Guantanamo Defendant Calls Trial a ‘Sham’

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

This April 24, 2007 file photo shows a Joint Task Force guard (L) at Camp #1 inside the detainee center at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba, as he talks with a detainee who has had his identity obscured per military review restrictions. Photo by Paul J. Richards / AFP / Getty Images.

The Saudi detainee refuses to participate in the military tribunal proceedings against him, which he calls politically motivated.
By Carol J. Williams / April 10, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — A Saudi prisoner Wednesday denounced the war crimes case against him as a politically motivated “sham” and had himself removed from the courtroom in symbolic protest.

Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza Al-Darbi, whose brother-in-law was among the Sept. 11 hijackers, informed the military judge hearing his terrorism conspiracy case that he wanted neither legal representation nor to be present at his trial.

Al-Darbi, 33, has been charged with conspiracy and material support for terrorism for allegedly training with Al Qaeda and plotting to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Al-Darbi, whose war crimes case is one of seven inching their way toward trial by the military tribunal at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, has yet to enter a plea and made clear he wouldn’t be returning for future sessions.

He arrived in court in the white tunic and blue canvas shoes denoting a compliant detainee and politely told the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, that he did not want to be represented by the military lawyer assigned to his case nor by any civilian attorney.

“History will record these trials as a scandal,” Al-Darbi said. “I advise you, the judge, and everyone else who is present to not continue with this play, this sham.”

Last month, a detainee charged with attempted murder in a grenade attack that wounded two U.S. national guardsmen in Afghanistan also refused to cooperate. Mohammed Jawad, a 23-year-old Afghan who had to be dragged from his cell for a March 12 arraignment, said he would boycott proceedings he considered illegitimate.

Pretrial hearings have begun for two other defendants, and three await arraignment, including another one this week.

Prosecutors have announced their intentions to try seven other Guantanamo prisoners but have yet to serve them with the war crimes charges announced as long as two months ago. Among those awaiting activation are the capital cases against self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five others accused of roles in those attacks.

The Army lawyer assigned to defend Al-Darbi, Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, is required by the military tribunal’s rules to represent the absent defendant anyway.

But Broyles said he would seek guidance from his bar association in Kentucky, as well as from the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, on whether ethical standards would prohibit his representation of a client who doesn’t want him.

Broyles faces a dilemma if he is ordered by the judge to defend Al-Darbi and advised by legal ethicists against an active role. “There’s every possibility that I’ll end up being a potted plant,” Broyles said.

In his brief address to Pohl, Al-Darbi repeated claims that he had been abused while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan.

Broyles told journalists last month that he’d been told by Al-Darbi that an Army counterintelligence specialist had beaten him and left him hanging from handcuffs during interrogations at Bagram air base, north of the capital, Kabul. Broyles indicated that any trial of his client would probably be bogged down in procedural wrangling for months.

Al-Darbi has never been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant, a necessary step before the tribunal can claim jurisdiction in the case.

None of the allegations against Al-Darbi tie him to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. His brother-in-law, Khalid Almihdhar, was one of the five hijackers who commandeered American Airlines Flight 77 and plowed it into the Pentagon.

Source. / LA Times / The Rag Blog

“Lord of the Rings” confiscated at Guantanamo
By Jane Sutton / April 11, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Guards seized a copy of the “Lord of the Rings” screenplay and a box of legal papers from a young Canadian facing trial at Guantanamo, prompting harsh words between his military defence lawyer and a spokesman for the detention operation.

The exchange, which took place over Wednesday and Thursday, came as 21-year-old Canadian captive Omar Khadr faced another pretrial hearing in the U.S. war court that has charged him with murdering a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002.

Khadr’s hearing at the remote U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba was postponed from Thursday to Friday by mutual consent of the prosecution and defence, a spokesman for the Pentagon office overseeing the trials said.

Khadr’s military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, told journalists that guards had seized a box of legal documents lawyers had given Khadr to review, returning only the empty box.

“He can’t even look at materials he needs to look at in order to help us defend him,” Kuebler complained, adding that rules for what prisoners facing trial can keep in their cells were constantly changing.

The spokesman for the joint task force that runs the detention centre rolled his eyes as Kuebler spoke and later disparaged his comments.

Guards are required to search detainees’ possessions for contraband and seized the box of documents because it contained items Khadr was not permitted to have, including the “Lord of the Rings” script, pictures and Internet news articles, the spokesman, Lt. Col. Ed Bush said.

“Materials considered to be related to detainee Khadr’s case have been returned with a stamp that will avoid any future confusion about the nature of the materials,” Bush said in a statement.

He said the screenplay had been returned to Kuebler “as a violation of the prohibition against providing detainees materials that are not directly related to his representation of his client.”

Kuebler said he had given Khadr the screenplay to help build rapport with him, noting that interrogators were permitted to give prisoners food and other gifts to develop their relationship and promote trust and information-sharing.

The exchange highlighted tensions between military defence lawyers, who have been among the loudest critics of the Guantanamo court, and authorities at the detention camp in southeastern Cuba.

