Disinformation » War On Terror

Another Gulf War Syndrome?

Raymond — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:46:47 +0000

Burning trash on bases is sickening soldiers, but the Army refuses to extinguish the burn pits.

Before her last deployment, 31-year-old Staff Sergeant Danielle Nienajadlo passed her Army physical with flying colors. So when she started having health problems several weeks after arriving at Balad Air Base in Iraq, no one knew what to make of her symptoms: headaches that kept her awake; unexplained bruises all over her body; an open sore on her back that wouldn’t heal; vomiting and weight loss. In July 2008, after three miserable months, Nienajadlo checked into the base emergency room with a 104-degree fever.

She was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and learned she had been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, a fast-progressing form of the disease. She told her doctors and her family she had felt fine until she started inhaling the oily black smoke that spewed out of the base’s open-air trash-burning facility day and night. At times, the plume contained dioxins, some of which can cause the kind of cancer Nienajadlo had.

“She breathed in this gunk,” says her mother, Lindsay Weidman. “She’d go back to the hooch at night to go to bed and cough up these black chunks.”

[Read more at Mother Jones]

Secret Document Calls Wikileaks ‘Threat’ to U.S. Army

Ralph Bernardo — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:20:57 +0000

David Kravets writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:

Wikileaks presents a “threat to the U.S. Army” and publishes “potentially actionable information” for targeting military personnel, according to a classified intelligence report posted on the whistleblowing site.

The 32-page report entitled Wikileaks.org — An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? indicates the government’s concern that “current employees or moles” within the Defense Department or the U.S. government “are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.” To stop this, the 2008 report had suggested a campaign to expose and punish those who leak to the site, which was founded in 2007 by Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians.

“Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the website that they will remain anonymous,” according to the report. “The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.”

Bush Officials Warned 9/11 Commission Against Probing Too Deeply

5by5 — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:26:15 +0000

Some people ask, “Why do conspiracy theories get such traction in people’s minds?”

Perhaps because the arguments against them are not entirely dissuasive, but I have to say, if nothing else, it’s largely because of stories like this one, that actually lend credence to people’s suspicions by providing them with objective proof of the government’s attempt to obfuscate and withhold vital information.

Whether it is done in order to prevent embarrassment, or to protect themselves from prosecution, the fact remains, Bush officials in Washington were more concerned with covering their own butts, than publicly revealing an inconvenient truth. Even if it meant that national security might be improved and a similar event avoided.

As of today, it has been revealed via a FOIA request made by the ACLU, that Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet sent a letter dated January 16, 2004 to the members of the 9/11 Commission that there was an investigatory line it was “not allowed to cross.”

The line was in questioning the terrorist suspects that the Bush Administration was busy torturing, in violation of both U.S. and international law. In other words, the Commission was not allowed to question the accused.

Hardly a high point for American jurisprudence.

LINK to Raw Story article

Subsection #3 is perhaps the most obscene part of the letter, as it is quite pointedly, a bald-faced LIE. It claims that detainees are receiving “humane treatment”, at precisely the same time as they are being waterboarded over 180 times, subjected to sleep deprivation (or what torturers of the Middle Ages called “Tormentum Insomniae”), stress positions, sexual humiliation, beatings until several deaths resulted, etc., etc., etc…..

Personally, I don’t think these three Bush Administration officials should have feared any commission headed up by a man like Lee Hamilton: your go-to guy for worthless commissions that assign no responsibility, impose no accountability, and even hide inconvenient evidence if necessary. He does have a history of placing bipartisanship over truth, as he did during the Iran-Contra investigations where he literally shuffled off evidence into a Senate storage room in the Hart Office Building that proved Bush Sr. and other Reagan officials (like now SecDef Gates) went to Paris & made backdoor deals with the Iranians to keep the hostages incarcerated until after Reagan was inaugurated.

Between Hamilton and Bush insider Zelikow, there was basically no chance that anyone would have to face punishment for their actions (or lack thereof) on that day.

