War criminal, serial liar, and complete incompetent Donald Rumsfeld has died at age 88.
Don’t bother reading the obituary. They make little to no mention about lying us into war or directly authorizing torture.
I imagine that he’s down in hell now, being waterboarded by Saddam Hussein, who has doubtlessly achieved trustee status by now.
https://t.co/xJ0yYHBqlt pic.twitter.com/7KQtzOam1p
— Human Rights Watch Watcher (@queeralamode) May 27, 2021
When someone suggests that, “It’s hard to find a large friend group of only sociopaths.”
QED, motherf%$#ers, QED.
The Biden Administration has announced that it will be appointing Richard Nephew as assistant envoy to Iran.
He’s kind of a classic foreign policy sadist, particularly as he is a former Obama Administration sanctions expert, but he’s written a book where he brags about hurting ordinary citizens through the sanctions that he devised.
Colloquially, it’s called saying the quiet part out loud. Legally, it’s called a crime against humanity:
The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. As the former principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obama’s State Department, Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile industry, and driving up unemployment rates.
Nephew has described the destruction of Iran’s economy as “a tremendous success,” and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country’s capital despite mounting US sanctions.
Nephew’s appointment to a senior diplomatic post suggests that rather than immediately returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran is unlikely to join.
Doubling down on bad policy and ignoring agreements that have been signed because ……… American Exceptionalism. Great policy there.
You see, he wrote a book:
………
Entitled “The Art of Sanctions: A View From The Field,” the book’s cover image features two Caucasian hands drawing a rope for a noose, presumably to strangle some insufficiently pliant Global South government. Its contents read like a list of criminal confessions, detailing in chillingly clinical terms how the sanctions Nephew conceived from inside an air-conditioned office in Washington immiserated average Iranians.
With his candor, Nephew has shattered the official US rhetoric about “targeted sanctions” that exclusively punish “bad actors” and their business cronies while leaving civilian populations unharmed.
………
Nephew also patted himself on the back for tripling the price of chicken “during important Iranian holiday periods,” thereby “contribut[ing] to more popular frustration in one bank shot than years of financial restrictions.”
Next, he boasted of more sanctions targeting civilians to prevent Iranians from obtaining the assistance they needed to repair their cars. “Iran’s manufacturing jobs and export revenue were the targets of this sanction,” Nephew wrote.
………
In response to online criticism, Nephew has claimed that “the main target” of the sanctions regime he designed was “the oligarchs.” But his book on “The Art of Sanctions” tells another story.
Nephew fondly recalls how he structured sanctions to sabotage Iranian economic reforms that would have improved the purchasing power of average people. The Obama administration destroyed the economic prospects of Iran’s working-class majority while ensuring that “only the wealthy or those in positions of power could take advantage of Iran’s continued connectedness,” he wrote. As “stories began to emerge from Iran of intensified income inequality and inflation,” Nephew pronounced another success.
Rather unsurprisingly, the government of Venezuela has submitted Nephew’s books and articles as evidence of war crimes to the ICC
Yesterday, we officially submitted before the International Criminal Court the book “The Art of Sanctions” and the article “Evaluating the Trump Administration’s Approach to Sanctions: Venezuela”, both by @RichardMNephew, advisor to Obama and Biden for the imposition of sanctions pic.twitter.com/lW9d3V4bRW
— Jorge Arreaza M (@jaarreaza) May 18, 2021
Richard Nephew’s books and articles are also evidence that he is too stupid, and too criminal, to hold a security clearance, much less hold a senior position in the any Presidential administration.
In response to massive and indiscriminate bombings of civilian targets in Yemen by the Gulf States, there was a massive march in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.
The Houthi Ansarullah Movement that controls most of north and west Yemen staged what was by all accounts an enormous demonstration in the capital of Sanaa on Saturday. It may have been the single largest demonstration in the country’s history. While it was unlikely actually to have involved a million people, it did probably tens of thousands, and it showed how strong grassroots support for the Houthis is in the north.
The massive demonstration in Sab`in Park in downtown Sanaa was intended to send a signal to Saudi Arabia and its coalition that the Houthis are enormously popular in the north and that the General People’s Congress, the parliament of Yemen in its present form, shares in that popularity.
