Category: Crimes Against Humanity

How is Barack Obama Different from George W. Bush?

No this is not a lead in for a joke it’s a real question because Barack “I’m Shutting Down the CIA Black Sites” Obama has set up a new CIA black site:

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there are as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA do not conduct operations; rather, they advise and train Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he adds. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”

Bullsh%@.

This is not an existing state security apparatus who is doing us a favor, this the CIA, and possibly the NSA running another black site.

The “official government” in Somolia controls, “Somali government forces control roughly thirty square miles of territory in Mogadishu thanks in large part to the US-funded and -armed 9,000-member AMISOM force.”

This government controls about half the land area of Liechtenstein and that only by dint of massive foreign aid.

Seriously, what Barack Obama has done by way of the rule of law and civil rights is worse than what George W. Bush did, because he has normalized behavior, both by refusing to investigate criminality, and by aping the policies of Bush/Cheney.

…and it’s not getting any coverage by the MSM.

Well, the DoJ is Saying that it Might Investigate Torturing People to Death

Of the 101 cases that special prosecutor John Durham investigated, he referred just 2 to be considered for further investigation.

Both of them were murder by torture, out of the dozens of cases of murder by torture, and the hundreds (probably thousands) of cases of torture without a death being involved.

As Glenn Greenwald observes, it doesn’t matter, because the Obama administration has ruled out prosecuting anyone who authorized torture but did not actually physically conduct it themselves:

In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House — announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., “good-faith” torturers). The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a “preliminary review” to determine if a full investigation was warranted — in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.

Adam Serwer makes the obvious conclusion, that absent prosecution of those who authorized torture, it will happen again.

In the matter of crimes against humanity, of which torture is one, the cover-up is a crime as well, and it is ongoing, and so not (yet) subject to the statute of limitations, so I hope that some future Justice Department will take the time to criminally investigate the Obama administration on this.  (Unfortunately, this would almost certainly involve a Republican President)

Otherwise, torture is the law of the land right now.

Pass the Popcorn, Wikileaks Again

Wikileaks has now released about 700 documents on what is going on in the Guantánamo Bay gulag, and the picture is one of a completely incompetent and immoral process.

Cases in point:

Given the totality it’s not the documentation, it’s not surprising that the New York Times strongly condemned the whole process:

The internal documents from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, published in The Times on Monday were a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released.

(emphasis mine)

It is refreshing to see the editorial page of the “paper of record” excoriate our gulag in the Caribbean, but unfortunately, they don’t go further, and ask why there have been no prosecutions of the lawless incompetent torturers.

Bradley Manning Has Been Transfered from Quantico to Leavenworth

And it appears that the conditions of his confinement will improve significantly:

The family of Bradley Manning has welcomed news that he has been moved from a top security military prison in Quantico, Virginia, to a “more open” military facility in Kansas.

Manning, the US soldier accused of downloading and leaking classified cables to WikiLeaks, was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, early on Wednesday, his aunt, Sharon Staples, confirmed.

His transfer follows sustained protests from human rights campaigners and others over his conditions at Quantico, where he was held in solitary confinement and on suicide watch, which has required him to be stripped naked at night apart from a smock and checked on repeatedly.

The commander of the Kansas facility said Manning would now receive three hours of recreation a day, and would “have the capability to interact with other pre-trial inmates on a routine basis”. Psychiatrists would assess his mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health on arrival, Lt Col Dawn Hilton said.

This did not happen because either the Pentagon or the Obama administration wanted this.

Between members of the British Parliament demanding an accounting of his treatment, Manning holds dual UK-US citizenship, and the UN Special Investigator demanding access, I think that the attempt by the Obama administration to extort a false accusation from Bradley Manning against Julian Assange has finally become politically untenable.

Props to those people who made this politically untenable.

Here’s a Surprise

Someone has discovered the handwritten notes of Dr. Bruce Jessen, a psychologist who helped design the CIA’s torture program, and it shows that the goal of the program was torture and the exploitation of prisoners. I would further add that the documents show that he knew that torture did not work, and simply produced false statements, which means that there was no purpose to the program beyond producing false propaganda:

Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on “war on terror” detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

But the handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government’s top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence. Rather, as Jessen’s notes explain, torture was used to “exploit” detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities. Jessen’s notes emphasize how a “detainer” uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner.

But no prosecutions, because Barack Obama is too busy torturing his own whistle blowers.

Why Dr. Jessen still has a medical license is beyond me.

Read the whole article, it’s extensive and chilling.

