By John Pilger - UK release Dec 12, 2010 YouTube introduction:
From the award-winning director of The War on Democracy comes John Pilger's latest wor, The War You Don't See. This hard-hitting exposé and scrutinizes the effects of the media during wartime, asking what is the role of the media in rapacious wars. When symbols are separated from facts and the facts don't matter, could the media be accused of conspiring to play down the carnage and of using 'embedded journalism' to amplify the lies? This documentary unveils the war you don't see and allows you to make up your own mind.
Jorge Videla, 85, was Argentina's president from 1976 to 1981 and was considered the architect of the so called "Dirty War" , the war the regime said to be against subversive terrorism .
He was found guilty of torture and murder among other crimes. The 31 prisoners he was convicted of killing were pulled from civilian jail cells and "shot while trying to escape".
During Videla's regime, an estimated 5,000 prisoners were held incomunicado, most of them were tortured and their bodies "disappeared" . It was later revealed that they were dumped , dead or drugged, into the River Plate from aircraft.
After the sentence Videla remained unrepentant and told the court that Argentine society had demanded the crackdown on dissents.
As judge Maria Elba Martinez handed down the sentence she said:
"Videla ... is a manifestation of state terrorism."
Another leader in Argentina's 1976-1983 military junta, Emilio Massera, died on Monday at age 85.
Massera was head of the Navy and operated one of Argentina's most notorious political prison and torture centre, the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, or ESMA.
Germany, Spain, Italy and France sought Massera over the killings of their citizens during the torture regime in Argentina. They had suspended arrest orders after Argentine courts had declared him unfit to stand trial on health grounds.
MORE AT:
MACLEANS: Ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Videla gets life sentence for torture, murder of prisoners in 1976 December 22, 2010 - Michael Warren, The Associated Press http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=w5477444
WATCH: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/17/wikileaks_cables_pfizer_targeted_nigerian_attorney "Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer hired investigators to find evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general to pressure him to drop a $6 billion lawsuit over fraudulent drug tests on Nigerian children."
"Eleven children died, and others suffered disabling injuries including deafness, muteness, paralysis, brain damage, loss of sight, slurred speech."
The USA Justice Department prosecutor is still investigating whether any CIA "enhanced interrogation expert", including Torture psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, should face criminal charges.
But just in case the last two ones are not above the Law, the CIA has agreed to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for the architects of the agency’s "interrogation" program.
Officials: CIA gave Waterboarders $5M Legal Shield
By Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo
WASHINGTON (AP) – The CIA agreed to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for two contractors who were the architects of the agency’s interrogation program and personally conducted dozens of waterboarding sessions on terror detainees, former U.S. officials said.
The secret agreement means taxpayers are paying to defend the men in a federal investigation over an interrogation tactic the U.S. now says is torture. The deal is even more generous than the protections the agency typically provides its own officers, giving the two men access to more money to finance their defense.
It has long been known that psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen created the CIA’s interrogation program. But former U.S. intelligence officials said Mitchell and Jessen also repeatedly subjected terror suspects inside CIA-run secret prisons to waterboarding, a simulated drowning tactic.
The revelation of the contractors’ involvement is the first known confirmation of any individuals who conducted waterboarding at the so-called black sites, underscoring just how much the agency relied on outside help in its most sensitive interrogations.
More about these guys at PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS BLOG: ( click on title)
Wikileaks - Its History and what has been made public:
"Wiki Rebels" documentary - 57 minutes
"SECRECY is a basic component of the Policy of Torture: It is essential to the structure of torture that everything takes place in secret, in the dark, beyond consideration of shame or account. When the torturer assures his victim ' no one will ever know' , he is at once working to break the victim's spirit and bolster his own". From "Settling accounts with torturers"-Lawrence Welsher
Shell's grip on Nigerian state revealed GUARDIAN UK - by David Smith, 8 December 2010
"US embassy cables reveal top executive's claims that company 'knows everything' about key decisions in government ministries"
The company's top executive told US diplomats that it had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries.