If so, Saudi Arabia did not get that message. Its fighter-bombers targeted downtown Sanaa in the midst of the demonstration, which arguably was a war crime (you aren’t allowed to endanger large numbers of civilians in war if you don’t have to). The Saudis are at war with rebel supporters of the Houthis, whom Saudi Arabian inaccurately depicts as a cat’s paw of Iran.
I get that they have a lot of oil, but the House of Saud is arguably the worst government, and their war in Yemen is destabilizing the region, creating a humanitarian catastrophe, and making the United States less secure.
Our support for the House of Saud is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.
In a TV interview today, Yemen’s ex-president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, appeared to invite Russian military intervention in the country’s conflict. He talked of reactivating old Yemeni agreements with the Soviet Union and offfered “all the facilities” of Yemen’s bases, ports and airports to Russia.
Saleh seemed to be advocating something similar to what happened in Syria, where Russia and Iran joined the conflict on the Assad regime’s side under the guise of fighting terrorism. A video of the interview is here, with a transcript in Arabic here.
Saleh, who was ousted from the presidency in 2012, is allied to the Houthis who currently control the Yemeni capital and large parts of the country, especially in the north. For more than a year Saudi-led forces, who back Saleh’s exiled successor, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, have been bombing Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. Meanwhile the Houthis, who have some Iranian backing, have attacked Saudi territory in the border area.
………
“We extend our hands to Russia. We have agreements with the Russian Federation which were with the Soviet Union. The legitimate heir to the Soviet Union is the Russian Federation, we are ready to activate these treaties and agreements that were between us and the Soviet Union.
“We agree on a principle, which is the struggle against terrorism … We extend our hands and offer all the facililties, and the conventions and treaties … We offer them in our bases, in our airports and in our ports – ready to provide all facilities to the Russian Federation.”
The most recent negotiations broke down, which is not a surprise, since the only offer on the table was unconditional and complete surrender by the Houthis.
I don’t expect Russia to take up this offer, but once again, our “Allies” in the Middle East find a way to make a conflict a complete cock up.
The reporting is reveals the mendacity, incompetence, and complete impotenceof Tony Blair on Iraq:
The Chilcot inquiry has delivered a damning verdict on the decision by former prime minister Tony Blair to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It says:
The UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot is withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. He says: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein
Chilcot finds that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003. The then prime minister disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities … were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” the report says.
Blair promised George Bush: ’I will be with you, whatever’
Tony Blair wrote to George W Bush eight months before the Iraq invasion to offer his unqualified backing for war well before UN weapons inspectors had complete their work, saying: “I will be with you, whatever.” In a six-page memo marked secret and personal, the then British prime minister told Bush, US president at the time, in July 2002 that the removal of Saddam Hussein would “free up the region” even if Iraqis may “feel ambivalent about being invaded”. It was one of 29 letters Blair sent to Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war, during the conflict and in its devastating aftermath, released on Wednesday as part of the Chilcot report.
“I will be with you whatever”.
He really was Bush’s Poodle.
I would also note that current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is suggesting that the parliament should take some sort of action against blair, which implies that he is generally supportive of efforts by some Scottish National Party MPs to draft bills of impeachment against Blair: (Impeachment is a very different thing in the UK)
Senior figures from Labour and the Scottish National party are considering calls for legal action against Tony Blair if the former prime minister faces severe criticisms from the long-awaited inquiry into the war in Iraq.
A number of MPs led by Alex Salmond are expected to use an ancient law to try to impeach the former prime minister when the Chilcot report comes out on Wednesday.
The law, last used in 1806 when the Tory minister Lord Melville was charged for misappropriating official funds, is seen in Westminster as an alternative form of punishment that could ensure Blair never holds office again.
Triggering the process simply requires an MP to propose a motion and provide supporting evidence as part of a document called the article of impeachment which has no time limit placed upon it. If the impeachment attempt is approved by MPs, the defendant is delivered to Black Rod [kind of like a sergeant at arms] before a trial.
A simple majority is required to convict, at which point a sentence can be passed which could, in theory, involve Blair being sent to prison. However, MPs have said the attempt will be symbolic and is unlikely to result in imprisonment.
