| Antiwar.com, July 14, 2008 |
| by Justin Raimondo |
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In spite of reassurances from the Washington talking heads and policy wonks that the U.S. is not about to launch an attack on Iran, or countenance an Israeli strike, the Sunday Times has the real scoop: “President George W. Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official. “Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread skepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political, and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an ‘amber light’ to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times. “‘Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack, and tell us when you’re ready,’ the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use U.S. military bases in Iraq for logistical support.” It seems, however, that the Israelis have already been using U.S. bases in Iraq to train for the coming attack. There have been denials all around – from the Iraqis, the Americans, and the Israelis – but both the Iraqi media and the Israeli media have reported, as the New York Post put it, that “Israeli warplanes have been flying over Iraq and landing at U.S. bases there in preparation for an attack on Iran.” The Iraqi Web site Nahrainet reported Israeli fighter jets have been in rehearsals, so to speak, for their much-anticipated strike at Iran, flying at night over Jordanian airspace and arriving at U.S. air bases in Nasiriyah in southern Iraq and near Haditha in western Anbar province. The Israelis, in concert with their amen corner in the U.S., have been engaged in a propaganda blitz targeting Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, the whole point of which is not to pressure the Iranians into backing down, but to force the U.S. to take action in lieu of the Israelis going it alone. Why fight if your big brother is willing to wage the battle? To that end, the Israelis are taking aim at Washington, rather than Tehran, in a full-scale political assault that shows every sign of succeeding where it counts – in the Oval Office. The Times cites a top Pentagon official: |
Archive for the ‘War Criminals’ Category
Amber Alert! Get ready for war
July 15, 2008Inside the Bush White House’s Nonstop Propaganda War
July 15, 2008RINF.COM, Monday, July 14th, 2008
By Mark Dery
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan exposes the culture of deception that sold an unnecessary war to the public
Scott McClellan is having a “Matrix” moment — the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dreamworld to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact. Remember that scene in “The Matrix” where Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion — the computer-generated simulation humanity experiences as everyday reality — to reveal the movie’s post-apocalyptic world for the irradiated slag heap it really is? Like that. “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” he tells Keanu Reeves, a riff on the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s pronouncement, in his book Simulations, that we live in a “desert of the real” — an ever-more-virtual reality where firsthand experience and empirical truth are being displaced by media fictions. He offers an example tailor-made for the Bush presidency: “Propaganda and advertising fuse in the same marketing and merchandising of objects and ideologies.”
This, in a word, is life inside the Bush administration’s Ministry of Truth, as described by McClellan in What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. In his frag ‘em-and-run memoir, the former White House press secretary — whose Secret Service code name, I kid you not, was “Matrix” — recounts how he and the rest of Team Dubya got caught up in the “permanent campaign,” a nonstop propaganda war whose tactical weapons were “the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin,” and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.
Now that McClellan has broken free from what he calls the “Washington bubble,” he can see the “massive marketing campaign” (his words, my italics) to sell the war in Iraq for the steaming heap of dookie it was: a PR operation characterized by a, er, “lack of candor and honesty,” as the author so masterfully understates it, having just told us that the administration dropped the trap on chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey for telling the Wall Street Journal that Bush’s war would likely cost between $100 billion and $200 billion — a fatal misspeak at a moment when “talking about the projected cost of a potential war wasn’t part of the script.” Neither was talking about “possible unpleasant consequences” (the choice of adjective is sheer virtuosity, like a grace note in a Paganini caprice); “casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions,” and other buzz-killers might jeopardize what advertisers call the “supportive atmosphere” that puts consumers in that impulse-buying mood — in this instance, buying the dubious case for war from a president who famously prefers faith to facts, a president who listens to his gut. Unfortunately, the trustworthy gurglings of the Bush gut were indistinguishable, in this case, from the offstage urgings of the neocons Colin Powell derided as “fucking crazies.”
Enabling Tyranny
July 15, 2008By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, July 14, 2008
I recently read that Brigette Bardot, now in her 70s, has been arrested as a hate criminal for complaining that Muslims in France slaughter sheep without first stunning them. The famous actress is known for her sympathy with animals, but the French government preferred to interpret her remarks as hatred for Muslims. Prosecutor Anne de Fontetts promised to throw the book at Bardot.
There are many incongruities here. The French are persecuting one of their own for taking exception to the practices of an alien culture. But then, perhaps this is just being broad-minded. What really jumps out is: if Bardot’s animal rights position makes her a hate criminal, what does French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s foreign policy position make him?
