Condoleezza Rice

Condi Rice Caught Lying About Torture

Bob Fertik — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:48:26 -0400

For 8 full years, Condi Rice used the immense powers of her office to lie her way out of every jam. But now that she has returned to Stanford and the Hoover Institution, she no longer has the Presidency to back up her lies. And her meeting with students on 4/27 was a disaster.

Scott Horton did some fact-checking and identified 6 lies. These lies will not go unnoticed by Judge Garzon in Spain, or at the Justice Department.

The clock is ticking for Condi Rice. It may take years, but she is likely to end up in jail where she belongs.

Judge Garzon Targets Cheney & Rice

Bob Fertik — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:53:38 -0400

Spain's crusading prosecutor, Judge Baltasar Garzon, was not put in charge of prosecuting the Torture Lawyers - Judge Eloy Velasco is reviewing that case. But Garzon has opened a brand new case, according to AFP:

Judge Baltasar Garzon will probe the "perpetrators, the instigators, the necessary collaborators and accomplices" to crimes of torture...

Garzon said that documents declassified by the US administration and carried by US media "have revealed what was previously a suspicion: the existence of an authorised and systematic programme of torture and mistreatment of persons deprived of their freedom" that flouts international conventions.

This points to "the possible existence of concerted actions by the US administration for the execution of a multitude of crimes of torture against persons deprived of their freedom in Guantanamo and other prisons including that of Bagram" in Afghanistan.

Very interesting! And who exactly does he have in mind? GOTV got the scoop from human rights lawyer Philippe Sands on Fresh Air:

According to his sources the targets of this investigation include Condoleeza Rice and Richard B. Cheney. What is likely to happen next is for the investigation to proceed; if unappealed, a court date will be set, and the targets will be advised to appear. Garzón may then issue an arrest warrant that will be valid, at least in Spain, but possibly other countries.

Today Eric Holder told reporters in Berlin he "did not rule out cooperating with such an investigation," and said he would provide evidence sought by Garzon if the request was legitimate:

"Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it," Holder said.

"This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law and to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately-created court, we would obviously respond to it," he said.

Asked if that meant the U.S. would cooperate with a foreign court prosecuting Bush administration officials, Holder said he was talking about evidentiary requests, and would review any such request to see if the United States would comply.

It's not clear why Garzon needs any secret evidence, when Cheney confessed to Jonathan Karl on TV:

KARL: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

CHENEY: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency [CIA] in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.

Book 'em, Dano!

Update 1: CNN has a less comprehensible translation:

The declassified U.S. documents, he wrote, revealed "an authorized and systematic plan for torture and harsh treatment of people deprived of their freedom without any charges and without the most basic elemental rights for detainees, set forth and demanded by international treaties."

The alleged plan at Guantanamo and other prisons, including a detention facility at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, "acquire almost an official and therefore generate penal responsibility in the different structures of execution — command, design and authorization of this systematic plan of torture," the judge wrote.

Update 2: CCR is cheering:

The case could lead to arrest warrants in Europe and, according to CCR attorneys, places new pressure on the Obama administration to appoint its own special prosecutor to investigate the crimes committed by former officials...

CCR attorneys hailed the decision as an important step in holding these officials and others accountable for their crimes. The new case could also include the lawyers and may well lead to investigations of top officials, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Update 3: If Condi tries this "Nixonian defense" in Spain, Judge Garzon will convict her in 35 seconds:

Q: Is waterboarding torture?

RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that's -- And by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did.

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

Rice & Ashcroft Blame Tenet for Torture

Bob Fertik — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:44:47 -0400

Now that the Busheviks' evil torture regime has been exposed, it's every (wo)man for him/herself! AP's Pamela Hess has the scoop:

Release of Bush-era documents that shed more light on the origins of the CIA's use of harsh interrogation tactics has ignited a backstage battle between former Bush officials over a crucial May 2002 meeting that paved the way for use of waterboarding on a suspected al-Qaida leader.

A "backstage battle?" Do tell!