Salmond, the former Scottish first minister, said there “has to be a judicial or political reckoning” for Blair’s role in the Iraq conflict. “He seemed puzzled as to why Jeremy Corbyn thinks he is a war criminal, why people don’t like him,” he told Sky News.
“The reason is 179 British war dead, 150,000 immediate dead from the Iraq conflict, the Middle East in flames, the world faced with an existential crisis on terrorism – these are just some of the reasons perhaps he should understand why people don’t hold him in the highest regard.
“[MPs] believe you cannot have a situation where this country blunders into an illegal war with the appalling consequences and at the end of the day there isn’t a reckoning. There has to be a judicial or political reckoning for that.”
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, did not disagree with the suggestion that he and Corbyn were going to “crucify” the former leader for “being a war criminal”.
I really hope that Blair is impeached.
It would result in his living he rest of his life in well-deserved disgrace, and it would also mean that his lucrative consultancy business would likely be dashed.
I’d like to see jail time, but that won’t happen, so disgrace is the best one can hope for.
Elie Wiesel, has died at age 87:
Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II and who, more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Menachem Rosensaft, a longtime friend and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, confirmed the death in a phone call.
Mr. Wiesel, a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor, was the author of several dozen books. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, the traumatized survivors — and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren — seemed frozen in silence.
He will be missed.
The German Parliament just voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and Turkish President Erdogan’s head is exploding:
The German Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a symbolic but fraught resolution on Thursday declaring the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 a genocide, escalating tensions with Turkey at a diplomatically delicate juncture.
The Turkish government angrily denounced the vote as “null and void,” and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called his ambassador in Germany back to Ankara for consultations.
“The way to close the dark pages of your own history is not by defaming the histories of other countries with irresponsible and baseless decisions,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, wrote on Twitter. In Ankara, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, “There is no shameful incident in our past that would make us bow our heads.”
Germany needs Turkey’s help in following through on a deal with the European Union to manage the refugee crisis attributed in large part to the Syrian civil war. At the same time, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been under pressure not to be seen as caving to pressure from Ankara to compromise on Western values, particularly after a recent dust-up over freedom of speech set off by a German comedian’s satire that outraged Mr. Erdogan.
………
Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its coalition partners supported the resolution, which was originally proposed for last year, to mark the centennial of the start of the killings. But it was repeatedly delayed, most recently in February, over concerns about angering Ankara.
As the vote approached, debate intensified in Germany, which is home to an estimated three million people of Turkish descent, many of whom have dual citizenship. About 2,000 Turks demonstrated last weekend in Berlin, rallying to say that Parliament is not a court and therefore should not pass judgment.
………
Her decision to do so, despite those objections, may have been influenced by an episode in March, when a German comic, Jan Böhmermann, lampooned Mr. Erdogan with a crude poem. Ms. Merkel initially criticized the verses, giving the impression — which she later said was a mistake — that she advocated restrictions on freedom of expression in Germany. Critics portrayed her as weak.
Cem Ozdemir, the co-chairman of the opposition Greens and a driving force behind the resolution, accused Ms. Merkel of paying little heed to Turkey for most of her decade in power, until circumstances forced her to engage with Mr. Erdogan.
On Thursday, Mr. Ozdemir said there was “never a favorable time to speak about something as dreadful as genocide.”
Mr. Ozdemir read century-old statements by officials of the German Empire showing they knew that up to 90 percent of Armenians had been killed. “Working through the Shoah is the basis of democracy in Germany,” Mr. Ozdemir said, referring to the Holocaust. “This genocide is also waiting to be worked through.”
There have been people fighting for this for decades.
Merkel is not one of these people. She felt a political need to push this through because she is seen as kowtowing to an increasingly megalomaniacal and despotic Turkish leader.
Still, this is a positive move, and hopefully we will see more of this.
