Category: Crimes Against Humanity

George Orwell Would Be Proud Appalled

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The 4 most knowledgeable journalists at Guantanamo Bay have been banned for “revealing” the identity of one of the witnesses, “Interrogator #1”.

The reason that I put “revealing” in quotes is because the individual in question’s name has been public knowledge for years:

Now the military has taken another great step toward enhancing the credibility of the proceedings by booting four reporters for violating a judge’s secrecy order. Their violation? Publishing the name of a former military interrogator who was a witness at the hearing. The Pentagon has now barred Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard, Globe and Mail reporter Paul Koring and CanWest news service reporter Steven Edwards from covering future military commissions at Gitmo.

And here’s the kicker: The identity of the interrogator had been widely reported before the trial. The name of the individual — known as “Interrogator No. 1″ in the courtroom at Gitmo — had been published during a 2005 court-martial in which he pleaded guilty to prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. And he had also allowed the use of his name in an interview with Shepard (!) in 2008.

BTW, it should be recalled that in the case in question the military is trying a child soldier.

Omar Khadr was 15 when the events in question took place.

Seriously, we have the gang that can’t shoot straight, or more accurately, the gang that is so concerned about managing the message that it’s making the “military tribunals” about as meaningful as Stalin’s show trials.

Welcome to our Gulag in the Caribbean.

Obama Authorizes Assassinations of American Citizens

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Radical Imam Anwar al-Aulaqi has now been placed on the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) target list, which means that he can be killed if spotted. (See also here)

Based on the reports that I’ve seen in the media, it’s pretty clear that there is probable cause to apprehend him on suspicion of a number of crimes, but basically, the JSOC is a hit list.

There won’t be any efforts to capture him, this means that he’s going to be taken out by a Predator drone or suchlike, and I find this to profoundly troubling.

Glenn Greenwald makes the point that this is authorizing the killing of an American citizen on the decision of one man, the President, a power that even George W. Bush did not claim, and I agree, though I am not quite as strident in my views.

Additionally, this has the effect of legitimizing the use of lethal force by other governments against those whom they deem terrorists.

Under the rules adopted, I could see the Chinese assassinating Uighur activists, the Russians assassinating Chechen activists, or the Turks assassinating Kurdish activists, on US soil.

Also, from a purely tactical perspective, if you have a person who is willing to die to accomplish their mission, and al Qaeda does, then it is rather simpler to locate the President of the United States than it is to locate Anwar al-Aulaqi or Saddam Hussein.

This may have the effect of encouraging direct action against American officials.

Rumsfeld To Face Lawsuit Over Torture

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The case here is very simple, contractors at Shield Group Security reported illegal arms sales and smuggling by the firm to US authorities.

When the fled to the US Embassy, they were then taken into custody and tortured by the US Army, using techniques that Rumsfeld specifically authorized.

U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen has ruled that their lawsuit can proceed.

The principle here is fairly simple: You can sue a police officer for brutality or false arrest, but not a prosecutor for deciding to pursue a case.

In this case Rumsfeld specifically authorized brutality.

Here’s hoping that Rummy spends his remaining days in penury.

Deep Thought:

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It appears that the Republicans have successfully prevailed upon Jim Bunning (R-KY) to end his filibuster, so the emergency unemployment extension will proceed.

Additionally, the Republicans are suggesting that the distinguished gentleman from Kentucky is suffering from overwork, so they are suggesting:

  • That he take a vacation.
  • And go to Sea World in Orlando.
  • And let his hair down.
  • And go swimming.
  • And meet Tillicum up close and personal as a part of a whale watching junket.

That is all.

More on Bybee and Yoo, and the Lessons Learned Therein

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Courtesy of Chris Floyd:

“Children, the law is nothing but a rag smeared with blood and sh%$.

“It is only for suckers, rubes and losers.

“Claw your way to the top — by any means necessary — and the law can never touch you.

“This is the American way.”

This is the message of Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ determination not to prosecute, nor review in the smallest way by the bar association, the contemptible actions of the worst of the wrong doers amongst Bush and His Evil Minions™.

Dick Cheney Just Confessed on National Television

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As much as it pains me to say, who watches the Sunday gasbags so I don’t have to, is completely correct when he says that Dick Cheney’s interview on ABC’s This Week is an admission that he committed war crimes:

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. [. . .]

KARL: And you opposed the administration’s actions of doing away with waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

This is an admission of guilt under the conspiracy laws as they currently stand, though, President “Hopey Changey” and his Attorney General, Eric “Hold of on Prosecutions” won’t do anything about it, because ………… Hell, I don’t know why, and it pisses me off.