The lawyers have complained that prison rules impede their efforts to put on an effective defence, while some in the detention operation have accused the lawyers of lying about

Source. / Reuters / The Rag Blog

Also see Guantanamo lawyer questions how U.S. soldier died.
For more facts about Guantanamo prison, go here.

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Manning Marable : African American Peacemakers

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Dr. Manning Marable.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and the Struggle against Racism, Inequality and War
by Manning Marable

[The following was first delivered as a speech at the University of Illinois at Chicago, sponsored by the Great Cities Institute on April 4, 2008. It is an important document and worthy of our attention.]

4 April 2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We still tend to focus our image of Martin delivering his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, at the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. However, civil rights was not the only issue that divided America in the 1960s. By 1966, U.S. military forces in South Vietnam amounted to 184,000; by January 1969, 536,000 U.S. troops were stationed in that country. For black Americans, the war had a direct impact upon every community. African Americans comprised about one out of every seven U.S. soldiers stationed in Vietnam, and because African Americans tended to be placed in “combat units” more often than middle-class whites. They also bore unfairly higher risks of being killed and wounded. From January through November 1966, over one-fifth of all army casualties were black.

By 1965, however, a small number of black progressives had begun to speak in opposition to the war. Julian Bond, elected to the Georgia State House of Representatives, defended the right of “the Vietnamese peasants who … have expressed a real desire to govern themselves.” The “gunboat diplomacy of the past” had little place in contemporary world affairs. Perhaps the most articulate opponent of the US war effort holding public office was US Representative Ronald V. Dellums. From the floor of Congress, Dellums declared:

“I consider our involvement in Indochina illegal, immoral and insane. We are in a war which is the greatest human and economic drain on American resources in modern times – a war disproportionately waged on the backs of blacks and browns and reds and yellows and poor and working class whites, a war resulting in an untold number of deaths of the Vietnamese people, a war that is justified only by the notion that we as a nation, must save face … Millions of people in the country are no longer willing to engage in such folly and be cannon fodder, and go across the water to spill their blood on foreign soil in a cause many of them do not even understand.”

Black activists and intellectuals, who were part of the Black Power movement, had serious reservations about participating in anti-war organizations dominated by white liberals and leftists. But almost all of them opposed the Vietnam War; some even drew an analogy between the suffering of the Vietnamese as a “colonial people”, and the “domestic colonialism” experienced by African Americans.

During the bitter national debate on Vietnam, nearly all major all public leaders within black America were forced to choose sides. As a dedicated pacifist, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not look upon the conflict benignly without taking some kind of public stand against the war. At the annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) executive board meeting held in Baltimore on 1-2 April 1965, Dr. King expressed the need to criticize the Johnson Administration’s policies in Southeast Asia. His old colleagues, fearful that Dr. King’s support for the anti-war movement would hurt the SCLC financially and politically, voted to allow him to do so only as a private person, without organizational endorsement. Bayard Rustin, the key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, still maintained close ties with King, and tried to pressure the SCLC leader into a position of neutrality on Vietnam. On 10 September 1965, Rustin, Dr. King, and SCLC aides Andrew Young and Bernard Lee met with the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg. Goldberg managed to convince Dr. King, for the moment, that the Johnson Administration had every intention of bringing the conflict to a peaceful resolution. For several months, Dr. King watched anxiously as the number of US troops stationed in Vietnam increased. Finally in January 1966, Dr. King published his criticisms about the Vietnam War.

“Some of my friends of both races, and others who do not consider themselves my friends, have expressed disapproval because I have been voicing concern over the war in Vietnam,” Dr. King explained. But as a Christian, Dr. King believed that he had no choice except to “declare that war is wrong.” Black leaders could not become blind to the rest of the world’s issues, while engaged solely in problems of domestic race relations. Martin argued, “The Negro must not allow himself to become a victim of the self-serving philosophy of those who manufacture war that the survival of the world is the white man’s business alone.” The negative response to Dr. King’s anti-war statement was swift. SCLC leaders in Chattanooga, Tennessee, severed relations with the national organization in protest. National Urban League director Whitney Young replied that blacks were not interested in the Vietnam issue. Martin vigorously lobbied among his allies in the SCLC to back his position on Vietnam, and in the spring of 1966 the organization’s executive board came out officially against the war.

Increasingly, as Dr. King’s attention was drawn to the Vietnam war, he also began to consider the necessity for black Americans to devise a more radical strategy for domestic reforms. Dr. King was beginning to articulate a radical democratic vision for American society: the nationalization of basic industries; massive federal expenditures to revive central cities and to provide jobs for ghetto residents; programs to address rural poverty; a job or guaranteed income for every adult American.

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before his assassination, Martin delivered his eloquent, yet controversial address, “Beyond Vietnam,” at New York City’s Riverside Church. In his sermon, Dr. King advanced his strongest denunciation yet of the U.S. military escalation in Vietnam.

“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,” Dr. King began, “because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” Martin noted that the presence of hundreds of thousands of US troops in southeast Asia had only led to the deaths of thousands of innocent victims, and had cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” Dr. King observed. It was impossible for the administration of then-President Lyndon Johnson to carry out his “Great Society” social programs, or his “War On Poverty,” when billions of dollars were being reallocated to destroy Vietnamese villages, towns and homes. King announced that “it would be very inconsistent for me to teach and preach nonviolence in this situation and applaud violence when thousands and thousands of people, both adults and children, are being maimed and many killed in this war.”

