United States wars, new book

This video from the USA says about itself:

April 24, 2013

As the Senate holds its first ever public hearing on drones and targeted killings, we turn the second part of our interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, “Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield.” Scahill charts the expanding covert wars operated by the CIA and JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in countries from Somalia to Pakistan.

“I called it ‘Dirty Wars’ because, particularly in the Obama administration, a lot of people are being led to believe that there is such a thing as a clean war,” Scahill says. He goes on to discuss secret operations in Africa, the targeting of U.S. citizens in Yemen and the key role WikiLeaks played in researching the book. He also reveals imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning once tipped him off to a story about the private security company Blackwater. Scahill is the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine and longtime Democracy Now! correspondent. For the past several years, Scahill has been working on the “Dirty Wars” film and book project, which was published on Tuesday. The film, directed by Rick Rowley, will be released in theaters in June.

By Ian Sinclair in Britain:

Dirty wars

Tuesday 21 May 2013

Within days of the September 11 2001 attacks it was clear that the Bush administration would exploit the terrorist attacks to push for war on Afghanistan and Iraq.

What is less well known is the huge transformation that occurred at the heart of the US government in those dark days – the topic of US journalist Jeremy Scahill’s new book Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield.

With the nation in a state of collective hysteria, the neoconservatives led by vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld rewrote the rules of the game, instituting a huge expansion of covert US wars.

Scahill spoke to me in London earlier this month about how covert action, secret prisons, drone strikes and assassination all began to be deployed on an unprecedented scale.

Having reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, the 38-year-old national security correspondent for The Nation magazine is one of the most knowledgeable observers of the so-called “war on terror.”

According to Scahill, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was sidelined after the World Trade Centre attacks, with Cheney and Rumsfeld viewing the CIA “as a worthless, liberal think tank.”

Instead they massively increased the funding and power of the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) – “the most closely guarded secret force in the US national security apparatus,” as Scahill describes it.

Formed in the 1980s and modelled on the British SAS, president Bill Clinton had muzzled the force following its disastrous involvement in the Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia in 1993.

But after the September 11 terror attacks the Bush administration let JSOC “off the leash,” Scahill says.

Or as CIA counter-terrorism centre chief Cofer Black put it: “All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off.”

JSOC’s primary role was established during the occupation of Iraq, Scahill says.

“The myth was that ‘the surge’ created this relatively stable couple of years in Iraq” – that US commander General David Petraeus instituted a brilliant counter-insurgency campaign.

However, “everyone in the US military knows this is just a fraudulent portrayal.” Rather “it had everything to do with JSOC creating a kind of Murder, Inc operation where it went down and just killed a tremendous number of people. There was no-one left to kill at one point,” he says bluntly. “JSOC had killed its way through every mom-and-pop resistance operation all the way through to al-Qaida in Mesopotamia.”

This, along with the US paying Sunni tribes, the “awakening councils,” not to kill US soldiers, was what was responsible for the lull in fighting, according to Scahill.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the public in Britain was often told that one of the reasons Tony Blair was supporting president Bush so closely was that he would be able to influence, and hopefully constrain, US policy.

Scahill laughs when I raise this argument.

“The notion that Blair was going to rein in Bush or Cheney is laughable. If anything Britain was used as a cover by the United States to give legitimacy to the Iraq war.”

In actual fact British forces were “deeply involved” in the assassination campaigns waged by JSOC in Iraq, with British units heading up JSOC operations, he explains.

Scahill is also very critical of President Barack Obama’s record in office – noting how the first black president came under intense pressure from the US military establishment to massively expand the covert wars in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

“And elsewhere – they were asking for authority in the Philippines and Indonesia and certain cases in Latin America, they wanted covert action inside Iran,” he notes.

Enamoured by the generals and admirals, the Obama administration caved in and “start hitting in Pakistan at three or four times the rate Bush was authorising.” Similar upswings in drone strikes, and the inevitable civilian casualties, occurred in Yemen and Somalia.

“Obama was trying to find a way to continue some of these policies by simply tweaking them, or adjusting them in a small way,” Scahill says.

“He ended extraordinary rendition by the CIA and closed CIA black sites. Instead what he is doing is working with human rights-abusing forces around the world to do it for the United States.

“So it’s by proxy now.”

