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Banned
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The NY Times is two days late, but IMO, they finally "came through" with something to post as a "bookend" to this thread's OP:
<b>(I'm going to post it and then add footnotes that point to article excerpts from my research....please check back later if your are interested.)</b> We are witnessing a series of speeches from the mouth of a lying POTUS who appears to be attempting to terrorize us, "his own people", in a desperate attempt to influence his political party's performance in the elections, less than 60 days from now, and to lift his own job approval and credibility polling numbers, out of the shitter!
So what I think that we've got going on is.....a POTUS who is a liar about the very circumstances that he is describing in order to legitimize the human rights and the constituional crimes that he has already authorized, and scare the shit out of us to persuade us to cede more power, at the expense of our own constitutionally guaranteed protections against abuses by governments, such as....<b>his !</b> He has bolstered the case for trying him and his "underlings" for crimes against humanity and against the constitution of the United States<b>[5]</b>.....and he's committed these crimes, IMO, without increasing our national security....quite the contrary, actually:
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/wa...n/08intel.html
September 8, 2006
The Intelligence Agency
Questions Raised About Bush’s Primary Claims in Defense of Secret Detention System
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — In defending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret network of prisons on Wednesday, President Bush said the detention system had used lawful interrogation techniques, was fully described to select members of Congress and led directly to the capture of a string of terrorists over the past four years.
<b>A review of public documents and interviews with American officials raises questions about Mr. Bush’s claims on all three fronts.</b>
Mr. Bush described the interrogation techniques used on the C.I.A. prisoners as having been “safe, lawful and effective,” and he asserted that torture had not been used. But the Bush administration has yet to make public the legal papers prepared by government lawyers that served as the basis for its determination that those procedures did not violate American or international law.
The president said the Department of Justice approved a set of aggressive interrogation practices for C.I.A. detainees in 2002 after milder ones proved ineffective on Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders taken into custody.
Current and former government officials said that specific interrogation methods were addressed in a series of documents, including an August 2002 memorandum by the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.’s use of 20 interrogation practices.
The August 2002 document, which was leaked to reporters in 2004, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death” could be allowable without being considered torture.
The memorandum was repudiated in another Justice Department document at the end of 2004, and Congressional officials said on Thursday that they had not received documents from the administration explaining the legal underpinnings of the program.
One prisoner is known to have died in Afghanistan after interrogation by a C.I.A. contract employee, but the agency has distanced itself from that episode, and the former employee was convicted on assault charges last month in federal court in North Carolina.
Some lawmakers questioned Mr. Bush’s claims that his administration fully briefed some members of Congress on details of the secret detention program.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had “withheld details of the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program from the Congressional intelligence committees.”
Congressional officials said on Thursday that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed about the existence of the C.I.A. detention program but was not informed about the locations of the secret prisons.
Public documents show that some of the information that led to the arrests of senior terrorism plotters like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh was known before the C.I.A. detained its first prisoner, Mr. Zubaydah, in the spring of 2002.<b>[3]</b>
Mr. Bush said it was Mr. Zubaydah who disclosed to C.I.A. interrogators that Mr. Mohammed was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and often used the alias Mukhtar, sometimes spelled Muktar.
“This was a vital piece of intelligence that helped our intelligence community pursue K.S.M.,” Mr. Bush said, referring to the terror suspect by his initials.
The report of the Sept. 11 commission said that the C.I.A. knew of the moniker for Mr. Mohammed months before the capture of Mr. Zubaydah.
According to the report, the C.I.A. unit given the task of tracking Osama bin Laden had intercepted a cable on Aug. 28, 2001, that revealed the alias of Mr. Mohammed.
Mr. Bush also said it was the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah that identified Mr. bin al-Shibh as an accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks.
American officials had identified Mr. bin al-Shibh’s role in the attacks months before Mr. Zubaydah’s capture. A December 2001 federal grand jury indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, said that Mr. Moussaoui had received money from Mr. bin al-Shibh and that Mr. bin al-Shibh had shared an apartment with Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot.
A C.I.A. spokesman said Thursday that the agency had vetted the president’s speech and stood by its accuracy.
“Abu Zubaydah was the authoritative source who identified Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9/11 and the man behind the nickname Muktar,” the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said in a statement. “His position in Al Qaeda — his access to terrorist secrets — gave his reporting exceptional weight and it gave C.I.A. insights that were truly unique and vital. Abu Zubaydah not only identified Ramzi Bin al-Shibh as a 9/11 accomplice — something that had been done before — he provided information that helped lead to his capture.”
