tagged w/ The U.S. government’s torture of detainees
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January 07, 2009
Military.com|by Christian Lowe
The head of counterterrorism operations for the U.S. Department of State said the al-Qaeda network is largely broken and has lost the ability to conduct large-scale terrorist operations.
While the U.S. has still been unable to kill or capture the organization's top leaders, they have nevertheless been "beaten back into a hole" by relentless pressure from special operations, law enforcement and drone attacks.
"They are scratching their heads, realizing they took on a pretty savvy opponent who went after them kinetically very fast, pulled out the rug from underneath them, put them on the run, put them in a area where they didn't have the assets they had before," said former Army special operations commander, Amb. Dell Dailey, who now heads the State Department's counterterrorism office. "Bin Laden can't get an operational effort off the ground without it being detected ahead of time and being thwarted."
Dailey cited the foiled terror plot to bring down as many as 10 U.S.-bound commercial jets in 2006 as an example of al-Qaeda's diminished capability to launch dramatic attacks.
"Their ability to reach is non-existent," Dailey told military reporters during a Jan. 6 breakfast meeting in Washington, D.C.
But that doesn't mean the U.S. can sit back and relax, he added.
Though he's a political appointee who may not keep his job in an Obama administration, Dailey had high praise for the incoming team's counterterrorism strategy and for the people who've been tabbed to wage it.
cont...January 07, 2009
Military.com|by Christian Lowe
The head of counterterrorism... more
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Everyone needs to
join and give your input on the Obama site for the message to pursue charges against Bush and his administration.Everyone needs to
join and give your input on the Obama site for the message to... more
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President Bush on Sunday defended controversial interrogation measures established by his administration, arguing that techniques like water-boarding helped save American lives.
“The techniques…were necessary and are necessary to be used on a rare occasion to get information to protect the American people,” Bush said during an expansive exit interview that aired on Fox Sunday.
Citing an interrogation with Al Qaeda strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, which included simulated drowning, otherwise known as “waterboarding,” the outgoing president said, “We believe the information we gained helped save lives on American soil.”
The Bush administration has been criticized by civil liberties advocates and others for the use of, and legal justifications underpinning, these harsh interrogation methods. President-elect Barack Obama has already promised to review these policies when he takes the oath of office later this month.
In the interview with Fox News Sunday, Bush joked that his administration has been “slightly criticized” for its policy to push the legal limits of the rights, the treatment and the interrogation of suspected terrorists detained by U.S. military and intelligence officials, or cooperative governments.”
The president defended those measures repeatedly on Sunday, saying, “I firmly reject the word ‘torture.’ Everything this administration does had a legal basis to it; otherwise, we would not have done it.”
In a separate interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Obama said, “From my view, waterboarding is torture.”
Whatever Bush administration policies he overturns, the president-elect wants to protect intelligence officials at the Central Intelligence Agency in order to do their jobs.President Bush on Sunday defended controversial interrogation measures established by... more
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Presidents have long strived to centralize influence in the White House, often to the frustration of their Cabinet secretaries. But not since Richard M. Nixon tried to abolish the majority of his Cabinet has a president gone so far in attempting to build a West Wing-based clutch of advisers with a mandate to cut through -- or leapfrog -- the traditional bureaucracy.
Obama's emerging "super-Cabinet" is intended to ensure that his domestic priorities -- health reform, the environment and urban affairs -- don't get mired in agency red tape or brushed aside by the ongoing economic meltdown and international crises. Half a dozen new White House positions have been filled by well-known leaders with experience navigating Washington turf wars.
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But some see the potential for chaos within the administration.
"We're going to have so many czars," said Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It's going to be a lot of fun, seeing the czars and the regulators and the czars and the Cabinet secretaries debate."
Carol M. Browner, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, is taking on a broad new portfolio with responsibility for Obama's ambitious agenda on the environment, energy and climate change.
