For many, the Obama candidacy represented a change so profound that they thought (or perhaps more accurately, hoped), that an Obama presidency would not only mean a deep domestic social transformation, but an end to the American cycle of war.To them the news of an upsurge in U.S. troops in Afghanistan means those hopes were dashed.They will not be the last ones. For among those many are those who never regarded the U.S. as an empire, and thus were woefully unprepared for the hunger of any president for more executive power, or the necessities of any empire to expand rather than simply cede power.Many of the most vociferous critics of the expansive powers of the Bush administration — of his wiretaps, his secret prisons, of his penchant for total surveillance over Americans at home or abroad — are strikingly silent now, when under Obama, these same powers reside in the executive.
Secret prisons? Yes – still there; illegal renditions ? Still there: Wire taps of Americans without court order? Yup. Indeed, little has changed but the public tone of debate. There’s little bombast, a good deal less bluster, and a whole lot less fear-talk, but the same programs are running — full speed ahead.And there’s still wars — begun in deception and greed; continued because of simple political necessity.
We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend.
Presumably, complying with American and international law are some of the ideals that we fight to defend.
Torture is a violation of both international and American law. Specifically, the Geneva Convention makes it illegal to inflict mental or physical torture or inhuman treatment.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s pre-eminent civil rights organization ACLU on Thursday slammed President Obama for shielding the Bush administration from accountability for its “dangerous torture policy,” and insisted that this “lack of transparency” severely threatens the future of constitutional liberty in the United States.
“The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture,” Jameel Jaffer, Director of ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a conference call with reporters. “Now the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity.”
While he credited Obama for having disavowed torture under his watch, Jaffer said that “on every front, the administration is actively obstructing accountability by shielding Bush officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture.”
Citing an argument that hallmarked the Bush years, Obama administration attorneys have asked a San Francisco court to drop all charges against Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored legal opinions that permitted the torture of prisoners.
An amicus curiae brief [PDF link] filed by the Department of Justice with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday essentially argues that because he was giving advice to the president on a national security matter, Yoo should not be held accountable for his actions as it would have a chilling effect on advice provided to future presidents.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.
The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.
US Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that five detainees would be moved from Guantanamo Bay to New York, where they would stand trial for carrying out the 9/11 attacks. However, five other detainees will continue to be tried before military commissions, which have lower standards of evidence. The five detainees coming to New York have previously indicated they intend to plead guilty, although the five to be tried before military commissions have not.
On the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, 21-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sitting in a segregation cell in Guantanamo Bay’s high security Echo Block.
He remembers the excitement among his fellow prisoners at the prospect of an Obama presidency. “Everyone was very hopeful; people were saying he was going to change things, that he would close the prison,” Gharani, who was released in June, says.
“Even the guards were telling us that if he won, things would improve for us.”
They were to be disappointed. A year after Obama’s election win, Al Jazeera has learnt that despite the new president’s pledge to close the prison and improve the conditions of detainees held by the US military, prisoners believe that their treatment has deteriorated on his watch.Read the rest of this entry »
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.
Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
“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.”
Twenty three Americans have been convicted in absentia, after an Italian court found them guilty of kidnapping in the CIA rendition of a Muslim cleric, the Associated Press reports. Three other Americans were acquitted.
The New York Timesreported earlier today, “Italian prosecutors have charged the American officials, all but one of them alleged to be agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, and seven members of the Italian military intelligence agency, in the abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors say the cleric was snatched in broad daylight, flown from an American air base in Italy to a base in Germany and then on to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured.”
1.26 Million is a small price to pay when compared to the massive war profits by many involved in policy making. This endless wars root lies in 9/11, and to sell the story, they needed extras. You know – people they could round-up to say “to date..546 potential terrorists have been arrested…” After ruining the lives of these people, they can pay them off, and keep the story sold, at any cost. -Brian
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. government will pay $1.26 million to five Muslim men detained for months without charges after the September 11 attacks who sued for unlawful imprisonment and abuse, their lawyers said on Tuesday.
The men claimed they suffered inhumane and degrading treatment in a Brooklyn detention center, including solitary confinement, severe beatings, incessant verbal abuse and a blackout on communications with their families and attorneys.
Even though Barack Obama, the candidate, pledged to end “the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries,” his FBI has been rendering kidnap victims to the U.S. The practice is still kidnapping, however; and it’s still illegal.
Unlucky victim No. 1 was Raymond Azar, 45, flown from Afghanistan to Alexandria, Va., not to a foreign country. The construction manager for Sima International, a Lebanese outfit that did work for the U.S. military, Azar said he was tortured by his abductors. He might just as well have been flow to Egypt under the Bushies.
Interestingly, Azar was never charged as a dangerous terrorist, only with conspiracy to commit bribery for wiring $106,000 in kickbacks to a U.S. employee’s bank account in hopes of getting $13 million in unpaid bills okayed.
For this comparatively trivial white collar crime, Azar’s lawyers said when arrested he was stripped naked, hooded, and subjected to a body cavity search. What’s more, according to an article by Scott Horton, writing on “Common Dreams,” Azar claims a federal agent showed Azar a photo of his wife and four children and told him to confess or else he might “never see them again.” Azar confessed, and pled guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery.
On October 22, 2009, George W. Bush came to Montreal to give a speech. Under Canadian law, once someone who has authorized or engaged in torture enters Canada, they can be tried in Canada for torture even if they are not Canadian. Montreal 9/11 Truth was ready with all the paperwork and that morning, the charges were filed.
More info after the jump…
Our court date will most likely be in January or February 2010 and we will receive a notice informing us of the exact date one month before the actual court date. We will keep you informed with new developments as we get them.
NEW YORK — A judge cited national security concerns in ruling Wednesday that the CIA does not have to release hundreds of documents related to the destruction of videotapes of Sept. 11 detainee interrogations that used harsh methods.
U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said he believed he had an obligation to let the CIA director decide what should be released when it pertains to methods used to make uncooperative detainees divulge information.
“The need to keep confidential just how the CIA and other government agencies obtained their information is manifest, and that has to do with the identities of the people who gave information and who were questioned to obtain information,” the judge said from the bench. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Brian 