Besides the 14 prisoners identified on Wednesday, some officials and human rights advocates questioned the fate of dozens of others believed to have moved through the C.I.A. prison network over the past four years.
Human Rights Watch, in response to a request from The New York Times, provided a list of 14 men who the organization believes have been secretly detained since the Sept. 11 attacks and whose whereabouts are still unknown.
One of the men, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, is believed to have given false information about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda after C.I.A. officials transferred him to Egyptian custody in 2002. Mr. al-Libi’s statements were used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.
It emerged later that Mr. al-Libi had fabricated these stories while in captivity to avoid harsh treatment by his Egyptian captors.
Human Rights Watch has also identified 20 other men it said were at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and who the group believes were once in C.I.A. custody.
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<b>I'll organize what follows, ASAP. I just wanted to offer it to the few who are interested, as quickly as I could....</b>
Quote:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...31/1018/NEWS02
Shift on Suspect Is Linked to Role of Qaeda Figures
BY DOUGLAS JEHL AND ERIC LICHTBLAU
NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 - The Bush administration decided to charge Jose Padilla with less serious crimes because it was unwilling to allow testimony from two senior members of Al Qaeda who had been subjected to harsh questioning, current and former government officials said Wednesday.
The two senior members were the main sources linking Mr. Padilla to a plot to bomb targets in the United States, the officials said.
The Qaeda members were Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a top recruiter, who gave their accounts to American questioners in 2002 and 2003. The two continue to be held in secret prisons by the Central Intelligence Agency, whose internal reviews have raised questions about their treatment and credibility, the officials said.
One review, completed in spring 2004 by the C.I.A. inspector general, found that Mr. Mohammed had been subjected to excessive use of a technique involving near drowning in the first months after his capture, American intelligence officials said.
Another review, completed in April 2003 by American intelligence agencies shortly after Mr. Mohammed's capture, assessed the quality of his information from initial questioning as "Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies."
Accusations about plots to set off a "dirty bomb" and use natural gas lines to bomb American apartment buildings had featured prominently in past administration statements about Mr. Padilla, an American who had been held in military custody for more than three years after his arrest in May 2002.
But they were not mentioned in his criminal indictment on lesser charges of support to terrorism that were made public on Tuesday. The decision not to charge him criminally in connection with the more far-ranging bomb plots was prompted by the conclusion that Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Zubaydah could almost certainly not be used as witnesses, because that could expose classified information and could open up charges from defense lawyers that their earlier statements were a result of torture, officials said......
.........The C.I.A. has not acknowledged that it holds Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Zubaydah, and the locations of their prisons remain unknown. The two were identified in the report completed in 2004 by the Sept. 11 commission as being among a small group of so-called high-value terror suspects held at undisclosed sites overseas. The C.I.A. has in custody two dozen to three dozen such prisoners, and more than 100 others have been transferred by the agency from one foreign country to another, a process called rendition, officials have said.
The United States has never publicly identified Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Zubaydah as having provided the critical information against Mr. Padilla. A seven-page statement that the Justice Department declassified in June 2004 identified the two main witnesses only as "senior Al Qaeda detainee No. 1" and "senior Al Qaeda detainee No. 2."
But the statement provided detailed information about the interactions of Mr. Zubaydah and Mr. Mohammed with Mr. Padilla in Pakistan and Afghanistan after Sept. 11, and the current and former officials said the unnamed detainees were in fact those two senior Qaeda officials.
The fact that the C.I.A. inspector general's report criticized as excessive the use of interrogation techniques on Mr. Mohammed had not previously been disclosed. A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined on Wednesday to comment on any inspector general's report describing him.
A senior American official said, "There has been no reason to doubt that the accusations against Padilla in relation to the bombing plot were genuine."
The official said the administration had determined that concerns about subjecting Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Zubaydah to cross-examination by defense lawyers would be insurmountable.
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Quote:
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/...d504955a92&p=1
Harkat informant called 'insane'
Terrorism suspect freed on bail; expert attacks accuser's credibility
Ian MacLeod, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, June 22, 2006
Suspected Ottawa terrorist Mohamed Harkat was freed on bail yesterday as evidence emerged that a former "high-ranking" al-Qaeda informant who triggered his arrest was, in fact, a relatively minor and "certifiably insane" operative.
What's more, Abu Zubaydah only revealed his information, including now questionable details about supposed al-Qaeda plots against the United States, while being tortured by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators.
