Saturday, November 12, 2005

Ten things we learned in 2004 about 9/11

Rigorous Intuition

What you don't know can't hurt them

From - Friday, December 31, 2004

Ten things we learned in 2004 about 9/11

1. The World Trade Center Black Boxes were recovered, though officials perpetuate the lie that they weren't.

2. FEMA really did arrive early in New York City, for the "bioterror drill" Tripod II, and Rudi Giuliani's testimony to that effect before the 9/11 Commission is its only public testimony which remains officially untranscribed.

3. The Total Information Awareness program was ready to roll out before Sept 11, and John Poindexter's office was established in the Pentagon no later than Sept 12.

4. A recording of six air traffic controllers' same-day detailing of their communication with two hijacked planes on September 11 was purposefully destroyed by the FAA.

5. NORAD was conducting a live-fly simulation of multiple hijackings on the morning of 9/11, which effectively hamstrung a fighter response already compromised by exercises which took the bulk of interceptors far from the eastern seaboard.

6. Dick Cheney was running a separate command and control communications system on 9/11, which whistleblower Indira Singh recognized as having "the exact same functionality I was looking to utilize [for] Ptech," the high tech terrorist and intelligence cut-out that "was set up in the basement of the FAA" for two years before the attacks. (Go to this page to download video testimony of Mike Ruppert and Indira Singh on this subject.)

7. George Bush was unwilling to reluctanctly meet members of his reluctantly struck 9/11 Commission unless Cheney accompanied him, both were unsworn, their words were unrecorded and untranscribed, the meeting was private and in the White House, and the members' notebooks were confiscated afterwards.

8. That John Ashcroft made the case for Sibel Edmonds' State Secret Privilege gag order by claiming that disclosure of her testimony would "cause serious damage to the national security interests of the United States" suggests he is at least an accessory after the fact (Daniel Ellsberg believes Ashcroft deserving of jail time for his role in obstructing justice), as Edmonds has been able to say that her testimony involves "specific information implicating certain high level government and elected officials in criminal activities directly and indirectly related to terrorist money laundering, narcotics, and illegal arms sales."

9. Donald Rumsfeld confirmed what we knew all along, that Flight 93 was shot down, and the corporate media flew into damage control for the Pentagon, saying the Secretary "misspoke" and "stoked conspiracy theories."

10. As Pakistan wound down the search for Osama bin Laden and "prohibited" American forces based in Afghanistan from making cross-border incursions into the Tribal Areas, Musharraf was rewarded with the approving words that his continuing rule remains an internal matter for Pakistanis. (Afghanistan was, arguably, more cooperative in their attempt to bring bin Laden to justice, and Iraq was not a rogue nuclear state.)

We're getting there. Of course, they are there already, and have been for years. But we're catching on.

The big picture remains grim, and getting grimmer, but small pictures can still be pleasant ones. I hope yours are in 2005.

In Zimbabwe, Thousands of Homeless, Hiding in Full Sight, Belie Leader's Denials

In Zimbabwe, Thousands of Homeless, Hiding in Full Sight, Belie Leader's Denials

By MICHAEL WINES

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe -

President Robert G. Mugabe has one word for reports that Operation Drive Out Trash, the urban-demolition campaign aimed at slum dwellers that his government describes as a civic beautification program, has rendered thousands of his impoverished citizens homeless.

"Nonsense," he told ABC News in an interview broadcast on Nov. 3. "Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. Where are the thousands? You go there now and see whether those thousands are there. Where are they? A figment of their imagination."

Clearly, Mr. Mugabe has not been to Bulawayo.

Just three miles west of the center of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Robson Tembo and his wife, Ticole, live in the open air in a small pen, 12 feet by 12 feet, built of deadwood and scrap. Rows of plastic grocery sacks hold the assets they have collected over 72 years.

Five miles north, Nokuthula Dube, 22, her two daughters and two orphaned relatives are squatting in an unfinished two-room house of cinder blocks. During a reporter's recent visit, an unidentified woman lay curled up on the concrete floor of the house's only closet, sleeping.

On the other side of town, Gertrude Moyo, 28, lives with her four children and seven other families in tents, pitched in the bush.

More than simple homelessness binds the three families. Until a few months ago, they all lived in Killarney, a shantytown with an improbable name that had housed Bulawayo's less fortunate citizens since the early 1980's.

