How easily our logic fails us in the face of the all-knowing mainstream media. ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko has succumbed to the effects of a radioactive isotope polonium 210, one of the rarest substances on the planet and one few could obtain according to Dr Andrea Sella, lecturer in chemistry at University College London, which he may or may not have ingested at a sushi bar in London.
Litvinenko, a critic of Putin, had been investigating the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, also a vocal critic of Putin, who was gunned down at a Moscow flat last month. There is also the fact that Litvineko had penned a piece back in July for the now-defunct Chechen press where he claimed that Putin was a pedophile. See here for the google cached article.
So, case closed? I mean, all the evidence would seem to point to Putin as the cause of Litvinenko's untimely demise. Well, no, actually. Thinking logically about it, or rather, thinking 'conspiratorially' about it (since this is, after all, a very clear case of conspiracy) it is far more plausible that Litvinenko's murder was carried out by an enemy of Putin. As with all cloak and dagger cases, in the absence of any empirical evidence, the closest approximation to the truth is generally achieved by asking "who benefits?" read more
One of the many strange things surrounding the murder of Alexander Litvinenko is the fact that it is being discussed at all. The exact details of the method used to assassinate him, his 3 week hospitalization, with pictures supplied by Lord Bell (more about him below) and Litvinenko's ultimate death have all been publicized to the greatest extent possible. This, it has to be said, is somewhat surprising given that covert intelligence matters (even those involving intelligence agencies of other nations) are usually kept covert.
IN what sounds like a scene from the 70s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, people in South Australia and western Victoria deluged police and media with reports of a spectacular meteor sighting.
The Bureau of Meteorology confirmed the object was a meteor.
Police in SA said they took calls from just after 8pm (CST) yesterday from Renmark and Loxton in the Riverland, most Adelaide suburbs and then from people living south of the city, with reports of a fireball in the sky.
In Victoria, callers to local radio from Bendigo to Horsham in the state's northwest down to Colac in the southwest, reported seeing a bright green object shooting westward in the sky.
One caller, Jeff, said he saw what he thought was a comet about 8.30pm (AEDT) as he was driving into Horsham.
"It was green like a meteorite or shooting star," he told ABC radio.
"It was really pretty bright and you could see something else coming down as well, but what it was I don't know."
Monty from Kaniva, near the SA border, said the object was bright and appeared to have debris trailing behind it.
"It was before sunset and normally you only see those things in the dark," Monty said.
"The trail hung in the sky for at least 15 minutes afterward like a jet stream."
Allen at Colac said: "I was sitting at the Shell servo at Colac and I was looking to the north and you could see the green light with the tail thing behind it."
Brian, who owns a farm at Laanecoorie, west of Bendigo, said he and his wife were outside when they saw the comet-like object streak across the sky.
"We looked up and there was a green comet-like thing dropping out of the western sky," Brian said.
"It dropped over the trees at the back of our property and it was making a tail as it went down." LINK
KAMPALA (Reuters) - Climate change is melting a legendary ice field in equatorial Africa and may soon thaw it out completely, threatening fresh water supplies to hundreds of thousands of people.
The fabled, snow-capped Rwenzori mountains -- dubbed the "Mountains of the Moon" in travel brochures -- form part of the Uganda/Democratic Republic of the Congo border and are one of Uganda's top tourist destinations.
But warmer temperatures are melting the glaciers sitting on their peaks, with some scientists predicting the ice could be gone within two to three decades.
"Definitely, the glaciers are decreasing," James Magezi-Akiiki, a climate change specialist at Uganda's environment ministry told Reuters.
"They have already decreased by 60 percent since 1910. If temperatures keep going up as they have, there's a high chance of them disappearing."
Scientists say tropical glaciers like the snowy peaks of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa's highest mountain, are especially sensitive to climate change.
"The same thing is happening to Kilimanjaro...It's gone from white to brown," Magezi-Akiiki said.
A study in 2002 showed Kilimanjaro to have lost more than 80 percent of its ice cap in the past 100 years, reducing water supplies to people living around it.
