Here's a petition demanding withdrawal from Iraq:

http://www.pdamerica.org/petition/iraq-exit-petition.php

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...879.html?nav=pq

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00216.htm

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/ne...t_id=1000920839

What are we to make of the presumed 50% who still believe in the lies? Of course, how do you explain "the Psychic Network?"

Bio for the author of the 'smoking gun' memo:

Matthew Rycroft CBE was born on 16 June 1968, and brought up in Southampton and Cambridge. He studied maths and philosophy at Oxford University.
Matthew joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1989. After a few months in Geneva and then on the NATO desk in London, he spent four years in the British Embassy in Paris.
In 1995-96 Matthew was head of the political section of Eastern Adriatic Department in the FCO; in this role he was a member of the British delegation to the Dayton peace talks on Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After two years in the FCO’s Policy Planning Staff covering European and trans-Atlantic issues, Matthew joined the British Embassy in Washington. There he followed American domestic politics from 1998 to 2002.
From 2002 to 2004, Matthew was Private Secretary to the Prime Minister Tony Blair, for Foreign Affairs, covering all foreign, European, Northern Ireland and defence issues. He received a CBE for this work in 2004.
Matthew became Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 2005. He is married to Alison, and they have three daughters, born in 1998, 2000 and 2005.

About 50% of them don't vote! about 22 million of these non-voters are young single women according to a report I've seen. They are "too busy" looking for a husband, or a career, and can't be bothered!

So if you have any young single women freinds, get a two by four. Get them to the voting booths.

I guess I made a presumption too. The other 50% may not believe the lies by BushCo that helped to take us into the war in Iraq, at least not 100% of the 50%. Some of the 50% may not even know who's President & may not know we're at war period. But, they could probably give you the run down on American Idol or Desperate Housewives.

Going lookin for that 2 by 4...

Here it is a week after the WP finally reported the memo story, the Austin "Statesman" finally gives it "some" attention (report in Chicago Tribune). It explains that the memo hasn't sparked much interest from Americans. I think that is true--it isn't news to many, everyone knows Bush lied about WMD's and fixed the facts and this memo just confirms old news.


British memo on Iraq creates a stir
A British official reported in 2002 that the Bush administration "fixed" intelligence to fit plans to oust Saddam
By Stephen J. Hedges and Mark Silva

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Thursday, May 19, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A British official's report that the Bush administration appeared intent on invading Iraq long before it acknowledged as much or sought Congress' approval -- and that it "fixed" intelligence to fit its intention -- has caused a stir in Britain.

But the potentially explosive revelation has proved something of a dud in the United States. The White House has denied the premise of the memo, and the American public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter debate over the reasons for the war.
All of which have contributed to a less than a robust discussion of a memo that would seem to bolster the strongest assertions of the war's critics.

Frustrated at the lack of attention to the memo, Democrats and other war critics are doing their best to make sure it gets a wider hearing, doing everything from writing letters to the White House to launching online petitions.

The memo was written by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft, based on notes he took during a July 2002 meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisers, including Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service who had recently met with Bush administration officials.

Since being leaked to a British newspaper, the memo has raised questions anew about whether the Bush administration misrepresented prewar intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify military action against Saddam Hussein's regime.

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," the memo said. "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Blair's office hasn't disputed the memo's authenticity, but the White House denies the assertions in it.

Dubbed "the Downing Street Memo," the report of the July 23, 2002, meeting of Blair and his aides purported to recount the Bush administration's approach to Iraq at that point. Summarizing the view of Dearlove after consulting with U.S. officials, the memo said: "Military action was now seen as inevitable."

At the time, the Bush administration was saying a decision to go to war hadn't been made and that Iraq could prevent military action by complying with existing U.N. resolutions on its arms programs.

The memo was divulged this month by the Sunday Times of London. It caused a stir in Britain, but in the United States the account has drawn only passing attention.

Opponents of the war have launched e-mail campaigns to elevate the issue. One Web site, DowningStreetMemo.com, encourages visitors to sign a petition and "take action." Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., wrote a letter this month to the White House, signed by 89 House Democrats, that expressed concern about the memo's revelations.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, asked about the memo's implication that intelligence was "fixed" on Iraq, said, "The suggestion is just flat-out wrong."

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto...060042003f.html

I love this framing. Only those anti-America anti-war types thought this memo was newsworthy. It had nothing to do with the Bush adminsitration being caught manipulating the world with its propaganda.

This is right in line with being stereotyped as flower in the gun barrel passivist because you state opposition to the unneccessary and illegal war in Iraq.

This topic should be brought to the forefront.

go to this site.

http://downingstreetmemo.com

go there and print out a poster and plaster it everywhere. got the idea from another site.

Great link, thnx Alyce.

Pinochet hospitalized after mini-stroke Boston Globe

Great Idea----will do it today!


Does anyone know if there is a link to broadcast of Scotsman Galloway tearing into senator Coleman at the oil for food hearing?

US generals say Iraq outlook 'bleak' Christian Science Monitor

Yes, Brookie, here it is:

http://www.edwardsdavid.com/BushVideos/msn...aq_050517-01.rm

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths

By Tim Golden / New York Times

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.

The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's response to the deaths.

Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details of the two men's deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated.

"What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that there were people who clearly violated anyone's standard for humane treatment," said the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're finding some cases that were not close calls."

Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or troublesome were also handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for long periods, an action Army prosecutors recently classified as criminal assault.

Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep. Shortly before the two deaths, observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross specifically complained to the military authorities at Bagram about the shackling of prisoners in "fixed positions," documents show.

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.

Last October, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case.

So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged, including four last week. No one has been convicted in either death. Two Army interrogators were also reprimanded, a military spokesman said. Most of those who could still face legal action have denied wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or in comments to a reporter.

"The whole situation is unfair," Sgt. Selena M. Salcedo, a former Bagram interrogator who was charged with assaulting Mr. Dilawar, dereliction of duty and lying to investigators, said in a telephone interview. "It's all going to come out when everything is said and done."

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

The Interrogators

In the summer of 2002, the military detention center at Bagram, about 40 miles north of Kabul, stood as a hulking reminder of the Americans' improvised hold over Afghanistan.

Built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop for the operations base they established after their intervention in the country in 1979, the building had survived the ensuing wars as a battered relic - a long, squat, concrete block with rusted metal sheets where the windows had once been.

Retrofitted with five large wire pens and a half dozen plywood isolation cells, the building became the Bagram Collection Point, a clearinghouse for prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The B.C.P., as soldiers called it, typically held between 40 and 80 detainees while they were interrogated and screened for possible shipment to the Pentagon's longer-term detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002 had been improvised as well. Captain Wood, then a 32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, N.C.; six Arabic-speaking reservists were added from the Utah National Guard.

Part of the new group, which was consolidated under Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence specialists with no background in interrogation. Only two of the soldiers had ever questioned actual prisoners.

What specialized training the unit received came on the job, in sessions with two interrogators who had worked in the prison for a few months. "There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation" like the one at Bagram, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.

Nor were the rules of engagement very clear. The platoon had the standard interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners "humanely," and when possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush's final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they "could deviate slightly from the rules," said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.

"There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists," Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.

The deviations included the use of "safety positions" or "stress positions" that would make the detainees uncomfortable but not necessarily hurt them - kneeling on the ground, for instance, or sitting in a "chair" position against the wall. The new platoon was also trained in sleep deprivation, which the previous unit had generally limited to 24 hours or less, insisting that the interrogator remain awake with the prisoner to avoid pushing the limits of humane treatment.