More broadly, Scahill believes “Obama has tried to find a way to legitimise the core of the Bush-Cheney programme while defending the system itself from attack both internally and externally. And it’s been pitched that this is a cleaner, more legal way of waging war.”

Has it worked?

“I think he has largely been effective in selling that idea to liberals.”

Scahill isn’t a pacifist – he believes in the right of the state to defend itself.

But US policy “is just self-defeating.

“My fear is that we are actually creating more new enemies than we are killing terrorists,” he says.

“What’s our security going to look like 10 years from now as a result of killing innocent people in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan?

“If you and I sit down a decade from now I’m sure we will be talking about attacks that took place as a result of policy implemented right now.”

A key reason so many US citizens either actively support or are ignorant about these damaging actions is arguably the media’s inability to hold the US government to account since the 2001 attacks.

“I don’t believe there is a conspiracy with fat white guys smoking cigars in a back room and deciding how they are going to screw the little people,” Scahill says. “It’s unnecessary.

“Powerful people in government are close friends with powerful people in the media.

“They are part of the same class of people. They hang out together at weekends. They have their little parties like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where the president jokes about drones and the powerful media barons chuckle at his jokes, and their kids go to the same elite private schools.”

Scahill also argues that in the US “the default position is that power is right, that power is telling the truth, that the powerful are to be trusted.

“I think the opposite should be true – that you should always assume that what they are saying is manipulative,” he counters. “You have to be sceptical as a journalist.”

As Amy Goodman, his former colleague at news programme Democracy Now!, once said: “The role of journalism is to go where the silences are.”

By shining a light on the darkest parts of US foreign policy, Dirty Wars is a brilliant example of this noble aim.

With a senior US defence official recently testifying that the “war on terror” will continue for another 10 to 20 years, muck-raking, investigative journalists like Scahill are needed now more than ever.

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield is published by Serpant’s Tail, priced £15.99. A documentary based on the book will be released later this year. For more information see www.dirtywars.org.

Related articles

• US Special Ops Have Become Much, Much Scarier Since 9/11 (businessinsider.com)
• Talking to Jeremy Scahill on war, drones and Wikileaks (antonyloewenstein.com)
• At the Free Library of Philadelphia: Jeremy Scahill Talks About “Dirty Wars” (phillydeclaration.org)
• Video: Jeremy Scahill Speaks About His Book “Dirty Wars” (disquietreservations.blogspot.com)
• U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars … That It Will Publicly Admit (dprogram.net)

Dying US Iraq veteran’s letter to Bush and Cheney

This video from the USA is called Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq With Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers.

By David Walsh in the USA:

Dying US army veteran denounces “illegal” Iraq War

22 March 2013

Iraq War veteran Tomas Young, currently under hospice care at his home in Kansas City, Missouri, has written a scathing “last letter,” published at Truthdig.com, addressed to former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Young, the subject of the 2007 documentary film Body of War , explains that he is writing his letter “on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end.”

Young goes on: “I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.”

Body of War (2007): Tomas Young visits Ground Zero [Credit: Ellen Spiro / Mobilus Media]

Addressing Bush and Cheney, Young writes: “I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done.”

Body of War, co-directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, recounted Young’s story, his horrendous medical condition and his ongoing opposition to the Iraq War. Young enlisted in the US Army after the September 11, 2001 attacks, because, as he explains in his recent letter, “our country had been attacked.”

Body of War (2007): Gold Star Mothers who have lost children in the Iraq War touch Tomas Young at a Washington DC peace march [Credit: Ellen Spiro / Mobilus Media]

Only five days into his first deployment in Iraq in April 2004, while riding in a Humvee in Baghdad’s Sadr City, the young soldier was shot by an insurgent from above. The bullet severed Young’s spinal column. At the time of the making of Body of War, as the WSWS reported, he was “not only confined to a wheelchair but suffers severe attendant disabilities, including an inability to cough, trouble regulating his body temperature, dizzy spells, urinary tract infections and sexual dysfunction.”

After an anoxic brain injury in 2008, Young, now 33, explained to Truthdig’s Chris Hedges, “I lost a lot of dexterity and strength in my upper body. So I wouldn’t be able to shoot myself or even open the pill bottle to give myself an overdose.” He told Hedges, “I felt at the end of my rope … I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and fade away.”