Is Bradley Manning in Quantico, or Abu Ghraib?

Representative Dennis Kucinich is asking this question, and considering the extended isolation, the enforced nudity, etc. He’s right.

What is particularly telling is the fact that he has asked to speak to Manning, and it’s being deliberately slow walked.

That being said, Kucinich is being far to circumspect in his statement. It is clear that this behavior has been authorized at the very highest levels, and Barack Obama needs to be named, and shamed, over this.

Yes, This is a War Crime, and Barack Obama is Authorizing It

So now alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning is forced to stand outside of his cell naked for extended periods:

Manning, a 23-year-old Army private suspected of passing thousands of classified documents to the online site WikiLeaks, was placed on suicide watch for two days this week – against the recommendation of the jail’s forensic psychiatrist, attorney David E. Coombs said.

During this time, Manning was forced to stay in his cell around the clock, stripped to his underwear, the lawyer said. His prescription eyeglasses were taken from him, except for the hour of television he is allowed to watch or when he was reading, Coombs added.

The circumstances of Manning’s confinement have drawn public attention. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said he submitted to the State Department a formal inquiry about Manning’s treatment.

You know, the other stuff, covering up the war crimes by Bush and His Evil Minions is a secondary crime, an accessory after the fact.

This is something different. This is him authorizing torture on his own, because he is at the top of the chain of command, and he knows it is going on, and he is allowing it to happen.

I’m with Mark Kleiman on this, “This is a total disgrace. It shouldn’t be happening in this country. You can’t be unaware of this, Mr. President. Silence gives consent.

There is a part of me who wants a Republican to win the 2012 election, who then prosecutes Obama  for war crimes.

Of course, they won’t, because it would apply to them then, but the fact that there have not been cabinet level prosecutions over this is a travesty.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Barack Obama and His Evil Minions are drawing up plans for the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay:

The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials.

The draft order, a version of which was first considered nearly 18 months ago, is expected to be signed by President Obama early in the New Year. The order allows for the possibility that detainees from countries like Yemen might be released if circumstances there change.

But the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

The law here is clear.

If we are at war, and I understand the argument that the authorization for the use of force might constitute this, then you can detain people without access to the legal process, as prisoners of war, with all the rights pertaining to that status.

This is not about prisoners of war.  This is about the king throwing people in jail on nothing but his word, and it is antithetical to American founding principles, which should be obvious to everyone, except perhaps for the worst constitutional law professor ever.

And Now the US Military is Torturing Its Own Soldiers

Specifically PFC Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

It should be noted that this sort of treatment produces profound long term damage to mind that is akin to traumatic brain injury.

This is deliberate punitive torture, and its purpose is two fold:

  • To serve as a warning to other whistle blowers.
  • To coerce false testimony that can be used to prosecute Julian Assange.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America, which is a lot like George W. Bush Dick Cheney’s America, only less respect for due process and transparency.

You can donate to PFC Manning’s defense fund here.

But Eric “Place” Holder Remains True to Form

The Obama Department of Justice has elected not to prosecute CIA officials who obstructed justice by erasing torture tapes:

Central Intelligence Agency officials will not face criminal charges for the destruction of dozens of videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of terrorism suspects, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

After a closely watched investigation of nearly three years, the decision by a special federal prosecutor is the latest example of Justice Department officials’ declining to seek criminal penalties for some of the controversial episodes in the C.I.A.’s now defunct detention and interrogation program. The destruction of the tapes, in particular, was seen as so striking that the Bush administration itself launched the special investigation after the action was publicly disclosed.

Government officials said Tuesday that the special prosecutor, John H. Durham, could still decide to charge current and former C.I.A. officers and lawyers with making false statements to a grand jury over the course of the investigation, which began in January 2008.

Yes, they could, “Charge current and former C.I.A. officers and lawyers with making false statements,” but they won’t because they want to cover this up because Obama and Holder fear a future prosecution by a future Republican administration want to “look forward, not backward.”

Respect for the rule of law, my ass.

I can haz prosecutions?

George W. Bush just admitted that he specifically authorized waterboarding, which is unequivocally torture under US law:

Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.

In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

In his book, titled “Decision Points,” Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was “Damn right” and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.

Bush previously had acknowledged endorsing what he described as the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques – a term meant to encompass irregular, coercive methods – after Justice Department officials and other top aides assured him they were legal. “I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” Vice President Richard B. Cheney acknowledged in a television interview in February.

George W. Bush has just confessed publicly to a criminal conspiracy, and Barack Obama and Eric “Place” Holder need to (God I hate this term) “Man Up” and begin a criminal investigation.

