Saturday, August 21, 2010
Jon Stewart – The Daily Show – Extremist Makeover Edition Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal runs a holding company (Kingdom Holding Company) and is one of the most visible funders of Islamist organisations in the United States, including the Park51 Islamic Cultural Center project located two blocks away from 9/11 Ground Zero. The purchase of a [...]
Filed in Journalism, Notable
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Also tagged CIA, DEA, Espionage, Fox News, George W Bush, Gitmo. Guantanamo, Israel, Mossad, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, Rendition, Saudi Arabia, Torture, Wahhabi, Wahhabism
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European governments must be held accountable for their role in the extraordinary rendition practices in the so-called war on terror, rights groups say. According to the Open Society Justice Initiative, the European Court of Human Rights said it would consider the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri who was subjected to extraordinary rendition allegedly at [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged CIA, Courts, Extraordinary Rendition, Germany, Justice, Khaled el-Masri, Kidnapping, Law, Rendition, SCOTUS, State Secrets Privilege, Torture
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The closest thing we come to answer is an internal CIA e-mail released last Thursday, in which an unidentified CIA officer writes that (Jose) Rodriguez decided to destroy the tapes because they made the CIA “look horrible; it would be devastating to us.” But was Rodriguez acting on his own, or following orders? Rodriguez’s lawyer [...]
Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country’s Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say. The men were detained by the Iraqi army in October in sweeps targeting Sunni [...]
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.” “If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” Rumsfeld [...]
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Also tagged Abdul Rashid Dostum, Adel Hassan Hamad, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Beth Jones, Bounties, Cofer Black, Colin Powell, CSRT, Dick Cheney, DOD, Donald Rumsfeld, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Indefinite Detention, Intelligence, Iraq War, Jack Straw, Lawrence Wilkerson, Liz Cheney, Lying Liars, Pakistan, Pentagon, Pierre Prosper, Rendition, Richard Myers, Robert Gates, Saddam Hussein, SOF, Torture
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A federal judge in New York City on Wednesday denied for the second time the American Civil Liberties Union’s request for access to CIA documents about interrogation techniques, the Associated Press reported. The ACLU has waged a three-year battle for the release of nearly 600 different documents from the CIA that describe the use of enhanced interrogation [...]
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The legal issues can’t really be fully assessed without much more information than has been reported so far, but I see three separate problems—in ascending order of significance: Appropriated funds. Specific rules govern the use of congressionally appropriated funds, requiring the money to be used for the purpose for which it was in fact approved. [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Assassinations, CIA, Civilians, Contractors, Courts, Donald Rumsfeld, Geneva Conventions, Law, Laws of War, Military, Military Tribunals, Predator Drones, Propaganda
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Eventually he realized it wasnt the Americans he was trying to reach. He said it was something people didn’t always understand about radios, that even if the Americans stopped listening, the heavens always heard. – Eliot Pattison, The Lord of Death via Truthout: Detained I feel the same way about these blog entries. Having readers or [...]
The Obama administration does not expect to capture Osama Bin Laden alive. Attorney General Eric Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday that the possibility of catching the Al Qaeda leader alive is “infinitesimal.” “Based on the intelligence I’ve reviewed, the possibility simply does not exist,” Mr. Holder said in response to heated questioning [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Al Qaeda, Congress, Conservatives, Courts, DOJ, Eric Holder, Indefinite Detention, Intelligence, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Law, Osama bin Laden, Republicans
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Aside from the underlying issues–such as that some if not most of the interrogators in question are contractors who were working for Mitchell and Jessen, the fact that their identities are obvious enough for hippie human rights lawyers to discover them, and the fact that (contrary to Gertz’ use of the word “terrorist” throughout) some [...]
Re: Liz Cheney, Wm. Kristol, and their pals slandering DOJ attorneys as the “al-Qaida 7″ and the “Department of Jihad”, engaging in the smear tactics that became synonymous with McCarthy: If this seems confusing, here’s a simple principle to keep in mind: Representing someone in an American court does not mean agreeing with that person’s actions [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Conservatives, Courts, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Keep America Safe, Law, Liz Cheney, Neocons, Republicans, Smear Tactics, William Kristol
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Liz Cheney advocates torture and indefinite detention with no charges, and just launched a repulsive McCarthyite smear campaign equating all detainee lawyers with Al Qaeda. The ACLU has steadfastly opposed Bush’s torture policies as early as anyone, advocates due process for all, and ran a newspaper advertisement pointing out the indisputable fact that military commissions and [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged ACLU, Centrism, CIA, Courts, Dana Milbank, Drones, Due Process, Glenn Greenwald, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Indefinite Detention, Law, Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney, Military Tribunals, Predator Drones, Unlawful Combatants
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(Xinhua) Updated: 2010-03-12 16:52 BEIJING – China’s Information Office of the State Council published a report titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009” here Friday. Following is the full text: The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009 on March 11, 2010, posing [...]