Some former Bush officials argue that they were not properly warned by CIA officials about the potential perils of the severe methods, while others insist there were explicit cautions.

Gee, I wonder who says they weren't "properly warned"?

A former senior Bush administration official familiar with the deliberations told The Associated Press that during a meeting of Bush senior officials in May 2002, then-CIA director George Tenet, backed by agency lawyers and CIA officers, reassured former NSC director Condoleezza Rice, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and others that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were both safe and necessary.

The former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue's continuing sensitivity, said Tenet and other CIA officials did not mention the techniques' potential legal and physical dangers.

So some anonymous Bushie says Tenet was the evildoer while Rice and Ashcroft were completely innocent dupes of his evil scheme. Does anyone care to go on the record?

Tenet was not available for comment Saturday. Rice and other former Bush administration principals involved in or aware of the May 2002 meeting have not responded to efforts by the AP to obtain comment in recent days.

Nope! What a bunch of cowards.

Obama and Holder Must Prosecute War Crimes or Become Guilty of Them Themselves

dlindorff — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:26:08 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The dithering and ducking going on in the Obama White House and the
Holder Justice Department over the crimes of the Bush administration
are taking on a comic aspect.

On the one hand, we have President Obama assuring us that under his
administration, there will be respect for the rule of law, and on the
other hand we have this one-time constitutional law professor and his
attorney general declaiming that there is no need for the appointment
of a prosecutor to bring charges against the people in the last
administration, in the CIA, in the National Security Agency and in the
Defense Department and the military who clearly have broken the law in
serious and felonious ways.

What gets silly is that America is either a nation of laws…or it
isn’t. It is either a place where “nobody is above the law”…or it isn’t.

There is really no middle ground here.

The latest solid and incontrovertible evidence of outrageous and
criminal behavior by the White House is the discovery—and the public
release by the Obama administration—of documentary evidence that the
CIA committed not just torture but willful obstruction of justice by
destroying video tapes of some 92 interrogations of terrorism suspects
and captives in the so-called Bush “War” on Terror. Plus the release of
a stack of nine legal opinions by White House and Justice Department
lawyers providing legal cover for torture, including executive orders
from President Bush and directives from then Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld authorizing torture.

We now know that those legal opinions were so blatantly illegal and
simply designed to provide cover that the authors--former Deputy
Assistant Attorney General John Yoo (now ensconsed in a tenured faculty
position at the law school of UC Berkeley where he teaches, with a
straight face, constitutional law, and writes a syndicated opinion
column on similar topics), and his then boss, Jay Bybee, then Assistant
Attorney General for the Office of White House Legal Counsel, and now
an appeals court judge for the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals
in San Francisco—had them classified, simply to hide them from public
inspection. For those memos alone, Yoo should be fired from his
teaching post and disbarred, while Bybee, who failed to mention his
activities during his judicial confirmation hearings, should be
impeached. That would just be for starters.

Setting aside the many other crimes of the Bush administration for
a moment—the authorization of a massive warrantless electronic spying
program on Americans, the use of military personnel to actively spy on
groups engaged in lawful First Amendment activities, the lying about
reasons for going to war in Iraq, etc.--the issue of officially
sanctioned acts of torture by American forces, which we know occurred,
is not just a crime under the US Criminal Code, which since 1996 has
incorporated the Geneva Conventions specifically as US law. The
planning and sanctioning of torture, as well as the covering up of
torture, and the failure to punish torture are also crimes.

The Obama administration may, on the basis of whatever twisted
political logic it is operating under, not want to appoint a prosecutor
and indict the war criminals of the Bush administration. But this is
not a question of whether or not to push for health care or labor law
reform, where the Obama administration has a right to consider what the
political pros and cons are of moving forward. Here, we’re talking
about enforcing the law. There are no options but acting. Not only does
a commitment to the rule of law require prosecution here, right up to
the president and vice president. The failure to prosecute
war criminals is in itself a crime, meaning that there is a narrow
window of time to act before Obama himself, and his attorney general
Eric Holder, will be open to charges that they too are war criminals.