Ashton Carter, the Secretary of State, just issued the highest civilian award that the Pentagon can issue to a civilian to Henry Kissinger:
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter hosts an award ceremony honoring Dr. Henry A. Kissinger for his years of distinguished public service at 4 p.m. EDT, in the Pentagon. Media interested in covering the ceremony should plan on meeting in Room 2D961 by 3:45 p.m. to be escorted to the ceremony. Foreign journalists without a Pentagon building pass must plan on being escorted from the River Entrance Pedestrian Bridge only, or, if arriving at the Pentagon Metro Entrance Facility, must contact 703-697-5131 a minimum of one hour prior to arrival. Please arrive no later than 45 minutes before the event if coming by Metro. U.S. journalists without a Pentagon building pass will be picked up at the River Entrance Pedestrian Bridge or the Pentagon Metro Visitors Entrance only. If arriving by Metro, please contact 703-697-5131 a minimum of one hour prior to arrival, and plan to arrive no later than 30 minutes before the event; have proof of affiliation and photo identification. Please call 703-697-5131 for escort into the building.
If you are unaware of his record, here is a quick primer:
On Monday afternoon, at 4 pm Eastern, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will host an awards ceremony at the Pentagon honoring one of the world’s most notorious war criminals.
The criminal in question, Dr. Henry Kissinger, has never been charged. But the evidence that he aided and abetted war crimes during his time in the White House advising Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford is well-established and overwhelming.
While Kissinger deserves real credit for some of America’s most important Cold War victories, including Nixon’s diplomatic opening to China, he is also responsible for some of its worst atrocities. Carpet-bombing Cambodia, supporting Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh, greenlighting the Argentinian dictatorship’s murderous crackdown on dissidents — all of those were Kissinger initiatives, all pushed in the name of pursuing American national interests and fighting communism.
While the Obama administration might want to pretend that only the first half of his résumé exists, that doesn’t change reality. The secretary of defense is handing an award to a man whose actions belie the values Obama administration claims to stand for. It’s hardly alone in this: Kissinger has been treated as an elder statesman in polite Washington society for decades. But this is the most recent example, and one of the most high-profile, of polite Washington society rewriting Kissinger’s legacy. Let’s not forget what it really is.
………
Most infamously, Kissinger masterminded a Nixon-era plan to carpet-bomb Cambodia. Nominally, the bombing — which indiscriminately hit targets in civilian-populated areas — was supposed to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases. In reality, it was designed to improve America’s strategic position before a negotiated withdrawal.
………American bombs killed between 150,000 and 500,000 people in Cambodia. That created a swell of public support for Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge rebels, who exploited popular anger at the bombings to seize control of the government in 1975. The Khmer Rouge then slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and starved even more, ultimately killing at least a million people, about one-seventh of the country’s population.
………
He pulled the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, from his post for questioning the policy, and blocked efforts to pressure Pakistan (a US ally) to end its slaughter. The killing only stopped after India intervened to stop it; estimates of the death toll range from 300,000 to 3 million.
………
In 2014, newly declassified documents suggested that in the 1970s, Kissinger signaled to Argentina’s right-wing military leaders that the US would not object to its plans to launch a 1976 crackdown on dissent that became known as the Dirty War — which killed about 30,000 people.
He’s kind of like Stalin, without the charm.
This is some unbelievably f%$#ed up sh%$.
Over at Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler observes that CIA Director John Brennan’s assurances that CIA officers would not torture people would not have ended any of the prior instances of torture:
………
But it’s funny, too, because Brennan’s assurances about waterboarding would hold true even for the period when CIA was waterboarding detainees. Because CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding.
As a reminder, at least four detainees were known to be waterboarded under the Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification. The first, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, was waterboarded by Egyptian intelligence, though with Americans present.
The others were waterboarded as part of torture led by Mitchell and Jessen, who were not CIA officers, but instead contractors. CIA officers were definitely involved in that torture (as they were present for our outsourced Egyptian torture). But the torture was technically done by contractors.
Don’t get me wrong: CIA officers did engage in a whole lot of torture directly.
But Brennan’s squirmy language should only emphasize the fact that even when CIA was in the business of waterboarding, CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding. So Brennan’s guarantees that CIA officers won’t do so in the future are pretty meaningless guarantees.
Not a surprise. Brennan has been objectively pro-torture for over a decade.
The control of our state security apparatus has been ceded to people who aggressively pursue evil, self-destructive, and ineffective policies and programs.
The down-slope of empire for your perusal.
The NSA has a metadata analysis program in South Asia that it used to make up a kill list. It is rather unironically called called SKYNET.