"THE STREAMS WOULD DISAPPEAR"
Two U.N. reports coinciding with a conference on climate change in Kenya this week warned of disastrous consequences for Africa from global warming caused by CO2 emissions.
"Climate change threatens to intensify water insecurity on an unparalleled scale," the U.N. Human Development Report said.
Glaciers are often a crucial store of fresh water.
"The streams originating from the Rwenzori glaciers would disappear if they melt," said Magezi-Akiiki. "And during the dry season they are the only source of water."
He said measures needed to be taken to prepare people in western Uganda for future water shortages, including drilling bore holes to access water under the ground and building irrigation systems to conserve the region's rain.
The fabled status of the Rwenzoris stretches back to a remark by Greek geographer Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, who described "Mountains of the Moon whose snows feed the lakes, sources of the Nile."
The passage is thought to refer to the Rwenzoris, whose glacial streams run into Lake Albert as it joins the Nile.
"If the glaciers go, it would definitely impact on tourism. With no snow, tourists wouldn't go," Magezi-Akiiki said. "And there would be no water for them."
An ancient mega-catastrophe paved the way for the dinosaurs and spawned the Australian continent, new research suggests. (Image courtesy of Ohio State University)
Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.
The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.
Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, south of Australia -- also suggest that it could have begun the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent by creating the tectonic rift that pushed Australia northward.
Scientists believe that the Permian-Triassic extinction paved the way for the dinosaurs to rise to prominence. The Wilkes Land crater is more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, which marks the impact that may have ultimately killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub meteor is thought to have been 6 miles wide, while the Wilkes Land meteor could have been up to 30 miles wide -- four or five times wider.
"This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time," said Ralph von Frese, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University.
He and Laramie Potts, a postdoctoral researcher in geological sciences, led the team that discovered the crater. They collaborated with other Ohio State and NASA scientists, as well as international partners from Russia and Korea. They reported their preliminary results in a recent poster session at the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly meeting in Baltimore.
The scientists used gravity fluctuations measured by NASA's GRACE satellites to peer beneath Antarctica's icy surface, and found a 200-mile-wide plug of mantle material -- a mass concentration, or "mascon" in geological parlance -- that had risen up into the Earth's crust.
Mascons are the planetary equivalent of a bump on the head. They form where large objects slam into a planet's surface. Upon impact, the denser mantle layer bounces up into the overlying crust, which holds it in place beneath the crater.
When the scientists overlaid their gravity image with airborne radar images of the ground beneath the ice, they found the mascon perfectly centered inside a circular ridge some 300 miles wide -- a crater easily large enough to hold the state of Ohio.
Taken alone, the ridge structure wouldn't prove anything. But to von Frese, the addition of the mascon means "impact." Years of studying similar impacts on the moon have honed his ability to find them.
"If I saw this same mascon signal on the moon, I'd expect to see a crater around it," he said. "And when we looked at the ice-probing airborne radar, there it was."
"There are at least 20 impact craters this size or larger on the moon, so it is not surprising to find one here," he continued. "The active geology of the Earth likely scrubbed its surface clean of many more."
He and Potts admitted that such signals are open to interpretation. Even with radar and gravity measurements, scientists are only just beginning to understand what's happening inside the planet. Still, von Frese said that the circumstances of the radar and mascon signals support their interpretation.
"We compared two completely different data sets taken under different conditions, and they matched up," he said.
To estimate when the impact took place, the scientists took a clue from the fact that the mascon is still visible.
"On the moon, you can look at craters, and the mascons are still there," von Frese said. "But on Earth, it's unusual to find mascons, because the planet is geologically active. The interior eventually recovers and the mascon goes away." He cited the very large and much older Vredefort crater in South Africa that must have once had a mascon, but no evidence of it can be seen now.
"Based on what we know about the geologic history of the region, this Wilkes Land mascon formed recently by geologic standards -- probably about 250 million years ago," he said. "In another half a billion years, the Wilkes Land mascon will probably disappear, too."