If we don’t get a prosecution going of Bush administration
officials responsible for war crimes, the day will come when not only
will George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld
be unable to travel abroad. Barack Obama and Eric Holder will also be
confined to US soil.

To join the campaign to make the Obama Administration obey the law and prosecute war crimes by the last administration, go here.
__________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in signed collector’s edition hardcover or in paperback
direct from the author). Order from ThisCantBeHappening.net, where you can also read other work by the author.

Can the Son of Sam Law Be Used Against Condi?

Bob Fertik — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:28:38 -0500

Condi Rice signed a $2.5 million 3-book deal with Crown, a division of Random House.

Rice will combine candid narrative and acute analysis to tell the story of her time in the White House and as America's top diplomat, and her role in protecting American security and shaping foreign policy during the extraordinary period from 2001-2009.

Of course Condi was the National Security Advisor during the campaign of propaganda and lies that defrauded Congress into authorizing the invasion of Iraq. She was one of the most prolific liars, infamously warning Americans "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." At the time, Condi knew full well that Iraq had no nuclear weapons or even a nuclear weapons program.

The unprovoked invasion of Iraq, which was rejected by the United Nations Security Council, was a war crime. The invasion led to further war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians and journalists. And the American soldiers who were killed or maimed were the victims of Condi's fraud.

In total, the victims of Condi's crimes number in the millions, counting the survivors of those killed. So here's a legal question: can Condi's victims collect damages under the Son of Sam Law, which was specifically written to prevent criminals from profiting from books about their crimes?

The initial obstacle is that Condi has not been charged with any crimes. But that could easily be remedied by a Special Prosecutor or even a local District Attorney using the strategy developed by famed prosecutor Vince Bugliosi.

White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:32:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

Set aside for the moment the fact that the claim that Saddam
Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore (so-called yellowcake) from the
desert nation of Niger was based upon forged documents which were
almost certainly the work of Defense Department hacks in the
Rumsfeld/Cheney-created Office of Special Plans (see my book The Case for Impeachment).
Even if this fraudulent deal had been real, how on earth could it have
been used as it was by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to
justify an invasion of Iraq?

Consider that what was being asserted was that Iraq had attempted
(not even succeeded!) to buy 400 tons of uranium ore. This claim was
used by President Bush, in his Jan. 20, 2003 State of the Union
address, to argue that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But in the case of a country that does not have a nuclear weapon, a program is years away, perhaps a decade or more away, from the reality of having a usable weapon.

As we have seen in the case of Iran, which has been refining
uranium ore now for at least five years, the mere fact of possessing
uranium ore, and even of having a quantity of gas centrifuges to refine
out the minute quantities of the fissionable isotope U-235 are only the
first and, technologically speaking, the easiest, steps towards
actually constructing a bomb. (Experts say that after all this time,
even if it is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb, which the
Iranian government denies, the country remains years from that alleged
goal.)

If Bush and Cheney had not been lying through their teeth, and
Saddam had actually been buying yellowcake for the purpose of making a
nuke weapon, he would still have had to obtain large numbers of
centrifuges, would have had to power them up and run them for years,
and would have then had to obtain the technology to build and test a
bomb, none of which steps he was even alleged to have taken.

Yet Bush was claiming that there was an imminent threat to
America posed by Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake purchase effort, and that
an invasion had to be launched almost immediately. He used the term
imminent because that is the legal requirement in the UN Charter, to
which the US is a signatory and which is based upon the Nuremberg
Charter established at the end of the Second World War. It states that
no nation may invade another nation unless that nation poses an
imminent threat to the would-be invader.

The yellowcake story, now definitively shown to have been a
deliberate lie, even if true, could not have constituted such an
imminent threat.

Yet not once has this key point been addressed by any member of
Congress who voted to authorize an invasion. Nor does the point get
mentioned in mainstream journalistic reports on the matter.