Today, Killarney is a moonscape of sunbaked dirt, scrub and burned-out rubble. Last May and June, police officers reduced its huts to wreckage, burned their remains and routed the area's more than 800 residents as part of Operation Drive Out Trash.

"They had iron bars as long as this," Mr. Tembo said of the police, stretching his arms wide. "They demolished part of every hut, and then they told us to destroy the rest."

Mr. Tembo said he refused, and so the police finished the job, leveling his two-room home built of wooden poles and metal walls.

More than five months after the demolitions began, Zimbabwe's government continues to insist that the destruction of 133,000 households, by its own count, was a long-overdue slum-clearance effort that has caused its citizens only temporary inconvenience.

The government contends that most of those made homeless have been relocated to the rural villages where they lived before migrating to the cities, mostly to look for work. Others, it says, will be placed in thousands of new homes being built to replace the illegal huts that have been razed.

Mr. Mugabe has rejected the United Nations' attempt to raise $30 million to aid the victims of Operation Drive Out Trash on the ground that Zimbabwe has no crisis. Despite a public appeal by Secretary General Kofi Annan on Oct. 31, the government so far has rejected any assistance that implies that its evicted citizens are in distress.

Yet many are in great distress. Relying on the estimates of Zimbabwe's government, the United Nations says 700,000 people were displaced by the May and June demolitions and a later campaign, Operation Going Forward, No Turning Back, in which police officers routed those who tried to return to the cities and rebuild.

An August survey of more than 23,000 Zimbabwean households by the South Africa-based advocacy group ActionAid International places the number of those made homeless as high as 1.2 million - more than 1 in 10 Zimbabweans.

Where many have gone is a mystery. The government carted thousands to holding camps that were later disbanded, and transported thousands more by trucks into the countryside and left them there, ostensibly near their rural homes. Those people are registered with local officials, but almost certainly, they are but a fraction of the total.

In the Nkayi district, a vast expanse of bush terrain north of Bulawayo with 110,000 people, fewer than 700 families are known to have been relocated, according to church officials involved in assisting them.

Similarly, the government's home-building plan has fallen far short of its promises and of the demand. Mr. Mugabe pledged three trillion Zimbabwe dollars for construction in July - about $30 million in American dollars, and dropping steadily given Zimbabwe's 400 percent inflation rate. But the national treasury is all but bare, and in Bulawayo, where 1,000 homes were promised in short order, fewer than 100 are being built.

So where are the homeless?

"This remains what I'd call an invisible humanitarian crisis - invisible to international eyes, the reason being that those who were displaced have been dispersed," said David Mwaniki, who oversees ActionAid's work in Zimbabwe.

Many are probably with relatives; a few have fled the country. Others are in the bush, surviving off the kindness of neighbors. Many more have vanished into hovels and tents and half-built houses.

The United Nations says 32,000 of Bulawayo's 675,000 residents lost their homes and were ordered to leave the city during the demolition campaign; city officials put the number at 45,000. Torden Moyo, who directs an alliance of local civic groups called Bulawayo Agenda, says there is no doubt where they have gone.

"Ninety-five percent are now back," he said. "They're still struggling, still homeless, still penniless, still shelterless. They've been made refugees in their own country."

Killarney is proof of that. Before the demolitions, it was dirt-poor but thriving, subdivided into three villages with stores and services. All that has been razed and burned. Northeast of town, not far off the road to Bulawayo's airport, Nokuthula Dube, her own children and an orphaned niece and nephew share the two rooms of a half-finished home. Ten stunted cornstalks and some greens grow in a makeshift plot outside, but the five live on donated cornmeal from a nearby church.

Ms. Dube returned from her niece's school in June to find her home in Killarney's Village One wrecked and on fire. Homeless and pregnant, she lost her housecleaning job in a nearby suburb. Her husband, Nomen Moyo, had to move away to keep his job as a gardener. Ms. Dube said she and the children walked for a week, sleeping by the road, before finding the shell where they now live.

In September, Ms. Dube had a daughter, Mtokhozisi. She left her 3-year-old daughter, Nomathembe, and the two orphans - 10-year-old Pentronella and 14-year-old Kevin - alone while she gave birth in a local hospital. She walked home from the hospital with her newborn. "I left in the morning," she said, "and arrived around 3."