The revelations by senior Federal Bureau of Investigation and CIA officials are contained in The One Percent Doctrine, a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. journalist and author Ron Suskind.
Though it does not mention Mr. Zubaydah's tip about Mr. Harkat, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has confirmed he identified Mr. Harkat as the former operator of a guest house in the Pakistani city of Peshawar for extremists travelling to Chechnya. Mr. Harkat has denied any connection to Mr. Zubaydah.
It is not known what other incriminating information Canadian authorities have against him.
Yet even before Mr. Harkat's December 2002 arrest and detention on a government-issued security certificate, there were serious doubts within the FBI and CIA about Mr. Zubaydah's credibility, according to the book.
Their apprehensions and that "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and leap, screaming, at every word he uttered," were ignored by senior White House officials who wanted to publicly trumpet Mr. Zubaydah's March 2002 capture in Pakistan as a major coup for the "war on terror," writes Mr. Suskind.
But Mr. Zubaydah was little more than a "travel agent" for al-Qaeda operatives moving around the globe and had no operational role, says the book.
Quoting an unnamed top CIA official, it describes a high-level meeting at CIA headquarters:
"Around the room, a lot of people just rolled eyes when we heard comments from the White House. I mean, (President George W.) Bush and (Vice-President Dick) Cheney knew what we knew about Zubaydah. The guy had psychological issues. He was in a way, expendable. It was like calling someone who runs a company's in-house travel department the COO (chief operating officer). The thinking was, why the hell did the president have to put us in this box?"
Mr. Harkat's lawyer, Matt Webber, yesterday said the book's assertions about Mr. Zubaydah credibility are "quite staggering.
"It goes to show just how unreliable some of the (intelligence) information is. How could this have ever been presented as a reliable source of information in light of this?"
In March 2002, nine months before Mr. Harkat's arrest, Mr. Zubaydah was captured by CIA, FBI and Pakistani intelligence officers at his home in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Authorities, writes Mr. Suskind, believed he was an important, but mysterious player in al-Qaeda.
Counter-terrorism intelligence over the previous two years had picked up numerous references to the 30-year-old Saudi-born Palestinian. "His name was intoned by operatives at all levels, by new recruits, by foot soldiers, and wannabes throughout South Asia and the Mideast. It wasn't always clear what Zubaydah was doing, or where he fit in the wider organization. Just that he seemed to connect people."....
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...602142_pf.html
Secret World of Detainees Grows More Public
By Dan Eggen and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 7, 2006; A18
....The DNI documents portray the capture and intermittent interrogations of Zubaida as crucial to unraveling much of what the government knows about the Sept. 11 attacks and the internal operations of al-Qaeda. But some of the portrayal appears to be at odds with other published reports, and intelligence sources indicated yesterday that Zubaida's case is more complicated than the administration let on.
Zubaida "was wounded in the capture operation" in Pakistan in March 2002, and "likely would have died" if the CIA had not provided medical attention, according to the documents. <b>During an initial interrogation, he provided information "that he probably viewed as nominal," but which included identifying Mohammed as the Sept. 11 mastermind who used the nickname "Mukhtar," the documents say. The information "opened up new leads" that eventually resulted in Mohammed's capture, the documents say.
But in his recent book, "The One Percent Doctrine," Ron Suskind reported that a tipster led the CIA directly to Mohammed and subsequently collected a $25 million reward. Intelligence sources said yesterday that Suskind's description is correct but that Zubaida's information was also helpful.</b>
<b>What the DNI documents also do not mention is that the CIA had identified Mohammed's nickname in August 2001, according to the Sept. 11 commission report.</b> The commission found that the agency failed to connect the information with previous intelligence identifying Mukhtar as an al-Qaeda associate plotting terrorist attacks, and identified that failure as one of the crucial missed opportunities before Sept. 11.
When Zubaida refused to provide further information, the CIA designed a new interrogation program that would be "safe, effective and legal," the DNI documents say, leading to "accurate and highly actionable intelligence" that led to the capture of Binalshibh........
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Quote:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...itroom.02.html
THE SITUATION ROOM
Interview With Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; U.S. Soldiers' Bodies Found Mutilated in Iraq; Interview With Author Ron Suskind; Data Brokers Selling Personal Phone Records
Aired June 20, 2006 - 17:00 ET
......BLITZER: There's controversy emerging right now about your reporting involving Abu Zubaydah. Remind our viewers who he was.