Average Americans, nearly half of whom reportedly believe that the
earth was formed just 6000 years ago and a fair proportion of whom
believe that the sun revolves around the earth, might be excused for
not understanding this point, but clearly intelligent members of
Congress like former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry
and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who both claim they
might not have voted for war “had they had known then what they know
now,” are themselves caught in a lie.

They and other war backers clearly knew in 2002 and 2003 that the
yellowcake story, even if true, was no justification for war. So did
editors and reporters (like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New
York Times, for example).

I have yet to see a single US corporate media outlet explain that
the yellowcake story was simply never a justification for war. It will
probably never happen, and yet many analysts have said it was that
claim by Bush, Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and
others (remember her dark warnings about not wanting a “smoking gun” to
be a “mushroom cloud”?), more than any other that stampeded the nation
into a war that has cost over $1 trillion over five years, and over
4000 US lives and one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld and others in the outgoing
administration should all be impeached, tried and jailed for their
lying and treason in embroiling the US in the pointless and criminal
Iraq War, with the yellowcake story a key element in any indictments.
But there needs to be some kind of reckoning too, for the willful
ignorance and deceit on the part of the majority of Congress and of the
press in pretending that an alleged scheme to buy uranium ore was a
justification for launching a war of aggression, which five years on,
is still continuing.

The American people themselves also need to reflect deeply, not
just on how ill served we are by our elected officials and by our
media, but on how gullible we have become, and how ignorant.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/38360';
digg_title = "White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\nA new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have long known: that the White House and in particular then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.\r\n\r\n What is astonishing about this report, which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable justification for launching a war.";
digg_skin = 'standard';

A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

dlindorff — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:34:51 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Before the odor of burned gunpowder has left the air of the Taj
Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the US is lecturing India not to go off
half-cocked and attack Pakistan, simply because all of the attackers in
the terrorist assaults in that city arrived by boat, apparently from
neighboring Pakistan. US officials, including Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, are calling on India to engage in a “transparent” and
“thorough” investigation into the attacks to establish who was
responsible.

How different this is from the American government’s response to the 9-11 attacks in the US!

`Instead of a “transparent” investigation, we got secret sessions
of the Congressional intelligence committees, closed-door interviews of
key officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney by
the 9-11 Commission, and of course the secret round of thousands of
mostly Islamic people living in the US, many of whom were held of
months incommunicado and without charge, some of whom were subjected to
torture, and many other of whom were deported to likely arrest, torture
and even death.

Instead of a calm assessment of what had happened and who was
responsible, the Bush Administration rounded up Saudi members of the
Bin Laden family, and others connected to the regime in Saudi Arabia,
whence came most of the people reportedly involved in the hijacking of
the four planes used in the attacks, and, with no attempt at
interrogation, flew them home to Saudi Arabia. Then, again with only
minimal evidence, the US launched an all-out war within days upon
Afghanistan, with the goal of ousting and destroying the Taliban
government of that country. Shortly after that aggressive move, the
Bush/Cheney administration shifted its focus and launched an even
larger all-out war against Iraq, a nation that had no connection
whatsoever with the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

So much for transparency and measured responses.

Here again, we have an example of the US expecting one mode of behavior for the rest of the world, and another for itself.

We Americans, it would appear, are not required to operate in a
logical manner, are not required to think through the consequences of
our actions, are not required to obey international laws, and are not
required to listen to the counsel of others. If the United Nations will
not support our plan to attack and topple the government of another
sovereign nation, we will just do it ourselves. But other countries may
not behave in this manner.

There is another way that India and the US are different which has
come to light in this latest atrocity. Following the Mumbai attacks,
India’s minister of security resigned, in an admission that his
department had failed to discover an attack that was clearly at least
six months in planning, and had failed to prevent the massive loss of
life because of inadequate preparation of police and troops for such an
eventuality (police and soldiers were not equipped even with sniper
rifles and scopes that might have enabled them to shoot and kill some
of the 10 terrorists with minimal threat to their hostages).

