Picture of the Week April 28, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush, War.Tags: roger hollander, Iraq war, Iraq, George Bush, abby zimet, bush library, Melissa Stockwell
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04.28.13 – 10:22 AM, http://www.commondreams.org
With all the boot-licking coverage of last week’s rewriting of history, this photo was nowhere in sight. Yes, it’s real: Melissa Stockwell, the first female U.S. soldier to lose a limb in Iraq, reading the Pledge of Allegiance. By Alex Wong for Getty. Worth many thousands of words.
277 Million Boston Bombings April 24, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in armaments, Arms, Asia, History, Iraq and Afghanistan, Laols, Vietnam, War.Tags: Afghanistan, armaments, arms, boston bombings, cluster bombs, history, Iraq, land mines, laos, Robert Scheer, roger hollander, terrorism, Vietnam War, weapons
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SharePosted on Apr 23, 2013, http://www.truthdig.com
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| AP/Brendon Smialowski |
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Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton looks at a memorial about cluster bombing during a tour of the Cooperative Orthotic Prosthetic Enterprise (COPE) Center in Vientiane, Laos, in 2012. |
The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim” is the way The New York Times defined the hideousness of the weapons used, and President Obama made clear that “anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.” But are we as a society prepared to be judged by that standard?
The president’s deployment of drones that all too often treat innocent civilians as collateral damage comes quickly to mind. It should also be pointed out that the U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal and, as our killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese demonstrated, those weapons are inherently, by the president’s definition, weapons of terror. But it is America’s role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our country’s refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the world’s nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston.
To this day, antipersonnel weapons—the technologically refined version of the primitive pressure cooker fragmentation bombs exploded in Boston—maim and kill farmers and their children in the Southeast Asian killing fields left over from our country’s past experiment in genocide. An experiment that as a sideshow to our obsession with replacing French colonialism in Vietnam involved dropping 277 million cluster bomblets on Laos between 1964 and 1973.
The whole point of a cluster weapon is to target an area the size of several football fields with the same bits of maiming steel that did so much damage in Boston. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been active in attempting to clear land of remaining bomblets, estimates 10,000 Lao civilian casualties to date from such weapons. As many as twenty-seven million unexploded bomblets remain in the country, according to the committee.
Back in 1964 at the start of that bombing campaign, I reported from Laos, an economically primitive land where a pencil was a prize gift to students. It is staggering to me that the death we visited upon a people, then largely ignorant of life in America, still should be ongoing.and the deadly bomblets they contain has since expanded to most of the world, and they have been used by at least 15 nations. As a recent Congressional Research Service report noted:
“Cluster munitions were used by the Soviets in Afghanistan, by the British in the Falklands, by the Coalition in the Gulf War, and by the warring factions in Yugoslavia. In Kosovo and Yugoslavia in 1999, NATO forces dropped 1,765 cluster bombs containing approximately 295,000 submunitions. From 2001 through 2002, the United States dropped 1,228 cluster bombs containing 248,056 submunitions in Afghanistan, and U.S. and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 million to 2 million submunitions during the first three weeks of combat in Iraq in 2003.”
Israel is said to have dropped almost 1 million unexploded bomblets in Lebanon in the 2006 war against Hezbollah, which fired 113 cluster bombs filled with thousands of bomblets at targets in northern Israel.
I list all those dreary statistics to drive home the point that the horror of two pressure cooker bombs in Boston that has so traumatized us should help us grasp the significance of the 1.8 million bomblets dropped in Iraq over a three-week period.
Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians?
On Aug. 1, 2010, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning such weapons, became a matter of international law for the 111 nations, including 18 NATO members, that signed the agreement. The U.S. was not one of them. Current American policy, according to the Congressional Research Service report, is that “cluster munitions are available for use by every combat aircraft in the U.S. inventory; they are integral to every Army or Marine maneuver element and in some cases constitute up to 50 percent of tactical indirect fire support.”
However, there is new legislation pending in Congress that would require the president to certify that cluster munitions would “only be used against clearly defined military targets” and not deployed “where civilians are known to be present or in areas normally inhabited by civilians.” Lots of luck with that.
The Last Letter March 20, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush, War, Dick Cheney, Imperialism.Tags: roger hollander, Iraq war, Iraq, Dick Cheney, George Bush, U.S. imperialism, Iraq invasion, tomas young, iraq veteran
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Roger’s note: I want you to picture Bush and Cheney reading this letter. Notice the arrogance, the smugness, the disgusting grins as they dismiss these heartfelt letter with less concern than they would flicking an annoying fly of the table. They are impervious to moral criticism, they act with virtually complete impunity. It is frustrating, it is infuriating that so much power is in the hands of such reduced human beings. It is our present reality. They coined the phrase “axis of evil.” Ironic.
“How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” Bob Dylan
A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
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I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
| To read Chris Hedges’ recent interview with Tomas Young, click here. |
I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
Iraq invasion ‘the most vile crime against humanity of many of our lifetimes’ March 19, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, War, History, Imperialism.Tags: roger hollander, Iraq war, Iraq, Iraq occupation, U.S. imperialism, Iraq invasion, iraq deaths, fallujah, iraq children, iraq government, kevin baker
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Thoughts on the 10th anniversary of the war on Iraq
By Kevin Baker
The author is a former Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army infantry who spent a total of 28 months in Iraq.
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| Millions of Iraqi children have suffered the death of a close family member at the hands of the U.S. military, and will forever be impacted by the trauma of living under a brutal occupation for nearly a decade. |
In the next few minutes, as you’re reading this, a mother will give birth in Fallujah. There is a 33% chance because of U.S.-used depleted uranium that the child will be born with a life-crippling birth defect, or dead; a young man will forge through piles of trash for food to feed his impoverished and displaced family. There are over 5 million displaced Iraqis, high estimates of over 1.3 million killed and an entire country with no secure future. Food, water, power, housing, education, safety, freedom of speech—all words absent from America’s “liberated Iraq.” Most of these events are rarely reported.
Today marks the tenth year “anniversary” of the U.S.-led invasion against the people of Iraq. But this wasn’t the beginning of the U.S. war against the people of Iraq, it began much earlier. The United States has been for over 22 years (and still to this day) torturing the Iraqi people. From the bombing of powdered milk factories to the destruction of water purification facilities, the United States government has targeted the most innocent of Iraqis, their children. 500,000 Iraqi children were executed by the United States in the form of sanctions, embargoes, starvation and bombing campaigns prior to the invasion in 2003.