Bronx politician Adolfo Carrion Jr. is expected to serve in another new White House post, implementing Obama's education and housing agenda for cities.
cont...Presidents have long strived to centralize influence in the White House, often to the... more
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If Homo sapiens can stick it out on Earth for another two billion years, our descendants may witness quite a show in the night sky. Researchers estimate that the Milky Way will collide with its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, at around that time—well before the sun collapses into a white dwarf, perhaps destroying the Earth in the process.
This close encounter of the galactic kind could easily kick our solar system to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and there is a small chance we might even take up residence in Andromeda, according to astronomers T. J. Cox and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
The pair simulated the collision by estimating the relative speed between the two galaxies and the amount of gas and dark matter in the intervening space, which exerts a drag on their motions.
Andromeda is currently 2.3 million light-years from our galaxy. Researchers know that the two neighbors are approaching each other at 120 kilometers per second, but they are far less certain of Andromeda's sideways speed. If moving fast enough to the side, it would miss us entirely.
cont...If Homo sapiens can stick it out on Earth for another two billion years, our... more
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The American view............?or just the inability to stand up as reporters and claim the same about Bush and his evil manipulations and pursuit of oil pipelines???????
Why wouldn't Russia want to compete against Untied States? after all Reagan showed them the democratic way to steal from the poor with their permission.
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Five months after sending Russian tanks into Georgia, Vladimir Putin has turned his sights to another pesky democratic neighbor, Ukraine. His weapon of choice this time is natural gas.
[Review & Outlook] AP
Try to ignore the noise about transit fees, back payments and market prices. Here's the salient fact about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine over gas supplies: Russia's strongman is wielding the energy club to undermine the pro-Western government in Kiev and scare the European Union into submission. The strategic stakes are as great as in Georgia last summer.
Mr. Putin, who has no formal oversight role at Gazprom, nonetheless ordered a 15% cut in gas deliveries to Ukraine on New Year's Day, amid a contractual dispute over prices. Russia used the same crude pressure tactic in January 2006, when Gazprom first cut supplies and destroyed its once stellar reputation for reliability.
But the impact down the line on Europe, which gets a fifth of all its gas through Ukraine, appears more pronounced than three years ago. Amid freezing winter temperatures, six European countries yesterday reported a halt in gas supplies while five others saw significant reductions. Tens of thousands of people were left without heat, including two mid-sized cities in Bulgaria. Here in the U.S., heating oil prices jumped 3.3% on expectations that Europeans would switch from natural gas to warm their homes.
cont...The American view............?or just the inability to stand up as reporters and claim... more
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He said efforts were made to compromise and agree on a weaker press statement but there was no consensus. Palestinians carry the body of 4-year-old Lama Hamdan during her funeral in the town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mohammed Saber / EPA)
United Nations - The United States late Saturday blocked approval of a U.N. Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and expressing concern at the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas.
U.S. deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said the United States saw no prospect of Hamas abiding by last week's council call for an immediate end to the violence. Therefore, he said, a new statement at this time "would not be adhered to and would have no underpinning for success, would not do credit to the council."
France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, the current council president, announced that there was no agreement among members on a statement. But he said there were "strong convergences" among the 15 members to express serious concern about the deteriorating situation in Gaza and the need for "an immediate, permanent and fully respected cease-fire."
Arab nations demanded that the council adopt a statement calling for an immediate cease-fire following Israel's launch of a ground offensive in Gaza earlier Saturday, a view echoed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Libya's U.N. Ambassador Giadalla Ettalhi, the only Arab member of the council, said the United States objected to "any outcome" during the closed council discussions on the proposed statement.He said efforts were made to compromise and agree on a weaker press statement but... more
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GAZA CITY, 31 December 2008 (IRIN) - In Gaza’s main hospital, the director’s office is under virtual siege, according to an IRIN journalist in Gaza. Relatives of the injured are desperate to get their kin transferred to Egypt for emergency treatment. There is a fear here that the already overstretched healthcare system will collapse if Israel mounts a ground offensive into the tiny coastal strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians.
