I haven't gone anywhere, but I did get these shots:


Villagers looked at the remains of a house belonging to supporters of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan. Reports of Mehsud’s death were unconfirmed. (Ishtiaq Mehsud/Associated Press)


Children took refuge yesterday in a police office after clashes between security forces and Islamist radicals in Maiduguri. Fighting in the northern Nigerian city raged for a second day. (Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images)


Somali women who have been forced from their homes by violence in Mogadishu protested the lack of water near a camp for internally displaced people. (Mohamed Dahir/ AFP/ Getty Images)


Only craters and rubble remain of the Khazna village near Mosul after truck bombs exploded yesterday as residents slept. (Khalid Al-Mousuly/ Reuters)


Followers of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, seen on a poster at center, attended prayers in Baghdad yesterday. (KARIM KADIM/ASSOCIATED PRESS)


This undated photo showed Lynndie England holding a leash connected to a naked detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (Washington Post/ File)


Josh Habib (far left), a 53-year-old translator, along with two Marines, spoke to Afghan villagers. He has hiked in extreme heat, and said this is not the job he signed up for. (David Guttenfelder/Associated Press)


An egg seller in Kabul stood by a campaign billboard yesterday for President Hamid Karzai. A recent poll financed by the US government indicated that the race was tightening. (Paula Bronstein/ Getty Images)



A U.S. soldier reacts after a suicide car bomb explosion which occurred near the main gate of NATO's headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday Aug. 15, 2009. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das7 die, 91 wounded in blast near NATO HQ in Kabul)



--Gaza children shatter world record--"


Bai Yun (right) is pregnant again. The 17-year-old panda has given birth to four cubs since arriving at the San Diego Zoo. (Associated Press/ File 2007)

Not supposed to show 'em with the blindfolds on, MSM! It's a violation of the Geneva Conventions.


Iraqi police stand guard over two men who are alleged to have links to an attack on a U.S. military base that killed three soldiers in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, July 18, 2009. (AP Photo/ Nabil Juran)"

--The next tropical paradise--"

Speciesism is offensive.

You've seen the photos from Abu Ghraib and other places, right (take a look at the second item down from here, folks)?

\
Employees of the Norwegian Polar Institute captured a southern elephant seal on Bouvet Island, in the South Atlantic Ocean, as they prepared to attach a data-collecting device. (Associated Press via Norwegian Polar Institute)

Why would the seal feel any different about a shock to its system (note the seal on the right barking; he knows something isn't right)? 

All so some lying, agenda-pushing do-gooders can rig him up with some sort of GPS spy tracker? 

But they don't want to set up a global grid and chip every human, animal, and plant or anything; this is all for your own protection.

Just like ALL the UNENDING LIES and WARS are FOR YOUR OWN GOOD and PROTECTION!!!!

And the GLOBAL-WARMING FRAUD?

PLEASE!!!!

"Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009...are censored

 

 

Once again Project Censored gives us an overview of some stories that the mainstream media doesn't cover with any depth, if at all.

Also once again, conspicuous by it's absence, is any mention of Israel, the siege of Gaza and the Israeli zionist regime's continuing efforts to get the U.S. to fight its wars. 

I wonder why this is? Rarely is there even a 10 second mention on the news channels of the plight of those in the Gaza Strip concentration camp. There are numerous websites and blogs that give extensive coverage of the situation but it doesn't even make the top 25 for Project Censored. If this is not a censored story, what is?

Is Israel off limits to the folks at Project Censored? Who funds them and who decides the agenda?

9/11 censored gets a Japanese story but what about the myriad of American investigators and theorists who will continue attempting to expose the crimes of that day until the truth is known or until the day that they die? This has been a censored story since day one, especially concerning 9/11 being a false flag attack. If this is not a number 1 or 2 story every year, what is?

Naturally the private Federal Reserve gets no mention. After nearly 100 years of censorship about who owns them, no accountability to the public and how every move they make is for their and their allies benefit, why start now?

Congress being bought and sold to the money interests and not listening to their voting constituents is also left out. Maybe they know this is not a secret to most people and no need to list it as censored.

War crimes and criminal prosecution of the Bush administration? There's a lot talk of this but not in the media. Obama has said he won't do it so I guess there's no use in even mentioning it.

Lies of wars, the fraud of the 'War on Terror,' the continual fear mongering by the media?

How about the false left/right paradigm? The media censors any mention of lack of difference between the two major parties, especially concerning Israel and the never ending wars....

--MORE--"

"Somalia: Another CIA-Backed Coup Blows Up

by Mike Whitney

"The Ethiopian invasion, which was sanctioned by the US government, has destroyed virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the population has built for the last fifteen years." Abdi Samatar, professor of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, Democracy Now

December 02, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" --- Up until a month ago, no one in the Bush administration showed the least bit of interest in the incidents of piracy off the coast of Somalia. Now that's all changed and there's talk of sending in the Navy to patrol the waters off the Horn of Africa and clean up the pirates hideouts. Why the sudden about-face? Could it have something to do with the fact that the Ethiopian army is planning to withdrawal all of its troops from Mogadishu by the end of the year, thus, ending the failed two year US-backed occupation of Somalia?

The United States has lost the ground war in Somalia, but that doesn't mean its geopolitical objectives have changed one iota. The US intends to stay in the region for years to come and use its naval power to control the critical shipping lanes from the Gulf of Aden. The growing strength of the Somali national resistance is a set-back, but it doesn't change the basic game-plan. The pirates are actually a blessing in disguise. They provide an excuse for the administration to beef up it's military presence and put down roots. Every crisis is an opportunity.

There's an interesting subtext to the pirate story that hasn't appeared in the western media. According to Simon Assaf of the Socialist Worker:

--MORE--"

"Torturing Democracy: A Documentary That Could Put Dick Cheney Out Of Our Misery

 

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Torturing Democracy, an expose of how and why America came to be involved in open large-scale torture of prisoners (many of whom were simply shepherds captured by mountain tribesmen and sold into captivity), is now available for viewing online.

As Scott Horton reported last month, PBS can't find a time slot for this Frontline documentary until January 21, 2009 -- the day after Bush and Cheney are scheduled to leave office.

Horton has reported more recently that this documentary could help to provide "A Ticket to The Hague for Dick Cheney". Why? Because it has the power to change the minds of influential people in denial.

Horton explains:

Gene Burns is one of the nation’s most popular talk radio hosts. For years he has dismissed accounts of torture; America, he has said, does not torture. But last night, after watching Torturing Democracy and realizing that he had not understood how important and serious an issue torture had become, Burns abruptly changed his tune. Here’s a transcript of his remarks.

I now believe that some international human rights organization ought to open an investigation of the Bush Administration, I think focused on Vice President Dick Cheney, and attempt to bring charges against Cheney in the international court of justice at The Hague, for war crimes. Based on the manner in which we have treated prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and the manner in which we have engaged in illegal rendition–that is, surreptitiously kidnapping prisoners and flying them to foreign countries where they could be tortured by foreign agents who do not follow the same civilized standards to which we subscribe.

I’ve always said that I’ve thought that even at Guantánamo Bay the United States was careful to stay on this side of torture. In fact, you may recall that on a couple of occasions we got into a spirited debate on this program about waterboarding, and whether waterboarding was torture. And I took the position that it was not torture, that it was simulated drowning, and that if that produced information which preserved our national security, I thought it was permissible.

And then I saw Torturing Democracy.

And I’m afraid, now that I have seen what I have seen, that I was wrong about that. It looks to me, based on this documentary, as if in fact we have engaged in behavior and practices at Guantánamo Bay, and in these illegal renditions, that are violations of the international human rights code.

And I believe that Dick Cheney is responsible. I believe that he was the agent of the United States government charged with developing the methodology used at Guantánamo Bay, supervising it for the administration, and indulging in practices which are in fact violations of human rights.

A large part of the population still credits the Bush Administration’s absurd claim that it never embraced or applied torture to detainees as a matter of policy. Two recent documentaries, Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side (for which I was both a consultant and interviewee) and Sherry Jones’s PBS feature Torturing Democracy investigate the administration’s policies and conduct. Both draw from decision-makers inside the administration and soldiers on the frontline.

The administration did its best to spike both films. Taxi was to be aired on the Discovery Channel, but with Discovery Communications then in the process of going public and facing sensitive SEC clearances, executives apparently decided not to risk provoking the anger of the White House. As I reported elsewhere, PBS also found that it had no network space for Torturing Democracy until January 20, 2009 — the day the Bush Administration decamps from Washington.

Why was the administration so concerned about these two films? The conversion of Gene Burns supplies the answer. No one who sits through these films, I believe, will be able afterwards to accept the official version of events. George Bush has good reason to be afraid of too many Americans watching these documentaries.

George Bush is not the only one who has good reason to be afraid of too many Americans watching these documentaries. And that, in my opinion, is good incentive to watch them -- and to spread the word about them!

So here are those links again:
Torturing Democracy
Taxi to the Dark Side

--MORE--"

(Blog author's note: I have seen Taxi to the Dark Side and believe it is EVERY AMERICANS DUTY to see it.  I also look forward(?) with disgust at seeing this latest report.  Then I will ask -- along with others -- when do the WAR CRIMES TRIBUNALS START?)

For more on the abominable atrocity of U.S. torture, go HERE and scroll down.

"Possible legislation ranges from indefinite detention or a new national security court... "

HOW MANY campaign promises does this guy have to go back on for the American people to see that he is simply ONE MORE GLOBALIST FRONT MAN -- with a different color skin (that is how the MSM and globalist rulers intend to claim his popular appeal at the same time they stifle any dissent against their plans).

"Guantanamo's closure would not settle fate of detainees" by Julian E. Barnes and David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times | November 25, 2008

WASHINGTON - ....

Obama advisers predict that his administration might have to decide whether to ask Congress to pass legislation allowing a number of detainees to be held indefinitely, without trial....

The debate suggests that the decision to close Guantanamo might be the easy part for Obama. Much harder will be sorting out the legal complexities of holding, prosecuting, transferring, or releasing the roughly 250 prisoners at the prison....

Why should they be held AT ALL? 9/11 was an INSIDE JOB by the CIA and MOSSAD, and the WHOLE WORLD KNOWS IT!!!!

So ALL THESE GUYS are either INNOCENT or OUR "Al-CIA-Duh" agents!!!! STOP IT with the SHIT FOOLEYS, 'bamer!!!!!

Not all can be returned to home countries, even if they are no longer considered a possible danger. The process of sending them home is slow, and some fear they would be tortured or killed upon their return....

Like they WEREN'T BEING TORTURED at GITMO??

WE have to IMPRISON THEM INDEFINITELY so they WONT BE TORTURED after we have ALREADY TORTURED THEM?

Good God, what the hell kind of logic is that?!!!!

The pressure for new legislation could be increased if officials find a larger number of prisoners who can neither stand trial nor go home. Possible legislation ranges from indefinite detention or a new national security court to a simpler law blocking detainees from seeking asylum. --more--"

The GREAT, DEAR LEADERS ain't closing nuthin', AmeriKa!!!!!!

Related: Torturing Democracy: A Documentary That Could Put Dick Cheney Out Of Our Misery

Guess which one takes up the main body of the Zionist-controlled MSM's work?

"China maintains hold on Tibet; Show of force aims to deter unrest" by Charles Hutzler, Associated Press | November 25, 2008

XIAHE, China - .... In a separate development, China rejected the findings of a United Nations committee that torture is "routine and widespread" in the Asian nation, calling the report biased. A report issued last week by the UN Committee Against Torture concluded that Chinese police frequently use torture to extract confessions.... --more--"

And as that august body of globalist mass-murderers (rightly) criticizes the Chinese government: US fights release of Chinese Muslims

Of course, the U.S. TORTURES THEM for the Chines so we are looking at MSM s*** fooleys, folks! All part of the BIG GAME of OBFUSCATION and LIES!!!!

"Yeah, right. Tibet. Human rights. Sure. Whatever." -- Mike Rivero of What Really Happened

How come this accounting isn't in my MSM article pick-up in the post below, readers?

At this point, do you need any more evidence that my comments on AmeriKa's MSM are true, readers?!

This is what I do EVERY DAY so I KNOW they are LYING or HIDING things!!!!

Which is why YOU and I are HERE, isn't it?

"Report: U.S. Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators"

"by JUSTIN ROOD

May 20, 2008—

"U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

"Why are we doing China's dirty work?" Manning said. "Surely we're better than that."

Ummm, actually no. Not on torture, and not on natural disasters, either!

You PROUD NOW, shit-eating 'murkns?

An official authorized to speak on behalf of the Defense Department but who declined to be named confirmed it was Pentagon policy to allow officials from other countries to have access to interview their nationals at Guantanamo but declined to discuss the specifics alleged in the report.

According to Fine's report, the FBI agent said the Uighur detainee told him that the night before his interrogation by Chinese officials, "he was awakened at 15-minute intervals the entire night and into the next day." The detainee also allegedly said he was "exposed to low room temperatures for long periods of time and was deprived of at least one meal."