Today Iraq is in shambles because of the almost decade-long US occupation and war. The majority of Iraqi people do not have access to continued supply of clean water, food, shelter, education, healthcare or security. The current Iraqi government has expressed its concern for the Iraqi people in the form of U.S.- supplied guns, bullets and misery. Peaceful demonstrations against government corruption and injustice are met with deadly violence from the new “democratic” government; organizers are jailed and tortured.
Explosions erupt in crowded cities tearing people and families apart, shattering brick and glass while soaking the streets with blood. The country’s once-united national identity, with no sectarian strife, was consciously demolished and manipulated by the U.S. occupation. The people of Iraq never asked for the U.S. invasion or occupation yet it is them who pay the price for it on a daily basis. For them, the Iraq war didn’t end the day the United States withdrew its occupying forces, for them the Iraq war is still very real.
The harsh reality of daily life for the Iraqi people seems to be missing from the mainstream media. The Bush administration submitted false intelligence reports while lying to the American people about WMD’s. Every piece of “evidence” that the Bush administration had introduced to justify going to war with Iraq is now known to be a lie. However, those that convinced the American people it was in our interests to send our loved ones to war and die are still free today.
In fact, those who lied to the American people sending us to die are now waging a new warfare on those service members they depended on to wager their war. They are waging an economic assaults against the enlisted rank-and-file in the form of exterminating the Tuition Assistance programs. The politicians chant slogans like “Support our Troops” while cutting medical aid to those wounded in their wars, and refusing to respond in any meaningful way to the suicide epidemic. The current Democratic administration continues to send young men and women to kill and be killed in the unpopular Afghanistan war, another war for profit based on lies. If this government does not care about its own service members, why would we buy the line that they care about liberating other nations?
On the tenth tragic anniversary of Iraq we send our deepest and most sincere condolences to the people of Iraq. Words cannot express the sorrow, sadness and regret we have for participating in the imperialists’ war. Every war and every act of aggression by the United States is cloaked in the noble cause of “humanitarian intervention” or “promotion of democracy” or “protecting civilians” as bombs, bullets and sanctions rained down upon the heads of the innocent.
Today we mark this anniversary as the most vile crime against humanity in many of our lifetimes. Until people in the United States see the class character of every U.S.- led war, enlisted service members will be sent to kill and die for the wealthy, and millions of innocent people will bear the brutal violence. It is our role as veterans to unmask and expose the real character of U.S. wars and defend the rights of those targeted by U.S.-aggression.
We will continue to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Iraq, fight the Afghanistan war and every war or “intervention” promoted by this government, and expose imperialism as a system we live under, not a policy. The United States government will not re-write history to fit its agenda. The historical tragedy that is known as the “Iraq War” will be remembered for what it is; an act of illegal aggression by the belligerent force of the United States. Together we will work to insure history does not repeat itself, ever again.
Confronting the lies about the Iraq invasion March 18, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Iraq and Afghanistan, Media, War.Tags: anti-war, anti-war movement, anti-war protests, brian becker, cheney, George Bush, history, Iraq, Iraq invasion, Iraq war, liberals, Media, roger hollander, saddam hussein, U.S. imperialism, us empire, wmd
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Please circulate this message widely among your friends and family.
Statement by Brian Becker, national coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq Confronting the lies about the Iraq invasion Ten years ago, the United States and Britain invaded Iraq. The history of how this invasion came about has been largely falsified by both the right-wing supporters of the invasion and the liberal commentators who opposed the war.
500,000 rally against looming war on Jan 18, 2003
The core argument of the professional liberal commentators and historians is that Bush hoodwinked the country and the general public, with the help of a supplicant media, by scaring people into thinking that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the Bush administration had to invade to defend America and its people. The fallacious handwringing liberal position was typified in the recent 10th-anniversary account of the war by Micah Sifry, published by the National Memo. “But 10 years ago, it was not a good time to be a war skeptic in America. It rarely is. The vast majority of ‘smart’ and ‘serious’ people had convinced themselves that in the face of Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, the prudent thing to do was to go to war to remove him from power,” writes Sifry. This is a fanciful and false account. The “country” was not hoodwinked. There was no general feeling that the U.S. must strike first or be engulfed by Saddam Hussein’s military. The opposite was true. The people of this country—and the world—mobilized in unprecedented numbers prior to a military conflict under the banner: “Stop the War Before it Starts.” An unprecedented, massive anti-war movement In the months prior to the invasion, I was the central organizer of the mass anti-war actions in Washington, D.C., that brought many hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of the capital in repeated demonstrations—on Oct. 26, 2002; Jan. 18, 2003; and March 15, 2003. The Jan. 18, 2003, demonstration filled up a vast expanse of the Mall west of the Capitol building, which houses the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The Washington Post described the Jan. 18 demonstration as the largest anti-war protest since the end of the Vietnam War. In addition to the Washington demonstrations, there were mass anti-war protests in cities throughout the United States, on both the east and west coasts and nearly everywhere in between. Thousands of organizations and millions of individuals were participants and organizers in this grassroots global movement. On Feb. 15, 2003, there were coinciding demonstrations in more than 1,000 cities in almost every country—including many hundreds of cities and towns in the United States. The rise of a global anti-war movement of such magnitude—before the actual start of military hostilities—was without precedent in human history. Mass anti-war movements and even revolutions have occurred inside one or more of the warring countries at the time of their defeat or perceived defeat, but the Iraq anti-war movement of 2002-2003 was in anticipation of a war and before the gruesome impact of the slaughter could be seen and felt. The depth of the movement was breathtaking for the organizers and the participants. Millions went into the streets over and over and over again. They knew that they were in a race against time. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were likewise racing to go to war, not because Iraq was getting stronger or closer to having weapons of mass destruction but because this global grassroots anti-war movement had the potential to shake the political status quo to its very foundations In February 2003, The New York Times described the global anti-war movement as the world’s “second super-power.” Why the race toward war It was under these circumstances that the “mass media” went into overdrive to promote the war. Anti-war voices on television were booted off the air. The airwaves were filled up with the obviously bogus imagery that Iraq in league with unspecified “Muslim terrorists” was about to engulf the United States in a nuclear mushroom cloud. The message was that war was inevitable and that protests were futile. Bush rushed hundreds of thousands of troops to Kuwait in a race to launch the invasion that they knew was likely to destroy the Iraqi military in a few weeks. The Democratic Party leaders in Congress had already acquiesced to Bush and Cheney’s war demands. Even though the calls and letters to Congress against the war were running 200 to 1, both the Senate and the House of Representatives, by lopsided margins, passed resolutions on Oct. 11, 2002, authorizing Bush to use the armed forces of the United States against Iraq. The Iraq invasion was a criminal enterprise. Millions of Iraqis died, more than five million were forced into the miserable life of refugees, thousands of U.S. troops were killed and tens of thousands of others suffered life-changing physical and mental injuries. Today, Bush and Cheney are writing books and collecting huge speaking fees. They are shielded from prosecution by the current Democratic-led government. The war in Iraq was not simply a “mistake” nor was it the consequence of a hoodwinked public. It was rather a symptom of the primary reality of the modern-day political system in the U.S. This system is addicted to war. It relies on organized violence, or the threat of violence, to maintain the dominant position of the United States all over the world. The U.S. has invaded or bombed one country after another since the end of the so-called Cold War. It has military bases in 130 countries and spends more on lethal violence than all other countries combined. Yes, in the United States the adult population is encouraged to vote every two or four years for one of two ruling-class parties that enforce the global projection of U.S. empire with equal vigor when they take turns at the helm. And this is labeled the exercise of “democracy” and proof that the United States is indeed the land of the free. The invasion of Iraq succeeded in creating mass human suffering and death. What Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld failed to anticipate was that the Iraqi people, like all people everywhere, would never willingly accept life under occupation. It was the unanticipated resistance of the Iraqi people that eventually forced the withdrawal of the occupation forces nine long years later. Brian Becker was the lead organizer of the largest anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C., between Oct. 26, 2002, and the start of the Iraq invasion on March 19, 2003. The October demonstration drew 200,000 people. Less than two months later, on Jan. 18, 2003, approximately 500,000 demonstrated again in what the Washington Post called the “largest anti-war demonstration” in Washington, D.C., since the end of the Vietnam War. On Feb. 15, 2003, millions of people demonstrated in nearly 1,000 cities around the world, including several hundred cities and towns in the United States. On March 15, just four days before the start of the invasion, 100,000 demonstrated once gain in Washington, D.C.
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Manning: Before Wikileaks, Leaked Docs Offered to NYT, WaPo February 28, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Iraq and Afghanistan, Media, War.Tags: Afghanistan War, bradley manning, davide coombs, denise lind, foreign policy, Iraq war, journalism, Media, military commission, roger hollander, war, whistle blower, whistleblower, wikileaks
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Roger’s note: it is impossible not to compare Bradley Manning’s heroic act with that of Daniel Ellsberg’s Vietnam era release of the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg was acquitted of the charges the government laid against him, and was vindicated both morally and legally. Unfortunately, we live in and era that is even more repressive than it was in the 1960s, and era where torture and extra-judicial murder are normalized (or should I say sanctified?). Bradley Manning has already and will continue to suffer for his brave and patriotic action. Big Brother wants us all to know that he is watching and will show no mercy.
Published on Thursday, February 28, 2013 by Common Dreams
Whistleblower reads prepared statement: Wanted documents to reveal “true costs of war”
- Common Dreams staff
(Credit: Reuters)In what The Guardian‘s correspondent Ed Pilkington describes as a “bombshell” revelation, Bradley Manning on Thursday revealed that prior to reaching out to Wikileaks with a trove of government and military documents, the whistleblower first contacted more established media outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, but was brushed off by editors.
As Pilkington, present in the courtroom for the reading of Manning’s statement, reports:
While he was on leave from Iraq and staying in the Washington area in January 2010 he contacted the Washington Post and asked would it be interested in receiving information that he said would be “enormously important to the American people”. He spoke to a woman who said she was a reporter but “she didn’t seem to take me seriously”.
The woman said, according to Manning’s account, that the paper would only be interested subject to vetting by senior editors.
Despairing of that route, Manning turned to the New York Times. He called the public editor of the paper but only got voicemail.
He then tried other numbers on the paper but also got put through to voicemail, and though he left a message with his Skype contact details, nobody called him back. Manning added he had also contemplated going to the website Politico, but harsh weather prevented him.
Such testimony belies the US government’s ongoing insinuation that Wikileaks—which specifically describes itself as a “not-for-profit media organization”—somehow played a role in compelling Manning to leak the documents. It further provides evidence that Manning was acting in the capacity of a true government or military whistleblower by proactively seeking out the media in hopes of bringing to light what he considered information vital to the public interest.
“I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. It might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.” –Bradley Manning
Manning also explained his deeper motivations, which included hopes that the leaks documents would expose the “true costs of war”. According to Pilkington’s account, Manning stated:
“I felt we were risking so much for people who seemed to be unwilling to cooperate with us leading to frustration and hostility on both sides. I began to get depressed about he situation we were mired in year after year.
“We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. It might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.”
Thursday’s courtroom proceedings were covered best on Twitter:
Thursday’s revelations came as Manning read a prepared statement—reportedly handwritten over 35 pages—before a packed military courtroom. The statement is Manning’s first complete account of what government and military information he leaked to Wikileaks, and an explanation of why he chose to do so.
Manning pled guilty to a series of charges, including providing Wikileaks with confidential military information, but denied the most serious charge against him, that of “aiding the enemy.”
According to FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola, reporting live from the courtroom, Manning’s plea makes possible two rulings by the presiding judge: “guilty to lesser-included offenses pursuant to the plea” or “guilty of the greater offenses in the original charges.” The court cannot find him “not guilty” based on his plea.
Pilkington also reported that Manning “confirmed he wants to be tried by military judge [Colonel Denise Lind] alone,” with no military equivalent of a jury.
In addition to revealign his attempts to contact other outlets first, Manning also told the courtroom that once he’d established communication with Wikileaks, “No one associated with [the outlet] pressured me into sending more information.”
In regards to his leak of the collateral murder video, Manning said, “I was disturbed by the response to injured children” and that the soldiers captured in the video “seemed to not value human life by referring to [their targets] as ‘dead bastards.’”
He also said that he released the intelligence because he wanted to “spark a domestic public debate about our foreign policy and the war in general,” and added: “At the time I believed, and I still believe, these are … [among] … the most significant documents of our time.”
Pilkington continues:
Through his lawyer, David Coombs, the soldier pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges that included possessing and wilfully communicating to an unauthorised person all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure. That covered the so-called “collateral murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some US diplomatic cables including one of the early WikiLeaks publications the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan warlogs, some of the files on detainees in Guantanamo; and two intelligence memos.
These lesser charges each carry a two-year maximum sentence, committing Manning to a possible upper limit of 20 years in prison.
