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UK government spends 2 million on TV documentaries promoting their policies

Monday, August 4th, 2008

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Climate camp raided for a second time

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Six people have been arrested at Medway’s climate camp.

The first arrest was at 12.30am today, when a 40-year-old man was quizzed on suspicion of possession of a prohibited weapon

The other five were arrested between 5.50am and 6.30am, one of these a 27-year-old man arrested on suspicion of obstructing an officer.

The remaining four, all male aged between 31 and 45, have been arrested for public order offences.

Police say they were told to move their vehicles because of access for emergency vehicles.

They were given three hours to move them. When the campaigners didn’t do so the vehicles were treated as abandoned. The police have attempted to seize them. The window of one of the vehicles was smashed in order to seize it.

The move increases the tension between the two sides.

Climate camp protesters say police have sprayed people with pepper spray.

The eco-warriors say they were woken at about 5am today by police, who said they were going to take away their vehicles.

The campaigners say they have already given the police the registration numbers of all vehicles on site.

The protesters say the police, dressed in riot gear, have not listened to their pleas to leave the vehicles, a minibus and medical vehicle and another car, where they are.

Protesters say they had no choice but to form an arm-linked ring of people around the vehicles to stop them from being taken and claim the vehilces are taxed, insured and have up-to-date MOTs.

One protester who didn’t want to be named said: “The police have been really heavy-handed. All we want to do here in site is to have a peaceful protest, but the police seem to want confrontation.”

Meanwhile, a small but energetic rally from Rochester to Kingsnorth took place on Sunday, organised by Camp supporters, Campaign Against Climate Change.

Around 200 people turned out on Rochester High Street for the march, and listen to various speakers from Kent and further afield, including Green MEP Caroline Lucas.

Protestors reached the power station just after 5pm, flanked by scores of police officers, including mounted units and a police helicopter.

Many supporters then marched a further two miles to join the official camp.

http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kol08/article/default.asp?article_id=45813

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Police get £160m of bonuses in one year

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Christopher Hope | The payments were condemned by frontline officers and even a police chief who benefited personally from them. Taxpayer groups said the payments raised “serious questions” about why so much was paid out.

Officers of all ranks can earn thousands in bonuses for extra duties on top of their salaries and overtime allowances.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act showed that police pocketed £157million last year, including foreign trips with the Royal Family.

The average bonus payment ranged from £273 in Fife to £1,206 in Staffordshire. Some £3.4million was paid out for unpleasant work or particular dedication to duty.

This included up to £500 for gruesome tasks such as dealing with a fatal road traffic accident.

Other examples included:

• £500 was paid to a sergeant for the removal of a 30 stone man in the advanced stages of decomposition

• a police constable in Brent received £200 for the “setting up of a borough gym”

• another officer received £500 for disposing of a large number of motorcycles on his days off

• two Royal protection officers received £500 for being “regularly deployed overseas and regularly meeting high-ranking people in the host country”

The payments were heavily criticised. Northumbria Chief Constable Mike Craik, who personally shared £47,000 with his deputy and three assistants, said: “Bonuses do not have a place in the police service.

“Sometimes what officers have to do can be awful. I was a senior investigating officer in London. I have seen the most grisly things you could ever come across but that is the job I signed up to do.”

He added: “Bonuses do not lead to improved performance. Our high performance has come from work we would have done anyway.”

Police Federation chairman Paul McKeever described the system as “divisive and unfair”. He added: “We are fighting for the best pay deal possible and not to have officers reliant on ad-hoc bonuses.”

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, added: “This seems to be an extraordinary amount of money to give in bonuses at a time when there is apparently not enough money to honour even the basic police pay settlement.

“With some forces clearly struggling to protect the public adequately, there are serious questions to be asked about why so many bonuses are being paid out across the board.”

The Association of Police Authorities, which is responsible for the bonus system, said: “We are committed to reviewing the bonus scheme in order to understand if and how it improves performance.”

The Home Office said it had no plans to review the system.

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First UK ID card contract with Thales worth £18m

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Jeremy Kirk | Thales has won a four-year contract worth £18 million for the UK’s national ID card programme, which aims to keep closer track of its citizens to cut down on crime and fraud.

The contract is the first to be awarded, according to the UK Identity and Passport Service (IPS). Thales will design and test the National Identity Register, a database that will hold peoples’ personal and biometric details.

Thales is one of five main suppliers picked by IPS that will compete for specific contracts for various projects to support the ID card plan. The 10-year project, expected to run through 2017, will cost at least £4.7 billion.

Computer Sciences (CSC), Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Fujitsu and IBM are also part of the “strategic supplier group,” which IPS has said was created to speed the procurement process and issuing of contracts. 3M, which makes the UK’s biometric passports, has been selected to manufacture the ID cards.

The ID card programme was attacked in May by an independent group of advisors, which issued a report with concerns over how the complex system would be integrated with other government systems.

The scrutiny of the ID card project follows criticism of other large UK government IT projects. The IT revamp of the National Health Service has been plagued by problems with suppliers and cost overruns.

IPS is scheduled to start issuing biometric ID cards to foreign nationals this year. By late next year, ID cards will be issued to so-called critical workers, such as those employed at airports and other security-related jobs. In 2010, the cards will be issued to those who request them, with a mass issuance starting around 2011 or 2012.