"The agent stated that he understood that the treatment of the Uighur detainees was either carried out by the Chinese interrogators or was carried out by U.S. personnel at the behest of Chinese interrogators," the report by the Department of Justice inspector general stated.

We render prisoners to Syria and Egypt to be tortured -- and China renders theirs to us, huh?

U.S. forces captured roughly three dozen Uighurs in eastern Afghanistan shortly after invading the country in October 2001. The men said they were working there to earn money for families back home and to evade the Chinese government, which is known for taking a harsh and uncompromising line with separatist Uighurs.

So AmeriKa is WORSE than China, aren't we?

The U.S. State Department has found China to have suppressed the religious freedom of Uighurs, who are Muslim, and has accused the Chinese government of persecuting, even executing, those who advocate Uighur independence.

Oooooh, they are MUSLIM!! That EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!

You know, I never want to hear the "china is an enemy" crap then, huh?

In 2006, after the United States released five Uighurs from Guantanamo, China asked for them to be repatriated so they could be prosecuted as terrorists. The United States declined to do so, out of concern they would not be treated humanely.

Yeah, we give out fun rides like waterboarding and stuff like that!!!

Instead they transferred the men to Albania, which was the only country out of 90 approached by the U.S. government who would take them.

The Pentagon says it is trying to release and resettle the majority of the 17 Uighurs who remain in Guantanamo, although it says it still considers them enemy combatants and a threat."

Pffffft!!

I'm SICK of the fucking "TERRORIST" LIE, readers, I REALLY AM!!!!

Ah, the SWEET SMELL of BUSH'S FREEDOM and LIBERATION!!

"Iraq security pact poses detainee dilemma for US" by Ryan Lucas, Associated Press | November 24, 2008

CAMP CROPPER, Iraq - The US military is rushing to build criminal cases against some 5,000 detainees it deems dangerous.... because the proposed security pact with Iraq would end its right to hold prisoners without charge.... If passed, the deal would mean US troops could no longer hold people without charge as they have since the 2003 invasion....

The Americans have evidence against only "a few hundred" of the most dangerous detainees, Quantock said, leaving open the possibility that thousands could find themselves back on Iraq's streets soon....

Where they SHOULD HAVE BEEN from the beginning!

The transition comes amid a marked improvement in security that has boosted the confidence of Iraq's government and allowed security-based detention to give way to a civilian justice system. It would also mark a major step toward shutting down a detention system that was tainted by the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where US guards abused detainees.

As if Abu Ghraib was the ONLY INCIDENT and PLACE of TORTURE!

US forces are holding around 16,500 detainees in all. The largest facility, with some 12,900 prisoners, is at Camp Bucca near the city of Basra. --more--

The artcile goes on to say we are bringing "civilian justice" and our court system to enlighten the Iraqis! How sickening!

For more on the abominable atrocity of U.S. torture, go HERE

"Counting down; '24' sets up new season with a TV movie, but is series out of time?" by Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff | November 22, 2008

.... The story line has Jack Bauer trying to rescue 14 black kids from rebels in Sangala. The implication is that gung-ho Jack has undergone a change, that he's a more reserved, chastened hero for a post-post-9/11 world in which President Bush's outgoing approval rating is remarkably low. He's, like, Maria Von Trapp in the rain forest. Still hoarse, mind you, but a hoarse humanitarian.

With the Barack Obama presidency approaching, and the national mood in flux, the "24" writers are clearly trying to respond by making Jack Bauer into something of a Brack Bauer - not as hot-headed, willing to listen to his foes, a de-escalator. The show needs a boost, both creatively and in the ratings, and so Jack has supposedly mellowed....

****************

Since its 2001 premiere, "24" has been a remarkably timely TV vehicle - a kind of cultural biofeedback machine. The show arrived coincidentally right after 9/11, and Jack happened to personify an any-means-to-an-end-of-terrorism spirit.

Coincidence, huh?

The writers intuited the national mood well enough to give us a black president, David Palmer, years before that became a reality.

That makes you wonder, too, doesn't it? Just "coincidentally" had the foresight to see a black president when none of us did, huh? So what about that NUKE BOMB that blew up a U.S. city on the show? Didn't that happen (I wouldn't know; I have never watched it, and never will)?

And they provided vivid examples of torture, both by and of Jack, just in time for Abu Ghraib and the national waterboarding debate. "24" has been an amazing artifact of America's post-millennial fear of the Other....

I'm sorry, readers, but this stuff is sickening to me! The agenda-pushing propaganda is hurtful to the soul!

Once again, then, the sky will be falling on "24," and Jack will need to exert force at any cost. Will viewers be willing to buy into the Chicken Little game one more time?

Short answer: NO!!!!

When does a rogue hero become a tired joke?

Oh, you mean, LIKE BUSH? And NO ONE is LAUGHING!!!!!

--more--"

It is what I and others have been hollering about for a LONG TIME!!!

RELEASE all those innocents and CLOSE DOWN that HELL HOLE!!!

"Judge orders 5 Guantanamo inmates released; Says they were unlawfully held nearly 7 years" by William Glaberson, New York Times | November 21, 2008

NEW YORK - In the first hearing on the government's justification for holding detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled yesterday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release....

How are you going to pay them back for the TIME LOST that they can NEVER GET BACK?

Stephen Oleskey, a partner with the Boston-based law firm WilmerHale.... the law firm represented the six men pro bono: "The six men hardly fit the profile of dangerous terrorists or 'enemy combatants.' They have wives and children, most worked for charities in Bosnia, thousands of miles from the battlefield of Afghanistan, and not one had directly participated in any hostilitites against the United States." --more --"

Translation: Another GOVERNMENT FRAME UP COLLAPSES!!!!

I don't know; you decide:

"Attorney general collapses giving speech; he's alert in hospital

(CNN) -- U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed while giving a speech Thursday at the Federalist Society dinner at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington....

Mukasey, 67, was giving a spirited defense of the Bush administration's legal policies when his speech began to slur and he lost track of his thoughts about 30 minutes into his talk. Seconds later, he became rigid and then began to slump.... During his speech, he praised the administration for "nothing less than a fundamental reorganization of our government" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and blasted the "relentless critics of the very policies that have kept us safe....

--MORE--"

Coincidence?

Look, maybe the government and MSM can lie about 9/11; however, God is omnipotent so HE KNOWS!!!

And it really, really, bothers me -- especially in this case.

Related: U.S. Torture Destroys Minds

"Prosecutor: No sign Pakistani suspect was abducted, tortured" by Larry Neumeister, Associated Press | November 20, 2008

NEW YORK - The US government has not found a "shred of evidence" that a Pakistani woman accused of trying to kill a US soldier and FBI agents was abducted or tortured in the five years before her arrest, a prosecutor said yesterday.

Assistant US Attorney David Raskin said US agencies had searched for evidence to support reports that Aafia Siddiqui was detained in 2003 and held for years, but found none.

Then they were not looking very hard!! And even if they were, do you think this lying, law-breaking, war-criminal government would admit it?

He said it was more likely that Siddiqui disappeared in 2003 because she went into hiding after marrying an Al Qaeda operative who helped facilitate the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and because she knew 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

"A more plausible inference is that she went into hiding because people around her started to get arrested and at least two of those people ended up at Guantanamo Bay," Raskin said. Raskin said the United States responded to repeated allegations in published reports and found "zero evidence that Ms. Siddiqui was abducted, kidnapped, tortured, anything we hear repeatedly."

Really?

"In recent weeks, Pakistani newspapers reported that a lawyer, Javed Iqbal Jaffery, had petitioned a Pakistani court for Siddiqui's release and vowed to bring her detention to the UN human rights commissioner. According to the reports, Jaffrey alleged that Siddiqui was jailed in Kabul after being held in Bagram; a British journalist reached a similar conclusion based on interviews with prisoners released from Bagram"

He added: "I have found not a shred of evidence those allegations are true." Raskin spoke at a hearing yesterday to discuss a psychologist's conclusion that Siddiqui, 36, is mentally unfit for trial. She is being held at a Texas facility after she was brought to the United States in August to face attempted murder and assault charges.

Although the psychologist's report is secret, defense lawyer Elizabeth Fink gave an indication of its contents yesterday when she said Siddiqui believes she is living with two of her children.

The woman's mind has been shattered due to a combination of beatings, torture, and rapes!!!

Also see: Where Are Aafia Siddiqui's Children?

And if her CHILDREN were TORTURED in FRONT OF HER?!! What would THAT DO to YOUR MIND, Americans?

At one point in the hearing, Raskin mocked the suggestion in published reports that law enforcers had detained any of Siddiqui's three children for years. He said they were "certainly not abducted by US forces, or the dark side, whatever you want to call it."

He said Siddiqui's oldest boy was detained by Afghanistan police in July when he was found with his mother. The FBI said Siddiqui carried bottles and jars of chemicals, papers describing US landmarks, and instructions on how to make chemical weapons. --more--"

Sorry, I'm not buying MSM and government bulls*** anymore!!!!

For more on the abominable atrocity of U.S. torture, go HERE

"Democrats Cover Up Bush Era War Crimes

The Associated Press writes:

"Two Obama advisers said there's little—if any—chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage."

And when Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy was asked if Bush officials could face war crimes, he responded:

"In the United States, no. These things are not going to happen."

This is not entirely surprising, given that Democratic congress members Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman and John D. Rockefeller were secretly briefed on torture many, many years ago, and yet did nothing to stop those unlawful programs. Indeed, they egged the torturers on (for example, the above-linked Washington Post article says "no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder").

Remember, those who authorize or cover up war crimes are themselves guilty of war crimes. The Democratic leadership thus has every incentive to cover up war crimes.

The fix is already in. Only massive pressure on the government can force war crimes trials.

--MORE--"

"Monday, November 17, 2008

Another Act of Treason: George W. Bush 'Outed' Valerie Plame

Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan has revealed that it was George W. Bush himself who authorized Dick Cheney to 'out' Valerie Plame. When he is no longer President, Bush will not be able to 'pardon' himself for the many 'counts' of high treason that will be charged him. Bush must therefore move to pardon himself while he is still in the White House but doing so will prove his guilt! Innocent folk don't 'pardon' themselves of serious crimes.

Nixon left the White House aboard a helicopter. To make a fast getaway, Bush will need a jet. When he is no longer President, Bush will not be able to 'pardon' himself for the many 'counts' of high treason that will be charged him. I accuse Bush of war crimes, high treason, graft, and various capital crimes as stated succinctly in US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441. Amid the lies he told about 911, the lies he told to wage aggressive war, it is now learned that it was Bush --personally --who 'outed' CIA operative Valerie Plame....

--MORE--"

Related: Operation FALCON: Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally

NSPD-51 and the Potential for a Coup d’état by National Emergency

"ARE YOU ON THE LIST?

The federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that will override the Constitution in the event of a major terrorist attack (Photo: Illustration by Brett Ryder)

This is a really difficult post because I know what they did to this woman.

Related: Torture Will Drive You Insane

The Grey Lady of Bagram

She was RAPED and BEATEN REPEATEDLY, readers. And now they have her ON DRUGS!!!!

"Evaluation says MIT grad unfit for trial; Lawyer cites stress of imprisonment" by Larry Neumeister, Associated Press | November 18, 2008

I'm sure THAT WAS the POINT!!! Destroy her mind so she can not fight the false charges!!!

NEW YORK - A Pakistani woman accused of trying to kill a US soldier and FBI agents while she was in custody in Afghanistan is mentally unfit for trial, a court-ordered psychological evaluation has determined.

Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT graduate and trained neuroscientist, is unable to understand the nature and consequences of court proceedings and cannot assist properly in her defense, according to the evaluation at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.

US District Judge Richard M. Berman in Manhattan described the results in an order sent to lawyers, according to an entry in the case yesterday. Berman said the evaluation was being filed under seal. He scheduled a conference tomorrow for lawyers to discuss what should happen next, including the possibility of medication to treat Siddiqui's depression.

And here is another thought: WHERE is HER BOY? Being tortured at Gitmo or some black site? Was he TORTURED IN FRONT OF HER?

She was charged with attempted murder and assault after she was accused of grabbing a rifle at a police station in Afghanistan in July and shooting at US Army and law enforcement personnel. She was shot and wounded. In August, she was brought to the United States to face the charges.

At the request of her lawyer, Elizabeth Fink, and federal prosecutors, she was transferred last month to the Texas facility that specializes in mental health treatment for women. Fink said Monday that she anticipated a heated conversation at tomorrow's hearing about whether Siddiqui should be medicated.

She said she was not surprised her client was incompetent for trial after suffering enormous psychological pain. "There's every reason to believe that she was broken and that what happened to her that put her in this state was caused by her being held by the dark side, whether that's the Americans or the Pakistanis or the Afghanis," Fink said.

She said a government assertion that Siddiqui for the last five years has "been running free is just fantasy." Siddiqui has failed to appear in court several times, and Fink has noted that her client has refused to leave her jail cell, interact with her lawyers, or open legal mail.

See: Memory Hole: What Four Years of Torture Will Do to an Innocent Man

The same goes for women!

"She's been broken and she's lost her mind," Fink said. A message for comment left with federal prosecutors was not immediately returned. --more--"

As an American, I am ASHAMED at what my government has done to this woman!!

