No Dictation

I forgot to publish this page! It is from June, and so much happens week to week I can not keep up.

This series by McClatchy News is devastating. With all the evidence coming out that torture and murder of detainees is well known, where is our TV News? Talking about another domestic murder but never this outrage.

Here is the link to the 5 part series: www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/
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General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes
Posted on Wed, Jun. 18, 2008

General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 18, 2008 08:34:09 PM

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.

Taguba didn’t respond to a request for further comment relayed via a spokesman.

The group Physicians for Human Rights, which compiled the new report, described it as the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date.

Doctors and mental health experts examined 11 detainees held for long periods in the prison system that President Bush established after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. All of them eventually were released without charges.
More at McClatchyDC.com
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Posted on Sun, Jun. 15, 2008

America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men

Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 14, 2008 10:50:09 PM

GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

They shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as “the worst of the worst.”

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

“He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government,” a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

More at MclatchyDC.com
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Also check out the “More on this Story” links. This is a very important series.

This came out on my birthday, the 20th, so it is a bit behind. I have been listening to Robert Kennedy Jr. and Mike Pappantino talk about it on Ring of Fire on Air America radio. I have to post this. It speaks to everything that is going on.

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

Read more

Keith Olberman and Jonathan Turley

War crimes? Yes…

When the Bush administration talks about “immunity”, it is themselves they are worried about. Most of the “detainees” are innocent people picked up randomly, or as in this case, turned in for cash or favors. Even when their innocence has been accepted and confirmed by our own intelligence services, the American torture system does not know what to do with these traumatized people.

It is coming out and it is ugly. Any American citizen that still fools themselves that Guantanamo only holds “bad actors”, as Cheney likes to say, must be deliberately planted head first in sand… or too distracted, texting in their choice for American Idol.

Only the delirium of nationalistic fever could create this nightmare.

The war on terror is hogwash, and the evening news is like coming attractions for Orwell’s Hate Night.

“Radical Shia blah blah blah” “Radical Insurgant blah blah blah”…

Angry men with guns? Yes.

What if the Iraqis freed us from Bush? He does have weapons of etc. etc., he is an eminent threat. What if they built a green zone around Washington?

What would they be calling you?

I would be “Radical Jewish Catholic Female”…

The biggest impediment to war is the compassion of the American people. That compassion has been exploited and misdirected. The war must be kept noble and worthy until the Oil Law is signed, OOPS I mean the BENCH MARKS… the bench marks have been reached. Once that happens the entire narrative will be different.

Dick Kazan, on his blog The Ramblings of a Sane Man (www.SaneRamblings.com), writes an excellent scenario of what the story would look like if it were reversed.