But as the 519th interrogators settled into their jobs, they set their own procedures for sleep deprivation. They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up themselves, one former interrogator, Eric LaHammer, said in an interview.

The interrogators worked from a menu of basic tactics to gain a prisoner's cooperation, from the "friendly" approach, to good cop-bad cop routines, to the threat of long-term imprisonment. But some less-experienced interrogators came to rely on the method known in the military as "Fear Up Harsh," or what one soldier referred to as "the screaming technique."

Sergeant Loring, then 27, tried with limited success to wean those interrogators off that approach, which typically involved yelling and throwing chairs. Mr. Leahy said the sergeant "put the brakes on when certain approaches got out of hand." But he could also be dismissive of tactics he considered too soft, several soldiers told investigators, and gave some of the most aggressive interrogators wide latitude. (Efforts to locate Mr. Loring, who has left the military, were unsuccessful.)

"We sometimes developed a rapport with detainees, and Sergeant Loring would sit us down and remind us that these were evil people and talk about 9/11 and they weren't our friends and could not be trusted," Mr. Leahy said.

Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called "Monster" -he had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other soldiers said - was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for similar effect, documents show.)

"The other interrogators would use his reputation," said one interrogator, Specialist Eric H. Barclais. "They would tell the detainee, 'If you don't cooperate, we'll have to get Monster, and he won't be as nice.' " Another soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as "the King of Torture."

A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at Guantánamo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner's face and threatened to rape him, excerpts from the man's statement show.

Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to charge Specialist Corsetti with assault, maltreatment of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one of three members of the 519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at Fort Bragg said Specialist Corsetti would not comment.

In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were joined by a new military police unit that was assigned to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly reservists from the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., were similarly unprepared for their mission, members of the unit said.

The company received basic lessons in handling prisoners at Fort Dix, N.J., and some police and corrections officers in its ranks provided further training. That instruction included an overview of "pressure-point control tactics" and notably the "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee.

The M.P.'s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because they would "tear up" a prisoner's legs.

But once in Afghanistan, members of the 377th found that the usual rules did not seem to apply. The peroneal strike quickly became a basic weapon of the M.P. arsenal. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former Sgt. Thomas V. Curtis told the investigators.

A few weeks into the company's tour, Specialist Jeremy M. Callaway overheard another guard boasting about having beaten a detainee who had spit on him. Specialist Callaway also told investigators that other soldiers had congratulated the guard "for not taking any" from a detainee.

One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon "the Testosterone Gang." Several were devout bodybuilders. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, a group of the soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate flag, one soldier said.

Some of the same M.P.'s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist Callaway said.

Eventually, the man was sent home.

The Defiant Detainee

The detainee known as Person Under Control No. 412 was a portly, well-groomed Afghan named Habibullah. Some American officials identified him as "Mullah" Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander from the southern Afghan province of Oruzgan.

He stood out from the scraggly guerrillas and villagers whom the Bagram interrogators typically saw. "He had a piercing gaze and was very confident," the provost marshal in charge of the M.P.'s, Maj. Bobby R. Atwell, recalled.

Documents from the investigation suggest that Mr. Habibullah was captured by an Afghan warlord on Nov. 28, 2002, and delivered to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives two days later. His well-being at that point is a matter of dispute. The doctor who examined him on arrival at Bagram reported him in good health. But the intelligence operations chief, Lt. Col. John W. Loffert Jr., later told Army investigators, "He was already in bad condition when he arrived."

What is clear is that Mr. Habibullah was identified at Bagram as an important prisoner and an unusually sharp-tongued and insubordinate one.

One of the 377th's Third Platoon sergeants, Alan J. Driver Jr., told investigators that Mr. Habibullah rose up after a rectal examination and kneed him in the groin. The guard said he grabbed the prisoner by the head and yelled in his face. Mr. Habibullah then "became combative," Sergeant Driver said, and had to be subdued by three guards and led away in an armlock.

He was then confined in one of the 9-foot by 7-foot isolation cells, which the M.P. commander, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, later described as a standard procedure. "There was a policy that detainees were hooded, shackled and isolated for at least the first 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity," he told investigators.

While the guards kept some prisoners awake by yelling or poking at them or banging on their cell doors, Mr. Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the wire ceiling over his cell, soldiers said.

On his second day, Dec. 1, the prisoner was "uncooperative" again, this time with Specialist Willie V. Brand. The guard, who has since been charged with assault and other crimes, told investigators he had delivered three peroneal strikes in response. The next day, Specialist Brand said, he had to knee the prisoner again. Other blows followed.

A lawyer for Specialist Brand, John P. Galligan, said there was no criminal intent by his client to hurt any detainee. "At the time, my client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility."

The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been almost exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.'s were assigned no interpreters of their own. Instead, they borrowed from the interrogators when they could and relied on prisoners who spoke even a little English to translate for them.

When the detainees were beaten or kicked for "noncompliance," one of the interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was often "because they have no idea what the M.P. is saying."

By the morning of Dec. 2, witnesses told the investigators, Mr. Habibullah was coughing and complaining of chest pains. He limped into the interrogation room in shackles, his right leg stiff and his right foot swollen. The lead interrogator, Sergeant Leahy, let him sit on the floor because he could not bend his knees and sit in a chair.

The interpreter who was on hand, Ebrahim Baerde, said the interrogators had kept their distance that day "because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm."

"They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it was 'gross' or 'nasty,' " Mr. Baerde said.

Though battered, Mr. Habibullah was unbowed.

"Once they asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life in handcuffs," Mr. Baerde said. "His response was, 'Yes, don't they look good on me?' "

By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah's reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open target. One M.P. said he had given him five peroneal strikes for being "noncompliant and combative." Another gave him three or four more for being "combative and noncompliant." Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt trying to escape.

When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec. 3, he was in one of the isolation cells, tethered to the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held up by the chains.

Sergeant Boland told the investigators he had entered the cell with two other guards, Specialists Anthony M. Morden and Brian E. Cammack. (All three have been charged with assault and other crimes.) One of them pulled off the prisoner's black hood. His head was slumped to one side, his tongue sticking out. Specialist Cammack said he had put some bread on Mr. Habibullah's tongue. Another soldier put an apple in the prisoner's hand; it fell to the floor.

When Specialist Cammack turned back toward the prisoner, he said in one statement, Mr. Habibullah's spit hit his chest. Later, Specialist Cammack acknowledged, "I'm not sure if he spit at me." But at the time, he exploded, yelling, "Don't ever spit on me again!" and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the thigh, "maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah's limp body swayed back and forth in the chains.

When Sergeant Boland returned to the cell some 20 minutes later, he said, Mr. Habibullah was not moving and had no pulse. Finally, the prisoner was unchained and laid out on the floor of his cell.

The guard who Specialist Cammack said had counseled him back in New Jersey about the dangers of peroneal strikes found him in the room where Mr. Habibullah lay, his body already cold.

"Specialist Cammack appeared very distraught," Specialist William Bohl told an investigator. The soldier "was running about the room hysterically."

An M.P. was sent to wake one of the medics.

"What are you getting me for?" the medic, Specialist Robert S. Melone, responded, telling him to call an ambulance instead.

When another medic finally arrived, he found Mr. Habibullah on the floor, his arms outstretched, his eyes and mouth open.

