Tag: war crimes

While we were all shopping and arguing over whether or not fruitcake is fit for human consumption, Obama decided to go to bat and fight for someone.   Who was he fighting for?   The torturers of the Bush administration, that’s who.   Oh, and anyone else in the United States government who wants to torture and violate the human rights of others.

As Chris Floyd reports, The United States is now legally free to torture whomever it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court of the land, and the political power weilded by Barrack Hussein Obama.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.”  They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

And people wonder what this “hatred” is towards Obama.   “I didn’t get my pony?” they ask?   Ha.  They have no idea.   I hate Obama for the same reasons I hate Bush.  Why?  Because Obama IS Bush.   His administration is one and the same as the Bush administration, and I mean that quite literally when it comes to justice, human rights, and the wars.    ALL THE SAME PEOPLE are running the show, and we know that Bush’s Justice Department is a bunch of corrupt, human rights-violating  flunkies recruited from the ranks of the “religious right”.    And they are still in office, fighting for their hatreds

Now Obama is not just passively letting these people continue the Bush/Cheney yearas, he is going out of his way to enable  them.  

He is putting his name to the most egregious violations of human rights in this nation’s history.  

What’s really pathological is that he is shitting on the very system that freed African American people, of which he is a gene-carrying member.  

More from antiwar.com:

US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’

by William Fisher,

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that “torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use.”

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

Ironically, the first African American president is promoting a policy frighteningly familiar to the Dred Scott decision of yesteryear:

“Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow,” he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants – whether or not they were slaves – were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

Thanks, Obama.   Next time someone calls you an “Uncle Tom” I simply won’t cringe.  I might even nod.   I might even say “hell yeah.”

Drip, drip, drip…………… more from the faucet of recent history coming out from across the pond. When following this Inquiry, especially in viewing, insert American faces of those known from the cheney/bush administration and multiply the known and unknown ten, twenty, thirty……….times as they were the ringleaders and intelligence manipulators seeking justification to invade and destroy an innocent people and their country.

Just think how long before the Brits found out about the following did our administration and probably many in the ‘lockstep rubber stamping congress’ know:

I wonder if the Philadelphia Inquirer will start printing opinion pieces by Charles Taylor or Robert Mugabe soon.  Probably not, because their crimes were committed in Africa, at a safe distance from the editors’ board room, where the editors can comfortably judge these war criminals’ actions.  They aren’t intellectuals who justified torture of prisoners in America, like John Yoo.

In any case, they’re printing Yoo’s op-ed pieces now.  They are giving credibility to him and destroying their own credibility.  And, surprise, today John Yoo is saying that there’s no real reason to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a federal court in New York City.

House Shames Itself on Goldstone Report

Do you even know what the Goldstone Report is?    Ring any bells?   Have you heard the Corporate Media even mention it in the last few days?   Maybe?   Barely?   Sorta?  

Gotta love how this story is already down the Memory Hole, after barely any mention in the press WHATSOEVER.

Our beloved House of Representatives passed a resolution by a nearly 10-1 margin denouncing The Goldstone Report, which was issued by the United Nations and basically charged the state of Israel with WAR CRIMES in its brutal and inhuman attack on the Gaza Strip last year.

Shame on the House of Representatives, and on the Democratic leadership of the House, for pushing through a resolution once again blindly taking the side of Israeli aggression.

I’m referring to the vote on Tuesday, by a lopsided 344-to-36 margin*, to condemn the Goldstone report on Gaza.

That report, by South African jurist Richard Goldstone for the UN, showed that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes in the lead-up to and during Israel’s invasion of Gaza almost a year ago. (To read the executive summary, click here)

It noted that Israel deliberately attacked civilian targets, and did not take sufficient action to minimize civilian loss of life. For instance, it found that Israel even refused to allow the evacuation of the injured by ambulance.

The report also condemned Hamas for its rocket attacks into Israel, which the report said were designed to create terror.

Even as the U.N. was about to consider the report, the House measure called it “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” And it urged the Obama Administration to “strongly and unequivocally oppose” any discussion of it at the UN.

This reflexive attitude that Israel can do no wrong is morally bankrupt and exceedingly unhelpful in resolving, in a just manner, the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.

If you were paying any attention whatsoever, it is quite clear that Israel did, in fact, commit war crimes, and in no way can what they did be construed as “defending themselves.”

Yet our House of Representatives blindly sides with this tiny, belligerent, racist war-criminal state.  

Why?  

I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now why the United States blindly supports the most fascist and peace-threatening regime in the Western World, the state of Israel.   What does the United States get out of the deal?   It sure as hell isn’t about “Democracy”.   The United States doesn’t give a rats ass about Democracy in any other country, no in any way shape or form.   Just look at our support of the totalitarian, boiling-people-alive country of Uzbekistan for one despicable instance.

It might be about sharing intelligence and resources for covert activities and blackops, but the U.S. does that with other countries as well, such as Turkey, without such a blatant in-your-face disregard for human rights.    

“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.

Craig Murray was the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan until 2004, when he was let go for bringing up his concerns about these heinous and disgusting crimes.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

So this is your “war on terror”.   Torture people until they confess to whatever you want, then call it “intelligence” and send your forces, the guys who would take a bullet for you, the guys who think they’re doing what’s right, off on wild goose chases.

Nice.

What’s really disgusting is that the United States thought this would all be nice and legal since it was outsourced.  You know, it’s like thinking that hiring the hitman to kill your wife makes it ok, since you’re not the one pulling the trigger.

How the HELL could these idiots think this was legal?

It sure as hell isn’t legal if I hire someone to do something extremely illegal.  Not if it’s little old me, here in the United States.  But I guess the wizards like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo were paid big bucks to come up with ways that we could torture people in the most medivel ways and get away with it.  

Oh, and if you thought somehow this was actually about a “war on terrorism”?  

Wrong.  It’s about natural gas, and pipelines.

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.

Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.

“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”

The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.

What this means is that the “war on terror” isn’t even real.  The terror isn’t even real.  People are being boiled alive, and watching their children being tortured in front of them, so they’ll CONFESS to being terrorists, so we have an EXCUSE to keep our military there, and take over the country.

That’s about as evil as evil gets.

And our guy Obama seems to think it’s just a-ok to keep covering this up.  To do nothing about it.  Doesn’t that make him an accomplice?   I think it does.