On death threats: "We have hundreds of specific death threats from US military militants. That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on. Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending out to our lawyers and my children. However it is the specific calls from the elites of US society for our assassination, kidnapping and execution that is more concerning. These range from a US senate bill by John Ensign which seeks to declare us a "transnational threat" to assassination calls from former Bush speechwriters such as Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post and Bill O'Reilly of Fox News."
El Pais interview with Julian Assange in the December 5, 2010 - Full interview HERE
In Spain, the revelations that U.S. diplomats sought out and communicated directly with judges and prosecutors , in a large-scale coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct the criminal investigations in several cases in that country have dominated the news in Spain for the last three days now.
Scott Horton is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and New York attorney known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict.
Greg Mitchell, author of the Media Fix blog for the TheNation.com has been publishing an updated catalogue of information and reactions to the leaked cables at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/media-fix
WarLogs.Wikileaks.org(HERE) is a website which provides an easy way to search through the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, which were made public by Wikileaks on 22nd October 2010. The documents are a set of over 391,000 reports which cover the war in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009.
Salam Pax (aka Salam al-Janabi, Arabic: سلام الجنابي) is a pseudonymous blogger from Iraq whose site "Where is Raed?", gave a gripping account of the Iraq conflict During (and after) the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The pseudonym consists of the word "peace" in Arabic (Salām) and Latin (Pāx).
Don Arbor (www.donarbor.com ) was a reader of the Blog and wrote the song "Salam Pax (Peace)", honoring the connections between people of different origins, and the possibility of a more peaceful world.
Salam's story He became known as the Baghdad Blogger. But no one knew his identity - or even if he existed.
by Chalmers Ashby Johnson (August 6, 1931 - November 20, 2010) extracted from Chalmers Johnson's (1931-2010) book: "BLOWBACK" (first edition 2000).
..."The CIA term for this policy is "disruption", by which it means the harassment of terrorists around the world.. .According to John Diamond of the Associated Press, "the CIA keeps its role secret, and the foreign countries that actually crack down on the suspects, carefully hide the U.S. role, lest they stir up trouble for themselves.". There are no safeguards at all against misidentifying "suspects" and "the CIA sends no formal notice to Congress". Disruption is said to be a preemptive, offensive form of counterterrorism. Richard Clarke, President Bill Clinton's antiterrorism czar, likes it because he can avoid "the cumbersome Congressional reporting requirements that go with CIA-directed covert operations" and because "human rights organizations would have no way of identifying a CIA role"....
Interview with Chalmers Johnson (August 6, 1931 - November 20, 2010) Johnson was a professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean war, was a consultant for the CIA and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972.
By Arundhati Roy, author of " The God of Small Things" - Booker Prize winner 1997
Speech at the opening Plenary of the World Social Forum in Mumbai on January 16, 2004 - "Another World is Possible"
"Last January thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared — reiterated — that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.
Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs — to further what many call The Project for the New American Century.
In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to `debate' the issue on `neutral' platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.
Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a `market' of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value — oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal — must do as they're told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State, was Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the case of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from." After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.
This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works.
Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It's what's emphasised and what's ignored. Say for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian Security Forces (making the average death toll about 6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago, in March of 2003, more than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and a 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police and administration watched, and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the Government that oversaw them was re-elected ... all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.
Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages fenced in with razor wire, U.S. soldiers will patrol our streets and, Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots could, like Saddam Hussein, be in U.S. custody, having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teeth examined on prime-time TV.
But as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism.
Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of being Non-Aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is `natural ally' — India, Israel and the U.S. are `natural allies'), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy.
A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been dispossessed by `development' projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice.
In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments — by dams, mines, steel plants and other `development' projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants.
Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors have been arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing the exits.
Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents — corrupt, local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Government signed a power purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!
Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.
The tradition of `turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)
That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys — the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) — are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO — so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee — so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?
Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.
In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity. Why else would it be that the U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20 times more than it taxes a garment made in the U.K.? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa bean produce only 5 per cent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa bean, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonising regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes, and repay them some $ 382 billion a year?
For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun was crucial for us. Though our governments try and take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancun taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancun we learned the importance of globalising resistance.
