obama chose to bend to the pressures of Official Washington.
Appeasing the Warmongers
Thinking he had stretched the tolerance of neocons and liberal hawks as far as he could by pushing through the nuclear deal with Iran, Obama fell in line behind their propagandistic denunciations of Assad and Putin. Obama’s administration joined in promoting the new favorite “group think” of Washington – that Putin had promised to only bomb the Islamic State and then reneged by attacking “moderate” rebels and their more powerful ally, Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
Conveniently, this storyline doesn’t cite the wording of Putin’s supposed “promise” although some articles do mention him vowing to attack “terrorist” groups, which the mainstream U.S. news media has interpreted as the Islamic State only. But this odd framing accepts the breathtaking premise that Al Qaeda is no longer a terrorist organization – apparently rehabilitated by the fact that Israel has been helping Al Qaeda’s affiliate, the Nusra Front, along the Golan Heights and prefers it to Assad’s continued rule. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Should US Ally with Al Qaeda in Syria?”]
Among the many purveyors of this “Putin lied” narrative is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who on Tuesday repeated the canard that Putin had “promised” to strike only the Islamic State and then broke that promise. For good measure, Cohen added that the Russians had “invaded” Syria although they were formally invited by the recognized government of Syria.
“Yes, the Russians did invade,” Cohen wrote. “They sent war planes, mechanized units and even troops into Syria. They have begun bombing missions, apparently hitting insurgents seeking to topple Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and not only, as Russian President Vladimir Putin promised, Islamic State units. Putin – surprise! – lied.”
Normally in journalism, before we accuse someone of lying, we show what they actually said and contrast it with the facts. But Official Washington has long since moved Putin into the free-fire zone of demonization. Anything can be said about him, whether based in reality or not, and anyone who objects to this “group think” is called a “Putin bootlicker” or a “Putin apologist.”
Thus, any reality-based skepticism is ruled out of the frame of debate. Such was the way that the United States plunged blindly into the Iraq War in 2003 when Saddam Hussein was the demonized figure and the Europeans who warned President George W. Bush not to invade were laughed at as “Euro-weenies.” American skeptics were “Saddam apologists.”
Inside-Out ‘Logic’
Cohen is back at it again in his Tuesday column, which – on the Internet – has the curious title “The High Cost of Avoiding War in Syria.” Cohen throws around the word “invasion” where Russia is involved – even when there was no “invasion” – but he advocates an actual U.S. invasion with cavalier hypocrisy.
Cohen slams Obama for not having established “a no-fly zone” in Syria earlier, which would have involved the United States bombing and destroying Syria’s air force, a clear act of aggression and an obvious boon to Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Cohen also says he was for “arming the rebels,” another violation of international law which – when tried by Obama to appease the drumbeat from Cohen and his ilk – led to many U.S.-trained and U.S.-armed rebels taking their equipment and skills to Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Yet, Cohen — on the prized opinion real estate of The Washington Post’s op-ed page and in his nationally syndicated column — unapologetically encourages an illegal invasion of another country while condemning Russia for doing the same except that Russia was following international law by working with the sovereign government of Syria and therefore has not “invaded” Syria.
We also are supposed to forget that Cohen’s ideas would benefit Sunni jihadists, such as the Al Qaeda-dominated “Army of Conquest” which could use the “no-fly zones” to mount a victorious offensive to capture Damascus and create a humanitarian crisis even worse than now.
Possibly with ISIS chopping off the heads of “infidels” – Christians, Alawites, Shiites, etc. – and with Al Qaeda having a new home in the center of the Middle East to plot terror strikes on the West, Cohen’s plan might necessitate a major U.S. military intervention that would get even more people killed and deal the final death blow to the American Republic.
In evaluating Cohen’s lame-brained double-think, it is worth remembering that he was one of the many U.S. opinion leaders who cheered on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deceptive Iraq War speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. Waving “we-love-Colin” pompoms alongside all his esteemed colleagues, Cohen laughed at anyone who still doubted that Saddam Hussein possessed hidden WMD stockpiles.
“The evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations – some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail – had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them,” Cohen wrote. “Only a fool – or possibly a Frenchman – could conclude otherwise.”
Ha-ha, did you get that clever line – “Only a fool – or possibly a Frenchman” – pretty funny except that by heaping ridicule on those of us who doubted Powell’s evidence, Cohen contributed to the deaths of some 4,500 U.S. soldiers, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the cost to U.S. taxpayers of more than $1 trillion, and chaos now spreading across not just the Middle East but into Europe.
In a normal place where there was some modicum of accountability, you would have expected Cohen to be banished to Storage Room B with his red stapler or worse. But no, Cohen is back running with the same juvenile in-crowd, behaving just as stupidly and just as recklessly as he has many times in the past.
Obama Intimidated
But the larger problem is that President Obama appears intimidated by this collection of know-it-alls who preen across the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times or who hold down prestigious “fellowships” at the Brookings Institution or other big-name think tanks or who self-identify as “human rights activists” advocating “humanitarian” wars.