The programme, which was fiercely opposed by privacy activists and those concerned about security, will be compulsory for those over 16 years old. Those applying for a new passport or renewing one will be issued an ID card.

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South Korea Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians

Monday, August 4th, 2008

“When the napalm hit our village, many people were still sleeping in their homes,” said Lee Beom-ki, 76. “Those who survived the flames ran to the tidal flats. We were trying to show the American pilots that we were civilians. But they strafed us, women and children.”

By CHOE SANG-HUN

03/08/08 “NYTimes” — – WOLMI ISLAND, South Korea — When American troops stormed this island more than half a century ago, it was a hive of Communist trenches and pillboxes. Now it is a park where children play and retirees stroll along a tree-shaded esplanade.

From a hilltop across a narrow channel, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, memorialized in bronze, appears to gaze down at the beaches of Inchon where his troops splashed ashore in September 1950, changing the course of the Korean War and making him a hero here.

In the port below, rows of cars, gleaming in the sun, wait to be shipped around the world — testimony to South Korea’s industrial might and a reminder of which side has triumphed economically since the conflict ended 55 years ago.

But inside a ragged tent at the entrance of the park, some aging South Koreans gather daily to draw attention to their side of the conflict, a story of carnage not mentioned in South Korea’s official histories or textbooks.

“When the napalm hit our village, many people were still sleeping in their homes,” said Lee Beom-ki, 76. “Those who survived the flames ran to the tidal flats. We were trying to show the American pilots that we were civilians. But they strafed us, women and children.”

Village residents say dozens of civilians were killed.

The attack, though not the civilian casualties, has been corroborated by declassified United States military documents recently reviewed by South Korean investigators. On Sept. 10, 1950, five days before the Inchon landing, according to the documents, 43 American warplanes swarmed over Wolmi, dropping 93 napalm canisters to “burn out” its eastern slope in an attempt to clear the way for American troops.

The documents and survivors’ stories persuaded a South Korean commission investigating long-suppressed allegations of wartime atrocities by Koreans and Americans to rule recently that the attack violated international conventions on war and to ask the country’s leaders to seek compensation from the United States.

The ruling was one of several by the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in recent months that accused the United States military of using indiscriminate force on three separate occasions in 1950 and 1951 as troops struggled against Communists from the North and from China. The commission says at least 228 civilians, and perhaps hundreds more, were killed in the three attacks.

In one case, the commission said, at least 167 villagers, more than half of them women, were burned to death or asphyxiated in Tanyang, 87 miles southeast of Seoul, when American planes dropped napalm at the entrance of a cave filled with refugees.

“We should not ignore or conceal the deaths of unarmed civilians that resulted not from the mistakes of a few soldiers but from systematic aerial bombing and strafing,” said Kim Dong-choon, a senior commission official. “History teaches us that we need an alliance, but that alliance should be based on humanitarian principles.”

The South Korean government has not disclosed how it plans to follow up on the findings. And Maj. Stewart Upton, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington, said the Pentagon could not comment on the reports pending formal action by the South Korean government.

Under South Korea’s earlier authoritarian and staunchly anti-Communist governments, criticism of American actions in the war was taboo.

But after investigations showed that American soldiers killed South Korean civilians in air and ground attacks on the hamlet of No Gun Ri in 1950 — and after the United States acknowledged the deaths but refused to investigate other claims — a liberal government set up the fact-finding commission in 2005. More than 500 petitions, some describing the same actions, were filed to demand the investigation of allegations of mass killings by American troops, mostly in airstrikes.

The recent findings were the commission’s first against the United States, and it is unlikely that the commission has the time or resources to investigate many more before it is disbanded, as early as 2010.

Separately, the commission has also ruled that the South Korean government summarily executed thousands of political prisoners and killed many unarmed villagers during the war.

The Wolmi victims’ demands for recognition tap into complicated emotions underlying South Korea’s alliance with the United States.

“We thank the American troops for saving our country from Communism, for the peace and prosperity we have today,” said Han In-deuk, chairwoman of a Wolmi advocacy group. “Does that mean we have to shut up about what happened to our families?”

The airstrikes came during desperate times for the American forces and for the South Koreans they came to defend.

The war broke out in June 1950 with a Communist invasion from the north. In September, when the American military planned the landing at Inchon to relieve United Nations forces cornered in the southeastern tip of the peninsula, it decided it first had to neutralize Wolmi, which overlooks the channel that approaches the harbor.

“The mission was to saturate the area so thoroughly with napalm that all installations on that area would be burned,” Marine pilots said in one of their mission reports on Wolmi that were retrieved by the commission from the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States.

They also reported that no troops were seen, “but the flashes observed on the ground indicated the intensity of the fire to be accurate enough to destroy any about.”

The reports describe strafing on the beach but make no mention of civilian casualties.

The Inchon landing helped United Nations troops recapture Seoul and drive the North Koreans back. But the tide turned again when China entered the war.

The other two attacks the commission ruled on, in Tanyang and Sansong, south of Seoul, occurred as Communist forces barreled down the peninsula. As the allies fell back, they were attacked by guerrillas they could not easily distinguish from refugees.