A few weeks ago, a man who said he was the house's owner appeared. "He wants us to leave," she said. "He's claiming that this is his house."

Asked where they would go, she said, "Only God knows."

Across town, Gertrude Moyo, who lived in Killarney for 23 years before being driven out on June 11, lives in a 10-foot-by-15-foot tent with her four children. Her husband died a year ago. She said the police first took the family to a transit camp for the homeless, then to the tent. Mrs. Moyo said she was told to wait for a new home.

In fact, the government is building a row of houses next to her tent, and says they are for victims of the demolitions. But Ms. Moyo said the police had told her that her family was going not to a new home, but to a plot of farmland north of town.

Robson Tembo and his wife drifted from one church to a second, then to a succession of relatives' homes before finally returning in late September to Killarney's Village Three. They built their scrap-metal enclosure not far from the two-room home in which they once lived, and which the police had razed in May.

Once a miner, Mr. Tembo is now too infirm to walk very far, much less work. A son who cleans houses gives the couple maize; a second sometimes brings money.

Mr. Tembo's great worry, he said, is that the police, who cruise up and down Killarney's main dirt road, will evict the couple again. "I'm from Malawi," he said. "But if they tear down this hut of mine, I will stay here, because I have nowhere to go in Malawi."

Local church workers, who have assumed much of the burden of finding and caring for the homeless here, say that about 240 of Killarney's residents have returned, many living in the sort of scrap-metal lean-to's that the Tembos cobbled together.

Down a dirt path, past the charred remains of huts in what was once Killarney Village Two, Mhulupheki Tshuma, 29, his wife, Ncadisani, and their 20-month-old son survive by scavenging plastic containers and collecting white pebbles, which Mr. Tshuma sells as decorations for graves. Two other children have been sent to live with relatives elsewhere in town.

Mr. Tshuma was born here, and his parents died here. The family lived in a two-room mud hut when the police arrived in early June and burned it down. "The only thing I took out," Ms. Tshuma said, "was the children."

After wandering for three months, they returned on Sept. 4 and built a hovel. The police demolished it on Sept. 29. Now they live in the open air, their living space bounded by knee-high mud walls and pieces of rubbish.

Mr. Tshuma said the police returned early this month and beat him roundly, telling him he had to leave. But that is impossible. "We came here," he said, "because we didn't have anywhere else to go."

Torture suspect trying to stay in U.S.


Posted on Sat, Nov. 12, 2005


U.S. & CHILE

Torture suspect trying to stay in U.S.
A Chilean torture suspect who lives in Miami-Dade County is reported to be seeking a special visa as protection against possible deportation.


BY ALFONSO CHARDY

achardy@herald.com

The Bush administration, already confronting tough criticism at home and abroad for its treatment of detainees in the war on terror, now is facing the political ghost of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier -- by way of a Miami area man linked to his death.

Armando Fernández Larios, implicated in the 1976 assassination of Letelier and the torture and slaying of dissidents in his homeland, is seeking a visa reserved for government informants to avoid deportation.

Now living in Kendall, the former Chilean military officer has been in the United States without proper immigration papers since arriving from Chile in 1987 to face charges related to the Letelier car-bombing in Washington, D.C.

His case has divided the Bush administration, pitting some immigration officials against the Justice Department at a sensitive time when White House policies on the war on terror -- particularly U.S. treatment of alleged foreign terrorists captured in other countries -- have come under fire.

It follows closely the case of Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles, whose extradition is sought by Venezuela to face charges of masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people. A U.S. immigration judge has ruled against deporting him to Venezuela, and the case remains an open sore in U.S.-Venezuela relations.

As some Chileans clamor to try former dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes against humanity, the U.S. treatment of Fernández Larios, once one of Pinochet's trusted military men, will come under intense scrutiny.

FEDS IN TURF BATTLE

Some immigration officials have wanted to detain Fernández Larios to face deportation proceedings, citing his lack of any immigration papers and a 1996 law that mandates deportation of foreigners convicted of aggravated felonies. But they have been prohibited from acting because high-ranking officials at the Justice Department want to keep the Chilean in reserve as a possible witness in any future prosecution of Pinochet or his associates.

The Justice Department in February permitted a Chilean judge to interrogate Fernández Larios and another defendant in the Letelier case -- Michael Townley -- in connection with the killing in Argentina of anti-Pinochet Gen. Carlos Prats.

