Tag: war crimes

    I am greatly saddened to report the following . . .

    Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that US forces in Afghanistan are carrying out what he referred to as “battlefield executions” of prisoners.

   “One of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan,” Hersh said during a discussion at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference last month in Geneva, where he was also the keynote speaker. “They’re being executed on the battlefield.”

HuffingtonPost.com

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    Video and more below the fold

    The Obama Justice Department (on April 15th 2010)* announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years.  

~snip~

    (T)he DOJ alleges “that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA,” and it claims “Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information.”

~snip~

    Although the indictment does not specify Drake’s leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake’s bringing to the public’s attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA’s spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.

salon.com

Bold text and some editing* done by the diarist

   The indictment of Thomas Drake has NOTHING to do with the illegality of the Bush warrantless wiretapping program, rather, it has to do with Drake’s uncovering of major failures and cost over-runs within the domestic spying program. As Greenwald writes . . .

    I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct.  But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened ).  It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.

salon.com

Bold text added by the diarist

    Wait, wait, wait! If Obama’s DoJ is prosecuting crimes from the Bush era isn’t that an act of “Looking backwards, not forward”? ( and yes, revealing state secrets, even if done for the good of the public as whistleblowers do, is still illegal. )

More below the fold

In an Op-Ed on 4/12/2010, Robert Wright wrote about President Obama’s authorization to target a US citizen for assassination and his use of unarmed drones to kill Al Qaeda leaders in villages in Pakistan.

I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me 20 years ago that America would someday be routinely firing missiles into countries it’s not at war with. For that matter, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a few months ago that America would soon be plotting the assassination of an American citizen who lives abroad.

Shows you how much I know. President Obama, who during his first year in office oversaw more drone strikes in Pakistan than occurred during the entire Bush presidency, last week surpassed his predecessor in a second respect: he authorized the assassination of an American – Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Imam who after 9/11 moved from Virginia to Yemen, a base from which he inspires such people as the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be underwear bomber.

The Obama administration has lowered another legal barrier shielding  Americans from extrajudicial punitive action by their own  government, in this case authorizing the CIA to kill a US citizen suspected of  having ties to al-Qaeda in Yemen and links to two attacks inside the United  States last year.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric born in New Mexico but now living in Yemen, may  be the first US citizen targeted for  assassination by the CIA under a counter-terror policy established by  President George W. Bush and since embraced by President Barack Obama.

Awlaki was previously  viewed simply as an Islamic preacher  espousing a radical religious viewpoint, but the reassessment of his status  began last year when it was disclosed that Army Maj. Nidal Hassan had been communicating with  Awlaki via e-mail before the Army psychiatrist allegedly shot and  killed 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood in Texas last November.

A month later, on Christmas Day, a  young Nigerian man, Umar  Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up a  Northwest Airlines jetliner over  Detroit, and US intelligence  officials revealed that Abdulmutallab  had been a student of Awlaki’s in Yemen. Though Awlaki denied ordering the attack, word began to spread that the CIA was adding Awlaki to a list of about  two dozen  people targeted for assassination.

Multiple press reports now indicate  that Awlaki has been put  on the death list, a move that the Obama  administration justifies by claiming  to have information that Awlaki  has shifted from denouncing the United  States to plotting violent acts against Americans.

Read all of it here:

Obama Administration Authorizes CIA to Kill US Citizen

by Jason Leopold, April 7, 2010

The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty used to say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Now it says, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.”

Why did everything go to Hell so fast?    

driftglass knows why, we ll know why . . .

We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick: “I miss Nixon.  Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.”

And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail.  Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.

They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.

America could have had justice.

But America didn’t get justice.  

America got Hopey McChange, who said he wants to look forward, not backward.  Who said there must be no “retribution”, no “vengeance”, no “payback”, who said the era of “divisive partisanship” must end.  

Anybody remember this?

Monday, April 14, 2008 Obama would ask his AG to “immediately review” potential of crimes in Bush White House

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted — but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.

Or this

Turley: Obama ‘owns’ Bush ‘war crimes’ if he looks the other way

David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Raw Story

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

President George W. Bush’s offhand acknowledgement in an interview Sunday with Fox’s Brit Hume that he personally authorized the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may create thorny legal and moral problems for incoming President Barack Obama.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Monday, “We now have President Bush speaking quite candidly that he was in the loop, we have Dick Cheney who almost bragged about it. The question for Barack Obama is whether he wants to own part of this by looking the other way.”

Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, “We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation’s going to be to move forward.”

All most bragged about it? How about admitted it. Not only did the media “yawn”, so did the Obama and the Justice Department

A two part series, from Time magazine, of a total breakdown of a platoon and especially one soldier’s descent into madness in Iraq. The leadership vacuum, moral and the chain of command not recognizing what was happening. {I added ‘abeers’ photo’s}

I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about this book in the coming weeks!