Category: War

US military plans to extradite stop-lossed Iraq war vet to Iraq for court martial over protest rap song

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Fort Stewart, Ga. – The US military plans to extradite a stop-lossed Iraq war veteran to Iraq “within a few days” to face a court martial for allegedly threatening military officers in a protest rap song he made.

Spc. Marc Hall has been jailed in the Liberty County Jail near Fort Stewart, Ga., since Dec. 11 because he wrote a song called “Stop Loss” about the practice of involuntarily extending military members’ contracts.

“It is our belief that the Army would violate its own regulations by deploying Marc and it would certainly violate his right to due process by making it far more difficult to get witnesses. It appears the Army doesn’t believe it can get a conviction in a fair and public trial. We will do whatever we can to insure he remain in the United States,” said Hall’s civilian attorney, David Gespass. >>>>>>

(AP/Huffington Post) — SHAHI KOTO, Pakistan – A roadside bomb killed three U.S. soldiers and partly destroyed a girls’ school in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday in an attack that drew attention to a little-publicized American military training mission in the al-Qaida and Taliban heartland.

They were the first known U.S. military fatalities in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions near the Afghan border and a major victory for militants who have been hit hard by a surge of U.S. missile strikes and a major Pakistani army offensive.

The blast also killed three schoolgirls and a Pakistani soldier who was traveling with the Americans. Two more U.S. soldiers were wounded, along with more than 100 other people, mostly students at the school, officials said.

We see images of Darfur on our computer screens, with people like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Don Cheadle raising awareness about the mounting humanitarian crisis in that region of the Sudan and Chad. But to make the story clear, they tend to speak of Darfur as an isolated conflict inside Sudan; the greater context of the crisis does not change the dire need for aid and intervention.

But the reasons behind the conflict in Darfur are complicated, and they cannot be separated from Sudanese civil war history. The conflict in Darfur started as an uprising against the Sudanese government by the Fur and other farmers in the region because they were marginalized and excluded from the peace negotiations toward ending the Second Sudanese Civil War…

This was on the PBS News Hour 02.03.10, they do give a couple of links and extended interviews with the participants I’ll also post below.

Using Drama to Understand and Heal the Wounds of War

So far, flight control refuses to land any planes, instead routing every new arrival into a holding pattern.   Too much congestion?    Bad weather?  Runways unavailable?  Who knows.  

The planes have arrived, fraught with heavy cargoes and passengers, circling above.  New arrivals are added to the top of the stack, and aircraft at the bottom should be taken out and allowed to make an approach first, letting each aircraft above move down one level.  There are limits to both fuel and vertical airspace.  Laden aircraft can’t just zoom off into some weightless outer orbital, or magically appear on the ground without some orderly intervening process.  What goes up, must come down, and all that.  That’s what gravity is all about.

I’ve been thinking a lot about our current situation in the government. And the wars. And our current and seemingly never ending involvement with torture.

With the somewhat recent revelation that some suicides in 2006 were questionable at best, I’m reminded of the things happening in 2006 and why more investigations into the Bush administration are necessary.

Report Casts Doubt On Guantanamo Suicides

by The Associated Press [via NPR]

January 18, 2010

Three Guantanamo Bay detainees whose deaths were ruled a suicide in 2006 apparently were transported from their cells hours before their deaths to a secret site on the island, according to an article in Harper’s magazine.

The published account released Monday raises serious questions about whether the three detainees actually died by hanging themselves in their cells and suggests the U.S. government is covering up details of what precisely happened in the hours before the deaths.

I first read about the suicides through that NPR article. It says the suicides likely happened at a facility near the main Gitmo facility, referred to as “Camp No.” The justification for setting up these facilities and for using this kind of interrogation technique is apparently 9/11:

After the terror attacks on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA set up a number of so-called “black” sites around the world, where harsh interrogations of terrorism-era suspects took place.