"It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared," the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, recalled.

Not all of the guards were indifferent, their statements show. But if Mr. Habibullah's death shocked some of them, it did not lead to major changes in the detention center's operation.

Military police guards were assigned to be present during interrogations to help prevent mistreatment. The provost marshal, Major Atwell, told investigators he had already instructed the commander of the M.P. company, Captain Beiring, to stop chaining prisoners to the ceiling. Others said they never received such an order.

Senior officers later told investigators that they had been unaware of any serious abuses at the B.C.P. But the first sergeant of the 377th, Betty J. Jones, told investigators that the use of standing restraints, sleep deprivation and peroneal strikes was readily apparent.

"Everyone that is anyone went through the facility at one time or another," she said.

Major Atwell said the death "did not cause an enormous amount of concern 'cause it appeared natural."

In fact, Mr. Habibullah's autopsy, completed on Dec. 8, showed bruises or abrasions on his chest, arms and head. There were deep contusions on his calves, knees and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared to have been the sole of a boot.

His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably caused by the severe injuries to his legs, which traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to his lungs.

The Shy Detainee

On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr. Dilawar arrived at Bagram.

Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.

Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.

"He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.

On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.

At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.

Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar's family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)

The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.

Mr. Dilawar's three passengers were eventually flown to Guantánamo and held for more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guantánamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and humiliating rectal exams.

"They did lots and lots of bad things to me," said Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker from Khost. "I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk."

For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most difficult thing seemed to be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head. "He could not breathe," said a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers.

Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.

When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.

"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."

Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M.P.'s had delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.

Many M.P.'s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar's injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar's orange prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled.

"I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing restraints," the soldier told investigators. "Over a certain time period, I noticed it was the size of a fist."

As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be released. But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the annoyed guards heard only noise.

"He had constantly been screaming, 'Release me; I don't want to be here,' and things like that," said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul Ahad Wardak.

The Interrogation

On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned hostile.

The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale C. Walls II, later contended that Mr. Dilawar was evasive. "Some holes came up, and we wanted him to answer us truthfully," he said. The other interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo, complained that the prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and refusing to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting against the wall.

The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai, recalled the encounter differently to investigators.

The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr. Dilawar of launching the rockets that had hit the American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the ground, he was unable to hold his cuffed hands above his head as instructed, prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop.

"Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him about being a man, which was very insulting because of his heritage," Mr. Ahmadzai said.

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.

"This went on for 10 or 15 minutes," the interpreter said. "He was so tired he couldn't get up."

"They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her," he went on. "Once Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.

"About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai said. "There was no interrogation going on."

The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M.P.'s to keep Mr. Dilawar chained to the ceiling until the next shift came on.

The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At around noon, the M.P.'s called over another of the interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar down.

"I told him, 'Look, please, if you want to be able to sit down and be released from shackles, you just need to be quiet for one more hour."

"He told me that if he was in shackles another hour, he would die," Mr. Baerde said.

Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell. Mr. Dilawar's hands hung limply from the cuffs, and his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward.

"He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed 'a shot,' " Mr. Baerde recalled. "He said that he didn't feel good. He said that his legs were hurting."

Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar's plea to one of the guards. The soldier took the prisoner's hand and pressed down on his fingernails to check his circulation.

"He's O.K.," Mr. Baerde quoted the M.P. as saying. "He's just trying to get out of his restraints."

By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final interrogation in the first hours of the next day, Dec. 10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he had been beaten by the guards.

"But we didn't pursue that," said Mr. Baryalai, the interpreter.

Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But his more aggressive partner, Specialist Claus, quickly took over, Mr. Baryalai said.

"Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me," the interpreter told investigators. "He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the table front."

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter said, the interrogators pulled him to his feet and pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress position, the prisoner leaned his head against the wall and began to fall asleep.

"It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate, but he couldn't physically perform the tasks," Mr. Baryalai said.

Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and "shook him harshly," the interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be "treated like a woman, by the other men" and face the wrath of criminals who "would be very angry with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks." (Specialist Walls was charged last week with assault, maltreatment and failure to obey a lawful order; Specialist Claus was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to investigators. Each man declined to comment.)

A third military intelligence specialist who spoke some Pashto, Staff Sgt. W. Christopher Yonushonis, had questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had arranged with Specialist Claus to take over when he was done. Instead, the sergeant arrived at the interrogation room to find a large puddle of water on the floor, a wet spot on Mr. Dilawar's shirt and Specialist Claus standing behind the detainee, twisting up the back of the hood that covered the prisoner's head.

"I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by pulling on the hood," he said. "I was furious at this point because I had seen Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection."

"What the hell happened with that water?" Sergeant Yonushonis said he had demanded.

"We had to make sure he stayed hydrated," he said Specialist Claus had responded.

The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead.

The Post-Mortem

The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah's death.

One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man's legs "had basically been pulpified."

"I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.

After the second death, several of the 519th Battalion's interrogators were temporarily removed from their posts. A medic was assigned to the detention center to work night shifts. On orders from the Bagram intelligence chief, interrogators were prohibited from any physical contact with the detainees. Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was also banned, and the use of stress positions was curtailed.

In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.

The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no threat" to American forces.

They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar's parents, who begged them to explain what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves to recount the details.

"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem."

In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he had never been interviewed.

"I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case," he said. "I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been one of the last to see this detainee alive."

Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee's last interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.

He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."

Ruhallah Khapalwak, Carlotta Gall and David Rohde contributed reporting for this article, and Alain Delaqueriere assisted with research.

Source: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=2708

The Bagram file

The story of two Afghans' brutal death at the Bagram U.S. military base comes from a nearly 2,000 page Army criminal investigation file, a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times

Click here to begin the flash feature

I am posting this because the two men involved were picked up in Sweden by the American Gulf Jet ghost plane...Sweden deserves to be condemnd for allowing this to happen...But where is the critizism towards the U.S for going in on foreign soil, removing two people, and deliver them to a country where they are tortured?




http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a...re_050521042644



UN condemns Sweden for violating anti-torture treaty 13 minutes ago



STOCKHOLM (AFP) - The Swedish government has described allegations it violated an international anti-torture accord for deporting an Egyptian back to his home country, where it was of concern he might be tortured, as "serious" and says it would "study them carefully".

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The UN Committee against Torture condemned Swedish authorities for the December 2001 expulsion of suspected Islamic militant Ahamed Hussein Mustafa Kamil Agiza, saying the move went against rules that state governments should stop people from being put at risk of torture.

The committee in Geneva, which oversees respect for the International Convention against Torture, acted on a complaint lodged in 2003 on behalf of Agiza, who is serving a prison sentence in Egypt.

"The Committee considers at the outset that it was known, or should have been known, to (Sweden) at the time of the complainant's removal that Egypt resorted to consistent and widespread use of torture against detainees," the panel said in its ruling.

Swedish news agency TT quoted Barbro Holmberg, minister for migration, as saying: "These are serious criticisms, we will study them carefully to see how they can guide us in the future."

Agiza and Egyptian human rights groups claimed he had been tortured regularly since he returned to his homeland.

Agiza, today aged 42, claimed asylum in Sweden in 2000.

Where is the mention of the American Gulf Jet ghost plane?...I must have missed something.