This is an UNACCEPTABLE ATROCITY and I can BARELY STAND ANYMORE!!!!!!!

They were at Gitmo, and you know what that means:

"US held 12 juveniles at Guantanamo

SAN JUAN - The United States has revised its count of juveniles ever held at Guantanamo Bay to 12, up from the eight it reported in May to the United Nations, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday,

The government has provided a corrected report to the UN committee on child rights, according to Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon. He said the United States did not intentionally misrepresent the number of detainees taken to the isolated Navy base in southeast Cuba before they turned 18....

Yeah, sure, the Navy didn't lie, whatever. How about LETTING THEM ALL GO? 9/11 an INSIDE JOB!!!!!

A study released last week by the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas concluded the United States has held at least a dozen juveniles at Guantanamo, including a Saudi who was 17 when he arrived and who committed suicide in 2006..... --more--"

Frikkin CLOSE that place down NOW!!

For more on the abominable atrocity of U.S. torture, go HERE

"Bagram's Black Hole: Guantánamo Bay was bad enough -- Bagram is worse

by Daphne Eviatar, The American Lawyer



November 13, 2008

Eric Lewis didn't know much about Ruzatullah's case when he decided to take it on two years ago. All he knew was that in October 2004, Ruzatullah, an Afghan man in his thirties, was spending a quiet evening at home with his family in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, when U.S. troops forced their way in and searched the place. The soldiers found no guns or other weapons, but they seized Ruzatullah and his brother Inavatullah (many Afghans have only one name) and took them to the U.S. military base at Bagram. Inavatullah was released 15 days later; Ruzatullah remained at the de facto detention center. When Lewis took the case in 2006, Ruzatullah was still in U.S. custody. No charges had been brought against him. His friends and family insisted that he had no connection to terrorists, criminals, or any armed forces.

A commercial litigator at Baach Robinson and Lewis -- a boutique law firm in Washington, D.C. -- Lewis ordinarily represents foreign banks, insurance companies, and governments in fraud and insolvency cases. He heard about the detainees at Bagram from Tina Monshipour Foster, a former attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where Lewis had been a board member. Foster's two-year-old nonprofit, the International Justice Network (IJN), provides legal assistance to victims of human rights abuses, as well as linking advocates around the world. The problems she described to Lewis -- hundreds of detainees held incommunicado and without charges at Bagram for years, unable to contact family or friends or even to see the evidence against them -- drew him in....

--MORE--"

"China's 'action plan' on rights meets skepticism; Move called ploy, but some, seeing shift, voice hope" by John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times | November 7, 2008

BEIJING - Facing international criticism over human rights abuses, China is preparing a national "action plan" on such issues as torture and freedom of speech, but critics yesterday were skeptical the move would bring much change.

After what the U.S. has done vis-a-vis torture, I'm really tired of the Zionist MSM bashing China over the head with the "human rights." Go tell it to the Palestinians, Zio-press!

Oh, yeah: U.S. Tortures for China

Pfffft

China has recently faced domestic pressure from politically oriented bloggers and a growing middle class to guarantee more human rights. Some said they hoped that President-elect Barack Obama would apply more pressure on China in regard to citizens' rights than has President Bush.

Seriously, how can such an authoritarian state face "domestic pressure" -- unless, ONCE AGAIN AmeriKa's racist, agenda-pushing, enemy-creating, Zionist MSM has LIED TO US!!!

Some activists worried that Beijing's promise for a new human rights strategy was promoted by the nation's information office, in charge of shaping public image, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an agency with little domestic clout. The state-run media have reported that the plan will include contributions from the courts, parliament and nongovernmental groups.

Hey, we have those here in AmeriKa!! They are called newspapers or news broadcasts!!!

"But the real issues that concern the world, including the torture of prisoners and free speech, are the domain of the police - the Ministry of Public Security - and they're not mentioned as being at the table," said Joshua Rosenzweig, Hong Kong research manager for the Dui Hua Foundation, a US-based human rights group. "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has absolutely no authority over China's police. That doesn't inspire much confidence that real human rights issues will be addressed or dealt with." --more--"

How about turning that lens on USreal and THEIR TREATMENT of MUSLIMS, huh? And need I even comment on Rosenzweig (Jewish)?

That's why I hate western human rights groups!

"....

Where once Americans prided themselves on never starting wars, but rather accepting them if no other option were available, Bush seemed too eager to fight in Iraq. 

Americans love to lie to themselves about history, don't they?  Never started any wars!  Tell it to the Mexicans, Nicaraguans, and the Vietnamese (for starters)!

Where Americans prided themselves on their defense of religious freedom, Bush seemed too willing to advertise his Christianity.

Notice how Zionism and its control over our society never enters the equation?

Where Americans valued their civil liberties, Bush believed people would accept electronic surveillance as a means to root out terrorists.

Haven't we?  We will never even know the scale of the spying (something Obama will continue) because of telecom immunity.

And where Americans prided themselves on their humanity, Bush seemed too willing to excuse alleged torture of prisoners in American custody.

For more on the abominable atrocity of U.S. torture, go HERE

--link--"

And he didn't even touch upon the economy: Obama On Board

I watched the documentary TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE last night on HBO, readers.  It is a MUST SEE, and if you are a human being it will draw tears. 

"Taxi to the Dark Side, a horrifying documentary about an Afghani cabbie who died in U.S. military custody, added a Peabody to its list of awards, which already included an Oscar. Taxi raised disturbing questions about interrogation techniques and U.S. wartime policies"

Also read: The Torture of Dilawar and Habibullah

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes."

"In addition to Bush, suspects in the alleged conspiracy include a who’s who of top officials in Bush’s first term, principally Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and their aides, says ABC News."

So, WHEN are the IMPEACHMENT TRIALS?

Also see: Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

Bush Says Americans Approve of His Torture Policy

I'm not highlighting because the whole page would be red-acted.

Just TAKE IN the HORROR, readers!!!!

"Human rights group says it has proof of detainee abuse; Report cites medical review of former inmates" by Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | June 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - A Cambridge-based human rights organization said it has found medical evidence supporting the claims of 11 former detainees who were allegedly tortured while in American custody between 2001 and 2004, in what a former top US military investigator said amounts to evidence of war crimes.

Medical evaluations of the former inmates found injuries consistent with the alleged abuse, including the psychological effects of sensory deprivation and forced nudity as well as signs of "severe physical and sexual assault," Physicians for Human Rights said in a report scheduled for release today.

The report also alleges that in four of the cases, American health professionals appeared to have been complicit by denying the detainees medical care and observing the abuse but making no effort to stop it - charges that, if true, represent gross violations of medical ethics.

Four of the men were captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and seven were held in Iraq. All were released in recent years, and none was charged with a crime.

Physicians for Human Rights, a liberal-leaning nongovernmental organization established in 1988, relies on health professionals to investigate human rights abuses around the world. It has been credited for chronicling the AIDS epidemic in Africa and investigating conditions in US prisons and juvenile detention centers.

A Physicians for Human Rights official was questioned earlier this month by Israeli authorities after organizing mobile health clinics in Palestinian areas.

The subjects of the group's latest study were identified with the help of two law firms that represent the former detainees, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. The group also established a five-person internal ethics board to review the investigative procedures.

The 130-page report, a copy of which was provided to the Globe, is being released as Congress convenes hearings on the Bush administration's use of controversial interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects. The hearings have examined allegations that some techniques amounted to torture and violated international law, and the Physicians for Human Rights study offers medical evidence to support those allegations.

One detainee who said he was repeatedly stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver had wounds consistent with such treatment, the doctors reported. Another who said his captors sodomized him also had physical signs that supported the allegation, while several others had burns and psychological problems the doctors concluded were consistent with electrical shocks.

All of them are suffering physical or mental trauma as a result of the abuse, the team of physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists reported.

"This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," retired Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq in 2004, wrote in the preface.

Neither the Bush administration nor the Pentagon commented on the unpublished report yesterday. President Bush has repeatedly said he does not condone torture and allows interrogation techniques that are aggressive but legal.

The report challenges that contention with a detailed physical and psychological profile of each of the former detainees. In two of the cases, the medical investigators had access to the subjects' recent medical records. All 11 men were given pseudonyms for their protection, according to the report.

The doctors found that "Kamal," an Iraqi in his late 40s held from September 2003 until June 2004 at Abu Ghraib, has a lesion near his right ear that is "consistent with a healed cut from a sharp-edged instrument," according to the report. He also had another wound by his left ear, described as "a healed puncture injury" that matches "Kamal's description of being stabbed with a screwdriver in his cheek by a soldier," the report states.

Psychologically, "Kamal's clinical presentation, reported history of abuse, and the result of psychological testing support the presence of several psychiatric diagnoses," including depression, a panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the report.

A subject named "Amir," an Iraqi in his late 20s held in Abu Ghraib prison from August 2003 to January 2005, "showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick," the report found.

"Yasser," another Abu Ghraib detainee in his mid-40s, had scars on his thumbs and irregularities in the contours of his tongue, according to the report. The medical team concluded that the damage supports his contention that his American captors subjected him to electric shocks.

The report quotes directly from Yasser's interview with the study team: "When they shock you with electricity it feels like your eyes will explode."

Three of the Iraqi detainees and one former Guantanamo inmate reported that they were examined by a medical professional during an episode of torture or physical abuse, but that the abuse continued, the report states. And in another apparent violation of medical ethics, two of the former Guantanamo detainees said they suspected that the psychologist that interviewed them while in custody shared information about them with their interrogators.

Some of the subjects' injuries, however, the doctors found, could not be conclusively linked to abuse while in US custody.

While a bone scan of a middle-aged Iraqi identified as "Laith" showed significant damage to his jaw, the investigators could not determine whether it resulted from blunt force trauma by his captors or a prior dental infection.

Still, Physicians for Human Rights concluded that all of the interrogation techniques the 11 men allegedly endured - including officially sanctioned exposure to extreme temperatures and placement in "stress positions," as well as unauthorized treatment such as sexual abuse - violated both domestic criminal law and international human rights treaties.

The physicians urged the Bush administration to "repudiate all forms of torture" and called on Congress to immediately ban at least 17 of the interrogation techniques they chronicled in their review. It also said the US government should provide reparations to the abuse victims.

General Taguba's judgment was far more severe. "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," he wrote."

And where did they come up with this stuff?

"Origins of detainee tactics detailed" by Anne Flaherty, Associated Press | June 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks pursued abusive interrogation techniques once used by North Korea and Vietnam on American POWs despite stern warnings by several military lawyers that the methods were cruel and even illegal, according to a Senate investigation.

The findings, detailed in a hearing yesterday, brought rebukes of the Pentagon effort from Democrats and Republicans alike. "The guidance [administration lawyers] provided will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, an Air Force Reserve colonel who teaches military law for the service.

The hearing is the Senate Armed Services Committee's first look at the origins of harsh interrogation methods and how policy decisions were vetted across the Defense Department.

Its review fits into a broader picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.

The panel is expected to hold further hearings on the matter and release a final report by the end of the year.

Among its initial findings is that senior Pentagon lawyers, including the office of general counsel William "Jim" Haynes, sought information as early as July 2002 regarding a military program that trained US troops how to survive enemy interrogations and deny foes valuable intelligence.

Much of the training program, known as "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape," or SERE, is based on experiences of American prisoners of war in previous conflicts, including those in Korea and Vietnam.

In response, SERE officials provided Haynes's office a list of tactics that included sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, and stress positions.

Haynes, who resigned his post in February, testified that he remembers receiving the information, but that he did not recall requesting it personally.

Several of those techniques, including stress positions, were later approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a December 2002 memo for use at Guantanamo Bay.

Rumsfeld and Haynes agreed to the methods, despite objections by military service lawyers that they might be illegal."

One place they raised torture techniques was from the Soviets; however, this article doesn't tell you that.

Words like "freedom" are ringing quite hollow, aren't they, 'murkns?

Are you PROUD NOW?!

Not like it matters. U.S absolves all its war criminals.

"Soldiers are cleared in newsman's death

The shooting death of a Reuters journalist in the midst of a firefight in Baghdad in 2005 was justified because US soldiers believed the camera protruding from an unmarked car was a rocket-propelled grenade, the Pentagon's internal watchdog has concluded. The Defense Department's inspector general said Reuters safety practices contributed to the death of sound technician Waleed Khaled (AP June 18, 2008)."

Taking it lying down, 'eh, MSM press?

And the Congress?

Pffffffttt!

--MORE--"

"The whole case should be war crimes charge number one.

After reading it, who can deny that this war on "terror" is bogus; who could possibly believe a damn thing this government says; and who can not (or refuses to) see this criminal gang in the White House?

Please take a look at the picture to get a perspective of the event(s) to be described.

"Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation" by DEBORAH SONTAG


Jose Padilla, 36, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert and former Chicago gang member... lawyers for Mr. Padilla suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense.... a "completely docile" prisoner.

And he is accused of what, exactly?


The Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges... an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government... extraordinary, and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Mr. Padilla’s status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy combatant last fall. The Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention — and thus the issue of the president’s authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him indefinitely without charges — when the Bush administration pre-empted its decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.

Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.

Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a “North American terror support cell” that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas “to participate in violent jihad” and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.

Mr. Padilla faces two charges that each carry a maximum penalty of 15 years. Over the summer, Judge Marcia G. Cooke of United States District Court in Miami threw out the most serious charge, of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country, saying that it replicated accusations in the other counts and could lead to multiple punishments for a single crime.

This was a setback for the government, which has appealed the dismissal.

I am absolutely speechless!!

"The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him?"

The charges have now shifted:

"The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America. Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a “North American terror support cell” that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas “to participate in violent jihad” and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan?"

WTF?!  How many of those are false charges for this kangaroo court?! And remember, this is "an American citizen on American soil and [held] indefinitely without charges," seized solely on the "president's authority."

I'm not feelin' any effin' safer knowing that "The Decider" is insane, let me tell you that!


Three and a half years as an enemy combatant... monotony of solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C. One spring day, got to go to the dentist... a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event:

“Today is May 21. Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist... offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.

His interrogations included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums,” LSD, or some other drug, subjected to loud noises and noxious odors, sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold, and harsh lights.

Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. His isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations.... Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

Blackened goggles and earphones are rarely employed in internal prison transports in the United States, but riot gear is sometimes used for violent prisoners.

Read further and you will see how violent Padilla is.

Was it a root canal or the "Marathon Man" treatment Dustin Hoffman received?

Is it safe?

The "secretive military incarceration of an American citizen," a "detention without charges" gives me a warm fuzzy; how about you?

And LOOK at the LIST of CRIMES:

"Interrogations included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums,” LSD, or some other drug, subjected to loud noises and noxious odors, sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold, and harsh lights.... Denied access to counsel for 21 months. His isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations.... Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

YOU GOD-DAMNED MONSTERS!


The military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment.

Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a Pentagon spokesman, could not comment on the methods used to escort Mr. Padilla to the dentist.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law:

“There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”

Federal prosecutors: "[We deny] “in the strongest terms” [the accusations of torture and say that] Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security. His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary. While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”

The prosecutors have asked the judge to forbid Mr. Padilla’s lawyers from mentioning the circumstances of his military detention during the trial, maintaining that their accusations could “distract and inflame the jury."

Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman and Navy Commander:

"If they pose a threat to the individuals charged with transporting them, clearly appropriate measures must be taken to protect the guards and any other personnel involved."

I can hardly comment the stuff is so damn Orwellian!

Needs met? Yeah, I'm sure it's been a real vacation for Mr. Padilla!

Prosecutors should rightly be worried about treatment during detention, since Padilla an innocent man.

I'm not on the jury; however, I am inflamed by the case, but not distracted!

All done for "protection." Pah!

Do really believe that this is a government to be trusted?

And other than a few fart mists, notice how little coverage this case got in the MSM?


To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial scheduled for late January.

Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct,” saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy combatant.

Defense lawyers say it is unconscionable to ignore Mr. Padilla’s military detention because, among other reasons, it altered him in a way that will impinge on his trial. They say they have had a difficult time persuading him that they are on his side.

Defense lawyers’ questions often echo the questions interrogators have asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the lawyers said. He is especially reluctant to discuss what happened in the brig, fearful that he will be returned there some day.

Orlando do Campo, one of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender's office, said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative and that he expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about sports, and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears:

“There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience.”

Andrew Patel, another of Padilla's defenders, visited him repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court, but said his client is nonetheless mistrustful:

“I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme.

During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body. The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”

Michael Caruso, a public defender for Mr. Padilla, pleaded “absolutely not guilty” for him to charges of conspiracy and of providing material support to terrorists.


And what is the diagnosis?

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said Mr. Padilla refuses to review the video recordings of his interrogations, which have been released to his lawyers but remain classified:

“[Mr. Padilla] lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense. It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation. When approached by his attorneys, he begs them 'please, please, please' not to have to discuss his case. He refuses to watch videos of his interrogation and he refuses to answer questions pertaining to aspects of the evidence in his case.”


(Segments of this report were augmented by a December 5, 2006 Associated Press report carried by the Boston Globe)

THESE ANTIWAR VOICES and PROTESTERS got SECOND-SECTION, LOCAL COVERAGE!!

Not PAGE-ONE COVERAGE like the LIES that got us in there and the LIES about the SURGE SUCCESS!!

Hell, they don't even get front-section coverage like the Tibetan protests!!!!

Nope, the ANTIWAR PROTESTERS will be BURIED in the BACK in the War Daily Boston Globe!

I rest my case, readers, I rest my case!!!!!!!!

"Veterans recall horrors of war in live broadcast" by Anna Badkhen, Globe Staff | March 16, 2008

CAMBRIDGE - Liz Jackson's eyes were fixed on a screen showing a live broadcast of anguished testimonies by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans describing what they had seen and done during their combat tours.

Jeffery Smith recalled how his Army unit beat and humiliated Iraqi prisoners. Former Marine Bryan Casler recounted how fellow Marines urinated and defecated into food and gave it to Iraqi children.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Former Marine Matthew Childers talked about how he used to humiliate Iraqi civilians during predawn raids on their homes. When he described turning away an Iraqi father who was asking American troops to help the badly burned baby he carried in his arms, Jackson began to weep silently.  "These soldiers are saying: 'I'm complicit,' " said Jackson, 29, a community organizer from Cambridge. "But every American citizen who saw this happen and isn't out there protesting is complicit. I include myself."

Doing all I can; tried that route. Where's the change? It's gone the other way!

Hundreds of soldiers and Marines from across the country are testifying this weekend in the "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan" hearings, a four-day event held at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. The event is named after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings in which Vietnam War veterans testified in a Detroit hotel about war crimes they had participated in or witnessed.

The hearings, which began Thursday and end today, were organized by the Iraq Veterans Against War, a national antiwar organization, and broadcast live in locations across the country.

NOT ON MY TELEVISION they weren't!!!!!!

And how come the Globe DIDN'T COVER UNTIL SUNDAY 'eh?

Because the hearings are now OVER?

The veterans who testified called for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Oh, that's why the Globe didn't cover it until Sunday -- and why placed the story in the back!

"In the United States today people's minds have gotten off the war. We are trying to get their attention," said Paul Shannon, whose New England United antiwar network organized the live screening shown yesterday in First Parish Unitarian Church in Harvard Square, in a side room that was packed with about 300 antiwar activists, former troops, local residents like Jackson, and curious passersby.

On Friday, more than a dozen Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from Massachusetts drove to Silver Spring to observe and participate in the hearings. One of them, Ian J. Lavallee, an Iraq war veteran from Jamaica Plain, said in a phone interview yesterday that although he was not planning to testify, he wanted to attend the hearings because it was his "duty to the people of the world" to condemn an "occupation that is being waged in our name and with our tax dollars."

Which was FOR ISRAEL, need I remind you!!

"We dehumanized people. The way we spoke about them, the way we destroyed their livelihoods, their families, doing raids, manhandling them, throwing the men on the ground while their family was crying," recalled Lavallee, 23, who served in Iraq in 2005 and was honorably discharged from the Army in 2006 after he attempted suicide.  "I became a person I never thought I would become," he said. "It really upset me that I did these things."

America's TRUE HEROES!!!!!

From a folding chair in the Cambridge church, a fellow veteran, Patrick Dougherty, watched the hearings intently. "It just takes me back there," he said. The testimonies reminded him "how malicious we were over there."  Dougherty, who was deployed to Baghdad and Mahmoudiya for 14 months beginning in 2003, "felt from the start that we had no intention to win hearts and minds," he said, his hands nervously running from the stubble on his chin to his hair and back to his chin.

No it was about CONTROLLING OIL and REMOVING ISRAEL'S ENEMY Saddam!!!!!

"The way we treated our detainees like animals, kept them in cages in the hot sun all day - " said Dougherty, 24, who studies biology at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Fields Corner.   Dougherty was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He said he had considered testifying at the Winter Soldier hearings, but his doctor talked him out of it because the event could conjure memories too difficult for the veteran to bear.

Most of the people who came to watch the testimonies were members of antiwar groups in Massachusetts. Jennifer Magee, who works at Harvard University Art Museums, came because her roommate, an antiwar activist, had told her about it.  "These are the stories you never hear in the paper," said Magee. "It's really powerful to hear from the veterans."

Why would the SAME MSM that LIED US INTO this ABOMINABLE ATROCITY -- and which CONTINUES to LIE with astonishing regularity -- want to talk to these guys, huh?

Charles Gluck, a social worker from Long Island who was visiting Cambridge yesterday, wandered in after he saw a poster outside the church advertising the event.  "Some of the things I heard were shocking," Gluck said after listening to several testimonies. "My hope is that a movement like this would expand and . . . give people opportunity to make a more informed decision as to who the next president will be."

Yeah, never mind WE the PEOPLE taking control of this thing and DUMPING this SHIT GOVERNMENT and its MSM MOUTHPIECES!!!

No, let's just wait for the NEXT DICTATOR, er, "president" to come along and SAVE US!!!!

Well, SCREW THAT!!!

That's what we elected a Democrat Congress for and you see how that worked out!

No public screening of the hearings will be held today. Recordings of the testimonies are available at ivaw.org/winter- soldier/howtowatch."

--MORE--"

"NEW REPORT: ABU GHRAIB PRISONERS PACKED IN ICE WATER-FILLED GARBAGE CANS AND SENT INTO SHOCK, MILITARY POLICE SAY

by Sherwood Ross

March 17, 2008

Muslim prisoners held in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a national magazine.

Davis, from the Roselle, N.J., area, said while stationed at the prison he also saw an incinerator with "bones in it" that he believed to be a crematorium and said some prisoners were starved prior to their interrogation.

Wow, AmeriKa has JOINED the NAZIS!!!!

Another soldier that had been stationed at Abu Ghraib, M.P. Sabrina Harman---who gained dubious fame for making a thumbs-up sign posing over the body of a prisoner she believed tortured to death---said the U.S. had imprisoned "women and children" on Tier 1B, including one child was as young as ten.

"Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father," write co-authors Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris in the March 24th issue of The New Yorker magazine, which describes Abu Ghraib in a 14-page article titled "Exposure."

You PROUD ameriKa?

They assert "the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration."

They add that the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented in the prison "were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments." (President Bush has insisted "We do not torture," The Associated Press reported on November 7, 2005.)

Imprisoning suspects in a war zone, torturing and/or murdering them, and holding their wives and children as hostages, are all banned practices under international law. Some prisoners died from rocket attacks on the compound. 

Harman said she didn’t like taking away naked prisoners’ blankets when it was really cold. "Because if I’m freezing and I’m wearing a jacket and a hat and gloves, and these people don’t have anything on and no blanket, no mattress, that’s kind of hard to see and do to somebody---even if they are a terrorist." (Note: the prisoners were suspects, not terrorists, being held without due process on charges of which they were often ignorant and without legal representation.)

Harman said the corpse she posed with likely was murdered during interrogation although a platoon commander said he had died of a heart attack. Harman and another soldier, Corporal Charles Graner unzipped his body bag and took photos of him and "kind of realized right away that there was no way he died of a heart attack because of all the cuts and blood coming out of his nose." Harman added, "His knees were bruised, his thighs were bruised by his genitals. He had restraint marks on his wrists. "

Asked why she posed making a "thumbs up" gesture over the corpse, Harman said she thought, "Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them (the photos) I go, 'Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.’"

The corpse, said to have died under interrogation by a CIA agent, was identified as that of Manadel al-Jamadi. An autopsy found he had succumbed to "blunt force injuries" and "compromised respiration" and his death was classified as a homicide, The New Yorker article said. The dead man was removed from the tier disguised as a sick prisoner, his arm taped to an IV, and rolled away on a gurney, apparently as authorities "didn’t want any of the prisoners thinking we were in there killing folks," Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, Harman’s team leader, told the magazine.

Harman said she saw one naked prisoner with his hands bound behind his back raised higher than his shoulders. This forced him to bend forward with his head bowed and his weight suspended from his wrists and is known as a "Palestinian hanging" as it is said to be used in Israeli prisons, Gourevitch and Morris write.

That's who TRAINED the AmeriKan MONSTERS!!!!!!!!!

But WE DON'T TORTURE!!!!

In a letter to a friend Harman described "sleep deprivation" used on the prisoners: "They sleep one hour then we yell and wake them---make them stay up for one hour, then sleep one hour---then up etc. This goes on for 72 hours while we fuck with them. Most have been so scared they piss on themselves. Its sad." On one occasion, she wrote, sandbags soaked in hot sauce were put over the prisoners’ heads.

The CIA agent that interrogated al-Jamadi at the time of his "heart attack" was never charged with a crime but Harman was convicted by court-martial in May, 2005, of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners, dereliction of duty and sentenced to six months in prison, reduced in rank, and given a bad-conduct discharge.

Five other soldiers involved in taking pictures were sentenced to terms of up to ten years in prison. Gourevitch and Morris write, "The only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was cleared of criminal wrongdoing."