Filed in Documents, News Blurbs, Notable
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Also tagged AIDs, Arms Trafficking, BATF, Censorship, Child Labor, China, CIA, Civil Rights, Crime, Cuba, Cuban Embargo, Discrimination, DOJ, ECHELON, Education, Environment, Equal Pay, Espionage, FBI, FISA, Freedom of Press, Freedom of Speech, Hate Crimes, Healthcare, Hegemony, Homeless, Homelessness, Human Rights, Hunger, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Internet, Labor, Military, Minorities, Murder, NSA, Oppression, Overseas Military Installations, Patriot Act, Poverty, Prisoners, Prisons, Racism, Rape, Rendition, Surveillance, Torture, Unemployment, US Human Rights Record 2009, Veterans, Walmart, Wiretapping, Women
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These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month. Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” [...]
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
In essence, the classified memo cited by Cheney stated that the CIA torture of Abu Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla in 2003. But as Isikoff reports, the newly-released docs point out that Padilla was arrested in 2002 — so torture couldn’t have secured his capture. This also appears [...]
Monday, February 15, 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8DSnVlGnbo[/youtube] KARL: … waterboarding, clearly, what was your… CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that… KARL: And you opposed the administration’s actions of doing away with waterboarding? CHENEY: Yes. He just admitted being an accomplice. To date approximately 100 detainees (at minimum), including [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Notable
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Caught on Tape, CIA, Crime, Dick Cheney, Evidence, Guantanamo, Iraq War, JSOC, Military, Torture, War Crimes, Waterboarding
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Monday, February 15, 2010
There are times when governments fight to keep documents secret to protect sensitive intelligence or other vital national security interests. And there are times when they are just trying to cover up incompetence, misbehavior or lawbreaking. Last week, when a British court released secret intelligence material relating to the torture allegations of a former Guantánamo [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Binyam Mohamed, CIA, Courts, Crime, Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Hillary Clinton, Intelligence, Law, MI5, Rendition, Torture, War Crimes
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A new investigation by journalist Anand Gopal reveals harrowing details about US secret prisons in Afghanistan, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Gopal interviewed Afghans who were detained and abused at several disclosed and undisclosed sites at US and Afghan military bases across the country. He also reveals the existence of another secret prison [...]
Three developments last week show the growing gap between the Obama Administration and its NATO allies with respect to the legacy of torture from the Bush era. They also demonstrate that, contrary to Obama’s promises faithfully to uphold the Convention Against Torture and Geneva Conventions, his Justice Department has no intention of doing so when [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Alberto Gonzales, Canada, Cover-Ups, David Addington, David Margolis, DOJ, Douglas Feith, Eric Holder, Ethics, Guantanamo, Jay Bybee, Jim Haynes, John Yoo, NATO, Spain, Torture
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The practice that Sher Khan describes here, first used in classical antiquity and later by American soldiers battling the Filipino insurgency around the turn of the last century, is called the “water cure.” One of the JAG School textbook cases of prosecution for torture involves this procedure. The case became notorious in the United States [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Anand Gopal, DOD, DOJ, FOIA, Geneva Conventions, International Law, International Red Cross, JSOC, Law, Noor Agha Sher Khan, Robert Gates, Secret Prisons, Torture, Waterboarding
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In February 2004, David J. Evans, a marine biologist and photographer, was engaged as part of a team working on the Pentagon’s Legacy Program, which documents the cultural and environmental aspects of Defense Department operations. His assignment was to survey and photograph the rich array of wildlife and vegetation at Guantánamo Naval Base. After publication [...]
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A major new report on secret detention policies (.doc) around the world, conducted by four independent UN human rights experts, concludes that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Afghanistan, CIA, Disappeared, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Iraq, JSOC, Rendition, Secret Detention, Secret Prisons, Torture, UN
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Saturday, January 23, 2010
“A commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves… When injustice anywhere is ignored, justice everywhere is denied. Acknowledging and remedying mistakes does not make us weaker, it reaffirms the strengths of our principles and institutions.” Not Amnesty International’s words, but those of US Secretary [...]
Ensign asked Blair why it made sense to restrict interrogations of terrorism suspects to the techniques listed in the mostly-Geneva-Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on Interrogations, as Obama insisted in one of the first executive orders of his presidency. Blair strongly strongly defended the decision. “We looked at that quite carefully,” Blair said. “We do not [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Army Field Manual on Interrogations, Dennis Blair, DNI, Geneva Conventions, Human Rights, Intelligence, John Ensign, Law, Military Tribunals, Miranda Warning, National Security, Secret Prisons, Terrorism, Torture
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Thursday, January 21, 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHupKGP3iX8[/youtube] Scott Horton speaks with Keith Olbermann about The Guantánamo “Suicides”—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.