Manning also pleaded not guilty to 12 counts, including to the largest charge of “aiding the enemy,” which would have supposed that he knowingly gave help to al-Qaida either by leaking secret intelligence directly or via its publication on the internet. He also denied that at the time he gave the information to Wikileaks, he had “reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation”.
According to Gosztola, Manning pled guilty to “all that was anticipated except he did not plead guilty to releasing the Granai air strike video.”
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Obama’s Dirty Wars Exposed at Sundance January 24, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan, War, War on Terror.Tags: amy goodman, civilian casualties, david riker, dirty wars, drone missiles, jeremy scahill, jsoc, rick rowley, roger hollander, sundance, Taliban
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Roger’s note: if there are any Obama fans reading this, all I can say is, “please, open your eyes.”
PARK CITY, Utah—As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film’s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. The increasing pace of U.S. drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a U.S. press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama’s new bangs. “Dirty Wars,” along with Scahill’s forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.
Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul, Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported.
Scahill told me: “In Gardez, U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S.”
Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of U.S. foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of Feb. 12, 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by U.S. special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the U.S. soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife’s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.
Sabir recounted his ordeal for Rowley’s camera: “My hands and clothes were caked with blood. They didn’t give us water to wash the blood away. The American interrogators had beards and didn’t wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages. By the time I got home, all our dead had already been buried. Only my father and my brother were left at home. I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and my father wouldn’t let me. I wanted a jihad against the Americans.”
Before leaving, Scahill and Rowley made copies of videos from the cellphones of survivors. One demonstrated that it was not a Taliban meeting, but a lively celebration of the birth of a child that the raid interrupted. Rowley described another video: “You can hear voices come over it, and they’re American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night’s killings, getting their story straight. You hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.”
The film shows an image captured in Gardez, by photographer Jeremy Kelly, sometime after the massacre. It showed a U.S. admiral named McRaven, surrounded by Afghan soldiers, offering a sheep as a traditional gesture seeking forgiveness for the massacre. The cover-up had failed.
William McRaven headed the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. Following the thread of JSOC, painstakingly probing scarcely reported night raids, traveling from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, Scahill’s reporting, along with Rowley’s incredible camerawork, constructs for the first time a true, comprehensive picture of JSOC and Commander in Chief Obama’s not-so-brave new world.
The Inauguration Day drone strike in Yemen was the fourth in as many days, along with a similar increase in strikes in Pakistan. The Washington Post reported that Obama has a “playbook” that details when drone strikes are authorized, but it reportedly exempts those conducted by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Inauguration Day, Obama officially nominated John Brennan, a strong advocate for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that many call torture, and architect of the drone program, to head the CIA.
With the film “Dirty Wars,” co-written with David Riker and directed by Rowley, Jeremy Scahill is pulling back the curtain on JSOC, which has lately exploded into the public eye with the torture-endorsing movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the killing of Osama bin Laden. When “Dirty Wars” comes to a theater near you, see it. Sadly, it proves the theater of war is everywhere, or, as its subtitle puts it: “The World Is a Battlefield.” As Scahill told me, “You’re going to see a very different reality, and you’re going to see the hellscape that has been built by a decade of covert war.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
© 2012 Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 1,100 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.
COMMENTS
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Klovis • 3 hours ago All in a day’s (or night’s) work for the agents of empire!
Good report from Amy; good work from Scahill & co. Let’s hope this film opens some eyes. I, and many of us, already know this sort of stuff is going on, but maybe the folks in Anytown, USA, will get a glimpse of the awful reality of what our government does across the world.
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countryrd • 3 hours ago Kill anything that moves. It has always been the way of empires. How these killers can live with themselves is really the big question. Right up there with that is how do those who make policies leading to this kind of slaughter sleep at night. Callous uncaring killers with no accountability and, in fact, glorified when they return as “HEROES”. It is a sick perversion. Is it surprising then when we turn this violence onto ourselves?
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erroll countryrd • 2 hours ago “Kill anything that moves”.
Indeed as writer Nick Turse brings out that that was pretty much the tacit, if not the official, policy of the U.S. military in Vietnam in his incredibly powerful and extremely well written book which bears the title of his tome. What happened so often in Vietnam is now occurring once again overseas as the article notes that:
“You hear them [U.S. soldiers] trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.”
It would seem that the U.S. military is continuing on in the less than admirable tradition of what took place in Vietnam when the military there, from Colin Powell on down, tried and succeeded for the most part in covering up the many atrocities that the United States military committed against the Vietnamese. We now have our brave men and women in uniform doing the same thing only it is now taking place in the Middle East instead of Southeast Asia.
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Gubdeb countryrd • an hour ago Training begins with the screen at home and at theaters.
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Pierre Adler • an hour ago The U.S. military and a good deal of the fat asses that sit in Congress are the greatest terrorists in world history.
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nathanielheidenheimer • 3 hours ago Now the Drones are the CIA’s baby no less than the U-2 was their child in the 1950′s. How can we tell if elected officials are calling any shots at all? Amy your show is great but it’s gaping bald spot is growing more apparent every day: a complete failure to integrate the most recent scholarship of the National Security State with other politics. Increasingly, in the word of the Alternative media it seems as if there is a quid pro quo: great stuff on the sculpting of our corporate now in exchange for selling a hollow ahistorical two dimensionalism re the history of our National Security State. Ray McGovern has had some very, very interesting things to say about when the CIA was in it’s teeny bopper years, 13-16. This coincided with some guy who–according to all academic scholarship published since 2000 was a president who was getting out of Vietnam, resisting CIA policies in Brazil, Israel, Indonesia, Cuba, Laos, Congo and towards the Soviet Union over the very basis of the Cold War which served as the ostensible raison d’etre of the emerging US Garrison State. Isn’t it time we take a closer look at the Coup of 1963 in this its 50th anniversary? Isn’t it time we look at the MEDIA IMPLICATIONS of that coup?
Hows bout asking Ray on to talk about this topic? Or are we ONLY allowed to hear Noam’s completely decontexturalized drive by assertions in which he quotes Richard Helms’ top aid. Again.
There was a time when the US left was different. There was a time when this comment could not be so easily put in the ash tray so conveniently labelled “Alex Jones”. The US left now recognizes that shows such as those on MSNBC play a strategic niching role in fragmenting US political communication. Create a channel for the would-be-critics of the Corporate Democrats and the corporations can lower the volume of dissent that the full spectrum hears. Do you think that strategy might be going on … elsewhere on the political spectrum? Mere speculation? Try history. See the history of Encounter Magazine 1950-64. See the great book by Frances Saunders called The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. In England it was called Who Paid The Piper?