The Donahue-Spiro documentary included a number of moving sequences of Young participating in anti-war activities where he encountered other disabled veterans, as well as family members of soldiers who had died in Iraq. In August 2005, along with his wife at the time, Young traveled to Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan’s protest encampment outside George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. …

“I did not join the Army to ‘liberate’ Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called ‘democracy’ in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes.”

Young describes his body “filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away,” dealing with the fact “that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.”

Toward the end of his letter, Young writes, “I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. … My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial.”

Young’s letter and condition speak to the appalling tragedy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the waste and destruction of hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of lives, all sacrificed in the pursuit of US imperialist dominance of the globe.

Related articles

• Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life (leaksource.wordpress.com)
• Dying Iraq War Veteran’s Open Letter To George Bush & Dick Cheney (federaljack.com)
• The Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran (goldenageofgaia.com)
• Tomas Young’s Dying Letter to Bush and Cheney (americanlivewire.com)
• Iraq War vet pens ‘last letter’ to Bush and Cheney (americansforcommonsenseblog.wordpress.com)
• Tomas Young Reads His Last Letter To Bush & Cheney (sammyscoops.wordpress.com)
• Thoughts On Losing Aaron Swartz and the Last Days of Tomas Young (thirdcoastblog.wordpress.com)
• British Labour politician regrets voting for Iraq war (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Morello rages against war machine (politico.com)

Fifty governments in global torture

This video from the USA says about itself:

Sep 29, 2006

Based on incorrect information, Canadian ‘renditions’ victim Mahar Arar was kidnapped by U.S. authorities and sent to Syria to be tortured. Arar explains why he told the torturers the lies they wanted to hear.

By Joshua Hersh in the USA:

Extraordinary Rendition Report Finds More Than 50 Nations Involved In Global Torture Scheme

Posted: 02/04/2013 11:14 pm EST  |  Updated: 02/05/2013 11:24 am EST

WASHINGTON — The U.S. counterterrorism practice known as extraordinary rendition, in which suspects were quietly moved to secret prisons abroad and often tortured, involved the participation of more than 50 nations, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Open Society Foundations.

The OSF report, which offers the first wholesale public accounting of the top-secret program, puts the number of governments that either hosted CIA “black sites,” interrogated or tortured prisoners sent by the U.S., or otherwise collaborated in the program at 54. The report also identifies by name 136 prisoners who were at some point subjected to extraordinary rendition.

The number of nations and the names of those detained provide a stark tally of a program that was expanded widely — critics say recklessly — by the George W. Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and has been heavily condemned in the years since. In December, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, condemned the CIA’s detention and interrogation efforts as “terrible mistakes.”

Although Bush administration officials said they never intentionally sent terrorism suspects abroad in order to be tortured, the countries where the prisoners seemed to end up — Egypt, Libya and Syria, among others — were known to utilize coercive interrogation techniques.

Extraordinary rendition was also a factor in one of the greatest intelligence blunders of the Bush years. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan national and top al Qaeda operative who was detained in Pakistan in late 2001, was later sent by the U.S. to Egypt. There, under the threat of torture, he alleged that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda in biological and chemical warfare. He later withdrew the claim, but not before the U.S. invaded Iraq in part based on his faulty testimony.

When he came into office, President Barack Obama pledged to end the U.S. government’s use of torture and issued an executive order closing the CIA’s secret prisons around the world.

But Obama did not fully end the practice of rendition, which permits the U.S. to circumvent any due process obligations for terrorism suspects. Instead, the administration said it was relying on the less certain “diplomatic assurances” of host countries that they would not torture suspects sent to them for pretrial detention.

This decision, the OSF report concludes, was tantamount to continuing the program, since in the absence of any public accounting, it was impossible to measure the accuracy of those “assurances.”

Without any public government records to read, Amrit Singh, the OSF’s top legal analyst for national security and counterterrorism and the new report’s author, turned to news reports, the investigations of a global network of human rights organizations, and the proceedings of a handful of foreign courts that have investigated their own countries’ practices.

What Singh saw was a hasty global effort, spearheaded by the United States in the months after 9/11, to bypass longstanding legal structures in order to confront the emerging threat of international terrorism.

