This is the eighth post in a series, posted on conjunction with BadGalsRadioon the subject of accountability of the Bush 43 administration and in support of Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry”. Links to our previous articles are at the bottom.
If you have read our posts up to now and watched the videos, you must realize that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of their administration have a whole lot of explaining to do as far as 9/11, the lies leading up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, domestic spying, the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, the use of torture, the further deregulation of what they have the gall to call “our financial system” and a whole gamut of other issues.
It appears then that rather than having to explain their deeds in a court of law (let’s not lose hope here), the boys have decided to publish their memoirs in book form.
Bush’s book tentatively titled Decision Points, is scheduled for a 2010 release by Crown.
Instead of telling his life story, Bush will concentrate on about a dozen personal and presidential choices, from giving up drinking (that was probably a mistake, as maybe he wouldn’t have committed all of those errors, while in a drunken stupor) to picking Dick Cheney as his vice president to sending troops to Iraq. He will also write about his relationship with family members, including his father, his religious faith and his disgraceful response to Hurricane Katrina.
We know that George W. Bush has had an extensive experience with books. This photo from the morning of September 11, 2001 is a case in point.
Financial details were not disclosed, although publishers have openly expressed doubt that Bush would receive the $15 million Clinton got for his memoir, My Life.
There are even rumors, that Bush asked Dick Cheney to write the book for him. Andy Borowitz writes: “according to sources close to the former president, Mr. Cheney was his second choice to write the memoir after Mr. Bush was turned down by his first choice, author James Frey.
Known for his reluctance to acknowledge mistakes, Bush said the book would include self-criticism, “Absolutely, yes,” but cautioned that “hindsight is very easy” and that he would make sure readers could view events as he saw them.
“I want to recreate what it was like, for example, right after 9/11,” he said, “and have people understand the emotions I felt and what others around me felt at the time.”
Asked if he might write about the ouster of his first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, or about his decision not to pardon Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, choices both openly disputed by Cheney, Bush said he didn’t know.
We suppose that if Cheney actually has anything to do with Bush’s book, those chapters may very well have the expected flavor.
Most top officials in the Bush administration, from Condie Rice to Karl Rove, have either completed their books or are in the midst of writing them. Dick Cheney has said he plans to pen a memoir and Laura Bush has a deal with Scribner.
Frankly, what could any of those books tell us that we already don’t know? Will they reveal the true events of 9/11, the “intelligence findings” about supposed WMD’s in Iraq, or how the administration has colluded with the Wall Street crooks? Those would be revelations of the first magnitude, but don’t expect to see any of them in any of these books.
Save your money and buy something actually worth reading and short of supporting Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry” and a much needed investigation by the Justice Department of the eight years of Bush’s and the neocons’ rule, we would much rather forget all of these distasteful characters and just wait for what history will really have to say about them.
This is the seventh post in a series, posted on conjunction with BadGalsRadioon the subject of accountability of the Bush 43 administration and in support of Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry”. Links to our previous articles are at the bottom.
President Obama needs to tell Attorney General Eric Holder to indict Dick Cheney, right now, for war crimes.
Just look at the statute, Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, Section 2441. It says that someone is guilty of a war crime if he or she commits a “grave breach of common Article 3” of the Geneva Conventions. And then it defines what a grave breach would be.
Supadubya [EXPLICIT LYRICS]
I absolutely suggest you watch this, cause these guys is throwin down hard as war. damn they absolutely must put out a cd when the trial starts. get them the crimes and let em rap it to Holder if nothing else works. he would have no choice but to tap his toe to this truthandlyrical assault on these Phucks. “Go Bwoys”
One such breach is torture, or the conspiracy to commit torture, which Cheney was clearly in on, as when he repeatedly defended waterboarding and talked about the need to go to the “dark side” Here’s the language from the statute: “The act of a person who commits, or conspires to commit, an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation, coercion, or any reason based on discrimination of any kind.”
Why Was This nutcase not already indicted ?