Approximately 100 million years ago, Australia split from the ancient Gondwana supercontinent and began drifting north, pushed away by the expansion of a rift valley into the eastern Indian Ocean. The rift cuts directly through the crater, so the impact may have helped the rift to form, von Frese said.
But the more immediate effects of the impact would have devastated life on Earth.
"All the environmental changes that would have resulted from the impact would have created a highly caustic environment that was really hard to endure. So it makes sense that a lot of life went extinct at that time," he said.
He and Potts would like to go to Antarctica to confirm the finding. The best evidence would come from the rocks within the crater. Since the cost of drilling through more than a mile of ice to reach these rocks directly is prohibitive, they want to hunt for them at the base of the ice along the coast where the ice streams are pushing scoured rock into the sea. Airborne gravity and magnetic surveys would also be very useful for testing their interpretation of the satellite data, they said.
NSF and NASA funded this work. Collaborators included Stuart Wells and Orlando Hernandez, graduate students in geological sciences at Ohio State; Luis Gaya-Piqué and Hyung Rae Kim, both of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Alexander Golynsky of the All-Russia Research Institute for Geology and Mineral Resources of the World Ocean; and Jeong Woo Kim and Jong Sun Hwang, both of Sejong University in Korea.
Pierre Gemayel, a Lebanese cabinet minister and member of the Maronite Christian Phalange party, has been shot dead in Beirut.
His car was attacked in a Christian area on Tuesday.
Gemayel, son of ex-president Amin Gemayel, was a member of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, which is locked in a power struggle with pro-Syrian factions.
Analysts say Gemayel's death is likely to worsen tensions in the already divided country. Gemayel's vehicle was rammed in a Christian district before armed men riddled it with bullets. Al Jazeera's correspondent said there was panic in Beirut after the assassination, with people rushing to get home.
Residents of the mainly Christian town of Zahle staged angry protests along the international expressway linking Zahle with Baalbek.
The protesters denounced the Maronite Christian leader of the Free Patriotic Party, the retired General Michel Aoun, and Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief. They also chanted anti-Syrian slogans
The Kataeb (Phalange) party called on supporters to show self-restraint and foil "attempts to destabilise Lebanon".
In looking back at that of my own education, I have come to the conclusion that much of what I learned was a matter of propaganda. And I am sorry to say that it wasn’t until “that sorrowful day in September” that I decided to take a serious look at the history of our country, and it was that which has made all the difference, that which no doubt changed my life.
President Kennedy receives the flag of the cuba exiles (Brigade 2506) in Miami in Dec. 29, 1962 and declares: "I promise to return this flag in a free Havana." Kennedy had been misinformed about the exact details of the planned Cuban invasion.
On November 18th, 1963, John F. Kennedy predicted that the month of April, 1964, would bring "the longest and strongest peacetime economic expansion in our Nation's entire history." And he added: "The steady conquest of the surely yielding enemies of misery and hopelessness, hunger, and injustice is the central task for the Americas in our time . . . 'Nothing is true except a man or men adhere to it -- to live for it, to spend themselves on it, to die for it . . . '"
Time was slipping through his hands . . . he had four days to live.
By Pauline Paulinson 16 November, 2006 Countercurrents.org
Depleted uranium (DU) is cheap toxic waste from nuclear power plants and bomb production. However, uranium is one of earth's heaviest elements and DU easily smashes through tanks, buildings and bunkers spontaneously catching fire and burning people alive. The radioactivity lasts over 4,500,000,000 years and causes cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects. The blueprint for DU weapons is in a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan Project.
BAGHDAD: Victims of Iraq's sectarian slaughter are no longer being kept for relatives but photographed, numbered and buried in government cemeteries because the country's morgues can store no more bodies.
Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.
In October, a bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, its director, Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi, said.
The city's network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now held more than 500, he said.
Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.
"We can't remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again," Mr Obaidi said. "We simply don't have the staff."
Mr Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives was an emotional and logistical burden.
"Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They're all looking for their dead sons and I don't know how the computer or we will bear up," he said.