Lawmakers and human rights groups have also criticized Sweden for allowing the extradition to be handled by American agents. Both men were returned to Egypt on an airplane leased by the U.S. government.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...world-headlines

Thanks SL..

You're welcome. We all need to put up a strong fight to save America for our future generations. America is too great to drowned by all the unethical tactics run by the powerful few and hoodlums that's destroying this
beautiful and gracious nation. We need to seriously study the haunting chaos and mess caused by this administration and its montrously power-crazed supporters! American money is being spent to create choas instead of helping those Americans who desperately needs it to advance America's honorable future and hope.

What does America hope to gain by helping erase the world of all other cultures and rise with blood spattered on all American names? It's like calling all to respect the Mafia Empire!

Thanks for posting these, putino.

Thank you for this post SL....I read about this on a Swedish news site, where it was more detailed, however I was unable find to an english translation covering the whole story....But this link is very close to how it read in the Swedish news...Thank's again

- Bump -

Check this website out.

UN slams abuse of Afghan detainees at US detention centers Xinhua

UN slams abuse of Afghan detainees at US detention centers Xinhua

UN slams abuse of Afghan detainees at US detention centers Xinhua

United States of America

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Head of state and government: George W. Bush
Death penalty: retentionist
International Criminal Court: signed
UN Women’s Convention: signed
Optional Protocol to UN Women’s Convention: not signed

Further information

USA: Dead wrong – the case of Nanon Williams, child offender facing execution on flawed evidence
(AI Index: AMR 51/002/2004)

USA: “Where is the compassion?” – The imminent execution of Scott Panetti, mentally ill offender
(AI Index: AMR 51/011/2004)

USA: Another Texas injustice – the case of Kelsey Patterson, mentally ill man facing execution
(AI Index: AMR 51/047/2004)

USA: Osvaldo Torres, Mexican national denied consular rights, scheduled to die
(AI Index: AMR 51/057/2004)

USA: Undermining security – Violations of human dignity, the rule of law and the National Security Strategy in “war on terror” detentions
(AI Index: AMR 51/061/2004)

USA: An open letter to President George W. Bush on the question of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
(AI Index: AMR 51/078/2004)

USA: Appealing for justice – Supreme Court hears arguments against the detention of Yaser Esam Hamdi and José Padilla
(AI Index: AMR 51/065/2004)

USA: Restoring the rule of law – the right of Guantánamo detainees to judicial review of the lawfulness of their detention
(AI Index: AMR 51/093/2004)

USA: A deepening stain on US justice
(AI Index: AMR 51/130/2004)

USA: Human dignity denied – torture and accountability in the “war on terror”
(AI Index: AMR 51/145/2004)

USA: Guantánamo: Military commissions – Amnesty International observer’s notes, No. 3 – Proceedings suspended following order by US federal judge
(AI Index: AMR 51/157/2004)

USA: Excessive and lethal force? Amnesty International’s concerns about deaths and ill-treatment involving police use of tasers
(AI Index: AMR 51/139/2004)

USA: Proclamations are not enough, double standards must end – more than words needed this Human Rights Day
(AI Index: AMR 51/171/2004)

All AI documents on United States of America

Covering events from January - December 2004

Hundreds of detainees continued to be held without charge or trial at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Thousands of people were detained during US military and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and routinely denied access to their families and lawyers.

Military investigations were initiated or conducted into allegations of torture and ill-treatment of detainees by US personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and into reports of deaths in custody and ill-treatment by US forces elsewhere in Iraq, and in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. Evidence came to light that the US administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques that violated the UN Convention against Torture. Pre-trial military commission hearings opened in Guantánamo but were suspended pending a US court ruling.

In the USA, more than 40 people died after being struck by police tasers, raising concern about the safety of such weapons. The death penalty continued to be imposed and carried out.

International Criminal Court

The US government intensified its efforts to curtail the power of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In December, Congress approved a provision in a government spending bill mandating the withholding of certain economic assistance to governments that refuse to grant immunity for US nationals before the ICC.

Guantánamo Bay

By the end of the year, more than 500 detainees of around 35 nationalities continued to be held without charge or trial at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay on grounds of possible links to al-Qa’ida or the former Taleban government of Afghanistan. While at least 10 more detainees were transferred to the base from Afghanistan during the year, more than 100 others were transferred to their home countries for continued detention or release. At least three child detainees were among those released, but at least two other people who were under 18 at the time of their detention were believed to remain in Guantánamo by the end of the year. Neither the identities nor the precise numbers of detainees held in Guantánamo were provided by the Department of Defense, fuelling concern that individual detainees could be transferred to and from the base without appearing in official statistics.

In a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court ruled in June that the US federal courts had jurisdiction over the Guantánamo detainees. However, the administration tried to keep any review of the detainees’ cases as far from a judicial process as possible. The Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), an administrative review body consisting of panels of three military officers, was established to determine whether the detainees were “enemy combatants”. The detainees were not provided with lawyers to assist them in this process and secret evidence could be used against them. Many detainees boycotted the process, which by the end of the year had determined that more than 200 detainees were “enemy combatants” and two were not and could be released. The authorities also announced that all detainees confirmed as “enemy combatants” would have a yearly review of their cases before an Administrative Review Board (ARB) to determine if they should still be held. Again, detainees would not have access to legal counsel or to secret evidence. Both the CSRT and the ARB could draw on evidence extracted under torture or other coercion. In December, the Pentagon announced that it had conducted its first ARB.

The government informed the detainees that they could file habeas corpus petitions in federal court, giving them the address of the District Court in Washington DC. However, it also argued in the same court that the detainees had no basis under constitutional or international law to challenge the lawfulness of their detention. By the end of the year, six months after the Supreme Court ruling, no detainee had had the lawfulness of his detention judicially reviewed.

Detentions in Afghanistan and Iraq

In August, the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, appointed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld following the publication of photographs of torture and ill-treatment committed by US personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (see below), reported that since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, about 50,000 people had been detained during US military and security operations.

US forces operated some 25 detention facilities in Afghanistan and 17 in Iraq (see below). Detainees were routinely denied access to lawyers and families. In Afghanistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had access only to some detainees in Bagram and Kandahar air bases.

Detentions in undisclosed locations

A number of detainees, reported to be those considered by the US authorities to have high intelligence value, were alleged to remain in secret detention in undisclosed locations. In some cases, their situation amounted to “disappearance”. Some individuals were believed to have been held in secret locations for as long as three years. The refusal or failure of the US authorities to clarify the whereabouts or status of the detainees, leaving them outside the protection of the law for a prolonged period, clearly violated the standards of the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

Allegations that the US authorities were involved in the secret transfer of detainees between countries, exposing detainees to the risk of torture and ill-treatment, continued.

Military commissions

By the end of the year, 15 detainees were subject to the 2001 Military Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism. Detainees named under the Military Order can be detained without charge or trial or tried before a military commission. Military commissions are executive bodies, not independent or impartial courts, with the power to hand down death sentences; there is no right of appeal against their decisions to any court.

Four of the 15 – Yemeni nationals Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul and Salim Ahmed Hamdan; Australian national David Hicks; and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan – were charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes and other offences. The first pre-trial hearings were held for these four detainees in August.