Another grave breach is “cruel or inhuman treatment,” or the conspiracy to inflict such treatment. Again, Cheney was supervising such treatment in the White House, which would qualify as committing this crime. One time, it got so ghoulish that Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the other principals, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
Here’s the language on “cruel or inhuman treatment”: “The act of a person who commits, or conspires or attempts to commit, an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical or mental pain or suffering . . . including serious physical abuse, upon another within his custody or control.”
An additional breach is “mutilation or maiming.” Since some detainees say they no longer have the complete functioning of arms or limbs, Cheney may be on the hook here, too. “The act of a person who intentionally injures, or conspires or attempts to injure, or injures whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons . . . by disfiguring the person or persons by any mutilation thereof or by permanently disabling any member, limb or organ of his body, without any legitimate medical or dental purpose.”
“Intentionally causing serious bodily harm” is yet another grave breach. The statute defines this as: “The act of a person who intentionally causes, or conspires or attempts to cause, serious bodily injury to one or more persons, including lawful combatants, in violation of the law of war.”
For each of these offenses, Cheney could receive life in prison, according to the statute.
That is where he belongs.
And it’s time for Obama to stop pussyfooting around. He should indict, arrest, and prosecute Cheney.
“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” said Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.), in the preface to the Physicians for Human Rights report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives”. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
That question is now firmly on Obama’s desk.
And if he continues to dodge it, he’ll make a sick joke of the pious claim that we are a nation of laws, not men.
What Inquiring Minds Want to Know is, Why Does He Always Get INDICTED, But Never Charged ?
HOUSTON (Reuters) – A grand jury in South Texas indicted U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and former attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday for “organized criminal activity” related to alleged abuse of inmates in private prisons.
The indictment has not been seen by a judge, who could dismiss it.
The grand jury in Willacy County, in the Rio Grande Valley near the U.S.-Mexico border, said Cheney is “profiteering from depriving human beings of their liberty,” according to a copy of the indictment obtained by Reuters.
The indictment cites a “money trail” of Cheney’s ownership in prison-related enterprises including the Vanguard Group, which owns an interest in private prisons in south Texas.
Former attorney general Gonzales used his position to “stop the investigations as to the wrong doings” into assaults in county prisons, the indictment said.
Cheney’s office declined comment. “We have not received any indictments. I can’t comment on something we have not received,” said Cheney’s spokeswoman Megan Mitchell.
The indictment, overseen by county District Attorney Juan Guerra, cites the case of Gregorio De La Rosa, who died on April 26, 2001, inside a private prison in Willacy County.
The grand jury wrote it made its decision “with great sadness,” but said they had no other choice but to indict Cheney and Gonzales “because we love our country.”
Texas is the home state of U.S. President George W. Bush.
Bush and his Republican administration, which first took office in January 2001, leave the White House on January 20 after the November presidential elections won by Democrat Barack Obama. Gonzales was attorney general from 2005 to 2007.
(Reporting by Chris Baltimore and JoAnne Allen, Editing by Frances Kerry)
Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
Countdown:The Nation’s Washington editor Chris Hayes points out the missing pieces in Dick Cheney’s defense of torture at Guantánamo Bay.
Doug Ireland: New anti-condom CDC regs give the lie to Bush’s election-year rhetoric.
At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton–the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President–in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.
One of France’s best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke–who came to fame by unearthing major French campaign finance scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of indictments–has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation.
According to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret “retrocommissions” paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery’s construction. These reports say van Ruymbeke has fingered as the bagman in the operation a 55-year-old London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, who has worked for Halliburton for some thirty years. It was Tesler who was paid the $180 million as a “commercial consultant” through a Gibraltar-based front company he set up called TriStar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria deal by Halliburton and Technip and registered in Madeira, the Portuguese offshore island where taxes don’t apply. According to Agence France-Presse, a former top Technip official, Georges Krammer, has testified that the Madeira-based consortium was a “slush fund” controlled by Halliburton–through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root–and Technip. Krammer, who is cooperating with the investigation, also swore that Tesler was imposed as the intermediary by Halliburton over the objections of Technip.