While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, the UN estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. Last week, the Iraqi Health Minister put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the US invasion at about 150,000 - close to the UN figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000-50,000.
At some morgues, bodies are even being turned away.
"We have to reject them," said Hadi al-Itabi, of the morgue in Kut, southeast of Baghdad.
"We just don't have enough cold storage."
Increasingly, Iraqis are being killed far from home and in secret - the victims of kidnappers and sectarian death squads.
With nowhere else to look when a friend or loved-one goes missing, family members first check the local morgue.
Abbas Beyat joined the line outside Baghdad's central morgue after his brother Hussein disappeared a month ago while driving through the mainly Sunni town of Tarmiyah, 48km north of Baghdad.
"There were three piles, each with about 20 bodies," Mr Beyat, 56, said of the scene inside the morgue. "The clerk told me to dig through them until I found my brother. I had to lift them off until I found him," he said.
Health Ministry officials are discussing how to handle the overflow of bodies. One proposal under consideration is the use of refrigerated trucks, manned by staff entrusted specifically to help identify bodies.
Today, while driving through town, I wound up behind a minivan that had a big sticker on the back. The sticker had an Israeli flag in the middle of it, and under it the quotation from the book of Genesis that reads "I will bless those who bless thee."
I would like to take this time to list my own reasons for thanking and blessing Israel, our lone ally in the Middle East, for everything she has done for us, since I am quite sure most Americans are unaware of just what kind of friend she has been to us.
For extorting from me and my fellow Americans $4,000,000,000.00 a year for the last 4 decades, we bless thee.
For taking our most sophisticated weapons technology and stealing it for yourself without paying the American patent holders, we bless thee.
For taking that high-tech military technology and selling it to our enemies, such as the Russians and Chinese, thus further endangering us, we bless thee.
For using that weaponry in a sustained attack against a United States ship, the USS Liberty, in an attempt to sink her, thus preventing US servicemen from revealing to the rest of the world information concerning the war crimes they witnessed you commit against Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Desert during the Six Day War, as well as for the purposes of dragging the US into yet another one of your murderous adventures, we bless thee.
For killing 35 and wounding 170 American sailors aboard the USS Liberty, we bless thee.
For bribing the United States government into covering it up, preventing any justice from being done for the benefit of the families of the lost sailors - as well as the American People, we bless thee.
For sending your agents into Egypt and blowing up American buildings for the purpose of blaming the Arabs in an event known as the Lavon Affair, we bless thee.
For sending your agents into Libya during the Reagan administration, and broadcasting radio messages in Arabic that were designed to sound like "terrorist cell planning" so that the US would initiate military strikes against Khadafi in an event known as Operation Trojan Horse, we bless thee.
For withholding information from us concerning the planned attacks against the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, attacks you knew about through your moles in the Islamic world and about which you deliberately refused to warn us in order to further your interests against the Arabs, we bless thee.
For employing Jonathon Pollard, an American serviceman paid to spy for Israel in order to steal even more of our National Security secrets for your parasitic purposes, we bless thee.
For blackmailing President Clinton through one of your sayanim, Monica Lewinsky, in order to prevent a coherent peace program from being pushed forward between yourself and the Palestinian people whom you have brutalized and murdered for the last 50 years, we bless thee.
For breaking every agreement you have made with your Arab neighbors, stealing their land, displacing, murdering, and treating them like the animals you see them as, we bless thee.
For using your agents within the first Bush administration to involve us in the first Gulf War, causing the deaths of American men and women, and exposing our servicemen to whatever bioweapons were and are responsible which have led to Gulf War Syndrome, we bless thee.
For your role in the September 11 attacks in this country, and for blackmailing and bribing the US government into deporting back to Israel the 100 or more intelligence agents that were arrested after the attacks, we bless thee.
For suppressing the information from the American people of your involvement in the September 11 attacks and sending us in the wrong direction in search of answers, we bless thee.