Fearing enemy infiltration, American troops stopped refugees streaming down the roads and told them to return home or stay in the hills, or risk getting shot by allied troops. On Jan. 14, 1951, the Army’s X Corps under Maj. Gen. Edward M. Almond ordered the “methodical destruction of dwellings and other buildings forward of front lines which are, or susceptible of being, utilized by the enemy for shelter.” It recommended airstrikes.

“Excellent results” was how American pilots summarized their strikes at Sansong on Jan. 19, 1951.

The same day, however, one of General Almond’s subordinates, Brig. Gen. David G. Barr of the Seventh Infantry Division, wrote to General Almond that “methodical burning out poor farmers when no enemy is present is against the grain of U.S. soldiers.” At least 51 villagers, including 16 children, were killed in Sansong, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The attack on Tanyang followed the next day, when, survivors say, American planes dropped napalm near the entrance of the cave where refugees had sought shelter.

“When the napalm hit the entrance, the blast and smoke knocked out kerosene and castor-oil lamps we had in the cave,” Eom Han-won, then 15, said in an interview. “It was a pitch-black chaos — people shouting for each other, stampeding, choking. Some said we should crawl in deeper, covering our faces with wet cloth. Some said we should rush out through the blaze. Those who were not burned to death suffocated.”

Like Mr. Eom’s family, most of the people there were refugees who had been turned back at an American roadblock south of Tanyang, survivors said. In the days before the attack, the cave was packed with families. When the American warplanes flew in from the southwest, children were playing outside amid cattle and baggage.

That day, the Seventh Division’s operations logs noted that 13 planes attacked “enemy troops” and “pack animals and cave.” It reported “many casualties and got all animals.”

Mr. Eom, who rushed out of the cave into a hail of machine-gun fire from the planes but survived, said, “The Americans pushed us back toward the enemy area and then bombed us.” He said he lost 10 family members.

Shortly afterward, South Korea’s Second Division reported 34 civilians killed and 72 wounded at Sansong, but “no enemy casualties,” prompting the American military to open an investigation. The American investigators did not dispute the South Korean report but concluded that the airstrike was “amply justified.” They said that Sansong was considered an enemy haven and that its residents had been warned to evacuate.

The case appeared closed until several years ago, when, in the course of a Korean television reporter’s investigation, villagers acquired a copy of the American military’s wartime report and read that they had been told to evacuate. They insist, and the commission agreed, that this was not true. They say the village where North Korean troops were sighted was elsewhere and was never bombed.

Regarding the Wolmi attack, the commission said that while it recognized the need for the landing at Inchon, it could find “no evidence of efforts to limit civilian casualties.”

Wolmi survivors said the North Korean officers’ housing was about 1,000 feet away from their village. They say the American pilots, whose mission reports noted “visibility unlimited” and firing altitudes as low as 100 feet, should not have mistaken villagers, including many women and children, for the enemy.

They said the American troops later bulldozed their charred village to build a base.

“If you say these killings were not deliberate and were mistakes, how can you explain the fact that there were so many of these incidents?” asked Park Myung-lim, a historian at Yonsei University in Seoul.

The victims’ grievances found an outlet in 2005, when left-leaning civic groups tried to topple the MacArthur statue. But Wolmi survivors said they did not join the protest for fear they might be branded anti-American.

“We consider MacArthur a hero to our country, but no one can know the suffering our family endured,” said Chung Ji-eun, an Inchon cabdriver whose father died at Wolmi. “Both governments emphasize the alliance, but they never care about people like us who were sacrificed in the name of alliance.”

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The Politics of Rice

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Inside USA travels to Haiti to look at how the stories of politics, rice, and the United States are deeply interwoven.

Twenty years ago, Haiti produced enough rice to feed its population. Importing rice from other countries like the US was unheard of.

Today, the country of less than 10 million people is the third largest importer of US rice in the world – 75 per cent of the rice eaten in Haiti is shipped in from the US.

Great for farmers in places like Arkansas and Missouri but devastating for farmers in the Artibonite valley, which used to be Haiti’s rice bowl.

And now that Haiti is utterly dependent on imported food, the entire country is vulnerable to the mood swings of the global market. So when the price of rice doubled in the last year, the majority of Haitians, who live in bitter poverty, got slammed.

In an election year, Americans are also facing skyrocketing food prices, while Congress just passed a farm bill that includes almost a billion dollars a year for rice farmers in the US.

On this week’s Inside USA, we look at the politics of rice and the policies forged in Washington, felt in Haiti.

Part 1

Part 2

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Did McCain’s foreign-policy advisor profit from the Iraq war?

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Mark Benjamin | As recently as last year, John McCain’s senior foreign-policy and national security advisor, a neoconservative who played a leading role in pushing for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, was trying to use his role in promoting the Iraq war to make money off Iraqi oil. In a confidential memo, a company called World Strategic Energy, for which top McCain aide Randy Scheunemann was an executive consultant, told prospective investors that Scheunemann could help World Strategic Energy win oil contracts in Iraq because he was well-connected in the Iraqi exile community and had been a “key player” in getting the U.S. involved in Iraq. The memo was first published by blogger and Salon contributor Lindsay Beyerstein, who wrote that the 44-page brochure-style “placement memorandum” was being circulated to potential investors as late as 2007.