On 8 November, US District Court Judge James Robertson presiding over Salim Hamdan’s habeas corpus appeal issued an order stating that Salim Hamdan could not be tried by military commission as charged. Judge Robertson ordered that unless and until a “competent tribunal”, as required under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, determined that Salim Hamdan was not entitled to prisoner of war status, he could only be tried by court-martial under the USA’s Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Judge Robertson held that even if Salim Hamdan was found not to have prisoner of war status by a “competent tribunal” which satisfied the requirements of the Third Geneva Convention (which the judge said neither presidential nor CSRT determinations would satisfy), his trial before the military commission would be unlawful because of military commission rules permitting the exclusion of the defendant from certain sessions and the withholding of certain classified or “protected” evidence from him. Military commission proceedings were still suspended at the end of the year, with the government having appealed against Judge Robertson’s ruling.

Torture and ill-treatment of detainees outside the USA

Photographic evidence of the torture and ill-treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by US soldiers became public in late April, causing widespread national and international concern. President Bush and other officials immediately asserted that the problem was restricted to Abu Ghraib and a few wayward soldiers.

On 22 June, after the leaking of earlier government documents relating to the “war on terror” suggesting that torture and ill-treatment had been envisaged, the administration took the step of declassifying selected documents to “set the record straight”. However, the released documents showed that the administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques that violated the UN Convention against Torture and that the President had stated in a central policy memorandum dated 7 February 2002 that, although the USA’s values “call for us to treat detainees humanely”, there are some “who are not legally entitled to such treatment”. The documents discussed, among other things, ways in which US agents could avoid the international prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including by arguing that the President could override international and national laws prohibiting such treatment. These and other documents also indicated that President Bush’s decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions to detainees captured in Afghanistan followed advice from his legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, that this would free up US interrogators in the “war on terror” and make future prosecutions of US agents for war crimes less likely. Following the presidential elections in November, President Bush nominated Alberto Gonzales to the post of Attorney General in his new administration.

On 30 December, shortly before Alberto Gonzales’ nomination hearings in the Senate, the Justice Department replaced one of its most controversial memorandums on torture, dated August 2002. Although the new memorandum was an improvement on its predecessor, much of the original version lived on in a Pentagon Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism, dated 4 April 2003, which remained operational at the end of the year.

A February report by the ICRC on abuses by Coalition forces in Iraq, which in some cases were judged to be “tantamount to torture”, was also leaked as was the report of an investigation by US Army Major General Antonio Taguba. The Taguba report had found “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” against detainees in Abu Ghraib prison between October and December 2003. It had also found that US agents in Abu Ghraib had hidden a number of detainees from the ICRC, referred to as “ghost detainees”. It was later revealed that one of these detainees had died in custody, one of several such deaths that were revealed during the year where torture or ill-treatment was thought to be a contributory factor.

During the year, the authorities initiated various criminal investigations and prosecutions against individual soldiers as well as investigations and reviews into interrogation and detention policies and practices. The investigations found that there had been “approximately 300 recorded cases of alleged abuse in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Iraq.” On 9 September, Major Paul Kern, who oversaw one of the military investigations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there may have been as many as 100 cases of “ghost detainees” in US custody in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld admitted to having authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to keep at least one detainee off any prison register.

However, there was concern that most of the investigations consisted of the military investigating itself, and did not have the power to carry the investigation into the highest levels of government. The activities of the CIA in Iraq and elsewhere, for example, remained largely shrouded in secrecy. No investigation dealt with the USA’s alleged involvement in secret transfers between countries and any torture or ill-treatment that may have ensued. Many documents remained classified. AI called for a full commission of inquiry into all aspects of the USA’s “war on terror” and interrogation and detention policies and practices.

During the year, released detainees alleged that they had been tortured or ill-treated while in US custody in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. Evidence also emerged that others, including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and the ICRC, had found that such abuses had been committed against detainees.

Detentions of ‘enemy combatants’ in the USA

In June the US Supreme Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a US citizen held for more than two years in military custody without charge or trial as an “enemy combatant”, was entitled to due process and habeas corpus review of his detention by the US courts. His case was remanded for further proceedings before the lower courts. While the latter were pending, he was released from US custody in October and transferred to Saudi Arabia, under conditions agreed between his lawyers and the US government. These included renouncing his US citizenship and undertaking not to leave Saudi Arabia for five years and never to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan or Syria.

José Padilla, a US national, and Ali-Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a Qatari national, remained detained without charge or trial as “enemy combatants”. José Padilla had filed a similar petition to Yaser Hamdi before the US Supreme Court but the Court rejected his petition on the grounds that his appeal had been filed in the wrong jurisdiction. The case was pending a rehearing in South Carolina, where he was detained in a military prison at the end of 2004.

Prisoners of conscience

Conscientious objectors Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía Castillo and Sergeant Abdullah William Webster were imprisoned; they were prisoners of conscience. Both men remained in prison at the end of the year.

Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía Castillo was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for desertion after he refused to return to his unit in Iraq on moral grounds relating to his misgivings about the legality of the war and the conduct of US troops towards Iraqi civilians and prisoners. His trial in May went ahead despite a pending decision by the army on his application for conscientious objector status.

In June, Sergeant Abdullah William Webster, who had served in the US army since 1985, was sentenced to 14 months’ imprisonment and loss of salary and benefits for refusing to participate in the war in Iraq on the basis of his religious beliefs. He had been ordered to deploy to Iraq despite submitting an application to be reassigned to non-combatant services. His application for conscientious objector status was refused on the ground that his objection was not to war in general but to a particular war.

Refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers

In November, National Public Radio (NPR) reported allegations of abuse of immigration detainees held at three New Jersey jails, including Passaic Jail and Hudson County Correctional Center. They included claims that two prisoners were beaten while handcuffed and that others were bitten by guard dogs. AI had reported on similar abuses in 2003. Most of the alleged victims in the NPR report were deported before investigations could be completed. The Department of Homeland Security said it was reviewing various contract detention facilities but did not confirm which jails were covered in the review.

Ill-treatment and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials

There were reports of ill-treatment and deaths in custody involving “new generation” tasers: powerful dart-firing electroshock weapons deployed or trialled by more than 5,000 US police and correctional agencies. More than 40 people died after being struck by US police tasers, bringing to more than 70 the total number of such deaths reported since 2001. While coroners generally attributed cause of death to factors such as drug intoxication, in at least five cases they found the taser played a role.

Most of the people who died were unarmed men who did not appear to pose a serious threat when they were electroshocked. Many were subjected to multiple shocks and some to additional force such as pepper spray or dangerous restraint holds, including hogtying (placing someone face-down with their hands and feet bound together from behind).

There were reports that tasers were used by officers routinely to shock people who were mentally disturbed or simply refused to obey commands. Children and the elderly were among those shocked. In most such cases, the officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing. In some departments tasers had become the most common force tool used by officers against a wide range of suspects.

AI reiterated its call on the US authorities to suspend use and transfers of tasers and other stun weapons pending a rigorous, independent inquiry into their use and effects.

Death penalty

In 2004, 59 people were executed, bringing to 944 the total number of prisoners put to death since the US Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on executions in 1976. Texas accounted for 23 of the year’s executions, and 336 of all the executions in the USA since 1976. Five people were released from death row in 2004 on grounds of innocence, bringing to 117 the total number of such cases since 1973.

Eight people prosecuted in the Texas jurisdiction of Harris County were executed during the year, despite concern around the reliability of forensic evidence processed through the Houston Police Department (HPD) crime laboratory where serious problems had been uncovered in 2003. In October, a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said that there should be “a moratorium on all executions in cases where convictions were based on evidence from the HPD crime lab until the reliability of the evidence has been verified”. His was the only dissenting voice when the Court denied death row inmate Dominique Green’s request for a stay of execution on the basis of concern around the accuracy of the HPD’s ballistics work in his case, and the discovery of 280 boxes of mislabelled evidence that could affect thousands of criminal cases. Dominique Green was executed on 26 October.