As of the night of 30 December the death toll from the Israeli offensive had reached 380, with 1,800 wounded, according to the Gaza health ministry. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) said 30 children and nine women were among the dead and 250 children had been injured.
Fifteen medical patients passed through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt for emergency care on that day, said WHO.
Hospitals in the enclave have been overwhelmed by the trauma cases flowing into emergency rooms since the morning of 27 December.
An official from the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, Aed Yaghi, said at a press conference on 30 December that there were 2,053 hospital beds in Gaza, and warned it was not enough.
“One hundred and fifty patients were brought in at once,” said Khaled Abu-Najar, a staff nurse in Al-Shifa’s emergency room. “We lack beds, sterile gloves, sheets, scissors and gauze to treat patients.”
ShortagesGAZA CITY, 31 December 2008 (IRIN) - In Gaza’s main hospital, the... more
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wow .....10 yrs from now we will be giving them free oil.....
and (Un's= United nations pursuit of oil from poor countries.....no wonder they are pist!) sounds to me like someone needs to govern and do elections in the UN.
BAGHDAD, 4 January 2009 (IRIN) - An Iraqi government survey conducted late 2008 has found that 95 percent of Iraqi families would prefer to keep the state’s free food programme running rather than replace it with financial aid, a government spokesman said on 3 January.
“We interviewed 15,000 families all over Iraq and have already presented the outcomes to all concerned governmental parties for consideration when adopting new measures in this regard,” Abdul-Zahra al-Hindawi, spokesman for the Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation, which conducted the survey, told IRIN.
However, al-Hindawi said that his ministry, which oversees economic and human development projects, supports the government plan to withhold the programme from well-to-do people and provide food solely to poorer families.
“It will benefit the Iraqi economy when money goes only to buy food for those who need it,” al-Hindawi told IRIN.
Iraq’s food rationing system, known as the Public Distribution System (PDS), was set up in 1995 as part of the UN’s oil-for-food programme following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait 17 years ago. However, it has been crumbling since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 due to insecurity, poor management and corruption.wow .....10 yrs from now we will be giving them free oil.....
and (Un's=... more
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The U.S. government’s torture of detainees in the “war on terror” can be traced directly to a Feb. 7, 2002, memo signed by President George W. Bush.
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This was conclusion #1 of the recently released final report of the Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.
Thanks primarily to this document, debate concerning one of the most shameful aspects of the “war on terror” has entered the mainstream debate after years on the edges of public discourse. [For more on the report, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Torture Trail Seen Starting with Bush.”]
Torture, however, is only one of the crimes associated with the “war on terror.” A few prominent examples of other crimes waiting to be “sourced” are:
Extraordinary rendition, illegal detention, loss of habeas corpus, abuse and murder of civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, and the creation of millions of impoverished refugees.
With these crimes, the need to find the origin is every bit as imperative as with torture. But we don’t need to ask the Senate Armed Services Committee to initiate 18-month investigations for each of these as well.
The question of responsibility for these and all other war crimes, including torture, was answered over 60 years ago at Nuremberg when high-ranking Nazis were brought to account for their atrocities in World War II.
On Sept. 30, 1946, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, president of the International Military Tribunal, read the judgment of the first Nuremberg trial, which included these memorable words:
“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Torture, rendition, loss of liberties, unnecessary death and destruction are just some of the trees. Aggression is the forest.
And there can be no doubt that President George W. Bush and members of his inner circle have committed "the supreme international crime."
The invasion of Iraq is the clearest example of American aggression associated with the “war on terror.” The invasion – launched on March 19, 2003 – violated the Nuremberg Charter (Article VI(a)), as well as the United Nations Charter (Article 2, Sec. 4 and Article 39) and U.N. Security Council Resolution #1441.The U.S. government’s torture of detainees in the “war on terror”... more
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