SUSKIND: Abu Zubaydah is the first major capture of the war on terror. He's picked up in Pakistan in March of 2003. And of course, at this point we hadn't gotten bin Laden or Zawahiri or any of the major players. There was great need by the administration to say we got somebody.
And of course, when we got Zubaydah they trumpeted it far and wide. He is an operational chief. He's the No. 3. Meanwhile, inside of FBI and CIA they were looking at the real evidence of the capture, including a diary that Zubaydah had written across 10 years, where essentially he presents himself as three different characters with all sorts of little crazy details about life and who's eating what and who's saying what.
Zubaydah, according to analysts in both CIA and FBI, is insane, is schizophrenic, is certifiably split personality. And more than that, he is largely the travel agent. That's why he kept popping up on signal intelligence. He's moving people around. He's paying bills...
BLITZER: There are former intelligence -- high-ranking intelligence analysts out there, because we've spoken to some, who say that, you know what, he did provide some useful information and still provides some useful information.
SUSKIND: I show in the book exactly the useful information he provided, and at the same time <b>I show that essentially what happened is we tortured an insane man and jumped screaming at every word he uttered, most of them which were nonsense...</b>
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<b>[3]</b>The following disclosures about Ramzi al-Shibh was reported five years ago, in Sept., 2001, six full months before Zubadayah was captured, at the end of march, 2002. In Bush's Sept. 6, 2006 speech, he said:
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...A00894D9404482
http://hatemonitor.csusb.edu/NewsHea...ws_briefs.html {Loc. not far from top of page.)
International Arrests Made
The pursuit of the network behind the terrorist attacks in the United States spread across Europe today, with arrests of four people in Britain and seven men in France and the issuing of two arrest warrants in Germany.
Prime Minister Abd al-Qadir Ba Jamal of Yemen announced the detention of 21 men for questioning about their possible links to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fugitive who is the prime suspect in the attacks.
President Alejandro Toledo of Peru announced the detention of three men of Middle Eastern descent for potential links to international terror.
The British arrests were by the antiterrorist police, according to Scotland Yard, which said that two men and a woman, all in their 20's, had been arrested at two houses in West London. A fourth person, a man, was arrested in Birmingham, England. One of the unnamed persons has since been released after questioning. No further details were given.
In Germany, the arrest warrants were for two men who had signed a lease on an apartment and apparently lived with Mohamed Atta, a civil engineer who was said to be a hijacker on one of the planes that plowed into the World Trade Center. They have each been charged with 5000 counts of murder by German authorities.
"The German-based terrorist organization that was involved in the attacks on Sept. 11 is slowly getting a face, and with that names," the federal prosecutor of Germany, Kay Nehm, said today. One man being sought, Said Bahaji, paid the rent on the apartment, in Hamburg, and left Germany for Pakistan a week before the attacks, according to Nehm.
The actions by the German authorities are directly linked to the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the abortive hijacking of a plane which crashed near Pittsburgh. Bahaji and the other man named,<b>Ramzi Muhammad Abdullah bin al-Shibh,<b> had links to the hijackers and were guilty of "grave crimes," Nehm said.
At one time, the two shared an apartment in Hamburg with Atta, who was said to be the head of the cell that commandeered the first plane to hit the trade center. Bahaji paid the rent, and Atta and bin al-Shibh paid their shares to him, the prosecutor said. On the bank transfer forms, on the line after "purpose of payment," they wrote, "Dar al-Ansar," which in Arabic means "house of supporters," Nehm said.
Last August or September, bin al-Shibh asked to enroll in a pilot's course at a flight school in Florida and sent $2,200, Nehm said. Al—Shibh could not obtain a visa and did not go to flight school
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<b>[3]</b>An FBI agent, Dennis Lormel, told a congressional committee about Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, 45 days <b>before</b> Zubadayah was captured!
Quote:
http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress02/lormel021202.htm
Testimony of Dennis M. Lormel, Chief, Financial Crimes Section, FBI
Before the House Committee on Financial Services, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
February 12, 2002
Financing Patterns Associated with Al Qaeda and Global Terrorist Networks
....Sleeper Cells
One pattern of terrorist financing that has emerged involves Al Qaeda cells in Europe.....
