BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

DU Shells Used by U.S. Worse Than Nuclear Weapons

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

NaturalNews | The use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by the U.S. military may lead to a death toll far higher than that from the nuclear bombs dropped at the end of World War II. DU is a waste product of uranium enrichment, containing approximately one-third the radioactive isotopes of naturally occurring uranium. Because of its high density, it is used in armor- or tank-piercing ammunition. It has been fired by the U.S. and British militaries in the two Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, as well as by NATO forces in Kosovo and the Israeli military in Lebanon and Palestine.

Inhaled or ingested DU particles are highly toxic, and DU has been classified as an illegal weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations.

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has estimated that 50 tons of DU dust from the first Gulf War could lead to 500,000 cancer deaths by the year 2000. To date, a total of 2,000 tons have been generated in the Middle East.

In contrast, approximately 250,000 lives were claimed by the explosions and radiation released by the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing [of nuclear bombs] has been released from DU weaponry since 1991,” said Leuren Moret, a U.S. nuclear scientist. “The genetic future of the Iraqi people, for the most part, is destroyed. The environment now is completely radioactive.”

Because DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the Middle East will, for all practical purposes, be radioactive forever.

The two U.S. wars in Iraq “have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and people, particularly children, are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially for eternity,” said anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott.

Since the first Gulf War, the rate of birth defects and childhood cancer in Iraq has increased by seven times. More than 35 percent (251,000) of U.S. Gulf War veterans are dead or on permanent medical disability, compared with only 400 who were killed during the conflict.

Have Your Say: DU Shells Used by U.S. Worse Than Nuclear Weapons
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

U.S. Soldiers Did ‘Dirty Work’ for Chinese Interrogators

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

By JUSTIN ROOD | U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men — or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China’s ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel “are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese,” she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

Have Your Say: U.S. Soldiers Did ‘Dirty Work’ for Chinese Interrogators
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Heart experts warn Tasers deadly

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

By Suzanne Fournier | Tasers can cause fatal cardiac arrest and are even more dangerous if the subject is agitated, stressed and experiencing pain from the high-voltage device, two top Vancouver heart specialists said Tuesday.

Dr. Michael Janusz, a heart surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital and UBC told the Braidwood Inquiry into Taser use Tuesday that “Tasers almost certainly can cause cardiac arrest in humans, particularly in people with underlying heart disease.”

Janusz told retired judge Tom Braidwood that the risk of dying after being Tasered is similar to the chances of dying after major heart surgery.

Janusz quoted San Francisco cardiologist Dr. Zian Tseng’s findings of about “1.4 per cent mortality for individuals subdued by police using a Taser.. (which) is similar to the mortality risk of a coronary artery bypass operation.”

And Dr. Charles Kerr, a “cardiac electrophysiologist” at St. Paul’s and UBC, said that police should routinely carry defibrillators if they plan to employ Tasers and should be trained to initiate resuscitation after using the Taser on someone who is then unresponsive.

Kerr said that although the Taser may be “better than a bullet” and may have its place in policing, he is also concerned about the potential effect Tasering could have on the approximately 35,000 British Columbians who have either a pacemaker or an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD).

Outside the inquiry, Janusz said he had viewed the bystander video of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski being Tasered at the Vancouver airport and dropping to the floor seconds later, jerking his legs spasmodically and then falling motionless.

“That was really awful, a tragedy,” said Janusz.

The inquiry continues Tuesday afternoon with the evidence of a New Westminster police sergeant.

Braidwood is inquiring into Taser use by municipal police, sheriffs and corrections officers and in the fall, will hold a further inquiry into Dziekanski’s death, once the RCMP investigations are complete.

Have Your Say: Heart experts warn Tasers deadly
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Consciousness of Guilt: Genocide in Iraq?

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Counterpunch | Despite the precipitous plunge in his popularity and growing criticism of his competency, character, and style, George W. Bush is not really that much different from other presidents with respect to his hegemonic ambitions or his proclivity to use force to achieve foreign policy objectives. Continuing historical patterns, President Bush and all presidents since World War II have committed horrendous crimes against humanity in order to protect and advance American interests under the guise of liberating people from under the jackboot of brutal dictators or communist subversives, bringing democracy to totalitarian states, improving the lives of those who are suffering and eradicating terrorism.

