{"id":189980,"date":"2010-01-19T17:56:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T22:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/01\/19\/there-is-a-point-where-obama-moves-beyond-looking-ahead-and-becomes-a-co-conspirator\/"},"modified":"2010-01-19T17:56:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T22:56:00","slug":"there-is-a-point-where-obama-moves-beyond-looking-ahead-and-becomes-a-co-conspirator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/01\/19\/there-is-a-point-where-obama-moves-beyond-looking-ahead-and-becomes-a-co-conspirator\/","title":{"rendered":"There is a Point Where Obama Moves Beyond “Looking Ahead,” and Becomes a Co-Conspirator"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine<\/span> looks at the deaths of three detainees in detention at Guant\u00e1namo, 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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama\u2019s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously\u2014and may even have continued\u2014a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guant\u00e1namo in 2006.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The law, both US and international, is clear here: covering up a war crime is a war crime.<\/p>\n

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guant\u00e1namo 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 Guant\u00e1namo 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities <\/span>ordered nearly all the reporters at Guant\u00e1namo to leave and those en route to turn back<\/span>. The commander at Guant\u00e1namo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths \u201csuicides.\u201d In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to <\/span>attack the dead men<\/span>. \u201cI believe this was not an act of desperation,\u201d he said, \u201cbut an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.\u201d Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners\u2019 families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019 deaths was <\/span>full of unacknowledged contradictions<\/span>, and the centerpiece of the report\u2014a <\/span>reconstruction of the events\u2014was simply unbelievable<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands<\/span>, and, in at least one case, his own feet<\/span>, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat<\/span>. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags<\/span>, 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<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis mine<\/span>)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Whoever this individual is, they are, as I noted earlier, guilty of war crimes.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine looks at the deaths of three detainees in detention at Guant\u00e1namo, 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: \u2026\u2026\u2026 Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama\u2019s young …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1032,1006,1168,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crimes-against-humanity","category-military","category-torture","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189980"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}