I would note that inaction not does make Holder, and Obama accessories in crimes against humanity.

There is an affirmative requirement to investigate and prosecute under the treaties.

Big Surprise

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Former Liberian President, and mass murderer, Charles Taylor is saying that he did mining deals with Pat Robertson in exchange for his lobbying Bush and His Evil Minions™ for support:

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, testifying in his war crimes trial in The Hague on Thursday, said that his government had awarded American televangelist Pat Robertson a gold mining concession in 1999 and that Robertson later offered to lobby the Bush administration on the government’s behalf.

The revelations came in the midst of Taylor’s U.N.-backed trial on 11 counts of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone’s 1990s civil war. Taylor is accused of directing a Sierra Leonean rebel group, the United Revolutionary Front, in a campaign aimed at securing access to the country’s diamond mines. The rebel movement stands accused of committing mass atrocities in the West African country in the late 1990s, including the mutilation of thousands of civilians.

Here’s hoping that the war crimes tribunal comes after Pat Robertson, whose association with Taylor has been common knowledge for at least a decade.

Of course, Robertson will never see the inside of a court room, because the United States won’t turn over anyone for war crimes, because we’re big enough not to play by the rules, so all that we will hear from him on this is his spokesman’s denial.

Obama Goes to “National Prayer Breakfast”

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So, he showed up to the little bit of Christian Dominionism run by “The Family”, though he did condemn the “kill the gays” bill in Uganda.

I have no word yet on whether the Ugandan genocidal manics David Bahati, author of the Ugandan “Kill the Gays” bill, and Ugandan Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo, one of its chief supporters, were in attendance, though they had intended to until this entire thing blew up.

I also think that any politician who associates with “The Family” to any degree is doing this country a great harm.

There is a Point Where Obama Moves Beyond “Looking Ahead,” and Becomes a Co-Conspirator

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Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine looks at the deaths of three detainees in detention at Guantánamo, and concludes that it is likely that they were tortured to death, and almost certain that there is a pervasive and ongoing coverup of the details of their deaths:

……… Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

The law, both US and international, is clear here: covering up a war crime is a war crime.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

(emphasis mine)

This is well into the territory of the SNL phony news report that anti-Apartheid activist Stephen Biko had died in custody as the result of his hunger strike, and please ignore the skull fracture, which was a result of a good faith effort by the authorities attempt to force feed him roast beef through his skull.

It is clear that there is a pervasive and ongoing cover-up of this affair within the military. It’s also clear that it is large enough that political appointees within the Department of Defense have to be giving their tacit approval of a continuing deception.

Whoever this individual is, they are, as I noted earlier, guilty of war crimes.

With the appearance of Horton’s story on the web, and Keith Olbermann’s show, everyone in the military and civilian chains of command at the Pentagon and the White House has to be aware of these issues.

If immediate action, by which I mean an independent investigation, is not taken to uncover the facts, and then these individuals, including Barack Obama, are war criminals.

I understand that the Obama administration finds investigating what appears to be a multiple cases of torturing people to death to be politically inconvenient, but political inconvenience does not excuse law breaking.

The Hague, Bitches

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We have new revelations on the British investigation of what happened during the march to the invasion of Iraq, the sort of investigation that US politicians have specifically eschewed, has revealed that Tony Blair was informed that Saddam had no WMD before the invasion:

Tony Blair was aware of last-minute intelligence revealing that Saddam Hussein had probably dismantled his chemical and biological weaponry, a key adviser has said.

Sir John Scarlett, who was the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the run-up to the war, said that two reports received in March 2003, which suggested that Iraq’s weaponry had been taken to pieces, were sent directly to the former prime minister. He also said that Mr Blair was made aware of doubts over Saddam’s access to the warheads needed to deliver them.

We now have enough evidence for the ICC to start an investigation, and perhaps enough for an indictment.

Please though, make it a secret indictment, so you can apprehend Reverend Smiler when he steps off the plane in Brussels.

Obama Doubles Down for Torture

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We have another resignation from the Obama Administration, Phil Carter, and it seems to flow from the same dynamics that had Greg Craig being forced to resign 2 weeks ago.

Mr. Carter was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, which meant that he was in charge of trying detainees, and was a vociferous opponent of both Bush’s kangaroo courts, the use of evidence derived from torture, and has also been very leery of the military commissions, though he does support the use of courts martial through the UCMJ.