Singh condemned the consequences of that effort in the report’s introduction. “By enlisting the participation of dozens of foreign governments in these violations, the United States further undermined longstanding human rights protections enshrined in international law — including, in particular, the norm against torture,” she wrote.

“Responsibility for this damage does not lie solely with the United States,” Singh added, “but also with the numerous foreign governments without whose participation secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations could not have been carried out.”

The list of those nations includes a range of American allies (Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany) and familiar Middle Eastern partners in the messy fight against radical Islam (Jordan, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates). Their alleged levels of participation vary widely, from countries like Poland, which agreed to host CIA black-site prisons, to nations like Portugal and Finland, which merely allowed their airspace and airports to be used for rendition flights.

A few of the nations involved, such as Australia and Sweden, have begun a process of public accounting and compensation for their roles in the process. Others, including Italy and Macedonia, have recently become embroiled in trials of local officials and CIA agents in absentia over their actions.

This story has been updated with links to the Open Society Foundations report, released Tuesday.

See also here.

Related articles

• More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture (alhittin.com)
• Top News: CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries ‘offered covert support’ (guardian.co.uk)
• More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture (wired.com)
• 54 countries helped CIA to kidnap, detain and torture – report (rt.com)

Bush administration knew Iraq had no WMD’s

This video from the USA says about itself:

Tyler Drumheller, now-retired CIA officer, appears on 60 Minutes to talk about the Bush Administration’s phony, manufactured “intelligence” that they used as the justification to invade Iraq.

Treason, anyone?

From daily News Line in Britain:

Thursday, 27 December 2012

Bush, Cheney and Rice were personally told that Iraq had no WMDs

THE US ThinkProgress website has published the text of the ‘60 Minutes’ TV interview with former CIA official Tyler Drumheller who revealed that in October 2002 a very highly placed Iraqi government official revealed that Iraq had no wmds and that Bush, Cheney, and Rice were personally told this information.

In October 2002, the CIA had made, what it termed, a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear programme.

Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister made an agreement to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Tyler Drumheller was in charge of the operation and was questioned on ‘60 Minutes’ by Ed Bradley.

The transcript shows that Drumheller said: ‘This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein, someone who would know what he was talking about.’

Bradley: You knew you could trust this guy?’

Drumheller: We continued to validate him the whole way through.

Bradley: According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high level meeting at the White House.

Drumheller: The President, the Vice President, Dr. Rice.

Bradley: And at that meeting?

Drumheller: They were enthusiastic because they said they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.

Bradley: And what did this high level source tell you?

Drumheller: He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction programme.

Bradley: So, in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active programme for weapons of mass destruction?

Drumheller: Yes.

Bradley: There’s no doubt in your mind about that?

Drumheller: No doubt in my mind at all.

Bradley: It directly contradicts, though, what the President and his staff were telling us.

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.

Bradley: Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister. He was taken aback by what happened.

Drumheller: The group that was dealing with preparations for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested. And we said, Well, what about the intel? And they said, Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.

Bradley: And if I understand you correctly, when the White House learned that you had this source from the inner circle of Saddam Hussein, they were thrilled with that.

Drumheller: The first we heard, they were. Yes.

Bradley: But when they learned what it was that he had to say, that Saddam did not have the capability to wage nuclear war, weapons of mass destruction?

Drumheller: They stopped being interested in the intelligence.

Bradley: The White House declined to respond to Drumheller’s account of Naji Sabri’ s role, but Secretary of State Rice has said that Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister-turned-US spy, was just one source, and therefore his information wasn’t reliable.

Drumheller: They certainly took information that came from single sources on uranium, on the yellowcake story and on several other stories that had no corroboration at all, and so you can’t say you only listen to one source, because on many issues they only listened to one source.

Bradley: So you’re saying that if there was a single source and that information from that source backed up the case they were trying to build, then that single source was okay, but if it didn’t, then the single source was not okay because he couldn’t be corroborated.

Drumheller: Unfortunately, that’s what it looks like.

…

Recently Mike Barker made a Freedom of Information request to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [in Britain] in relation to two letters written by Sabri.

Dated 2 September 2012 it asked to ‘Please confirm these extracts from two letters from Dr Naji Sabri, Minister for Foreign Affairs under President Saddam Hussein, sent to Kofi Annan Secretary General to the UN.

