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host · 03-09-2006, 03:14 AM

Sorry to bring news that your "smokinggun" was discredited last year in the UK "ricin terrorists" trial. I wrote about it in a <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?p=1751493&highlight=ricin#post1751493">TFP thread</a> that you posted to, but you apparently didn't read the news articles that I linked to... in April, 2005, when it happened...it was well reported in the UK and in the US. The "manual" that you cite, was exposed as a US DOJ misinformation "OP". It was apparently actually compiled in the '80's, possibly by one of our own intelligence agencies....

Quote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/st...585130,00.html
The ricin ring that never was

Yesterday's trial collapse has exposed the deception behind attempts to link al-Qaida to a 'poison attack' on London

Duncan Campbell
Thursday April 14, 2005

......The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaida manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial for the first attack on the World Trade Centre. But it wasn't an al-Qaida manual. The name was invented by the US department of justice in 2001, and the contents were rushed on to the net to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act.

To show that the Jihad manual was written in the 1980s and the period of the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book called the Poisoner's Handbook, by Maxwell Hutchkinson.

We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist. An Asbo might be appropriate.

· Duncan Campbell is an investigative writer and a scientific expert witness on computers and telecommunications. He is author of War Plan UK and is not the Guardian journalist of the same name.

Mojo_PeiPei, you may come back with a response that "there are two manuals"...it is confusing. When the BS that you want to embrace comes from the UK or US intelligence and/or law enforcement communities as the "sole source", Who TF knows...? One thing to consider is that the "manual" that was discredited in a $50 million British prosecution, was reportedly found in "Manchester in 2000", was "named" by Ashcroft's DOJ in 2001, and was presented as evidence in a criminal trial in a US Federal Court in 2001.

The Ricin reciped in the "manual" has been convincingly discredited, and the "manual" is organized in a very similar way to the <a href="http://www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=98">SOA manuals</a> at the FT. Benning School. They've since changed the acronym to <a href="http://www.soaw.org/new/">"WHINSEC"</a> and it's still a terrorist training school, and "we" run it for the benefit of training security forces of repressive Latin American regimes.

Quote:

http://www.soaw.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=851
U.S. Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture

Saturday, September 21st 1996

Dana Priest, Washington Post

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer

U.S. Army intelligence manuals used to train Latin American military officers at an Army school from 1982 to 1991 advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion against insurgents, Pentagon documents released yesterday show.

Used in courses at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, the manual says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use “fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum,” according to a secret Defense Department summary of the manuals compiled during a 1992 investigation of the instructional material and also released yesterday.

A summary of the investigation and four pages of brief, translated excerpts from the seven Spanish-language manuals were released last night by the Defense Department, which recently has taken to making controversial information available in the evenings, after the deadlines of the prime-time network television news programs.

The Army School of the Americas, long located in Panama by moved in 1984 to Fort Benning, Ga., has trained nearly 60,000 military and police officers from Latin America and the United States since 1946.......

...and Mojo_PeiPei....it's my country, too...and sometimes....I'm ashamed to be an American....I envy you your "uncluttered" POV, but I've always been one to ask too many questions. My eyes are bloodshot from keepin' 'em "wide open".

Quote:

http://www.soaw.org/new/pressrelease.php?id=104
For Immediate Release: February 1st, 2006
Contact: Christy Pardew, 202.903.7257, media(at)soaw.org

Thirty-one Nonviolent Activists Sentenced to Prison in Columbus, Georgia

Two protestors over 80 years old headed to prison for actions opposing controversial Army training school

Columbus, GA – This week a federal judge in Columbus, Georgia sentenced 31 human rights activists to prison. Two of these individuals are over 80 years old; one is 19. The sentences come less than a week after a military jury in Colorado decided not to jail an Army interrogator even though they found him guilty of negligent homicide in the torture and killing of an Iraqi detainee. The 32 defendants were charged with trespass after peacefully walking onto the Fort Benning military base in protest of a controversial Army training school located there, and each person faced a maximum sentence of six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Those arrested were among 19,000 who gathered in November outside the gates of Fort Benning to demand a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy and the closure of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC). The demonstration was the 16th annual one organized by School of the Americas Watch, a faith- and conscience-based organization working to close the school.

“For eight years, I have been studying this issue and listening to the stories of those most affected by the School of the Americas,” said Delmar Schwaller, an 81-year-old World War II veteran and active community volunteer sentenced to two months in prison. “My prison sentence doesn’t change my feelings about my action. I know this was the right thing to do.”

