Torture for Nothing
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The loser in this deal is America’s sterling record as a paragon of due process and the rule of law. A military trial in which classified evidence is permissible — some of it based on hearsay and coerced testimony — does serious damage to America’s image at home and abroad.
Hicks’ plea is a bargain for him and his family, and a good deal for politicians. But it is no bargain for U.S. legal jurisprudence.
‘We were torturing people for no reason’
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That was how he was described in an e-mail promoting a panel discussion, “24: Torture Televised,” hosted by the Center on Law and Security of the New York University School of Law on March 21. He doesn’t shy away from the description.
As a specialist in a military intelligence battalion, Lagouranis interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Al Asad Airfield and other places in Iraq from January through December 2004.
Coercive techniques, including the use of dogs, waterboarding and prolonged stress positions were employed on the detainees, he says. Prisoners held at Al Asad Airfield, about 110 miles northwest of Baghdad, were shackled and hung from an upright bed frame welded to the wall in a room in an airplane hanger, he told me in a phone interview.
When he was having problems getting information from a detainee, he recalls, other interrogators said, “Chain him up on the bed frame and then he’ll talk to you.” Lagouranis says he didn’t participate directly in hangings from the frames.
The results of the hangings, shacklings and prolonged stress positions - sometimes for hours - were devastating. “You take a healthy guy and you turn him into a cripple, at least for a period of time,” Lagouranis told me. “I don’t care what Alberto Gonzales says. That’s torture.”
…Lagouranis is one of the few individuals to have spoken publicly about his experiences as an interrogator who used or saw harsh techniques inflicted on prisoners in the war. (His book, “Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey through Iraq,” co-authored with Allen Mikaelian, will be published in June.)
Lagouranis is hardly the only one familiar with the stories. At least nine individuals have been sentenced to prison for detainee-related offenses at Abu Ghraib. Others may someday face prosecution for alleged crimes and detainee abuse in the Iraq war.
Lagouranis reported the detainee abuses that he witnessed in Iraq and is not a suspect in detainee-related abuses. As he says, he followed military guidelines during interrogations. “The things I participated in were technically legal,” he explains.
Yet there have been repercussions. He suffered from panic attacks after his return to the United States and was placed under army psychiatric care. He received an honorable discharge from the army in July 2005.
…He and other soldiers discussed the Geneva Conventions during military training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in 2003, before being deployed to Iraq. But it became clear they were not always expected to abide by them, he says.
Some of the soldiers and officers had been influenced by Mark Bowden’s October 2003 article in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” which described techniques that, in the author’s words, are “excruciating for the victim” yet “leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.”
“It seems to me Bowden was advocating what he calls ‘torture lite,’ ” Lagouranis told me. “That made an impression on a lot of people. The feeling was that what we had been taught about the Geneva Conventions was not going to be followed anymore.”
Things seemed different in Iraq. “I started realizing that most of the prisoners were innocent,” Lagouranis told me. “We were torturing people for no reason. I started getting really angry and really remorseful and by the time I got back I completely broke down.”
At the NYU event, Lagouranis said, “I’m from New York City. I’m college-educated. But you put me in Iraq and told me to torture, and I did it and I regretted it later.”
That is something Lagouranis and others like him will be dealing with for a long time. “I didn’t know I would discover and indulge in my own evil,” he writes in his forthcoming book. “And now that it has surfaced, I fear that it will be my constant companion for the rest of my life.”
What kind of a society are we creating for ourselves?
Iraq/Iran Border Clashes
News — Lisa @ 2:05 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
Has the UK and the US been antagonizing Iran at border sites? Recent reports suggest that there have been some skirmishes at borders and the media has placed unquestioning blame for them on Iran. Military officials, however, admit that these border areas are not well defined, making it difficult to know at times exactly whether you are in Iranian or Iraqi territory.
The US News & World Report recently reported that there have been some previously unreported clashes at the border between the countries. What they don’t mention is that the Pentagon has not been able to say exactly which side of the border “coalition†forces were on when some of the “showdowns†with the Iranians occurred. It is unknown, for example, if the British ship had crossed into Iranian waters when it was intercepted. Only today, several days after the incident, did Britain come forward with information claiming the ship was seized in Iraqi waters.