Townley has admitted planting the car bomb that killed Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974 in an attack that was similar to the Letelier assassination two years later in Washington. Townley served time for the Letelier killing, but is now free and living somewhere in the United States. Fernández Larios has denied any role in the Prats case and at this point is not sought in Chile in either the Prats or Letelier matters.

The informant visa, known as an S visa, could lead to a green card and confer added protection to Fernández Larios against any possible future move to deport him, a federal law-enforcement official knowledgeable about the case said on condition his identity not be revealed. He added that immigration officials in favor of deporting Fernández Larios had recently renewed efforts to thwart the visa bid.

Fernández Larios' Miami attorney, Steven Davis, said his client is aware that a visa is in the works but has not heard if it has been approved. Davis said his client would not comment.

Under existing regulations, an S visa can only be filed by a federal or state law enforcement agency -- not by an individual. The federal law enforcement official familiar with the case said the Justice Department was involved in the application.

According to regulations, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division must certify that the visa is warranted and, if so, forwards the application to the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These steps can be taken if the secretary of state and the attorney general decide that the applicant possesses ''critical reliable information'' about a criminal or terrorist organization or operation.

The Justice Department, ICE and the State Department would not comment on the matter, citing ''privacy regulations.'' Paul Bresson, a Justice spokesman, said, ``We are not able to comment on specific ongoing cases.''

DEEMED KEY WITNESS

In 1987, Fernández Larios traveled to the United States under the protection of the Justice Department, which deemed him a key witness in its investigation into the Letelier assassination.

Fernández Larios pleaded guilty to acting as an accessory after the fact in the bombing, telling investigators he had traveled to Washington D.C. before the attack to case Letelier's office, home and car. Then he relayed the intelligence to Townley, an American who at the time worked for DINA, Pinochet's intelligence service. Townley later attached the bomb to Letelier's car. Fernández Larios served five months and moved to Kendall upon his release.

Ever since, Fernández Larios has been living without immigration status, Davis noted.

BORN IN WASHINGTON

Ironically, Fernández Larios, 55, was born in Washington D.C., but he is not an American citizen because his father was a Chilean diplomat assigned to the U.S. capital and children of foreign diplomats born in the United States are not granted automatic citizenship.

When Fernández Larios came to the United States in 1987, he told a federal judge that Pinochet once told him not to cooperate with the U.S. investigation.

He did not know that the purpose of his mission was part of an assassination plot, Fernández Larios said.

Fernández Larios has also been implicated in the killings of several activists in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 1973, military coup that overthrew Marxist President Salvador Allende and brought Pinochet to power. Fernández Larios denied any role in those killings.

A federal jury found Fernández Larios liable in one of the slayings during a civil case in Miami federal court in 2003.

For now, Fernández Larios remains in Miami-Dade -- awaiting a visa and fighting deportation.

A Pact With the Devil

By Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers

11/11/05 "Lew Rockwell" -- --

Recently, over these past few weeks,

many newspapers and other mainstream mass media have apologized for
not reporting the truth about the Iraq War. Their weak excuses are
that they were deceived by the lies put forth by the Bush
administration for going to war against a defenseless country and
the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Do not
be fooled by these feeble excuses. Also, don't think that these
apologies absolve you, the average pro-war American, from your
complicity in war crimes committed in your name. The Bush
administration is guilty; the mass media is guilty; and – if you
supported this vile crime against humanity – you too are guilty. I
pray to God every night that all the guilty will receive their
proper judgment and the sooner the better.

Of course the newspapers, etc, did not do their jobs in
investigating the lies and prevarications of the Bush
administration. Of course they are as guilty as the Bush
administration itself in leading the American public into a war of
aggression and making the United States today's international pariah
nation; a pariah nation unequaled since Nazi Germany. But realizing
this fact is not telling the entire story; there is something else
to be considered about this entire sordid affair; there is something
else that points to an even worse blight on a modern America's sick
society and culture. What price will American's pay for fame?

The mass media is a business. They are in business to make money.
Only a fool would run a business trying to sell people something
that they do not want. After 9/11, a very ill-educated, self-
centered, and vindictive American public wanted blood. They wanted
revenge. It mattered not who was the target of that revenge, average
America wanted their blood-thirst satiated in any way possible
against the most convenient target. Those targets wound up being
innocent people bombed in Afghanistan and trumped up charges against
innocents resulting in mass murder in Iraq. "Kill them all and let
God sort them out" was the call. Like a school of piranhas on a wild
feeding frenzy, an ignorant American public sucked up the
propaganda. And what an anti-American, disgraceful sight is was.