Tesler is a curious fellow: A veteran operator in Nigeria, he was the financial adviser to the late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha and controlled his personal fortune, while at the same time working for Halliburton. Abacha’s former Oil Minister, Dan Etete–who is suspected of having used some of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy–was deposed by Judge van Ruymbeke in December. According to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper), Etete’s testimony seemed to confirm the judge’s suspicions that Tesler laundered the $180 million through offshore and other accounts, and that part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha’s coffers. Tesler’s bank accounts in Monaco, Switzerland and elsewhere have been subpoenaed in an effort to find out where the money went.
Judge van Ruymbeke’s authority for his transnational investigation comes from a law France passed in 2000 against “bribing foreign officials,” following its ratification of a convention adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prohibiting bribe-giving in the course of commercial transactions. The notion that the judge’s targeting of Cheney might be in part retaliatory for the Bush Administration’s exclusion of France from Iraq reconstruction contracts is unlikely: Van Ruymbeke is notoriously independent, and his previous investigations have been aimed at politicians and parties of both right and left. He’s also no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics, having previously investigated bribe-giving by the French petrogiant Elf–indeed, it was in the course of his Elf investigation that van Ruymbeke stumbled upon the Nigerian deal.
The suspected bribe money was mostly ladled out between 1995 and 2000, when Cheney was Halliburton’s CEO. The Journal du Dimanche reported on December 21 that “it is probable that some of the ‘retrocommissions’ found their way back to the United States” and asked, did this money go “to Halliburton’s officials? To officials of the Republican Party?” These questions have so far gone unasked by America’s media, which have completely ignored the explosive Le Figaro headline revealing the targeting of Cheney. It will be interesting to see if the US press looks seriously into this ticking time-bomb of a scandal before the November elections.
About Doug Ireland – Doug Ireland, a longtime Nation contributor who lived in France for a decade, can be reached through his blog, Direland.
(end of clipped article)
I just want to know Mr. Holder, when can I see this picture on MY Front Page. Make it soon, as he’s always pretending to be one step from the grave; but if that’s the case, why not grant his wish and make him the first case of Legally Assisted Suicide. we have an expert here by the name of Dr Kevorkian who’d probably if given advance clemency and proof of no further prosecution; offer to assist DICK in Getting the Phuck Outta Here.
Mr. Holder, grant our Mothers Day Wish, Indict Bush Co. Soon.
This is the sixth post in a series, posted on conjunction with BadGalsRadio on the subject of accountability of the Bush 43 administration and in support of Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry”. Links to our previous articles are at the bottom.
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It can be argued just how much power Dick Cheney had within the Bush administration. But virtually all would agree that he was the most powerful vice president in American history.
No other vice president has in effect picked himself for the position, as Cheney did being the head of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential search in the 2000 campaign. And none has ever arrived at the White House as the most experienced member of the presidential team. In January 2001 Cheney’s only rival in knowledge of arcane Washington’s ways was his closest ally in the Bush cabinet, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In the administration’s early days, Dick Cheney was put in charge of developing energy policy, one of Mr. Bush’s top priorities. Hence the “Cheney energy task force”, whose proceedings and decisions remain secret to this day. His real dominance was established after the September 11 attacks. On that day, it was he who took charge at the White House and directed the first response.
Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh talked about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”
Hersh says: “Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command – JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him…
Take a look at this video for more information:
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in turn has aired this “Unauthorized Bio of Dick Cheney.”
And here is part two of the “Unauthorized Bio of Dick Cheney”:
And now part three:
As we know, Mr. Cheney is still active on the television circuit and you can be sure that he is still very active indeed in the back channels of his political world and recently has even stated in an interview with CNN that in fact Obama’s decisions are putting the country at risk.
Here was President Obama’s response to those accusations on CBS’s 60 Minutes.
You be the judge whose words are more believable.