Despite these criticisms, eleven days later, in New York City’s Central Park, Dr. King led a rally of 125,000 in protest against the Vietnam War. As New York Times journalist Bob Herbert observed, Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” address “unleashed a hurricane of criticism.” The NAACP and other moderate civil rights leaders, such as Bayard Rustin, sharply criticized King for “stepping out of his perceived area of expertise, civil rights, to raise his voice against the evil of the war.” The New York Times joined these critics, proclaiming in an editorial headline, “Dr. King’s Error.”

Four decades later, the US was once again confronted with a controversial, unwinnable ground war in Asia, and a domestic debate over our military involvement there. In the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks after 9/11 back in 2001, African Americans, like other Americans, were morally and politically outraged by Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. Yet they were deeply troubled by the immediate groundswell of patriotic fervor, national chauvinism and numerous acts of violence and harassment targeting individual Muslims and Arab Americans. They recognized that behind this mass upsurgence of American patriotism was xenophobia, ethnic and religious intolerance that could potentially reinforce traditional white racism against all people of color, particularly themselves. They questioned the Bush administration’s “Patriot Act of 2001” and other legal measures that severely restricted Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights. For these reasons, the majority of black leaders sought to uphold Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s tradition of civil rights and civic liberties, and boldly challenged the US rationale for its military incursions in both Afghanistan, and later Iraq.

Read all of it here. The Black Commentator

[Dr. Manning Marable holds the position of Professor of Public Affairs, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University, where he founded and directs the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. Dr. Marable is the author or editor of more than 20 books. His current project is a major biography of Malcolm X, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, to be published by Viking Press in 2009.

Dr. Manning Marable also serves as national chair of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS).]

Visit the website of Dr. Manning Marable.

Thanks to Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog

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Paying to Repair It for Decades to Come

Posted on April 11, 2008 by RagBlog

Iraq and the US economy: ills feeding off each other
By Joseph E. Stiglitz / April 11, 2008

Some say there are two issues in the coming American elections: the Iraq war and the economy. On days when the war seems to be going better than expected, and the economy worse, the economy eclipses the war; but neither is faring well. In some sense, there is only one issue, and that is the war, which has exacerbated America’s economic problems. And when the world’s largest economy is sick – and it is now very sick – the entire world suffers.

It used to be thought that wars were good for the economy. After all, World War II is widely thought to have helped lift the global economy out of the Great Depression. But, at least since John Maynard Keynes, we know how to stimulate the economy more effectively, and in ways that increase long-term productivity and enhance living standards.

The Iraq war, in particular, has not been good for the United States’ economy, for three reasons. First, it has contributed to rising oil prices. When the US went to war, oil cost less than $25 a barrel and futures markets expected it to remain there for a decade. Futures traders knew about the growth of China and other emerging markets; but they expected supply – mainly from low-cost Middle East providers – to increase in tandem with demand.

The war changed that equation. Higher oil prices mean that Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Middle East oil dictators and oil exporters elsewhere in the world rather than spending it at home.

Moreover, money spent on the Iraq war does not stimulate the economy today as much as money spent at home on roads, hospitals, or schools, and it doesn’t contribute as much to long-term growth. Economists talk about “bang for the buck” – how much economic stimulus is provided by each dollar of spending. It’s hard to imagine less bang than from bucks spent on a Nepalese contractor working in Iraq.

With so many dollars going abroad, the American economy should have been in a much weaker shape than it appeared. But, much as the Bush administration tried to hide the true costs of the war by incomplete and misleading accounting, the economy’s flaws were covered up by a flood of liquidity from the Federal Reserve and by lax financial regulation.

So much money was pumped into the economy and so lax were regulators that one leading American bank advertised its loans with the slogan “qualified at birth” – a clear indication that there were, in effect, no credit standards. In a sense, the strategy worked: a housing bubble fed a consumption boom, as savings rates plummeted to zero. The economic weaknesses were simply being postponed to some future date. The Bush administration hoped that the day of reckoning would come after November 2008. Instead, things began to unravel in August 2007.

[Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University, received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. His most recent book, co-authored with Linda Bilmes, is “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.”]

Read all of it here. Daily Star, Lebanon / The Rag Blog
Also seeThe $3 Trillion War by Joseph Stiglitz / The Rag Blog

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Illinois Man Makes It Through Day

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Blume summons the strength to brush his teeth.

Adam Blume: An amazing story of survival.
April 11, 2008

Schaumburg, IL—Despite an overwhelming, seemingly endless barrage of frustrations, area systems analyst Adam Blume made it through the entire day Tuesday, overcoming the odds against him in a Herculean display of courage, perseverance, and the indomitable human spirit.