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Klovis nathanielheidenheimer • 3 hours ago Good post, Nathaniel. I’ve always been mystified by Noam’s blind spot as per the JFK assassination as well as the policies of that administration.
As for Alex Jones, his politics may be screwy, but he’s been a pretty good guerilla journalist over the years covering police abuses and secret ops and seems to have some good contacts inside the security-spook establishment, so the left dismisses him at its peril. He certainly didn’t help his credibility with his televised meltdown.
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nathanielheidenheimer Klovis • 3 hours ago Klovis, as of 7:55 AM I am still deeply suspicious of Alex Jones and why he has so much money to do what he does. Has he often had some great guests? Yes. However, I call this strategy Ashtraying it. In other words put him on Alex Jones, then later when there are mass viewing moments like the incredible circus that MILLIONS SAW not just tens of thousands, it all gets thrown out baby and bathwater style. That is SPECUlation on my part about Alex Jones, but it is informed speculation on account of I have read a fair amount on Cold War Communications history.
I could well be mistaken.
How the heck would I know?
When one speculates like this it is important to label it as such , but that does not mean that historically relavent tributaries should not flow into the river of discussion. Man.
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Klovis nathanielheidenheimer • 3 hours ago I must say I’ve wondered the same thing at times, even before his blowup. He also seems to play more and more to the peanut gallery of his rightwing audience. I only follow him sporadically, through links at other sites, but I seemed to notice a shift in his rhetoric after the formation of the Tea Party.
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Nancy Mater nathanielheidenheimer • an hour ago See ” Dark Legacy”
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Ullern • an hour ago “Obama’s Dirty Wars Exposed at Sundance”
That’s all fine documentation – by Scahill/Rowley – and followup article by Amy Goodman. Well done there.
But it’s all well known facts and conditions of the post-911 wars to anyone following with a modicum of independent interest. Though this followup documents closer what’s previously established, it’s no new exposure.
That only goes to show how denied the reality of wars and exploitation and other conditions of the populace is in the USA these days.
Over and over again climate extreming is “exposed” as real. The wars of aggression are “exposed” as counterproductive and horribly unfair and destructive. The corporate sweatshops of Bangladesh, India, China and other poor countries are “exposed” as substandard and in breach of international laws. The activities of capitalism and financial institutions are “exposed” as grossly exploitative, fraudulent and unsustainable. And the obvious existence of the human inner world with compassion as a central trait, is “exposed” as denied by the official, competitive paradigm.
All these “exposures” – fine as they are in themselves – regrettably and paradoxically also serve to reinforce the denials, as they imply that these conditions are “news”.
It’s weird to behold how self-evident facts are “exposed” and established over and over again in the public sphere by the corporate media.
What needs to be “exposed” better is the deliberately induced public amnesia in the corporately hijacked main media.
We in the western-dominated global human tribe need a revolution that dispels with the unecological, disharmonious exploitations of most of the human tribe and all of the biosphere that now have been forced to dominate.
There are lots of approaches to do this: anything that increases harmony between people and people, and people and planet is part of the needed revolution. Any action that reduces artificially contrived tensions contributes.
One good place of attack would be to abolish Compound Interest in financial transactions, and use the natural human growth-decline rate of 1.3 % annually as a target for increase in “growth”/change in human activities to offset natural decline.
The Tobin tax introduced in parts of EU now is also a good development.
When corporations aren’t allowed to run rampant, less wars and more peace follows.
All war is dirty. – That’s another of those denials often “exposed” and claimed as news – over and over again. The interests denying that fact and glorifying war, even as “necessary”, are those that need to be “exposed” and stopped.
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Gubdeb • an hour ago The MSM wasn’t there because this is pretty much old news. Kudos for the film as it probably serves a purpose for documentation purposes, but it’s a bit too late for anything else.
I’d like to see something on today’s big story: Women now having “opportunities” to serve as murderers for the army. Yes, you too have “opportunities” to murder, maim and destroy for the asshole in the White House. Another notch in the belt of The Man.
Growing up, I distinctly remember seeing films at school showing asian females marching & carrying guns, the narrator saying how communists countries would stoop so low as to make their women fight.
Our nation, using illegal immigration, unemployment, gangs and decades of violence/conditioning through broadcast and film has, finally, turned the female of our species (at least the American ones) into killing machines. Indeed…”Opportunities” but for whom? The State and its awful Empire, or the naive individual who is about to be used.
This is truly evil.
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Tom Carberry • 24 minutes ago Millions will see Zero Dark Thirty and maybe a few thousand will see Dirty Wars.
Nothing changes in America. During slavery, thousands opposed slavery, but millions supported it.
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Bi-Polar Bear • 2 hours ago How does this film differ from what Bradley Manning did?
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natureschild3 Bi-Polar Bear • an hour ago as i understand it from the military’s pov any person who enlists signs a contract making that person ‘government issue’ as in dehumanized property of the military branch. “our is not to reason why, our is but to do and die.” in my opinion that’s entrapment! during the nam police action, however, a gi speaking up about wanton brutality could choose to protect the truth even if the truth damaged the “good guy” reputation. manning attempted to go the chain-of-command route, but his efforts were rebuffed. what a sad,sad state of affairs!
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apresledeluge Bi-Polar Bear • 16 minutes ago I think, taken together, both are extremely important.
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Also on Common Dream
The ‘War on Terror’ – by Design – Can Never End January 5, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Iraq and Afghanistan, War, War on Terror.Tags: afghanistan occupation, Afghanistan War, al-Qaeda, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, habeas corpus, jed johnson, obama administgration, patriot act, Pentagon, presidential assassination, roger hollander, state secrets, Taliban, terrorism, U.S. imperialism, war on terror, warrantless eavesdropping
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Published on Friday, January 4, 2013 by The Guardian
As the Pentagon’s former top lawyer urges that the war be viewed as finite, the US moves in the opposite direction
by Glenn Greenwald
A U.S. Army soldier takes cover as a Black Hawk chopper takes off from a U.S. military base in Arghandab valley near Kandahar. (Photo: Reuters)
Last month, outgoing pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson gave a speech at the Oxford Union and said that the War on Terror must, at some point, come to an end:
“Now that efforts by the US military against al-Qaida are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves: How will this conflict end? . . . . ‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’ Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives. . . .
“There will come a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaida and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, that al-Qaida will be effectively destroyed.”
