There go the civil liberties!
Category: War Crimes
Broder
15,000 unreported civilian deaths in Iraq
Revealed via new leak by Wikileaks. I knew it was bullshit that the U.S. has always claimed it doesn’t keep count, because the military does love paperwork:
Sand flies
No, it shouldn’t take a mother thousands of miles away to get her soldier son the medical care he needs. Sheesh.
‘Summarily executed’
I can’t quite seem to hypnotize myself into being okay with this, nor with our country basically pretending it isn’t true. Glenn Greenwald:
Last week, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights released a comprehensive reportdetailing its findings regarding the May, 2010, Israeli attack on the six-ship flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Israel-blockaded Gaza. The report has been largely ignored in the American media despite the fact (or, more accurately: because) it found that much of the Israeli force used “was unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers”; that “at least six of the killings can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions“; and that Israel violated numerous international human rights conventions, including the Fourth Geneva Conventions (see p. 38, para. 172).
Even more striking in terms of U.S. media and government silence on this report is the fact that one of the victims of the worst Israeli violations was a 19-year-old American citizen. As Gareth Porter documents in an excellent article at The Huffington Post, the report “shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.” In particular:
The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground.
The report says Dogan had apparently been “lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time” before being shot in his face.
The forensic evidence that establishes that fact is “tattooing around the wound in his face,” indicating that the shot was “delivered at point blank range.” The report describes the forensic evidence as showing that “the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back.”
There’s more, if you can stomach it.
Convicted
I don’t even know what to say to this:
JERUSALEM — An Israeli military court convicted two soldiers on Sunday of using a 9-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield by forcing him to check bags for explosives in Israel’s 2008-9 Gaza war.
The court said that the two men, both infantry sergeants, had taken part in an operation to seize an apartment building in Tel al-Hawa, a southern suburb of Gaza City, while under attack from Hamas fighters.
A summary of the court’s judgment provided by the military spokesman’s office said the two had rounded up civilians and come upon bags in a bathroom. They grabbed the child and ordered him to check the bags for booby traps.
“The boy, who feared for his fate and was pressured by the situation, wet his pants,” the judges said, pointedly noting that, “unlike the soldiers, the boy had no means of personal protection.”
After the boy emptied the contents of one bag and had trouble opening a second, one of the soldiers shot at the second bag. The boy was returned, terrified but unharmed, to his family.
Laos, Cambodia, Pakistan
What three countries were secretly invaded by the U.S. in our lifetime, while the establishment looked politely in the other direction?
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
‘Dwight Was Right’
Michael Moore explains who’s really in charge.
War is the obscenity
A reminder:
Today at 1:00pm eastern time, U.S. military veterans hung an enormous banner on the front of the Newseum, wrapping their message around the First Amendment chiseled in five stories of limestone.
Opposed to the wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine, the vets’ message said loud and clear: “MR. OBAMA: END THESE FUCKING WARS! WAR IS THE OBSCENITY.”
Several veterans dropped the banner down the front of the Newseum, while others distributed special edition copies of the War Crimes Times, explaining the action and what they considered obscene.
“The American public should be shocked that we are still killing and crippling thousands of innocent people in these countries as well as our own soldiers — that’s what’s truly obscene,” said Mike Ferner, 59, who served as a navy corpsman during Vietnam. “Blowing people’s arms and legs off, burning, paralyzing them, causing sewage to run through their streets, polluting the water that kills and sickens children, terrorizing and bombing people and their livestock with flying robots– that defines obscenity. If this banner shocks and offends a single person who hasn’t been shocked and offended by what’s being done in our name, we’ve accomplished our misson.”
Veterans and activists taking part in the event include Ken Mayers, Kim Carlyle, Mike Ferner, Bruce Berry, Debbie Tolson, Nic Abramson,Tarak Kauff, Mike Hearington, Will Covert and Elliott Adams of Veterans For Peace.
Is this why we’re still at war?
Almost nine years ago, a British embassy official recorded the consensus among American and British officials that the plausibility that we were still at war would affect whether we could legally hold detainees for long periods without trial.
Nine years later, just a handful of the men ultimately captured have had a trial. Our sole claim to still be at war–aside from the Administration’s attempts to stretch the terms of the AUMF–are the 50 al Qaeda members still in Afghanistan. And on that basis, we still hold hundreds of men without trial.
You see, from the start this war was designed to be our longest war. Because all those Commander-in-Chief powers both Republicans and Democrats have grown to love so much depend on it continuing.
Our men and women are risking their lives in Afghanistan at this point to make indefinite detention more legally “plausible.”