Because of all this, asking those critical questions, and the attempts to find answers to them, gets left up to the general public, as the compliant corporate press happily takes whatever the government feeds them, rather than acting like the Fourth Estate – the literal guardians of the truth, who should at a minimum, regard those in power with rational skepticism, not blind belief.

So the answer is to my initial question is simply this – conspiracy theories get traction because all the people who SHOULD be doing their jobs ferreting out the truth, AREN’T.

U.S. Attorney General: Bin Laden Will Be Killed

majestic — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:59:14 +0000

Does anyone else think this is likely a precursor to Osama turning up dead before long? From the Washington Post:

Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Tuesday that Osama bin Laden will never face trial in the United States because he will not be captured alive.

In testy exchanges with House Republicans, the attorney general compared terrorists to mass murderer Charles Manson and predicted that events would ensure “we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden” not to the al-Qaida leader as a captive.

Holder sternly rejected criticism from GOP members of a House Appropriations subcommittee, who contend it is too dangerous to put terror suspects on trial in federal civilian courts as Holder has proposed.

The attorney general said it infuriates him to hear conservative critics complain that terrorists would get too many rights in the court system.

Terrorists in court “have the same rights that Charles Manson would have, any other kind of mass murderer,” the attorney general said. “It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be coddled, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be treated with kid gloves.”

The comparison to convicted killer Manson angered Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who said it showed the Obama administration doesn’t understand the American public’s desire to treat terrorists as wartime enemies, not criminal defendants.

“My constituents and I just have a deep-seated and profound philosophical difference with the Obama administration,” Culberson said.

Holder, his voice rising, charged that Culberson’s arguments ignored basic facts about the law and the fight against terrorists.

“Let’s deal with reality,” Holder said. “The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom.”

Pressed further on that point, Holder said: “The possibility of catching him alive is infinitesimal. He will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people so he can’t be captured by us.”…

[continues in the Washington Post]

Karl Rove Says He’s ‘Proud’ U.S. Waterboarded Suspected Terrorists

majestic — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:50:00 +0000

Evil and proud of it – as reported by the BBC:

A senior adviser to former US President George W Bush has defended tough interrogation techniques, saying their use helped prevent terrorist attacks.

In a BBC interview, Karl Rove, who was known as “Bush’s brain”, said he “was proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists”. He said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, should not be considered torture.

In 2009, President Barack Obama banned waterboarding as a form of torture. But the practice was sanctioned in written memos by Bush administration lawyers in August 2002, providing legal cover for its use. In 2008, CIA head Michael Hayden told Congress it had only been used on three high-profile al-Qaeda detainees, and not for the past five years.

One of those was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a key suspect in the 9/11 attacks. Mr Rove said US soldiers were subjected to waterboarding as a regular part of their training. A less severe form of the technique was used on the three suspects interrogated at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, he added.

“I’m proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots such as flying aeroplanes into Heathrow and into London, bringing down aircraft over the Pacific, flying an aeroplane into the tallest building in Los Angeles and other plots,” Mr Rove told the BBC…

[continues at the BBC]

Cartman of ‘South Park’ Signs for 500 AK-47s, Like Just Like Blackwater Did…

Ralph Bernardo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:23:31 +0000

Art imitating life? Not quite … Spencer Ackerman reports on the Washington Independent:

On Feb. 23, I broke a story about how the Senate Armed Services Committee determined that Blackwater employees in Afghanistan signed for hundreds of AK-47s and pistols using the name “Eric Cartman,” evidently a reference to the popular South Park character.

On March 17 — which Dave Weigel tells me is the season premiere — South Park will show Eric Cartman signing for the guns.

Splitting the Sky on Trial in Canada for Attempting to Arrest President Bush

phunkychic666 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:02:37 +0000

Via YouTube:

A man named Splitting the Sky, tried to arrest former President George W. Bush for war crimes. He crossed police lines on one of President Bush’s visits to Canada and was arrested. He now faces criminal charges in court, the trial began today.