In any case, considering the fact that Dick Cheney has suffered four heart attacks – the first at age 37 – and that he has a pacemaker implanted in his chest, the man has proven to be a durable player in U.S. and neocon politics.
Personally we would advise the former veep to take it easy and go fishing and hunting, take care of his ailing heart and finally leave us alone.
This is the fifth post in a series, posted on conjunction with BadGalsRadioon the subject of accountability of the Bush 43 administration and in support of Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry”. Links to our previous articles are at the bottom.
We are asking all political and human rights bloggers to join us in creating a pool of information on the 9/11 FRAUD.
We will be sending our findings regularly to Atty Gen. Eric Holder; asking for a Special Prosecutor – for Bush Co. Please Won’t You Join Us in Revealing The Truth to Mr Holder, so that the tragedy is documented properly; by those who’ve suffered the most, the survivors.
“Accrued liabilities for U.S. federal employees’ and veterans’ benefits now total $4.5 trillion. Indeed, our debt for veterans’ health and disability payments has risen by $228 billion in the past year alone…
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the interest payments on the money borrowed to finance the Iraq war will total $264 billion to $308 billion.” That $2,000,000,000,000?
A portion of this was clipped from “Think Progress” Thursday, March 19, 2009 Weeks after President Obama was inaugurated, Dick Cheney gave an interview to Politico slamming Obama’s detainee policies and warning that he was making America less safe (charges he repeated again last Sunday). Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff who left the Bush administration in protest, wrote an essay on the Washington Note last evening slamming Cheney’s fearmongering. Wilkerson calls Cheney “evil” and says his detainee policies were only “assisting” terrorists:
Cheney went on to say in his McLean interview that “Protecting the country’s security is a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people and we are not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.” I have to agree but the other way around.
Cheney and his like are the evil people and we certainly are not going to prevail in the struggle with radical religion if we listen to people as he. […]
We have actively studied the questionable nature of the official version of what happened to our nation on September 11, 2001.
Throughout the first year after 9-11 we ignored and did not believe those who asked us to question the official story. Like millions of Americans we believed America had been attacked by terrorists from abroad.
Sadly, we are now convinced that rogue elements within our government committed a vicious criminal act against its own citizens for the larger purpose of swaying us to support both domestic and foreign policies mapped out in the late 1990’s. 9-11 was Hitler’s Reichstag fire of 1933 and Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor masterfully coordinated to achieve the desired ends of an imperialistic role for America in the world, patriotic support at home and the erosion of our constitutional rights.
In a nutshell, the war on terrorism is a cruel hoax by a misguided, out-of-democratic control small group of individuals sabotaging the best of American values. We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis combined with severe domination from an Orwellian corporate media knowingly or unknowingly being of service to the true powerbrokers behind the curtain.
okay lets get down to the Meat and Potatoes,
Unplug the War Machine By Facing the Disturbing Truth Behind the Events of September 11, 2001
They lied about Iraq and Afghanistan and just about everything else. Why are we willing to accept their version of 9/11 that made it all possible?
Initially, most of us fell for their version of the events. But then came the slip-ups. The leaseholder of the World Trade Center admitted on PBS in ‘Rebuilding America’ that WTC-7 was ‘pulled‘ on 9/11 (See video here in Windows Media Format), which is the standard slang for controlled demolition. (911 sharethetruth.com)
How Bout a Lil Fish..
this fishing expedition caused us to loose control of our internal politics; and our economy. all over a Ruse. Damn fish stories.. always turn out to be lies. We should have known better.
Economists project a much higher ‘burn rate’ than government estimates
The Associated Press
The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book. Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and “realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017. Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs. Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted.
But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say. In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing “significant” future resources to the wars, “requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge.” These numbers don’t include the war’s cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion _ with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.
Untold economic damage No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.
In their book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests.
That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses. That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War. Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004’s, the CBO reports.