The USA continued to contravene international law by using the death penalty against child offenders – people who were under 18 at the time of the crime. Around 70 child offenders remained on death row during the year, more than a third of them in Texas.

In January, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from the State of Missouri in the case of Christopher Simmons, who was 17 years old at the time of the crime. The Missouri Supreme Court had overturned his death sentence in 2003 on the grounds that a national consensus had evolved against the execution of child offenders. The scheduled executions of a number of child offenders were stayed pending the US Supreme Court’s ruling, which was expected in early 2005.
On 31 March, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handed down its judgement following a lawsuit brought by Mexico on behalf of its nationals arrested, denied their consular rights, and sentenced to death in the USA. The ICJ found that the USA had violated its international obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and that it must provide effective judicial review and reconsideration of the impact of the violations on the cases of the foreign nationals involved. The ICJ noted with “great concern” that an execution date had been set for Osvaldo Torres Aguilera, one of the Mexican nationals named in the lawsuit. Osvaldo Torres’ execution was subsequently commuted by the governor of Oklahoma following an appeal for clemency from the President of Mexico and a recommendation for commutation from the state clemency board. On 10 December, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal of José Medellin, a Mexican national on death row in Texas, to determine what effect US courts should give to the ICJ ruling. The case was due to be considered during 2005.
Prisoners with histories of serious mental illness continued to be sentenced to death and executed.

Charles Singleton was executed in Arkansas on 6 January. At times on death row, his mental illness had been so acute that he had been forcibly medicated.
Kelsey Patterson, diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, was executed in Texas on 18 May. The Texas governor rejected a recommendation for clemency from the state Board of Pardons and Paroles in his case.
On 5 August James Hubbard was executed in Alabama. He was 74 years old – the oldest person to be put to death in the USA since 1977 – and had been on death row for more than a quarter of a century. James Hubbard was reported to suffer from dementia which sometimes led him to forget who he was and why he was on death row.

AI country visits

AI delegates visited Yemen in April and spoke with relatives of detainees from the Gulf region held in Guantánamo Bay. An AI delegate attended pre-trial military commission hearings in Guantánamo Bay in August and November.

Source: http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/usa-summary-eng

Proud to be an American... but ashamed of this administration.

Proud to be a Californian, and I hope we secede real soon so we're no longer associated with the corruption that is contemporary America.

With all of our flaws this is still one of the freest countries on the planet.

But we do have serious flaws that we must deal with. Flaws which are getting worse, which are being aggravated by Bush.

Please note that in the rest of the world (I live in Italy, so I feel the bad feelings of europeans toward the United States), the opinion is the opposite...

A lot of people in Europe, and in other places of the world, see United States of America like a Country in which human right's abuses happen every day, elections are stolen, and wars are waged without a real motivation except oil profit for conservative corporates...

This is the opinion that many people have about USA today: say "thanks" to Bush, if you want, but this is the sad reality

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/5/26/84928/0553

DOD Personnel Impersonated State Dept. Officials at Gitmo

by susanhu
Thu May 26th, 2005 at 08:49:28 AM PDT
On the heels of the ACLU's shocking announcement yesterday, which is headlining U.S. newspapers today ('bout time), that the FBI documented, in 2002 (!), complaints by Gitmo detainees of desecration of the Koran (and which I wrote about yesterday) -- comes this from those same FBI documents, which, notably, are different versions of documents released months ago by the FBI:

Documents released by the FBI state that Defense Department personnel impersonated State Department officials in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay ...

"Defense Department interrogators, possibly on instructions from high-level officials, went to great lengths to avoid being held accountable for the use of unlawful interrogation methods," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "Apparently Defense Department personnel were willing to use torture but they wanted others to be held responsible for it."

: : : More below : : :

We already knew that interrogators impersonated attorneys. The actual attorneys for detainees found, when they visited Guantanamo Bay, that they had often had to overcome the fear of their clients that they too were impersonators. (I've diaried about this impersonation and will find direct references shortly.)

We know, from the investigative piece that Martin Longman (BooMan) and I did last week, that detainees who had no possibility of comparing stories with each other, reported to their attorneys the same kinds of abuse of the Koran, as well as countless other physical and mental abuses.

More from today's ACLU press release:

Defense Department Personnel Impersonated State Department Officials in Guantánamo Interrogations, FBI Documents Show

Defense Department And CIA Are Unlawfully Withholding Photographs and Documents Concerning Torture Of Prisoners, ACLU Argues in Court Today

... In December 2004, the FBI released documents stating that Defense Department interrogators impersonated FBI agents in order to avoid being held responsible for the use of "torture techniques." The new documents provide the first indication that Defense Department interrogators impersonated State Department officials as well.

The documents released by the ACLU today are different versions of documents that the FBI provided to the ACLU several months ago. One of the new documents which was previously redacted refers to "information concerning impersonation by DOD interrogators at Guantánamo representing themselves to be officials of the FBI and U.S. State Department." The remainder of the document is almost entirely redacted. Another of the newly released documents, dated January 2004, suggests that the FBI would "finally make an arrest" in relation to the "interrogations in June 2003 when an FBI agent was impersonated."

The FBI released the documents in response to a federal court order that directed the FBI and other government agencies to comply with a request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

Today, the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union will return to federal court to argue for the release of other documents withheld by the Defense Department and the CIA.

"The United States government continues to withhold documents critical for determining who is ultimately responsible for the systemic and widespread abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "The public has a right to know the full truth about the involvement of high ranking U.S. officials in this scandal."

"At today's hearing," says the ACLU press release, "the ACLU will seek the disclosure of Department of Justice memoranda relating to CIA interrogation methods and a Presidential directive authorizing the CIA to set up secret detention centers in other countries."

Although the documents have been referenced in media reports, the CIA has refused even to confirm or deny that the documents exist. The ACLU will also seek the disclosure of photographs of abuse and Defense Department documents relating to concerns raised by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The government agencies named as defendants in the case are: the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

[.................]

At today's hearing, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein will hear oral arguments from attorneys representing the ACLU and the government. The hearing will continue on Tuesday, May 31 at 10 a.m. in Judge Hellerstein's courtroom at the United States District Court located at 500 Pearl Street in New York.

The lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Singh, Jaffer and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur N. Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Read the documents yourself that the ACLU and other groups have obtained.

FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.

The release of the declassified document came the week after the Bush administration denounced as wrong a May 9 Newsweek article that stated U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down a toilet to try to make detainees talk.

The magazine retracted the article, which had triggered protests in Afghanistan in which 16 people died.

The newly released document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made days earlier by a detainee, whose name was redacted, in two interviews with an FBI special agent, whose name also was withheld, at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.

The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and a series of other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

"Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet," the FBI agent wrote.

"The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the FBI agent wrote.

The Pentagon stated last week it had received "no credible and specific allegations" that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had put a Koran in the toilet.

The documents indicated that detainees were making allegations that they had been abused and that the Muslim holy book had been mishandled as early as April 2002, about three months after the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo.