Analysis of the results now indicates that it doesn’t work, but drone based terror continues to rain down on innocent civilians:
In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that “we kill people based on metadata.” Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.
Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA’s SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person’s likelihood of being a terrorist.
Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA’s methods as “ridiculously optimistic” and “completely bullsh%$.” A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET’s machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as “extremists,” the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of “20070108” on one of the SKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.
In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that “scientifically unsound” algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.
(%$ mine)
This is why our roving army of flying killing machines is such a bad idea: If most of the people you kill are innocent, they will have relatives looking to avenge their cowardly assassination.
It’s basic human nature.
The prosecutor for the military commission at Guantánamo is retroactively classifying pubic hearings:
The war court prosecutor is arguing that public disclosure of a transcript of a public hearing held at Guantánamo last year could endanger national security in response to a legal motion brought by 17 news organizations protesting pick-and-choose secrecy in the Sept. 11 pretrial hearings.
Army Brig. Gen Mark Martins makes the argument in a filing obtained by The Miami Herald that was still being reviewed for sensitive information on Thursday and not publicly released. At issue is the Pentagon’s decision to black out large portions of a 379-page transcript of an Oct. 30 hearing that included testimony from two soldiers who work at Guantánamo’s most clandestine prison, called Camp 7.
“That this information was uttered in a public session or is reported in news coverage does not render the information unprotected or vitiate the damage further disclosures would beget,” prosecutors wrote Jan. 29 in the 29-page filing in the war court case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
In defending the decision to censor what was public information, the prosecutors included a less-redacted transcript that showed previously blacked out sentences and in the same filing sealed up a declaration from the Guantánamo prison commander explaining what is at risk.
………
Reporters, Sept. 11 victim family members and other members of the public heard the testimony on Oct. 30 through a 40-second audio delay designed to let the judge or a court security officer mute the sound if anyone spilled national security secrets. No one ever pushed the button. But when the transcript came out weeks later, portions that the Miami Herald had reported in a routine Twitter stream were gone.
Now, a comparison of the two different censored transcripts of the same hearing offer a study in over-classification. Nearly every redaction is refined in the updated version.
The term to describe this sh%$ is “Orwellian”.
In the Democratic Debates, Hillary Clinton touted Henry Kissinger’s support of your stint of Secretary of State.
Anyone who is proud of being endorsed by that amoral war criminal is not, “A mindful human being,” to borrow Ron Reagan Jr.’s description of Dick Cheney:*
I mean, Jesus H. Christ in a Chilean dungeon.
“I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time.”
Dear Ms. HRC: There is being tone-deaf, and then there is not being able to tell the difference between the New York Philharmonic and an abbatoir. What putative progressive—hell, what putative human being—would brag on being endorsed by the most pus-blooded vampire in American public life? Here with an opposing opinion are 40,000 dead Chileans, 100,000 dead East Timorese, and countless dead Laotians, Vietnamese and dead Cambodians.
And she’s the one with the foreign policy chops.
Good god.
Actually, the fact that Kissinger is still living in freedom might lead one to doubt the goodness of God.
The fact that Hillary Clinton lauds his support, and is by all reports a good friend of his, means that her much lauded foreign policy chops are highly overrated, but we already knew that.
*RRJ said about Dick Cheney, “I don’t think he’s a mindful human being. That’s probably the nicest way I can put it,” when describing Cheney’s behavior toward his mom, Nancy Reagan at his Dad’s funeral.†
†The Link is here. The Cliff Notes version is that Dick Cheney escorted her to Reagan’s casket, and he stopped at the bottom of some stairs, and allowed an 80 year old woman with glaucoma to flounder her way up the stairs. (Really classy)
The Senate Intelligence Committee issued its torture report.
The unclassified summary was released redacted to the point of incoherence.
The full report was sent to the wWhite House which promptly locked it away and forbade anyone from reading it, regardless of their security clearance.
It’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear saying, “La, la, la, I can’t hear your!”
One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a highly redacted executive summary of its investigation into the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The 525-page summary was shocking in many of its details, revealing the torture and rape of detainees held in CIA custody and encompassing treatment far in excess of even the torture techniques formally authorized by the Bush administration.
