Tag: Afghanistan

From the ACLU’s A Ponzi Scheme of Torture

Chapter 4, Part 3  3/20/2010

http://www.thetorturereport.or…

(this same link in a form which does not jump all over the page when the mouse attempts to scroll over it here:  http://www.thetorturereport.or…  )

Timeline Summary of Binyam Mohamed and Abu Zubaydah:

April 2002.  Binyam Mohamed arrested in Pakistan.  Interrogated by the British Secret Service MI6. Tortured in Moroccan secret prisons.

Sept 2004 Binyam Mohamed sent to Guantanamo, from Bagram, Afghanistan. Although declared an

“enemy combatant”  Nov 2004, Binyam Mohamed decides not to participate in the military Tribunal created by President Bush in Oct 2001.

2005  Binyam Mohamed charged with conspiring against the U.S., with “Usama Bin Laden (a/k/a Abu Abdullah), Saif al Adel, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri (a/k/a “the Doctor”), Mohammad Atef (a/k/a Abu Hafs al Masri), Abd al Hadi al Iraq, Zayn al Abidin Muammad Husayn (a/k/a Abu Zubayda hereinafter “Abu Zubayda”), Jose Padilla, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad” to commit acts of terrorism.

Zubaydah, the vanishing man-

(Binyam)Mohamed was formally recharged with conspiracy on May 28, 2008. The charge sheet is virtually identical to the one issued on November 4, 2005, except that Richard Reid’s name has been removed from paragraph (e) and every reference to Abu Zubaydah has been purged from the document. Where before “Binyam Mohammad then traveled to Birmel, Afghanistan and was introduced to Abu Zubayda” and “Abu Zubayda promised him training in Pakistan building remote control devices for explosives,” for example, now “Binyam Mohamed then traveled to Birmel Afghanistan, and trained on building remote control devices.” “After arriving in Lahore, Binyam Mohammad and Jose Padilla met with Abu Zubayda in private and discussed plans for attacks against the United States” and “Abu Zubayda stated he preferred Binyam Mohamed conduct an ‘overseas’ operation instead of going back to Afghanistan” became “After arriving in Lahore, Binyam Mohamed and Jose Padilla plotted attacks against the United States. After these discussions, Mohamed and Padilla agreed to be sent to the United States to conduct these operations rather than returning to Afghanistan.”23 [23]

Sept 22, 2008. Lt Col Darrel Vandeveld, US military Tribunal prosecutor, requests to resign his military commission, stating he had ethical qualms about continuing to prosecute Guantanamo detainees without evidence being made available for the defense.

Oct 20, 2008.  Pentagon dropped all charges against Binyam Mohamed and four other detainees whose original charge sheets had linked them to Abu Zubaydah.

Oct 21, 2008. The United Kingdom notifies the Foreign Office they are about to hand down notice on releasing CIA documents for Binyam Mohamed’s attorneys.

Oct 22, 2008.   The British courts rule.  A British – US diplomatic tug of war over who goes first, releasing what classified documents, trying to hide the torture evidence, results. This year, a few paragraphs were released, showing that the British govt. secret services did know of Binyam Mohamed’s incarceration.

Jan 22, 2009.  President Obama orders Guantanamo closed, bans torture, forms task force to review all cases.

Feb 23, 2010.  Binyam Mohamed finally freed and returned to the UK.

from Binyam Mohamed’s Statement the day he was released:

….For myself, the very worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence. I had met with British intelligence in Pakistan. I had been open with them. Yet the very people who I hoped would come to my rescue, I later realised, had allied themselves with my abusers.

I am not asking for vengeance; only that the truth should be made known, so that nobody in the future should have to endure what I have endured.

Have a friend that contacted me and in that e-mail she told me about a brainstorming meeting taking place just before this weekend and into, April 1-3 of the Millennial Veterans. One of the couples sons, an Afghanistan and Iraq war Veteran, he served in both theaters, is attending this gathering. This group of Millennials sounds an awful lot like what happened as to us boomer’s especially those of us after our service in the military and especially Vietnam. Matter of fact the whole movement, the Millennials, of this generational group are getting much more involved in many issues that seemed to have skipped over the couple of generations just previous to them at least for most in those generations. I’ve been watching them for a few years now. They’ve not only taken up the issues we oldsters worried about and lobbied to change, in government and in society, they’ve been expanding on them not only to fit these times but like the technology they’ve expanded the issues forward, and now some of them have not only served in War but have done so in Two occupations of choice and in more then one tour of duty.

They call it missing in action, but those soldiers are missing at home, too, at every wedding and every graduation and every holiday.

Sometimes you meet an old man who has children and grandchildren now, and he never had a father. You meet amputees who had twenty good years ahead of them, playing softball or throwing a football around on Thanksgiving or pushing a stroller and lifting a baby ever so carefully out of it…

No war ever ends.

I remember Mr. Bush in the Press Club video, looking under a table for WMDs and all the elite reporters laughing, Karl Rove and Rumsfeld laughing and all the elite reporters laughing with them. Remember them!

There’s always broken souls and crazy men raging in bare rooms, and women who wake up screaming, and children alone in the dark, listening.

Names and dates of birth on tombstones and monuments, and a mother who remembers every birthday, soldiers buried in consecrated ground and others unburied in jungles and wastelands. This was the father who would have given the bride away. This was the brother who would have been the best man.

No war ever ends.

