The War You Don't See - Full Documentary

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.

Thanksgiving

Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?

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. "

Arundhati Roy

Wikileaks Iraq War Diary Press Conference - October 23, 2010 - London

Wikileaks Iraq Files List Torture Electrocution and Executions of Detainees and children

On Friday, 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history. Iraq War Documents reveal Torture, Civilian Deaths

WikiLeaks’ War Logs page includes a search engine that makes it easy to browse and search through the documents.

To search the documents visit:
http://warlogs.wikileaks.org/

More at:
The Guardian UK - Sunday 24 October 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/24/iraq-war-logs-us-iraqi-torture

WIRED - October 22, 2010
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/wikileaks-press/#ixzz13LKfVLnZ

"The United States of America Has Gone Mad."

by British novelist John le Carré - 2003

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost—because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people—in Iraqi lives?

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall—just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist. [...]

What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us—to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s part in all of this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t get out.

It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. [...]

I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’t explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.

"But will we win, Daddy?"

"Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed."

"Why?"
"Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him."

"But will people be killed, Daddy?"

"Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."

"Can I watch it on television?"

"Only if Mr Bush says you can."

"And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?"

"Hush child, and go to sleep."

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

Democracy Now! - Broadcast September 20, 2010

Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism by Sherene H. Razack

Sherene H. Razack is also the author of :

Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslins from Western Law and Politics
2008 - Sherene Razack - ISBN 978-0802094971
Sherene H. Razack looks at how "race thinking" supports the idea that the suspension of rights for racialized groups is warranted in the interests of national security. She points out to "race thinking" as being a structure of thought that divides up the world between the deserving and undeserving according to racial descent.

'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
George Santayana , 1905 - Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284

The "Somalia Affair" (1993) Revisited

The Somalia Affair was a 1993 military scandal that was later dubbed "Canada's national shame".

Shidane Abukar Arone was a Somali teenager who was tortured and beaten to death by Canadian soldiers in the Canadian Base in Somalia, on 17 March 1993.

Arone was caught on March 16 attempting to steal supplies from the Canadian base. Two members of the Canadian Military Base, Master Corporal Clayton Matchee and Private Kyle Brown, bound Arone and tortured him over the next several hours. Ultimately, he died of his injuries.

While the military initially claimed Matchee and Brown had acted alone, it was later revealed that sixteen others had visited the tent while Arone was captive, including superior officers.

At first DND officials told the media that Arone had likely died from natural causes. It took several weeks for the Canadian people to become aware of the actual events in Somalia.

An inquiry officially known as The Somalia Commission of Inquiry began in 1994 after public outcry.

The military disengagement from accountability and evasion strategies permeated the inquiry where Air Force General Jean Boyle blamed his subordinates for wrong doing.

It ran until 1997 when it was cut short by the government in the months before the 1997 election.The inquiry was never able to examine top level governmental decision-making, nor did it actually examine the alleged events in Somalia.

"Conspicuously absent from the report is anything on the most sensitive aspect of the Somalia affair — the torture and murder of Shidane Arone."
[Somalia debacle a high-level cover-up - The CBC Digital Archives Website- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - [Page consulted on May 23, 2009.] -
WATCH HERE

See Rex Murphy's piece: The Somalia affair-
"Macho thuggery," scapegoating, blockading requests for information, and evasive testimony taint the noble pursuit of peacekeeping."

The CBC Digital Archives - WATCH HERE
[Page consulted on May 23, 2009.]


"We promised them peacekeepers,and in some cases, we sent them thugs."

Reference: "Bloody and contemptuous images"- The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Digital Archives Website.

[Page consulted on May 23, 2009.]

WATCH HERE

The Somalia Inquiry heard from witness who testified that the lack of accountability sent the wrong message to the troops and that military police were deliberately stalled from investigating a shooting by Canadian soldiers of unarmed Somalins in the back, killing one Somalian and wounding another that took place just 12 days before the torture and murder of Shidane Arone.