For using one of your agents in the US Army Weapons Lab to steal anthrax and distribute it into our mail system, terrorizing US citizens and killing several in order to blame the Arabs, we bless thee.
For using your agents in the US Government, namely, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, and the rest into initiating this war in the Middle East so that you could bring to heel all the enemies you have made during the last 50 years, we bless thee.
For using your agents in the media to lie to us on a minute by minute basis about the war, lying to us as to how "just" this cause is, and what the real reasons behind it are, we bless thee.
For using your agents in the Christian Evangelical community, such as Falwell, Graham, Swaggert, Robertson and the rest who praise you as God's chosen people and further keep Americans in the dark about who you really are what you have done, and what you are truly about, we bless thee.
For bringing idiots like Limbaugh, Liddy, Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly and Savage to the forefront as paid liars who will support you and further lead Americans astray, we bless thee.
For making America your attack dog, and for sending her sons and daughters to fight and die in all your future wars, we bless thee.
For using your influence in the media to hide the real statistics about the war, the dead and wounded on both sides, we bless thee.
For using us in such a way that not only further inflames the Arab world against us, but as well has succeeded in our alienating ourselves against those nations with whom we have been friendly for over a century, we bless thee.
And finally, for using your influence in our media and academia to flood our minds with pornography and lies, as well as inculcating in us a hatred for our history, religion, and culture, for dividing our nation between races and sexes, and for releasing into our society all of your plagues and filth that have left us a rotted out corpse of a once great nation, oh Israel, our friend,
Politics just became more revolting....if that's even possible.
Monday, 13 November 2006
Robert Fisk
'GREAT NEWS from America," the cashier at my local Beirut bookshop shouted at me, raising her thumbs in the air.
"Things will be better after these elections?"
Alas, I said. Alas, no. Things are going to get worse in the Middle East even if, in two years' time, America is blessed with a Democrat (and democratic) president.
For the disastrous philosophers behind the bloodbath in Iraq are now washing their hands of the whole mess and crying "not us" with the same enthusiasm as the Lebanese lady in my book shop, while the "experts" on the mainstream US east coast press are preparing the ground for our Iraqi retreat - by blaming it all on those greedy, blood-lusting, anarchic, depraved, uncompromising Iraqis.
I must say that Richard Perle's version of a mea culpa did take my breath away.
Here was the ex-chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board Advisory Committee - he who once told us that "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform" - now admitting that he "underestimated the depravity" in Iraq.
He holds the President responsible, of course, acknowledging only that - and here, dear reader, swallow hard - "I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies ..."'
Maybe I find this self-righteous, odious mea culpa all the more objectionable because the same miserable man a couple of years ago attacked me as a supporter of the Baathist regime. At the time I was reporting Saddam's mass rapes and mass hangings at Abu Ghraib prison while Perle and his cohorts were silent about Saddam's wickedness and their chum Donald Rumsfeld was cheerfully shaking the monster's hand in Baghdad in an attempt to reopen the US embassy there.
Not that Perle isn't in good company. Kenneth Adelman, the Pentagon neocon who also beat the drums for war, has been telling Vanity Fair that "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" is dead.
This is not the worst to come from those who encouraged us to invade Iraq and start a war which has cost the lives of perhaps 600,000 civilians. A new phenomenon is creeping into the pages of The New York Times and those other great organs of state in America. For those journalists who supported the war, it's not enough to bash George. No, they've got a new flag to fly: the Iraqis don't deserve us. David Brooks - he who once told us that neocons such as Perle had nothing to do with the President's decision to invade Iraq - has been ransacking his way through Elie Kedourie's 1970 essay on the British occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s. And what has he discovered? That "the British tried to encourage responsible leadership to no avail", quoting a British officer at the time as concluding that Iraqi Shia "have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own".
But the Brooks article in The New York Times was also frightening. Iraq, he now informs us, is suffering "a complete social integration", and "American blunders" were exacerbated "by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise, even in the face of self-immolation".
