Category: Crimes Against Humanity

Radovan Karadzic Arrested

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Pity the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague doesn’t have the death penalty

Bosnia’s Serb wartime president, Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, has been arrested, Serbian President Boris Tadic’s office said on Monday.

Amazing how soon it happened after the EU gave the Serbs a reason to catch him. You see, the, “EU has made delivering indicted war criminals to the Hague a precondition for Serbia’s membership.”

50 Days of Sleep Deprivation

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Guantanamo records show that Salim Hamdan was subjected to sleep deprivation for 50 days (see also here).

After 72 hours of sleep deprivation, people start to hallucinate. They literally become psychotic and desperate.

It’s a great technique to get false confessions, because you tell them what they want, and they are inclined to give it to you, but to get accurate information, not really, because after a few days, much less 50 days (!), they no longer have a grasp on reality.

There are a few thousand people, both in the active duty military and in government civilian service, who need to spend the rest of their lives in jail over this.

It’s All of Them

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Glenn Greenwald believes that the motivation for the Democrats caving on FISA is that leading Democrats are themselves legally liable for their complicity.

He then cites Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side. Her book documents some of the torture and knowledge of the illegality of senior Bush administration officials, and she has a fascinating response in an online chat on the Washington Post:

New York, N.Y.: In your interview with Harper’s yesterday, you said that this about why war crimes prosecutions are unlikely: “An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.”

What did you mean by that? Who specifically is compromised ” who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised” — Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Jay Rockefeller? — and how are they “compromised”?

Jane Mayer: The ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were briefed dozens of times about the CIA’s interrogation and detention program over the past seven years – so any member who has held one of those posts has arguably been complicit. Some say they tried to object, internally. But either because of the threat of violating national security, or, because of the fear of the political price of dissent, these figures in both parties would find it very hard at this point to point the finger at the White House, without also implicating themselves.

So it’s not just Bush and His Evil Minions&trade who are war criminals. It’s also Jane Harmon, Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and who knows who else amongst just the Democrats.

International Committee of the Red Cross Reported Torture by US Forces

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Well, it turns out that the ICRC specifically warned members of the military and the Bush administration that they were engaging in war crimes:

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

….Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

I really hope that there is a prosecutor in The Hague getting his ducks in a row over this case now.

Zimbabwe

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Well, it looks like FIFA is weighing in on Zimbabwe and Mbeki’s support of Mugabe, as they are now making statements that seem to imply that the world cup may be moved because of “regional instability”.

As lame as it sounds, this may be the only thing to keep Mbeki from being Mugabe’s agent in this matter.

Still the news is generally not good with ZANU-PF planning to escalate the violence against the opposition.

As to negotiations, were are getting conflicting reports, and Tsvangirai has just denied that there are any talks in process.

Botswana has taken what I believe to be the proper stance, saying that they do not recognize Mugabe as president.

Interestingly, we have reports that Mugabe has been effectively sidelined by the 6 top members of the state security apparatus, and that they are more brutal than Mugabe.

We are also seeing increasing calls for sanctions, which, predicably, the Mugabe regime called racist.

Righteous Indignation

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Minstrel Boy has a righteous takedown of America’s torture policy that is, like everything else on the internet, better written than my stuff, titled, They Don’t Even Plagarize From the Best.

Of interest is that he has actually been through SERE anti-torture training, and he has a low opinion of them too:

It was sadistic bullshit run by sick f@cking bullies. It was some real REMF puke sons of bitches getting their jollies off by acting like a bunch of swaggering pieces of shit. It accomplished jack fucking sh@t. It didn’t train anybody in any kind of knowledge except that there were a lot of pissant low rent bastards who wore the same uniforms as us. F@ck SERE.

Highly recommended read.

We Learned Torture from the Chinese Communists

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This is lovely. Now we know were Bush and His Evil Minions™ got their torture ideas:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

(emphasis mine)

So, we used the torture that the Chinese did to our soldiers. That is so delightful.

I would also note that this torture was never intended to get useful information. It was intended to extract false propaganda statements, such as the one that the North Vietnamese extracted from John McCain when he was a prisoner of war.

Court Cites Carroll in Uighur Gitmo Case. I would have Cited Kafka

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The unclassified portions of decision by the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia regarding Uighur’s imprisoned at Gitmo has now been released. (Background here)

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.

The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

……

Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

……

The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.

(emphasis mine)

When you lose David Sentelle on basic human rights, you are off the track. When David Sentelle signs of on a ruling that quotes Lewis Carroll, you are not only off track, you are off planet.

Your Late Nite Zimbabwe Update

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Well, Officials: Mugabe has won his phony election, and has been sworn in.

It also that Tsvangirai has hardened his stance a bit, saying that there will be no unity government with the MDC as a junior partner.

Bush is calling for more sanctions, but they are not enough. If Bush were to threaten sanctions against banks with subsidiaries doing business in Zimbabwe, the cash that the ZANU-PF uses to reward loyalists, and Mugabe would be out in a week.

Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu has declared that the “international community has the right now to override the sovereignty argument of the country.”

As a first step, he would shut down commerical air transport from Zimbabwe, which would mean that, “Mugabe and his sidekicks would not be able to — as they are now — escape the rigors of their own policies.”

Zimbabwe Vote Proceeds

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And it appears that it’s not enough that Mugabe and his thugs forced Tsvangirai out of the race, that they are now using violence to force people into the ballot booths:

In some other suburbs of Harare, the capital, residents said they had been rounded up Thursday night, forced to chant pro-Mugabe slogans until daybreak and then force-marched to the polls. They were told to copy the serial numbers off their ballots so it could be confirmed later that they had voted for their 84-year-old president.

(emphasis mine)

The interesting thing is that I think that I’m more disgusted with South African President Thabo Mbeki than I am with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

As near as I can figure out, Mbeki is Mugabe’s butt boy because he is afraid that what is happening in Zimbabwe, where the trade union movement became the basis for a popular political movement, will happen in South Africa, where the trade unions have become increasingly hostile to the ANC and its IMF driven cheap labor policies.

It’s Been a Busy Few Days in Zimbabwe

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It turns out that Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from the runoff has, if anything, intensified ZANU-PF thuggery.

Of course, in response, you have the African National Congress coming out in favor of doing nothing about all this. Increasingly, I believe that there are elements in the ANC who believe that Mugabe’s fate will be theirs one day, and so they will support him to the bloody end.

Morgan Tsvangirai is calling for international isolation and armed peace keepers before a fair election can be held.

I will say that when the most effective action taken on all this so far is Queen Elizabeth II stripping Mugabe of his knighthood, you know that the regional and international response is pretty pathetic.

Barack Obama has condemned Mugabe, and has talked with Tsvangirai on the phone.

Truth be told, this surprises me.

I don’t think that there is really any electoral advantage in all this.

Zimbabwe

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Morgan Tsvangirai says that he will leave the Dutch embassy shortly, and the UN Security Council is now saying that the violence has made the runoff election a sham.

Needless to say, it does not help that the African National Congress has explicitly rejected any international intervention, though the Congress of South African Trade Unions has called Mugabe’s regime illegitimate.

As Will Bunch says, the only way to get a meaningful intervention there is to find massive oil reserves, so perhaps the MDC needs to start drilling.

White House Ignored Professional Advice on Torture

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Big surprise…..not.

It turns out that whenever someone who was not one of Dick Cheney’s butt boys suggested that there were limits to executive power, and getting congress to pass legislation supporting at least part of what they wanted.

Note that this is not moral objections we are talking about. This is professional lawyers saying that the courts will bounce this before the ink is dry.

Well, the Courts Finally Recognize That There are Limits

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Hazaifa Parhat, a Uighur (pronounced weeger) was declared an “illegal enemy combatant” because the Uighur separatists are occasionally friendly with people who are friendly with al Queida, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that this was insufficient in a unanimous vote.

Note that this was not under the Supreme Court’s habeas corpus ruling. It was under the “Detainee Treatment Act” that the Republithug congress passed in 2006 stripping everyone of habeas corpus rights.

There was no evidence. Not even after Bush and His Evil Minions™ declared them terrorists at the bidding of the Chinese government, and then tortured these guys on behalf of the Chinese Communists.

No evidence. And the only reason to call them “illegal enemy combatants” was because Bush wanted to make nice with the Chinese commies.

The specifics of the non-existent evidence are still not public, as the judgement has to be scrubbed of classified data, but that’s why a bunch of Republithug appointed judges.

Tsvangirai Takes Refuge in Dutch Embassy, but Here Comes Mbeki to the Rescue

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While he has not formally requested asylym, it’s clear that Tsvangirai believes that his life is in danger, which is why he’s sleeping there.

We also have Thabo Mbeki traveling to Zimbabwe, to make a “final plea” to Mugabe about doing the right thing. We can be sure that Mbeki’s effort will be ineffectual, and will be full of enabling language. That is what he’s done for the past 10 years.

Tsvangirai Withdraws from Zimbabwe Runoff, Calls for International Intervention

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Basically, he’s saying that any election would be a sham because of the levels of violence.

Needless it does not help that Mugabe is claiming rule through divine right:

“Only God, who appointed me, will remove me, not the MDC, not the British,” Mugabe declared in the city of Bulawayo on Friday. “Only God will remove me!”

Tsvangirai is also calling for international intervention, though it is clear that as long as Thabo Mbeki is involved in the process, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) will do nothing, so any meaningful intervention will have to go through the UN, as South Africa is the colossus of the region, but Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president, is the functions as the moral pygmy shielding Mugabe.

Thankfully, he should be succeeded by Jacob Zuma in the less than a month.

Hopefully, individual countries will go the route of Australia, and impose tough sanctions, such as, “financial sanctions and suspending non-humanitarian aid, and defence and ministerial links, besides travel bans on members of the Zimbabwe regime.”