Despite the passage of 12 months, the actual report, comprising 6,700 pages, still has not been made publicly available. In fact, reading it appears to be prohibited among officials in the executive branch. Nearly a month and a half after the report’s initial release, it had not even been taken out of the package in which it was delivered to the Department of Justice and Department of State, according to government lawyers. Even the organization that was the subject of the report, the CIA, tightly controlled internal access and made “very limited use” of it, as had the Department of Defense, the lawyers said in a court filing.
That shunning of the torture report appears to be ongoing and very much by design: It turns out the Department of Justice has “refuse[d] to allow executive branch officials to review the full and final study,” Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy wrote in a letter last month to the attorney general and FBI director, urging that they or their “appropriately cleared” underlings read the full report.
“The legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of executive branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it,” they added.
Elizabeth Beavers, a policy coordinator focusing on torture at Amnesty International, believes that no one in the Obama administration, including at the Department of Justice, has read the full report. “They appear to be taking a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ [stance] with regards to the proof of criminal acts it may contain,” she said. But “for the administration not even to read the whole report, and to look the other way while it is possibly buried or even destroyed, sets a dangerous precedent by excusing major crimes like torture and forced disappearance.”
It appears that Obama is still insisting on ignore the most depraved excesses of the state security apparatus, and someone in his administration is trying to insure that they never have direct knowledge of what was done.
They must think that they won’t be subject to the International Criminal Court if they are willfully blind.
Admittedly, my knowledge of international law is limited, but I do not think this argument would wash in The Hague.
U.S. Military Suspends Members Over Kunduz Hospital Strike – The New York Times
The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell, said Wednesday that several service members had been suspended from duty after an internal military investigation of the American airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz last month.
Calling the airstrike a “tragic mistake,” General Campbell read a statement announcing the findings of the investigation, which he said concluded that “avoidable human error” was to blame, compounded by technical, mechanical and procedural failures. He said another contributing factor was that the Special Forces members in Kunduz had been fighting continuously for days and were fatigued.
The special forces were “Fatigued”.
Sounds like, “The dog ate my homework.”
General Campbell and his staff did not say how many people were being disciplined, or how. But a senior United States military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that one of those punished was the Army Special Forces commander on the ground in Kunduz during the fighting. The official would not identify the commander by name, but said the officer, a captain, was relieved of his command in Afghanistan on Wednesday morning.
Translation: he is the the chosen patsie, because he is only a captain.
This what happens in these cases: They lay everything at as low a level as is possible, and/or blame reservists or national guardsman.
Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan, had been seized by the Taliban in the days before the airstrike. General Campbell said the gunship’s crew believed it was firing on a different building identified as a Taliban base in the city. He said that the aircraft’s targeting systems failed to deliver accurate information and that email and other electronic systems aboard the aircraft, including a video feed that would normally have sent pictures to higher-level commanders in real time, also failed during the operation.
Seriously?
The general confirmed that Médecins Sans Frontières, the French name of Doctors Without Borders, had succeeded in reaching the Special Forces commander to inform him of the attack about 12 minutes into the airstrike, at 2:20 a.m. But he said the strike was not called off until 2:37 a.m. — after the aircrew had already stopped firing. But that timeline does not agree with accounts by the aid group and other witnesses, who said the strike went on for more than an hour.
The aid group, which has called for an independent, nonmilitary international inquiry into the airstrike, was sharply critical of General Campbell’s remarks. “The U.S. version of events presented today leaves M.S.F. with more questions than answers,” said Christopher Stokes, the organization’s general director. “The frightening catalog of errors outlined today illustrates gross negligence on the part of U.S. forces and violations of the rules of war.”
Gee, you think?
This stinks to the high heavens.
(on edit)
And the fact that they dumped this the day before thanksgiving is also highly suspect.
Charlie Pierce notes that the latest argument for not allowing Syrian Refugees into the US is, “Syrian Refugees Must Be Kept Out Because It’s Too Easy to Get a Gun in America.
Te stoopid. It burns us.
“Bombing of Hospitals Called Routine.” That was the August 9, 1973, Newsday coverage of congressional hearings on “clandestine U.S. air and ground activities in Cambodia and Laos”:
U.S. commanders in Vietnam placed no restrictions on ground or air attacks against Viet Cong or North Vietnamese hospitals a Senate committee was told yesterday by several Vietnam veterans.