According to Information Clearing House’s running tally as of July 12, 1,236,604 Iraqis have been slaughtered as a result of the Sarkozy-supported US invasion and occupation of Iraq. If Bardot is a hate criminal under French law for complaining about how Muslims prepare their mutton, why isn’t President Sarkozy a hate criminal for supporting an American policy that has resulted in the deaths of 1,236,604 Muslims and the displacement of 4 million Iraqis?
Such incongruities are everywhere. It is as if people are no longer capable of thought.
Last week the US Congress passed an ex post facto law that legalized the illegal behavior of telecommunication companies that enabled the Bush Regime to violate US law and to spy on Americans without warrants. Retroactive laws are unconstitutional. But, alas, the US Constitution does not make campaign contributions, and telecommunication companies do.
The Bush Regime claimed that its illegal behavior, which requires an unconstitutional retroactive law to protect telecommunication companies and President Bush from being held accountable, is necessary to protect us. But as our Founding Fathers and every intelligent patriotic person since has patiently explained to the American public, it is the Constitution that protects us. No safety can be found by fleeing the Constitution.
Without the Constitution we have no protection. We simply stand naked before unbridled government power.
That’s pretty much how we stand now after 7.5 years of the Bush Regime. Electing a Democratic Congress in 2006 did not make any difference. Indeed, it was a Democratic majority Congress that last week gave Bush his unconstitutional ex post facto law.
Mukasey: Bush’s New ‘Mr. Cover-up’
July 14, 2008Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, July 10, 2008
Even Sen. Charles Schumer, whose vote last year ensured Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, was left sputtering as Mukasey returned the favor by rebuffing Schumer’s concerns about the Bush administration’s political prosecutions.
At the end of his round of Senate Judiciary Committee questions, Schumer referred to allegations that White House political adviser Karl Rove had pressed for the selective prosecution of Alabama’s Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman, who was viewed as a threat to Republican dominance of the South.
“Do you think that someone in the Justice Department should ask Karl Rove whether he was involved, whether he did the things that are alleged – someone somewhere – or is there a possibility that no one should ever ask him?” the New York Democrat said, his voice rising.
Mukasey responded coolly that he would not endorse the questioning of Rove. In disgust, Schumer said, “I find these answers very disappointing.”
But Schumer was not alone. At the oversight hearings on July 9, the committee’s Democrats and the ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, voiced varying levels of disappointment at Mukasey’s refusal to look back at the misconduct – including criminal acts – that had occurred earlier in the Bush administration.
Indeed, Mukasey’s evasive answers recalled the stonewalling of his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales. Mukasey’s vague and meandering responses made two things clear, however: George W. Bush’s hubris about what he sees as his unlimited presidential powers continues and Mukasey will serve as Bush’s rearguard protector during his final six months in office.
In a separate confrontation with two House committees, Mukasey has promulgated a novel legal theory justifying his refusal to release FBI reports on interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney about their roles in exposing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
Even though Bush has not asserted executive privilege regarding the FBI reports, Mukasey has refused to honor subpoenas from the House committees on the grounds that to do so would threaten “core Executive Branch confidentiality interests and fundamental separation of powers principles.”
Mukasey’s theory ignores a variety of precedents, including the public release of criminal-case testimony by Bush’s three predecessors (Bill Clinton on the Monica Lewinsky case, George H.W. Bush on the Passportgate affair and the Iran-Contra scandal, and Ronald Reagan on Iran-Contra.)
Nuremberg Defense
In his Senate testimony, Mukasey also left no doubt that the Justice Department would take no action against anyone in the administration who violated criminal statutes in the “war on terror” if they were following legal advice from superiors, a modern version of the so-called Nuremberg defense.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, urged Mukasey to “follow what I think is the clear standard of the law within your own department and initiate those investigations” into the Bush administration’s abuse of detainees, including the use of “waterboarding,” a form of simulated drowning.
Durbin noted that retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse probe, stated recently that “the Commander in Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture” and that “there is no longer any doubt about whether the current administration committed war crimes, the only question that remains is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held accountable.”
Mukasey, however, responded that anyone who acted in “good faith” and relied on the Justice Department’s legal advice “cannot and should not be prosecuted.” The same protection should cover government lawyers who gave the advice, he said.
Red Cross finds Bush administration guilty of war crimes
July 14, 2008In a secret report last year, the Red Cross found evidence of the CIA using torture on prisoners that would make the Bush administration guilty of war crimes, The New York Times reported Friday.
The Red Cross determined the culpability of the Bush administration after interviewing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to the article.
Prisoner Abu Zubaydahwho said he had been waterboarded, “slammed against the walls” and confined in boxes “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position.”
The information comes from a new book written by Jane Meyer, who has frequently published articles concerning counter-terrorism in The New Yorker.
