WASHINGTON — Three Guantánamo detainees were slated to leave the American prison in Cuba this week after about 14 years in captivity. But early Wednesday morning, only two were willing to board the plane.
The third — Mohammed Ali Abdullah Bwazir of Yemen — balked at the last minute, even though he has a history of hunger striking to protest his indefinite detention without trial. In recent days, Mr. Bwazir was “frightened” to leave the prison and go to a country where he has no family, his lawyer, John Chandler, said. The country has not been identified.
Mr. Chandler also said his client — who was born around 1980 and brought to Guantánamo in 2002 — was depressed. He compared his client to a character in the prison movie “The Shawshank Redemption” who has spent so much of his life behind bars that he cannot handle life on the outside after finally being paroled.
“Can you imagine being there for 14 years and going to a plane where you could finally leave, and saying ‘No, take me back to my cell?’ ” Mr. Chandler said. “This is one of the saddest days of my life.”
Category: The Regime
War is a racket
https://youtu.be/Vmk5xO8siDk
Via Raw Story. Remember when Michael Moore showed this in Farenheit 911, and people accused him of staging it? Good times!
At a Credit Suisse conference in West Palm Beach this week, representatives from major defense contractors spoke to their investors about how well business was going in these times of global war. Representatives from top firms like Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin were in attendance, in somewhat of a celebration of the escalating conflict in the middle east and Africa.
Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner gave a speech openly praising the “indirect” benefits that defense contractors would see as a result of the war in Syria. A portion of his speech was captured on audio by someone inside and shared widely on the internet hours after the conference.
In the audio that was captured, Tanner discussed the many recent troubles in the Middle East, with an escalation of conflict in Syria and Turkey. He pointed out how these conflicts would lead to increased sales for their company.
Tanner said that the increased conflict would cause “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theater.”
According to the Intercept, during another speech at the conference, Wilson Jones, the president of the defense manufacturer Oshkosh, said that “with the ISIS threat growing, there are more countries interested in buying Oshkosh-made M-ATV armored vehicles.”
Raytheon Chief Executive Tom Kennedy also joined in the informal celebration, saying that his company was seeing “a significant uptick for defense solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East.”
“It’s all the turmoil they have going on, whether the turmoil’s occurring in Yemen, whether it’s with the Houthis, whether it’s occurring in Syria or Iraq, with ISIS,” Kennedy added.
In addition to the growing wars, the contractors also celebrated the fact that the defense sector was recently granted a $607 billion budget by the government.
Amnesty queries U.S. bombs deal with Saudi Arabia
The US state department has approved the sale of $1.3bn of bombs to Saudi Arabia, to allow the Gulf nation to replenish its depleted weapons supplies as it continues to conduct intensive air strikes in Yemen and Syria. Amnesty International, however, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that some of the types of bombs the US proposes… Continue reading “Amnesty queries U.S. bombs deal with Saudi Arabia”
‘Heat flash’ spotted on radar before crash
Why do I get the feeling that this is meant to draw us into another war?
A U.S. official told CNN on Tuesday that a “heat flash” over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was detected by a military satellite just before the Saturday plane crash that killed 224 people aboard a Russian airliner, the network reports. The account echoes an NBC report sourced to two senior defense officials, and both reports say that the satellite evidence indicates that a “catastrophic in-flight event”—possibly an explosion caused by a bomb or mechanical failure—downed Metrojet Flight 9268. NBC says that it’s unlikely that a missile could have caused the crash because the satellite that picked up the flash would have also registered the “heat trail” of a missile but did not; CNN also says the U.S. has ruled out the possibility that the plane was shot down.
Metrojet officials said Monday that they were sure that the crash had not been caused by mechanical failure or pilot error but didn’t provide any evidence of that claim. The plane involved, an Airbus A321, dropped some 5,000 feet in a minute before breaking into pieces and never issued a distress call.
Pentagon: U.S. to begin ‘direct action on the ground’ in Syria And Iraq
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter says the U.S. will take “direct action on the ground” in Iraq and Syria. “We won’t hold back from supporting capable partners in opportunistic attacks against ISIL, or conducting such missions directly whether by strikes from the air or direct action on the ground,” Carter said in testimony before the Senate Armed… Continue reading “Pentagon: U.S. to begin ‘direct action on the ground’ in Syria And Iraq”
What a coinky dink
That certainly is odd, isn’t it?
The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights was recently burglarized after they filed a lawsuit against the CIA for refusing to release declassified documents to the public. Data and equipment were stolen from the office, and it is suspected that the CIA may have had something to do with the break-in. The specific documents in question that the group was filing the lawsuit over were also stolen from the office.
[…] The center filed the lawsuit just weeks ago, on October 2nd. The lawsuit alleged that the CIA violated the Freedom of Information Act by withholding information about the 1981 Santa Cruz massacre in El Salvador.
The Santa Cruz massacre was carried out by an elite puppet dictatorship that was heavily backed and influenced by the CIA and the US government. The military forces, led by Lt. Colonel Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez, killed hundreds of innocent civilians who were fleeing the gunfire. The CIA has spent decades protecting Pérez, and keeping the war crimes that took place a secret. However, Pérez is currently on trial in El Salvador, and the declassified CIA files could actually help with the case against him.