These are laudable goals reflecting prevailing shibboleths domestically. These goals are an alluring mantle for the real paradigm governing foreign policy which is the pursuit of American interests with total indifference to the consequences to people victimized by American “ideals”.

The gaping discrepancy between the stated goals of American foreign policy and its praxis is best exemplified by the apogee of war crimes: genocide. In its pursuit of these lofty goals, the United States has committed genocide in Iraq. Intervention resulting in genocide at the very minimum proves that American government’s professed motives for foreign policy decisions are altogether specious.

Rationalizations for the application of military force have been based on euphemistic doctrines which have no basis in American or international law. George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war was not new to foreign and defence policy strategists but can be traced back to Dean Acheson’s doctrine dismissing the applicability of international law to the United States as outlined in a speech to the American Society of International Law in 1963 in which he argued that:

The power, position and prestige of the US had been challenged [Cuban Missile Crisis] by another state and the law does not deal with such questions of ultimate power – power that comes close to the source of sovereignty. [1]

In other words, national interests including meretricious threats to the sovereignty of the American State supersede international law despite the fact the United Nations Charter makes provisions for these exigencies.

The growing appetite for the unilateral application of force resulted in the “humanitarian intervention” or “illegal but legitimate” doctrine during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. This doctrine validated acts of preemption that justified the use of force whenever a threat was neither imminent nor substantial but necessary to defend the security interests of the United States against a perceived threat easily manufactured through the propaganda of fear.

Invading and occupying Iraq under the pretext of a preemptive war, a country already decimated by Dessert Storm, sanctions and no-fly-zones, represents the quintessential tragedy and hypocrisy of American foreign policy. To verify that the American Government is guilty of genocide in Iraq, I will establish a set of criteria based on the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and apply them to Iraq.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide sets out a number of criteria to evaluate whether or not a war crime attains the magnitude of genocide. These criteria are not without controversy but by examining the scholarly literature on the subject and the judgments of the International Criminal Court, I have established conservative standards to assess whether or not the American Government is responsible for genocide in Iraq.

According to the Convention:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm;
c) Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Although the phrase “in whole or in part” sounds ambiguous, its ambit has been restricted by judgments of the International Criminal Court. According to the Rapporteur for the Preparatory Commission of the International Criminal Court, “The accused aimed to destroy a large part of the group in a particular area.”

The International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia concluded that “The killing of all members of a group within a small geographical area” was tantamount to genocide.

Notwithstanding the imprecision of these definitions of “part”, the area in Bosnia referred to in the ruling sets a baseline for future cases. The architect of the Convention, Raphael Lemkin, intended to define “in part” as a level of destruction sufficiently substantial to imperil the existence of the group. Shedding even further light on this problem, the Convention itself considers attempted genocide to be punishable under the Convention implying that intent alone is sufficient to establish guilt.

“Intent” is another term in need of clarification. Apart from direct evidence through orders, statements, or coordinated acts, intention can be shown if “Acts of destruction that are not the specific goal but are predictable outcomes or by-products of a policy, which may have been avoided by a change in that policy.” [2]

The Genocide Convention defines two basic levels of guilt: the direct commission of genocide and complicity to commit genocide.

Complicity in genocide must embody:

Intentional participation;
Knowledge of the genocidal intent of the perpetrators;
Organizing, planning, supplying arms, training intelligence, or direct military support.
One example of direct American genocide, Iraq, has suffered massive destruction to its infrastructure, the economy and human life, particularly since the imposition of American sanctions in 1990 and the bombing in 1991. UN Resolution 661 mandated sanctions against Iraq originally to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The resolution was worded in such a way as to grant the United States a veto over which products could be traded with Iraq. The American government exploited that veto to severely punish the people of Iraq in the hope that they would overthrow Saddam Hussein themselves.

According to a 1993 UNICEF study, “What has become increasingly clear is that no significant movement toward food security can be achieved so long as the embargo remains in place.” [3]

Declassified documents divulge the fact that the Americans were aware of and responsible for a humanitarian crisis caused by the sanctions. A Defense Intelligence Agency report on January 18, 1991 concludes that:

Failing to secure supplies [for Iraq] will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences; if not epidemics of disease…Current public health problems are attributable to the reduction of normal preventative medicine, waste disposal, water purification and distribution electricity, and the decreased ability to control disease outbreaks.[4]

On January 15, 1991, B-52s were flying towards their targets in Iraq and cruise missiles were fired from ships in the Indian Ocean. Iraqi defences were incapable of offering any resistance.