Sergeant Javal Davis, describing Abu Ghraib generally, said the prison reminded him of something out of a "Mad Max" movie, explaining, "The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost." The inside, he said, is "nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot. Their (prisoners’) rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn’t want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it --- the place you would never ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy."

Yup, the U.S. DETENTION CENTERS!

Hellooooooo, NAZIS!!!!!

When a delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited the prison in October, 2003, they were denied full access (contrary to international law) and, The New Yorker said, "what they were permitted to see and hear did not please them: men held naked in bare, lightless cells, paraded naked down the hallways, verbally and physically threatened, and so forth."

The ICRC reported the prison was plagued by gross and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions, including physical abuses that left prisoners suffering from "incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions…suicidal ideas."

#

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based journalist and veteran public relations consultant who suspects the Bush regime may be bad for the image of the United States. He is founder of the Anti-War News Service."

--MORE--"

Not a summer camp, folks.

A hell-hole of a torture chamber -- brought to the Iraqis by George W. Bush and his "liberation."

"In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse" by Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall New York Times March 19, 2006

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.  Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.   It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

Which continue to this day.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.  The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross.  The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

Even Hitler let the Red Cross in, readers.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.  Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

I'm tired of the excuses!  There IS NO EXCUSE for TORTURE! EVER!!!!

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.  "We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops.  One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special Operations soldiers who were in the unit — by phone, through relatives and former neighbors — were also unsuccessful.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.  In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

There are no conspiracies except 19 Arabs from a cave on 9/11.

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended often in a cell at Abu Ghraib.  Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways.

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.  Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics.

Somehow, that sounds like it violates the Geneva conventions.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement.

Outrageous!

The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.  The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.

Never mind the horrors Americans inflicted upon them, right?

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from peeking out.

Awwwww, we are so nice!!!!

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

Are Iraqis even human to our brave fighting men?

This is DISGUSTING to me, reader?

Treating the Iraqis like they are ANIMALS!!!!!!

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had reviewed.  In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future.  Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)

Gonna be hard to find Osama unless you have a shovel.  HE DEAD!!!!

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.  Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.

You mean THIS Zarqawi?

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk.

Oh, so this type of treatment happened ALL OVER IRAQ, huh?  Reader, I am ashamed of my government and appalled at its actions!

I'm SORRY, Iraqis, for what my mass-murdering, war-criminal government has done to your great society, culture and people. It will never be enough, but as an American, I APOLOGIZE to YOU with every fiber of my being.

I'm sorry the American people have failed you!

These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.  At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

Translation: Iraqis were WATERBOARDED!!!  And the damn U.S. government says they only waterboarded three or four people!

What a bunch of f****** criminal liars!!!!!!

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited.

Sure looks like TORTURE to me!  If you don't think so, reader, then maybe you wouldn't mind taking the same treatment yourself, right?

Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.  Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

Each paragraph gets worse and worse, readers!!  And where is my $100?

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders presented them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.

They even got SOUVENIRS for TORTURING Iraqis!  Whadda country!

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.  The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003, raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target information and other intelligence to the task force.

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds of standard F.B.I. practice."

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

That's what AmeriKa is all about!

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24, 2004.

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield. "These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task force operations.

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama.  Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

Yup, we will NEVER KNOW the extent of U.S. TORTURE of Iraqis!  And Americans will have no clue as to why people hate us!

It ain't about freedom and all that s***!  THIS is why they hate us -- TORTURE!!!!!!!!

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Yeah, BURY the WAR CRIMES even DEEPER!!!

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams," to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said.

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.  On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10 task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences.  Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress.

Did you ever hear of any investigative report on this, readers?  I never did, and I read the New York Times for DECADES until January 1st of this year -- and since then, I have not purchased one copy!  In fact, I get a bit queasy when I even see one now.  And the thought of touching one? Ugh!

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public."

And the Times just let it drop, didn't they? 

--more--"

"New Interrogation Rules Set for Detainees in Iraq" by Eric Schmitt New York Times March 10, 2005

WASHINGTON, March 9 - After clashing with Afghan rebels at the village of Miam Do one year ago, American soldiers detained the village's entire population for four days, and an officer beat and choked several residents while screening them and trying to identify local militants, according to a new Pentagon report that was given to Congress late Monday night.

Although the officer, an Army lieutenant colonel attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, was disciplined and suspended from further involvement with detainees, he faced no further action beyond a reprimand.  The episode, described only briefly in a summary of the report reviewed by The New York Times, was one example of how little control was exerted over some conduct of interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subject of an exhaustive review just completed by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, the naval inspector general.

The report finds that early warning signs of serious abuses did not receive enough high-level attention as the abuses unfolded, and that unit commanders did not get clear instructions that might have halted the abuses. The findings of this review, the latest in a series of military inquiries conducted in the past year, come as the top American military commander in Iraq has ordered the first major changes to interrogation procedures there in nearly a year, narrowing the set of authorized techniques and adding new safeguards to prevent abuse of Iraqi prisoners, officials said.

The new procedures approved by the officer, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., on Jan. 27, have not been publicly disclosed, but are described in the Church report, a wide-ranging investigation into interrogation techniques used at military detention centers in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq.

"This policy approves a more limited set of techniques for use in Iraq, and also provides additional safeguards and prohibitions, rectifies ambiguities and, significantly, requires commanders to conduct training on and verify implementation of the policy, and report compliance to the commander," according to a summary of the inquiry's classified report.

Three senior defense officials said Wednesday that the new procedures clarified the prohibition against the use of muzzled dogs in interrogations, gave specific guidance to field units as to how long they could hold prisoners before releasing them or sending them to higher headquarters for detention, and made clear command responsibilities for detainee operations. They did not describe the particulars of the changes, which are likely to be a main focus of a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing set for Thursday to review the Church report's findings. It will be the first Congressional hearing into the prisoner abuse scandal since last September, when senior Army investigators presented their findings.

In a brief interview on Tuesday night on Capitol Hill after briefing senators on operations in Iraq, General Casey, who took over the Iraq command last summer, said the changes were intended to "tighten up" the interrogation procedures American officials have been using since May 13, 2004. A senior military official also said the revised procedures reflected the experience military officials had gained since then.

General Casey declined to discuss any specific changes, but the report summary said the main intent was to resolve ambiguities "which, although they would not permit abuse, could obscure commanders' oversight of techniques being employed."  Admiral Church's report faults senior American officials for failing to establish clear interrogation policies for Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving commanders there to develop some practices that were unauthorized, according to the report summary. But the inquiry found that Pentagon officials and senior commanders were not directly responsible for the detainee abuses, and that there was no policy that approved mistreatment of detainees at prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

These conclusions track with those in a draft summary of the inquiry's findings that The New York Times described in an article last December.  But the final report contains new information about the scope of the abuses and specific cases of mistreatment.  These findings are in an unclassified 21-page executive summary of the classified report, which runs 368 pages, according to a Senate Republican aide. A copy of the summary was reviewed by The Times.   The report concludes that American officials failed to react to early indications of prisoner abuse and to deal with them.

"It is clear that such warning signs were present, particularly at Abu Ghraib, in the form of communiqués to local commanders, that should have prompted those commanders to put in place more specific procedures and direct guidance to prevent further abuse," the summary said.  "Instead, these warning signs were not given sufficient attention at the unit level, nor were they relayed to the responsible C.J.T.F. commander in a timely way," the summary said, referring to the commanders in Iraq.

Two senior defense officials said on Wednesday that the most striking warning signs were reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross to American military officials in Iraq of serious mistreatment of the prisoners, especially a briefing to officials at Abu Ghraib prison in October 2003. One of the senior officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Church report has not yet been publicly released, said that had military officials heeded the Red Cross's warnings, which were made public months later, "some of the abuses might not have happened."

The report's disclosure of the abuse at the village in Afghanistan was described in The Boston Globe on Wednesday. According to the inquiry, American ground forces clashed with Afghan rebels at Miam Do on March 18, 2004. After the battle, the American soldiers detained the villagers to interview them and screen for militants. The number of detained is not known.  During this process, the report said, the Army lieutenant colonel, who had accompanied the American combat troops, "punched, kicked, grabbed and choked numerous villagers." The report did not identify the officer, who was nearing retirement and who, until the Miam Do incident, had displayed "exceptional service," including two deployments to Afghanistan, according to Pentagon officials and documents.

At the time of the fighting around Miam Do, in Uruzgan Province in central Afghanistan, a military spokesman said two American soldiers, an Afghan army sergeant and at least eight militants had been killed, as well as a civilian woman. A compound cordoned off by the American and Afghan troops was bombarded by allied aircraft, but when the troops moved in, they were fired upon again from within the compound. Taliban propaganda and a ton of weapons were seized, according to a report by The Associated Press.

The lawless province was viewed as a refuge of dispersed fighters and leaders of the Taliban movement, which was ousted from control in the 2001 war in Afghanistan.  The report also delved into the role that medical personnel might have played in failing to report abuses they witnessed or treated. Investigators reviewed the cases of 68 detainees who died while in American custody, including 63 in Iraq and five in Afghanistan, the summary said. Six of those deaths were related to detainee abuse, investigators determined.

In three cases, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, the report concluded that "it appeared that medical personnel may have attempted to misrepresent the circumstances of the death, possibly to disguise detainee abuse." These cases were forwarded to the Army surgeon general for review, the report summary said.  A spokeswoman for the surgeon general said Wednesday that the review was continuing.

Admiral Church's report is the sixth major inquiry into the abuse and detention operations. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld directed the inquiry 10 months ago to examine the interrogation techniques in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq, and to identify any gaps among the various investigations.  The report was based on more than 800 interviews with personnel who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba as well as thousands of pages of documents and a review of all the other investigations and reviews on detainee abuse and detention operations. Its statistical conclusions derived mainly from 71 completed cases of substantiated detainee abuse as of Sept. 30, 2004, including 20 that involved mistreatment during interrogations.

The Church report contrasted the rigorous review of interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay with a much more haphazard process in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it noted the interrogation techniques migrated from one area to another in the absence of adequate oversight from high-level Pentagon officials. "We consider it a missed opportunity that no specific guidance on interrogation techniques was provided to the commanders responsible for Afghanistan and Iraq," the report summary said.

The inquiry found, for instance, that by January 2003, military interrogators in Afghanistan were using techniques similar to those that Mr. Rumsfeld had approved for use only at Guantánamo Bay. Those techniques included stress positions and sleep and light deprivation.  As a result of the military inquiries and individual criminal investigations into detainee abuse, the Army said last week that it had taken 120 actions against 109 soldiers so far. That includes 32 courts-martial, and 88 other forms of punishment, including reprimands and dismissal from the service."

--more--"

Have you ever seen a cuter little girl, readers?

So why was her father taken away for two years and abused?

"Jailed 2 Years, Iraqi Tells of Abuse by Americans" by Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet

DAMASCUS, Syria — In the early hours of Jan. 6, Laith al-Ani stood in a jail near the Baghdad airport waiting to be released by the American military after two years and three months in captivity.

He struggled to quell his hope. Other prisoners had gotten as far as the gate only to be brought back inside, he said, and he feared that would happen to him as punishment for letting his family discuss his case with a reporter.  But as the morning light grew, the American guards moved Mr. Ani, a 31-year-old father of two young children, methodically toward freedom. They swapped his yellow prison suit for street clothes, he said. They snipped off his white plastic identification bracelet. They scanned his irises into their database.

Why do I think of the Anti-Christ when I read that?!!

Then, shortly before 9 a.m., Mr. Ani said, he was brought to a table for one last step. He was handed a form and asked to place a check mark next to the sentence that best described how he had been treated:

“I didn’t go through any abuse during detention,” read the first option, in Arabic.

“I have gone through abuse during detention,” read the second.

In the room, he said, stood three American guards carrying the type of electric stun devices that Mr. Ani and other detainees said had been used on them for infractions as minor as speaking out of turn.

“Even the translator told me to sign the first answer,” said Mr. Ani, who gave a copy of his form to The New York Times. “I asked him what happens if I sign the second one, and he raised his hands,” as if to say, Who knows?

“I thought if I don’t sign the first one I am not going to get out of this place.”

Shoving the memories of his detention aside, he checked the first box and minutes later was running through a cold rain to his waiting parents. “My heart was beating so hard,” he said. “You can’t believe how I cried.”

His mother, Intisar al-Ani, raised her arms in the air, palms up, praising God. “It was like my soul going out, from my happiness,” she recalled. “I hugged him hard, afraid the Americans would take him away again.”

Just three weeks earlier, his last letter home — with its poetic yearnings and a sketch of a caged pink heart — appeared in The Times in one of a series of articles on Iraq’s troubled detention and justice system.

After his release from the American-run jail, Camp Bucca, Mr. Ani and other former detainees described the sprawling complex of barracks in the southern desert near Kuwait as a bleak place where guards casually used their stun guns and exposed prisoners to long periods of extreme heat and cold; where prisoners fought among themselves and extremist elements tried to radicalize others; and where detainees often responded to the harsh conditions with hunger strikes and, at times, violent protests.