"Somalia investigation hit 'inexplicable delay'" - Broadcast Date: March 10, 1997

The CBC Digital Archives- WATCH HERE - [Page consulted on May 23, 2009.]


References:
The Killing Of a Somali Jars Canada - The New York Times - Feb 11, 2006 - by CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH
[Page consulted on May 23, 2009.]
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/11/world/the-killing-of-a-somali-jars-canada.html

Final Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia- [Page consulted on May 23, 2009.]
http://www.dnd.ca/somalia/somaliae.htm

CBC Archives - The Somalia Affair - http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/peacekeeping/topics/723/
[Page consulted on May 23, 2009.]

Somalia Cover-Up; A Commissioner's Journal 1997 by Peter Desbarats - Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (November 15, 1997)- ISBN-10: 0771026846

Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers said he fears for the safety of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks

See transcript:" Daniel Ellsberg Says He Fears US Might Assassinate Wikileaks Founder" at:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

British military intelligence ran a secret torture unit in Iraq

The Baha Mousa inquiry - UK - Update March 16, 2010

Baha Mousa was a 26-year-old Iraq civilian who worked as hotel receptionist. He was arrested along with six other men and taken to a British base where he was killed by British soldiers who repeatedly beat him on the neck, chest and genital areas.
(HERE - BBC News - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3931023.stm - retrieved March 23, 2010)

The Baha Mousa Inquiry in UK, has brought to light the information that Attorney General "blocked" system to stop prisoner abuse and that British military intelligence ran a secret torture unit in Iraq, with prisoners deprived of sleep and kept hooded for long periods in intense heat, according to fresh evidence."
ARTICLES HERE:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/16/iraqi-prisoner-abuse

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/818475-renegade-torture-unit-in-iraq-run-by-british-intelligence-officers

GUERNICA - Testing ground for the military tactic of blanket-bombing of a civilian population to demoralize the enemy (1937)

Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso. This painting can be seen in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain.

"Guernica" shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians.

Guernica became a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war.

Some elements of the painting:
- a wide-eyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms
- Daggers that suggest screaming replace the tongues of the bull, grieving woman, and horse.
- a horse falling in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin
- A human skull overlays the horse's body.
- A bull appears to gore the horse from underneath
- On the far right, a figure with arms raised in terror is entrapped by fire from above and below.


On 26 April 1937, for over three hours, twenty-five or more of Nazi Germany's best-equipped bombers, accompanied by at least twenty more Messerschmitt and Fiat Fighters, dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the village of Guernica, in Spain, slowly and systematically pounding it to rubble. Those trying to escape were cut down by the strafing machine guns of fighter planes.

The warplanes of the German Condor Legion, commanded by Hitler's Air Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, were using the war as an opportunity to test out new weapons and tactics.

Guernica had no strategic value as a military target, although Air Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, claimed publicly that the target was a bridge over the Mundaca River on the edge of town, chosen in order to cut off the fleeing Republican troops. But although the Condor Legion was made up of the best airmen and planes of Hitler's developing war machine, not a single hit was scored on the presumed target, nor on the railway station, nor on the small-arms factory nearby.

Some time later, a secret report to Berlin was uncovered in which Von Richthofen stated, "...the concentrated attack on Guernica was the greatest success,"

The report made it clear that the all-out air attack had been ordered on behalf of Spain's military general, dictator and head of state Francisco Franco, to break the spirited Nationalist forces.

Guernica had served as the testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic - blanket-bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy. It was wanton, man-made holocaust.

On May 12, 1999, the New York Times reported that, after sixty-one years, in a declaration adopted on April 24, 1999, the German Parliament formally apologized to the citizens of Guernica for the role the Condor Legion played in bombing the town. The German government also agreed to change the names of some German military barracks named after members of the Condor Legion. By contrast, no formal apology to the city has ever been offered by the Spanish government for whatever role it may have played in the bombing.