According to witnesses, though it seemed on more than one occasion throughout the day that his life would come to an end, Blume valiantly found the wherewithal to carry on. Not only did the 37-year-old successfully get out of bed and leave his apartment, but he somehow found the strength to navigate through the day’s many challenges and, once victorious, made his way back home again. Hit from every side with such formidable opponents as suburban conformity, mind-numbing coworkers, and the celebrity “infotainment” magazine he paged through on his lunch break, Blume nonetheless trudged along—permitting nothing, no matter how soul-deadening, to break his will.

“Man, what a day,” Blume said regarding his 16-hour battle with everything from public transportation to profound spiritual alienation.

Experts estimate that, by 10 p.m. Tuesday night, Blume had survived exposure to approximately 1,700 advertising images of epic banality, at least 35 emotionless interactions with complete strangers without making any real human contact, and more than 25,000 moments of soul-crushing inner emptiness throughout the almost day-long struggle. In addition, he also surmounted the onslaught of more than 150 separate anxiety-producing forces, including credit card debt, weight gain, hair loss, sexual inferiority, loneliness, a dead-end job, geographical isolation from extended family, virus-laden spam, the need to keep his cell phone charged, in-store Muzak, mortality, mounting laundry and dishes, his cable bill, indefinable longing, fear of terrorism, online gossip, the unavoidable certainty of his own unimportance, nostalgia for a past that never was, severe lower-back pain, and general ennui.

“I only wish I had gotten a chance to pick up those replacement filters for the vacuum cleaner,” Blume said only moments after valiantly suppressing the urge to set fire to his carefully cataloged file cabinet of insurance information and old appliance manuals. “The last ones I got were for the wrong model, but I can’t take them back because I didn’t save the receipt and now I need new ones.”

How Blume made it out of his kitchen—let alone his apartment and suffocating cubicle—may never be known.

“And for some reason, I had the song ‘Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe’ stuck in my head all day,” he added.

Blume’s epic odyssey of survival reportedly began at 6:15 a.m., the moment he awoke. After enduring the sudden, unrelenting attack of his bedside alarm clock, Blume resisted the near-overpowering compulsion to press the snooze button a second time. Courageously hurling himself from bed and dragging his almost unconscious body the 15 feet to his bathroom, Blume was almost defeated before even making it to work when, as he was putting toothpaste on his toothbrush, it fell on the floor.

“I thought I was going to lose it right there,” Blume later told reporters. “It was lying in that space between the sink and the bathtub, covered in dust, so I had to bend over, grab it, rinse it off under some hot water, and put some more toothpaste on it. I hate when that happens.”

According to roommate Joe Tesch, with whom Blume shares an apartment despite already having reached middle age, the physically, financially, and spiritually exhausted man then stared at his hollow face in the mirror for approximately three minutes before showering, shaving, and moving his bowels in time to catch the 7:04 bus.

After arriving at work, Blume’s trials and tribulations only continued. Over the next 10 hours, Blume weathered an onslaught against his very humanity, from automated menus on telephones and cash machines, to shrill homeless men yelling in the street, to a coffee stain on his workplace-mandated tie.

This was not Blume’s first exposure to adversity. When pressed, he was able to recall several such incidents, including the time in May 1993 when he walked on crutches all the way from the bus stop at the bottom of a large hill in Madison, WI to the unemployment office located at the top, the 72 hours he spent stranded in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport during the 2004 Christmas season, and the thousands of other battles before, between, and since.

“Another day, another dollar,” said Blume, modestly downplaying the impressive scope of his accomplishments. “I suppose I just did what anybody would have done.”

Blume’s inspiring battle against the dehumanizing forces of modernity continues tomorrow

Source. The Onion / The Rag Blog

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Hook ‘Em : UT Laser Makes Brightest Light in the Universe

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Erhard Gaul, research associate at the Fusion Research Center, left, speaks beside the Texas Petawatt laser with Dr. Yury Zakharov from the Novosibirsk Institute in Russia and Willie Padilla, professor of physics at Boston College. Photo by Peter Franklin / Daily Texan.

UT owns world’s most powerful laser:
Texas Petawatt is stronger than U.K. rival
By: Katie Petroski / April 19, 200k

UT houses a laser, nestled in a cramped basement room, that created the brightest light in the universe for fractions of a second March 31, beaming the University into the international spotlight.

After four years under construction, the Texas Petawatt laser reached 1.1 petawatts of power, making it the most powerful laser in the world. The only other laser that can reach petawatt capacity is in the United Kingdom.

The laser sits on a 30-foot-long table in a room that filters particles out of the air. Hundreds of optic components are hand-bolted to the table to create a pathway for the laser beam to compress and amplify the energy. This process keeps the light beams from damaging the equipment and still generates as much energy as possible.

The beam ultimately travels about 200 feet back and forth through a series of optics and amplifiers until it reaches its target that rests in a chamber about the size of a kickball.

Todd Ditmire, a physics professor and the director of the Texas Petawatt project, explained the laser’s power. The sunlight that falls on the state of Texas yields 100 trillion watts. A petawatt is the equivalent of 1,000-million-million watts of energy.

The power focuses on an area one-tenth the width of a human hair and occurs fast enough for 1 million laser pulses to stack end to end in the time it takes to blink an eye, said Mikael Martinez, Texas Petawatt’s project manager. Dimensions as small as this create temperatures up to 10 million degrees Celsius, hotter than the center of the sun.