Scheunemann was pushing for the use of U.S. military force in Iraq a decade ago. He was a director of the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative group that sent a public letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In 1998, while working for Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, he helped author a bill that gave close to $100 million to the Iraqi National Congress, the anti-Hussein exile group run by Ahmad Chalabi. The World Strategic Energy document memo includes a photo of Scheunemann with Chalabi. After working on McCain’s failed presidential bid in 2000, Scheunemann went on to become the head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a non-government organization with close ties to the Bush administration that was formed in 2002 and dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003. “Randy Scheunemann was a key player in the U.S. involvement in the Iraq war,” says the memo. “[H]e coordinated the White House’s ‘Outside the Government’ public relations campaign on Iraq while administering relationships with key Iraqi leaders in exile.” The brochure says that thanks to Scheunemann, “some of the team’s strongest relationships are in Iraq.”

Scheunemann is McCain’s point man in articulating and defending the senator’s Iraq policy. McCain was also a major advocate of the original invasion. The Worldwide document seems to portray Scheunemann as attempting to profit off the war. It is unclear how much, if any, money Scheunemann made from Worldwide.

The brochure lists the company’s president as Stephen Payne, who also appears in the photo alongside Chalabi. Payne recently stepped down from a U.S. government advisory role after a report in the Sunday Times of London showed that Payne, also a lobbyist, had offered a foreign official meetings with top Bush administration officials in exchange for a $250,000 donation to Bush’s presidential library. The paper reported that Payne had also boasted to a foreign official that Scheunemann had been “working for me on my payroll for five of the last eight years.”

The McCain campaign did not return e-mails seeking comment on the document. Payne also did not return a similar call.

Continue http://www.salon.com/news/primary_sources/2008/08/01/scheunemann/index1.html 

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Spy-in-sky patrols over British cities

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Jason Lewis | MI5  is using a fleet of sophisticated surveillance aircraft to search for unidentified Britons who fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The manhunt has been ordered because it is feared the committed and highly trained fighters may have returned home to plot terror attacks in the UK.

Planes with eavesdropping equipment are now flying over British cities searching for returning Afghan fighters.

They are attempting to identify suspects using ‘voice prints’ of fighters with British accents picked up by RAF Nimrod spy planes monitoring Taliban battlefield radio signals.

The revelation comes after the former SAS commander in Afghanistan yesterday confirmed that British Muslim extremists were actively supporting Taliban and Al Qaeda attacks on British troops.

He said there was also evidence that these people were then returning home to plot further attacks in the UK.

Brigadier Ed Butler warned: ‘There is a link between Kandahar and urban conurbations in the UK. This is something the military understands but the British public does not.’

Whitehall sources have never officially confirmed that the three Britten-Norman Islander aircraft based at RAF Northolt in West London are being used for covert surveillance by MI5.

Last year it was revealed that West Midlands Police had used the aircraft, which can monitor computer and mobile-phone communication and long-wave radios, to track suspects connected to the plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier.

And their long-term role with the Security Service was apparently confirmed by a photograph, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, of an MI5 surveillance officer, Steven Lanham, who died on duty in 1999, dressed in a flying suit alongside one of the aircraft.

The Islander aircraft regularly patrol the skies over Birmingham and Coventry, Leicester, West Yorkshire and the bordering Greater Manchester areas, flying at between 12,000ft and 15,000ft.

Their equipment and capabilities have never been officially disclosed but they are believed to be able to monitor mobile-phone calls. More recently they have been fitted with equipment capable of picking up signals from wi-fi computer networks.

‘Traffic’ intercepted by the equipment on board is analysed and processed, probably at the GCHQ spy centre in Cheltenham, searching for voice matches with those overheard in the Afghan war zone.

Voices heard in Afghanistan and the suspect voices in the UK are computer-analysed looking for a match. It is understood that, in some cases, it has been possible to determine the true identities of the Taliban fighters from the UK.

Last night Whitehall sources refused to discuss MI5 surveillance methods.

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Guantanamo dangles new incentive for detainees

Monday, August 4th, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — In hopes of encouraging better behavior among terrorism suspects in a maximum-security facility here, parts of it will be gradually transformed to let some of the men eat, visit and exercise together.

The planned easing of conditions in some cell blocks of Camp 6 is part of an effort to provide more “intellectual stimulation” for the prisoners, said Rear Adm. Dave Thomas, who two months ago took over command of the military prison and interrogation network.

“The effect I hope to achieve is to get greater compliance,” Thomas said Saturday as he showed journalists the construction work underway to reconfigure guard posts and access.

Prisoners excluded from the initial communal-living group “would see that others got this, and that might be an incentive,” he said.

Camp 6, where about 75 prisoners live in individual cement-walled cells with steel doors, was modeled after a prison in Michigan, with a common area outfitted with tables and stools for meals, games and conversation.

The detainees have been able to see those areas from the narrow windows in their cell doors, but they haven’t been allowed to use them.

Camp 6 was nearing completion in May 2006 when a riot in Camp 4 — which housed detainees considered the most compliant — prompted prison officials to tighten restrictions throughout the sprawl of what are now eight prison camps.