No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate Globalisation on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, they become powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of ex-President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.
Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the Opposition into Government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats — most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.
This week at the World Social Forum, some of the best minds in the world will exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we're fighting for. It is a vital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the Movement for Global Justice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi's Salt March was not just political theatre. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow non-violent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theatre. It is a very precious weapon that needs to be constantly honed and re-imagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.
It was wonderful that on February 15th last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people in five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15th was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonised — as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the best-seller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.
This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we — all of us gathered here and a little way away at Mumbai Resistance — need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an over-arching pre-ordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.
If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-liberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.
Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the U.S. army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler. And that — after a quarter century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.
So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S. occupation and that we believe that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?
How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old Killer Ba'athists, are they Islamic Fundamentalists?)
We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.
Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the U.S. government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.
I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social Forum and Mumbai Resistance, we choose, by some means, two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win.
The Project For The New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.
For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war. "
US Admiral Richard C. Macke's comments about the rape of a 12 year-old girl by three American servicemen in Okinawa, Japan in September 1995:
" I think it was absolutely stupid. I have said several times: for the price they paid to rent the car used in the crime, they could have had a girl prostitute"
" Wild Strawberries" ("Smultronstället") - Ingmar Bergman's Movie - 1957
"So it struck me - what if you could make a film about this; that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door, and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives." - Ingmar Bergman - 1957
(Part 1/15 to Part 15/15)
At the end of the day, the so called "extracted memories" , those gotten through torture, threats and rape of a human being, distorted and manipulated as they are, belong to the torturers and rapist themselves, to fuel their sadism and arrogance and to be used in their fabricated lies and delusions of power.
They don't belong to the human beings they victimize and are far away from the truth that is reserved to those who can recognize the holiness and Dignity of any human being, those to whom "dignity" is not just a bunch of letters in a billboard or script.
For those "image makers", torturers and rapists, the "dignity performers", goes what belongs to them: the fables they need to justify their brutality and shameless, promiscuous and corrupt mentality. “Damn right.”
Thousands Converge at the gates of Fort Benning for 20th Anniversary of November Vigil to Close the School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), also known as SOA - "The School of Assassins".
Thousands of torture survivors, veterans, faith-based communities, union workers, students, musicians, human rights activists and others from across the Americas are gathered today at the gates of the U.S. military base Fort Benning to call for the closure of the School of the Americas .
During the protest, the names of the torture, rape and murder victims of graduates of the school are read by the participants.
Many of the notorious human rights violators responsible for rape, torture, kidnapping, assassination and disappearance of thousands of people in Latin America and elsewhere were/are graduates of the School of the Americas.
Among them are generals Leopoldo Galtieri, Efraín Ríos Montt and Manuel Noriega, dictators such as Bolivia's Hugo Banzer and many of Augusto Pinochet's officers.
Members of the infamous Atlacatl Battalion of El Salvador who carried out the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador were also trained at SOA.
A database with graduates of both the SOA and WHINSEC who have been accused of human rights violations and other criminal activity is kept by The School of the Americas Watch, an advocacy organization founded by Father Roy Bourgeois and a small group of supporters in 1990 to protest the training of mainly Latin American military officers, by the United States Department of Defense at the School of the Americas (SOA).
SOA Watch conducts a vigil each November at the site of the academy, in protest over the murders, rapes and torture and contraventions of the Geneva Accord committed the graduates of the academy or under their leadership.
Today, November 20, 2010, is the 20th Anniversary of this November Vigil and regardless the well known abuses committed by some of the graduates of the School, it is kept open by the United States and in 2000 the United States Congress renamed the School of the Americas the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
"Government agencies will not be able to hide information behind the veil of national security if the information offers evidence of complicity in torture, a Federal Court judge has ruled."