Nobody resigned for the manifold failings that led up to and allowed
for the 9-11 attacks. Nobody resigned for intelligence failures, nobody
resigned for air defense failures, nobody resigned for investigative
failures, nobody resigned for the lies that were the basis for the
attack on Afghanistan and the war against Iraq. There has indeed been
zero accountability in the US for the biggest national security
disaster since Pearl Harbor. But in India, it took only days for the
chief person responsible for security in the Indian government to
resign his post in disgrace.

Let us hope that saner heads prevail in India when it comes to Pakistan, as the story of this latest terror action is exposed.

And let us hope that Americans finally demand an honest accounting
of what happened on 9/11/2001 and that those who are guilty of allowing
it to happen, and of sending the country off on a pointless, bloody and
seemingly endless jihad in the Middle East as a result are exposed and
forced to pay for their ineptness and their crimes.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Condi Lies About Suskind Forgery Charge

Bob Fertik — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:28:54 -0400

Ron Suskind's explosive new book has the Busheviks so terrified that they deployed their designated liar, Condi Rice, to lie through her teeth to Karl Rove's personal stenographer, Politico's Mike Allen.

Here's the video link, at least until they scrub it because Condi's lies (in bold) are so obvious:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=9160921

Mike: Madame Secretary, as you know there's a new book by Ron Suskind which says the White House ordered the CIA to falsify intelligence about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda. Is it possible the United States government forged a letter from Iraq's intelligence chief to Saddam Hussein?
Condi: the United States government didn't forge a letter. The White House in which I was working and I think...
Mike: they didn't direct...
Condi: the people as I understand it - the people that he quotes as being sources for that have denied it.
Mike: So you think it's impossible...
Condi: The United States, the White House was not going to ask someone to ask someone to forge a letter on something of this importance.
Mike: You believe it did not occur...
Condi: It did not occur. The intelligence might have been wrong, that's now clear, not because people weren't working very hard. But when you have an opaque regime like Saddam Hussein's regime that had used WMD before that had them before, one can understand how the judgment may have been wrong. But the decision to go to war was based on the strategic threat of Saddam Hussein, the fact that we'd been to war against him before, the fact that he still threatened his neighbors, and the fact that we were told that he was reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction.

To prove that Condi is lying, we'll pay $1,000 to anyone who runs this video through lie detector software and gets a reliable result.

It's long past time for Congress to ask Condi these questions under oath and threat of perjury.

Torture for the Torturers

dlindorff — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:04:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t believe in torture, but right now, I’d like to see a few
people subjected to some of the torture techniques that they approved
for use against US captives in the so-called War on Terror.

I’d be satisfied if they just stuck to the ones used against
15-year-old Omar Khadr—techniques that a US federal judge established
constituted torture under the Geneva Conventions.

I have a 15-year old son, so I’m particularly aware of what an
atrocity it has been the way the US has treated Khadr, and some 2500
other young boys and teenagers that it admits to having captured and
labeled as “enemy combatants” in its so-called “war on terror.”

Khadr, recall, was sent at the age of 14 to Pakistan by his
allegedly terrorist-linked Canadian father to attend a madrassa—one of
those fundamentalist Muslim schools. Like a number of students of those
schools, he was indoctrinated in jihad and ended up fighting with the
Taliban in Afghanistan against the warlords that opposed them. When the
US attacked Afghanistan, in 2001, Khadr got caught up in a war against
America. According to the charge against him, he was arrested in 2002
after US Special Forces found him and some adult fighters hiding out in
a remote compound in the mountains. The Americans called in an air
strike, and then moved into the rubble to find out who was left—quite
probably, according to some testimony in the case—to finish them off.
Someone, still alive after the attack, tossed a grenade which killed
one of the Americans and blinded another. The others sprayed the
wounded fighters, gravely injuring Khadr and killing one of his older
companions.

Khadr was accused of being the grenade tosser, and was reportedly
tortured in Afghanistan, before being shipped off to Guantanamo, where
he remains six years later, facing a military tribunal. He was
interrogated there, not just by Americans, but by Canadians too.