What we also need to understand that in both Bush’s and Cheney’s talk about torture, the never suggest that they got actionable intelligence, nor that they even expected to get actionable intelligence from torture.

There are vague claims of “saving lives”, but if those were true, they would have been declassified or leaked years ago.

They didn’t authorize torture because there was a ticking bomb, there wasn’t.

They didn’t get actionable intelligence, because they would have trumpeted it.

They had no belief that it would generate actionable intelligence.

They did this because they it mad them feel tough. They deliberately authorized the infliction of pain in order to derive pleasure and self worth.

This is the very definition of Sadism.

So they Torture a Little Boy, Admit the Testimony Thereby Extracted, Use it to Coerce a Confession, and Sentence Him to 40 Years in Prison

Only he will actually be out in less than 3 years, since Omar Khadr will be transferred to Canada, and released for time served:

A United States military commission at Guantánamo Bay has sentenced a former child soldier for Al Qaeda to 40 years in prison for war crimes — but he might be released in less than three years, the Defense Department said.

A panel of seven military officers at the American military base in Cuba determined on Sunday that the child soldier, Omar Khadr, 24, should be imprisoned — for terrorism-related offenses he committed in Afghanistan when he was a teenager — until he nearly reaches retirement age.

But that sentence was theoretical. Under the terms of a plea agreement, Mr. Khadr will serve no more than eight years. Moreover, after one year, Mr. Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is likely to be transferred to a prison in Canada, where he would be eligible to apply for parole after serving two years and eight months.

Seriously.

The was a show trial, with a predetermined result specifically to allow face saving on the idea of military commissions.

The proceedings are a travesty of the law and basic decency, and every individual up the chain of command who allowed this case to proceed is guilty of conspiracy to violate both US anti-torture statutes and international treaties to which the United States is a signatory.

Not feeling hopey changey right now.

Despicable……

So the military commissions have secured another confession, Omar Khadr.

They shoot a 15 year old, torture and threaten confessions out if him, allow his confessions to be admitted anyway, and now they have coerced a confession out of him by throwing bogus charges at him:

This morning I sat in a U.S. military commissions courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and watched the first child soldier charged by a Western nation since World War II plead guilty to crimes he was never even accused of. If the guilty plea of Omar Khadr this morning was a face-saving effort by the U.S. government, it was a sad day for the rule of law in the United States.

Omar Khadr is the 24-year-old Canadian who’s spent a third of his life in U.S. custody without trial after being accused of helping his father’s al Qaeda associates build improvised explosive devices when he was just 15. He was taken to Afghanistan from Canada by his father at the age of nine. The lone survivor of a 2002 U.S. assault on an Afghan compound, Khadr was accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier.

But as he entered his guilty plea this morning — after the government agreed he’d serve just one more year at Guantanamo Bay, and an as-yet-unspecified number of years in Canada — it was clear that prosecutors had taken the opportunity to throw the kitchen-sink-full of charges at him – including far more crimes than he’d even been charged with. Most importantly, Khadr pled guilty to the murder of two Afghan soldiers who accompanied U.S. forces in the 2002 assault on the compound. The government has never presented any evidence whatsoever that Khadr was responsible for that.

…………

This is more than morally repugnant.

This sort of treatment of a child forced into battle by adults is is a war crime, and everyone involved in the trial, up to and including the commander-in-chief, Barack Obama are guilty.

Of course, there will never be an accounting, for even the worst of them.

After all, the two greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, Stalin and Mao, died of natural causes while remaining in power.

Judge Says Torture Evidence Inadmissible

Actually, he did not say torture, he said “harsh interrogation”, but he also said that any information arising from the CIA’s torture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was inadmissible.

I believe that the term is “fruit of the poisoned tree,” and by harsh, he does not mean what Jon Steward did to Jim Cramer, he means torture:

In the months since Mr. Ghailani was brought to New York from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan has rejected defense requests to dismiss the case because of violations of Mr. Ghailani’s right to a speedy trial and because of accusations he was tortured.

But just as the trial was to begin on Wednesday, Judge Kaplan ruled that he would not allow the witness to testify. He noted that the government had acknowledged that it had identified and located the witness through interrogation of Mr. Ghailani when he was earlier held in a secret overseas jail run by the Central Intelligence Agency. His lawyers have said he was tortured there.

Judge Kaplan said he was “acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live.”

“But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests,” he went on. “We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand.”

It really is remarkable how the torture fetish of Bush and His Evil Minions continues to f%$# up everything that it touches to this day.