‘Letter dated 11 June 2002 from the Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General.

‘On instructions from my Government, I have the honour to transmit to you, enclosed herewith, a letter dated 11 June 2002 from Mr Naji Sabri, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Iraq, concerning threats by the United States of America to use its nuclear capability against a number of States, including Iraq.

‘I should be grateful if you would have this letter and its annex circulated as a document of the Security Council.

‘(Signed) Mohammed A. Aldouri.’

The letter stated: ‘Secretary-General

‘On 10 March 2002 United States newspapers leaked information on a confidential report by the United States Department of Defense (the Pentagon) entitled “Re-evaluation of the nuclear situation”, in which it is stated that the Administration of President George W Bush had ordered the Department of Defense to prepare contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against China, Iraq, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the Russian Federation and the Syrian Arab Republic, and that the Department of Defense had submitted the report to the Senate on 8 January 2002. Later, senior United States Administration officials confirmed the information in the report
‘(Signed) Naji Sabri’

The second letter stated: ‘Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Iraq’

September 16, 2002.’

‘Mr. Kofi Annan,

‘The Secretary General of the United Nations

‘Dear Secretary-General, held in your office in New York on 14 and 15 September 2002, with the participation of the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States. . .

‘I am pleased to inform you of the decision of the Government of the Republic of Iraq to allow the return of the United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq without conditions.

‘The Government of the Republic of Iraq has responded, by this decision, to your appeal, to the appeal of the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, as well as those of Arab, Islamic and other friendly countries.

‘The Government of the Republic of Iraq has based its decision concerning the return of inspectors on its desire to complete the implementation of the relevant Security Council resolutions and to remove any doubts that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction…

‘This decision is also based on your statement to the General Assembly on 12 September 2002 that the decision by the Government of the Republic of Iraq is the indispensable first step towards an assurance that Iraq no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction and, equally importantly, towards a comprehensive solution that includes the lifting of the sanctions imposed on Iraq and the timely implementation of other provisions of the relevant Security Council resolutions, including resolution 687(1991).

‘To this end, the Government of the Republic of Iraq is ready to discuss the practical arrangements necessary for the immediate resumption of inspections.

‘In this context, the Government of the Republic of Iraq reiterates the importance of the commitment of all Member States of the Security Council and the United Nations to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Iraq, as stipulated in the relevant Security Council resolutions and article (II) of the Charter of the United Nations.

‘I would be grateful if you bring this letter to the attention of the Security Council members.

‘Please accept, Mr Secretary-General the assurances of my highest consideration.

‘Dr Naji Sabri

‘Minister of Foreign Affairs

‘Republic of Iraq’

While Iraq wanted peace, the US and the UK were determined to go to war and commenced the destruction of Iraq and its infrastructure shortly afterwards, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and turning millions into refugees.

Related articles

• Source of the Iraqi WMD Claims Comes Clean (ritholtz.com)
• Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq (kaystreet.wordpress.com)

US Republicans against disabled people

This video from the USA says about itself:

Tea Party Candidate Attacks Disabled Veteran Opponent for Dress Shopping

Oct 14, 2012 by TheYoungTurks

“One of the dirtier House races this election cycle is between Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., and Army vet Tammy Duckworth, who lost both of her legs in combat. Walsh has been attacking Duckworth for things like talking about her military career (“My God, that’s all she talks about,” he once said), and, now, wearing dresses.

At a debate, Walsh held up a photo of Duckworth and said: “I was marching in a parade in Schaumburg [Ill.[, Sunday, two days before the Democratic convention, when Tammy Duckworth was on a stage down in Charlotte [N.C.[ — if you can look at the picture — picking out a dress for her speech Tuesday night.” Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show), Steve Oh (COO of The Young Turks) and RJ Eskow (The Breakdown, Huffington Post) break down why Rep. Joe Walsh, a man who dodged child support, would launch a sexist attack against a disabled U.S. Army veteran.

For quite some Republican politicians in the USA, not even George W Bush was far enough to the political Right.

For them, George W Bush starting wars was OK. Many veterans of those wars became disabled.

At least, the Bush administration accepted on paper that those disabled veterans should not be discriminated against.