This creates conditions similar to the center of stars, allowing scientists to understand astrophysics in previously inconceivable ways.

“With lasers like this, we can bring some of that down to earth in a laboratory,” Ditmire said.

The Texas Petawatt’s unique system of shortening the pulse and amplifying light energy to generate so much power also enables the system to create neutrons that aid in understanding how nuclear reactors age over time.

Martinez hopes the laser, which has undergone construction since 2004, will continuously generate enough power by the end of the summer to fire its first shots.

“This makes us extremely proud,” said Martinez, who added that the laser appeared on Wired.com.

“Other people have impressive lasers, but this puts us in an internationally unique regime where we can perform high-density experiments that no one else can.”

Source. Daily Texan / The Rag Blog

Image courtesy Mikael Martinez and the Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd Ditmire.

Texans Build World’s Most Powerful Laser
By Alexis Madrigal / April 08, 2008

Scientists have switched on the world’s most powerful laser, which for one-trillionth of a second is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the United States. The laser’s output tops a petawatt, which is a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) watts of power.

In the basement of the physics building at the University of Texas at Austin, the school’s High Intensity Laser Science Group built a petawatt laser in hopes of recreating astronomical phenomena like supernovae in miniature.

“We can put materials into states that you can’t access here on earth,” said Mikael Martinez, the laser project’s manager. “You’d have to go out into space and hang out with an exploding star to observe what we plan to observe here in Texas.”

When the scientists turned on the laser on March 31, it became the world’s most powerful operational laser, but it doesn’t yet hold the record for the most powerful laser ever built. That honor, at least for a few more months, belongs to the now mothballed Nova laser built at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The Nova produced 1.25 petawatts of power when it was first switched on in 1996. Martinez said he expected his project to break that record within the year, reaching between 1.3 and 1.5 petawatts.

Below, we take a virtual walk through the tech — amplifiers, compressors and crystals — that make this Texas-size laser so powerful.

The power of a laser, its output in watts, is determined by the energy of the laser pulse, measured in joules, divided by its duration, measured in seconds (tiny fractions of a second in this case). So, to get high power, you can either turn up the energy or cram the same amount of energy into a shorter duration pulse — or do both. The problem is that turning up the energy makes it more difficult to get short pulses.

The solution to this problem require an almost Rube-Goldberg setup inside a 1,500-square-foot cleanroom. The most powerful laser in the world starts, poetically enough, with a “seed laser” that puts out a wimpy nanojoule of energy for a couple hundred femtoseconds (that’s 10-15 seconds). It must be run through a series of amplifiers, compressors, and stretchers before it can recreate the conditions inside the sun for a trillionth of a second.

Source. Wired Science / The Rag Blog

But Can it do This?

Thanks to Burnt Orange Report.

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George W. Bush Is a War Criminal

Posted on April 11, 2008 by RagBlog


White House Authorized War Crimes
By Jan Crawford Greenburg, Howard L. Rosenberg and Ariane de Vogue / April 9, 2008

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ // Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were “hundreds of [Principals] meetings” on a wide variety of topics and that he was “not at liberty to discuss private meetings.”

The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment today.

Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.

“I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us the information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and across the world,” Bush said in a speech in September 2006.

Read the rest here.
ABC News / Information Clearing House / The Rag Blog

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Olbermann : Some Telling Commentary on the State of the Military in Iraq

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

No end in sight on Iraq?
By Thorne Dreyer / April 10, 2008 / The Rag Blog

Below is video from Keith Olbermann’s Countdown from this evening, April 10, 2008. It features snippets from President Bush’s speech on Iraq with the usual gleefully caustic and sardonic commentary from Olbermann.

Keith calls the president a “liar” one more time. He points out that the post-surge “drawdown” leaves more American troops in Iraq than were there before the surge. And, in response to W’s announcement that GI’s will now alternate between 12 months in Iraq and 12 months at home, Olbermann reminds us that the Democrats proposed just that a year ago and were voted down. He says that GI suicides are occurring at a record rate. And, that most sane voices now advise that nothing short of two years at home and one year in the field will suffice — in terms of the sanity of the soldiers and their families and the effectiveness of the fighting force.

Most interesting, though, was Olbermann’s interview with Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson was ascerbic in his criticism of Bush and of the state of the military in Iraq. First, he said, “I don’t believe Iraq is a theater in the war on terrorism,” and added that the mumbling among the generals about the conditions with the military is growing louder. The situation in Iraq is now “reminiscent of the worst days in Vietnam,” he said.

Col. Wilkerson said, in his opinion, that Bush and Cheaney decided on a strategy for Iraq in the summer of 2007 to “put enough troops in Iraq and a Commander in Iraq and an Ambassador” whose mission was set the course in a manner designed to avoid “major damage to the Republican Party, and further damage to the White House,” and to pass the problem on to the next administration. That was their strategy, he says, “and it looks like they’re going to get away with it.”

In sum, Col. Wilkerson said, “you’re talking about an administration that treats the troop as if it’s as disposible as a plastic glove.”