Iraq, Brooks has decided, is "teetering on the edge of futility" (whatever that means) and if American troops cannot restore order, "it will be time to effectively end Iraq", diffusing authority down to "the clan, the tribe or sect" which - wait for it - are "the only communities which are viable".
Nor should you believe that the Brooks article represents a lone voice. Ralph Peters, a USA Today writer and retired US army officer, says he supported the invasion because he was "convinced that the Middle East was so politically, socially, morally and intellectually stagnant that we had to risk intervention - or face generations of terrorism and tumult".
For all the US Government's errors, Peters boasts, "we did give the Iraqis a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy".
But those pesky Iraqis, it now seems, "preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption".
Peters' conclusion?
"Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it." As a result, "it's their tragedy, not ours. Iraq was the Arab world's last chance to board the train to modernity, to give the region a future ..."
Incredibly, Peters finishes by believing that "if the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries" because Iraq will have "consumed terrorists" and the United States will "still be the greatest power on earth".
It's not the shamefulness of all this but the racist assumption that the hecatomb in Iraq is all the fault of the Iraqis, that their intrinsic backwardness, their viciousness, their failure to appreciate the fruits of our civilisation make them unworthy of our further attention. At no point does anyone question whether the fact that America is "the greatest power on earth" might not be part of the problem. Nor that Iraqis who endured among their worst years of dictatorship when Saddam was supported by the US, who were sanctioned by the UN at a cost of a half a million children's lives and who were then brutally invaded by our armies, might not actually be terribly keen on all the good things we wished to offer them.
Many Arabs, as I've written before, would like some of our democracy, but they would also like another kind of freedom - freedom from us.
But you get the point. We are preparing our get-out excuses. The Iraqis don't deserve us. Screw them.
That's the grit we're laying down on the desert floor to help our tanks out of Iraq.
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent of The Independent
A lawsuit in Germany will seek a criminal prosecution of the outgoing Defense Secretary and other U.S. officials for their alleged role in abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo
Posted Friday, Nov. 10, 2006
Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The plaintiffs in the case include 11 Iraqis who were prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as well as Mohammad al-Qahtani, a Saudi held at Guantanamo, whom the U.S. has identified as the so-called "20th hijacker" and a would-be participant in the 9/11 hijackings. As TIME first reported in June 2005, Qahtani underwent a "special interrogation plan," personally approved by Rumsfeld, which the U.S. says produced valuable intelligence. But to obtain it, according to the log of his interrogation and government reports, Qahtani was subjected to forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation and other controversial interrogation techniques.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs say that one of the witnesses who will testify on their behalf is former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq. Karpinski — who the lawyers say will be in Germany next week to publicly address her accusations in the case — has issued a written statement to accompany the legal filing, which says, in part: "It was clear the knowledge and responsibility [for what happened at Abu Ghraib] goes all the way to the top of the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ."
A spokesperson for the Pentagon told TIME there would be no comment since the case has not yet been filed.
Along with Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Tenet, the other defendants in the case are Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone; former assistant attorney general Jay Bybee; former deputy assisant attorney general John Yoo; General Counsel for the Department of Defense William James Haynes II; and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Senior military officers named in the filing are General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top Army official in Iraq; Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of Guantanamo; senior Iraq commander, Major General Walter Wojdakowski; and Col. Thomas Pappas, the one-time head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib.
Germany was chosen for the court filing because German law provides "universal jurisdiction" allowing for the prosecution of war crimes and related offenses that take place anywhere in the world. Indeed, a similar, but narrower, legal action was brought in Germany in 2004, which also sought the prosecution of Rumsfeld. The case provoked an angry response from Pentagon, and Rumsfeld himself was reportedly upset. Rumsfeld's spokesman at the time, Lawrence DiRita, called the case a "a big, big problem." U.S. officials made clear the case could adversely impact U.S.-Germany relations, and Rumsfeld indicated he would not attend a major security conference in Munich, where he was scheduled to be the keynote speaker, unless Germany disposed of the case. The day before the conference, a German prosecutor announced he would not pursue the matter, saying there was no indication that U.S. authorities and courts would not deal with allegations in the complaint.