(Please Click the Title Link to Read the Complete Article)
A new analysis of the total fatalities in the Iraq war during the presidency of George W. Bush demonstrates that the likely number is between 800,000 and 1.3 million. The analysis appears in The Nation (Feb. 16, 2009) and can also be read here. It has been translated into four languages and has appeared in more than 3,000 publications and on-line websites. Reporter Tom Ricks adds that the war seems far from over. Read his commentary.
geeeeee,, Hitler, Co’mon Condi – claiming Hitler ?
somehow I always knew that she had a thang for him but it was even a suprise to me that she would step to this level. damnnn,
then we after offer something for those who don’t like the other meat, take a samplin of this hotdog
HOT DOG !!!
This My Friends is the Steak -
Colin Powell explains the Lie that made him step down after he was puppeted to the United Nations.
Look at how clearly this was revealed and even Powell had to back that thang up. he was played by Bush Co; but he stood up like a true patriot and corrected this lie. Thank You General Powell you are My Hero.
Yowzer – did he say “Held Secretly“; when did he become sheriff of the world ?
The Iraq war has been perhaps America’s bitterest lesson since Vietnam in the realities of war and geopolitics, profoundly altering ordinary citizens’ sense of their country, its essential abilities, and the overall role it plays in the world. It has cost more than 4,000 American lives and ten’s of thousands of Iraqis.
The bottom line may be that today many in the US view the Iraq invasion as a mistake they don’t want to see repeated. Troubles in Iraq appear to have fed a desire on the part of some ordinary Americans for disengagement with the world. “We are in a period of rising isolationism, just as we saw a bump in isolationism after the war in Vietnam in the ’70s,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, at a Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Six years ago, America, as well as Iraq, was a different place. Virtually every major poll showed US majorities in support of military action. On another point, national opinion seems clearer: In hindsight, a majority of Americans view the decision to invade as a mistake. Moreover, interest in and knowledge of the situation in Iraq are declining among US citizens, in part because news coverage is diminishing.
Public awareness of the number of US military fatalities in Iraq has declined sharply. That does not mean Americans do not support their troops, of course. In fact, unlike the situation during the Vietnam era, there appears to be widespread realization that a small slice of US society, the military, is bearing a disproportionate burden.
Americans are generally wary of foreign entanglements and worry about the ramifications of long-term commitments overseas, concludes an analysis of public opinion on Iraq by Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. But if nothing else, the war in Iraq may have heightened the awareness of Americans about the problems of the rest of the globe.
why it’s Condilicious..
we’ll be presenting our special DICKins edition real soon; and no-doubt it will include lots of assorted Nuts and Screws.
“I cannot honestly believe that people are still denying we committed torture. And what about the right to Habeas Corpus? Are we not to lead by example when we enter countries, especially when we are ostensibly trying to show that democracy is a better option?” Thank you Sherlock!
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This is the fourth post in a series, posted on conjunction with BadGalsRadio on the subject of accountability of the Bush 43 administration and in support of Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry”. Links to our previous articles are at the bottom.
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We have all seen the disgusting photos of American soldiers playing with and abusing prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The photos of the terrified, terrorized men and as it turns out women as well have circled the globe and have in fact become something of a symbol of George W. Bush’s and the neocons’ “war on terror”.
When those photos surfaced, the entire focus on the previous 9/11 issues, Iraq’s supposed stocks of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein, along with Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaida, paled. The world’s media has switched their investigative focus to reports of prisoner abuse, CIA’s “extraordinary renditions”, and the violations of the Geneva Conventions in many ways and forms.
The Abu Ghraib abuse orgies were committed by personnel of the 372nd Military Police Company of the United States Army together with additional US governmental agencies. These additional agencies have been referred to as the OGA (Other Government Agencies), which is an often-used euphemism for the Central Intelligence Agency.
As it turns out, these were only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Information about CIA’s so-called black prisons and interrogation centers has begun to surface.
Allegations and reports about unmarked planes transporting prisoners through a number of countries, on the way to prisons, interrogation/torture centers in countries with either a “friendly” disposition towards the U.S. “war on terror”, or ones who wanted to punish, or extract information from their own citizens, who might have been perceived as enemies of the ruling regime, or simply those, who did it for the money that the CIA was paying for such “services”.