Carter is denying that he is leaving for policy differences, but considering the actions of the Obama administration, which has been to use military commissions to ensure convictions when they might be in doubt through tainted (tortured) evidence, I do not take his statement at face value.

We Luv Torture

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Glenn Greenwald points us to a Pew Research Center survey that shows that the citizens of the United States are the most supportive of torture of any of the nationalities tested.

We are, therefore, a bunch of cowardly sadists, and maybe Liberace was right, and I should make aliyah to Israel.

I do know that I am thoroughly disgusted at this, and I think that people are missing something: When these reservists and national guardsman come home, some of them will be in law enforcement, and they will bring torture with them.

Expect your next traffic stop to come with stress positions.

We’re Still Torturing at Black Prisons

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So much for change we can believe in.

The CIA is still maintaining gulags where prisoners are tortured:

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces.

The problem here is that he wants to split a difference, because he is too eager to please people, and there is no difference to split: You either torture, or you don’t. You either allow the ICRC to review conditions at POW camps, or you don’t, you either try terrorists in real courts, or you don’t.

What’s more, this is well corroborated:

Although his and other detainees’ accounts could not be independently corroborated, each was interviewed separately and described similar conditions. Their descriptions also matched those obtained by two human rights workers who had interviewed other former detainees at the site.

(emphasis mine)

What Barack Obama (and Eric Holder, and much of the rest of Obama’s security/intelligence appointees) has done is to spiff up the image of the torture, but it is still going on.

There is a point where a line gets crossed, and it won’t be just covering up for Bush and His Evil Minions™, and maybe shading a few lines on due process.

After a few more months of this, Barack Obama becomes a war criminal too.

More on the Exit of Greg Graig, White House Counsel

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Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf of Time magazine have the full rundown, but the basic thesis is that Dick Cheney started saying bad things about Barack Obama when it started to become obvious that Cheney might be in legal jeopardy if Obama did not go all out to stop all investigations and public disclosures on law breaking by Bush and His Evil Minions™.

At Firedog Lake, Marcy Wheeler hits the nail on the head when she says, “I guess Dick Cheney is right–Obama can’t stand up to terrorists. Terrorists like Dick Cheney.”

(emphasis mine)

Zimbabwe Update

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The big news is the political fight over a bill to reform the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which after much conflict, was finally passed by Parliament.

What likely led to this meeting of the minds was evidence that the incompetent and corrupt management of RBZ Director Gideon Gono was driving away potential donors and foreign investors.

That being said, I do not think that the RBZ bill was why China has signed an $8 billion investment deal.

In any case, Gono was last seen attempting to strong-arm banks into lending to expropriated farms, which is not surprising as the ZANU-PF is stepping up its farm seizures for corrupt bureaucrats program.

In any case, the unity government is holding cabinet meetings again, which is a good sign, I guess.

Of more significance is the fact that Botswana President Ian Khama is calling for new elections and explicitly blaming the ZANU-PF for the lack of progress.

It’s nice that someone involved the SADC “Enable Mugabe Program” is pushing back.

Additionally, we are starting to see protests in Europe against the SADC’s support of Mugabe: Zimbabwe Vigil has petitioned the EU to suspend all aid to members of the SADC, which is a start.

More significant, though may be the fact that PM Morgan Tsvangirai is to meet with Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, current chairman of the AU.

This is a positive development for a number of reasons:

  • Gadaffi won’t run like a scared kitten at Mugabe’s accusations of being a “neocolonialist stooge”, because, after all, Ronald Reagan tried to kill him, and he blew up Pan Am flight 103.
  • As head of the AU, he words have a lot of influence.
  • As an oil exporter, his dollars have a lot of influence.
  • Gadaffi is very interested in getting credibility on the world stage, and by taking on Mugabe aggressively, he gets that credibility with almost no risk involved.

So, after massive smuggling, murders by the authorities, and forced labor, the Kimberley Process decides against suspending Zimbabwe’s certification as a being not “conflict diamonds”, despite a
report from their own investigators saying that they should be suspended.

This reveals the Kimberly process a complete and utter joke, and on queue, once the threat of suspension is lifted, the New Reclamation Group Ltd. mining company sweeps in with a contract.

There is a promise by the Zimbabwe government not to export diamonds until measures are in place to prevent abuse, but I don’t trust this very much, if it comes from the Prime Minister’s office, then it means nothing, and if it comes from Mugabe, it’s a flat out lie.

Of note, The Rapaport Group and the RapNet Diamond Trading Network have announced that they are “implementing an immediate trading ban on all diamonds from Zimbabwe due to severe human rights violations in Marange,” and Leber Jeweler Inc. has announced the same.