Waterboarding For Dummies

phunkychic666 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:55:14 +0000

MARK BENJAMIN writes on Salon:

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking — and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session — and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session — a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

Birth Defects on the Rise in Fallujah

tonyviner — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:40:15 +0000

Via the Daily Mail:

A Fallujah mother holds her little girl, who was born without a left forearm and hand.

A high number of children are being born with birth defects in an Iraqi city where U.S. forces may have used chemical weapons during a fierce battle in 2004.

Children in Fallujah are being born with limb, head, heart and nervous system defects.

There is even a claim that a baby was born with three heads. The number of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than the rate in Europe.

The city, 40 miles west of Baghdad, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Iraq war in late 2004. U.S. Marines led Operation Phantom Fury to recapture it from insurgents.

British troops were involved in manning checkpoints on the outskirts of the city as the Americans went in. The U.S. has admitted that it used white phosphorus in the attack, but only as an illumination device.

One Child Dies Every Two Minutes in Afghanistan

phunkychic666 — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:57:10 +0000

Tom Parry writes on uruknet.info:

Children in Afghanistan are more likely to die before the age of five than children anywhere else in the world, according to Save the Children.

At the current appalling rate, one child dies every two minutes in the violence-wracked nation. The study shows that last year was also the deadliest for Afghan children since the fall of the Taliban.

More than 1,050 were killed in suicide attacks, air strikes, explosions and crossfire, according to latest figures. Save the Children insists the true scale of the humanitarian crisis facing the country remains hidden because of the focus on the conflict.

It says: “The international community needs to ensure families across the country — not just those living in the conflict zones — are able to access the clean water, nutritious food and healthcare they need to keep their children alive.”

Pakistan Knows Where Osama Bin Laden Is – But Won’t Tell

majestic — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:54:35 +0000

So says author Stephen Tanner in an interview with CNN’s Afghanistan Crossroads:

Osama bin Laden – remember him? Where is he, and is the U.S. getting closer to killing or capturing him?

Those are the questions hovering over several recent developments in the Afghanistan war: the capture of Afghan Taliban military leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the killing of two key Taliban commanders and an increase in drone attacks.

But several authorities on the eight-year Afghanistan war say no one should expect to see bin Laden in handcuffs anytime soon.

“No, I don’t think we’re getting any closer,” says Stephen Tanner, author of Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War against the Taliban.

Tanner says the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, knows where bin Laden is hiding, but is not ready to say.

“We got to make a deal with Pakistan because I’m convinced that he’s [bin Laden] protected by the ISI,” Tanner says.

Tanner says that rogue elements within the ISI – if not the Pakistani government – may be using bin Laden as a “trump card” to exert leverage over the United States. Tanner says that Pakistani leaders are concerned that the U.S. will draw closer to India, Pakistan’s chief rival.

Flashing the bin Laden trump card will insure that the U.S. will continue to send aid to Pakistan because it considers it a bulwark against radical Islam, Tanner says. Without the bin Laden trump card, though, Pakistan would be in danger of being abandoned by the U.S., Tanner says.

“I just think it’s impossible after all this time to not know where he is. The ISI knows what’s going on in its own country,” Tanner says. “We’re talking about a 6-foot-4-inch Arab with a coterie of bodyguards.”…

[continues at CNN's Afghanistan Crossroads]

Many Are Dying For Our Having Hoped Obama Would Not Practice Imperialism

Jay Janson — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:21:51 +0000

In retrospect, does it not sound terribly naive that we would hope a U.S. president whose candidacy was selected and backed by our most powerful bankers would be permitted, just maybe, perhaps by virtue of his being black and well spoken, to modify the intense imperialism that has characterized all previous presidencies since, if not including, that of Teddy Roosevelt and before?

He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has.

He indicated he would be willing to sacrifice men, women and children to assassinate leaders of those warring against American occupations and he has.

He said he would, and he did, send more troops to broaden the war against Pashtun Taliban, formerly the Reagan approved and recognized government of Afghanistan.

He has praised Americans for having fought the Vietnamese in their own country and keeps American troops in Iraq, though he called Iraq a “dumb war.” when seeking the votes of citizens no longer supporting that war.