Arguably, Obama has always had an outsized regard for people with establishment credentials. It is, after all, how he rose through the ranks as first an extremely bright academic and later a talented orator and politician. Without family connections or personal wealth, he needed the approval of various influential individuals. If he offended them in some way, he risked being pigeonholed as “an angry black man.”
Indeed, the comedy duo Key & Peele developed a series of funny skits with Jordan Peele playing the always proper and controlled Obama and Keegan-Michael Key as “anger translator Luther.” Obama even invited “Luther” to translate Obama’s speech to the 2015 White House Correspondents Dinner, except that by the end of that talk Obama was expressing his own anger and Luther peeled away.
The problem in the real world is that Obama remains cowed by the Important People of Washington – represented in that oh-so-important crowd at the dinner – and bows to their misguided thinking.
Obama also is facing a beefed-up lobbying operation for Saudi Arabia to go along with the always formidable Israel Lobby. The Intercept reported that in September the Saudi kingdom added to its large stable of thoroughbred influence-peddlers by signing “Edelman, the largest privately owned public relations agency in the world [and] the Podesta Group … a lobbying firm founded by Tony Podesta, a major fundraiser for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.”
Indeed, the repressive Saudi kingdom may need some special P.R. help as it prepares to behead Ali Mohammed al-Nimr whose body would then be attached to a cross or otherwise displayed in a crucifixion that would leave his corpse to rot for several days as a warning to others. Al-Nimr is a Shiite who at the age of 17 in 2012 participated in a pro-democracy demonstration that was viewed as an affront to the monarchy.
The Saudis also have been waging a ruthless air war against impoverished Yemen, attacking Houthis who stem from a branch of Shia Islam which Saudi Sunni Wahhabism considers apostasy. The Saudi bombing campaign, which recently killed some 131 celebrants at a wedding inside Yemen, gets intelligence and logistical support from the Obama administration even though the slaughter of Houthis has benefited their Yemeni rivals, “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” who have gained ground behind the Saudi air offensive.
Diverting Attention
Yet, the Saudis’ P.R. battalions – along with the Israel Lobby – have kept Official Washington’s focus in other directions. Indeed, there are now so many false or dubious narratives dis-informing the capital’s “group think” that U.S. decisions are driven more by mythology than facts.
Obama could begin the process of restoring sanity to Washington by declassifying U.S. intelligence analyses on several key issues. For instance, Obama could release what’s now known about the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack outside Damascus.
After that attack, there was a rush to judgment at the State Department and within the mainstream U.S. news media to blame that atrocity on Assad’s forces, although I’m told that CIA analysts have since moved away from that view and now agree that the attack was likely a provocation designed to draw the U.S. military into the war on the side of the Sunni jihadists. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]
Though Obama and other officials have dropped the sarin accusations from their public speeches – harping instead on “barrel bombs” as if those homemade weapons are some uniquely evil device – Obama has refused to retract the sarin allegations which helped shape the hyper-hostile “conventional wisdom” against Assad.
Similarly, Obama has withheld U.S. intelligence information about the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, letting stand hasty accusations blaming Putin. Obama appears infatuated by the trendy concept of “strategic communications” or “Stratcom,” which blends psy-ops, propaganda and P.R. into one noxious brew to poison public opinion about one’s “enemy.”
With the recent Russian military intervention in Syria, Obama had the chance to correct the record on the sarin-gas attack and the MH-17 shoot-down but instead continued the “Stratcom” both in his United Nations speech and his news conference last Friday with more hyperbolic attacks against Assad and Putin. In doing so, Obama apparently bowed to the desired rhetoric of hardliners like U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and the editorial-page masters of The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Obama may have hoped his harsh language would appease the neocons and their liberal-hawk pals, but the tough-guy rhetoric has only opened him up to new attacks over the disparity between his words and deeds. As the clueless columnist Richard Cohen wrote, “A no-fly zone needs to be established. It is not too late to do something. By doing so little, the United States has allowed others to do so much.” [Emphasis in original.]
In other words, Cohen appears to want the U.S. military to shoot down Russian planes over Syria, even though the Russians have been invited by the recognized government to be there and the U.S. has not. The minor complication of possible human extinction from a nuclear war apparently is of little consequence when compared to the street cred that one gets from such manly talk.
For Official Washington – and apparently Obama – the peace option is regarded as unacceptable, i.e., working with Russia and Iran to achieve a power-sharing unity government in Damascus (with the promise of elections as soon as possible) along with the United States demanding from its regional “allies” a complete shutdown of assistance to the Islamic State, Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and all other Sunni jihadists.
That option would require Obama and the neocon/liberal-hawk cowboys to get down off their high horses, admit they have been tossing their lasso in the wrong direction – and compromise.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Somalia Ratifies Rights of Children Treaty, Leaving United States as only Holdout
By Steve Straehley | AllGov | October 4, 2015
And then there was one.