But extremely conservative Republicans now want to destroy the Bush administration’s work on this.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Senate blocks disability treaty

Wednesday 05 December 2012

by Our Foreign Desk

The US Senate, led by right-wing Republican opposition, rejected a United Nations treaty today on the rights of the disabled.

With 38 Republicans casting No votes, the 61-38 vote fell five short of the two-thirds majority needed to ratify a treaty.

The vote took place in an unusually solemn atmosphere, with senators sitting at their desks rather than milling around the podium.

The treaty, which has already been signed by 155 nations and ratified by 126 countries including Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, simply states that nations should strive to assure that the disabled enjoy the same rights and fundamental freedoms as their fellow citizens.

It was negotiated by the George W Bush administration, completed in 2006 and signed by President Barack Obama in 2009.

The blueprint for the UN treaty, formally called the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, was the US Americans with Disabilities Act, which put the US in the forefront of efforts to secure equal rights for the disabled in 1990.

That act was signed into law by George H W Bush, George W Bush’s father, another Republican president. The main senator promoting it was Bob Dole, later Republican presidential candidate.

Republicans ludicrously claimed that the treaty could pose a threat to US national sovereignty.

“I do not support the cumbersome regulations and potentially overzealous international organisations with anti-American biases that infringe upon American society,” huffed Republican Senator Jim Inhofe.

The treaty had been widely backed by the disabilities community and veterans groups.

White House press secretary Jay Carney called the vote disappointing and noted that President Obama had declared just before the vote that “disability rights should not stop at our nation’s shores.”

Related articles

• Republicans cite abortion, home schooling to defeat UN disability treaty (rawstory.com)
• Vote for U.N. disability rights treaty fails, despite Dole’s push (kansascity.com)
• Dysfunction and Lies: Senate Vote Beyond Shameful (themoderatevoice.com)
• How Low Can You Go? Senate GOP Tanks Disabilities Treaty, Siding with Paranoid Rick Santorum and Glenn Beck (pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com)
• UN disability law fails in Senate (bbc.co.uk)
• Rights of Persons with Disabilities (playaminded.wordpress.com)
• Senate Rebuffs Dole’s Appeal for Passage of UN Disability Treaty (hispanicbusiness.com)
• Senate Republicans reach new low in rejecting UN treaty on rights of disabled (dailykos.com)

Bush-Gadaffi joint venture torturing

This video from the USA is called ACLU Challenges Jeppesen Dataplan and CIA Rendition.

From Human Rights Watch in the USA:

Libya: U.S. – Torture and Rendition to Gaddafi’s Country – New Accounts of Waterboarding, Other Water Torture, Abuses in Secret Prisons

Press release

Washington — The United States government during the Bush administration tortured opponents of Muammar Gaddafi, then transferred them to mistreatment in Libya, according to accounts by former detainees and recently uncovered CIA and UK Secret Service documents, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. One former detainee alleged he was waterboarded and another described a similar form of water torture, contradicting claims by Bush administration officials that only three men in US custody had been waterboarded.

The 154-page report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya,” is based on interviews conducted in Libya with 14 former detainees, most of whom belonged to an armed Islamist group that had worked to overthrow Gaddafi for 20 years. Many members of the group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), joined the NATO-backed anti-Gaddafi rebels in the 2011 conflict. Some of those who were rendered and allegedly tortured in US custody now hold key leadership and political positions in the country.

“Not only did the US deliver Gaddafi his enemies on a silver platter but it seems the CIA tortured many of them first,” said Laura Pitter, counterterrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “The scope of Bush administration abuse appears far broader than previously acknowledged and underscores the importance of opening up a full-scale inquiry into what happened.”

The report is also based on documents – some of which are being made public for the first time – that Human Rights Watch found abandoned, on September 3, 2011, in the offices of former Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa after Tripoli fell to rebel forces.

The interviews and documents establish that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US, with aid from the United Kingdom (UK) and countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, arrested and held without charge a number of LIFG members living outside Libya, and eventually rendered them to the Libyan government.

The report also describes serious abuses that five of the former LIFG members said they experienced at two US-run detention facilities in Afghanistan, most likely operated by the CIA. They include new allegations of waterboarding and other water torture. The details are consistent with the few other first-hand accounts about the same US-run facilities.