He has praised European settlers for their westward march across America without acknowledging the death and suffering of the indigenous peoples of the continent whose nations the settlers from across the sea conquered

He pre-justified the week long massacre of Gaza, and kept silent during the chilling dispatch of four hundred Palestinian children along with over a thousand of their relatives and friends

While still a candidate, he signed on to giving hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers who favor, propagate and profit from wars.

We could have been pretty sure Obama would never condemn the industrial investment banks of Henry Ford, Rockefeller, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Dupont, Joe Kennedy, Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman, Brown Brothers, J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Allen and John Foster Dulles, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, ITT, and media magnates William Randolph Hearst, the UP Syndicate, the Chicago Tribune, and others for having backed Adolph Hitler and invested in arming the Germany of the Nazis up to superpower status, knowing full well (and in most cases pleased) that Hitler persecuted Jews and Communists.

Obama has always proclaimed capitalism and the United States as, overall, “a force for good in the world.”

“Hope springs eternal.” is the saying often applied to circumstances that don’t appear to warrant hope.

Zen Buddhists, practicing a strict application of highly disciplined mind, understand “hope’ and “fear’ as two sides of the same coin.

Just as fear can have a negative function, hope can paralyze, can be made to substitute for action and can becloud accurate appraisal and decision making.

Both hope and fear anticipate something that has not yet happened. For example, hoping that a certain damn will not break is similar to fearing that it will.

Fear and hope, not unlike prayers evoked in their name, are retreats from endeavor, a postponement or avoidance of involvement. As does fear, hope lessens the awareness and attention so critical to decisive action.

Millions of progressives, even if not completely hooked by the campaign slogan of “change” hoped that Obama would be different. But, as the wise saying goes, “Hoping doesn’t make it so.”

Before the election our priority was getting a Democrat elected as America’s first black president, and we felt obliged to lay low so the rabid and ignorant right wing plurality out there would not associate Obama with criticism of America, or the peace movement which corporate media characterizes as appeasement and weakness. Immediately after inauguration Obama bombed Pakistan as promised (a promise most assuredly meant for the ear of the military complex).

During our present generation, the lies, misrepresentations and treachery of U.S. presidents (Obama now included), Congresses and a Pentagon subservient media cartel have caused a multi massive amount of Muslim children to fall in harms way of lethal U.S. military action in Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Pakistan and Yemen. This merely continues a century long history of vicious and cruel armed Western imperialism in Muslim lands: various sub-Saharan African colonies, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq, since the Ottoman empire was sliced up for England and France with United States of America in profitable acquiescence.

Our hope was incredibly misplaced, that once in office, Obama would have acted contrary to his promises of bellicose intentions and as an exception to all his imperialist predecessors, that he had only pretended to be a hawk before an war indoctrinated electorate in order to gain office. A capitalist chief executive allowed to place the lives of children being slaughtered by U.S. military in poor Third World countries above the interests of Wall Street war profits would have no precedent.

Extremists fighting for justice in a world of U.S. military hegemony hold the millions of Americans limiting themselves to only hoping for a safer fate for foreign children, guilty and responsible as the Commander-in Chief Obama’s other officials of U.S. corporate governance.

Americans in general have a good amount of leisure but little or no interest in the crimes of their government abroad. Among them are many Americans who are personally disturbed or uncomfortable particularly about their awesomely powerful military taking the lives and limbs of children. But the greater part of pangs of conscience is devoted to hoping rather than any action at all. Those who seek news and information beyond that twisted on TV and in tabloids, will know of daily atrocities by the same boastful military that though having a large military facility less than three hundred miles from the Haiti earthquake zone did little more than block the aid coming into the Port-au Prince airport from other nations, disembarking its fine Navy hospital ship from Maryland only three days after the quake struck.

Since hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, obviously fear of retribution beyond that of 9/11 is more prevalent than the hope that our killing will cease.

This article was originally published by OpEdNews in February 2010.