In direct testimony and in letters, the veterans said hospitals often were considered targets rather than areas to be avoided as required by the Geneva convention on warfare.…
………
In testimony on the hospitals, Alan Stevenson, a stockbroker from San Francisco and former Army intelligence specialist, said that while in Quang Tri province in 1969, he routinely listed hospitals among targets to be struck by American fighter plans.………
Former Air Force captain general Gerald Greven said he personally ordered bombing raids against hospitals: It was policy, he said, to “look for hospitals as targets.”
This provides some context, and it’s pretty clear that bombing hospitals has been official military doctrine in my lifetime.
When one looks at who the hospital were treating, and when they were treated, it reinforces the suspicion that the hospital was targeted because of its role as a hospital:
On Tuesday, the Daily Beast noted that DOD had not fulfilled its promise to release the preliminary results of its investigation into the October 3 bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières trauma center in Kunduz a month earlier.
………
One possible explanation may be that on October 24, ISAF Commander John Campbell ordered another inquiry, this one carried out by a higher ranking general from another command.
………
Today, MSF released its own report of the bombing.
The report is interesting because, from the start, it has been clear MSF had a pretty good inkling of why they had been targeted. It lays out how, on September 28, the patient base in the hospital shifted from being primarily government forces to Taliban forces (though there were also 26 children treated that day) — though all were subject to MSF’s requirement that no weapons be brought into the compound. About half the 130 patients in the hospital during the attack were Taliban.
Perhaps most interesting is this paragraph, indicating that by Wednesday September 30, MSF had concluded two of those Taliban patients were more senior Taliban.
By Wednesday, MSF was aware of two wounded Taliban patients that appeared to have had higher rank. This was assumed for multiple reasons: being brought in to the hospital by several combatants, and regular inquiries about their medical condition in order to accelerate treatment for rapid discharge.
I’m going to guess that one or both of these men were used to claim the hospital was operating as a command post, if not to claim it could legitimately be targeted.Much later in the report, it describes Afghan forces searching the hospital as the evacuation started.
………
In Kabul, the group’s general director, Christopher Stokes, told reporters that the Pentagon had been in direct contact just days before the attack to ask whether Taliban militiamen were “holed up” in the Kunduz hospital compound and whether the staff felt threatened.
Stokes said MSF replied that there were no armed Taliban on the grounds and the 140-bed hospital was functioning normally.
“There was no following” dialogue from the U.S. military “saying, ‘We have different information. We are going to bomb you,’ ’’ Stokes said.
My sense is that the strikes were deliberate.
Of course, I’m sure that we will get the official Pentagon report sometime in 2017 absolving the military of all blame.
In the UK, the Chilcot commission has conducted a serious investigation how the Tony Blair government came to join in the Iraq invasion.
The report has not been reported to the public, but leaks are coming out, and the latest leak that ministers were instructed to burn the attorney general’s opinion which cast the invasion into doubt, and this one is big, because it demonstrates a direct knowledge that the invasion was on (at best) shaky legal ground, and that there was an active and aggressive cover-up of this:
Tony Blair has denied reports that ministers were instructed to ‘burn’ a report questioning the legality of the Iraq war less than three weeks before British forces invaded the country.
The Mail on Sunday quotes an unnamed senior No 10 figure saying that the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, presented a 13-page legal opinion on 7 March 2003 that suggested the war could be challenged under international law because of the lack of UN backing.
The paper’s source says: “There was pandemonium. The date when war was expected to start was already in the diary, and here was Goldsmith saying it could be challenged under international law. They said ‘burn it, destroy it’ and got to work on the [attorney general].”
………
On Thursday, Sir John Chilcot announced he would publish his long-awaited report into the Iraq war in June or July next year, giving government officials up to three months to carry out national security checks on its findings. In a letter to the prime minister, Chilcot said the text of his report – which is expected to be around 2 million words long – would be finalised in the week of 18 April 2016.
Blair’s office denied that he was the cause of the delay, saying he had replied to documents he received as part of the Maxwellisation process – in which witnesses who are to be criticised are given a right to reply – in August this year after receiving them in January.
