Barack Obama, Murderer and War Criminal-in-Chief
Arthur Silber
I will be blunt, for certain conclusions are now inescapable, even this early in the miraculous, transcendent Age of Obama. Insofar as those who regularly follow political matters are concerned, and especially with regard to those people who write about politics and foreign policy — which is to say, insofar as commentators and reporters in the mainstream media and on blogs are concerned — to continue to believe that Barack Obama represents any kind of “impro vement” over the abomination of George W. Bush is not an innocent error. To persist in delusions of this kind requires that one intentionally and deliberately blind oneself to evidence that assaults us every day…
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Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off
From My Lai to Bala Baluk
MIKE WHITNEY
Barack Obama is aggressively stepping up the war in Afghanistan. He’s intensified the cross-border bombing of Pakistan and he is doubling the number of U.S. troops to 68,000 by 2010. He’s also a strong proponent of pilotless drones even though hundreds of civilians have been killed in bombing raid blunders. On May 4, 2009, 143 civilians were killed in a bombing raid in Bala Baluk, a remote area south of Herat. Obama brushed off the incide nt with terse apology never intimating that the US policy for aerial bombardment would be reviewed to avoid future mishaps…
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Nakba Day 2009: How many Palestinian Children Does It Take To Make A Jewish State In Palestine?
Lawrence of Cyberia
Sixty-one years, sixty-one children you’ve probably never heard of. 1. Unidentified Palestinian girl , one of the victims of a bomb attack in Jerusalem on 29 December 1947. Members of the Irgun militant Zionist group threw a bomb from a passing taxi at a bus in the Palestinian residential quarter near Herod’s Gate, killing 17 Palestinian civilians….
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Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
Jeremy Scahill
As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sle ep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals. More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo…
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U.S. air strike victims say Taliban long gone
Jason Motlagh
Afghans who lost family members in a U.S. bombardment last week say Taliban militants fled hours before the U.S. attack — an account that contrasts with Pentagon claims about an incident that has come to encapsulate an uphill battle for Afghan hearts and minds. Haji Sayed Barakat, who lost two children and his wife of 35 years in the May 4 attack, said Taliban militants were present in the area but had moved on two hours before the U.S. air strikes. In a voice m ore confused than angry, the Afghan farmer gestured toward his three remaining daughters, now recovering in the sterile quarters of Herat hospital’s new burn ward. “My girls, do they look like Taliban?” he asked…
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There’s nowhere like home
Marcy Newman, body on the line
On the day we commemorate an Nakba (albeit one under closure yet again)–when as a result of Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine, when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes and their land, when thousands of Palestinians were massacred–we find a new Nakba in the making in Pakistan. This is from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees…
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What is Acknowledged and What Remains Unknown
Sexual Torture
DAVID ROSEN
…The limited sources limit the public’s knowledge of the full scope of the torture committed by American intelligence agents, military officers and private contractors. Focusing on the issue of sexual torture, which includes prolonged nudity, reveals what has been made public but also what has yet to become publicly acknowledged. Failure to publicly acknowledge the full scope of sexual torture, along with all the other “harsh” interroga tion techniques, creates a sanitized, “official,” history. Americans will never know what torture was committed in their name, nor be able to hold accountable those who ordered and executed these actions unless they go beyond “official” sources…
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America Creating ‘Talibanization’ in Pakistan, Say Arab Media
Jalal Ghazi
…Abu Ghaniya explained that, unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan, which has one supreme leader – Mullah Omar- the Pakistani Taliban have many local leaders. In some cases, these leaders are at odds with one another, but after the U.S. air strikes and repeated Pakistani government military operations, they have become more united under the Taliban banner. Pakistani political observer Abdel Ghafar wrote on Al Jazeera’s website that different local Pas htun leaders decided to join the Taliban after U.S. attacks in their areas when they realized that the Pakistani government would not defend them…
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New Leader of Afghan War Likes Torture
Ed Brayton
Esquire has an article, first printed in 2006, about Camp Nama, a detention facility in Iraq that made Abu Ghraib look like a church social. It contains testimony from two military officers who worked at the facility until their consciences could take it no more and then blew the whistle. How bad was it? It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in — they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.”…
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Who is not corrupt in Iraq?