The media has chosen to ignore the many official admissions about confusion about the exact border locations and has reported instead, as undisputed fact, that Iran purposely crossed into Iraq on more than one occasion.
Is this the beginning of another war? Have we been antagonizing Iran in the hope that it would retaliate so we had an excuse for the need to move forward with a war? The UN agreed to sanctions. What’s next on the agenda?
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The reporting from the US NEWS & World Report has a few important issues missing, like the fact that during a press briefing a Pentagon official said they were not 100% sure about the exact location of the troops because the border area between Iran and Iraq has been in dispute since the war of 1976. This situation was exacerbated during the 8 years of war between 1980-1988 and has never been resolved.
Second, have US forces EVER been quiet in response to an attack? Why is it that in this case, US forces did not call for air support or respond to the Iranian troops with the overwhelming amount of firepower they had? It is extremely unusual for US troops not to react when antagonized.
Why did the Pentagon choose not to make this report available until the day after the incident with the British troops? What happened to the follow up of the event and what have they done about those missing Iraqis? (the report said that Pentagon will do everything to follow the case). Why weren’t any of these questions asked and answered?
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Here’s how one such incident was reported by the mainstream media:
Exclusive: Iranians Had Showdown With U.S. Forces
…U.S. News has learned that this is not the first showdown that coalition forces have had with the Iranian military. According to a U.S. Army report out of Iraq obtained by U.S. News, American troops, acting as advisers for Iraqi border guards, were recently surrounded and attacked by a larger unit of Iranian soldiers, well within the border of Iraq.
The report highlights the details: A platoon of Iranian soldiers on the Iraqi side of the border fired rocket-propelled grenades and used small arms against a joint patrol of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers east of Balad Ruz. Four Iraqi Army soldiers, one interpreter, and one Iraqi border policeman remain unaccounted for after the September incident in eastern Diyala, 75 miles east of Baghdad.
During a joint border patrol, both American and Iraqi soldiers saw two Iranian soldiers run from Iraq back across the Iranian border as they approached. The patrol then came upon a single Iranian soldier, on the Iraqi side of the border, who did not flee.
While the joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol was speaking with the soldier, according to the report, the patrol was “approached by a platoon-size element of Iranian soldiers.” An Iranian border captain then told the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers that “if they tried to leave their location, the Iranians would fire upon them.” During this conversation with the Iranian captain, Iranian forces began firing and continued when U.S. troops tried to withdraw.
Iraqi and American forces returned fire “to break contact and left the area to report the incident,” the report noted. “The Iranian forces continued to fire indirect fire well into Iraq as Coalition Force soldiers withdrew; for reasons unknown at this time, the Iraqi Army forces remained behind.”
No American soldiers were wounded in the incident.
It is possible that Iranians thought they were in Iranian territory, according to U.S. military officials. Such border confusions and disputes happen routinely.
In the British naval incident on Friday, Iran claimed it seized the vessels because they were in its territorial waters. U.S. military officials tell U.S. News that the Iranian forces very likely belong to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which tend to be far more aggressive than regular Iranian naval forces, which U.S. military officials routinely describe as “extremely professional.” (NOTE: WERE THE SHIPS in Iranian waters? Military officials don’t say.)
Iranian and Iraqi forces continue to clash in Iraq. U.S. special operations forces have been tasked with nabbing Iranian members of the Revolutionary Guards’ al-Quds Brigade, the foreign operations arm of the Iranian military, which also supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
U.S. forces grabbed six Iranians with alleged ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil in January, reportedly using stun bombs, seizing computers, and taking down an Iranian flag from the raided building’s roof. Iran said the building was a consulate and the men were diplomats–and continues to demand their release. One of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite politicians condemned the raid, calling it an attack on Iraq’s sovereignty.