On Thursday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviewed Johnson, and before doing so, she opined as follows:
“When does this thing we are in now end? And if it does not have an end — and I’m not speaking as a lawyer here, I am just speaking as a citizen who feels morally accountable for my country’s actions — if it does not have an end, then morally speaking it does not seem like it is a war. And then, our country is killing people and locking them up outside the traditional judicial system in a way I think we maybe cannot be forgiven for.”
It is precisely the intrinsic endlessness of this so-called “war” that is its most corrupting and menacing attribute, for the reasons Maddow explained. But despite the happy talk from Johnson, it is not ending soon. By its very terms, it cannot. And all one has to do is look at the words and actions of the Obama administration to know this.
There’s no question that this “war” will continue indefinitely. There is no question that US actions are the cause of that, the gasoline that fuels the fire.
In October, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported that the administration was instituting a “disposition matrix” to determine how terrorism suspects will be disposed of, all based on this fact: “among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade.” As Miller puts it: “That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”
The polices adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression and release-restrictions at the camp; minted a new theory of presidential assassination powers even for US citizens; renewed the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping framework for another five years, as well as the Patriot Act, without a single reform; and just signed into law all new restrictions on the release of indefinitely held detainees.
Does that sound to you like a government anticipating the end of the War on Terror any time soon? Or does it sound like one working feverishly to make their terrorism-justified powers of detention, surveillance, killing and secrecy permanent? About all of this, the ACLU’s Executive Director, Anthony Romero, provided the answer on Thursday: “President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day. His signature means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended.”
There’s a good reason US officials are assuming the “War on Terror” will persist indefinitely: namely, their actions ensure that this occurs. The New York Times’ Matthew Rosenberg this morning examines what the US government seems to regard as the strange phenomenon of Afghan soldiers attacking US troops with increasing frequency, and in doing so, discovers a shocking reality: people end up disliking those who occupy and bomb their country:
“Such insider attacks, by Afghan security forces on their Western allies, became ‘the signature violence of 2012′, in the words of one former American official. The surge in attacks has provided the clearest sign yet that Afghan resentment of foreigners is becoming unmanageable, and American officials have expressed worries about its disruptive effects on the training mission that is the core of the American withdrawal plan for 2014. . . .
“But behind it all, many senior coalition and Afghan officials are now concluding that after nearly 12 years of war, the view of foreigners held by many Afghans has come to mirror that of the Taliban. Hope has turned into hatred, and some will find a reason to act on those feelings.
“‘A great percentage of the insider attacks have the enemy narrative — the narrative that the infidels have to be driven out — somewhere inside of them, but they aren’t directed by the enemy,’ said a senior coalition officer, who asked not to be identified because of Afghan and American sensitivities about the attacks.”
In other words, more than a decade of occupying and brutalizing that country has turned large swaths of the population into the “Taliban”, to the extent that the “Taliban” means: Afghans willing to use violence to force the US and its allies out of their country. As always, the US – through the very policies of aggression and militarism justified in the name of terrorism – is creating the very “terrorists” those polices are supposedly designed to combat. It’s a pure and perfect system of self-perpetuation.
There is zero reason for US officials to want an end to the war on terror, and numerous and significant reasons why they would want it to continue.
Exactly the same thing is happening in Yemen, where nothing is more effective at driving Yemenis into the arms of al-Qaida than the rapidly escalated drone attacks under Obama. This morning, the Times reported that US air strikes in Yemen are carried out in close cooperation with the air force of Saudi Arabia, which will only exacerbate that problem. Indeed, virtually every person accused of plotting to target the US with terrorist attacks in last several years has expressly cited increasing US violence, aggression and militarism in the Muslim world as the cause.
There’s no question that this “war” will continue indefinitely. There is no question that US actions are the cause of that, the gasoline that fuels the fire. The only question – and it’s becoming less of a question for me all the time – is whether this endless war is the intended result of US actions or just an unwanted miscalculation.
It’s increasingly hard to make the case that it’s the latter. The US has long known, and its own studies have emphatically concluded, that “terrorism” is motivated not by a “hatred of our freedoms” but by US policy and aggression in the Muslim world. This causal connection is not news to the US government. Despite this – or, more accurately, because of it – they continue with these policies.
One of the most difficult endeavors is to divine the motives of other people (divining our own motives is difficult enough). That becomes even more difficult when attempting to discern the motives not of a single actor but a collection of individuals with different motives and interests (“the US government”).
But what one can say for certain is that there is zero reason for US officials to want an end to the war on terror, and numerous and significant reasons why they would want it to continue. It’s always been the case that the power of political officials is at its greatest, its most unrestrained, in a state of war. Cicero, two thousand years ago, warned that “In times of war, the law falls silent” (Inter arma enim silent leges). John Jay, in Federalist No. 4, warned that as a result of that truth, “nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it . . . for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans.”
Only outside compulsion, from citizens, can make an end to all of this possible.
If you were a US leader, or an official of the National Security State, or a beneficiary of the private military and surveillance industries, why would you possibly want the war on terror to end? That would be the worst thing that could happen. It’s that war that generates limitless power, impenetrable secrecy, an unquestioning citizenry, and massive profit.
Just this week, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration need not respond to the New York Times and the ACLU’s mere request to disclose the government’s legal rationale for why the President believes he can target US citizens for assassination without due process. Even while recognizing how perverse her own ruling was – “The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me” and it imposes “a veritable Catch-22″ – the federal judge nonetheless explained that federal courts have constructed such a protective shield around the US government in the name of terrorism that it amounts to an unfettered license to violate even the most basic rights: “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret” (emphasis added).
Why would anyone in the US government or its owners have any interest in putting an end to this sham bonanza of power and profit called “the war on terror”? Johnson is right that there must be an end to this war imminently, and Maddow is right that the failure to do so will render all the due-process-free and lawless killing and imprisoning and invading and bombing morally indefensible and historically unforgivable.
But the notion that the US government is even entertaining putting an end to any of this is a pipe dream, and the belief that they even want to is fantasy. They’re preparing for more endless war; their actions are fueling that war; and they continue to reap untold benefits from its continuation. Only outside compulsion, from citizens, can make an end to all of this possible.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian. A former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon. His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. His other books include: Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, and How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
Omar Khadr will remain incarcerated for at least two years, report says December 21, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Iraq and Afghanistan, Torture, War.Tags: corrections canada, Criminal Justice, Guantanamo, michelle shephard, millhaven, Omar Khadr, roger hollander, torture
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Roger’s note: when will the torture of Omar Khadr end? He pleaded guilty only to avoid a lifetime in Guantánamo. He was nearly dead when captured, was tortured mentally and physically, including a torturous series of “interviews” with Canadian CSIS, which are documented in the film, “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo.” His treatment both by the American and Canadian government can be characterized as vengeful and barbaric.