The book is titled “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” and will be released next week.
Mayer cited “sources familiar with the report” to explain the confidential document as a warning “that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”
The report was submitted to CIA last year and concluded that American interrogation methods are “categorically” torture that violates both domestic and international law, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported Friday.
Although the CIA had already admitted to the use of waterboarding, Meyer says in the book that several CIA officers confirm the findings of the Red Cross, including the other forms of torture mentioned.
Maddow called George W. Bush a “torture-approver-in-chief who has yet to be held to account for anything” and said that congressman Dennis Kucinich had reintroduced his articles of impeachment against the president.
Maddow questioned constitutional law expert Johnathan Turley about the development.
“The problem for the bush admin is that they perfected plausible deniability techniques,” Turley said. “They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether waterboarding is torture and it leaves the impression that its a closed question.
“It’s not. It’s just like the domestic surveillance program that the federal court said just a week ago was also not just a closed question.”
When asked by Maddow if the chances are now greater that Bush will be prosecuted now or after leaving office by the international community, Turley compared the situation to Serbia in the early 90s.
“I’d never thought I would say this, but I think it might in fact be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought in my lifetime I would say that.”
How Britain Wages War
July 13, 2008| by John Pilger | ANTIWAR.COM, July 12, 2008 |
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The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny. Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, which he won serving in the British army. He has been refused entry to Britain and treatment for a serious heart ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Downing Street to hand his Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to see him. The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children. They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by NATO bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, NATO planes struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village: children, women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22 civilians died like this. All, including the roasted children, are described as “militants” or “suspected Taliban.” The Defense Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghanistan is “the noble cause of the 21st century.” The third photograph is of a computer-generated aircraft carrier not yet built, one of two of the biggest ships ever ordered for the Royal Navy. The £4bn contract is shared by BAE Systems, whose sale of 72 fighter jets to the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia has made Britain the biggest arms merchant on earth, selling mostly to oppressive regimes in poor countries. At a time of economic crisis, Browne describes the carriers as “an affordable expenditure.” The fourth photograph is of a young British soldier, Gavin Williams, who was “beasted” to death by three noncommissioned officers. This “informal summary punishment,” which sent his body temperature to more than 41 degrees, was intended to “humiliate, push to the limit and hurt.” The torture was described in court as a fact of army life. The final photograph is of an Iraqi man, Baha Mousa, who was tortured to death by British soldiers. Taken during his post-mortem, it shows some of the 93 horrific injuries he suffered at the hands of men of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment who beat and abused him for 36 hours, including double-hooding him with hessian sacks in stifling heat. He was a hotel receptionist. Although his murder took place almost five years ago, it was only in May this year that the Ministry of Defense responded to the courts and agreed to an independent inquiry. A judge has described this as a “wall of silence.” A court martial convicted just one soldier of Mousa’s “inhumane treatment,” and he has since been quietly released. Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families of Iraqis who have died in British custody, says the evidence is clear – abuse and torture by the British army is systemic. Shiner and his colleagues have witness statements and corroborations of prima facie crimes of an especially atrocious kind usually associated with the Americans. “The more cases I am dealing with, the worse it gets,” he says. These include an “incident” near the town of Majar al-Kabir in 2004, when British soldiers executed as many as 20 Iraqi prisoners after mutilating them. The latest is that of a 14-year-old boy who was forced to simulate anal and oral sex over a prolonged period. |
President George W Bush backs Israeli plan for strike on Iran
July 13, 2008As Tehran tests new missiles, America believes only a show of force can deter President Ahmadinejad
President George W Bush: US officials acknowledge that no American president can afford to remain idle if Israel is threatened
President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.
Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.
“Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.
Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets.
“It’s really all down to the Israelis,” the Pentagon official added. “This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran.”
The official added that Israel had not so far presented Bush with a convincing military proposal. “If there is no solid plan, the amber will never turn to green,” he said.
There was also resistance inside the Pentagon from officers concerned about Iranian retaliation. “The uniform people are opposed to the attack plans, mainly because they think it will endanger our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source said.
Complicating the calculations in both Washington and Tel Aviv is the prospect of an incoming Democratic president who has already made it clear that he prefers negotiation to the use of force.
Senator Barack Obama’s previous opposition to the war in Iraq, and his apparent doubts about the urgency of the Iranian threat, have intensified pressure on the Israeli hawks to act before November’s US presidential election. “If I were an Israeli I wouldn’t wait,” the Pentagon official added.
Marine’s graphic interview describes killing of prisoners in Iraq
July 12, 2008Sgt. Jermaine Nelson, in a tape-recorded interview, says he and a fellow sergeant were ordered to kill the prisoners during a sweep through a Fallouja neighborhood in 2004.