Someone within the Chilcot commission has concerns that this report is going to get buried, and so stuff is leaking out.
Assuming that this report is accurate, and it certainly smells true, it creates a real possibility of some sort of repercussions to Tony “The Smiler”, even if it is just making him toxic enough that foreign governments who have been paying him big bucks (Pounds) as a “consultant” might terminate their deals.
I’d like to see him in the Hague, along with Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and the rest of their Evil Minions™, but that is not going to happen.
Last week, as a part of the Pentagon’s “investigation” of a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) bombing in Kunduz, sent in investigators ……… in a tank ……………… which ground much of the evidence to dust:
A US tank has forced its way into the shell of the Afghanistan hospital destroyed in an airstrike 11 days ago, prompting warnings that the US military may have destroyed evidence in a potential war crimes investigation.
As calls grow for independent inquiry into Kunduz airstrikes, the president of Médecins Sans Frontières demands that those responsible are held to account
The 3 October attack on the Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz killed 10 patients and 12 staff members of the group.
In a statement on Thursday, the medical charity, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said they were informed after Thursday’s “intrusion” that the tank was carrying investigators from a US-Nato-Afghan team which is investigating the attack.
“Their unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear,” MSF said.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported intrusion, which came as new evidence emerged that US forces operating in the area at the time of the attack knew that the facility was a hospital.
And now we have another MSF hospital bombed, this one in Yemen.
Considering the US record on such things,* one has to wonder if perhaps our military establishment is sick of
Airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition targeting rebels in Yemen have destroyed a small hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the northern province of Saada, although there were no deaths and only one injury, the aid group said Tuesday.
The first of several strikes came around 11 p.m. on Monday and hit a building housing the facility’s administration offices, according to Hassan Boucenine, the aid group’s head of mission in Yemen who spoke to The Associated Press by telephone from the southern port city of Aden.
No one was inside at the time, he said, adding that by the time a second strike targeted the main nearby building about 10 minutes later, its occupants — some 12 staff and patients — had been evacuated.
“This attack is another illustration of a complete disregard for civilians in Yemen, where bombings have become a daily routine,” Boucenine said later in a statement by the group, also known by its French acronym MSF.
It urged coalition forces to explain the circumstances around the attack, saying that the hospital’s GPS coordinates were regularly shared with the Saudi-led coalition and its roof was clearly identified with its logo. The bombing of civilians and hospitals is a violation of international humanitarian law, it added.
The group operates in eight Yemeni governorates at a time when many foreign aid groups and even United Nations personnel have been evacuated. In its statement, it said the destroyed hospital had treated roughly 3,400 patients were since MSF began supporting it in May.
The Saudi-led, U.S.-backed coalition has been launching airstrikes against Yemen’s Shiite rebels, also known as Houthis, and their allies since March. Saada, the Houthis stronghold, has faced a particularly intense bombardment.
The United Nations said the facility was the 39th health center hit since the violence escalated in March, adding that critical shortages of fuel, medication, electricity and water could mean many more will close. Amnesty International said the strike may amount to a war crime and called for an independent investigation.
MFS treats anyone regardless of politics, and I’m beginning to think the Pentagon, and the Saudi state security apparatus, don’t like this.
It does seem rather similar to the spate of bombing of well documented Al Jazeera facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.
*Donald Rumsfeld justified the bombing of hospitals during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, because they were treating combatants, which was a remarkably blithe admission of war crimes, since treating the enemy does not remove a hospital’s protected status.
Every time we get a new bit of information about Obama’s drone policies, it just gets worse:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that U.S. drone policy is insane.
But one story told by the main drone whistleblowing reporter – Jeremy Scahill – shows just how insane it really is.
Specifically, Scahill explained today that Americans target TALL people in Afghanistan and other countries … assuming that tall men must be Arabs or “foreign fighters.”
In one instance, the U.S. targeted for drone assassination a man who they thought was unusually tall. In reality, he was a normal-size man … who happened to be surrounded by children.
Notwithstanding some domestic accomplishments, such as his half assed healthcare reform, Obama’s true legacy will be his immoral and counterproductive drone war.
Obama’s embrace of the contemptible and disasterous historical legacy of the Dulles brothers is complete.