Somalia last week deposited its instrument of ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), leaving the United States as the world’s only country that has not done so. And it doesn’t look like the U.S. will join the club any time soon.
The convention, adopted in 1989, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, with 196 signatory nations. It is a commitment to promote and respect the human rights of children, including the right to life, to health, to education and to play, as well as the right to family life, to be protected from violence and from any form of discrimination, and to have their views heard, according to the UN. Somalia began its process of ratification in January 2015; another holdout, South Sudan, ratified the treaty in May.
Although President Barack Obama gave his support to the CRC before he took office, saying “it is embarrassing that the U.S. is in the company of Somalia, a lawless land. If I become president, I will review this and other human rights treaties,” he hasn’t submitted the treaty for Senate approval.
If he did submit it, it’s unlikely it would be approved. Conservatives oppose the CRC, some saying it would weaken U.S. sovereignty. Others say being a party to the treaty will undermine the role of American parents in raising their children.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon urged the United States “to join the global movement and help the world reach the objective of universal ratification.”
To Learn More:
Hailing Somalia’s Ratification, UN Renews Call For Universalization Of Child Rights Treaty (United Nations)
Only 2 Countries Have Not Joined the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child: South Sudan and…United States (by Danny Biederman and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Obama moves to dismiss case of Yemeni whose innocent relatives were killed in US drone strike
Reprieve – October 2, 2015
The US government has asked a D.C. court to dismiss the case of a Yemeni man whose family members were killed by a US drone strike, on the basis that he has no legal ‘standing’ to bring a case against them.
Earlier this year, Mr bin Ali Jaber filed a lawsuit against President Obama, seeking a declaration from a federal court in Washington, D.C., that the 2012 strike was unlawful and his innocent relatives were wrongfully killed. The Obama administration yesterday filed a motion asking the court to dismiss Mr bin Ali Jaber’s case entirely. They argued that Mr Jaber has no standing – i.e. that he has no legal right to bring his case in the US – and that whether a US drone killed his relatives is a ‘political question’ that no court should review.
However, in November 2013 Mr bin Ali Jaber travelled to Washington, D.C. where he had meetings with White House and NSC officials about his relative’s deaths. No US official suggested then that Mr. Jaber, who is the appointed representative of the Jaber family estates, lacked authority to speak for the family.
Faisal lost his nephew Waleed and his brother-in-law Salem in a US drone attack in the village of Khashamir on August 29 2012. Waleed was a local policeman, and Salem was an imam who was known for speaking out against al-Qaeda in his sermons – including on the Friday before he was killed. After the strike and Faisal’s travels to the US, Faisal’s relatives were given a plastic bag containing $100,000 in sequentially-marked US dollar bills as a condolence payment, but the US has never admitted responsibility for the killings.
Mr bin Ali Jaber had previously written to the White House offering to settle the case on one condition – that he receive a public apology from the US. He did so in the footsteps of President Obama’s apology, earlier this year, to the families of Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein, an Italian and an American citizen who were killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan in January. It marked the first known US acknowledgement of responsibility for civilian deaths under the drone programme.
In a letter to President Obama, Cori Crider – Mr bin Ali Jaber’s lawyer at human rights organization Reprieve – writes: “I write today to make a formal offer of settlement. In consideration for dropping this lawsuit, Mr. Jaber asks for nothing more than what you gave the families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto: an apology and an explanation as to why a strike that killed two innocent civilians was authorized.”
Covert strikes by the CIA in Yemen and Pakistan are believed to have killed hundreds of civilians, but the US has never formally admitted responsibility beyond the deaths of Mr Lo Porto and Mr Weinstein.
Cori Crider, attorney for Faisal bin Ali Jaber and a director at international human rights charity Reprieve, said: “Once again we see the yawning gulf between this President’s rhetoric on drones and the reality. President Obama once said innocent drone deaths would haunt him as long as he lives – so why, then, does sorry seem to be the hardest word? It is insulting to my client to be told he has no right to represent his family’s estate, when White House officials certainly thought he was worthy of meetings in Washington. The US is now trying its level best to block Faisal’s quest for justice by kicking him out of the courts. There is no good reason that the President stood up in front of the world with the Lo Porto and Weinstein families to say sorry for the US’ tragic mistake, but can’t do so for a Yemeni man. The hypocrisy of the Administration’s stance sends a harmful message, telling the entire Muslim world that its lives have no value to the United States.”
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The United States and Human Trafficking
By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 11.10.2020
In the beginning of October, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order about imposing sanctions on countries that, in Washington’s opinion, “do not put forth sufficient efforts to combat human trafficking”. The list of countries put together by Washington specifically includes Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and the DPRK. In addition, US representatives in the IMF and multilateral banks have been ordered to vote against certain projects in which funds will be provided to Russia, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Syria, and several other countries. … continue
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