Meanwhile, outside of the diamond trade, things continue apace, with Mugabe and the ZANU-PF planning to introduce a law which would require that foreign owned companies be majority black owned. Note: not even the majority locally owned, this is determined by the pigmentation of the equity holders.

ZANU-PF has become the party of Apartheid in Zimbabwe.

We also have continued use of the state security apparatus to intimidate the opposition, with the head of the national trade union being arrested on trumped up charges, as well as the increasingly bizarre trial of deputy agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennett.

What do we have on the case of Bennett, we have a judge who made statements at the trial of the chief witness against Bennett that indicate bias. This is important because this witness, Peter Hitschmann, has recanted his testimony and alleged that it was extracted by torture.

We also have the police presenting weapons that were not seized from Bennett’s house as evidence, and that the Defence is has a request to have the police log books on this matter made available to them, and the police, as well as the attorney general, are vociferously fighting this.

An Interesting Take on the Possibility as Tony Blair as EU President

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George Monbiot, at The Grauniad* says it all when he states that, “Making this ruthless liar EU president is a crazy plan. But I’ll be backing Blair.”

He is backing Blair because if he becomes EU President, he must necessarily work from his office in Brussels, and Belgium has acceded to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which means that, unlike in the US and the UK, they can indict him, arrest him, and ship him off to the Hague for trial:

Within the UK, there is no means of prosecuting Blair. In 2006 the law lords decided that the international crime of aggression has not been incorporated into domestic law. But, elsewhere in the world, it has been. In 2006 the professor of international law Philippe Sands warned that “Margaret Thatcher avoids certain countries as a result of the sinking of the Belgrano, and Blair would be advised to do likewise”.

I’m beginning to think that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should be made EU President too.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

Italian Conviction of CIA Kidnappers Means Nothing

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The fact that Judge Oscar Magi convicted 23 Americans in absentia for kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr really has very little meaning, even with sentences of up to 8 year in prison.

It sounds significant, until you realize that the senior Italian officials who were in on this were acquitted by reason of state security:

Charges were also dropped against five Italians, including the former head of the Sismi military intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, because evidence against them violated state secrecy rules.

So the senior people in the Italian state security apparatus, the ones who could say no, get off Scott free.

Some lower level operatives, however, got hung out to dry for following orders:

However, the judge sentenced two more junior Sismi agents to three years in prison as accomplices, indicating Italian authorities were aware of the abduction.

How is “Lynndie England” spelled in Italian?

New York Times Calls Out Obama on Torture

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Their editorial board just called out Obama as Bush II on torture and secrecy.

OP/EDs generally don’t mean much, but I think that the Times, at least in its unsigned editorials, is a barometer of a certain segment of the population, or at least that segment that doesn’t live inside the DC Beltway, and as such, this could mean a trend.

I’d give it about 5 to 1 against it being a trend, but a week ago, I would have said 20 to 1.

Barack Obama, Objectively Pro Genital Mutilation Since 2009

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Britain’s high court has ruled that all evidence of Binyam Mohamed by the CIA and its proxies will be reviewed in open court, despite the protestations of Foreign Secretary David Miliband to keep this matter hush hush.

As I noted earlier, one of the tortures was to have his genitals sliced with a scalpel and irritating liquids loured in the wounds.

This is what the British government, at the urging of the US government were trying to make “go away”.

Rather predictably, the Obama administration has condemned the decision by the court to reveal crimes against humanity:

Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: “We are not pleased”, adding that Washington kept such information confidential “to protect our own citizens”.

Anyone who did this, or allowed it to be done, is a criminal, and should be tried and imprisoned, not protected.

It should also be noted that the Obama administration has threatened to withhold intelligence from the British if the details of their torture get out.

Damn.

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So, the House of Representatives by a vote of 307-114 has passed an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act which exempts torture, because, I guess, everyone in Washington wants them covered up, because with knowledge is the possibility of accountability, and accountability is an anathema to the Beltway Boyz.

What is most repulsive is that this is designed just to cover up Bushie malfeasance:

To follow up on my earlier post about Rep. Louis Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and her speech on her colleagues’ move to amend the Freedom of Information Act to prevent the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, it’s worth looking at the conference report on the bill. The bill is called the “Protected National Security Documents Act of 2009,” but refers not to any “documents” per se, but only to any “photograph” taken between Sept. 11, 2001 and Jan. 22, 2009, that “relates to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”

(emphasis mine)

Big surprise, the guy supporting this the strongest is Joe Lieberman.