Through it all, Mr. Ani was never actually charged with a crime; he said he was questioned only once during his more than two years at the camp.  American detention officials acknowledged that guards used electric devices called Tasers to control detainees, but they said they did so rarely and only when the guards were physically threatened. The officials said that detainees had several ways to report abuse without repercussions, and that all claims were investigated.

So the Iraqis get the same dissident treatment Americans get -- zzzzzzzzzzzttttt!

Officials declined to give specific details about why they had detained Mr. Ani or why they had freed him.  “He was released because the board that reviewed his case didn’t believe he any longer posed a threat,” said First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, a spokeswoman for detention operations, in a written answer to questions. “He was originally detained as a security threat. I don’t have anything more.”

The Detention System

The American detention camps in Iraq now hold 15,500 prisoners, more than at any time since the war began. The camps are filled with people like Mr. Ani who are being held without charge and without access to tribunals where their cases are reviewed, the Times examination published last December found.

Mr. Ani, a women’s clothing merchant, said he was detained in 2004 after American soldiers who were searching for weapons in his six-family apartment building found an Iraqi military uniform in the basement. His joy upon being released in January was short-lived. Days later, he said, a Shiite militia ransacked his home in Baghdad, looking to kill him. He hid, going from house to house, until he could move his family out of Iraq.

Now he is among the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who have taken refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan, where sectarian rifts are springing up.   In one area of Damascus, Shiite refugees from Iraq have established a mini version of Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood. Sunni refugees, in turn, are forming their own enclaves. In interviews, former detainees seethed with rage at the United States.

That was certainly to be expected!

One, a 43-year-old man from Samarra, Iraq, said he was released last year despite having fought American troops.  “I wish to go back to Iraq and fight against the Americans, God willing,” vowed the man, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his nom de guerre, Abu Abdulla, for fear of reprisal.

Mr. Ani has other priorities, still exhausted from his detention and preoccupied with finding a permanent home. But he regularly turns his television to a new station called Al Zawra, transfixed by its running montage of videotaped attacks on American troops.

The station is owned by a Sunni, Meshaan al-Juburi, a former Iraqi politician who was indicted last year on charges of embezzling millions of American dollars; he denied the charges and returned to Syria, where he lived before the war. The station has become an information center for the Sunni insurgency and in the process has exasperated American and Iraqi forces. In an interview at his office here, Mr. Juburi said that he opposed Al Qaeda’s use of suicide bombers to kill Iraqi civilians but was soliciting support for Iraqis intent on killing American troops. When the image of a roadside bomb blowing up an American Humvee appears on the large flat screen on his office wall, his eyebrows rise and he urges his visitors to watch, “This is a good one.”

A Nightmare Begins

Mr. Ani’s ordeal began on Oct. 14, 2004, when soldiers brought him in for what he described as desultory questioning.

“ ‘Are you married? How many children? Sunni or Shiite? Which mosque do you pray in?’ ” Mr. Ani said he was asked. “I said I didn’t pray, and they said, ‘Are you not Muslim,’ and I said, ‘Yes, but I’m not praying and going to mosques.’ ”

“They never asked me about terrorism,” he said. “I’m a normal person, just a usual man, and don’t have anything to do with anyone who was fighting against the Americans.”

Mr. Ani spent a total of 44 days at two other American facilities before being sent to Camp Bucca. In all, he said, he was questioned just once at each site.  Mr. Ani said the electric prods were first used on him on the way to Camp Bucca. “I was talking to someone next to me and they used it,” he said, describing the device as black plastic with a yellow tip and two iron prongs. He said the prods were commonly used on him and other detainees as punishment.

We ELECTRICALLY SHOCKED these guys?  I'm HORRIFIED!

“The whole body starts to shake and hurt,” he said. “And you lose consciousness for a couple of seconds. One time they used it on my tongue. One guard held me from the left and another on my back and another used it against my tongue and for four or five days I couldn’t eat.”

This is Bush's liberation?  TORTURE?

In a separate interview, the insurgent from Samarra said such a device had been used on him for speaking out of turn. Ahmed Majid al-Ghanem, 50, a former Baath Party official who was also freed from Camp Bucca and is now living in Syria, said in a separate interview that he witnessed the electric prods being used as punishment on other detainees. 

The Times interviewed Mr. Ani at his apartment in Damascus, the Syrian capital, where he sat on a couch with his parents, wife and children. When he demonstrated how he had been held for the electric prod, his 4-year-old daughter, Al Budur, mimicked his actions.

Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a detention system spokesman, said: “Every use of less than lethal force, to include use of Tasers, is formally reported by facility leadership, ensuring soldiers are in accordance with proper use. Touching a Taser to someone’s tongue is not one of the approved uses.”  Mr. Ani said guards treated him kindly when he arrived at the jail on Nov. 20, 2004. He recalls being given soap, and, when his hands cracked from the cold, a soldier bringing him lotion and socks.

But soon new guards came “who had had special thoughts,” he said. “They were not allowing us to talk. They cut off the salt, gave us food that was not fit for dogs. One guard named David sometimes brought us outside to stay in the sun, or when it was cold. He also didn’t respect our faith, telling us not to pray here, and when we moved not to pray there.”

Yeah, that really wins over the hearts and minds of Muslims, insulting and disrespecting their religion.

The detainees also began fighting among themselves. Those who spoke to the American guards were ostracized. Long toilet lines further raised tensions.  One day the guards searched a makeshift prayer area, Mr. Ani said, “and they started to step on the Korans, which fell down.”

BLASPHEMERS!!!!! I'm appalled at this insulting and disrespecting behavior by U.S. troops.  What an outrage!

“A fight started,” he continued. “There was a huge demonstration. The prisoners started to throw their shoes at the guards, and we started to beat them with empty plastic bottles. The guards shot at us with rubber bullets, but then prisoners were killed and others were injured.”

A Pentagon statement at the time described such an incident in January 2005, saying that four detainees were killed when guards were compelled to use deadly force to quell the riot and that it was set off by a search for contraband. Colonel Curry said an investigation concluded that a detainee leader had fabricated the Koran allegations to instigate violence.

Mr. Ani and other former detainees said there were frequent demonstrations to protest various grievances. Mr. Ghanem said he was released in late 2003 after hunger strikes forced camp officials to review his case and those of others.  Detention officials said they were also fighting radicalization at the camps and were trying to identify and isolate extremists. Former detainees said in interviews that the influence of Islamic extremists was still growing. At Camp Bucca, they said, hundreds of men formed a group called the Brothers. Members shaved their beards and otherwise masked their ideology so they would be placed with other detainees.

Mr. Ani generally slept in a wooden barrackslike structure, with a mattress on the ground and a nail on the wall for hanging clothes. Once, when the guards found an improvised needle that he said was used to repair clothes, he was taken to an isolated cell, where he was kept for 24 days.  “You cannot see the difference between day and night,” he said. “There was no opening, not even in the door.”

Colonel Curry said it was standard to discipline detainees when they did not follow procedure.  Mr. Ani despaired of ever being released. His letter that was printed in The Times ended with, “I hope I can be dust in the storms of Bucca so that I can reach you.”

Dangers Beyond Jail

“I didn’t see any kind of solution for me,” Mr. Ani said after his release. “The only solution was to die,” he said, his eyes welling with tears. “I was hoping to die.”

This is the hope and bright future Bush has brought to the Iraqis? This type of stuff is shattering my heart!

In releasing Mr. Ani, the American military transferred him to Camp Cropper in Baghdad and gave him $25, which he and his parents used to hire a taxi. Along the way home, they had to dodge Shiite-controlled checkpoints, and just days later, he said, he narrowly escaped capture by a Shiite militia. Mr. Ani and other Iraqis say they believe these militias have found a way to learn when Sunni men are released from jail and then hunt and kill them. 

Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, commander of American detainee operations, said that he had heard such concerns and that he was trying to alter the process of releasing detainees to improve their safety.  Mr. Ani said that for him there was only one way to stay alive: flee Iraq.  He said he was scared and puzzled about his next step. He said he felt that he could not stay in Syria, if only because work was scarce. But he must compete with other refugees for the attention of another host country.

“Until now, I can’t sleep, really,” he said. “Whenever I hear something noisy I stand up. I’m in a very bad psychological situation. I can’t stop thinking of what we should do. I don’t have a future here. How should we live?”  When his uncle put on Al Zawra, the satellite television station, Mr. Ani turned to look at the scenes of Sunni children who had been killed and the attacks on American soldiers.

“I am an Iraqi,” he said. “I love my country. Of course, everyone who is an Iraqi at the moment, we are thinking how can we support our country.”

“The United States through its actions made people hate the Americans much more than before.”

How about that last quote from Mr. Ani?

George W. Bush -- the Third Anti-Christ -- "through [HIS] actions made people hate the Americans much more than before."

Read until the end, please....

"Hundreds of Iraqi Detainees Get First Taste of Freedom" by Dexter Filkins New York Times June 8, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 7 — The first of 2,500 Iraqi prisoners set for release stepped off a bus to freedom on Wednesday morning at Baghdad's central bus station, with many dropping to their knees and pressing their foreheads to the scalding pavement to offer thanks.

The roughly 100 male detainees, ordered to be set free in a good-will gesture on Tuesday by the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, walked to an awning to take shelter from the fierce sun. They each collected a $200 gift from a local Sunni political party, listened to a speech by one of its members and then wandered into the city where they had been taken prisoner by American soldiers months ago.

"The Americans were accusing me of being a terrorist, but even their own investigators did not believe it," said Khairallah Ibrahim Muhammad, a 37-year-old man released Wednesday. He said he was taken by American soldiers from his home, in the Saydiya neighborhood of Baghdad, on Dec. 11, 2004.  "I think they arrested me because I go to dawn prayers at the mosque every morning," Mr. Muhammad said.

He was among about 500 Iraqis released at various points across the country on Wednesday, after Mr. Maliki made his announcement as an effort to calm tensions between Iraq's main sectarian groups, who have been killing each other at a high pitch for the past few months. The government here is dominated by Shiites like Mr. Maliki; most detainees are Sunni Arabs.  The 2,500 detainees whom Mr. Maliki said he intended to release represent about 10 percent of the prisoners in Iraq, many of them jailed on suspicion of ties to the guerrilla insurgency. 

In addition to the 100 released at the Baghdad bus station, about 200 were let go Wednesday in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, and another 200 in Mosul, in northern Iraq, said Col. Wes Martin, an American officer at the scene in Baghdad.  None of the men released had been convicted of a serious crime, including aiding the insurgency, American officers said. Even so, some of them had spent more than a year in prison. The terms of their release included a pledge to renounce violence and to be good citizens of Iraq.

According to Mr. Muhammad and the others, many of the Iraqis taken prisoner were scooped up in sweeps of Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods, with little regard given to their individual identities. Most of the 100 men released at the bus station on Wednesday were Sunni Arabs, and many said they were from Saydiya, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in southern Baghdad. 

One of them was Muhammad Jassim, a 62-year-old former official in the Iraqi Ministry of Trade. He said American troops took him captive on the same day as Mr. Muhammad, and he, too, recalled being led away in handcuffs and a blindfold. Mr. Jassim said he was accused of being in a kidnapping ring.  "Do you think someone my age would be involved in kidnapping?" Mr. Jassim asked. "The Americans detained about 50 people from my neighborhood that night."

Mr. Jassim, an owlish-looking man with large eyeglasses, wore a pressed white shirt and khaki pants, both given to him the night before his release from Camp Bucca, a large American-run prison in southern Iraq. Mr. Jassim described his treatment at Camp Bucca as "not bad," though he had nothing nice to say about the food there.

The meals, he said, usually consisted of beans: "The first night it was French beans. The second night, broad beans. The third night, it was lentils," Mr. Jassim added, pursing his lips. "Those were the worst."

None of the Iraqis emerging from the buses on Wednesday complained of mistreatment. Indeed, the larger concern among Sunni leaders is not the American-run prisons like Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, which house about 14,500 prisoners, but with the prisons run by the Interior Ministry without American oversight. They are thought to hold a nearly equal number of detainees.

Some prisoners found in Interior Ministry prisons have shown obvious signs of torture and beatings; other Sunnis have been taken away by men in Iraqi police uniforms, only to be found dead later.

Suhaila Jabbar, sweltering beneath a black abaya, stood at the bus station waiting for her 17-year-old son, Walid, who never arrived. Ms. Jabbar said she had recently been notified that he would be released Wednesday after nine months, but he never emerged. Ms. Jabbar even carried his prison number: 81304.

This woman's story starts the waterworks, folks!

Walid aside, her greater worry, Ms. Jabbar said, was her 14-year-old son, for whom she was so afraid that she asked that his name not be printed. Her younger son, she said, was taken away by Interior Ministry officers three months ago. While she knows that Walid is alive and in Camp Bucca, Ms. Jabbar said, she still has no word at all about the other boy.

"I have no idea where he is being held," Ms. Jabbar said.

After a time, Ms. Jabbar, with her 5-year-old son, Muhammad, in tow, turned and left the station."

Oh, reader, WHERE are this woman's sons?

Have they been found or released in the last 18 months?

What happened to them?

--more--"

I wonder if she ever found him....