Restricting the bombing to only military targets was not part of the U.S. war plan whereas targets included hospitals, electric utilities, schools, factories, water treatment plants, irrigation systems, food storage facilities and community health centres. Over 200,000 people died, the majority of whom were civilians.

In 2003, George Bush Junior inflicted further atrocities on the devastated people of Iraq and on a country virtually bombed back into pre-industrial times by another so-called war. As of today, Iraq has suffered a further one million casualties and four million refugees.

Whether or not the administrations of Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior intended to commit genocide in Iraq is irrelevant because the consequences of the bombings and sanctions could have been predicted by any reasonable person. The actions of these administrations clearly resulted in mass killing, serious bodily and mental harm, and the infliction of conditions calculated to bring about Iraq’s physical destruction in whole or in part. Iraq is a clear-cut case of genocide.

The carnage resulting from this genocide clearly exposes the disparity between the professed principles of American foreign policy and its manifest practice. This hypocrisy betrays the indifference of American leaders to basic democratic principles and to respect for both domestic and international law.

David Model is a Professor of Political Science at Seneca College. He is the author of States of Darkness: US Complicity in Genocides Since 1945. He can be reached at: david.model@senecac.on.ca

Notes

[1] Acheson, D. (1968). Dean Acheson’s remark is quoted in Louis Henkin: “How Nations Behave: Law and Foreign Policy.” Columbia University Press. P. 265-266.

[2] Gellately, R., and Kiernan, B. (Eds.). (2003). The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. P. 15.

[3] UNICEF Report. (1993). Children, War, and Sanctions. Cited in Ullrich, G. (1998) “The effects of Sanctions on the Civilian Community of Iraq.”

[4] Defense Intelligence Agency. (1991, January 8). Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities.

Have Your Say: Consciousness of Guilt: Genocide in Iraq?
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

UK may store all phone calls and emails

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

New Scientist | The UK government is considering a massive database to store every person’s emails, phone calls, text messages and internet use. The plan was suggested as a tool to help security forces tackling crime and terrorism.

At the moment, records of phone calls and text messages are kept for up to 12 months by telecoms companies, in compliance with a European Union anti-terrorism directive.

But a new proposal by the UK Home Office would see internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies handing over records containing billions of emails as well as Internet usage and voice-over-Internet calls, media reports said on Tuesday.

Police and security services would only be granted access to the information after seeking permission from the courts. The UK was this year labelled an “endemic surveillance society” by a study of privacy protections worldwide.

Playing catchup

The Home Office said the database could help catch up with rapid changes in communication methods during the past 15 years.

“The changes to the way we communicate, due particularly to the internet revolution, will increasingly undermine our current capabilities to obtain communications data and use it to protect the public,” it said in a statement.

“To ensure that our public authorities and law enforcement agencies can continue to use this valuable tool, the government is planning to bring forward the Communications Data Bill.” The draft bill is expected to be released later in the year, but the plan has yet to be discussed by ministers.

Phone calls would not be recorded in full, but the phone numbers involved and the duration of each call would be logged.

Secret records

In 2006, the US National Security Agency was found to be secretly keeping billions of such records. Experts say such records can reveal detailed information about callers’ lives, but that such analysis is unproven as a way to reliably track and catch criminals.

Critics of the new plan have raised concerns about privacy. Jonathan Bamford, Assistant Information Commissioner at the UK government’s regulatory office for data storage, use and privacy said: “We are not aware of any justification for the state to hold every UK citizen’s phone and internet records. We have warned before that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society.”

Opponents also pointed to the UK government’s recent track record on large databases. A health service database that is the world’s biggest civil IT project has incurred large budget overruns and delays, while a recent security breach saw the whole nation’s child benefit records lost in the post.

Have Your Say: UK may store all phone calls and emails
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FBI Report Details Guantánamo War Crimes

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE | In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.

In one of several previously undisclosed episodes, the report found that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims held there, waking them every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese. In another incident, it said, a female interrogator reportedly bent back an inmate’s thumbs and squeezed his genitals as he grimaced in pain.

The report describes what one official called “trench warfare” between the F.B.I. and the military over the rough methods being used on detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The report says that the F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were all made aware of the F.B.I. agents’ complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result.

The report quotes passionate objections from F.B.I. officials who grew increasingly concerned about the reports of practices like intimidating inmates with snarling dogs, parading them in the nude before female soldiers, or “short-shackling” them to the floor for many hours in extreme heat or cold.