Published on Thursday December 20, 2012, www.thestar.com
Omar Khadr
Janet Hamlin/POOL/REUTERS FILE PHOTO
A Correctional Service of Canada report states that because of his Guantanamo conviction, Omar Khadr, now at Millhaven, was assessed as an inmate convicted of first-degree murder and terrorism and therefore is automatically designated “maximum security.”
Michelle Shephard National Security Reporter
Former Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr will remain incarcerated at Millhaven Institution’s maximum security facility with little chance of rehabilitation or parole for at least two years.
A Correctional Service of Canada report obtained by the Toronto Star states that due to his Guantanamo conviction, Khadr was assessed as an inmate convicted of first-degree murder and terrorism and therefore is automatically designated “maximum security.”
Although Khadr would be eligible for day parole in March, it is extremely rare for anyone with this designation to be approved. His status will be reviewed in December 2014.
University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob said he was dismayed that Corrections Canada chose to apply the standardized “Custody Rating Scale” for Khadr, which automatically designates him maximum security, despite the unique aspects of his case and reports of his good behaviour during his 10-year incarceration at Guantanamo.
READ MORE: Omar Khadr’s mother both ‘happy and sad’ after son returns to Canada
“They should be looking at his past, the circumstances of his offence, how old he was,” Doob said. “It’s perpetuating this view that he’s the same as the guy who is a terrorist or member of organized crime who killed somebody on the streets of Toronto yesterday.
“The thing about approaching this the way they did ensures the outcome. I’ve never met Omar Khadr, I know nothing about him and I can go to the web and see that he’s going to be classified as maximum security.
“Isn’t that a little bizarre? Why didn’t it take three minutes instead of three months if that is all they were going to do?”
Khadr has been held at the Millhaven facility’s hospital for assessment since being transferred to Canada from Guantanamo on Sept. 29. The 26-year-old is now expected to be moved to a range in the general population with other maximum security inmates.
The Khadr saga stretches back to July 2002, when at the age of 15, he was shot and captured following a battle in Afghanistan.
In October 2010, he pleaded guilty to five Guantanamo offences including “murder in violation of the laws of war” for the death of U.S. Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer who was fatally wounded in the battle.
His plea deal gave him an eight-year sentence and chance to return to Canada.
Child and civil rights advocates, including Liberal Senator and retired Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, have pushed to have him recognized and treated as a child soldier, and the UN condemned both the U.S. and Canada for the prosecution of a juvenile for war crimes.
Khadr’s lawyer, John Norris, said he was disappointed the designation will limit Corrections Canada’s ability to provide rehabilitation options, aside from Khadr continuing his education and religious counselling from a prison-approved imam.
“Their hands really are tied by the fact that he’s stuck in max, because they can’t help him get ready to return to the community,” Norris said, adding that he is “weighing the options” in terms of any legal challenges.
“What he really needs is the ability to re-integrate into the community. Re-integration is one of the cardinal principles of dealing with child soldiers. It’s also a key principle in dealing with young people in general.”
Véronique Rioux, a spokeswoman for Corrections Canada said she was unable to comment on individual cases, citing privacy concerns.
It is believed Khadr will receive similar rights as other inmates, including the ability to see visitors. Norris said Khadr has already met with his mother Maha Elsamnah and Arlette Zinck, an English professor from King’s University College in Edmonton, who began providing him lesson plans and visiting him while he was incarcerated in Guantanamo.
Although the eight-page report does outline many of the aspects of the case, Khadr’s security risk rating of 139 determines his status. The scale automatically gives him 69 points for a murder conviction, 20 points for a terrorism offence, 30 points for his age at the time of conviction (he was 25) and 20 points for his sentence length (eight years.)
Any rating over 134 is considered maximum security.
“This says absolutely nothing about whether Omar is a danger to the public and it’s critical people understand it’s completely divorced from that,” Norris said. “In fact, the scoring requires Corrections to ignore the evidence that his is not a danger.”
The Millhaven’s Assessment Unit report recommends that Khadr be kept in a “highly structured environment in which individual and group interaction is subject to direct and constant supervision
“During the intake assessment interview Khadr emphasized that his current sentiments/beliefs reflect pro-social changes in attitudes promoting peaceful resolution to conflicts,” the report states.
But the report also notes that given Khadr’s limited access to other inmates since his arrival, it is difficult to assess how he will interact with other prisoners.
“Not to negate the length of time he has spent in custody (in Guantanamo) with no evidence of attitudinal or behaviour problems; Khadr is a new arrival to the Canadian federal correctional system . . . Correctional Services Canada has not had the opportunity to assess the risk he may pose to the security of the institution, other offenders or the risk to his own safety.”
Concerns about Khadr’s connections to Al Qaeda as a teenager and during his incarceration at Guantanamo are noted in the report, which recommends monitoring his association with other offenders, “particularly those who look up to him.” A security officer noted a Millhaven inmate convicted of terrorism communicating with Khadr through his cell on Oct. 1, 2012, the report states, without giving any further details.
The report references positive assessments of Khadr by Katherine Porterfield, a clinical psychologist at New York’s Bellevue Hospital and forensic psychiatrist and retired U.S. Army Brig.-Gen. Stephen Xenakis. The pair spent several years and hundreds of hours with Khadr during his detention in Guantanamo and the report states according to their accounts, “it would appear that Khadr demonstrated the ability to develop positive interpersonal relationships.”
But the report also states, that “Correctional Services Canada is not in receipt of information from Guantanamo Bay pertaining to his behaviour while detained at the facility.”
There is no mention of the reports by psychiatrists Michael Welner or Alan Hopewell, which Public Safety Minister Vic Toews personally requested from U.S. defence secretary Leon Panetta, delaying Khadr’s expected transfer to Canada and infuriating Obama administration officials eager to transfer the Toronto-born detainee.
Welner told a Guantanamo courtroom during Khadr’s sentencing hearing that he was “highly dangerous” and considered a “rock star” at Gitmo.