In other documents, FBI agents stated that Guantanamo detainees also accused U.S. personnel of kicking the Koran and throwing it to the floor, and described beatings by guards. But one document cited a detainee who accused a guard of dropping a Koran, prompting an "uprising" by prisoners, when it was the prisoner himself who dropped it.

The Pentagon had no immediate comment on the documents.

The United States currently holds about 520 detainees at Guantanamo, a high-security prison it opened in January 2002 for non-U.S. citizens caught in the U.S. war on terrorism.

Former detainees and a lawyer for current prisoners previously have stated that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had placed the Koran in a toilet, but the Pentagon last week said it did not view those allegations as credible.

'MORE CREDIBLE'

"Unfortunately, one thing we've learned over the last couple of years is that detainee statements about their treatment at Guantanamo and other detention centers sometimes have turned out to be more credible than U.S. government statements," said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer.

Jaffer said the latest documents show the U.S. government had heard detainees complain as early as 2002 about desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, including at least one mentioning it had been placed in a toilet.

In another document, written in April 2003, an FBI agent related a detainee's account of an incident involving a female U.S. interrogator.

"While the guards held him, she removed her blouse, embraced the detainee from behind and put her hand on his genitals. The interrogator was on her menstrual period and she wiped blood from her body on his face and head," the memo stated.

A similar incident was described in a recent book written by a former Guantanamo interrogator.

The U.S. military launched an inquiry after the Newsweek article was published into whether Guantanamo personnel placed the Koran in a toilet, but the review was limited to searching through official day-to-day log entries.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week said Newsweek "got the facts wrong." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman last week called the article "demonstrably false."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050525/ts_nm/...tanamo_koran_dc

Maybe Friedman is right, and we should just shut the place down.

On the other hand, there is pretty credible evidence, on cd roms and in computers, that a detainee is instructed to say anything that would shame Islam in order to enrage muslims and recruit more al queda members. I do not know if all of this is true, or some of it....probalby a little of both. But we have such a credibility problem because of that damn gang of thugs at Abu Graib and RUMSFELD WHO NEEDS TO RESIGN....that we can't know, but we can pretty well guarantee that the world believes the terrorists! I hate to say this, but I think the whole world just loves to finally find a way to attack the US, and I think they have always wanted to find a way to take us down a bit because of their own inferiority complex...but, we gave them the perfect ammunition! We need to win in Iraq, but we need better leadership to do it. This is getting stupid and ridiculous!

Amnesty International Wants U.S. Officials Arrested and Investigated

By Bob Dart

05/26/05 "Cox News" - - WASHINGTON - Amnesty International USA urged foreign governments Wednesday to use international law to investigate Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other alleged American "architects of torture" at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and other prisons where detainees suspected of ties to terrorist groups have been interrogated.

"If those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them," said William Shulz, executive director of the U.S. branch of the international human rights agency.

In its annual report on "The State of the World's Human Rights," Amnesty International said the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "has become the gulag of our times" and accused U.S. officials of flaunting international law in their treatment of detainees.

There is no statute of limitations on crimes such as torture, Shulz said.

So for years to come, the director warned, "the apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998."

Gen. Pinochet, a former dictator of Chile, was arrested on an international warrant issued by a Spanish judge while Pinochet was in England receiving medical treatment.

Charged with torturing Spanish citizens in Chile, he was held under house arrest in England for more than a year but eventually returned to his homeland and escaped an international trial.

If the United States "continues to shirk its responsibility" of investigating allegations of abuse to the top of the chain of command, Shulz said, foreign governments should uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, called the charges "unsupported by the facts."

The well-publicized abuses of detainees have been a "stain on the image of the United States abroad," he conceded, but the exposures only reinforced the administration's commitment to human rights.

"We hold people accountable when there is abuse," he said.

Amnesty International's demand for international action came as a private activist group that spans the ideological spectrum called for President Bush and Congress to appoint an independent, bipartisan panel, modeled after the Sept. 11 commission, to investigate the "various allegations of abuse of terrorist suspects."

The group calling for appointment of such a commission ranged from former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene and former Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla., on the right to Thomas Pickering, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and Morton Halperin of the Center for American Progress on the left.

Pickering said his conversations during recent international travels confirmed the damage that prisoner abuse charges have done to the nation, disheartening our allies and giving ammunition to our enemies.

But others on the panel said they were not as concerned about foreign reaction as with domestic values.

"We should be opposed to this (torture) because of who we are -- not what they think," said Keene.

In issuing the Amnesty International report, Shulz specifically named those he regarded as potential "high-level torture architects."

In addition to Rumsfeld and Gonzales, they included former CIA Director George Tenet; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq; Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo; and Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy.

Shulz said the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment legally bind the countries that have signed them to exercise "universal jurisdiction" on people suspected of violations.

Certain crimes, including torture, amount to offenses against all of humanity so all countries have a responsibility to investigate and prosecute people responsible for such crimes, he said.

Copyright: Night Ridder

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

See the video here: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article8956.htm

My only problem with this is that you never hear a peep out of these people when other regimes commit the same kind of criminal acts. Consistency lends credibility.

http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aireport/
Annual reports

Amnesty International Report 2005
©AI
Each year Amnesty International publishes a report on its work and its concerns throughout the world.

Report 2005
During 2004, the human rights of ordinary men, women and children were disregarded and grossly abused in every corner of the globe. The Amnesty International Report 2005, covering 149 countries, is a detailed picture of these abuses.

The report also acknowledges the opportunities for positive change that emerged in 2004, often spearheaded by human rights activists and civil society groups.

Whether in a high profile conflict or a forgotten crisis, Amnesty International campaigns for justice and freedom for all and seeks to galvanize public support to build a better world.

View the Report 2005 online

Previous Reports
View the report from previous years
Please select year -
2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993

WOW! Go Johnny, Go!

Does anybody remember when this happened???

Canadian authorities arrest US president George W. Bush

Paul K. J.

11/30/04 "ICH" -- Ottawa -- Canadian authorities have arrested US president George W. Bush in Ottawa. He has been charged with several offences under Canada's War Crimes Act. Vice-President Dick Cheney has mobilized the American military and all border crossings between the two nations have closed. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has urged for calm in a short radio and television broadcast to the Canadian people immediately after the arrest. Part of the Prime Minister’s broadcast is included here:




"Oh, how sweet it IS!

It was a HOAX in 2004, but maybe not this time, huh?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050529/ap_on_re_mi_ea/us_iraq

Myers Defends Treatment of Gitmo Prisoners By MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 26 minutes ago



The Pentagon's top general on Sunday defended the treatment of prisoners at the U.S. Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and said the U.S. believes al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is wounded, though it's not known how badly.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. has done a good job of humanely treating detainees. Muslims in several countries have protested in recent weeks about allegations that a Quran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo as part of an interrogation of a prisoner.

The human rights group Amnesty International released a report last week calling the prison camp "the gulag of our time."

Myers said that report was "absolutely irresponsible." He said the U.S. was doing its best to detain fighters who, if released, "would turn right around and try to slit our throats, slit our children's throats."

"This is a different kind of struggle, a different kind of war," Myers said on "Fox News Sunday."

"We struggle with how to handle them, but we've always handled them humanely and with the dignity that they should be accorded."

Myers said a copy of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, had not been flushed down a toilet. He repeated the Pentagon's contention that five cases of mistreatment of the Quran at Guantanamo had been confirmed. He did not give any other details about the mistreatment.