By Tony Perry
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2008
CAMP PENDLETON — A graphic, vulgarity-laced interview in which a Marine described how he and two other Marines killed four unarmed prisoners in Iraq was played today during a preliminary hearing in the case.
Sgt. Jermaine Nelson, in a tape-recorded interview with a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent, said he and Sgt. Ryan Weemer were ordered by Sgt. Jose Nazario to kill the prisoners as the Marines swept through a neighborhood in Fallouja in late 2004.
Several minutes of the tape were played at the hearing for Weemer, who faces murder and dereliction of duty charges. Nelson faces similar charges, and Nazario faces manslaughter charges in federal court in Riverside.
Nelson told the investigator that Nazario told him, “I’m not doing all this [expletive] by myself. You’re doing one and Weemer is doing one.”
Nelson said that he watched in shock as Nazario shot a kneeling prisoner at point-blank range: “He hit the dude in the forehead, the dude went down and there was blood . . . all over his [Nazario’s] boots.”
Weemer then used his service pistol to shoot one of the prisoners, Nelson said. “He shot him and the dude was on the ground and rolling and [Weemer] was shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting.”
The case began when Weemer, who had left the Marine Corps, told a job interviewer from the Secret Service about the killings. The Marine Corps recalled him to active-duty so he could be charged.
Nelson and Weemer, in their interviews, said that Nazario ordered the killings after getting a radio message from a superior that ordered the Marines not to take time to process the prisoners according to the rules. The Marines were needed to support other Marines sweeping through the insurgent-held city, Weemer said in his interview.
A hearing officer, at the conclusion of the preliminary hearing, will recommend to Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland whether the case should go to court martial, be dropped or be handled through an administrative procedure.
After seeing Weemer and Nazario shot prisoners, Nelson said he lost his reluctance to join in the killings. “I said [expletive] and I shot my dude.”
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
Bosnia remembers Srebrenica victims
July 12, 2008| Al Jazeera, July 11, 2008 | |||
Some 30,000 Muslims from across Bosnia have gathered to remember the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and bury the remains of more than 300 newly identified victims. The funeral ceremony for the 308 Muslims, who were among 8,000 killed in Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II, was held at a memorial site just outside the eastern town. The remains of the victims, aged between 15 and 84, were exhumed from mass graves after the end of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war and identified by DNA analysis. “It was so hard when they informed me that my father has been identified,”Vanesa Mehmedovic, who is to bury her father Mevludin, said. “However, since he is not with us in a way, I’m glad that his soul will finally find peace,” she said. Symbolic march Almost 220 buses ferrying around 10,000 people converged on Srebrenica, while many more arrrived in other vehicles, organisers said. The commemoration was held amid fears of possible anti-Muslim violence due to Bosnian Serb anger with a UN court’s decision last week to clear Naser Oric, the former commander of Muslim forces in Srebrenica, of war crimes. Refik Dervisevic, a massacre survivor, arrived in Srebrenica late Thursday after taking part in a 100-kilometre “March of Peace”. Some 2,000 people participated in the symbolic march from the village of Nezuk, near the eastern town of Tuzla, to Srebrenica, the route taken by many Muslims seeking to flee Serb forces. “This is the third time that I am taking part in the march,” Dervisevic said. “The first time I did not remember anything. I was just walking being haunted by thoughts. “Last year I remembered the details from July 1995. I saw the place where I separated from my brother who was killed.” So far some 2,900 Srebrenica victims have been buried at the memorial built in 2003. Thousands of others are yet to be exhumed and identified in the area, where around 70 mass graves have been uncovered. Act of genocide Near the end of Bosnia’s war, Serb forces overran the then UN-protected enclave summarily killing some 8,000 Muslim men and boys. The International court of justice and the UN war crimes tribunal, both based in The Hague, have ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide. The alleged masterminds, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, are still at large. “It’s a shame that 13 years after what has happened in Srebrenica and after the end of the war, Karadzic and Mladic are not arrested,” the Dnevni Avaz daily newspaper quoted John Williamson, the US war crimes ambassador, as saying. “We will continue to urge the leaders in the region to do everything they can to make fugitives face justice and I’m sure that they will be arrested,” Williamson, who also attended the commemoration., said. His words were echoed by the victims’ relatives. “We are still fighting to prove to the world what has happened here while those who are the most responsible for the crime are being rewarded with freedom,” Munira Subasic, head of an association of Srebrenica mothers, said. Srebrenica remains a part of the Serb-run entity of Republika Srpska, which along with the Muslim-Croat Federation makes up post-war Bosnia. |
Peace and Justice Post 