Journalist Mark Danner in his book Torture and TruthAmerica, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror has published the latest revelations.
Here’s a video interview with Mark Danner:
The author and the reviewers at the New York Review of Books ask the question: “Did they [the Abu Ghraib abuse] depict the rogue behavior of ‘a few bad apples’? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the “war on terror?”
The documents in the book include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the U.S. could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by U.S. Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guantánamo “migrated” to Iraq as resistance to the U.S. occupation grew and US casualties mounted.
According to the confidential (up to the point of getting leaked into the hands of Danner) International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report:” The detainee would be photographed, both clothed and naked prior to and again after transfer. A body cavity check (rectal examination) would be carried out and some detainees alleged that a suppository (the type and the effect of such suppositories was unknown by the detainees), was also administered at that moment.
The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles. In addition, some detainees alleged that cotton wool was also taped over their eyes prior to the blindfold and goggles being applied….
The detainee would be shackled by [the] hands and feet and transported to the airport by road and loaded onto a plane. He would usually be transported in a reclined sitting position with his hands shackled in front. The journey times…ranged from one hour to over 24 to 30 hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate and defecate into the diaper.”
Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002.
After being treated for his wounds – he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture – Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in the white room described below.
“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.
“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.
“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.
“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”
It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators and that everyone in that white room – guards, interrogators, doctor – was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a CIA officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.
Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”
He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific…. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”
Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, CIA officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the CIA director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.
At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:
“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”
The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”
After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.
“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.
“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”
After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.
“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.
This went on for approximately one week.”
There are other, similar horror stories in Mark Danner’s book. And remember that most of these facts and accounts are based on the ICRC report. It is hard to imagine that the ICRC – which didn’t release the report, because it wanted to remain neutral and retain access to such prisoners – would document events in a biased way.
This is not to say that we support Abu Zubaydah’s actions, affiliations, or loyalties. Nothing could be further from the truth. His experience simply illustrates the inner workings of the Bush administration during their “war on terror”. And what basically interests us and should interest both the U.S. Government and the American people is the fact that these methods have violated our principles, the Geneva Conventions and the military Uniform Code of Military Justice. These policies, even when used against the most distasteful of “enemy combatants” are definitely contrary to what the United States of America has always stood for. Let’s not forget that the members of our armed forces could just as easily be designated as “enemy combatants” by practically any country and entity, which might consider us to be their enemy. That’s just one of the reasons why we should scrupulously abide by the Geneva Conventions.
In short: this is definitely another serious issue which should be investigated by Senator Patrick Leahy’s “commission of inquiry”. It is to be hoped that the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the rest of President Barack Obama’s administration will be supportive in this endeavor.
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If you have read our posts up to now and watched the videos, you must realize that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of their administration have a whole lot of explaining to do as far as 9/11, the lies leading up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, domestic spying, the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, the use of torture, the further deregulation of what they have the gall to call “our financial system” and a whole gamut of other issues.
Instead of telling his life story, Bush will concentrate on about a dozen personal and presidential choices, from giving up drinking (that was probably a mistake, as maybe he wouldn’t have committed all of those errors, while in a drunken stupor) to picking Dick Cheney as his vice president to sending troops to Iraq. He will also write about his relationship with family members, including his father, his religious faith and his disgraceful response to Hurricane Katrina.
There are even rumors, that Bush asked Dick Cheney to write the book for him. Andy Borowitz writes: “according to sources close to the former president, Mr. Cheney was his second choice to write the memoir after Mr. Bush was turned down by his first choice, author James Frey.
It can be argued just how much power Dick Cheney had within the Bush administration. But virtually all would agree that he was the most powerful vice president in American history.
we’ll be presenting our special DICKins edition real soon; and no-doubt it will include lots of assorted Nuts and Screws.
The documents in the book include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the U.S. could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by U.S. Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guantánamo “migrated” to Iraq as resistance to the U.S. occupation grew and US casualties mounted.