In bringing the new case, however, the plaintiffs argue that circumstances have changed in two important ways. Rumsfeld's resignation, they say, means that the former Defense Secretary will lose the legal immunity usually accorded high government officials. Moreover, the plaintiffs argue that the German prosecutor's reasoning for rejecting the previous case — that U.S. authorities were dealing with the issue — has been proven wrong.
"The utter and complete failure of U.S. authorities to take any action to investigate high-level involvement in the torture program could not be clearer," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a U.S.-based non-profit helping to bring the legal action in Germany. He also notes that the Military Commissions Act, a law passed by Congress earlier this year, effectively blocks prosecution in the U.S. of those involved in detention and interrogation abuses of foreigners held abroad in American custody going to back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a result, Ratner contends, the legal arguments underlying the German prosecutor's previous inaction no longer hold up.
Whatever the legal merits of the case, it is the latest example of efforts in Western Europe by critics of U.S. tactics in the war on terror to call those involved to account in court. In Germany, investigations are under way in parliament concerning cooperation between the CIA and German intelligence on rendition — the kidnapping of suspected terrorists and their removal to third countries for interrogation. Other legal inquiries involving rendition are under way in both Italy and Spain.
U.S. officials have long feared that legal proceedings against "war criminals" could be used to settle political scores. In 1998, for example, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — whose military coup was supported by the Nixon administration — was arrested in the U.K. and held for 16 months in an extradition battle led by a Spanish magistrate seeking to charge him with war crimes. He was ultimately released and returned to Chile. More recently, a Belgian court tried to bring charges against then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for alleged crimes against Palestinians.
For its part, the Bush Administration has rejected adherence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on grounds that it could be used to unjustly prosecute U.S. officials. The ICC is the first permanent tribunal established to prosecute war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity.
Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas's good ol' boy network. He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein with American-made weapons in the country's war against Iran in the 1980s.
Gates, who currently is president of Texas A&M University, came under intense fire during confirmation hearings in the early 1990s for being unaware of the explosive situation in Iraq in the 1980s, and the demise of the Soviet republic.
Gates joined the CIA in 1966, and spent eight years there as an analyst before moving over to the National Security Council in 1974. He returned to the CIA in 1980, and a year later was appointed by Ronald Reagan to serve as deputy director for intelligence. Five years later, he was named deputy director for the agency, the number two post in the agency. In 1989, he was appointed deputy director of the National Security Council and in 1991, when the first Bush administration was in office, he was named director of the spy shop.
During contentious Senate confirmation hearings in October 1991 - which are bound to come up again - Gates's role in cooking intelligence information during the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed. It was during those hearings that senators found out about a December 2, 1986, 10-page classified memo written by Thomas Barksdale, the CIA analyst for Iran. That memo claimed that covert arms sales to the country demonstrated "a perversion of the intelligence process" that is staggering in its proportions.
The Barksdale memo was used by Gates's detractors to prove he played an active role in slanting intelligence information during his tenure at the agency under Reagan. Eerily reminiscent of the way CIA analysts were treated by Vice President Dick Cheney during the run-up to the Iraq war three years ago, when agents were forced to provide the Bush administration with intelligence showing Iraq was a nuclear threat, Barksdale said he and other Iran analysts "were never consulted or asked to provide an intelligence input to the covert actions and secret contacts that have occurred."
Barksdale added that Gates was the pipeline for providing "exclusive reports to the White House," intelligence that was "at odds with the overwhelming bulk of intelligence reporting, both from U.S. sources and foreign intelligence services."
In testimony before the Senate on October 1, 1991, Harold P. Ford, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described an aspect of Gates's personality that mirrors many of the top officials in the Bush administration today.
"Bob Gates has often depended too much on his own individual analytic judgments and has ignored or scorned the views of others whose assessments did not accord with his own. This would be okay if he were uniquely all-seeing. He has not been ..." Ford said.