Saad Abbas, Azzaman
It is not wise and fair to single out the Ministry of Trade as an example of how corruptive Iraqi ministries and government have become. Corruption is a reality in our wounded country. It is more dangerous to the future of Iraq than terrorism which has been tearing the country and its people apart. It has taken so long to embark on any serious anti-corruption measures. For this reason, corruption has spread like an infectious disease and is easily discernible at all governme nt ranks…
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West Bank closed by IOF
Yisrael Beiteinu seeks to criminalise marking the Nakba
Palestinian Information Center
Ehud Barak, the Israeli war minister ordered a general closure on West Bank on the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the Nakba, while Lieberman threatened criminalising the marking of Nakba. Thousands of Palestinians across the West Bank marked, on Thursday, the Nakba which took place 61 years ago when Palestinians were uprooted from their towns and villages, on the ruins of which the state of “Israe l” was founded by Jewish Europe…
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Obama on torture photos: cover-up and complicity
Bill Van Auken
President Obama’s repudiation of his promise to comply with a court order and release Pentagon torture photos marks a qualitative deepening of the cover-up of the crimes carried out under Bush as well as their continuation under the new administration in only slightly altered form. The president’s decision amounts to the deliberate suppression of evidence that the US military-intelligence apparatus, at the direction of the White House, carried out systemic to rture…
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Vanity Fair’: Wolfowitz rejected Sunni overtures in Iraq in ’04 by calling them ‘Nazis’
Philip Weiss
David Rose is reporting in Vanity Fair that back in 2004, nearly 3 years before the U.S. included Sunnis in efforts to end the insurgency in Iraq, Sunnis reached out to the Americans and were rebuffed. Rose says it was neocons who blocked the overtures. His account turns partly on Ken Wischkaemper, a Texas agricultural businessman who had contracted to the Coalition Provisional Authority and was approached by leading Sunni s…
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Video: Nakba remembered amid Gaza suffering
AljaeeraEnglish
Palestinians have marked the occasion of the 1948 “catastrophe”, or Nakba, when they fled their homes in the face of the establishment of Israel. Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin reports from Gaza, where this year’s commemorations have been overshadowed by the more recent destruction wrought by Israel’s war on the territory…
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GI Special 7E11: Torture [ 13 May 2009 ]
Thomas F. Barton
Great Moments In U.S. Military History: Troops Kill 12-Year Old Selling Fruit Juice; Despicable U.S. “Official” Rat Filth Tell Their Usual Lies About It.
The boy was found with ten thousand Iraqi dinars in his hand – worth less than $9. U.S. officials said the money is evidence of a disturbing new trend. “We have every reason to believe that insurgents are paying children to conduct these attacks or assist the attackers in some capacity, undoubtedly placing the children in harm’s way,” a U. S. military spokesman wrote in an email on Saturday. But eyewitnesses said the boy, identified as Omar Musa Salih, was standing by the side of the road selling fruit juice – a common practice in Iraq — and had nothing to do with the attack.
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Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory No. 19/2009 (07 – 13 May 2009)
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Israeli violations of international law and humanitarian law escalated in the OPT during the reporting period (07 – 13 May 2009): Shooting: During the reporting period, five Palestinian civilians, including two children and one woman, were wounded in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the West Bank, four Palestinian civilians, including two children, wer e wounded when IOF used force against a peaceful demonstration organized in protest to the construction of the Annexation Wall in Bal’ein village, west of Ramallah. In the Gaza Strip, on 07 May 2009, a Palestinian woman was wounded when IOF troops positioned at the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel opened fire at Palestinian houses in al-Shouka village, east of Rafah. During the reporting period, IOF gunboats fired on Palestinian fishing boats…
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Powell aide says torture helped build Iraq war case
Matt Smith, CNN
Finding a “smoking gun” linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday. The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney’s office kept close tabs on the questioning…
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