Ex-Intel Committee Chair Blasts GOP Successor for Killing Torture Probe

Raymond — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:57:44 +0000

From Mother Jones:

A former Democratic senator who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the start of the US government’s campaign against Al Qaeda tells Mother Jones he cannot fathom why his Republican replacement squashed his request for an independent review of the interrogation techniques then being used by the CIA. That onetime senator, Bob Graham of Florida, says he believes Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) neglected his obligations as head of the intel panel by smothering Graham’s proposal for a committee assessment of so-called enhanced interrogation practices.

On February 4, 2003, according to a CIA memo released last week, senior CIA officials—including Stanley Moskowitz, the agency’s head of congressional liaison; Scott Muller, the agency’s top lawyer; and James Pavitt, the deputy director for operations—presented a classified briefing in a Capitol Hill office to Roberts and an aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the committee. Over the course of nearly two hours, the briefers covered the CIA’s brutal interrogation (or torture)—including waterboarding—of two detained terrorist suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and told Roberts of the agency’s plan to destroy videotapes of the Zubaydah sessions. The memo noted that Roberts “posed no objection to what he had heard” and “supported the interrogation effort.”

During the meeting, a Roberts aide asked Moskowitz if he had “taken up the line” a request Graham had made in late November 2002 for an independent committee inquiry into the CIA’s interrogation program. (At that time, Graham had been chairing the intelligence committee, but he left the committee in January 2003, as Republicans took over the Senate.)

[Read more at Mother Jones]

Too Much Bang, Bang: The Need to Demilitarize US National Security

Raymond — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:09:16 +0000

From Truthout:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a provocative and even dangerous speech at the National Defense University (NDU) last week that revealed the cold-war thinking of a key holdover from the Bush administration. With language reminiscent of the worst days of the cold war in the 1950s, Gates argued that the “demilitarization of Europe – where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it – has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st century.” He concluded that a perception of European weakness could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers. Gates didn’t name these so-called hostile powers; indeed, it would have been ludicrous to try to do so.

Instead of haranguing the European members of NATO, who don’t share our views about the threat of international terrorism or the need for a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan (or Iraq for that matter), the United States should be reducing its own global military presence, including its commitment to NATO. For the past several years, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, Gates has been making the case for turning NATO into an instrument for the projection of power abroad, using Afghanistan as an example of an expanded global role. The international coalition did not work well in Iraq; it is not working well in Afghanistan; and the results of these efforts point to the dysfunction of NATO as a military alliance. Did Gates notice that the coalition government in Netherlands collapsed on the eve of his speech because of the controversy over keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan?

[Read more at Truthout]

With No Modification and Little Debate, Democrats Send Patriot Act Extension to Obama

Raymond — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:30:32 +0000

Even though I didn’t expect any better, this story really breaks my heart. As long as this law is in effect, 9/11 never ends. Whether you believe it is the government or the terrorists who were behind the attack, it’s obvious that someone was trying to really screw you over nine years ago, and this story is a little reminder of that. Kudos to Dennis Kucinich for holding his ground on this and other civil liberties issues that other Democrats won’t touch for fear of being soft on terrorism. Personally, I’d rather be hard on human rights.

From The Raw Story:

Kucinich jeers: Congress is ‘complicit’ in violating Americans’ constitutional rights. In the wake of congressional Democrats’ reauthorization and extension of the USA Patriot Act, few elected Democrats have been as vocal about the post-9/11 security measures as they were during the Bush administration.

Leave it to stalwart House progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to raise a rallying cry against what he called America’s love of its fears.

“This legislation extends three problematic provisions of the PATRIOT Act and, at the same time, leaves some of the most egregious provisions in place, absent any meaningful reform and debate,” he declared in a media advisory.

The specific provisions he cited are the Patriot Act’s powers to conduct roving wiretaps, conduct surveillance of people not thought to have any association with terrorism and tap into your personal records, such as library accounts.