A citizen of Canada, and clearly someone who was captured and held
in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which hold that children are
“protected persons,” not to be held as POWs if captured in wartime, but
rather to be treated as victims of war, Khadr has thus far been
abandoned to his fate by his own government. The Conservative prime
minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, anxious to have Canada serve as a
willing servant of US military power and foreign policy, has not lifted
a finger to help him.

Now a court in Canada has ordered the Canadian government to
release videotapes it was keeping secret of Khadr’s interrogations, and
they make for ugly viewing. Khadr is shown weeping, holding up his
wounded arms, pleading to be given treatment, pleading to be returned
to Canada. It’s a disgusting scene, especially when we learn that he
had already been “softened up” for his Canadian interrogators by
American torture specialists at Guantanamo who subjected this boy to
three weeks of sleep deprivation and god knows what other creative
techniques which we recently learned were copied from the methods
developed by the North Koreans and applied to American captives in the
Korean War.

It all makes you disgusted to be an American—especially with so
many Americans still justifying this kind of grotesque behavior.

But back to my desire to see some torture inflicted. My profound
wish is that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Department
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Canadian Prime Minister Harper all be subjected to no less than a month
of torture, to include water boarding, at least 2-3 weeks of sleep
deprivation, a variety of 24-stints of being forced into stress
positions (Rumsfeld’s should be standing), some violent slapping
around, and a bit of creative sexual humiliation. Since we don’t know
at this point that anal sodomizing was officially sanctioned, or just
was something that the torturers on the ground came up with that was
then ignored by superiors, I’m willing to let that one be left up to
those performing the torture, but I sure won’t object if it happens.

At this point, I can’t think of anything less than such a
punishment that would be fitting for these monsters who are currently
still running our, and Canada’s, governments.

When I think of what kind of twisted minds these people must have
in order to actually have met in the White House and approved such
methods for use against human beings—human beings who under our
Constitution are to be afforded the presumption of innocence, and who
are promised to be protected against “cruel and unusual” punishments
(or in Harper’s case to have known about it and then not protested,
even to protect a child born in his own country)—it makes me sick to my
stomach.

If there is a hell, I am sure there is in it some special circle
reserved for such monsters, but I think, having seen what was done at
their direction and with their approval to young Khadr (who after all,
if he really ever did toss that grenade, was only doing what any US
soldier would hope to have the courage to do in wartime if his unit
were attacked), that hell is too good for these leaders. They all need
and deserve the special punishment of having done to them what they
ordered or allowed to be done to others.

Sadly, my wish to see them suffer such a fate is unlikely to be
granted. One can at least hope, though, that they will have their names
etched somewhere for posterity on some memorial to the victims of war
crimes and to the eternal condemnation of the perpetrators of such
bestiality.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and columnist based in Philadelphia.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Keeping America Safe from Child "Terrorists"

dlindorff — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:53:16 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of the
warmongers and terror-pimps in the White House would have us believe
that Omar Khadr is a monster. Khadr is the 21-year-old Canadian who is
facing one of the first show-trials at Guantanamo.

But let’s just step back a minute and consider Mr. Khadr’s case.

The son of an alleged Islamic fundamentalist, Khadr was sent to one
of those fundamentalist madrassa schools in Pakistan back when he was
14. From there, he went to Afghanistan, to join with the Taliban in
fighting against the remnant warlord backers of the Soviet Union, which
had attempted to run Afghanistan as a vassal state.

Then came 9-11 and the October 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.
Young Khadr suddenly found himself fighting against the world’s most
powerful military.

In 2002, after the Taliban government had fallen, Khadr was still
out in the hills with the forces of resistance. The Taliban government
was gone, but the war was not over. In fact it’s still not over, with
the Taliban resurgent in much of Afghanistan.

In this situation, with some 20,000 US and European troops battling
across Afghanistan, Khadr, by then at the ripe age of 15, found himself
with a group of five older fighters in a compound up in the hills. Some
US Special Forces came on the location, and, peeking through cracks in
the door, saw the group, armed with AK rifles. They called on the men
to surrender, but the men allegedly refused.