"Lost Amid the Rising Tide of Detainees in Iraq" by Sabrina Tavernise New York Times November 25, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 21 - Early this month, Iraq Abbas received a phone call from a man she did not know.

"Your husband is still alive," Ms. Abbas recalled the man saying, as she sat in a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad. "Don't give up. Meet anyone who can help."  The stranger told her he had shared a cell with her husband in an underground bunker. It was the first that Ms. Abbas had heard of her husband, Ibrahim Fayadh Abdul Hamid al-Timimi, since police commandos came into their home and arrested him on May 26, just hours after a bombing in their neighborhood.

One week after she got the phone call, American forces raided a bunker that fit the description the man gave, uncovering 169 inmates, many of them starving and abused, and tools of torture hidden in the ceiling. Iraqi officials say that all of the men in the bunker had links to the insurgency.  As the Iraqi government begins to take over from the American military, it has stepped up its hunt for insurgents, acting on tips from hot lines and rounding up suspects in neighborhoods near bombings. But the influx of new prisoners - the population of the four American-run prisons here has doubled over the past year, and Iraqi jails are packed - has overwhelmed the Iraqi authorities, rights groups say. And while the scandal in Abu Ghraib prison ushered in new reforms in American-run jails, the mushrooming Iraqi detention facilities operate virtually unchecked.

There is so little oversight, rights groups say, it is impossible to tell how many detention centers exist. After the bunker was found last week, an Interior Ministry official declined to give the number or locations of detention centers in Baghdad. It typically takes three months to be brought before a judge, Human Rights Watch says. In the meantime, detainees are left to circulate in an archipelago of unofficial detention centers, in many cases without an arrest record or oversight by agencies other than the Interior Ministry.

"I get calls all the time from families whose relative disappeared after being arrested," said a representative of a rights group in Iraq who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. "Sometimes I meet them at the morgue because they think they may have been killed. There is no transparency. In many cases there is no recourse to the law. A climate of impunity prevails everywhere." The representative, who has done extensive research on Iraqi prisons, said there were hundreds of such cases a month.

In some ways, Ms. Abbas's story evokes comparisons with the Saddam Hussein era, when people disappeared at night and their relatives searched for them for years.

Except AmeriKa HAS KILLED MORE than Saddam did!!!

In addition to the TORTURE we brought with us!!!

Her husband was still wearing his nightclothes when, just after midnight, police commandos entered their house and snatched him and his two brothers, taking them with bags on their heads, she said. The commandos returned later for another brother. The next five months, Ms. Abbas, pregnant and with only an eighth-grade education, said she searched tirelessly for traces of him. It took her two months to figure out that the men who took him were not ordinary city police officers, but commandos. She visited police stations, mosques and a claims office inside the Interior Ministry, and then later the commando headquarters.

Commandos? I don't like the sound of that!

Strangers seemed always to know more of Ms. Abbas's husband than she did. This summer a man called her, again without identifying himself, saying he could secure her husband's release for $700. She gave him some clothing, food and money. She never heard from him again.

"He cheated us," she said.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Ms. Abbas, in a black robe, pulled small scraps of paper out of her black purse, showing a trail, tattered and creased, of fruitless effort. One of the scraps, was a temporary access pass to an area in the Interior Ministry where a claims department was located. She filed a claim but never heard back. An official in the ministry's intelligence unit, who identified himself as Brigadier Safaa, said on Sunday that the claims office was always open to visitors.

"I feel hopeless," Ms. Abbas said. "Where am I supposed to go?"

Ms. Abbas said she had been told she could pass information to a prisoner for $200. The ministry has denied such allegations, although many former detainees confirm them.  The man who said he had been in prison with Mr. Timimi - asking that he not be identified by name for fear of arrest for talking of his experience - said Mr. Timimi had been badly beaten on his lower back and could no longer walk. He said that when they moved from a detention center to the bunker, they carried him on a stretcher.

An American official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the news media, confirmed that Mr. Timimi had been in the bunker the Americans raided. However, a spokesman for the American military command here said he had not been found there.  An Interior Ministry official confirmed that Mr. Timimi and his brothers had been in the bunker but said they had been transferred to Abu Ghraib, but an American spokesman for the prison said none of the Iraqis in the bunker had been transferred there. Neither Mr. Timimi's condition nor his whereabouts could be independently established.

Iraqi officials say that, even if abused, the prisoners were not necessarily innocent, adding that all the men in the bunker had links to the insurgency. His fellow inmate said Mr. Timimi had confessed to setting up a homemade bomb, but had done so under torture.

In the fog of war, it may never be clear what happened to Mr. Timimi.

And rest assured, the New York Times won't go looking, either!

That has not stopped Ms. Abbas from searching. On Sunday morning, she went to the bunker seeking answers but a guard shooed her away. She made dozens of calls to officials without result. One told her to come by a week later, but she has little hope.

"I turned my face to God," she said. "I told him, 'You are my last chance.'"

That's Bush's liberation, huh?

Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss!

--more--"

This item was buried in the ARTS SECTION (below fold)!!!!

Is it just me, or is there something OBSCENELY GROTESQUE about TORTURE LEADING in the ARTS SECTION and IGNORING IT on the NEWS SECTION?!?!

The "ART" of TORTURE?

Selected quotes:

"The picture was taken as "a souvenir," England tells Morris. "It's just a picture."

"Specialist Sabrina Harman tells Morris, "It was just - Hey, it's a dead guy, it'd be cool to get a photo next to a dead person.... people have photos of all kinds of things. Like, if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they'll take photos of it."

I'll bet she's a fun lay, huh?

"Sergeant Javal Davis tells Morris. "Everyone was taking pictures of everything, from detainees to death."

"Standard' ways of seeing; Errol Morris's new documentary invites a re-examination of vision and truth" by Mark Feeney, Globe Staff | May 16, 2008

"Standard Operating Procedure," Errol Morris's new documentary about the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, is very much a moral exercise: an examination of the misuse of power and abdication of personal responsibility by individual service personnel, the military as a whole, and, ultimately, the United States as a democratic society.

Yet it's also a striking visual exercise - a meditation on the hold that seeing has over us as human beings. That hold, as shown in Morris's film, is threefold: in how we do (and do not) distinguish fact from fiction visually; in how we respond at a wholly visceral level to varying degrees of moral outrage depending on our own role as spectator; and, simply, in how pervasive the act of recording what we see has become in our daily lives.

It's TORTURE and a CRIME, not a "striking visual experience" that we are talking about here, readers.

Let's not FORGET THAT like the critic wants you to!!!

These elements are so thoroughly woven into the film that Morris could have called it "Ways of Seeing" - except that the art critic John Berger beat him to it, for his classic book and BBC series on how we relate to visual artifice.  Morris's actual title refers to the Army's standard operating procedure in post-Saddam Iraq: ineptitude, maltreatment of prisoners, and an ultimate unwillingness to punish any guilty parties other than a handful of enlisted personnel. As regards seeing, though, the title has a further meaning - two meanings, in fact.

But we are about the "rule of law" and all that..... never mind....

Perceptually, humans have a standard operating procedure, too: We are prone to believing what we see. As a result, the photograph, as commonplace as it is, has a persuasiveness unmatched by anything we hear or read. In the assessment of evidence, the eye is all-powerful - if not all-knowing.

But DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE, readers -- believe what WE TELL YOU!!  I mean, give me a break!!!

As for the not-believing-your-own eyes, you got two choices, readers:  Either you are crazy, or the other guy is a liar!

I know where I come down.

Cinematically, an important part of Morris's standard operating procedure is the reenactment. He is one of the great interviewers in film history. (The things he gets people to say! Just ask Fred Leuchter, the Holocaust denier, in "Mr. Death," or Robert McNamara, in "The Fog of War," or Lynndie England, here.) And he long ago hit upon the use of reenacting events as a way to provide a visual counterpoint to the many talking heads that populate his films and to flesh out what they tell us.

Yeah, reenactments, so you may not be able to believe your own eyes, right?

As practiced by Morris, the reenactment works to augment his talking heads; it's a kind of talking past. Augmentation is not substitution, though. Morris edits, lights, and shoots the reenactments in such a way as to differentiate them visually from the interviews and archival footage. These two related yet opposed standard operating procedures make for an epistemological tension in the documentary. There's the (presumed) veracity of the photograph. And photography, of course, is what made Abu Ghraib notorious.

No, what makes it notorious is the TORTURE!!!!!

Then there's the (acknowledged) fictiveness of the reenactment.

Yeah, so it DIDN'T REALLY HAPPEN, you got that, readers?

How DISGUSTING this "movie" review is!!!!

This tension can make watching "Standard Operating Procedure" a fascinating excercise in the interplay of what we see, which is real but not necessarily true, and what we believe, which is always true, subjectively, but not necessarily real, objectively.

Translation:

The TORTURE you heard about and see on the screen there?

NOT REAL!!

This is a DISGUSTING "review," readers!!!

In fact, it gets more complicated than that. As the film notes, some of the Abu Ghraib photographs as released to the media were cropped or exist in very similar versions (either taken seconds later or by another camera) that can cast the recorded episode in a different light.

Yup, you CAN'T BELIEVE your LYING EYES, Americans!!

You better just believe the Zionist-controlled MEDIA!!!

And almost as if to bear witness to the slipperiness of photographic veracity, all three cameras the Abu Ghraib pictures came from had inaccurate time and date stamps. (The Army's Criminal Investigation Command had to reconstruct the photographic time sequence.)  As Philip Gourevitch writes in the namesake companion book to "Standard Operation Procedure," a collaboration with Morris, "photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation."

But, but, but... a picture is worth a thousand words, is it not?

Be NOT PROUD, Americans, for YOU CAN NOT ADMIT what MONSTERS you are!!!

D-E-N-I-A-L!!!!

Evidence can make other, more bewildering demands, too. Watching Morris' documentary, one realizes how powerfully the effective complicity that comes of seeing certain of these photographs affects our moral response to the acts they show. These are the photographs of enforced degradation, such as group masturbation; humiliating poses; and, most notoriously, the prisoner being held on a "leash" by England. (The picture was taken as "a souvenir," England tells Morris. "It's just a picture.")

By any sane measure, such acts - inexcusable as they are - are far less worse than the frequent instances of inflicting extreme physical deprivation and pain at Abu Ghraib, let alone killing.

??????!!!!!!!! DISGUSTING!!!  Yeah, leave alone the KILLING!!!

Yet the instinctive revulsion one feels at seeing the acts of degradation is distinctly more pronounced than the dismay we feel upon seeing other, more horrific but less outre images. It may just be that movies and television and video games have so inured us to violence. It also may be that such extreme acts lie beyond our active moral comprehension - as instances of outrageous humiliation do not. Even more, though, the response has to do with the element of spectatorship. We as viewers are implicated here - our presence enlarges, or even completes, the intended humiliation - as we are not with pictures of more grievous acts.

Yeah, and AS AMERICANS WE ARE per the NUREMBURG CASES!!

They are WAR CRIMES we are talkin' about!!!!!

The Army would seem to agree. A suspected terrorist, Manadel al-Jamadi, died while being interrogated at Abu Ghraib.

Can you imagine the hollering if an "enemy" did that to one of "our" soldiers?

Several service personnel saw fit to pose with the corpse and snap pictures. Specialist Sabrina Harman tells Morris, "It was just - Hey, it's a dead guy, it'd be cool to get a photo next to a dead person." The Army never charged anyone with al-Jamadi's murder - but Harman was initially charged with photographing his corpse! It's "Alice in Wonderland" as "Alice in Hell": Propriety trumps murder, violation causes revulsion as violence does not.

I'm beginning to think that THIS REVIEWER is SICK, SICK, SICK!!!!

Apparently, it was cool to get pretty much any kind of photo in Iraq. Many have pointed out that what made the events at Abu Ghraib a scandal was the photographic evidence.

Yeah, it wasn't the ACTUAL TORTURE at all, huh?

Translation: It is NOT a SCANDAL if WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT!!!

HOW REVOLTINGLY DISGUSTING this WHOLE PIECE turned out to be!!!!

Who knows what the fate of Guantanamo would have been were cameras there the way they are in Iraq.

Yeah, WHO KNOWS, what the fate of Gitmo could have been.

It's not like AmeriKa's MSM NEWSPAPERS would be INTERESTED in FINDING OUT, huh?

"Everyone in theater had a digital camera," Sergeant Javal Davis tells Morris. "Everyone was taking pictures of everything, from detainees to death." Or as Harman tells him, "people have photos of all kinds of things. Like, if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they'll take photos of it." The most striking word there is, of course, the adverb.

Yeah, and the fact that ONLY the AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN NOT SEE THESE PHOTOS!!!!

John Updike has written of the "surreal centrality" of the automobile in American life. That may change, the price of gasoline being what it is. The surreal centrality of the camera is unchallenged. Taking pictures, "Standard Operating Procedure" reminds us, is as ubiquitous in an Iraqi prison as in a suburban backyard. What's most un-American about Guantanamo isn't, alas, waterboarding or lack of due process. It's the absence of clicking camera shutters."

So what, those things would be O.K. as long as we SAW THEM?!