[Read more at The Raw Story]

Mossad ‘Factory’ Churned Out Fake Australian Passports

Ralph Bernardo — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:45:46 +0000

Adam Korman writes on ABC News (Australia):

A former Mossad officer has alleged the Israeli spy agency has its own “passport factory” to create or doctor passports for use in intelligence operations. Relations between Australia and Israel are under strain after three Australian passports were apparently used by suspects in the killing of top Hamas leader Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Dubai police say they are 99 per cent sure Mossad was behind the operation to smother Mabhouh with a pillow in his hotel room. Victor Ostrovsky, a case officer at Mossad for several years in the 1980s, says he has no doubt Australian passports have been forged or fraudulently used for similar operations in the past.

“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said. “They’ll shy away right away. So most of these [Mossad] operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.

Bush’s CIA Torture Psychologists Sought To Use ‘Mock Burials’

JacobSloan — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:25:56 +0000

Documents reveal that burying detainees alive was sought as an interrogation method by the Bush’s torture psychologists, but rejected by the Department of Justice “in the rush to approve waterboarding”:

CIA’s torturers asked DOJ to let them use mock burials. But DOJ said no.

PDF page 42 of the OPR Report (searchable copy here) includes a list of the torture techniques that Mitchell and Jessen recommended be used with Abu Zubaydah. Whereas the Bybee Two Techniques memo approves ten techniques, Mitchell and Jessen recommended twelve. In other words, Mitchell and Jessen asked for two techniques to be approved that did not get specific approval.

The twelfth technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.

There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the Bybee Two memo, because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out.

Washington Times Reports 9/11 Inconsistencies

phunkychic666 — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:24:24 +0000

Jennifer Harper for the Washington Times:

A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.

“In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards,” says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.

“The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials,” Mr. Gage adds.

The technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers has prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.

He is particularly disturbed by Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper, which was not hit by an aircraft, yet came down in “pure free-fall acceleration.” He also says that more than 100 first-responders reported explosions and flashes as the towers were falling and cited evidence of “multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft. at 60 mph” and the “mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking.”

There is also evidence of “advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material found in the World Trade Center dust,” Mr. Gage says. The group’s petition at www.ae911truth.org is already on its way to members of Congress…

[continues in the Washington Times]

The New York Times on Its ‘Kill More Civilians’ Op-Ed Writer

Ralph Bernardo — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:42:55 +0000

Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:

Last week, I wrote about the mysterious Op-Ed writer, Lara M. Dadkhah, published by the New York Times, who urged that the U.S. be less restrained about slaughtering Afghan civilians with air attacks (when Dadkhar reads things like this from today — “Airstrike kills dozens in Afghanistan … Ground forces at the scene found women and children among the casualties” — she presumably thinks: “yes, that’s exactly what we need more of”).

As I noted, beyond how deranged the argument was, virtually no information was disclosed about Dadkhah herself, who was allowed to tout her work for a “defense consulting company” without even specifying who it was. The Hillman Foundation’s Charles Kaiser asked NYT Op-Ed Page Editor David Shipley about this strange matter and received this reply:

We found Ms. Dadkhah from work she did in Small Wars Journal, work that was part of her Ph.D. dissertation at Georgetown. Ms. Dadkhah only recently took a job at Booz Allen. We tend not to mention the names of companies — as it can run the risk of seeming self-promotional. I thought it was sufficient to have the author say, as she did high up in the piece, that “While I am employed by a defense consulting company, my research and opinions on air support are my own.” It’s worth underscoring that Ms. Dadkhah’s research regarding close air support came entirely from her doctoral research, and that these are issues she has written about over the the last couple years for Small Wars.

Read More of Glenn Greenwald’s article in Salon

Kidnapping and Trading in Iraqi Children

phunkychic666 — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:18:27 +0000

Layla Anwar writes on uruknet.info:

While quite a bit of a fuss was raised regarding the kidnapping, smuggling and trafficking in Haitian children and rightly so, the same can’t be said about the fate of Iraqi children.