American forces may soon be getting further insight into recent Iranian attacks. Earlier this month, a former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guards–and is thought to have considerable knowledge of Iran’s national security network–left the country and is said to be cooperating with western intelligence agencies, sharing information on links between Iran and Hezbollah in south Lebanon, for example. Iranian officials said the official, Ali Rez Asgari, was kidnapped by western agents. (NOTE: Is it so unbelievable that he was kidnapped? The US has kidnapped people from several different parts of the world already as part of its extraordinary rendition program.)
Shortly afterward, Iran threatened to retaliate in Europe for the supposed kidnapping, what it claims to be the most recent in a series of abductions in the past three months. According to the British Sunday Times, in the Revolutionary Guards’ weekly newspaper this week, a columnist believed to have close ties to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote: “We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed, blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks. Iran has enough people who can reach the heart of Europe and kidnap Americans and Israelis.”
US Firms Scramble for Worker Visas
News — Lisa @ 8:48 am - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
Region’s firms scramble for worker visas
This is one of the issues that will wreak havoc on the US economy. If the US continues to lower the number of skilled workers allowed into the country, then the jobs will be moved overseas and we will lose not only the jobs but also the tax dollars. We allowing fewer H1-B visas and student visas than ever — we are driving away many entrepreneurs. It is amazing how easily we forget that we are a nation of immigrants.
Look for stories in your papers about how this influences the local economy. This story is from Pittsburgh:
Employers can begin submitting petitions to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Monday, for a new round of 65,000 visas that become available on Oct. 1. Supporters of the program, such as Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, say that’s not enough visas to meet demand. Opponents say companies use the program to pay lower wages and displace American workers. Â
Syed I. Ahmed, chief executive of RIZ Global, the H-1B visa program is necessary for his company to compete globally against companies offering IT services worldwide. About 20 of his company’s 35 employees are working with H-1B visas, and he plans to add 15 more this year.
Pittsburgh-area employers have looked to the H-1B visa program to hire computer programmers, engineers, scientists, college professors, physicians, foreign language teachers and even soccer coaches, according to applications filed with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Certification for fiscal year 2006. The visas permit foreigners to work for six years, or 10 years for those working on a Defense Department project.
Among the local employers tapping into the global talent pool are U.S. Steel Corp., PPG Industries Inc., H.J. Heinz Co., and Alcoa Inc, as well as information technology firms such as iGate Global Solutions. The region’s universities and major hospitals rely upon H-1B visas. Even an international union like the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh has workers under the program.
“The supply of visas don’t come close to approaching the demand. … The caps that are in place are just ridiculous,” said Robert Whitehill, an immigration law attorney at Fox Rothschild’s Pittsburgh office. “There’s not enough U.S. workers ready, willing and able to fill the positions.”
Last year, the allotment of H-1B visa applications was exhausted in May, while the allotment for workers with more advanced degrees, closed in July, Whitehill added.
…”It’s important, as a certain portion of work in our business needs to happen at the client site, for which our global employees need work permits,” said Mohan Sekhar, chief delivery officer at iGate.
The harsh reality of the global economy is that if IT companies in the U.S. can not provide the skills sought by the nation’s businesses, those companies will take that work elsewhere, Ahmed said. That often means going overseas.
“They will move out your project if you don’t have the experience (clients) need,” Ahemd said. The H-1B visas keep good jobs in the U.S., which means the workers are spending money here and paying taxes, he said.
“When they (visa opponents) realize it, it will be too late,” Ahmed said.
Several years ago Congress allowed 195,000 H-1B visas to be issued, but Congress reacted to complaints about a flood of foreign labor in the marketplace by setting a limit of 65,000 under a 2004 law.
“The number of visas available under the scheme is far less than the number we need, given the (quantity) of work that needs to be executed at our client sites,” iGate’s Sekhar said.
“People are coming out of the top universities in India and China, and to study at a top U.S. university, is a dream of a lifetime,” Bryant said. One they get their degrees, they want to be part of the IT industry here.
“Statistics show overwhelmingly that these immigrants are a major driving force behind the U.S. technology economy,” Bryant said.