Camp 4 held 175 men before the riot — which was reportedly sparked by guards’ mishandling of a Koran during a search for contraband.

Only 75 men are now at the barracks-like facility, where they live 10 to a room, take their meals together and can spend most daylight hours outside playing sports.

Guantanamo’s prisoner population has dropped in the last few years from more than 700 to about 270, with men deemed of little threat to U.S. security being released or transferred to be dealt with by their home countries.

Thomas declined to say whether the prisoner population had become more difficult as less confrontational detainees had left.

But he did concede that there was no further demand for facilities for the “highly compliant.”

At Camp 4, which has a capacity of 200, one of the empty rooms has been outfitted with a flat-screen TV to show taped sports events and TV programs — the favorite being the Discovery Channel’s adventure fishing series “The Deadliest Catch,” Thomas said.

Another barracks has been converted into a schoolroom where English lessons are offered, as are lessons in basic written Arabic and Pashto for illiterate detainees.

At Camp 5, housing about 50 prisoners in maximum-security conditions, movies are shown every two weeks to individual detainees as a reward for good behavior, the admiral said.

The films are shown in the prison’s interrogation room.

Though the changes at Camp 6 are intended to allow more interaction among prisoners, camp-to-camp communication is still discouraged.

Among the new features of the side-by-side Camps 5 and 6 is an external speaker system that emanates a gargling sound to muffle shouted messages from the outside recreation pens of the adjacent compound.

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0432.html

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FBI Told to Blame Anthrax on al-Qaeda

Monday, August 4th, 2008

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK - WASHINGTON | In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was “beaten up” during President Bush’s morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

“They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. “Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with,” the ex-FBI official said. “They couldn’t go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next.”

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Next president should order investigation of Bush-Cheney use of torture

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Rosa Brooks, Los Angeles Times | Even war criminals have fan clubs. On Tuesday, 15,000 people in Belgrade, Serbia, protested the transfer of indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. Karadzic is implicated in torture, rape, murder and genocide, but to some self-styled Serbian patriots, these are mere details.

”Long Live Radovan!” chanted the protesters.

For the many Americans who read of Karadzic’s arrest but wondered, ”Yes, great - and when will George W. Bush and Dick Cheney face trial for war crimes?” this is something to keep in mind. Karadzic was the leader of a small, unrecognized rogue republic and presided over a genocide - but he evaded justice for more than a decade and still keeps a loyal fan base.

Bush and Cheney are the leaders of the most powerful state in the world, and their misdeeds, though egregious, aren’t on the same level as Karadzic’s. (Unless - ahem - you count the Iraq war, on the ”it was all a tissue of lies” theory. But for the sake of the argument, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.) So no one should be surprised that there’s still a Bush fan club (albeit a small one) or that the prospects of criminal proceedings against the president and his henchmen are virtually nonexistent.

It’s not that Bush, Cheney and Co. don’t deserve to end up in the dock. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who was commissioned by the Pentagon in 2004 to investigate the abuses at Abu Ghraib, recently concluded that ”The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. . . . A government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. . . .There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.”

The human cost of those crimes? It’s hard to say for sure, given the administration’s penchant for secrecy (understandable, because the president was warned as early as January 2002 of ”the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act” by his then-chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales). But when the nongovernmental Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project examined thousands of pages of internal government records, it documented more than 330 cases ”in which U.S. military and civilian personnel are credibly alleged to have abused or killed detainees” at ”U.S. facilities throughout Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.”

A McClatchy Newspaper Group report released a few weeks ago came to a similar conclusion, finding that brutal mistreatment of prisoners was routine in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo, even though in many cases the abused detainees had no ties to al-Qaida.

Did all this violate U.S. and international law? You betcha. The U.S. is party to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, and torture is also a federal crime. At the time most of the abuses were committed, the War Crimes Act also criminalized violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits ”cruel treatment and torture (and) outrages upon personal dignity.” And under the doctrine of ”command responsibility,” senior civilian and military leaders could all face criminal liability for authorizing or tolerating the abuses.

But don’t hold your breath. As far back as 2001, administration lawyers were crafting legal opinions designed to shelter their bosses from any future criminal liability, and much evidence has since been hidden and destroyed. Then in 2006, the GOP-dominated Congress amended the War Crimes Act - with retroactive effect - to make future prosecutions almost impossible.

In any case, neither Democrats nor Republicans have the stomach for criminal proceedings against high-ranking current or former officials who still retain substantial public support. Meanwhile, no international tribunal is ever likely to have jurisdiction over the U.S. participants involved in the abuses.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up on accountability. John McCain and Barack Obama should be urged to establish a high-level, nonpartisan ”truth commission” with robust subpoena powers early in 2009. That commission should investigate, hold hearings and issue a public report on responsibility for torture, war crimes and other abuses committed during the Bush administration.
Such a panel wouldn’t satisfy those who’d like to see Bush and Cheney in prison garb, but it would be a major step toward undoing the damage the administration did to our reputation as a nation committed to human rights. And as more incriminating details come out - and they will - some Bush-Cheney fan club members might even turn in their membership cards.
—
* ROSA BROOKS is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

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Media Censorship at Olympics in China Mirrors FDA Censorship of Health Product Claims in America

Monday, August 4th, 2008

NaturalNews | The U.S. media is loudly protesting the censorship of their reporters at the Olympics in Beijing. Betraying its promise to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), China has blocked reporters’ access to “sensitive” websites, including those that mention human rights violations, the suppression of the Falun Gong religious group, the Tiananman Square uprising and other similar topics the Chinese government would like to imagine never happened. In response to these restrictions, U.S. reporters are crying foul, insisting that they should have full access to information without government censorship. By implication, they are also stating that the U.S. is a “free society” where information is never censored by the government.