“The CIA’s denial of our request is not credible. The CIA has previously declassified 20 documents relating to Ochoa. Why didn’t they at least give us copies of those same documents? There can be no national security concerns about documents that have already been made public,” Mina Manuchehri, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs said in a recent article.
Pérez was a favorite of the US military – Col. John Waghlestein, head of the U.S. Military Advisory Group said in a 1987 interview that “One of the things we tried to do, we kind of jokingly say we’d like to do, is clone Ochoa because he was so effective.”
What do we really know about Bin Laden’s death?
The whole story always sounded like a con job, because I was following the neighboring Pakistanis on Twitter during/after the raid, and their stories differed greatly from the official version. According to their reports, the Pakistani military’s cooperation was obvious. The NYT Magazine:
This sort of reception is nothing new for [Sy] Hersh. A Pentagon spokesman at the time of Abu Ghraib, Lawrence Di Rita, described one of his many (now unchallenged) articles for The New Yorker on the scandal as ‘‘the most hysterical piece of journalist malpractice I have ever observed.’’ Still, Hersh got worked up in some of the interviews he gave after the publication of the bin Laden piece. ‘‘I don’t care if you don’t like my story!’’ he told a public-radio host during one grilling. ‘‘I don’t care!’’ But with time, his petulance cooled into a kind of amusement. ‘‘High-camp’’ was one adjective he used to describe the administration’s version of the events.
At one point in our conversation, I reminded Hersh that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive judgment on what happened. I didn’t want to reinterview the administration officials who had already given their accounts of the events to other journalists. I saw this as more of a media story, a case study in how constructed narratives become accepted truth. This felt like a cop-out to him, as he explained in a long email the next day. He said that I was sidestepping the real issue, that I was ‘‘turning this into a ‘he-said, she-said’ dilemma,’’ instead of coming to my own conclusion about whose version was right. It was then that he introduced an even more disturbing notion: What if no one’s version could be trusted?
‘‘Of course there is no reason for you or any other journalist to take what was said to me by unnamed sources at face value,’’ Hersh wrote. ‘‘But it is my view that there also is no reason for journalists to take at face value what a White House or administration spokesman said on or off the record in the aftermath or during a crisis.’’
For those in and around the news business, the fact that Hersh’s report appeared in The London Review of Books and not The New Yorker, his usual outlet, was a story in its own right, one that hasn’t been told in full before. (Editors and reporters may not be as secretive as intelligence officials, but they like to keep a tight lid on their operational details, too.)
A week or so after the raid, Hersh called The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick. In 2009, Hersh wrote a story for the magazine about the growing concern among U.S. officials that Pakistan’s large nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of extremists inside the country’s military. Now he let Remnick know that two of his sources — one in Pakistan, the other in Washington — were telling him something else: The administration was lying about the bin Laden operation.
Go read it all, it’s really interesting.
At least 19 dead after U.S. airstrike hits clinic
The death toll continues to rise after a United States-led airstrike hit a Doctors Without Borders clinic in Kunduz, Afghanistan on Saturday. Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is now saying that at least 19 people have died, 12 of whom were staff and seven of whom were patients, including three children.… Continue reading “At least 19 dead after U.S. airstrike hits clinic”
Supporting child rape
As I recall, we’re even supplying Viagra to the tribal chieftains! Yes, it’s their “culture” — but the reason it’s their culture is a patriarchal tribal religion that makes sex between unmarried men and women unthinkable. So as you see, patriarchy doesn’t just screw women:
KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”
Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.
The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militia to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”
The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.
After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.
Oh dear
We can’t have neocon wet dreams of regime change thwarted!
Typical of the incoherence now common among U.S. foreign policy pundits discussing the Syrian crisis is Jeffrey Lewis, who took to the pages of the prestigious journal Foreign Policy to venture his opinion. He started out reciting the usual “group think” narrative about the need to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for stepping up support for the Syrian military in the face of gains by Sunni terror groups.
But Lewis, who is billed as an arms-control specialist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, then admitted that he doesn’t have a clue what to do, which at least is an improvement over all the other “experts” who say the U.S. must do something – anything! – to counter Russian intervention.
Lewis begins his article with a lot of scary talk about satellite photos confirming that Russia is expanding an air base near Latakia with the goal of increasing military aid to the evil Bashar al-Assad so as to give his doddering regime another lease on life.
“The satellite image shows far more than prefabricated housing and an air traffic control station,” Lewis observed. “It shows extensive construction of what appears to be a military canton … designed to support Russian combat air operations from the base and [which] may serve as a logistical hub for Russian combat forces.”
U.S. officials, he said, “believe Russia will base combat aircraft at the site.” The photos show that “construction crews have completed a taxiway that connects the runway to the construction area,” which in turn “means aircraft shelters for Russian aircraft.” Bottom line: “Russia is substantially expanding its involvement.”
In other words, the Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! After all, alarmism and drumbeating are de rigueur nowadays for U.S. pundits, so Lewis was doing what he had to do to remain in good standing with an increasingly bellicose – and delusional – foreign-policy establishment.
Continue reading “Oh dear”