Such tactics, said one F.B.I. agent in an e-mail message to supervisors in November 2002, might violate American law banning torture.

More senior officials, including Spike Bowman, who was then the head of the national security law unit at the F.B.I., tried to sound the alarm as well.

“Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don’t know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war,” Mr. Bowman wrote in an e-mail message to top F.B.I. officials in July 2003.

Many of the abuses the report describes have previously been disclosed, but it was not known that F.B.I. agents had gone so far as to document accusations of abuse in a “war crimes file” at Guantánamo. The report does not say how many incidents were included in the file after it was started in 2002, but the “war crimes” label showed just how seriously F.B.I. agents took the accusations. Sometime in 2003, however, an F.B.I. official ordered the file closed because “investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the F.B.I.’s mission,” the report said.

The inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, found that in a few instances, F.B.I. agents participated in interrogations using pressure tactics that would not have been permitted inside the United States. But the “vast majority” of agents followed F.B.I. legal guidelines and “separated themselves” from harsh treatment, the report says.

The report says that the F.B.I. “had not provided sufficient guidance to its agents on how to respond when confronted with military interrogators” who used interrogation techniques that were not permitted by the F.B.I., and that fueled confusion and dissension. But it also says that “the F.B.I. should be credited for its conduct and professionalism in detainee interrogations in the military zones.”

Jameel Jaffer, who tracks detainee issues for the American Civil Liberties Union, took a more critical stance, saying the report shows “the F.B.I.’s leadership failed to act aggressively to end the abuse.” Mr. Jaffer said the report “only underscores the pressing need for an independent and comprehensive investigation of prisoner abuse.”

The report documents in greater detail than ever before the conflict between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. over interrogation methods, which began with the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Qaeda figure, in Pakistan in March 2002. F.B.I. agents began the interrogation using traditional rapport-building methods, and one agent even provided personal care for Mr. Zubaydah, who had been shot three times and grievously wounded, “even to the point of cleaning him up after bowel movements.”

But C.I.A. personnel who took over the case within a few days began to use harsher methods that one F.B.I. agent described as “borderline torture,” and which the C.I.A. has acknowledged included waterboarding, in which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of suffocation.

The report describes extensive debate inside the F.B.I. over the next six months over whether it should continue to observe or assist the C.I.A. with interrogations using harsh methods it believed were counterproductive.

F.B.I. officials, including Pasquale D’Amuro, then the bureau’s top counterterrorism officer, believed the physical pressure being used by the C.I.A. was less effective than traditional noncoercive methods, that it would “taint” any future effort at prosecution, and that it “was wrong and helped Al Qaeda in spreading negative views of the United States,” the report says.

After the capture of another Qaeda figure, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, in September 2002, F.B.I. agents again traveled to a secret C.I.A. site where Mr. bin al-Shibh was being questioned. But only in 2003, the report concludes, did the F.B.I. make a “clean break” and choose to have no involvement in the C.I.A.’s harsh interrogations.

The report said several senior Justice Department Criminal Division officials raised concerns with the National Security Council in 2003 about the military’s treatment of detainees but saw no changes as a result. One Justice Department official said he believed that John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, had spoken to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about the department’s concerns about interrogation methods being used in late 2002 on Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Qaeda member who was believed to be the so-called 20th hijacker in the attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

But Mr. Ashcroft declined to be interviewed by the inspector general’s office of the department he had headed, an unusual refusal and one that hampered investigators’ effort to learn of discussions inside the National Security Council , the report says.

A spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft, Mark Corallo, said the former attorney general had not cooperated because “his conversations with the White House and with staff on national security matters are privileged.”

The report says that while some Justice Department officials believed that the physical pressure techniques being used by the military were wrong, others merely thought they might be ineffective.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, noted that abuses at Guantánamo were the subject of a 2005 Defense Department investigation that found no evidence of torture, though it did fault some interrogation tactics and called the Qahtani interrogation degrading and abusive.

The Justice Department said it was pleased that the report “credited the F.B.I. for its conduct and professionalism during interrogations.”

A C.I.A. spokesman said the harsh methods it used were “found lawful by the Department of Justice itself” and were “employed only when traditional means of questioning — things like rapport-building — were ineffective.”

Have Your Say: FBI Report Details Guantánamo War Crimes
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Latest News, War & Terrorism News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Translate: