January 19, 2010
1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”
When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.
Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.
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"Terror War" News, 9/11, Bush Admin/ officials, civil liberties/ human rights, Corporate Control, Domestic Surveilance, false flag terrorism, Freeedom of Information Acts (FOIA), guantanamo, Iraq, Military Commissions, Obama, Occupation, Pakistan, patriot act -9/11 legislation, Police State, preventative detention, US Army, War of Terror | Tagged: Bush, deaths, guantanamo, guards, illegal, June 9, murder, nop charges, Obama, preventative detention, Prison, suicides | 
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Posted by Brian
December 20, 2009
by Jon Gold, source: 9/11 Blogger
- We are fighting illegal preemptive wars against three countries. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. The resulting wars have caused well over 1,000,000 casualties. Preemptive war is illegal according to the Nuremberg Charter, and the United Nations charter. These wars are destabilizing the entire Middle East, and causing anti-American sentiment throughout the world.
- In America, the Constitution is being forgotten with the passage of bills like the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act. Americans are forced to wonder if their conversations are being monitored through the use of illegal wiretapping. The freedom of the press, and the right to peacefully assemble is being discarded.
- Executive Power within the United States is being expanded to the point of near-dictatorship, and accountability for the actions of the Executive, and other members of Government is non-existent.
- A constant state of fear is the norm.
- Billions upon billions are being spent on the previously mentioned wars, and things that are needed for the people are being forgotten about.
- Soldiers are dying, are being subjected to multiple tours of duty, are being exposed to depleted uranium and chemical weapons, are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, are committing suicide at an astounding rate, are being fed propaganda in order to murder innocents, and are having their families destroyed.
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Posted by Brian
October 14, 2009
In better times, a bleak war market would mean a boom in employment and fill all demands of the small communties. -ed
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Aided by a bleak job market, the U.S. military met all of its recruitment goals in the past year for the first time since it became an all-volunteer force in 1973, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
Military services have been stretched thin by conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving added weight to recruitment efforts as President Barack Obama considers sending another 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year.
The United States already has 67,000 troops in Afghanistan and about 119,000 in Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Brian
July 16, 2009
Related: Sep. 11th detainee tortured183 times in one month.
source: AP
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – A pretrial hearing in the Sept. 11 war crimes trial was delayed Thursday when none of the five defendants agreed to attend.
The defendants were apparently protesting a judge’s ruling that the accused mastermind of the terrorist attacks and two other men would not be able to speak at the session, which was to focus on preparations for a hearing on whether two of the men are mentally competent to stand trial.
The judge, Army Col. Steve Henley, had previously ruled that he would only allow the two defendants whose mental competency was in question to speak at the hearing.
Prosecutor Bob Swann said the government believes detainees should attend all sessions and he asked the judge to grant five minutes of speaking time for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other detainees to persuade them to attend.
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Posted by Brian
June 16, 2009
Source: Miami Herald
By DEVLIN BARRETT
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed complained that interrogators tortured lies out of him, though he proudly took credit for more than two dozen other terror plots, according to newly released sections of government transcripts.
”I make up stories,” Mohammed said at one point in his 2007 hearing at Guantánamo Bay.
In broken English, he described an interrogation in which he was asked the location of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
”Where is he? I don’t know,” Mohammed said. ‘Then he torture me. Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaeda which I don’t know him.’ I said no, they torture me.”
Yet at the same military tribunal hearing, Mohammed ticked off a list of 29 terror plots in which he took part.
The transcripts were released as part of a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking documents and details of the government’s terror detainee programs.
Previous accounts of the military tribunal hearings had been made public, but the Obama administration went back and reviewed the still-secret sections and determined that more portions could be released.
Most of the new material centers around the detainees’ claims of abuse during interrogations while being held overseas in CIA custody.
One detainee, Abu Zubaydah, told the tribunal that after months “of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries.”
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Posted by Brian
June 7, 2009
Imagine if over the course of 7 years you have been held in detention without knowledge of where you are, what you are charged with, who is charging you, and what evidence there is against you.
Not only that, but in the course of your 80 month detention, you are being water-boarded about six times a day, 183 times a month.
You have been tortured to the point that you don’t remember why you were arrested anymore. All these years you have been detained without a glimmer of getting out, and that’s before your guilt has been established…
Now theyyou have but one option. To choose to plead guilty and be fast-tracked to execution. Minus the trial and proof of guilt. I don’t blame them you for taking it, but how much more criminal can the authorities be?
-Brian
source: NY Times
The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.
The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.
The proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates by an administration task force on detention.
The proposal would ease what has come to be recognized as the government’s difficult task of prosecuting men who have confessed to terrorism but whose cases present challenges. Much of the evidence against the men accused in the Sept. 11 case, as well as against other detainees, is believed to have come from confessions they gave during intense interrogations at secret C.I.A. prisons. In any proceeding, the reliability of those statements would be challenged, making trials difficult and drawing new political pressure over detainee treatment.
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Posted by Brian