Perhaps these reporters have never actually opened their eyes in their own country. While China’s censorship of news websites is deplorable, the U.S. is engaged in a far more restrictive, freedom-crush brand of censorship in the health industry: The censorship of truthful descriptions of health products by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Like China’s government at the Olympics, the FDA has outlawed free speech by nutritional supplement companies, threatening them with fines, business interruptions and even jail time for their founders if they don’t remove all text from their websites and product packaging that seeks to inform consumers about the genuine health benefits provided by their products.

The FDA’s campaign of intimidation against food and supplement companies

For example, last year the FDA sent threatening letters to 29 growers of cherries, warning that they could not place links on their websites linking to scientific studies documenting the health benefits of cherries. Allowing consumers to be informed of the scientific truth about cherries, it seems, was simply intolerable by the FDA. Any company that linked to a scientific, peer-reviewed study showing cherries to be natural anti-inflammatory foods would be sued by the FDA and put out of business, the letters warned.

And that’s just the beginning. Over the last several decades, the FDA has seized imports of herbs from South America, threatened honest supplement companies to remove accurate information from their labels, and pursued a campaign of intimidation and tyranny against virtually the entire natural products industry. In fact, the FDA has even ordered the destruction of recipe books containing dessert recipes using stevia (you thought book burnings only happened in China? Think again…).

Why China and America both use censorship to protect the powerful

In all, the actions of the FDA makes China’s government look downright Libertarian. In the United States, the FDA has made sure that consumers have virtually zero access to truthful information about the benefits of nutritional supplements in much the same way the Chinese government blocks its citizens from having access to truthful information about human rights websites. These campaigns of censorship also happen for much the same reason: To protect the status quo and prevent a revolution from taking place (in China, it would be a social revolution. In the U.S., it would be a health care revolution).

You see, when it comes to real freedom, it makes no difference that China is a Communist government and America claims to be a Democracy: America blocks its citizens from accessing all sorts of crucial information about health freedom, just like China censors its internet to prevent people from learning about political freedom. In fact, both China and the FDA use many of the same online technologies to search for “offending” websites that they can shut down, intimidate or threaten with legal action. Those technologies, of course, were created by American companies like Google. And it is American companies like Yahoo that gladly hand over free speech protestors to tyrannical governments, betraying the privacy of their users and colluding with the thought police of various nations.

So reporters can protest all they want at China’s censorship of the internet, but when they return home from the Olympics, they will return to nations that practice the same brand of crushing censorship… the kind of censorship that keeps consumers ignorant and uninformed, protecting the profits of drug companies and cancer centers, all while interfering with the distributing of truthful information about the astounding ability of foods, superfoods, herbs and nutritional supplements to prevent cancer, halt heart disease, reverse diabetes, dissolve kidney stones, end depression and greatly extend lifespan (among other benefits).

They will talk about how China’s citizens don’t have access to a free press, and then they’ll turn right around and execute the very same censorship they are criticizing by refusing to print stories about the fraud of modern medicine; the quackery of chemotherapy; the monopoly price controls of Big Pharma and the outright criminal actions of the FDA.

The U.S. media mirrors China’s media censors

In fact, it is the mainstream media — the very group whining about freedom at the Olympics — that fully cooperates with the FDA by focusing its reporting on pharmaceuticals while ignoring the wealth of important information about natural remedies that could revolutionize health care and save the U.S. more than $40 trillion over the next few decades.

Really? $40 trillion? Absolutely: According to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, a 1% reduction in cancer mortality is worth about $500 billion to the U.S. economy over the long term. We have nutrients right now that can slash cancer rates by nearly 80 percent, across the entire population (vitamin D being the simplest one). That comes to $40 trillion in economic abundance from preventing cancer alone. (That’s enough money to rebuild every school, bridge, highway, park, library, airport and seaport in the entire country, by the way, but again, you’re not supposed to know that…)

The FDA doesn’t want anybody to know that Vitamin D prevents cancer, you see. That’s why no Vitamin D supplement company can make any statements at all about cancer. If they tried, they’d be arrested at gunpoint and dragged into prison like a Falun Gong member in Beijing. In China, of course, you might be sentenced to death and have your organs harvested and sold on the black market. In America, you might have your children kidnapped by state officials and watch in horror as their organs are destroyed by state-mandated chemotherapy chemicals that you are then obliged to pay for (at monopoly prices, no less). Don’t believe this actually happens in the United States? Think again. Read the story of Abraham Cherrix: http://www.naturalnews.com/019617.html

Don’t believe for a minute that you are free in America. You are merely a subject that’s exploited by powerful corporations and corrupt government regulators working in collusion with a media institution engaged in all-out censorship of stories that threaten the status quo: Health freedom, the truth about 9/11, voting fraud, the mass fluoridation of public water supplies, the real story behind the fractional reserve banking system and other similar topics. While every American citizens is TOLD they are free, if you look at the man behind the curtain, you’ll realize it’s all just smoke and mirrors (and bombs and bullets).