Other abuses reported by these former detainees include being chained to walls naked -sometimes while diapered – in pitch black, windowless cells, for weeks or months; restrained in painful stress positions for long periods, forced into cramped spaces; beaten and slammed into walls; kept indoors for nearly five months without the ability to bathe; and denied sleep by continuous, very loud Western music.

“I spent three months getting interrogated heavily during the first period and they gave me a different type of torture every day. Sometimes they used water, sometimes not…. Sometimes they stripped me naked and sometimes they left me clothed,” said Khalid al-Sharif, who asserted he was held for two years in two different US-run detention centers believed to be operated by the CIA in Afghanistan. Al-Sharif is now head of the Libyan National Guard. One of his responsibilities is providing security for facilities holding Libya’s high-value detainees.

The Libyan detainee accounts in the Human Rights Watch report had previously gone largely undocumented because most of those returned to Libya were locked up in Libyan prisons until last year, when Libya’s civil unrest led to their release. And the US government has been unwilling to make public the details about its secret CIA detention facilities. The accounts of former detainees, the CIA documents found in Libya, and some declassified US government memos have shed new light on US detention practices under the Bush administration but also highlighted the vast amount of information that still remains secret.

Despite overwhelming evidence of numerous and systematic abuses of detainees in US custody since the September 11 attacks, the US has yet to hold a single senior official accountable. Only a few low-ranking enlisted military personnel have been punished.

See also here.

The 156-page report produced by Human Rights Watch (HW) is based upon interviews with 14 Libyans subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture by the CIA and then forcibly returned to Libya, where they were imprisoned and in some cases tortured again by the government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Substantiating their testimony are classified documents—communications between the CIA and Libyan intelligence—found in the abandoned offices of former Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa after Tripoli fell to NATO-backed rebels in September 2011: here.

The European Parliament today strongly condemned the role of Britain and other EU states in the CIA torture and rendition programme: here.

Sweden helped Bush’s Iraq war

This video is called ‘From Assange to NATO, Sweden a voluntary vassal state of US’.

Translated from daily Expressen in Sweden:

Sweden helped the U.S. to bomb Baghdad

Prime Minister Göran Persson condemned the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 2003.

At the same time the Swedish military secretly helped the U.S. with information about bomb targets in Baghdad.

This is shown by declassified documents from the U.S. military headquarters, U.S. Central Command, which Expressen can publish today.

MP Peter Eriksson (Green Party) and the Left Party‘s former leader Lars Ohly are now demanding to know the truth about Sweden’s suspected duplicity.

If Sweden facilitated an attack, then that is very remarkable, says Lars Ohly.

Iraq: How the CIA Says It Blew It On Saddam’s WMD: here.

Related articles

• Sweden ‘helped US bomb Iraq in 2003′: report (thelocal.se)
• Sweden, while publicly protesting, aided US invasion of Iraq – report (rt.com)
• Sweden, while publicly protesting, aided US invasion of Iraq (EndtheLie.com)
• Russian Lawmakers to Review Military Transit Deal with Sweden (EndtheLie.com)

Bush endangered endangered species

From Science:

Protected Habitat Shrunk for U.S. Endangered Species

by Erik Stokstad on 5 July 2012, 5:37 PM

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) consistently disregarded scientific advice when determining how much land to protect for endangered species during the George W. Bush Administration, a new study shows. The analysis, which includes decisions made between 2002 and 2007, shows that the agency was much more likely to ignore expert advice to increase protected areas. Instead, the agency typically ended up cutting the amount recommended by scientists, often by a sizeable amount.

Bush and 9/11, new documents

This video from the USA is called Richard Clarke: Bush IGNORED terrorism.

By Mark Karlin, editor of BUZZFLASH at TRUTHOUT in the USA:

Bush Lied About 9/11, and Now We Have the Documents to Prove It

Wed, 06/20/2012 – 1:19pm.

At the time of 9/11, BuzzFlash was one of the extremely few major progressive websites on the Internet.

In the months and years following the suicidal hijacking attacks on the Twin Towers, BuzzFlash relentlessly exposed the negligence of the Bush administration in preventing the massacre from happening. (This is not to be confused with the 9/11 conspiracy movement, not at all.)

One of the biggest smoking guns was that Bush had received a CIA briefing while he was in Texas on vacation (in August of 2001), as currently recounted in a Salon article about a recent document dump:

Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.”