The Harper’s article suggested such a site at Guantanamo Bay may have belonged to the CIA or to the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

I remember 9/11. I remember how it was used as the justification for everything. I remember how people were tortured after 9/11 because they wouldn’t link 9/11 to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. I remember how the administration saw an opportunity with 9/11 and they went for it. When it didn’t work they tortured. They lied. They made up other claims that Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Last time there was a whistleblower revealing evidence to hamper the Bush administration’s plans, I remember how they outed his CIA agent wife.

I remember how their link from 9/11 to Saddam Hussein, al-Libi gave bad information to authorities because he was tortured. And this information was revealed in a DIA report that Dick Cheney read. And he committed suicide. I wrote about it, in fact.

I’ll quote from myself, again. May 15, 2009:

Joe Wilson was sent by the CIA to investigate claims of Iraq trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Africa:

Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division (CPD) — not by his wife — largely because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate committee report.

Cheney had asked for more information on an intelligence report earlier on the same day questioning the link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In response to his request, the CIA sent Wilson to Africa, and an aide to Cheney testified that he had no idea his request would result in that trip.

So, he wanted information but didn’t think they’d send someone to get information?

The DIA in question had some very interesting and useful information. You’re definitely going to want to read this:

WASHINGTON — A government document raises doubts about claims that Al Qaeda members received training for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, as Senate Democrats yesterday defended their push for a report on how the Bush administration handled prewar intelligence.

   […]

   The document from February 2002 showed that the agency questioned the reliability of Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training took place, the report said.

   The agency concluded that al-Libi probably misled the interrogators deliberately, and he recanted the statements in January, according to the document made public by Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The DIA report said that the links between al Qaeda and Iraq were probably not to be trusted and that al-Libi’s information was bad. This was made all the more strange when, in the midst of the Plame scandal, Karl Rove sent an email to the reporter Matthew Cooper, saying not to “get too far out” on Joe Wilson, the whistleblower, because the administration had information to discredit his findings and it was going to start declassifying things soon.

If they had this information, I don’t understand. This whole incident happened because Cheney asked the CIA for more information on the Iraq-AQ link and the Niger yellowcake. The CIA asked Joe Wilson to go to Niger because of his expertise on the subject, and Cheney says that the CIA misinterpreted his request and that he never wanted a trip to Niger. If there were information already to cast doubt on Wilson’s new information then why ask for any new information? It already existed!

Valerie Plame’s work consisted of monitoring WMDs going into and out of Iraq and Iran.  

Just had a gold star couple come in the shop looking for a flagpole on which they want to fly a USMC flag along with the US flag.  Their son was killed two weeks ago in Afghanistan two months into his fifth tour.  

Man, what do ya say, what can ya say.  I offered our condolences professionally and personally but whats that really mean.  Sometimes even in a simple job like this, selling flags, reality strikes home.

Haven’t posted anything in about a week or so on the Inquiry as I’ve had some other issues I’ve been following and there wasn’t really much more coming out as to the tidbits of what was happening on this side of the pond, my interest in this as the Brits are holding these hearings and that’s up to them to sort out there own leaderships guilt or innocence in justification for Iraq.

Tony Blair’s turn to testify is today and that’s already started, you can tune in here as he will be testifying for some six hours, these live video’s are then archived.

Not much has been covered as to these hearings here in the states even when mention of our administration, and others, were talking about taking down Saddam before 9/11, on 9/11 and shortly after and more.

“The Bigger the Lie, the More the People will Believe it”

– Adolf Hitler

Just a few days after the latest fake Osama bin Laden tape release, scantly a month after the ridiculously trumped up false flag underwear bomber ‘attack’ on Jesus’s fake birthday and on the heels of a relentless propaganda campaign of fear obviously designed to roll away the stone and resurrect the big lie of 9/11 there is this: Report: Al-Qaeda aims to hit U.S. with WMDs. Bravo to the neocons, they are right back in the game, not that they ever left, you just can’t completely get rid all of the cockroaches after an infestation no matter how good the Orkin men happen to be. The Mighty Wurlitzer’s story on the report in question leads with this nightmare blurb which smacks of the apocalyptic conjecture of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds that years before had been used to sell the wars that are still bankrupting America: