Some say impeachment is the solution...

CALL FOR IMPEACHING
BUSH AND COMPANY

And Veterans For Peace Agree!

COUP D'ETAT:
The Real Reason Tenet and Pavitt Resigned from the CIA June 3rd and 4th

Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Loomingby Michael C. Rupper additional reporting by Wayne Madsen from Washington © Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com

Le Monde diplomatique- June 2004 'Torture in a good cause'

From: <Raulmax@aol.com>
To: <Politics_CurrentEvents_Group@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Tue Jun 15, 2004 10:37:04 AM PDT
Subject: [Politics_CurrentEvents_Group] 'Torture in a good cause'

by Ignacio Ramonet

"The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the US and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all actsof torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment"

President George Bush, Washington Post, 27 June 2003

THE trap of colonial war is closing on the invading forces in Iraq. Like French troops bogged down in an earlier era in Algeria, the British in Kenya, the Belgians in the Congo, the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau and the Israelis today in Gaza, US armed forces are now realising that crushing military superiority is not enough to save them from hostage-taking, ambushes and other deadly assaults. For soldiers on the ground the occupation of Iraq is fast becoming a descent into hell.

The characteristics of colonial war are usually arrogance on the part of the occupiers, who believe that they belong to a superior race (more civilised, more advanced), are contemptuous of the colon-ised and sometimes refuse to admit that the colonised are even human (1).

This colonial sense of superiority all too easily leads occupying forces, in the name of some higher sacred mission - defending good against evil, protecting civilisation, defending democracy - into disproportionate use of force. In Falluja in April, for example, US forces were intent on punishing those who had mutilated the bodies of four security guards killed in an attack. The forces bombarded civilian residential areas and killed 600 people, including many children.

In this context the US broadcast network CBS decided to break the media silence. In its programme, 60 Minutes II, on 28 April, it showed the first photographs of the savage treatment of Iraqi prisoners by US jailers in Abu Ghraib. These trophy images shocked the world. The report was proof that torture was happening in Iraq. The programme was ready at the start of April, but Pentagon pressure delayed its broadcast for three weeks. The chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, personally contacted anchorman Dan Rather and asked him to postpone the programme, arguing that it would endanger the lives of the troops in the "battle of Falluja".

There was official pressure to get the broadcast cancelled. Only when CBS heard that the journalist Seymour Hersh (2), working for the New Yorker magazine, was planning to publish fresh photographs alongside extracts from a damning report prepared by General Antonio Taguba (3) did the network decide to go ahead.

Initially the media had complied with US government instructions that banned pictures of dead US soldiers in Iraq (4) and the media had also censored such pictures on the basis that they were "not very patriotic". Fox News host Bill O'Reilly said: "By using those graphic images of the torture, CBS has given the enemies of America a powerful weapon. And that's disturbing."

President Bush went on air to announce that he was shocked. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, stepped forward to deny all prior know ledge of these practices. Both blamed the excesses on a few black sheep. They were lying. Just as they had lied about the weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's supposed relations with Osama bin Laden.

The brutality against Iraqi prisoners was public knowledge. Besides Taguba's report, both the International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty International had reported on systematic brutality in accounts that had been circulating for months. As early as December 2002 the Washington Post (5) had revealed that prisoners accused of belonging to al-Qaida had been held in inhuman conditions by the US at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and had been tortured. Some had died as a result of their maltreatment.

Other prisoners had been sent to secret prisons on the island of Diego Garcia or to friendly countries - Egypt and Jordan - known for torture. Around 600 prisoners, whose identities are still unknown, were sent to Guantanamo Bay, where Red Cross inspectors are still denied access; Guantanamo tested the techniques subsequently extended to occupied Iraq. An officer in charge of the prisoners said: "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job." In a discussion of the treatment of prisoners J Cofer Black, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said succinctly: "There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves come off." This climate of legitim acy and impunity opened the way to general brutality against Iraqi prisoners. "Torturing in a good cause" is now seen as a grim exploit that merits souvenir photos. If only to remind those involved that colonial wars are always immoral.

________________________________________________________

(1) Donald Rumsfeld did recently admit that Iraqis "are human beings".

(2) Seymour Hersh is a veteran journalist who, in November 1969, reported the My Lai massacre in Vietnam of 16 March 1968; during a search and destroy operation conducted by Charlie Company of the US 11th Brigade under the command of Lieutenant Calley and Captain Medina, 300 civilians, women, children and old people were killed.

(3) www.agonist.org/annex/taguba.htm.

(4) The taboo was broken on 18 April by Tami Silicio, an employee of the Maytag Aircraft Corporation (subsequently sacked), who provided the Seattle Times with photographs of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq that had been brought home in cargo planes.

(5) Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, "US Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations", Washington Post, 26 December 2002.

Translated by Ed Emery

Clearly, we have a problem!

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It would be interesting to see if evidence shows the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq was created by the Saudi and Bush families? Or just used to effect the war on our rights and civil liberties and to take enormous profits from the US Treasury and working class for Military Economy and $40 barrel for Oil? Will leaking of CIA names and the mass deception of the American people, Congress, Senate and The International community will lead to Bush himself and his entire administration, staff and family.