SICK, SICK, SICK!!!!

This is what passes for AmeriKan journalism?

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Not for very long, but...

"Red Cross faults Afghan prison; Urges US to allow detainees to bring outside evidence" by Fisnik Abrashi, Associated Press  |  April 15, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan --The Red Cross criticized the way the United States handles prisoners at the highly secretive Bagram military base, urging reforms yesterday that would allow detainees to introduce testimony in their defense.

The criticism of the prison, which few outsiders have seen, goes to the heart of the system the Bush administration uses to justify holding detainees outside the United States.  Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said many of the 600-plus detainees at Bagram complain they do not know why they are being held. Kellenberger spent a half-day at the prison during a one-week visit to Afghanistan that ended yesterday.

"They do not know what the future brings, how long will they be there, and under which conditions will they be released," Kellenberger told a news conference.  While Kellenberger's comments were aimed specifically at Bagram, Red Cross chief spokesman Florian Westphal said there was "a strong parallel" with the US military detention centers in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"We've talked about the absence of a clear legal framework and of sufficient procedural safeguards with regard to Guantanamo, in particular, as we have done for Bagram," Westphal said in Geneva.  In Iraq, the US military holds about 23,000 detainees and schedules review hearings every six months to decide on release or continued custody. But new evidence is rarely - if ever - introduced, and the panel mostly assesses a detainee's conduct and statements while in custody.

Unlike Afghanistan, the United States asserts that a UN Security Council resolution gives it the authority to detain prisoners in Iraq. US forces can recommend a detainee be put on trial in an Iraqi court, but they are not bound by the court's ruling, military spokesmen have said.  Kellenberger welcomed the establishment of "enemy combatant review boards" in Afghanistan that examine every six months whether a detainee can be released. But he called yesterday for expanded prisoner rights, including allowing detainees to introduce outside testimony.

"I do consider the establishment of this body as progress, but I think it was high time," Kellenberger said. "This body should also get evidence from the persons outside, . . . evidence which can speak in favor of those who are detained . . . Evidence of people who know them, so that this evidence is brought into the process."

US military officials at Bagram declined comment yesterday. The prison is highly secretive, and unlike the US prison in Guantanamo, the military does not allow journalists to visit. It also does not reveal who is detained there.

"If you are [an] interned person for security reasons, one of the rights you have is to have a regular review by the body which is seriously examining if you are still a security problem or not," Kellenberger said. "We want to see that in this review process you get in as much evidence as possible, also from the outside."

How dare the United States ever lecture anyone else on human rights?

HOW DARE THEY?!

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Look at these guys and ask yourself, "what could they have done?"  Anything?

"Defying U.S. Plan, Prison Expands in Afghanistan" by TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration struggles for a way to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a similar effort to scale down a larger and more secretive American detention center in Afghanistan has been troubled by political, legal and security problems, officials say.

The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners — more than twice the 275 being held at Guantánamo.  The administration has spent nearly three years and more than $30 million on a plan to transfer Afghan prisoners held by the United States to a refurbished high-security detention center run by the Afghan military outside Kabul.

But almost a year after the Afghan detention center opened, American officials say it can hold only about half the prisoners they once planned to put there. As a result, the makeshift American site at Bagram will probably continue to operate with hundreds of detainees for the foreseeable future, the officials said.  Meanwhile, the treatment of some prisoners on the Bagram base has prompted a strong complaint to the Pentagon from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group allowed in the detention center.

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.  The senior Pentagon official for detention policy, Sandra L. Hodgkinson, would not discuss the complaint, citing the confidentiality of communications with the Red Cross. She said that the organization had access to “all Department of Defense detainees” in Afghanistan, after they were formally registered, and that the military “makes every effort to register detainees as soon as practicable after capture, normally within two weeks.

“In some cases, due to a variety of logistical and operational circumstances, it may take longer,” Ms. Hodgkinson added.

The obstacles American officials have faced in their plan to “transition out” of the Bagram detention center underscore the complexity of their challenges in dealing with prisoners overseas. Yet even as Bagram has expanded over the last three years, it has received a fraction of the attention that policy makers, Congress and human rights groups have devoted to Guantánamo.

“The problem at Bagram hasn’t gone away,” said Tina M. Foster, a New York human rights lawyer who has filed federal lawsuits on behalf of the detainees at Bagram. “The government has just done a better job of keeping it secret.”

The rising number of detainees at Bagram — up from barely 100 in early 2004 and about 500 early last year — has been driven primarily by the deepening war in Afghanistan. American officials said that all but about 30 of those prisoners are Afghans, most of them Taliban fighters captured in raids or on the battlefield.  But the surging detainee population also reflects a series of unforeseen problems in the United States’ effort to turn over prisoners to the Afghan government.

In a confidential diplomatic agreement in August 2005, a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times, the Bush administration said it would transfer the detainees if the Kabul government gave written assurances that it would treat the detainees humanely and abide by elaborate security conditions.

As part of the accord, the United States said it would finance the rebuilding of an Afghan prison block and help equip and train an Afghan guard force.   Yet even before the construction began in early 2006, the creation of the new Afghan National Detention Center was complicated by turf battles among Afghan government ministries, some of which resisted the American strategy, officials of both countries said.

A push by some Defense Department officials to have Kabul authorize the indefinite military detention of “enemy combatants” — adopting a legal framework like that of Guantánamo — foundered in 2006 when aides to President Hamid Karzai persuaded him not to sign a decree that had been written with American help.  Then, last May, the transfer plan was disrupted again when the two American servicemen overseeing the project were shot to death by a man suspected of being a Taliban militant who had infiltrated the guard force.

The Pentagon initially reported only that the two Americans, Col. James W. Harrison Jr. and Master Sgt. Wilberto Sabalu Jr., were killed May 6 by “small-arms fire.” But American officials said the Afghan guard had opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle as two vehicles carrying senior officers waited to pass through the prison gate. The killings forced more than a month of further vetting of the Afghan guards and the dismissal of almost two dozen trained recruits, Pentagon officials said.

A Spartan Site of Metal Pens

The Bagram Theater Internment Facility, as it is called, has held prisoners captured as far away as Central Africa and Southeast Asia, many of whom were sent on to Guantánamo. Since the flow of detainees to Cuba was largely shut off in September 2004, the Bagram detention center has become primarily a repository for more dangerous prisoners captured in Afghanistan.

Despite some expansion and renovation, the detention center remains a crude place where most prisoners are fenced into large metal pens, military officers and former detainees have said.  Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, on an American-controlled military base 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan.

Bagram is WORSE than GITMO!!!!!   Oh, God!

Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers. Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said.

No charges for FIVE YEARS, readers!

The treatment of prisoners at Bagram has generally improved in recent years, human rights groups and former detainees say, particularly since two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by their American captors. Two American officials familiar with the Red Cross complaint that was forwarded to the Pentagon over the summer described it as a notable exception.

A Red Cross spokesman in Washington, Simon Schorno, said the organization would not comment on its discussions with the Defense Department. But in remarks about the organization’s work in Afghanistan, its director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, emphasized on Dec. 13 that “not all places of detention and detainees” are made available to the group’s inspectors.

“The fact that the I.C.R.C. does not publicize its findings does not indicate satisfaction with the conditions of any given detention place,” he said on the group’s Web site.  The two United States officials, who insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality of Red Cross communications, suggested that the organization had been more forceful in private. They said the group had complained that detainees in the isolation area were sometimes subjected to harsh interrogations and were not reported to Red Cross inspectors until after they were moved into the main Bagram detention center and formally registered — after being held incommunicado for as long as several months.

One former Bush administration official said the Pentagon told Congressional leaders in September 2006 that a small number of prisoners held by Special Operations forces might not be registered within the 14-day period cited in a Defense Department directive issued that month. The exceptions were to be “approved at the highest levels,” the former official said.

Discounting Complaints

Bush administration officials have at times discounted complaints about the crowding and harsh conditions at Bagram by saying the detention center was never meant to be permanent and that its prisoners would soon be turned over to Afghanistan.

Hundreds of Bagram detainees have been released outright as part of an Afghan national reconciliation program. But by early 2006, internal Defense Department statistics showed that the average internment at Bagram was 14.5 months, and one Pentagon official said that figure had since risen.  After a White House agreement by President Bush and Mr. Karzai in May 2005, the plan to transfer the prisoners was drawn up by administration officials and outlined in an exchange of confidential diplomatic notes that August.

The two-page Washington note — the first document to become public showing the terms that Washington has sought from other governments for the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo and Bagram — asks the Kabul administration to share any intelligence information from the prisoners, “utilize all methods appropriate and permissible under Afghan law to surveil or monitor their activities following any release,” and “confiscate or deny passports and take measures to prevent each national from traveling outside Afghanistan.”

At the time, some Bush administration officials predicted that transfers from Bagram could begin within six months. Col. Manuel Supervielle, who worked on legal aspects of the transfers as the senior United States military lawyer in Afghanistan, recalled that officials in Washington expected the primary difficulty to be the rebuilding of a cellblock at Afghanistan’s decrepit Pul-i-Charkhi prison to meet international standards of humane treatment.

“We’ve got a bunch of guys we want to hand over to the Afghans,” Colonel Supervielle said, recalling the prevailing view. “Build a jail and hand them over.”

But complications emerged at almost every turn.  Afghan officials rejected pressure from Washington to adopt a detention system modeled on the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” legal framework, American officials said. Some Defense Department officials even urged the Afghan military to set up military commissions like those at Guantánamo, the officials said.

Officials of both countries said the defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, was reluctant to take responsibility for the new detention center as the Pentagon wanted, fearing he would be besieged by tribal leaders trying to secure the release of captives. The minister of justice, Sarwar Danish, opposed sharing his control over prisons, the officials said.  American officials finally brokered an agreement between the ministries, internal documents show. But that did not resolve more basic questions about the legal basis under which Afghanistan would hold the detainees.

For nearly a year, American military officials and diplomats worked with the Afghan government to draft a plan for how it would detain and prosecute all prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Colonel Supervielle, who had helped set up legal operations at Guantánamo, said the effort in Afghanistan was in some ways more complex. “You weren’t dealing just with a U.S. interagency process,” he said. “It involved the interagency process, bilateral relations with Afghanistan, the military coalition and other international interests.”

The draft law was finally delivered to Mr. Karzai in August 2006. Despite American entreaties, he decided not to sign it after opposition from senior aides, officials said.  The construction of a new detention center at Pul-i-Charkhi also proved more complicated than United States officials had anticipated.

A New Project Is Flawed

When Afghan contractors broke ground on the $20 million project in 2006, United States officials estimated that the center would hold as many as 670 prisoners. But as the military police colonel overseeing the project toured the site with Afghan and Red Cross officials, they pointed to a significant flaw. In other parts of Pul-i-Charkhi, men were crammed as many as eight to a cell, and used toilets down the hall. To improve security and hygiene, the Americans equipped each two-man cell in the new block with its own toilet.

I'm glad the U.S. had $20 million to build Afghan prisons for innocents, while we suffer here at home!

But because the cultural modesty of Afghan men would make them uncomfortable sharing an open toilet, it was subsequently decided that the prisoners should be held individually, two former officials involved in the project said. That immediately reduced the optimal capacity of the main prison to about 330 detainees, they said, although a Pentagon spokeswoman said its “maximum capacity” was 628 prisoners.

The training of Afghan military personnel to guard and administer the new prison has posed other challenges. After initially budgeting $6 million for guard training, the Defense Department decided it would need about $18 million for training and “mentoring” of guards over three years, officials said.  A first group of 12 Bagram detainees was moved into the Pul-i-Charkhi prison on April 3. Over the next nine months, that number rose to 157 prisoners, including 32 from Guantánamo, official statistics show. Afghan officials decided to release 12 of those detainees soon after their transfer.

Sent from ONE GULAG to ANOTHER!

American officials said the modest flow had been dictated mainly by the Afghan military, which has wanted to make sure its guards could handle the new arrivals. But some United States officials say they have also had to reassess the Afghans’ ability to hold more dangerous detainees.  They said the detention center at Bagram would probably continue to hold hundreds of prisoners indefinitely. “The idea is that over time, some of our detainees at Bagram — especially those at the lower end of the threat scale — will be passed on to Afghanistan,” one senior military official said last year. “But not all. Bagram will remain an intelligence asset and a screening area.”

Ms. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, acknowledged that the military was holding more detainees at Bagram than it had anticipated two years ago and that the Pentagon had no plan to assist the Afghans with further prison-building. But, she added, “A final decision on the higher-threat detainees has not yet been made.”

And even now, the legal basis under which prisoners are being held at the Afghan detention center remains unclear. Another Defense Department official, who insisted on anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue, said the detentions had been authorized “in a note from the attorney general stating that he recognizes that they have the legal authority under the law of war to hold enemy combatants as security threats if they choose to do so.”

Afghan officials said they were still expecting virtually all of the Afghan prisoners held by the United States — with the possible exception of a few especially dangerous detainees at Guantánamo — to be handed over to them.  A spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, Gen. Zaher Azimi, said, “What is agreed is that all the detainees should be transferred.”

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