Israel’s Defense Ministry has confirmed that the country is on the verge of seizing large swathes of fertile land in the occupied West Bank, a move that will likely exacerbate its already cooling relationship with Western allies, Reuters reports. COGAT, a unit of Israel’s Defense Ministry, told Reuters in an email that “the lands are in… Continue reading “Israel confirms plan to steal West Bank land”
Category: War Crimes
We have done such terrible things
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.”
‘Prosecute them’
In an editorial under a picture of Dick Cheney, the New York Times editorial board called Monday for a full investigation into, and prosecution of those who tortured in our name. I, for one, am shocked:
Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.
Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.
Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”
These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.
So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.
In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.
No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.
NPR: U.S. Army dismissed soldiers with mental health problems for ‘misconduct’
More than 22,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from brain injuries and mental health problems have been dismissed from the U.S. Army for “misconduct,” an investigation by National Public Radio revealed. Many of the soldiers have not been able to receive crucial retirement and health-care benefits that soldiers with an honorable discharge… Continue reading “NPR: U.S. Army dismissed soldiers with mental health problems for ‘misconduct’”
More from drone leaks
The source who leaked the documents told the Intercept he’s concerned that “addiction” to drone strikes in military circles may prevent the government from changing course away from extrajudicial killings. “The military is easily capable of adapting to change, but they don’t like to stop anything they feel is making their lives easier, or is to their benefit. And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things. It’s a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source told the Intercept. “But at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it’s going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they’re allowed to continue operating in this way.”
The US government creates so-called “baseball cards” to manage identifying possible targets during the killing process. That baseball card, along with other information, is part of the package that’s ultimately sent to higher ups including the President, who decide whether to bomb someone.
Decisions about who to kill are often based on cell phone records. Yet the drone documents describe the military’s signals intelligence (or SIGINT) capabilities in places like Somalia and Yemen as “poor” and “limited.” The Intercept’s source reflected on this problem: “There’s countless instances where I’ve come across intelligence that was faulty. It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people. And it isn’t until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time.”
The documents reveal that the US government is aware that many of its strikes do not kill the intended targets—as many as 9 out of 10. This despite claims by top members of the US security state establishment that its drone strikes do not kill civilians.
I would argue that the ease of use is what makes drones inherently immoral. The fact that they’re inaccurate is beside the point.
Obama apologizes to Doctors Without Borders
President Obama called Doctors Without Borders to apologize for a bombing that killed 12 staff members and at least 10 patients in Afghanistan, according to Press Secretary Josh Earnest. “This morning from the Oval Office, President Obama spoke by telephone with Doctors Without Borders International President Dr. Joanne Liu, to apologize and express his condolences for… Continue reading “Obama apologizes to Doctors Without Borders”
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”
‘If these images don’t change Europe, what will?’
Heart-rending pictures of a toddler’s lifeless body washed ashore on a Turkish beach sparked horror as the cost of Europe’s burgeoning refugee crisis hit home. The images of a tiny child lying face down in the surf at one of Turkey’s main tourist resorts has once more put a human face on the dangers faced by… Continue reading “‘If these images don’t change Europe, what will?’”
The Syrian conflict
Will the Brits finally be held accountable?
I’m glad this is finally going to be brought to worldwide attention. The British government should pay dearly for the things they did in the name of “fighting terror”:
Now Amal Clooney will represent Northern Ireland’s “Hooded Men,” 14 Irish prisoners who endured Britain’s version of Guantanamo in a case that, according to researcher Lauretta Farrell, has become “the benchmark by which other countries measure their ‘enhanced interrogation programs,’ and continues to be used to justify the use of torture by democratic societies.” The trial will be heard in the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, and its result could rewrite international law and help combat the use of torture globally.
Decades before Abu Ghraib’s hooded captives would become symbolic of torture in the public consciousness, the Hooded Men were subjected to dehumanizing, horrific “special treatment” at the hands of the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary—Northern Ireland’s former police force. Several of the men, who were arrested on suspicion of belonging to the Irish Republican Army, were in fact prominent civil rights activists, and one of them—P.J. McClean—was a founder of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. None were ever convicted of any offense.
Twelve of the men were captured on Aug. 9, 1971, when 342 Catholics were arrested as part of Operation Demetrius, which ushered in one of Ireland’s darkest times with mass internment, or imprisonment, without trial. During the first half of the 1970s, almost 2,000 people were interned and 7,000 people fled or were forced out of their homes amid sectarian violence. Under the notorious Special Powers Act, which rescinded habeas corpus and allowed almost free rein to British forces, internment had been employed by the Unionist government in every decade since the creation of the Northern Irish state as a means to suppress Republican opposition.
The 14 men would later describe themselves as “the guinea pigs” for what became known as the five techniques for in-depth interrogation: prolonged “wall-standing,” hooding, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink. Wall-standing involved forcing prisoners to stand balanced in the “search position” against a cell wall for hours at a time, causing painful muscle cramps. One of the men described being forced to remain in this position for 43½, and there were many other recorded instances of prisoners being kept this way for more than 20 hours. According to Amnesty International, hooding meant that a prisoner’s head was covered with an “opaque cloth bag with no ventilation” except during interrogation or when in isolation. Subjection to noise meant placing the prisoner in close proximity to “white noise” from machinery, such as a generator or compressor, for as long as a week. One of the men described to Amnesty International how he was driven to the brink of insanity by the noise and how he tried to commit suicide by banging his head against metal pipes in his cell.
Continue reading “Will the Brits finally be held accountable?”