The famous August brief[ing] called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas – which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

As BuzzFlash recalls, Bush curtly dismissed the CIA briefer discussing the secret document headlined “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” by telling the Langley liaison that “You have covered your ass, so now you can go (paraphrased).”

Futhermore, Condi Rice admitted later to having seen the same document, but neither she, the CIA, nor Bush did anything – absolutely nothing – about it. The document and others like it specifically mentioned hijackings, but the Bush White House did not heighten security at airports (not even notifying them) of the likelihood of imminent hijackings. Since the attacks on the Twin Towers were hijackings, such an action could have prevented the deaths of more than 3000 people.

This is what is best called governmental and personal negligence. Bush laughably – in a tragic sort of way – once conceded that if he had known that terrorists had planned hijacking planes into the Trade Center specifically, they might have done something to prevent it. But the mainstream corporate media failed to challenge him on the notion that he failed to issue any security measure to prevent hijackings, in general, which could have prevented the horrible debacle.

And Condi Rice claimed that no one had ever thought that planes would have been flown into buildings, when there was ample intelligence information that this was to be an expected strategy of Al-Qai’da and perhaps other terrorist groups. (In fact, Bush stayed on a boat during a world economic conference in Italy just shortly prior to 9/11 out of concern of an airborne terrorist attack on hotels.)

Salon furthermore points out that the newly released documents indicate that when the Bush administration took over from the Clinton administration it downgraded the hunt for Usama bin Laden. Translation: the Bush administration put the US more at risk.

It is hard to believe after a decade that Bush, Rice and the whole crew who – if they were in the military likely would have been court martialed for their negligence – are walking freely around the US at this time, as if they bear no responsibility for failing to prevent what happened on 9/11.

The newly released declassified CIA documents, sought by the National Security Archives under Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests, make the case that the US was betrayed by laziness (including Bush on his month long vacation interrupted by photo ops of him clearing brush) and egregious incompetence.

See also here. And here.

George W. Bush’s floating Abu Ghraibs

This video is called Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances.

From the human rights organization Reprieve in Britain:

US government must reveal information about prison ships used for “terror suspects”

02.06.08

In June 2005 the UN’s special rapporteur on terrorism spoke of “very, very serious” allegations that the United States was secretly detaining terrorism suspects in various locations around the world, notably aboard prison ships in the Indian Ocean region.

Reprieve, the legal action charity, believes that the US has operated a number of ships as floating prisons (possibly as many as 17), where prisoners have been interrogated under torturous conditions before being rendered to other, often undisclosed locations. Details regarding the operation of prison ships have emerged through a number of sources, including the US military and other administration officials, the Council of Europe, various parliamentary bodies and journalists, as well as the testimonies of prisoners themselves.

See also here. And here. And here. And here.

By Chris Floyd, in the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel in the USA:

UNPUNISHED WAR CRIMES METASTASIZING:

Outer Darkness: The Gulag Cancer Grows, State Terror Intensifies

Saturday, 24 May 2008

In any civilized country, these facts would provoke banner headlines, marathon television debates, investigations, prosecutions and widespread public revulsion.

I.

The United States government is holding some 27,000 human beings in secret prisons around the world. The overwhelming majority of them are being held indefinitely, without charges, without rights, cut off from the outside world, and subject to “harsh interrogation techniques” (to use the prim locution for “torture” used by the Bush Administration and universally adopted by the American media).

Many of these captives are stuffed into holding pens in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, which is still in operations despite the momentary torture-photo scandal of 2004 — and despite Bush’s earnest promise to Iraqis to tear down that hated symbol of Saddam’s torture. Other captives are crammed into the holds of prison ships floating around the world. Still others languish in the torture chambers of the Bush Administration’s Terror War allies — despotisms, tyrannies, brutal kingdoms — having been “renditioned” there by American agents, sometimes after being kidnapped, or sold into captivity by bounty hunters, or snatched up in mass sweeps or random grabs or simply for having the wrong name, the wrong face, the wrong color, the wrong religion.

Beyond Guantanamo, a Web of Prisons for Terrorism Inmates. Scott Shane, The New York Times News Service: “It is the other Guantanamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate”: here.

CIA prison exposed in Romania: here.