The Iraq war has been a monstrous crime

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Politicians crave a whitewash – but Britain must hold a fully open public inquiry into the bloodbath it helped to create

Seumas Milne

guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 May 2009 15.00 BST

It’s hardly surprising that those responsible for the human and social catastrophe unleashed by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, on both sides of the Atlantic, should be desperate to rewrite its history – or try to salvage the shattered reputation of those armies that carried it out. In Britain, as the bulk of its troops withdraw after a campaign that has already lasted longer than the second world war, that propaganda offensive has now reached fever pitch.

Gordon Brown claimed yesterday that the wreckage of blood-drenched Iraq was a “success story”. The defence secretary John Hutton insisted Britain should be proud of its “legacy” in the devastated cities of the south. Hilary Benn, the environment secretary boasted of his support for the original aggression on BBC’s Question Time yesterday, declaring that ” we leave Iraq a better place” – a line repeated word for word by the Sun today and echoed across much of the media.

But the politicians’ craving for a whitewash is no reason for anyone else to give house room to such an absurd travesty of the truth. The Iraq war has been a monstrous crime. Based on a false pretext, it has left hundreds of thousands dead, created more than four million refugees, unleashed an orgy of ethnic cleansing and laid waste to the broken infrastructure of a country already on its knees from 12 years of sanctions and a generation of war.

Children as Unlamented Victims of Bush’s War Crimes

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Children as Unlamented Victims of Bush’s War Crimes

By Michael Haas

May 01, 2009 — – Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.

The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and ‘enhanced interrogation’ now is that some modern-day officials appear proud of themselves.

By A.J. Langguth
May 3, 2009

As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle.

I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses.

At the time, I was researching a book on the United States’ role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator’s files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent’s Southern Cone.

Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been naive enough to be at first surprised and then appalled by the degree to which our country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.

Torture Was Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

By Marjorie Cohn |

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks that I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003 according to the newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.

Waterboarding, Interrogations: The CIA’s $1,000 a Day Specialists

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

New Focus on Two Retired Military Psychologists Called the ‘Architects’ of the CIA’s Techniques

By BRIAN ROSS, MATTHEW COLE, and JOSEPH RHEE

April 30, 2009

As the secrets about the CIA’s interrogation techniques continue to come out, there’s new information about the frequency and severity of their use, contradicting an 2007 ABC News report, and a new focus on two private contractors who were apparently directing the brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture.

According to current and former government officials, the CIA’s secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington.Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Five Things You Should Know About the ‘Torture’ Memos

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

April 21st, 2009 5:03 PM Eastern

By Judge Andrew Napolitano
FOX News Senior Judicial Analyst

No. 1. I have read the 175 pages of legal memoranda (”the memos”) that the Department of Justice (DoJ) released last week. They consist of letters written by Bush DoJ officials to the Deputy General Counsel of the CIA concerning the techniques that may be used by American intelligence agents when interrogating “high value” detainees at facilities outside the U.S. The memos describe in vivid, gut-wrenching detail the procedures that the CIA apparently inquired about. The memos then proceed to authorize every procedure asked about, and to commend the CIA for taking the time to ask.

No. 2. In the process of explaining to the CIA Deputy General Counsel just what his folks could do in order to extract information from uncooperative detainees, it is immediately apparent that the writers of the memos are attempting to find snippets of language from other memoranda that they or their colleagues have prepared and from unrelated judicial opinions that justify everything that the CIA wants to do.

This is not rocket science and it is not art. Everyone knows torture when they see it.

‘Witness for Jesus’ in Afghanistan

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Bagram has a thriving evangelical Christian community US soldiers have been encouraged to spread the message of their Christian faith among Afghanistan’s predominantly Muslim population, video footage obtained by Al Jazeera appears to show. Military chaplains stationed in the US air base at Bagram were also filmed with bibles printed in the country’s main Pashto and Dari languages. In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”. “The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says. “Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

A historic day for Iraq – but not in the way the British want to believe

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Robert Fisk: A historic day for Iraq – but not in the way the British want to believe

PA
Brigadier Tom Beckett (right) hands over to Colonel Henry A Kievenaar III at Basra Airbase yesterday

One hundred and seventy-nine dead soldiers. For what? 179,000 dead Iraqis? Or is the real figure closer to a million? We don’t know. And we don’t care. We never cared about the Iraqis. That’s why we don’t know the figure. That’s why we left Basra yesterday.

I remember going to the famous Basra air base to ask how a poor Iraqi boy, a hotel receptionist called Bahr Moussa, had died. He was kicked to death in British military custody. His father was an Iraqi policeman. I talked to him in the company of a young Muslim woman. The British public relations man at the airport was laughing. “I don’t believe this,” my Muslim companion said. “He doesn’t care.” She did. So did I. I had reported from Northern Ireland. I had heard this laughter before. Which is why yesterday’s departure should have been called the Day of Bahr Moussa. Yesterday, his country was set free from his murderer. At last.

3 Americans, 2 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

By NOOR KHAN and HEIDI VOGT, AP

May 1, 2009 KABUL (AP) — Three Americans and two other international troops were killed Friday in an attack in eastern Afghanistan, officials said. Insurgents attacked Afghan and international forces Friday with rocket-propelled grenades and guns, NATO forces said in a statement. The troops called in air support, forcing the militants to withdraw. They are being pursued, the statement said. Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, confirmed that three of the dead service members were Americans. The nationalities of the other two were not immediately known because NATO typically waits for countries to release such information. The Taliban have vowed to increase ambushes and other attacks as an additional 21,000 U.S. troops flood into Afghanistan this summer in an attempt to stem the group’s resurgence and bolster security for August presidential elections.

Sniper downs 2 U.S. soldiers in Amara

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

April 30, 2009 – 02:12:50

MISSAN / Aswat al-Iraq: Two U.S. soldiers were killed by sniper bullets in the city of al-Amara on Thursday, said a security source from the Missan province police.

“The two U.S. soldiers were killed when their patrol came under sniper fire in central Amara,” the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

“Iraqi police and U.S. forces cordoned off the area and conducted a wide-scale search operation looking for the sniper,” he said.

Aswat al-Iraq news agency failed to contact the U.S. army for comments.

Amara, the capital city of Missan province, lies 390 km south of Baghdad.

source:http://en.aswataliraq.info/?p=112407

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-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

3 U.S. Troops Are Killed in Iraq

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Published: May 1, 2009

BAGHDAD — Three Americans were killed Thursday in combat in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, the military said Friday, adding to the high death toll for American forces in Iraq last month.

The deaths brought the total number of American military personnel members killed in April to 18 — double the number in March and the highest since September 2008, when 25 were killed.

Anbar Province, a sprawling desert area in the west that was once the center of the insurgency, has become one of Iraq’s more peaceful provinces in recent years. That is partly a result of the many insurgents joining Awakening Councils and becoming allies of the United States military in exchange for steady pay. Still, the latest American deaths, of two Marines and a sailor, took place there, according to a military statement. No other details were released.