The Telegraph - UK - November 19, 2010 - Boris Johnson George W. Bush can’t fight for freedom and authorise torture If the West’s aim is to spread the rule of law, it cannot be achieved by vile means, argues Boris Johnson. It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution. As book tours go, this one would be an absolute corker. It is not just that every European capital would be brought to a standstill, as book-signings turned into anti-war riots. The real trouble — from the Bush point of view — is that he might never see Texas again.One moment he might be holding forth to a great perspiring tent at Hay-on-Wye. The next moment, click, some embarrassed member of the Welsh constabulary could walk on stage, place some handcuffs on the former leader of the Free World, and take him away to be charged. Of course, we are told this scenario is unlikely. Dubya is the former leader of a friendly power, with whom this country is determined to have good relations. But that is what torture-authorising Augusto Pinochet thought. And unlike Pinochet, Mr Bush is making no bones about what he has done.Unless the 43rd president of the United States has been grievously misrepresented, he has admitted to authorising and sponsoring the use of torture. Asked whether he approved of “waterboarding” in three specific cases, he told his interviewer that “damn right” he did, and that this practice had saved lives in America and Britain. It is hard to overstate the enormity of this admission. “Waterboarding” is a disgusting practice by which the victim is deliberately made to think that he is drowning. It is not some cunning new psych-ops technique conceived by the CIA. It has been used in the dungeons of dictators for centuries. It is not compatible either with the US constitution or the UN convention against torture. It is deemed to be torture in this country, and above all there is no evidence whatever that it has ever succeeded in doing what Mr Bush claimed. It does not work.It does not produce much valuable information — and therefore it does not save lives. Of course we are all tempted, from time to time, by the utilitarian argument. We might become reluctant supporters of “extreme interrogation techniques” if we could really persuade ourselves that half an hour of waterboarding could really save a hundred lives — or indeed a single life. In reality, no such calculus is possible. When people are tortured, they will generally say anything to bring the agony to an end — which is why any such evidence is inadmissible in court.In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”. The lawyers in question were Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and his deputy, John Yoo, and after a good deal of political cattle-prodding from Rumsfeld et al, they produced a totally barmy attempt to redefine torture so as to allow waterboarding.Pain was only torture, they determined, when it was “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death”. If that is right, it would seem that most of the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition would be acceptable to the American government. You could beat the soles of someone’s feet; you could pour molten candle wax on their extremities; you could even pull their finger nails out without infringing those conditions.How is some tired and frightened American officer supposed to make head or tail of this sophistry, late at night in some bleak Iraqi jail? How is he supposed to calibrate the pain that comes from an organ failure or death? It is no wonder, with orders like that coming from the top, that the troopers misbehaved so tragically in Abu Ghraib. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding their suspects and putting hoods over their heads. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding them and terrifying them with alsatian dogs or attaching electrodes to their genitals. They failed to see any moral difference, that is, because there isn’t any moral difference.That is the real disaster of the waterboarding policy — that we are left with the impression that the entire US military are skidding their heels on the slippery slope towards barbarism. And that is emphatically not the case. Yesterday at the Cenotaph we remembered the sacrifice of men and women not just in two world wars, but also in Iraq and Afghanistan. The purpose of these conflicts is not so much to defeat “the enemy”, but to defend things we believe to be inalienable goods — freedom, democracy and, above all, the rule of law.I believe that, of all nations, America still best upholds and guarantees those things. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the waterboarding disaster, or the evils of Abu Ghraib, have set up some kind of moral equivalence between America and – say – the murderous Taliban regime, let alone Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. If you want to appreciate the difference, remember that the perpetrators of Abu Ghraib were court-martialled, and we know about US interrogation techniques because of rules on freedom of information. But if your end is the spread of freedom and the rule of law, you cannot hope to achieve that end by means that are patently vile and illegal.How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.
Judge orders CIA to Disclose Cold War Records on Human Experiments -experiments still hidden include the use of chemical, biological, and psychological weapons. The plaintiffs stories are detailed in the complaint and go from loss of memory , disorientation and a series of disturbig symptons related to the experiments with devastating consequences to their lives and families.
Plaintiffs: Vietnam Veterans of America and six individual plantiffs
Defendants: Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael V. Hayden, USAF, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; United States Department of Defense; Dr. Robert M.Gates, Secretary of Defense; Peter Geren, United States Secretary of the Army; United States of America; and Michael B. Mukasey, Attorney General of the United States.
