Peace and Justice Post

The many reasons this torture evidence was too hot to handle

By Nat Hentoff

17/01/08 “Village Voice” — – So what was on those videotapes destroyed by the CIA? Let’s put a face to it. Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and, after being shot in the groin while trying to escape, was sent to recover in a CIA secret prison. He would be the first of the CIA’s many “ghost prisoners”—and also the first to test the value of what the president has often described as an “alternative set of [interrogation] procedures . . . that are safe and necessary.”
As described by Ron Suskind in The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 , Zubaydah—held in an ice-cold cell—was denied medication for his wounds, threatened with death, prevented from sleeping, incessantly blasted with pounding rock music (by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others), and, at last, waterboarded. After 30 seconds of feeling that he was on the verge of drowning, he was more than eager to answer any questions.

Continued . . .

RINF.com, January 18, 2008

The US Defense Secretary says his country is trying to understand ground realities before taking any action inside northwestern Pakistan.

“We’re trying to make sure we understand the ground truth before we take any action so that it is not be misperceived,” The Daily Times quoted Robert Gates as saying.

“We’re assessing what value we could have, or any other ally could have, in contributing to their security,” he added.

“This has always been an area that has not been fully under the control of the Pakistani government or where there has been a significant military presence,” he added.

Washington is reportedly considering military operations inside Pakistan allegedly to hunt militants who use the country’s tribal regions as hideouts.

US-led forces have already launched several air strikes on North Waziristan and in the Bajaur tribal area, killing dozens of civilians.

JR/ RE

UK Indymedia

World’s Silence Is Deafening | 19.01.2008 23:15

ALERT: Annapolis a Charade: Israel Plots Massive Aggression

It’s interesting to note that, while the Plant Spammed the site again, pretending to be someone else reposting old articles, he glaringly eliminates certain stories.

The timing is interesting, given the upcoming “Annapolis Conference”, which serves to be about PR alone, as Olmert has already ruled out any Negotiations or Compromise in the name of peace.

If you follow the events surrounding Israel’s “Disengagement” from Gaza, you will quickly understand that this was the plan all along. While Israel was making a public spectacle of “forcing Jews to leave their homes”, it was quietly surrounding the Strip with artillery emplacements, in an operation ominously named “First Rain”.

Under this operation, Gaza basically became a “Free-Fire Zone”, and several artillery and gunship strikes killed a high number of civilians. Finally, when one of these batteries fired upon and murdered a Palestinian family – picnicking on a beach that had been Segregated “Jews Only” only weeks before, Hamas finally decided to call an end to its unilateral, two-year cease-fire.

Continued . . . 

Counter-terrorism alert as a Dutch right-winger launches a movie that will denounce the Koran

Jason Burke, Europe editor
Sunday January 20, 2008
The Observer

The Dutch government is bracing itself for violent protests following the scheduled broadcast this week of a provocative anti-Muslim film by a radical right-wing politician who has threatened to broadcast images of the Koran being torn up and otherwise desecrated.

Cabinet ministers and officials, fearing a repetition of the crisis sparked by the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper two years ago, have held a series of crisis meetings and ordered counter-terrorist services to draw up security plans. Dutch nationals overseas have been asked to register with their embassies and local mayors in the Netherlands have been put on standby.

Continued . . .

Reuters, January 17, 2008

OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) – An official Canadian government document has put both the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners run the risk of being tortured, CTV television reported on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch U.S. ally.

The document mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

CTV said the document was part of a course on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats to help them determine whether prisoners they visited abroad had been mistreated.

It said the document mentioned U.S. interrogation techniques such as “forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation.”

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran and Afghanistan, CTV said.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier tried to distance Ottawa from the document.

“The training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government,” he said.

The mention of Guantanamo Bay is particularly sensitive, since the Canadian government rejects allegations that a citizen may have been mistreated there.

Omar Khadr has been in the facility for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Right groups say Khadr should be repatriated to Canada, an idea that Ottawa firmly rejects.

A spokeswoman at the U.S. embassy said she was looking into the report. No one was immediately available for comment at the Israeli embassy.

The torture awareness course started after Ottawa was strongly criticised for the way it handled the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An inquiry into the case revealed that Canadian diplomats had not received any formal training into detecting whether detainees had been abused. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

The Independent, January 16, 2008

As a bomb explodes in Beirut and Israel kills 19 in Gaza raids, Bush takes his Middle East peace mission to Saudi Arabia (and signs off $20bn weapons deal with repressive regime)

By Robert Fisk

Leader and Vassal

By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, January 17, 2008

After pandering to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s right-wing government last week, US president George W. Bush carried the Israeli/neoconservative campaign against Iran to Arab countries. Sounding as authentic as the “Filipino Monkey,” Bush told the Arab countries that “Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and that “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere.”

To no effect. Every country in the world, except America, knows by now that the US is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegemony over the world threatens the security of nations everywhere. But before we get into this, let’s first see what Bush means by “terrorist” and Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.

Bush considers Iran to be the leading state sponsor of terror, because Iran is believed to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian ghetto. Hezbollah and Hamas are two organizations that exist because of Israeli aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. The two organizations are branded “terrorist” because they resist Israel’s theft of Palestine and Israel’s designs on southern Lebanon. Both organizations are resistance organizations. They resist Israel’s territorial expansion and this makes them “terrorist.”

Keep reading . . .

The story that the Pentagon presented to the world through the news media a week ago about the naval encounter with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz has now largely unraveled. We now know the following:

– the audio threats that appeared on the Pentagon video were spliced in.

– the Pentagon cannot say where the threats came from.

– it is now almost certain that the audio threats did not come from the Iranian boats. The radio channel on which the threat was picked up is well-known to contain “heckling” by unknown parties. The audio doesn’t have the noise that one would expect if it came from the moving Iranian boats. Farsi speakers and Iranians told the Washington Post the voice did not sound Iranian. (This was all reported last week.)

– it is not true that the U.S. was “about to fire” on the Iranian boats.

– whatever happened, it appears to not have been at all unprecedented in terms of naval encounters between the U.S. and Iran, and the immediate U.S. reaction following the incident suggests it was not initially perceived as being out of the ordinary. (These assertions are documented here.)

Therefore, a reasonable conclusion, based on what we now know, is that this was a manufactured incident, in the sense that the account that the Pentagon presented to the world through the media was significantly false, and they knew or should have known that it was significantly false when they presented it.

Continued . . .

Al Ahram 17-23 January 2008

Although the leader of the rightist opposition in Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, is known for his coldness and disinclination towards praising others, he departed from character when he gave his impression of his meeting with US President George W Bush at dawn last Thursday in Jerusalem. He expressed surprise over Bush’s insistence on putting an end to the “threat” represented by the Iranian nuclear programme — that Israeli strategists say threatens Israel in particular — as well as Bush’s insistence that Israel must strike the Palestinian resistance and “break its back”. “I came out of that meeting more reassured towards Bush’s determination to end the Iranian threat, and comfortable with his pledge to provide a cover for any military activity Israel might undertake in Gaza. If matters were left to this president, he would not allow any Palestinian terrorist to remain alive,” he told Hebrew- language Israeli radio Thursday morning.

Continued . . .