Kimberly Rivera, Pregnant Mom of 4, Sentenced to Military Prison for Refusing to Serve in Iraq April 30, 2013
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Iraq and Afghanistan.Tags: aaron mate, amy goodman, Canada, canada government, conscientious objector, Democracy Now, Iraq war, james branum, Kimberly Rivera, roger hollander, Stephen Harper, War Resisters
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Private First Class Kimberly Rivera — a conscientious objector and pregnant mother of four — has just been sentenced to military prison for refusing to serve in the Iraq War. Rivera was on a two-week leave in December 2006 when she decided she would not return to Iraq for a second tour of duty. She and her family fled to Canada in February 2007, living there until their deportation back to the United States last year. On Monday, a military court sentenced her to 10 months behind bars. Her fifth child is due in December. We’re joined by Mario Rivera, Kimberly’s husband and now the primary caretaker of their four young children, and by James Branum, a lawyer who represents Kimberly and dozens of other conscientious objectors.
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AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the case of Private First Class Kimberly Rivera. She is a conscientious objector and a pregnant mother of four children, who has just been sentenced to military prison. Rivera first deployed to Iraq in 2006. During a two-week leave back in the U.S., she decided to refuse a second tour of duty in Iraq. In January 2007, Rivera and her family packed up their car and crossed the border into Canada. She was later charged with desertion and faced up to five years in prison if convicted. Well, on Monday she was sentenced to 14 months. Under a pretrial agreement, she will serve 10 months of that sentence.
This is Kimberly Rivera speaking late last year about her case.
AMY GOODMAN: Since their arrival to Canada in early 2007, Kimberly Rivera, her husband and two children settled in Toronto. She had two more children there and made several attempts to legally immigrate. Canada’s War Resisters Support Campaign championed the case, drawing endorsers including Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu. But Canadian officials refused. In August, they ordered the Rivera family to leave the country or face deportation. A provincial lawmaker representing Rivera’s Toronto district, Cheri DiNovo, condemned the order.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Ontario lawmaker Cheri DiNovo speaking last August.
Kimberly Rivera turned herself in at the U.S.-Canadian border just days later. She’s now on her way to a military prison for 10 months. Her fifth child is due while she’s behind bars.
Well, we’re joined right now by her husband, by Mario Rivera. He will now become the primary caretaker for their four young children. We’re also joined by James Branum, the defense attorney who represented Kimberly during her court-martial yesterday, Monday, at Fort Carson. He’s also represented dozens of other conscientious objectors, is legal director for the Oklahoma Center for Conscience and Peace Research. They’re speaking to us from the Tim Gill Center for Public Media in Colorado Springs, home to Rocky Mountain PBS and KRCC public radio.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Mario, you’ve just come out of the court yesterday. Can you respond to the sentencing of your wife Kimberly to 10 months in jail for refusing to return to Iraq and go to Canada instead?
MARIO RIVERA: I think it was severely harsh, and I personally feel that the judge already made up his mind before the trial had even started. It’s just too much. The kids need her.
AARON MATÉ: Mario, tell us about the reaction of your children. How have they handled this whole ordeal? And what did they say yesterday?
MARIO RIVERA: As soon as they found out yesterday, they broke down into tears. Just the thought of being away from their mother for—sorry, for 10 more months; they’ve already been gone for eight months out of her life, so it’s difficult.
AMY GOODMAN: Mario, how old are your kids, and what are their names?
MARIO RIVERA: Christian is 11, Rebecca is eight, Katie is five, and Gabriel is two.
AMY GOODMAN: James, James Branum, you’re her attorney. When she was in Iraq, she turned to a chaplain to say she could not do this, that she could not, when she looked at Iraqi children, she said, open fire?
JAMES BRANUM: Yes, she talked to the chaplain, expressed her concerns. She said that she didn’t think she should—could pull the trigger, if asked to. And this is a critical issue, because she was a gate guard at FOB Loyalty in Baghdad. Her job was a critical—critical thing, as far as security coming on and off the base. And so, she felt that she morally could not do what she was asked to do; at the same time, she realized that she would put other soldiers in danger if she didn’t pull the trigger when the time came. She talked to a chaplain about it. The chaplain largely pushed her aside, did not give her the counsel that she really needed. And so, when she came home on leave, she took other steps. And it’s unfortunate that she did not get the legal advice and information she needed to seek status as a conscientious objector.
AMY GOODMAN: So when she—
JAMES BRANUM: That said—
AMY GOODMAN: James Branum, so when she said this to the chaplain, he didn’t say, “There’s a way you can legally do this: You could apply for a CO status”? Instead he argued with her?
JAMES BRANUM: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So she didn’t know the process?
JAMES BRANUM: The chaplain was very, very resolute that Kim—that she needed to stay there, she needed to fulfill her mission, instead of giving her the spiritual counsel she needed at that moment. Instead, this chaplain told her basically, “Suck it up. Continue on.” And that was—that was not the advice she needed at that moment. She needed to know her rights. She needed to know AR 600-43 gives her the right to seek status as a conscientious objector. She didn’t know that.
AARON MATÉ: James, so 10 months in prison—how does this sentence compare to sentences to other resisters? And is there an exception here, by given the fact that she’s pregnant and is due in December? How does that factor in?
JAMES BRANUM: We don’t know. The judge doesn’t really give the rationale for why he made the decision he did. We do know there have been some resistance cases that have received greater sentences. As long as 24 months has been given. But many other resisters receive little jail time or no jail time. And people that desert, generally, over 90 percent do no jail time at all. And so, we feel that Kim was singled out.
Another thing, the prosecutor at trial said that he asked the judge to give a harsh sentence to send a message to the war resisters in Canada. And we feel that was—the Canadian government, in deporting Kim, said she would not face any serious punishment because of her political and conscientious objection to war. And in reality, that’s exactly what happened. That was the prosecution’s argument, that because she spoke out against the war, she therefore should be punished.
AMY GOODMAN: Mario, you live in Colorado, is that right, with your four children?
MARIO RIVERA: No, the four children are in Texas right now. I came up here in March, originally, because that was when the trial was supposed to have been. Unfortunately, my mom fell ill, and it was pushed back until yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: So, how will you raise the four kids alone? How are you going to do this over the next 10 months?
MARIO RIVERA: I don’t know. It’s going to be difficult. I’m just going to have to do my best and try to keep it together and keep them together and just help them be strong.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, and Mario especially. I know this was very tough for you to come on today. Mario Rivera, Kimberly Rivera’s husband—she serves her 10-month sentence; he becomes the primary caretaker for their four young children. She will be serving that time—where? In California?
JAMES BRANUM: We believe it will be in Miramar. One other critical thing to mention is there is an ongoing campaign to have her released on clemency grounds. Information on that—
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll link to that website at democracynow.org.