The mass media willingly obliged a sick and twisted thirst for
revenge by a sick and twisted American public by giving the crowd
what it wanted. In show business parlance the words would be, "The
show must go on!" and the media gave a spectacular all-American show.

But what is the mass media besides a group of individuals working in
a certain business? From what I've seen working in the mass media
for over 28 years, I can tell you that show business has much more
than its share of dishonest, vain, egotistical, and distasteful
people. Show business has more prima-donnas and vain-glorious people
in it than I have ever had the displeasure of working with in any
other business. The mass media is full of the most wretched people
you'd ever meet. I can count on my right hand the number of truly
honest, good people I've met in this business over these years.

Watch that Fox News or CNN newscaster. Besides dressing and putting
make-up like a prostitute (which, in a way, she is) she just reeks
of insincerity. She doesn't care if she's telling the truth or not.
All she cares about is her career and being on TV. She, and
thousands like her, contaminate the airwaves on your TV nightly.
They don't care about the truth. They only care about their job; and
carrying on the façade that they are important. They are the lowest
of the low. These are fake plastic people living in a make-believe
plastic world. To expect them to tell the truth is like expecting
men to bear children; it's not going to happen.

I've even met on-air announcers who threw away their own families
and children in the pursuit of fame. What sad and disreputable
excuses for human beings these people are. Don't think that I am
talking about just a few of your on-air announcers, I am talking
about the vast majority that you see on TV. The truly dedicated and
honest ones don't make it to fame; they have a conscience and drop
out while they can still look themselves in the mirror.

Most TV announcers have sold their souls to the devil in exchange
for fame. I know, I have met many who readily admit so (it doesn't
matter whether or not you believe in God or Satan – the fact remains
that these people made a pact with the devil in return for fame). We
should not expect anything from them except lies and a full plate of
vanity. Of course they lied about Iraq. Of course they'll lie about
anything. They have no conscience. After all, all they want to be is
on TV and to do so, they think they have to give the public what it
wants. It doesn't matter if it's the truth or not. Joe six-pack
doesn't like the truth; if the mass media told the truth, their
ratings would go down and our little Miss Hot-Shot newscasters might
be out of a job.

And now the public is waking up to the crimes and lies of the Bush
administration. Only a fool would expect that these sick examples of
human perversion who make up our mass media would suddenly change
their ways and begin to tell the truth.

I, for one, look forward to the day when these bastards get what
they deserve: And that is to be an unrecognizable no-body out on the
street begging for a job.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10962.htm

The Patriots of Guantanamo

By Gar Smith

11/10/05 "Global Research" -- --

There is a small band of men who

are such firm believers in the protections of the Bill of Rights
that they are willing to lay down their lives to defend these
principles. They aren't soldiers or civil libertarians — they are a
group of "enemy combatants" confined in the gulag of Guantanamo.

All freedom-loving Americans should pause to consider the sacrifices
of Fawzi al-Odah, Yousef Al Shehri, Abduhl-Rahman Shalabi, Mahid Al
Joudi and 21 other detainees who are engaged in a withering hunger
strike inside the prison cells of Guantanamo.

When Fawzi al-Odah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, he was 25-years-
old and he weighed a scant 139 pounds. Today al-Odah weighs 112
pounds. He has been on a fast since August 8 and now he is demanding
that the feeding tube forced down his nose be removed so he can die
and put an end to his suffering.

It is estimated that 540 men are imprisoned in Guantanamo without
charges, without trial, without any hope of redress. Hunger strikes
have been waged in Guantanamo since early 2002. The latest fast
involved 76 prisoners. By late October, 26 detainees were still
refusing food and 23 were being force-fed through tubes that,
according to attorney Julia Tarver, have left some of her
clients "vomiting up substantial amounts of blood."

Bill Goodman, Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights
(CCR) in New York, says "the Guantanamo hunger strikers are willing
to die unless they get humane treatment, including some small
measure of justice…. Bloody force-feeding with dirty tubes is
barbaric."