The SOA/ WHINSEC made headlines in 1996 when the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Despite this admission and hundreds of documented human rights abuses connected to soldiers trained at the school, no independent investigation into the facility has ever taken place. New research confirms that the school continues to support known human rights abusers. Despite having been investigated by the United Nations for ordering the shooting of 16 indigenous peasants in El Salvador, Col. Francisco del Cid Diaz returned to SOA/ WHINSEC in 2003.

Judge Faircloth is known for handing down stiff sentences to opponents of the SOA/ WHINSEC. Since protests against the SOA/ WHINSEC began more than a decade ago, 183 people have served a total of over 81 years in prison for engaging in nonviolent resistance in a broad-based campaign to close the school........

Finally, your Quran "take" is inaccurate, according to numerous June 2005 reports, including this one, from Foxnews...(where do you "get" your news, anyway?)

Quote:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,158577,00.html
Pentagon: Urine Touched Koran at Gitmo
Saturday, June 04, 2005
WASHINGTON — U.S. military officials say no guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects flushed a detainee's Koran down the toilet, but they disclosed that a Muslim holy book was splashed with urine. In other newly disclosed incidents, a detainee's Koran was deliberately kicked and another's was stepped on.......
....Hood said he found no other record of this detainee mentioning any Koran mishandling. The detainee has since been released.

In the March incident, as described in the report, the guard had left his observation post to go outside to urinate. The wind blew his urine through an air vent into the cell block. The guard's supervisor reprimanded him and assigned him to gate guard duty, where he had no contact with detainees, for the rest of his assignment at Guantanamo Bay.

In another of the confirmed cases, a contract interrogator stepped on a detainee's Koran in July 2003 and then apologized. "The interrogator was later terminated for a pattern of unacceptable behavior, an inability to follow direct guidance and poor leadership," the Hood report said.

Hood also said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Korans. "These included using a Koran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Koran, attempting to flush a Koran down the toilet and urinating on the Koran," Hood's report said. It offered no possible explanation for the detainees' motives.

In the most recent of those 15 cases, a detainee on Feb. 18 allegedly ripped up his Koran and handed it to a guard, stating that he had given up on being a Muslim. Several guards witnessed this, Hood reported.

Last week, Hood disclosed he had confirmed five cases of mishandling of the Koran, but he refused to provide details. Allegations of Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay have led to anti-American passions in many Muslim nations, although Pentagon officials have insisted that the problems were relatively minor and that U.S. commanders have gone to great lengths to enable detainees to practice their religion in captivity.

The former commander at Gitmo, does not seem like an officer who prizes the truth or supports, in an honest and forthright manner, the troops who followed his orders:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011102502.html
General Asserts Right On Self-Incrimination In Iraq Abuse Cases

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 12, 2006; Page A01

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, a central figure in the U.S. detainee-abuse scandal, this week invoked his right not to incriminate himself in court-martial proceedings against two soldiers accused of using dogs to intimidate captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to lawyers involved in the case.

The move by Miller -- who once supervised the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and helped set up operations at Abu Ghraib -- is the first time the general has given an indication that he might have information that could implicate him in wrongdoing, according to military lawyers......

....Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington expert in military law, said that Miller's decision is "consistent with his being concerned that he may have some exposure to worry about." Fidell added: "It's very unusual for senior officers to invoke their Article 31 rights. The culture in the military tends to encourage cooperation rather than the opposite."

Miller has long been in the spotlight of the Abu Ghraib abuse investigations, largely because he was sent to the Iraq prison in August and September 2003 with the goal of streamlining its intelligence-gathering operations, using Guantanamo Bay, commonly called "Gitmo," as a model. Officers at Abu Ghraib have said that Miller wanted to "Gitmo-ize" the facility, and that harsh tactics migrated from the Cuba facility via "Tiger Teams" that Miller sent to Iraq as trainers.....

Mojo_PeiPei, as an aside, my wife and I have a son who serves on active duty in an elite US Military unit. His mother and I are intensly proud of him. We have even more reason to "stay informed", because of the service of this fine young man. Our soldier told me last summer, that "liberals like me (host)", are interfering with the military recruiting effort, because of our beliefs and our rhetoric. Facing several more years of active duty, I don't know if his POV is a curse or a blessing. He is a devoutly religious, intensely patriotic, and idealistic early twentysomething. He is, however, misinformed. I draw the line by not disclosing even half of what I post on these threads, to our soldier. The lies, false motives, and corruption of our failed, anti-constitutional leadership and congressional representatives is itself, almost too much to bear. The added pain that is a consequence of this, is the division in my own family that I suspect is mostly due to "catapulting the propaganda". I regret that I am not able to keep my entire family out of the way of "it" when it lands!