As American torture Program goes unpunished and the CIA walks away with torture from waterboarding to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, illegal human experiments and whatever other atrocities they have been committing, British Courts go ahead and three of the interrogators have been “referred to the Director of Service Prosecutions, who has been asked to consider war crimes charges under the 2001 International Criminal Court Act.”.
UK Guardian released the clip below on November 5: 5 November 2010 - Guardian UK - by Ian Cobain and Richard Sprenger - guardian.co.uk The Guardian warns that the video “contains material that viewers may find disturbing.” "Secret British military video of interrogation techniques in Iraq" Watch Videotape: This clip was submitted during high court proceedings and shows a prisoner threatened, intimidated, subjected to sensory deprivation and complaining of starvation:
"As George W Bush defends the use of "waterboarding" for saving British lives, Channel 4's Job Rabkin looks at the former US president's defiance and regrets from his time in office. "
USA Air Force Research Lab’s “Human Effectiveness Directorate,” gets $49 million dollars to work on military ideas to mess with adversaries’ minds.
USA Air Force is looking to harness advances in bio-science so they can “degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive abilities.”
Air Force Col. Joseph Romano was sentenced to five years in prison for kidnapping. Two Italian agents, who were also convicted as accomplices, were given three-year prison terms. Former CIA station chief in Milan, Robert Seldon Lady, was given an eight-year term and Former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa and twenty-two other CIA officers were all sentenced in absentia to five years in prison.
During the Cold War, the CIA and the military experimented on unwitting human beings with dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of abusive and unlawful mind-control experiments.
More recently, the Pentagon’s National Research Council and Defense Intelligence Agency have been pushing for pharma-based tactics to weaken enemy forces.
In recent months, the Pentagon has funded several projects related to this and has been investing in projects aiming “remote control of brain activity using ultrasound.”
The Article published on WIRED - Danger Room:
Air Force Wants Neuroweapons to Overwhelm Enemy Minds
"Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing revamped a call for research proposals examining “Advances in Bioscience for Airmen Performance.” It’s a six-year, $49 million effort to deploy extreme neuroscience and biotechnology in the service of warfare....That’s right: the American Air Force wants a way to fry foes’ minds — or at least make ‘em a little dumber.
From 1947 - 1951, Vicent Price portrayed the radio incarnation of Leslie Charteris' character Simon Templar. At the conclusion of a radio broadcast of 'The Saint', episode "Author Of Murder", Price delivered the following message:
After the release of the War Logs, by Wikileaks, UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg shows the country's concerns and says on TV shows that this was such an issue of such serious concern that there should be an inquiry into it. On October 24, 2010, Nick Clegg called for an inquiry into allegations that Allied troops in Iraq turned a blind eye to torture and murder
October 25, 2010 After over a year of research, Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist Jeffrey Kaye, compiled a track record of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s Torture Program.
The compiled documents point to the fact that the Bush-era torture program gave continuation to work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved the complicity of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks.
In interview with a former Pentagon official, who worked closely with the USA Department of Defence’s ex-general counsel William Haynes, the official said that in 2002, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, apparently in recognition of legal problems regarding strategies to be used for extracting and evaluating information in the "War on Terror".
Wolfowitz issued directives to provided legal cover for a top-secret Special Access Program which experimented on ways to glean information from unwilling subjects and to achieve “deception detection.”
The full article and documents can be read at: October 14, 2010 by Truthout
It took professional interviewers with clean hands. There was no place for "enhanced interrogation" techniques, death threats, rape or whatsoever. Not even for the bit of "some torture" some still defend as "useful".
This is real life involving smart people in both sides. The results are shown in Court:
From The National Post Youtube channel, part of the video that was played during Williams' sentencing hearing in Belleville Oct. 20, 2010: Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzh3adTWZOg
“"What we know is that our northern border is where the terrorists came through. That's the most porous border that we have. We cannot allow terrorists, we cannot allow anyone to come across our border if we don't know why they're coming. So, we have to secure all of our borders and that's what that was about, is border security."
Comments by Sharron Angle , 2010 Republican nominee for the United States Senate seat in Nevada, on October 16, 2010