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Junior’s Reality Is One We Don’t Comprehend

Posted on April 11, 2008 by RagBlog

I’m through with masking the truth. It is time to publicise in vivid red, white, and blue the horrible consequences of this illegal, immoral, unconscionable war in the Middle East. When you finally become sick enough of seeing these graphic, real images of what happens in combat, perhaps some of you will finally begin to do something concrete and active to stop this war.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Bush Orders Halt to Troop Withdrawals
By DEB RIECHMANN, AP, Posted: 2008-04-10 12:26:29

WASHINGTON (April 10) -President Bush on Thursday ordered an indefinite halt in U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq after July, embracing the key recommendations of his top war commander. Bush said that Gen. David Petraeus will “have all the time he needs” to consider when more American forces could return home.

Bush’s decisions virtually guarantees a major U.S. presence in Iraq throughout his term in office in January, when a new president takes office.

In another major decision, the president announced he will seek to relieve the heavy strain on the Army by reducing the length of combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to 12 months, down from the current level of 15 months. He said the change would take effect on Aug. 1, and would affect U.S. forces already deployed on the front lines.

Bush said U.S. force have made major gains since he ordered a buildup of about 30,000 U.S. forces. “We have renewed and revived the prospect of success” the president said.

Bush delivered his remarks in the Cross Hall of the White House before an audience of veterans’ service groups and Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The president’s decision had been foreshadowed by two days of testimony before a skeptical Congress by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad. Now in its sixth year, the war has claimed the lives of more than 4,000 U.S. troops and cost more than $500 billion.

Read all of it here.

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M. Wizard on Documentary Film CHICAGO 10

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

CHICAGO 10 – OFFICIAL TRAILER

Power to the People : Chicago Remembered
By Mariann Wizard / April 10, 2008 / The Rag Blog

I took a little time this afternoon and went to see the movie Chicago 10 at the Regal Arbor in Austin — it’s about the trial of the Chicago 8-slash-7, and the “10” in the title, my son’s girlfriend figured out, has gotta be the lawyers, Kunstler and Weinglass, who along with the defendants were all sentenced to varying amounts of time behind bars for contempt.

The movie has a killer soundtrack; LOUD!, which I liked, and combines black and white and color (colorized???) footage from 1968 and ’69 pretty seamlessly with animated courtroom scenes, drawn from news artists’ contemporary sketches. The neat thing about the documentary footage is that director Brett Morgen jiggles and bounces and mixes it like a club deejay workin’ a Smokey Robinson tune, so you see the movement even in the stills, the blood even in the b&w.

Chicago 10 has its limitations — for some reason, although Dr. King’s assassination and the ensuing riots are brought in — Robert Kennedy’s assassination goes unnoted, as does LBJ’s decision not to seek the presidency in 1968 and any mention of Hubert Humphrey. Gene McCarthy is mentioned once, in passing and dismissively, and the clash which finally occurred between Chicago’s finest and actual convention delegates, when the police riot spilled over into the delegates’ hotel, is way downplayed. Having said that, try to catch this limited engagement; it will get your feet moving reflexively to evade capture and keep ahead of the tear gas.

The movie ends with Bobby Seale, free at last, addressing a huge throng of supporters, probably in Oakland, and beginning with the words, “Power to the People”! Good slogan, anybody ever think about reviving it??

Go here to director Brett Morgen website.
Review of Chicago 10 in Mother Jones.
Review in Chicago Tribune.

CHICAGO 10 – Seale vs. Hoffman

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The Clinton-Colombia Connection : It Goes Back a Long Way

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Bill Clinton and Columbian President Alvaro Uribe Valez at Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York, Sept. 20, 2006.

Columbia : Coffee, Cocaine and Clinton
By Arianna Huffington

A week ago, if you’d asked most people to say the first thing that popped into their heads when they heard the word “Colombia,” you might have gotten: “Bogotá,” “coffee,” “cocaine,” or maybe even “kidnappings.”

Today that list would probably be led by “Clinton.”

First came chief strategist Mark Penn’s “reassignment” following the embarrassing revelation of his side job advising the Colombian government on how to promote a trade agreement loudly decried by the candidate whose campaign has so far paid him and his firm $10,800,000 for his input.

Then came word that Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson also has financial ties to Colombia via his involvement the Glover Park Group, a company founded by Clinton administration alum Joe Lockhart that has also been advising the Colombian government.

And, of course, there is the Whitman sampler of Colombian goodies gobbled up by Bill Clinton, including: $800,000 in speaking fees from a Colombian pro-free trade agreement group; a “Colombia is Passion” award bestowed by Colombia’s president Alvaro Uribe (who honored the former president as an “unofficial minister of tourism”); and a sweet Colombian oil field deal for a company Clinton pal Frank Giustra’s investment firm had advised. Giustra is the mining magnate who has donated $31 million to Clinton’s charitable fund, and whom Bill personally introduced to Colombian President Uribe (Giustra is the same guy Clinton helped land a uranium deal in Kazakhstan, but that’s a Clinton story for a different blog post).

The Clinton-Colombia connection doesn’t stop there — and involves much, much more than a spousal disagreement over how free our trade with the Colombians should be.