Some statistics:
U.S. employers can hire skilled foreign residents for specialty occupations under the H-1B visa program. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, will begin accepting petitions on Monday for the visas that take effect Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year. Among the features of the program are:
* A limit set by Congress of 65,000 new H-1B visas.
* 6,800 visas set aside for citizens of Chile and Singapore.
* An extra 20,000 visas available to foreigners holding master’s or doctorate degrees.
* Companies must attest to paying foreigners prevailing wages for their job.
Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Washington, D.C.
Neil Bush: Saudi Arabia is A Tribal Democracy
News — Lisa @ 8:41 am - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
Neil Bush reveals why the Bush family loves Saudi Arabia (besides its riches): It is “a kind of tribal democracy that people don’t talk about very much. So it hurts me quite a bit and causes me anguish over the ignorance outside about Saudi Arabia.”
I can almost see the Bush family sitting around the dinner table dreaming of the day they can create a Saudi-style tribal democracy in the US. George Sr. gets the ball rolling, then Jeb clears the path for George junior, who whittles away the constraints of the Constitution. On the sidelines, Neil works to ensures public compliance by implementing a series of educational tools designed to teach young Americans obedience (students watch lessons on television and repeat what they are told/taught) and so on and so on.
Has anyone else noticed that Jeb has quietly stepped out of the spotlight? Where is he and what is he doing?
It is interesting to note that, Bush’s comment was made a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display. Human Rights Watch “said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights.”
It seems the Bush family still has some work to do — they can imprison people indefinitely without a trial and deny some basic legal rights and they can torture at will, but they can’t do it quite so publicly.
1 Million Iraqis Killed in the War
News — Lisa @ 7:43 am - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
When does it stop being a “fight for freedom” and start becoming genocide?
Deaths In Iraq Have Reached 1 Million: Grim claim on fourth anniversary of conflict
THE number of deaths in Iraq since the start of the conflict could be as high as one million, it was claimed yesterday. On the fourth anniversary of the invasion by Allied troops, an Australian scientist insisted the true death toll dwarfed previous estimates. Dr Gideon Polya said: “Using the most comprehensive and authoritative literature and UN demographic data yields an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq.”
His figure is far higher than the biggest previous estimate of 655,000. A spokesman for the Stop The War Coalition said the figure was “astonishing”, adding: “Four years after the start of the conflict in Iraq, we can now see what a disaster the war has been. “Everything we predicted would happen has taken place, but it has been far worse than we feared.”
Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has hit back at Hans Blix. The former UN chief weapons inspector had claimed that, aside from Saddam Hussein’s fall, everything in Iraq since the invasion had been a disaster. Yesterday, Beckett said: “It’s complete nonsense. I’m surprised at Hans Blix saying something so foolish and so negative.” She insisted there had been “a massive amount of change” in Iraq, including elections. President George Bush came under more pressure after seven US troops were killed in Iraq at the weekend. And the US military blamed al-Qaeda for chlorine bomb attacks that killed two people in Anbar province.
But who killed the Kennedys?
News — Lisa @ 7:24 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
I can’t believe they couldn’t get Khalid Sheikh Muhammed to confess to killing the Kennedys. After a few torture sessions they managed to convince him to confess to just about everything else:
1. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
2. The 9/11 attacks, from A to Z.
3. The shoe bomber operation to down two American planes.
4. A 2002 shooting in Kuwait that killed an American marine.
5. The Bali nightclub bombing that killed more than 180 in 2002.
6. Planning attacks against several prominent American skyscrapers.
7. Planning to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers.
8. Planning to bomb the Panama Canal.
9. Planning to assassinate several former American presidents, including President Carter.
10. Planning to bomb several New York landmarks, including the stock exchange and suspension bridges.
11. Planning to destroy several London landmarks, including Heathrow Airport and Big Ben.
12. Planning to destroy buildings in the Israeli city of Eilat, using planes leaving Saudi Arabia.
13. Planning to destroy Israeli and American embassies around the world.
14. Sending fighters into Israel to conduct surveillance on strategic targets.
15. Bombing a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, frequented by Israeli travelers.
16. Launching a Russian surface-to-air missile at an El Al airliner leaving Mombasa.
17. Conducting surveillance on nuclear power plants in the United States.
18. Planning to hit NATO headquarters in Brussels.
19. Planning to bomb 12 American aircraft full of passengers.
20. An assassination attempt on President Clinton in the Philippines in 1994 or 1995.
21. Shared responsibility for an assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in the Philippines.
22. Planning the assassination of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.
23. Attempting to destroy an American oil company in Sumatra owned by the Jewish former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.