At that point the brave Americans called in an air strike, and
clobbered the building. After that softening up, they went inside to
pick up the pieces.

Someone at that point, and US military prosecutors claim it was the
wounded Khadr, tossed a grenade while lying injured on the ground. The
grenade killed Special Forces Sergeant Christopher Speer. Speer’s
comrades opened fire, with three of them hitting Khadr.

When they went to check on him, the critically injured, yet
miraculously still living Khadr reportedly pleaded, “Shoot me!”
Reportedly, some of Sgt. Speer’s buddies were ready to do just that.
Apparently the “clicking” of injured captives by American forces (a war
crime) is not uncommon, and even has its own slang word. But a medic
with the group interceded and stopped the battlefield execution, and
took action to save Khadr’s life.

Khadr was eventually shipped off to Guantanamo, at the age of 15,
in violation of a 2002 protocol signed by the US which extended the
protection of the Geneva Conventions against imprisoning child soldiers
from the prior “under 15” standard to “under 18.” No matter, “bad guy”
Khadr would be one of at least 2500 children that the US has admitted
to incarcerating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere as
“enemy combatants.”

Today, Khadr is 21. He has spent the second half of his teenage
years confined in a prison camp on the naval base at Guantanamo.

This is what Bush and Cheney are really referring to when they
assure us that they are holding “the worst of the worst” on the island
of Cuba.

They are keeping us safe from 15-year-old boys.

And what, exactly, is Omar Khadr’s “crime”?

As far as I can tell, if he did toss that grenade (and there is
testimony from American witnesses that the thrower may have been
another man, who was killed in the resulting US barrage of fire), Khadr
was simply demonstrating extraordinary bravery of the kind that would
earn a silver star, at least, had it been a US soldier or marine doing
the same thing under the same circumstances. Consider: he and his
comrades-in-arms, battling in defense of their religion and, in some
cases, their nation, were bombarded from the air. They were then
approached by armed US troops—the very ones who had called in the air
strike. This was a battle, and it was not over yet. For all Khadr knew,
those US soldiers were going to kill them all. And in any event, Khadr
and his fellow fighters had a right to defend themselves to the death
to prevent capture. Sure it's unfortunate that Sgt. Speer was killed,
but that's what happens in wars.

Still, a fighter killing another fighter during warfare is not the
act of a “terrorist.” It may be brutal and it may be tragic, but it is
the act of a soldier. That soldier, if captured, is not a criminal, but
a POW. Moreover, if he is a child, the Geneva Conventions and the
subsequent protocol mentioned above, require that he be treated not as
a POW but as a victim of war.

Bush and Cheney don’t want to admit that the people fighting US
forces in Afghanistan are legitimate soldiers, entitled to protection
under the rules of war. They want us to believe that anyone who takes
up a gun in defense of their homeland or of the homeland of their
allies, and fights against the US military forces that are spread all
over the globe like Roman Legions of old, are “terrorists,” deserving
of whatever fate we hand them, by whatever rules we want to gin up.

But it’s worth remembering that this particular “terrorist,” at the
time of his “crime,” was simply a scared and badly-wounded 15-year-old
kid who had the balls to toss a grenade at well-armed soldiers on a
search-and-destroy mission.

In an interesting twist that further highlights the absurdity of calling a 15-year-old a hardened terrorist, Speer's widow, Tabitha, and another soldier who lost an eye in the grenade blast, sued not Khadr, but his father's estate, claiming that his "failure to control his son" had been the proximate cause of their losses. A federal district judge, in February 2006, awarded the two $102.6 million in damages. In other words, the court concluded Khadr wasn't responsible for his actions; his father was. And yet the US is prosecuting Omar Khadr for being a terrorist.

The Bush/Cheney administration’s incarceration and prosecution of
this boy was a war crime. His continued incarceration and the attempt
to prosecute him as a terrorist today makes a mockery of America’s
motto: Home of the Brave.

We should all be ashamed.

_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net