At the hearing, other CIA analysts said Gates forced them to twist intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by the former Soviet Union. Analysts alleged a report approved by Gates overstated Soviet influence in Iran that specifically led the late President Ronald Reagan into making policy decisions that turned into the Iran-Contra scandal.
Jennifer Glaudemans, a former CIA analyst, said at the 1991 Gates confirmation hearings that she and her colleagues at the CIA believed "Mr Gates and his influence have led to a prostitution of [Soviet] analysis."
Melvin Goodman, Glaudemans's former boss at the CIA, also said that under Gates, the CIA was "trying to provide the intelligence analysis ... that would support the operational decision to sell arms to Iran."
Gates testified at his confirmation hearing in October 1991 that he was aware the United States was selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. But he denied that he had any knowledge that Oliver North, the former National Security aide, was diverting money from arms sales to Iran to secretly aid the Nicaraguan contras.
But White House memos released at the time showed that North and John Poindexter, the national security adviser at the time, engaged in classified briefings with Gates on numerous occasions about Iran-Contra. Poindexter testified that he discussed the situation with Gates, but Gates said at his Senate confirmation hearings he had "no recollection" about those conversations.
Alan Fiers, a former CIA officer who served as an agency liaison along with North and met weekly with Gates, testified at Gates's confirmation hearings that he discussed specific details of the covert operation with Gates.
"Bob Gates understood the universe, understood the structure, understood that there was an operational - that there was a support operation being run out of the White House," and "that Ollie North was the quarterback," Fiers said at Gates's confirmation hearing in 1991. "I had no reason to think he had great detail, but I do think there was a baseline knowledge there."
If confirmed, Gates would arguably be overseeing a war that removed a dictator he personally helped to prop up. Tom Harkin, a senator from Iowa, described Gates's role in intelligence sharing operations with Iraq during a time when the United States helped arm Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran.
"I also have doubts and questions about Mr. Gates's role in the secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq," Harkin said during Gates's confirmation hearings on November 7, 1991. "Robert Gates served as assistant to the director of the CIA in 1981 and as deputy director for intelligence from 1982 to 1986. In that capacity, he helped develop options in dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually evolved into a secret intelligence liaison relationship with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Gates was in charge of the directorate that prepared the intelligence information that was passed on to Iraq. He testified that he was also an active participant in the operation during 1986. The secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq was not only a highly questionable and possibly illegal operation, but also may have jeopardized American lives and our national interests. The photo reconnaissance, highly sensitive electronic eavesdropping, and narrative texts provided to Saddam may not only have helped him in Iraq's war against Iran, but also in the recent gulf war."
No matter who wins the midterm election, be it Democrats or Republicans, the slaughter in Palestine will continue.
In fact, it is a safe bet to conclude that the vast majority of the winners, and indeed most of the losers, support the criminal state of Israel, infamous for using U.S. supplied weapons to kill Palestinian school children.
Israel's slaughter, fully supported by the neocons and most of our "representatives&quo t; sitting in Congress, is not even a campaign issue. Staunch support for Israel is a given. Pervert preachers may be paraded across the front page of newspapers and websites, but you will not see one photo of critically wounded children ushered into the hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.
"The bodies arrived one after another on the shoulders of a seemingly endless river of mourners," the Mercury News reported as I showed my ID to a volunteer at the senior citizens center where I voted earlier this afternoon.
"One was a small boy weighing no more than 60 pounds, tightly encased in a green Hamas flag. Another was only pieces, placed in a box and hustled down the street on a stretcher."
As I filled out my ballot, ignoring incumbents and concentrating on bond issues, "Palestinian agencies condemned the destruction of homes, orchards, water pipes and electricity cables during the raid, which was intended to curb militant rocket attacks.... When outsiders gained access yesterday they found the town's historic Nasr mosque almost flattened, except for one minaret.... Women queued at water trucks, afraid that the remaining water supply had been contaminated by sewage," explained the Times Online.
Pierre Gemayel, a Lebanese cabinet minister and member of the Maronite Christian Phalange party, has been shot dead in Beirut.