Censorship is a tool that protects the powerful

Every government, you see, has its power base to protect, and in the U.S., the power base is the corporations. If you threaten the corporations by telling the truth about nutritional supplements or natural healing modalities, you will be arrested, imprisoned or run out of the country. It happens in America every day. That’s why all the really effective cancer clinics are in Mexico and South America — they’ve all had to flee the “health police” in the U.S. that run around arresting people like Communist China Secret Police! Read my article documenting the true history of armed FDA raids on health clinics: http://www.naturalnews.com/021791.html

The thought police aren’t limited to China

I hope this latest fiasco at the Olympics in Beijing will serve as a reminder that China isn’t the only country that isn’t free: The U.S., U.K., Australia and most other western nations practice their own forms of censorship, and much of it is carried out at gunpoint. (Many health clinic raids in the U.S., for example, are carried out with SWAT teams armed with assault rifles and body armor.)

When it comes to accessing accurate information about health and supplements, U.S. citizens are no more free than China’s citizens, and they’re nowhere near as free as the citizens of Ecuador, for example, where a package of the Chanca Piedra herb just openly says, “Eliminates kidney stones.” Try to put that text on your bottle of herbs in the U.S. and you’ll find your product inventory confiscated by the FDA, which has become the “Ministry of Truth” on anything related to health.

While many reporters might be hoping for freedom in China right now, I’m hoping for freedom at home first. Let’s reclaim our own freedom of speech right here at home before we go worrying about how other countries censor their news.

Words and ideas banned in China:

Falun Gong
Tiananmen Square
Religious worship (including Christianity)
Voting rights
Workers’ rights
Civil liberties

Words and ideas banned in America:

Curing cancer with herbs
Saying no to vaccinations
Reversing heart disease with nutrition
Curing diabetes with vegetable juices
Eliminating depression with supplements
“Treating” any disease at all with herbs
Disagreeing with the “official” explanation of 9/11 and the WTC7 building

… and more. And while some skeptics might say that China’s censorship is far more severe because it deals with human rights violations, I say the FDA’s censorship of truthful health information IS a human rights violation!

What could be more important to human rights than the right of an individual to protect and preserve their own life by learning the truth about nourishing foods? To deny a population access to truthful information about the life-protecting properties of common nutrients is, all by itself, a crime against humanity and a damning violation of human rights!

The most astonishing thing about all of this is that China’s citizens think they are free! And if you live in the U.S., I’m willing to bet you think you’re free, too.

Remember this: Tyranny is always, always, always sold to the People as freedom. Every government lies to its People, as it is a necessary component of creating the illusion of freedom. But there is no such thing as real freedom in a society that restricts the Peoples’ access to the very information they need in order to make informed decisions about their own lives. America, then, is no more “the Land of the Free” than China.

Want to make America free? You’ll have to take it back from those who stole it from you. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson:

And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

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FBI seizes local Md. library computers

Monday, August 4th, 2008

The FBI removed computer records from the C. Burr Artz Library this week, a library official confirmed Saturday.

Darrell Batson, director of Frederick County Public Libraries, said two FBI employees came to the downtown Frederick library either Wednesday or Thursday. The agents removed two public computers from the library’s second floor. They told him they were taking the units back to their office in Washington, D.C., Batson said.

Batson expected the computers would be returned early this week, he said.

Debbie Weierman, spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office, would not comment Saturday on whether the agency had removed records from the library.

This was the third time in his 10 years with FCPL that the FBI has come to the library seeking records, Batson said. It was the first time they came without a court order.

The library’s procedure for such requests usually requires a court order, however after the agent described the case and the situation, he was persuaded to give them access, Batson said.

“They had an awful lot of information,” he said, but he was not allowed to discuss specifics.

“It was a decision I made on my experience and the information given to me,” he said.

C. Burr Artz Library has several dozen public computers. The agents seemed to know which ones they needed access to, he said.

Anyone with a library card and a PIN number can use FCPL computers. Without a library card, a person can get a temporary pass to go online.

Batson said the agents made no mention of Bruce Ivins, anthrax or Fort Detrick.

“Obviously it coincided with the events everyone is talking about,” he said.

(Copyright 2008 The Frederick News-Post. All rights reserved.)

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US Army tests secret Bio-Weapons on U.S Citizens

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Shocking Documentary that exposes the USA Army secretly testing Bio-Weapons on the public without their knowledge.

Look up in the sky and see that Chemtrails are now admitted openly in documents.

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Afghanistan: Not a Good War

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Conn Hallinan | Every war has a story line. World War I was “the war to end all wars.” World War II was “the war to defeat fascism.”

Iraq was sold as a war to halt weapons of mass destruction; then to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then to build democracy. In the end it was a fabrication built on a falsehood and anchored in a fraud.