Friday 25 June 2004
MP Captain Tells of Efforts to Hide Details of Detainee's Death
By Jackie Spinner Washington Post

Wednesday 23 June 2004
U.S. Drops Effort to Gain Immunity for Its Troops
By Warren Hoge New York Times

Lets hear from the fron,t a US Marine trained to kill civilians! (Audio)

U.N. Rights Chief Says Prison Abuse May Be War Crime
By WARREN HOGE
Published: June 5, 2004

The personal responsibilities each American holds themselves to will be the deciding factor for inditing, holding trials, and convictions or letting them get away with it, or worse, for being reelected and to continue their high crimes.

May 19, 2004
The White House's top lawyer warnings on War Crimes (text)
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent Newsweek

Could Bush administration officials be prosecuted for 'war crimes' as a result of new measures used in the war on terror? The White House's top lawyer thought so Suspected Taliban and al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base kneel down before military police as prisoners are processed into the detention facility in January 2002

Uranium Munitions use Exposed

The use of Depleated Uranium Weapons will be the crime that the world will pay for over the next 4.5 million years! (Check it Out!) (Flash File)

(Warning) the truth is told in very graphic terms, that could make you sick! But it won't effect you long term, unless you have a soul. It won't effect your ability to reproduce a healthy prodigy or live a long and healthy life, unlike these people and the generations after of those civilian Iraqi, International aid workers who will go to help them, and the American and coalition troops who were on the ground. Just not the people who actually ordered the use of these weapons!

How long have we been in control of Iraq, and should we have ever tried? (Flash File)
(Warning) the truth may make you think about what and who you are supporting!

Paper trail (Flash File)

Bush miliatry TOP GUN? (Flash File)

Thursday May 13, 2004 11:46 PM
By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. government threw moral qualms to the wind in employing ex-Nazis after World War II, contend historians who examined a mountain of declassified papers released Thursday.

The government ``dishonored the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and American soldiers who died,'' said Elizabeth Holtzman, member of a government-appointed group studying millions of pages of files from that era.

Reinhard Gehlen, for example, was recruited by the CIA after World War II because he was chief of army intelligence for the Nazis on the Eastern Front, where most of the mass killings of Jews occurred. Gehlen was undoubtedly involved in the brutal interrogation of Russian prisoners of war, Holtzman said.

Gehlen was brought to America and then sent back to Germany to set up a major spy network for the United States. First, he worked for the CIA; later his operation became the West German intelligence service and he was thought to have employed Nazi war criminals.

He is just one example of how the FBI and other U.S. agencies ignored the murky pasts of alleged Nazi collaborators, many living in the United States, because the government saw them as useful during the Cold War, according to the records released at the National Archives.

Four historians who collaborated on a book, ``U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis,'' based on the new records, said a good deal of information about the Holocaust was available early to officials of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor.

The book, also released Thursday, cites papers describing the systematic killing of European Jews months before the Allies - in a December 1942 statement saying Nazi Germany was carrying out a policy of mass extermination - acknowledged knowing about it.

In the summer of 1942, Joseph Goldschmied, a Czech banker who fled to the United States, gave U.S. officials a 26-page account of the German occupation, describing a shift in strategy from forced emigration of Czech Jews to their annihilation.

The historians also found detailed accounts from an unknown source, writing from Lisbon in a series of letters starting in June 1942, asserting Germany was no longer merely persecuting European Jews - ``It is systematically exterminating them.''

The letters appear to have been sent to Allen Dulles, then a U.S. intelligence officer stationed in New York, before his transfer to Switzerland in November 1942. Dulles later became CIA director.

Such material adds to evidence that some U.S. officials had heard reports about elements of the Holocaust. But the historians say their findings do not contradict long-existing accounts by U.S. officials that they did not know the scope of the killings at the time.

Historians discussed how alleged Nazi war criminals used their knowledge of the Soviets and Eastern Europe to play up their value to Allied officials after the war.

Historian Norman J.W. Goda said the FBI ``did not dig deep for the truth'' on such people because it wanted them on America's side in the Cold War with the communist Soviet Union.

The government saw Nazi sympathizers as useful in countering any pro-Communist leanings in immigrant communities in the United States, and the CIA and other agencies sometimes thwarted immigration authorities from beginning deportation proceedings, the records show.

The records also describe the case of Otto von Bolshwing, a former SS officer hired by the CIA in 1949. Bolshwing had worked with Adolf Eichmann before the war in planning the expropriation of Jewish property in Austria and later served as SS consultant to the forces that staged the bloody pogrom in Bucharest, Romania, in 1941.

The documents also show Theodor Saevecke served as a CIA agent in Berlin in the late 1940s, despite evidence he had executed members of the Italian resistance during the war.

``In U.S. intelligence, there was no prohibition of hiring anyone in the Gestapo and SS,'' said historian Timothy Naftali. ``This was a 'don't ask, don't tell' culture.''

The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group released the book by its independent historians.

The group has overseen the declassification and release of roughly 8 million pages of U.S. government records related to war criminals and crimes committed by the Nazi and Japanese Imperial Government during World War II.
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On the Net:
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group: http://www.archives.gov/iwg/