Against all odd, these almost completely powerless prisoners have
successfully employed the tactics of nonviolent resistance to win
recognition for those basic human rights and civil liberties that
all Americans claim as their patrimony.

On October 25, CCR lawyers won access to the detainees' medical
records but Tarver remains concerned about her clients, "some of
whom are young boys who have spent nearly four years without charge,
isolated miles away from their families, and are rapidly losing hope
that justice will ever prevail for them." Tarver reports that her
clients continue to be subjected to verbal and physical abuse,
medical maltreatment and unsanitary conditions.

The Legal Limbo of an Unnecessary War

The US declared war on Afghanistan ostensibly because the Taliban
government refused to turn over Osama bin Laden to the US.
Washington unleashed a rain of bombs with the declared goal of
toppling the Taliban. In the process, the US arrested hundreds of
Afghan and Islamic fighters who took up arms to resist the attacks.

We now know that some of these men were just luckless individuals
who were pulled from taxi cabs or marched from their homes to be
handed over to US soldiers as "Taliban fighters" — in exchange for
tempting bounties of Pentagon cash.

Three British men released in February 2004, complained of being
stripped, chained to the floor for 18 hours a day, placed in
isolation and threatened with dogs. During their detention, they all
confessed to crimes. They were only released after the British
government proved that all three had actually been in Britain at the
time of their alleged "crimes."

CCR President Michael Ratner cites the case as proof that coercive
interrogation doesn't work: "You get people willing to say anything
because they want the torture or the inhumane treatment to end."

"We're Going to Go to the Dark Side Now"

In the Post-9/11 world, Vice President Dick Cheney memorably told
Meet the Press: "We're going to have to go to the dark side now."

As a resutlt, Ratner notes, the US is "no longer a country of
law…. 'Taking off the gloves' means literally erasing the
Constitution and the protections against torture."

The outlines of this inhumane treatment are now a matter of public
record. Hooded interrogations. Stripping prisoners naked.
Removing "comfort items" (like prayer rugs and the Koran).
Exploiting phobias (like a fear of dogs). Employing painful "stress
positions."

More than a year ago, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case of
Rasul v. Bush that the detainees are entitled to legal
representation before federal courts. But the White House, the
Attorney General's office, and the Pentagon have chosen to ignore
the ruling.

That is why the Patriots of Guantanamo have been forced to go on
strike with their very lives. They are demanding that their
suffering be investigated and the "facts be submitted to a candid
world."

"Give Us Liberty or Give Us Death"

In 1776, America's Founding Fathers signed a document pledging
their "lives and sacred honor" to the cause of securing "certain
unalienable Rights." The Patriots of Guantanamo have neither pens
nor parchment: They have been compelled to their pledge not with
words but deeds.

When Patrick Henry thundered, "Give me liberty or give me death,"
his stirring words were rhetorical. Al-Odah's cry is dead serious.
He has informed his US lawyers that he wants a judge to order the
removal of the feeding tube that is keeping him alive.

Al-Odah's lawyer, Tom Wilner, insists that his client has the right
to demand to die to protest his continued imprisonment without
charges or any hope of a trial and release. Al-Odah is willing to
die "if it will bring justice."

The Patriots of Guantanamo are insisting on nothing less than the
same basic protections granted to US citizens under the Bill of
Rights — specifically, the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and
Ninth Amendments. Clearly something is seriously amiss when it is
the "enemies of democracy" that are willing to die to defend the
Bill of Rights while the men entrusted to defend the Constitution
ignore and abuse these very laws.

Today, America's moral standard is being weighed in the dungeons of
Guantanamo. The hunger strikers are not simply fasting for their
rights — they are fasting for all of us. Their demands should be our
demands. And, if they aren't, what guarantee do any of us have that
their fate might not one day be our own?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10959.htm

The White Death

The last paragraph is very important.

By Chris Floyd
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10960.htm
11/11/05 "Moscow Times" -- --

This week, the broadcast of a

shattering new documentary,provided fresh confirmation of a gruesome
war crime covered by this column nine months ago: the use of
chemical weapons by U.S. forces during the frenzied destruction of
Fallujah in November 2004.

Using filmed and photographic evidence, eyewitness accounts and the
direct testimony of U.S. soldiers who took part in the attacks, the
documentary -- "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre" -- catalogs the
American use of white phosphorus shells and a new, "improved" form
of napalm that turned human beings into "caramelized" fossils, with
their skin dissolved and turned to leather on their bones. The film
was produced by RAI, the Italian state network run by a government
that backed the war.