.....The FRG has conducted extensive analysis related to the Al Qaeda cell that was based in Germany which included among its members <b>Ramzi Bin al-Shibh</b> and hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwin Al-Shehhi. This analysis was instrumental in linking the hijackers and their ties to Al Qaeda, determining the support it provided to the events of September 11th, and establishing other ties to the Al Qaeda organization. It also established links between the German cell, the hijackers and Zacarias Moussaoui that contributed to the indictment of Moussaoui for his role in the September 11th attacks. This analysis included tracing wire transfers from Bin al-Shibh to Moussaoui. FRG financial investigation has also helped establish links between Moussaoui and an Al Qaeda cell in Malaysia. Authorities in Malaysia have arrested and charged a number of the members of this cell. It should be noted that <b>Bin al-Shibh</b> was one of the five terrorists appearing in videos recovered from an Al Qaeda location in Afghanistan which were recently released by the DOJ. The videos appear to show <b>Bin al-Shibh</b> and the others discussing preparations to commit terrorist acts. The FRG is conducting financial investigations on the other four terrorists featured in the videos in order to help track them down.....
In addition, the FRG is conducting financial investigations involving hundreds of subjects associated with terrorism investigations being conducted in various foreign countries in an effort to identify, track, and locate associates, funding sources, other cell members, etc.
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<b>[5]</b>
Quote:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...JiN2RlZGQyYjY=
August 7, 2006 6:17 AM
The Democrats’ Impeachment Road Map
It’s finished, ready to go — and waiting for November.
By Byron York
......And key elements of the president’s case for war, Conyers says, violated yet another statute. “We have found that President Bush and members of his administration made numerous false statements that Iraq had sought to acquire enriched uranium from Niger,” the report continues. “In particular, President Bush’s statements and certifications before and to Congress may constitute Making a False Statement to Congress in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1001.”
In the next section of the report, Conyers alleges that the administration, in its treatment of prisoners, both in Iraq and in the broader war on terror, has violated three laws:
Anti-Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. 2340-40A)
The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441)
Material Witness (18 U.S.C. 3144)
Conyers suggests that American officials might be tried under the War Crimes Act for “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and might also be liable under the Anti-Torture Statute. “Those who order torture, or in other ways conspire to commit torture, can be held criminally liable under this statute,” the report says. “The statue doesn’t require a person to actually commit torture with his own hands.” Conyers singles out the two attorneys general of the Bush presidency, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, as potential targets of prosecution........
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<b>[5]</b>
Quote:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/063...f,74085,6.html
Liberty Beat
Brutal Chain of Command
Harsh light from the Supreme Court on White House war crimes against detainees everywhere
by Nat Hentoff
August 6th, 2006 12:18 PM
[The detainee] was stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed . . . with very cold hoses in February. At night it was very cold. . . . He was completely naked in the mud, you know. . . . [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put next to an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was put back in the mud and sprayed. This happened all night. Everybody knew about it. — An interrogator with the special military and CIA task force at Camp Nama, Baghdad, quoted in a new 53-page Human Rights Watch report, "No Blood, No Foul: Soldiers' Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq From 2003-2005."
With war in the Mideast and civil war in Iraq, the June Supreme Court decision Hamdan v. Rumsfeld telling the president he does not have the "inherent" constitutional power to make up the law as he goes along with regard to our prisonershas lost traction in the news.
But in the weeks and months ahead, you'll be seeing and hearing a lot about a part of the ruling that especially alarmed the president, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and the Republican leadership in Congress.
In addition to telling George Bush's lawyers that the Guantánamo military commissions they invented outside our laws do not measure up to "all the judicial guarantees recognized as indispensable by civilized persons," <b>the Supreme Court's most shameful instruction to the administration was that, in the way it treats its prisoners anywhere in the world, the standard must be Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, to which this country is a signatory.
For those not aware of the very specific protections in Article 3 that set a minimal standard for prisoners whether or not they are part of a national armythey mandate that all detainees "in all circumstances be treated humanely."</b>
The president, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al. assure the world that we do just that and nobody anywhere believes them. But Article 3 goes much deeper than treating prisoners "humanely," prohibiting "at any time and in any place what- soever . . . violence to life and person [of detainees]in particular, murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture, [and]outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." (Emphases added.)
Moreover, in "No Blood, No Foul"—a report based largely on firsthand accounts by U.S. military personnel in Iraq who, like all our military there, were told by Bush and Rumsfeld the Geneva Conventions did not apply to their prisoners—Human Rights Watch emphasizes that the chain of command, all the way to the top, is accountable for what has been done to detainees because:
"Acts of torture and other mistreatment . . . constituted grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. <b>The United States is bound to investigate and prosecute grave breaches that are committed by U.S. personnel in Iraq. The Geneva Conventions impose on the United States an obligation to 'search for persons alleged to have committed, or to [have ordered] to be committed, grave breaches and to prosecute them.' "</b>
An independent prosecutor—if Congress ever appoints one—won't have any difficulty finding "grave breaches" by the White House, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department, going back to 2002.