I have already written several posts about this new lucrative business in Iraq, that of the kidnapping, trafficking and trading of children, and I am always aghast to see that no media or organization for the protection of children, like the famous UNICEF or Save the Child or OXFAM or anyone else, has given enough attention and dedicated effort to denounce and stop this tragedy…

Of course, before our “liberation” such criminality involving the selling, buying, trading, kidnapping, killing of children was unheard of…am I to deduce that Freedom and Democracy are baby killers? Am afraid so.

Hussein Anwar kindly forwarded this article a couple of months ago and I have been so busy with other things and only found the time today to translate it for you.

Anthrax Myth Persists Despite Evidence

majestic — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:26:55 +0000

The highly convenient way in which the U.S Government’s FBI has “closed the case” on the 2001 anthrax attacks will not wash with anyone who has read the excellent Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail by Bob Coen and Eric Nadler. I’d be interested to hear what Messrs. Coen & Nadler make of the issue of whether or not the anthrax spores used in 2001 were weaponized, discussed here in USA Today:

Can science ever do away with bad ideas? Or do they just limp along forever?

Consider the federal investigators who have “formally concluded” their investigation into the 2001 anthrax killings, pointing again to the late anthrax vaccine researcher Bruce Ivins as the case’s culprit.

Whatever history’s verdict on Ivins, one brouhaha at the center of the case has already outlived him — the story of “weaponized” anthrax.

“One of my biggest frustrations with this has been showing people the data, and it doesn’t matter,” says researcher Joseph Michael of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M. Michael has presented electron microscope results that show the 2001 attack anthrax wasn’t weaponized for two years, “but still the idea refuses to go away.”

The notion took hold in October of 2001, as the Hart senate office building faced closure due to anthrax contamination, when then-House minority leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., described some of the anthrax used in the attacks as “weapons-grade material.” The claim sparked a flurry of reports about the peculiar properties of the attack spores, their high quality and lightness, which hastened their spread through the building’s ventilation system.

Fears centered around silica, the chief ingredient in sand, which allows small bacterial spores to float more freely in the air, or aerosolize, if applied as a coating, a Cold War bioweapons technique studied at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.

In particular, a 2001 warning that silica had been purposely added to the attack anthrax came from virologist Peter Jahrling of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The warning was delivered to White House officials (reported in Robert Preston’s 2002 book, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story), after U.S. Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology X-ray results showed silica present in samples of the attack anthrax. The fear gained currency in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war’s beginning, which centered around fears of bioweapons, as well as chemical and nuclear weapons.

“The spores in the Washington, D.C. letters were of exceptional purity,” says the Justice Department’s just-released investigation summary.

So, as part of the investigation, Michael and his colleagues looked at the attack spores using electron microscopes, which can see at fine enough resolution, on the nanometer scale, to spot exactly where the silica resided.In so doing they knocked down the notion the attack anthrax had been weaponized with a silicon coating. Instead, they found silicon that occurred naturally inside the spores.

“I believe I made an honest mistake,” Jahrling told The Los Angeles Times, in a 2008 response to this news, adding he was “overly impressed” by his initial views of the attack spores under the microscope.

Still the idea lives on, for example, in a January opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, that cited scientists who see the amount of silica in the attack spores as “blowing the FBI’s case out of the water.” (The FBI argued the lab where Ivins worked didn’t have the facilities to weaponize the anthrax.)…

[continues in in USA Today]

Plane Crash in Austin, TX: Intentional Act?

disinfogreg — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:10:54 +0000

Small plane crash into Echelon building in Austin, TX, housing IRS employees. No fatalities reported yet:

According to Alex Jones’ PrisonPlanet.com:

UPDATE: NTSB Investigating Austin Plane Crash As An Intentional Act

Comment: How long before this is blamed on a Tea Party acitvist/Ron Paul supporter or 9/11 truther?

12:42 p.m.: The pilot of the plane had set his house on fire beforehand, stole the plane and crashed it intentionally, a federal official told CNN.

12:40 p.m.: Federal officials said two F-16 fighter jets were launched as a precaution after the crash, though terrorist intent was not indicated.