Reporters have no Confidence in the Public
News — Lisa @ 3:44 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
From The State of the News Media 2007:
I find this paragraph taken from the latest State of the News Media report extremely discouraging. Journalists misled the American public in the buildup to the war in Iraq and continue to misrepresent issues. But rather than feel the need to improve in the many areas they are lacking, they have chosen to blame the American public for having poor judgment. How difficult is it for reporters to remember their primary responsibility: To provide clear, unbiased information to the American public. We judge the media, the media doesn’t judge us.
Only five years earlier, news people were much more likely to see failures of their own making as more of an issue. Since then, they have come to feel more in touch with audiences, less cynical and more embracing of new technology. In other words, journalists feel they have made progress on the areas that they can control in the newsroom. While feeling closer to audiences, however, news people also have less confidence in the American public to make wise electoral decisions, a finding that raises questions about the kind of journalism they may produce in the future.
Hilarious Fox News Screen Shots
News — Lisa @ 3:29 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
Here are some classics from Fox News (I pulled these off Larry C. Johnson’s blog, No Quarter).Â
 
 
And my personal favorite:
More images can be found here.
City Likely Paved Over 9/11 Victims’ Remains
News — Lisa @ 12:54 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
This is absolutely disgraceful. Five years after the 9/11 attacks the city decided to search for the remains of victims and has found 400 bones so far. These remains mean closure for family members who have suffered for years. It is disgraceful that it has taken so long to recover the remains of those lost in the attacks.
The search for the remains of Sept. 11 victims has moved across the street from the site of the World Trade Center to the lot of a destroyed church, where important relics, including the bones of three saints, may also be buried.
Since October, more than 400 bones have been unearthed from the debris of a service road that construction trucks used to get in and out of the site after the 2001 attacks. The city, which oversaw the original cleanup of ground zero, is conducting a new search to find more remains of the 2,749 victims. Forty percent of the victims have not had remains identified.
Last week, two bones were recovered in the place where St. Nicholas’ Greek Orthodox Church used to be, and where digging has begun for remains, said an official who knows about the search but is not authorized to speak publicly about it.Debris from both towers collapsed onto the church and its parking lot on Sept. 11, 2001. The site was paved over to be used a staging area for reconstruction at the site, making it a likely place to find long-buried debris and remains, those involved in the initial cleanup say.
Mayans to Cleanse Site After Bush’s Visit
News, General — Lisa @ 8:04 am - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!
Mayans to cleanse site after Bush
Mayan leaders have said they will perform a ceremony after US President George W Bush visits an ancient site during his trip to Guatemala. Mr Bush is due at the Mayan ruins of Iximche, some 80kms west of the capital, Guatemala City, on Monday. His arrival brings him to the fourth nation in a five-state tour of the Latin American region.
But Mayan leaders said they will have to perform a special cleansing ceremony to clear bad energy left by his visit. “No, Mr Bush, you cannot trample and degrade the memory of our ancestors,” indigenous leader Rodolfo Pocop said, adding, “This is not your ranch in Texas.”
Mr Bush is due to visit farm co-operatives and education centres in the Chimaltenango district. Mr Bush is expected to be welcomed with native dances and to get a guided tour of the ruins of what was the capital of the Kaqchikel Mayan people before the 1524 Spanish conquest.
But after he leaves, Mayan protesters said they would hold a ceremony to restore peace and harmony to the area. “We reject this portrayal of our people as a tourist attraction,” Morales Toj said. “We will burn incense, place flowers and water in the area where Mr Bush has walked to clean out the bad energy,” he said.