This so far mythical prosecutor will be relying not only on Article 3 (common to the various Geneva Conventions of 1949) but also on an American law, the War Crimes Act of 1996. That statute forbids any U.S. personnel from committing any of the crimes listed in that statute. One of them is perpetrating "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions.
If an investigation of the chain of command happens, it would be one hell of a revelation, with reams of documented reports, including testimony by army personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, searches by human rights organizations, complaints by FBI agents on the scene, the many pages of facts on the ground obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act, and testimony by many of the actual survivors of these "grave breaches."
In the imminent national midterm political campaigns—and the presidential tournament two years from now—do you think Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, the Wizard of Oz money man George Soros, and other chieftains of the Democratic Party will persistently focus on the need for a truly independent inquiry into this administration's routine, systemic violations of Common Article 3? Ask your Democratic representatives in the House and Senate!
In the recent, nationally covered Democratic primary in Connecticut, focusing on beleaguered Joe Lieberman—billed as a "battle for the soul of the Democratic Party"—I haven't seen or heard any mention of the torture and other "humiliating and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners" in Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone a demand for breaking down the doors of the CIA's secret prisons in various parts of the world. (Surely some of the treatments there are, at the least, degrading.)
The author of "No Blood, No Foul" (see hrw.org) is the invaluable John Sifton, senior researcher on terrorism and counter-terrorism at the organization. "It is now clear," he says, "that leaders were responsible for abuses that occurred in Iraq. It's time for them to be held accountable."
By whom?
Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was the victim of a CIA "rendition"—not as usual, to a foreign country to be tortured, but to the CIA's own "Salt Pit" interrogation center in Afghanistan. He remembers that during his brutal interrogation there, "they told me that I was now in a country with no laws, and did I understand what that meant?"
Those interrogators were citizens not of Afghanistan but of the United States. <b>As you read this, the Bush administration is devising ways to persuade Congress to let it weasel out of the Supreme Court's findings in Hamdan v. Rumsfeldthat George W. Bush has been creating, with regard to his treatment of detainees, a country with no laws.</b>
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<b>[5]</b>
Quote:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index...pen&of=ENG-332
LIBRARY CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
AI Index: EUR 63/008/1996 1 March 1996
AI Index: EUR 63/08/96
BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
THE DUTY TO SEARCH FOR
WAR CRIMES SUSPECTS:
......Amnesty International welcomes the recent announcement that IFOR is now informing its personnel of the identities of people who have been indicted by the Tribunal by providing them with photographs of some of the accused and instructing them to arrest any accused they happen to encounter, if feasible. This step, however, fails to fulfil state obligations to search for, arrest and bring to justice those responsible for grave breaches of the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 for the Protection of War Victims and its Additional Protocol I.
The refusal to search for people who have been indicted by the Tribunal for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions is a clear violation of international law. <b>All the states contributing troops to IFOR are state parties or succesor state-parties to the Geneva Conventions and each is therefore obliged to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts, the courts of another state or an international criminal court</b> (Geneva Convention No. I, Art. 49; Geneva Convention No. II, Art. 50; Geneva Convention No. III, Art. 129; Geneva Convention No. IV, Art. 146). This obligation applies in all cases, not just when the Tribunal or a national court has indicted an accused or asked for a suspect to be provisionally arrested. Thus, the duty to search for people suspected of having committed or having ordered to be committed such grave breaches is independent of any action taken by the Tribunal or a national court. The Geneva Conventions expressly provide that states parties to the Geneva Conventions may not absolve themselves of any liability which they or other states parties have incurred in respect of grave breaches (Geneva Convention No. I, Art. 51; Geneva Convention No. II, Art. 52; Geneva Convention No. III, Art. 131; Geneva Convention No. IV, Art. 148). The official commentary by the International Committee of the Red Cross makes clear that this common provision removes any doubt that the duty to prosecute and punish the authors of grave breaches is absolute.
The refusal to search for people who have been indicted by the Tribunal also violates troop-contributing states legal obligations to implement Security Council Resolution 827 of 25 May 1993 establishing the Tribunal. That resolution requires all states to cooperate fully with the International Tribunal and to take any measures necessary to implement the resolution, including compliance with Tribunal orders or requests for assistance. There are no exceptions........
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Last edited by host; 09-08-2006 at 10:14 AM..
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