UPDATE: NTSB official told Fox News that they are investigating Austin, Texas plane crash as an intentional act, and said it appears the pilot set his own house on fire and then got in his plane and flew it into the building. An NTSB spokesman, however, told FoxNews.com that “we can’t confirm any of that.”

An IRS office is located inside the building, NTSB told Fox News.

U.N. Rejects ‘Militarization’ of Afghan Aid

Raymond — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:47:22 +0000

From NYT:

Senior United Nations officials in Afghanistan on Wednesday criticized NATO forces for what one referred to as “the militarization of humanitarian aid,” and said United Nations agencies would not participate in the military’s reconstruction strategy in Marja as part of its current offensive there.“We are not part of that process, we do not want to be part of it,” said Robert Watkins, the deputy special representative of the secretary general, at a news conference attended by other officials to announce the United Nations’ Humanitarian Action Plan for 2010. “We will not be part of that military strategy.”

The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has made the rapid delivery of governmental services, including education, health care and job programs, a central part of his strategy in Marja, referring to plans to rapidly deploy what he has referred to as “a government in a box” once Marja is pacified.

Mr. Watkins did not specifically criticize the Marja offensive, saying, “It is not the military that will be delivering the services, they will be clearing the area so the government can deliver those services.”

However, the United Nations would not be participating, he said.

Wael Haj-Ibrahim, head of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs here, said the military should not be involved in providing health care or schools.

[Read more at NYT]

Stopping Soldiers from Becoming Murderers

Raymond — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:40:16 +0000

From Time Magazine:

Adapted from Jim Frederick’s book Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death

On Nov. 5 of last year, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist known by his superiors to have job-performance problems and by others in the government to have Islamist sympathies, opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 43 more before he was subdued. Defense Secretary Robert Gates quickly ordered a blue-ribbon panel to conduct an investigation into how such an atrocity could occur. Gates emphasized the importance of accountability. “One of the core functions of leadership is assessing the performance and fitness of people honestly and openly,” he said. “Failure to do so … may lead to damaging, if not devastating, consequences.”

Demanding accountability is admirable, but it marks something of a change for the modern armed forces. There is a military maxim that a commander is responsible for everything his or her subordinates do, or fail to do. But this has been largely an empty cliché in the post-9/11 era. As Army Lieut. Colonel Paul Yingling noted in a 2007 article in the Armed Forces Journal, “A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank … As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” (See pictures from inside the apartment of Nidal Malik Hasan.)

This lack of consequences for failures among senior officers is particularly profound in cases of extreme malfeasance and war crimes. Whether it is the behavior of prison guards at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or less publicized — but sadly numerous — cases of murder and brutality committed by soldiers and Marines, the military has punished, often severely, those who committed crimes. But it has spent little energy examining the leadership and command failures that created a climate in which such crimes could occur in the first place. (See pictures of the Fort Hood shootings.)

[Read more from Time Magazine]

KBR Tells Court It Was Following Military Orders When Employees Burned Toxic Waste in Open Pits

Raymond — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 04:57:20 +0000

From Alternet:

The military’s largest contractor is trying to avoid liability for health risks associated with burn pits to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the truth is emerging.

In October a class action suit combining 22 lawsuits from 43 states was filed in US District Court in Maryland against KBR, Halliburton, and other military contractors for damages to health from open air burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to plaintiffs’ lawyers the military contracting giant had been paid millions of dollars to safely dispose of waste on bases but negligently burned refuse in open pits, spewing toxins, including known carcinogens, into the air. Last week, KBR sought to dismiss the charges. Their tack was not to deny that they burned lithium batteries, petroleum, asbestos, trucks, cars, paint, plastic, Styrofoam, medical waste including human limbs, and more, as the soldiers have charged, but to challenge their liability for any ensuing problems. According to KBR’s press fact sheet on the suit, the Army, not KBR, decides if a burn pit or an incinerator will be used, where it will be built in relation to living and working facilities, and what it can burn. KBR insists it was and is still just “performing under the direction and control of military commanders in the field.” In short, they were only following orders and the soldiers are going after the wrong guy.

[Read more at Alternet]