This is why we need prosecutions of both the torturers and those who authorized torture, because when this sh%$ goes down, it hurts all of us, and without consequences for the criminals, more people will be encouraged to break the law.

Jimmy Carter: Still a Wanker

It appears that Mr. Carter still cannot get over his hatred of Teddy Kennedy, so he’s going after a dead man, blaming Kennedy for killing his healthcare proposal.

Just as classy as ever, I see.

He still thinks that the Kennedy challenge in 1980 is what cost him the White House. It’s wasn’t.

What killed his chance for a 2nd term in 1980 was one James Earl Carter, was elected with much hope, but found to be a sanctimonious jerk.

I would note that this assessment does not include my opinion that Carter is a war criminal on par with Henry Kissinger because he and Zbigniew Brzezinsk decided to purchase a civil war in Afghanistan, knowing creating untold suffering in that nation and its neighbors.

The Anti-Defamation League Had Jumped the Shark

This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!

Specifically, Abraham Foxman has now vaulted over C. Megalodon*.

There are now credible allegations that Foxman lobbied against an interfaith trip to Auschwitz:

Earlier this month, several imams joined U.S. officials to visit the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps, a trip which resulted in the clerics issuing a statement condemning anti-Semitism and vowing “to make real the commitment of ‘never again.'”

The eight Muslim-American clerics were joined by Hannah Rosenthal, the presidential special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, and a handful of other officials from the Obama, Bush and Reagan administrations.

But according to Politico, “Organizers of the trip say they were dismayed that the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman lobbied U.S. officials against participating.”

I hope the Abraham Foxman has a serious mental or neurological problem, because otherwise, he is just a pathetic bigot, and dementia is preferable to that.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

The First Shoe Drops on Torture………

Remember the torture tapes that the CIA had destroyed on the watch of Porter Goss, the most corrupt CIA chief ever?

Well, some of the tapes missed the degausser:

The interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, a key figure in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was recorded several times while he was being questioned in Morocco by local intelligence officers, according to a U.S. official. The disclosure resolves a mystery over what are thought to be the only existing recordings from the CIA’s secret detention program.

The two videotapes and an audiotape do not show any use of what the CIA has called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the official said. Human rights groups have described the CIA’s methods as torture.

“The tapes, which were made and found years ago, show a guy sitting at a desk answering questions,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.

Still, the disclosure adds a new wrinkle to the public understanding of the documentation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

The destruction of 92 videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation and confinement of senior alQaeda figures at CIA secret prisons around the world is the subject of a criminal probe. Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the directorate of operations at the agency, issued an order to destroy the recordings in November 2005 as the CIA’s detention and interrogation program came under intense public and congressional scrutiny.

There are likely more tapes out there, and I would hope that the good (i.e. not-torturer) CIA agents who know where they are will get them to people who will do something (Yes, I know, Obama already said no prosecutions) about this.

Seeing as how one of the claims of the Binalshibh defense team is that he’s got a screw loose, these tapes may go a long way towards settling that issue as well.

The CIA claims that there was no torture harsh interrogation techniques in the tapes.

Naomi Campbell Should Go to Jail

I understand that she’s a model, and so I really don’t care all that much about her flirting with former Liberian dictator, and accused war criminal, Charles Taylor, and getting gifts, in this case blood diamonds, as a result.

That being said, she testified in front of the war crimes trial at the Hague about the diamonds, and what happened, and her former agent and actress Mia Farrow contradicted her on every point. (also here)

I’m sure that Ms. Campbell is embarrasses about (almost literally) playing footsie with a murderous dictator, but it’s clear that she is perjuring herself for no good reason.

They Should Save Their Energies for the Pedophile Priests

The Chilean President has denied a request by the Catholic Church to pardon members of the Pinochet junta currently jailed for murder, rape, kidnapping, etc.:

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on Sunday denied a pardon to people jailed for dictatorship-era crimes, a move likely to ease tensions with the opposition and rights groups over a controversial call for clemency.

Chile’s Catholic Church had asked Pinera to free or lower jail sentences of military officers convicted for human rights violations as well as other criminals in a call for clemency to mark the country’s upcoming bicentennial celebrations.

The pardon request infuriated human right groups and the center-left opposition, rekindling memories of General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973-1990 rule that still divides many Chileans.

I’m thinking that the Church of Rome issues of forgiveness that are a bit “closer to home”.

Perhaps they should address these matters before engaging in a full throated defense of the perpetrators of horrors of the Chilean dictatorship.