Vivid images show civilians, including women and children, who had
been burned alive in their homes, even in their beds. This illegal
use of chemical weapons -- at the order of the Bushist brass -- and
the killing of civilians are confirmed by former U.S. soldiers
interviewed on camera. "I heard the order to pay attention because
they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah," said one
soldier, quoted in The Independent. "In military jargon, it's known
as Willy Pete. Phosphorus burns bodies; in fact it melts the flesh
all the way down to the bone. ... I saw the burned bodies of women
and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a
radius of 150 meters is done for."

The broadcast is an important event: shameful, damning, convincing.
But it shouldn't be news. Earlier this year, as reported here on
March 18, a medical team sent to Fallujah by the Bush-backed Iraqi
interim government issued its findings at a news conference in
Baghdad. The briefing, by Health Ministry investigator Dr. Khalid
ash-Shaykhli, was attended by more than 20 major U.S. and
international news outlets. Not a single one of these bastions of a
free and vigorous press reported on the event. Only a few small
venues -- such as the International Labor Communications
Association -- brought word of the extraordinary revelations to
English-speaking audiences.

Yet this highly credible, pro-American official of a pro-occupation
government confirmed, through medical examinations and the
eyewitness testimony of survivors -- including many civilians who
had opposed the heavy-handed insurgent presence in the town --
that "burning chemicals" had been used in the attack, in direct
violation of international and U.S. law. "All forms of nature were
wiped out" by the substances unleashed in the assault, including
animals that had been killed by gas or chemical fire, said ash-
Shaykhli. But apparently this kind of thing is not considered news
anymore by the corporate gatekeepers of media "truth."

As we noted here in March, ash-Shaykhli's findings were buttressed
by direct testimony from U.S. Marines filing "after-action reports"
on web sites for military enthusiasts back home. There, fresh from
the battle, soldiers talked openly of the routine use of Willy Pete,
propane bombs and "jellied gasoline" (napalm) in tactical assaults
in Fallujah. As it says in the scriptures: By their war porn ye
shall know them.

This week, as in March, the Pentagon said it only used white
phosphorus shells in Fallujah for "illumination purposes." But the
documentary's evidence belies them. Although there are indeed many
white bombs bursting in air to bathe the city in unnatural light,
the film clearly shows other phosphorus shells raining all the way
to the ground, where they explode in fury throughout residential
areas and spread their caramelizing clouds. As Fallujah biologist
Mohamed Tareq says in the film: "A rain of fire fell on the city,
the people struck by this multicolored substance started to burn, we
found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the
clothes intact."

The slaughter in Fallujah was a microcosm of the entire misbegotten
enterprise launched by those two eminent Christian statesmen, U.S.
President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair: a
brutal act of collective punishment for defying the imperial will, a
high-tech turkey shoot that mowed down the just and unjust alike, an
idiotic strategic blunder that has exacerbated the violence and
hatred it was meant to quell. The vicious overkill of the Fallujah
attack -- where an estimated 1,200 civilians died while almost all
of the targeted insurgents slipped away beforehand -- alienated
large swaths of previously neutral Iraqis and spurred many to join
the resistance. It further entangled the United States and Britain
in a putrid swamp of war crime, state terrorism and atrocity,
dragging them deeper into a moral equivalency with the murderous
extremists whom the Christian leaders so loudly condemn.

Let's give the last word to Jeff Engelhardt, one of the ex-
servicemen featured in the documentary, who recently issued this
plea to his fellow U.S. soldiers on Fight to Survive, a new
dissident web site run by Iraqi War vets:

"I hope someday you find solace for the orders you have had to
execute, for the carnage you helped take part in, and for the pride
you wear supporting this bloodbath. Until then, you can only hope
for an epiphany, something that stands out as completely immoral,
that convinces you of the inhumanity of this war. I don't know how
much more proof you need. The criminal outrage of Abu Ghraib, the
absolute massacre of Fallujah, the stray .50 caliber bullets or 40mm
grenades or tank rounds fired in highly packed urban areas, 500-
pound bombs dropped on innocent homes, the use of 25mm depleted
uranium rounds, the inhumane use of white phosphorus, the hate and
the blood and the misunderstandings ... this is the war and the
system that you support."