The four-star general said the U.S. military had detained more than 68,000 people since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and investigated 325 complaints of mistreatment. Investigations have found 100 cases of prisoner mistreatment and 100 people have been punished, Myers said.

On Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Myers said U.S. officials believe postings on a militant Web site that Zarqawi had been wounded. Myers said he did not know whether Zarqawi had left Iraq for treatment in another country, as some militant sites and news organizations have reported.

Myers said he did not think the United States should have used more troops in the Iraq invasion but acknowledged that progress has proved slower than Pentagon officials had hoped.

"I don't think we understood that people had been suppressed, and their spirit had been suppressed to the point where it wasn't just going to naturally blossom once they had the opportunity," Myers said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Later Sunday, Myers was joining Rolling Thunder, an annual motorcycle rally in the capital to support veterans. Thousands of motorcyclists were riding from the Pentagon to the National Mall, gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Among those attending were Keith and Carolyn Maupin, the parents of Sgt. Keith Maupin, the only U.S. soldier listed as missing and captured in Iraq. The 21-year-old soldier has been missing since his convoy was attacked west of Baghdad on April 9.

"To see these people and see their faces, and hear their caring and sincerity, it's just amazing," Carolyn Maupin said in a telephone interview. "It touches our hearts."

___

By the way clapton, irrelevant irreverent photos effectively close down threads - haven't you noticed?

Another one from Buzzflash, worthy of reposting here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/opinion/...f50a31f&ei=5070

Op-Ed Columnist

By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 30, 2005

This Memorial Day is not a good one for the country that was once the world's most brilliant beacon of freedom and justice.

State Department officials know better than anyone that the image of the United States has deteriorated around the world. The U.S. is now widely viewed as a brutal, bullying nation that countenances torture and operates hideous prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in other parts of the world - camps where inmates have been horribly abused, gruesomely humiliated and even killed.

The huge and bitter protests of Muslims against the United States last week were touched off by reports that the Koran had been handled disrespectfully by interrogators at Guantánamo. But the anger and rage among Muslims and others had been building for a long time, fueled by indisputable evidence of the atrocious treatment of detainees, terror suspects, wounded prisoners and completely innocent civilians in America's so-called war against terror.

Amnesty International noted last week in its annual report on human rights around the world that more than 500 detainees continue to be held "without charge or trial" at Guantánamo. Locking people up without explaining why, and without giving them a chance to prove their innocence, seems a peculiar way to advance the cause of freedom in the world.

It's now known that many of the individuals swept up and confined at Guantánamo and elsewhere were innocent. The administration says it has evidence it could use to prove the guilt of detainees currently at Guantánamo, but much of the evidence is secret and therefore cannot be revealed.

This is where the war on terror meets Never-Never Land.

President Bush's close confidante, Karen Hughes, has been chosen to lead a high-profile State Department effort to repair America's image. The Bush crowd apparently thinks this is a perception problem, as opposed to a potentially catastrophic crisis that will not be eased without substantive policy changes.

This is much more than an image problem. The very idea of what it means to be American is at stake. The United States is a country that as a matter of policy (and in the name of freedom) "renders" people to regimes that specialize in the art of torture.

"How," asked Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, "can our State Department denounce countries for engaging in torture while the C.I.A. secretly transfers detainees to the very same countries for interrogation?"

Ms. Hughes said in March that she would do her best "to stand for what President Bush called the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity." Someone should tell her that there's not a lot of human dignity in the venues where torture is inflicted.

The U.S. would regain some of its own lost dignity if a truly independent commission were established to thoroughly investigate the interrogation and detention operations associated with the war on terror and the war in Iraq. A real investigation would be traumatic because it would expose behavior most Americans would never want associated with their country. But in the long run it would be extremely beneficial.

William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in an interview last week that it's important to keep in mind how policies formulated at the highest levels of government led inexorably to the abusive treatment of prisoners.

"The critical point is the deliberateness of this policy," he said. "The president gave the green light. The secretary of defense issued the rules. The Justice Department provided the rationale. And the C.I.A. tried to cover it up."

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, most of the world was ready to stand with the U.S. in a legitimate fight against terrorists. But the Bush administration, in its lust for war with Iraq and its willingness to jettison every semblance of due process while employing scandalously inhumane practices against detainees, blew that opportunity.

In much of the world, the image of the U.S. under Mr. Bush has morphed from an idealized champion of liberty to a heavily armed thug in camouflage fatigues. America is increasingly being seen as a dangerously arrogant military power that is due for a comeuppance. It will take a lot more than Karen Hughes to turn that around.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

Thanks for the post.

A far cry from the Memorial days of past. I hope he's proud of himself.

Ghee, do you have a mallet to go with that Robe?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050531/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush

Bush Calls Human Rights Report 'Absurd' By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
16 minutes ago



President Bush called a human rights report "absurd" for criticizing the United States' detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said Tuesday the allegations were made by "people who hate America."

"It's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.

In a Rose Garden news conference, Bush defiantly stood by his domestic policy agenda while defending his actions abroad. With the death toll climbing daily in Iraq, he said that nation's fledging government is "plenty capable" of defeating terrorists whose attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers have intensified.

Bush spoke after separate air crashes killed four American and four Italian troops in Iraq. The governor of Anbar province, taken hostage three weeks ago, was killed during clashes between U.S. forces and the insurgents who abducted him.

Bush said the job of the U.S. forces there is to help train Iraqis to defeat terrorists.

"I think the Iraqi people dealt the insurgents a serious blow when we had the elections," Bush said. "In other words, what the insurgents fear is democracy because democracy is the opposition of their vision."

On another foreign policy issue, Bush said he expressed concerns with Russian President Vladimir Putin about legal proceedings against former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky was convicted Tuesday of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison following a trail widely denounced as politically motivated.

Bush did not comment directly on the verdict, but said, "it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial."

The president said he has questioned whether the case shows a backsliding away from the rule of law and democracy in Russia and said it will "be interesting to see" how Khodorkovsky's expected appeal is handled by the government.

"Here, you're innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been ajudged guilty prior to having a fair trial," Bush said. "We're watching the ongoing case."

He said it was a "reasonable decision" to allow Iran to apply for WTO membership as a way to advance diplomatic discussions with Europe on Iran's nuclear program. In another hot spot, he urged further diplomacy to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Bush opened the news conference by urging Congress to pass his stalled energy legislation, restrain the growth of government spending, approve the Central American Free Trade Agreement and overhaul Social Security with a partial privatization plan.

He declared that the economy is strong, with 3.5 million jobs in two years and an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent. "Obviously, these are hopeful signs, but Congress can make sure the signs remain hopeful," he said in a five-minute opening statement in the Rose Garden.

After a bruising week on Capitol Hill, Bush urged both political parties to "set aside partisan differences" and work together.

Though he did not mention tax cuts in his opening argument, Bush said he still wants Congress to make his first-term cuts permanent. He also pledged not to give up on Social Security reform, despite intense opposition on Capitol Hill. "The easy path is to say, `Oh, we don't have a problem. Let's ignore it -- yet again."

After reading this, this dictator has to go.

Who `da ever thought the world would have to intevene on behalf of the American people ? (vicariously, of course)

Bob Barr ?! Ok - which side is up and which side is down..... what is left and what is right....
who is conservative and who is liberal.... .... sorry, it is just that a lot of molds are being broken lately..... which is not a bad thing in all cases.

BTW- Amnesty International is very well respected, as veritas has kindly pointed out.
And this proves it.