But Afghanistan is the “good war,” aimed at “those who attacked us,” in the words of columnist Frank Rich. It is “the war of necessity,” asserts the New York Times, to roll back the “power of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

Barack Obama is making the distinction between the “bad war” in Iraq and the “good war” in Afghanistan a centerpiece of his run for the presidency. He proposes ending the war in Iraq and redeploying U.S. military forces in order “to finish the job in Afghanistan.”

Virtually no one in the United States or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) calls for negotiating with the Taliban. Even the New York Times editorializes that those who want to talk “have deluded themselves.”

But the Taliban government did not attack the United States. Our old ally, Osama bin Laden, did. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are not the same organization (if one can really call al-Qaeda an “organization”), and no one seems to be listening to the Afghans.

We should be.

What Afghans Say

A recent poll of Afghan sentiment found that, while the majority dislikes the Taliban, 74% want negotiations and 54% would support a coalition government that included the Taliban.

This poll  reflects a deeply divided country where most people are sitting on the fence and waiting for the final outcome of the war. Forty percent think the current government of Hamid Karzai, allied with the United States and NATO, will prevail, 19% say the Taliban, and 40% say it is “too early to say.”

There is also strong ambivalence about the presence of foreign troops. Only 14% want them out now, but 52% want them out within three to five years. In short, the Afghans don’t want a war to the finish.

They also have a far more nuanced view of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. While the majority oppose both groups –13% support the Taliban and 19% al-Qaeda – only 29% see the former organization as “a united political force.”

But that view doesn’t fit the West’s story line of the enemy as a tightly disciplined band of fanatics.

Whither the Taliban

In fact, the Taliban appears to be evolving from a creation of the U.S., Saudi Arabian, and Pakistani intelligence agencies during Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union, to a polyglot collection of dedicated Islamists to nationalists. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar told the Agence France Presse early this year, “We’re fighting to free our country. We are not a threat to the world.”

Those are words that should give Obama, The New York Times, and NATO pause.

The initial invasion in 2001 was easy because the Taliban had alienated itself from the vast majority of Afghans. But the weight of occupation, and the rising number of civilian deaths, is shifting the resistance toward a war of national liberation. 

No foreign power has ever won that battle in Afghanistan.

War Gone Bad

There is no mystery as to why things have gone increasingly badly for the United States and its allies.

As the United States steps up its air war, civilian casualties have climbed steadily over the past two years. Nearly 700 were killed in the first three months of 2008, a major increase over last year. In a recent incident, 47 members of a wedding party were killed in Helmand Province. In a society where clan, tribe, and blood feuds are a part of daily life, that single act sowed a generation of enmity.

Anatol Lieven, a professor of war at King’s College London, says that a major impetus behind the growing resistance is anger over the death of family members and neighbors.

Lieven says it is as if Afghanistan is “becoming a sort of surreal hunting estate, in which the U.S. and NATO breed the very terrorists they then track down.”

Once a population turns against an occupation (or just decides to stay neutral), there are few places in the world where an occupier can win. Afghanistan, with its enormous size and daunting geography, is certainly not one of them.

Writing in Der Spiegel, Ullrich Fichter says that glancing at a map in the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) headquarters outside Kandahar could give one the impression that Afghanistan is under control. “Colorful little flags identify the NATO troops presence throughout the country,” Germans in the northeast, Americans in the east, Italians in the West, British and Canadians in the south, with flags from Turkey, the Netherlands, Spain, Lithuania, Australia and Sweden scattered between.

“But the flags are an illusion,” he says.

The UN considers one third of the country “inaccessible,” and almost half, “high risk.” The number of roadside bombs has increased fivefold over 2004, and the number of armed attacks has jumped by a factor of 10. In the first three months of 2008, attacks around Kabul have surged by 70%. The current national government has little presence outside its capital. President Karzai is routinely referred to as “the mayor of Kabul.”

According to Der Spiegel, the Taliban are moving north toward Kunduz, just as they did in 1994 when they broke out of their base in Kandahar and started their drive to take over the country. The Asia Times says the insurgents’ strategy is to cut NATO’s supply lines from Pakistan and establish a “strategic corridor” from the border to Kabul.

The United States and NATO currently have about 60,000 troops in Afghanistan. But many NATO troops are primarily concerned with rebuilding and development – the story that was sold to the European public to get them to support the war – and only secondarily with war fighting.

The Afghan army adds about 70,000 to that number, but only two brigades and one headquarters unit are considered capable of operating on their own.

According to U.S. counter insurgency doctrine, however, Afghanistan would require at least 400,000 troops to even have a chance of “winning” the war. Adding another 10,000 U.S. troops will have virtually no effect.

Afghanistan and the Elections

As the situation continues to deteriorate, some voices, including those of the Karzai government and both U.S. presidential candidates, advocate expanding the war into Pakistan in a repeat of the invasions of Laos and Cambodia, when the Vietnam War began spinning out of control. Both those invasions were not only a disaster for the invaders. They also led directly to the genocide in Cambodia.

By any measure, a military “victory” in Afghanistan is simply not possible. The only viable alternative is to begin direct negotiations with the Taliban, and to draw in regional powers with a stake in the outcome: Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, China, and India.

But to do so will require abandoning our “story” about the Afghan conflict as a “good war.” In this new millennium, there are no good wars.

 

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

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