As President, Bill Clinton had initiated Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion aid package to escalate the war on drugs in Colombia. I wrote a number of columns in 2000 and 2001 outlining the very troubling nature of this Clinton-backed initiative. I’ll include the links at end of this post if you want a fuller history, but here is a quick refresher:

At the time, Colombia was in the midst of a four-decades long three-way civil war pitting the Colombian army, which has one of the worst human-rights records in the Western hemisphere, against leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups, both largely funded by the drug trade (a war that continues to this day). Despite the abject failure of America’s misguided war on drugs — with the hundreds of billions spent on it failing to curtail drug use — Clinton decided that another billion or so directed to Colombia would do the trick. The Colombian military’s extensive ties to right wing death squads be damned! In fact, Clinton signed a waiver of human-rights provisions that Congress had imposed on the Colombia drug-war package.

The story of how Clinton helped funnel all that money to Colombia is a textbook case of much that is wrong with the way our political system operates.

For instance, to avoid resistance from those who did not believe this was the best way to spend over a billion in taxpayer dollars, the Clinton administration decided to introduce the Colombian aid as part of a larger emergency-spending package — bundling the potentially controversial measure with proposals to provide $2.2 billion for relief from natural disasters, and $854 million for military health care. It’s an old legislative ploy designed to squelch debate and force politicians to vote for wasteful — or even terrible — measures just because they don’t want to be painted as being against God, country, and disaster relief.

The Clinton White House also used a poll commissioned by a very interested party to help provide cover for the Colombian initiative. Here’s how it worked: defense contractor Lockheed Martin commissioned Democratic pollster Mark Mellman to conduct a poll which concluded that 56 percent of registered voters would support $2 billion being spent on “tracking planes to be flown in drug-producing areas.” (I’m surprised the poll didn’t also conclude that 82 percent of those 56 percent would be especially overjoyed if those planes were “Lockheed Martin P-3 tracking planes.”) Lockheed’s smart bomb hit its mark: five months after this manufactured mandate was presented to the president, he proposed the $1.3 billion package, confident that he could shake “the will of the people” (or at least the 800 people Mellman offered his tailor-made questions to) in the face of opponents.

And, it wasn’t just the White House playing the Beltway game. When there is that much money involved, you know that lobbyists will be right in the center of the action. In the case of Plan Colombia’s river of cash, among those involved were Clinton confident Vernon Jordan, whose law firm was hired by the Colombian government to stump for it on the Hill. And lobbyists for Occidental Petroleum, BP Amoco, and (flashback alert!) Enron, all of which had business interests in Colombia, were also greasing the wheels for the aid bonanza – as were lobbyists for a pair of helicopter manufacturers looking to get a cut of the substantial slice of the money earmarked for the purchase of drug-war fighting choppers.

This is how our government worked then – and how it continues to work today, with Washington insiders moving back and forth between lobbying firms, campaign staffs, and government positions, and former presidents raking in big bucks making speeches while acting as facilitators to sweetheart private deals and advocating for public ones.

And this is how our government will work in the future as long as we elect candidates whose campaigns are run by the likes of Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson — and advised by the likes of Bill Clinton. And that holds for the likes of Charlie Black, Rick Davis, and the bevy of other lobbyists guiding John McCain’s campaign as well.

Follow the stink rising off the Clinton/Colombia connection and you’ll arrive at the very large slagheap that American politics has become.

Source. The Huffington Post / The Rag Blog

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And It All Comes Tumbling Down

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Peak Energy. Peak Food?

World oil price hit a record of $112 a barrel today, gasoline prices also hit a record, electric power generation is faltering, and rice prices have risen 50 per cent in two weeks.

Peak energy soon equals peak food, IMO.

Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

Peak Oil Review
By Tom Whipple / April 7, 2008

1. Prices, Production and Exports
2. Electricity Shortages and Diesel
3. Rice, Inflation and Oil
4. Massachusetts Hosts a Meeting
5. Energy Briefs

1. Prices, Production and Exports
It was another week of volatility for oil prices as a potpourri of fundamentals, financial crisis, hearings, unemployment and a looming recession drove oil prices one way and then another. After losing $4 a barrel on Monday as speculators closed positions, prices recovered on Wednesday after the EIA reported that US gasoline stockpiles had fallen by 4.5 million barrels the previous week, twice what analysts had expected. On Friday, prices rose again to close out the week at $106 a barrel after the report that US jobs had declined for the third straight month, confirming fears that the US was headed for a recession. This time oil prices rose on bad economic news in expectation that there will be more interest rate cuts, a weaker dollar, and a flight to safe assets such as oil.

US gasoline prices rose to a record $3.30 on Friday and most analysts believe they will continue rising. The EIA is holding that average gasoline prices will peak at $3.50 later this spring, but many are predicting a spike to the vacinity of $4 a gallon.

In the wake of the inconclusive attack on Basra, Shiite cleric al-Sadr is calling for a million-man demonstration against the US “occupation” on Wednesday, the 5th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Some fear the demonstration could set off events destabilizing the government. In the meantime Iraq is still exporting oil from Basra at slightly below pre-attack levels.

OPEC reports March shipments were down about 85,000 b/d from February due to extensive maintenance and other problems in Nigeria that cut exports there to the lowest in five years. Of more interest was the report that Russia failed to increase its oil production for the third month in a row and the first quarter production was down by one percent from a year earlier. Moscow, however, is still predicting that production will grow by 1.7 percent this year, well below the 11 percent increase in 2003. Russin pipeline exports to Europe recovered to 4.23 million b/d in March, but many believe the surge was in anticipation of forrthcoming export taxs and that Moscow’s exports will soon drop.

2. Electricity Shortages and Diesel
Stories of current and imminent shortages of electric power are becoming more frequent each day. A combination of inadequate rain for hydro power, unaffordable oil and coal for thermal power, and rapidly increasing demand is leaving country after country with inadequate power for national grids.

It is becoming apparent that one of the unforeseen consequences of globalization is that there is simply not enough power being produced in the world to run the flood of inexpensive electric consumer goods – TVs, kitchen appliances, air conditioners — that are pouring from the factories of Asia onto the world.

The increasingly frequent “rolling blackouts” that are appearing around the world unfortunately are killing “essential” systems – water pumps, hospitals, banking computers, factories, TV stations, and telephone exchanges – as well as the less-essential consumer devices.

While electric companies may eventually be able to make special arrangements to exempt organizations that are vital to the economy from blackouts, there are massive numbers of organizations around the world that are completely dependent on electricity to keep functioning. For these, the choice is generate their own electricity with their own generators or shut down.

What is developing is a new and potentially very large demand for gasoline and particularly diesel fuel as the national power grids fall further and further behind in their ability to keep up with demand for electricity. Higher prices and shortages are clearly in store as more and more Chinese-made small and medium sized electric generators come into service around the world.

3. Rice, Inflation and Oil
Rice prices increased by 50 percent in the last two weeks to an all-time high as importing countries scrambled to hold off social unrest by securing supplies from the few exporters still willing to sell. As the staple food for 3 billion people, 33 countries are facing unrest as the price of food and energy becomes unaffordable.

There are multiple reasons behind the sudden price increase ranging from weather-related poor harvests, hoarding, and world-wide inflationary pressures resulting from high energy costs to the financial crisis. Major rice exporters such as India, China, and Vietnam have already curtailed or stopped exports to hold down domestic prices.


Among the hardest hit countries so far have been Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Pakistan where millions now face seriously restricted diets.

Even rich oil states are facing problems. Nigeria is one of the world’s largest importers of rice and Kuwait is now shut off from the Indian rice that is the staple food for most of the 1.3 million foreigners working in the country. Even the Saudis have removed the import duties on imported food. In Pakistan 80 million people are estimated to be at risk of not receiving sufficient food.

This situation is too complex to foresee future developments. If it gets worse, widespread food riots could topple governments. If millions are faced with starvation, pressure to stop production of biofuels will increase. Leverage of food exporting nations in world affairs will increase.

Read all of it here. Energy Bulletin / The Rag Blog

Whipple is a retired CIA analyst and without peer in documenting these things and connecting the dots.

Peak energy is an important factor limiting food production. (Food, in the USA especially, is equivalent to peak petroleum).

And peak food is the “final solution” to limiting world population in an expansionist global economy.

An economy in which every additional birth is regarded as a human addition to global profit potential.

In other words, the inherent dynamics of an inherently expansionist global capitalism is pressing the world toward population overshoot and mass starvation (as well as global warming and the extinction of countless species).

Its time we understand that; its probably already too late to avoid an incomprehensible scale of global misery.

Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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German Citizen Challenges U.S. Rendition Before Human Rights Commission

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese descent says the CIA abducted him Dec. 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonian border. Photo y Thomas Kienzle / AP.

Man claims CIA tortured him, goes to international court
April 9, 2009

Washington — A German citizen thwarted in the U.S. courts is taking his allegations of abduction and torture at the hands of the CIA to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union petitioned the commission on behalf of Khaled el-Masri, saying the U.S. government should be called on to apologize for its treatment of el-Masri and that the CIA’s anti-terrorism rendition program should be found unlawful.

The commission, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States of which the United States is a member.

A German of Lebanese descent, el-Masri says he was abducted in December 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonian border and flown by the CIA to Afghanistan and abused as part of the administration’s rendition program.

The Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege in el-Masri’s case, shutting him out of the U.S. court system. The Supreme Court last year refused to hear his case.

The CIA declined to comment about the petition filed on el-Masri’s behalf by the ACLU.

President Bush and others have confirmed the existence of the CIA’s rendition program, but the facts central to el-Masri’s claims “concern the highly classified methods and means of the program,” the government said.

By refusing to hear el-Masri’s case, the high court passed up an opportunity to review the doctrine of state secrets, which critics say this administration has used more frequently than its predecessors.

“This administration has routinely abused the state secrets privilege to avoid any accountability for egregious violations of the Constitution and international law,” Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said in a statement.

El-Masri says the CIA mistakenly identified him as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers

Source. Associated Press / The Rag Blog

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