It’s good that President Obama has gone to Afghanistan. There is much to see. And people have been speculating that Afghan “President” Hamid Karzai was informed only at the last minute because the White House doesn’t trust him. The White House has reason not to trust him. Which isn’t the only bad news out of Afghanistan. Despite some attempts to spin it otherwise, the war in Afghanistan is going the way wars in Afghanistan always go. Badly.

The Associated Press has some stark facts:

The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban’s momentum.

Those deaths have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded, with injuries more than tripling in the first two months of the year and trending in the same direction based on the latest available data for March.

U.S. officials have warned that casualties are likely to rise even further as the Pentagon completes its deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and sets its sights on the Taliban’s home base of Kandahar province, where a major operation is expected in the coming months.

Of course, this followed the big offensive in Marja. Which some tried to claim was some great military triumph. Was it?

Filmed in Iraq (the cradle of civilization) 2 weeks before “Shock and Awe”:

It’s GreenChange Blog Action Day and the theme is “war and peace.”  Part of the reason I oppose the war in Afghanistan – and almost every war, for that matter – is the inherent risk to civilians.  Whatever goal we’re fighting for there (getting bin Laden?  getting the Taliban?  getting al Qaeda?  protecting women?  I’m not really sure), it’s not worth the huge civilian death toll.  

Not only is it completely disgusting and tragic that these people are dying, but it only works to create more enemies.  Having a family member or friend killed or having your house blown to smithereens could definitely create an insurgent out of you.

So I’m just going to examine some recent news about civilian deaths, if for no other reason than to get around that terrible media bias of focusing almost exclusively on American deaths.

Where has the new found slanderous noise gatherings, ‘teabagger patriot’s’, been for the past years, before the new administration, and their messages now?

Where is their noise about ‘their’ taxes, and children being left in debt, as to these State AG’s coming out to try and take down the Health Care Bill, just signed, I mean hey, it’s State funds and time by many being spent, that these States don’t have so will need to run up even further huge and growing deficits, don’t know about where you are but we’ve got libraries and schools closing plus, not to mention they certainly sound like lawsuits by Political Activist Lawyers, don’t they hate those.

Know where they were then, saw much of their thoughts on message boards with articles and such over these past years.

I’ll show you at the bottom where many are today, the day after, but first a few reports on the present results of that past.

Everyone seems to know that the tea party “movement” had a rally on the steps of the capitol yesterday.  They got in the face of a few Congressmen and now every Beltway media outlet from the Washington Post to Meet the Press is talking about it.  But there was another protest in town yesterday.  Thousands of people showed up in front of the White House to tell Obama (and Congress) to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to treat Palestinians fairly, and to generally end the US military empire.

MSNBC estimates that somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 tea party people showed up at the capitol building.  Yet the low end of the estimates for the number of people who showed up at the peace demonstration (including myself) is about 2,500, and the high end is about 10,000.  Where’s our moment on Meet the Press?  Where’s our article in the New York Times?

why the fuck is Peter Orszag of OMB even commenting on this ?  

asked Compound F, earlier today.

https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

I picked this off of google cache, written post election, Nov 18 2008, marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives

Obama Wants Orszag At OMB

18 Nov 2008 03:05 pm

Barack Obama has tapped CBO director Peter Orszag to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, my collegues at National Journal report today.

He’s a youngish overachiever, just 40, and subscribes to the theory of what he once called “cool-headed, warm-hearted” economic policy. Judging by his blog, Orszag has smart and interesting things to say about the intersection of psychology and economics, the long-term vs. short-term effects of climate change legislation, honest budgeting and accounting, and lots more.

OMB is the executive branch’s budgetary arm and management oversight evaluator. The director serves as a key presidential adviser on the economy and is responsible for projecting the fiscal consequences of any presidential decision. OMB would figure out how much Barack Obama’s health care plan will cost, for example, as it gets introduced in Congress. It’ll score every bill that Congress sends to Obama. It’s the repository of policy, responsible for official statements. More to the point, though, is that OMB will administer Obama’s transparency agenda. Regulatory reform will originate at OMB.

HuffPo has been following Orszag’s love life, the love child with the Greek tycoon heiress, and the engagement to the drop dead gorgeous young Russian born ABC news “financial reporter.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

This is going to be an action packed weekend in DC and around the nation.  On Friday, there will be protests of Yoo.  On Saturday, there will be a massive antiwar demonstration (there will also be demonstrations in Philly, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and South Dakota, among other places).  On Sunday, there will be a large march for immigration reform.  And there will be other related events around the country, along with the small protests and events that happen all the time.

So join me below the fold to see how you can effect change this weekend.

Game of Life Reddit alien generator from Tom Robinson on Vimeo.

John Horton Conway’s game of “Life” is just about the simplest representation of organic processes which captures anything of their complexity, and it’s essentially unpredictable.

No one has ever discovered a general description of the sort of structure which will generate relatively simple patterns like a “reddit alien.” The folklore of “Life” evolved by trial and error over millions of hours of computer animations in math and physics and computer science departments all over the world, and the sort of people who are better at understanding this sort of thing than anybody else only slowly, slowly developed a few rules of thumb for designing simple structures whose evolution we can more or less predict, but only after observing the still unpredictable outcome of microscopic variations in initial conditions, all of them exquisitely sensitive to the alteration of even one pixel on the screen, where almost anything that you and I would call a pattern rapidly dissolves into disorder.

Now imagine a game of “Life” where the rules vary radically across the screen, external factors constantly impinge upon the game, and you don’t know the rules.

This is a picture of the American “game” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.