newsviewsnolose@yahoogroups.com on behalf of dick.mcmanus (dick.mcmanus@yahoo.com)
Over 1 million Iraqis have been killed for what? Happy Easter
Over 1 million Iraqis have been killed for what? Happy Easter
Commentary by me:
Some 4265 US troops/civilians killed in Iraq more than 80,000 US troops who have been wounded or injured in the war, or the health care for the more than 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are seeking medical care from the VA. Then there is the fact that we sprayed deplete uranium all over Iraq contaminating our own troops who will have children with birth defects. The true cost of the war will exceed $3 trillion.
Over 1 million Iraqis have been killed, over 5 million Iraqi children are now orphans, and over 3 millions husbands and wives are now widowers or widows. Not counting the generation in the future the will be affected by DU.
Just because 3,000 dead on 9/11 and later first responders were poisoned by the dust.
"use all necessary and appropriate force...to prevent any future acts " Oh give me a friggen break. An invasion of Afghanistan was not necessary or appropriate.
We need to put the blame for the Iraq and Afghanistan war on those US Senators and Representatives who voted for them. The blood of our soldiers is on their hands. They have shamed us, just like when our government shamed us when they sent Japanese Americans to prison camps. Enduring Freedom my ass, freedom to die for an oil pipeline across Afghanistan and for their mineral resources.
677 US dead so far there.
Now the CIA Director Leon Penetta says we should punish the CIA interrogators who did the torturing. Has everyone lost their bloody minds? What the hell do we stand for?
Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists
a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary
and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons
he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such
organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of
international terrorism against the United States by such nations,
organizations or persons.
and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons
he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such
organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of
international terrorism against the United States by such nations,
organizations or persons.
House of Representatives
On September 14, 2001 bill House Joint Resolution 64 passed in the
House. The totals in the House of Representatives were: 420 Ayes, 1
Nay and 10 Not Voting (the Nay was Barbara Lee - D-CA).
On September 14, 2001 bill House Joint Resolution 64 passed in the
House. The totals in the House of Representatives were: 420 Ayes, 1
Nay and 10 Not Voting (the Nay was Barbara Lee - D-CA).
Senate
On September 14, 2001 Senate Joint Resolution 23 passed in the Senate
by roll call vote. The totals in the Senate were: 98 Ayes, 0 Nays, 2
Present/Not Voting (Senators Larry Craig - R and Jesse Helms - R).
On September 14, 2001 Senate Joint Resolution 23 passed in the Senate
by roll call vote. The totals in the Senate were: 98 Ayes, 0 Nays, 2
Present/Not Voting (Senators Larry Craig - R and Jesse Helms - R).
The United States' Bush Doctrine stated that, as policy, it would not
distinguish between al-Qaeda and nations that harbor them.
There is so far no evidence produced that the state of Afghanistan, at
the time, either attacked the United States or authorized or approved
such an attack.
There was a treaty directly on point at that time, the Montreal
Sabotage Convention to which both the United States and Afghanistan
were parties. It has an entire regime to deal with all issues in
dispute here, including access to the International Court of Justice
to resolve international disputes arising under the Treaty such as the
extradition of Bin Laden. The Bush administration completely ignored
this treaty
Bush, Jr. instead went to the United National Security Council to get
a resolution authorizing the use of military force against Afghanistan
and Al Qaeda. He failed.
The first Security Council resolution refused to call what happened on
September 11 an "armed attack"--that is by one state against another
state. Rather they called it "terrorist attacks."
Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois,
http://www.counterpunch.org/boyle0917.html
Bush did not order an invasion of Afghanistan because he believed that
the Taliban had conspired with al-Qaeda to commit the 9/11 attacks and
not because he felt that the Taliban had committed some act of war
against the United States by knowingly "harboring" a known fugitive.
Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan because the Taliban
government refused to comply with his demand to unconditionally
deliver bin Laden to the United States. He always made it clear that
if the Taliban delivered bin Laden to the United States, such action
would spare Afghanistan from a U.S. invasion.
The 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in which one of
the perpetrators was a Kuwaiti man of Pakistani descent named Ramzi
Yousef who was residing in Pakistan. Rather than invade Pakistan to
capture or kill Yousef, which would have killed and maimed countless
Pakistanis, U.S. officials simply bided their time until he was
arrested in Pakistan and brought to New York for trial. It took time,
but that's the way the criminal-justice system often works.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger136.html
Where is the discussion of this take no prisoners order?
Afghan Massacre
In September 2001, Pres. Bush gave the green light to J. Cofer Black
(the CIA officer in charge of the CIA's Counter-terror Center) to
begin inserting special operations forces into Afghanistan. Before
the core CIA team, JAWBREAKER, deployed on September 27, 2001, Black
gave his men a direct order. "Gentlemen, I want to give you your
marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed
this with the President, and he is in full agreement, " Black told
covert CIA operative Gary Schroen (who must have been in this group of
men). "I don't want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them
dead... They must be killed..." Schoen said it was the first time in
his thirty year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary
rather than attempting a capture. (p. 268)
Comment: Cofer Black now later became employed by Blackwater and/or
Graystone. This is a partern seen in the past, where the neo-con-men
move operations they can't risk becoming public to-off-the book,
corporate/civilian outfits.
NOTE: A nice way to say MURDER and to violate the law of land warfare
- taking no prisoners.
The covert operation Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied
heavily on private mercenaries. answering directly to him, rather than
active-duty military forces. Black's men recruited about sixty former
DELTA Force, ex-SEALs, and other special forces soldiers /CIA
operatives as independent mercenaries of the initial mission, making
up the majority of the first Americans into Afghanistan. (p. 270,
Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.by
Jeremy Scahill, 2007)
On November 21 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun
civilians surrendered at Konduz to the Northern Alliance commander,
General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them have never been seen again.
As Jamie Doran's film Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death records, some
hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were loaded into container
lorries at Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, on November
26 and 27. The doors were sealed and the lorries were left to stand in
the sun for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan
prison, 80 miles away. The prisoners, many of whom were dying of
thirst and asphyxiation, started banging on the sides of the trucks.
Dostum's men stopped the convoy and machine-gunned the containers.
When they arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives were dead.
The US special forces running the prison watched the bodies being
unloaded. They instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of them before
satellite pictures can be taken". Doran interviewed a Northern
Alliance soldier guarding the prison. "I was a witness when an
American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever
they wanted. We had no power to stop them." Another soldier alleged:
"They took the prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned
them to the prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they
disappeared."
Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the
corpses, then driven to a place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili. In
the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead
were dumped into ditches. Anyone who moved was shot. The German
newspaper Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one
doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there
are no doubts on this issue." The US group Physicians for Human Rights
visited the places identified by Doran's witnesses and found they
"all... contained human remains consistent with their designation as
possible grave sites".
Source: George Monbiot
March 25, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk
December 9, 2007
Secretly briefed, Pelosi did not object to waterboarding in 2002
"In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first
look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from
reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody," the Post wrote. "For
more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's
overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had
devised to try to make their prisoners talk."
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Pelosi_did_not_object_to_waterboard...
During this virtual tour, Nancy Pelosi did not object. On the
contrary, the Post reports that "no formal objections were raised by
the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in
which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats
and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter.
From 2002 to 2003, "lawmakers who held oversight roles during the
period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob
Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep.
Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan)."
Furthermore, Pelosi engaged in some dirty politicking with Jane Harman
when she took over the Speaker of the House position in 2007.
According to RAW Story, "only Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) -- then the
second-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee who would
supplant Pelosi in 2003 -- formally objected" to the interrogation
techniques discussed. "Harman, who was set to lead the House
Intelligence Committee when the Democrats retook the chamber in 2006,
was pushed aside by Pelosi when she took over as Speaker.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kevin_go_071209_pelosi_3a_com...
distinguish between al-Qaeda and nations that harbor them.
There is so far no evidence produced that the state of Afghanistan, at
the time, either attacked the United States or authorized or approved
such an attack.
There was a treaty directly on point at that time, the Montreal
Sabotage Convention to which both the United States and Afghanistan
were parties. It has an entire regime to deal with all issues in
dispute here, including access to the International Court of Justice
to resolve international disputes arising under the Treaty such as the
extradition of Bin Laden. The Bush administration completely ignored
this treaty
Bush, Jr. instead went to the United National Security Council to get
a resolution authorizing the use of military force against Afghanistan
and Al Qaeda. He failed.
The first Security Council resolution refused to call what happened on
September 11 an "armed attack"--that is by one state against another
state. Rather they called it "terrorist attacks."
Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois,
http://www.counterp
Bush did not order an invasion of Afghanistan because he believed that
the Taliban had conspired with al-Qaeda to commit the 9/11 attacks and
not because he felt that the Taliban had committed some act of war
against the United States by knowingly "harboring" a known fugitive.
Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan because the Taliban
government refused to comply with his demand to unconditionally
deliver bin Laden to the United States. He always made it clear that
if the Taliban delivered bin Laden to the United States, such action
would spare Afghanistan from a U.S. invasion.
The 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in which one of
the perpetrators was a Kuwaiti man of Pakistani descent named Ramzi
Yousef who was residing in Pakistan. Rather than invade Pakistan to
capture or kill Yousef, which would have killed and maimed countless
Pakistanis, U.S. officials simply bided their time until he was
arrested in Pakistan and brought to New York for trial. It took time,
but that's the way the criminal-justice system often works.
http://www.lewrockw
Where is the discussion of this take no prisoners order?
Afghan Massacre
In September 2001, Pres. Bush gave the green light to J. Cofer Black
(the CIA officer in charge of the CIA's Counter-terror Center) to
begin inserting special operations forces into Afghanistan. Before
the core CIA team, JAWBREAKER, deployed on September 27, 2001, Black
gave his men a direct order. "Gentlemen, I want to give you your
marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed
this with the President, and he is in full agreement, " Black told
covert CIA operative Gary Schroen (who must have been in this group of
men). "I don't want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them
dead... They must be killed..." Schoen said it was the first time in
his thirty year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary
rather than attempting a capture. (p. 268)
Comment: Cofer Black now later became employed by Blackwater and/or
Graystone. This is a partern seen in the past, where the neo-con-men
move operations they can't risk becoming public to-off-the book,
corporate/civilian outfits.
NOTE: A nice way to say MURDER and to violate the law of land warfare
- taking no prisoners.
The covert operation Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied
heavily on private mercenaries. answering directly to him, rather than
active-duty military forces. Black's men recruited about sixty former
DELTA Force, ex-SEALs, and other special forces soldiers /CIA
operatives as independent mercenaries of the initial mission, making
up the majority of the first Americans into Afghanistan. (p. 270,
Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.by
Jeremy Scahill, 2007)
On November 21 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun
civilians surrendered at Konduz to the Northern Alliance commander,
General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them have never been seen again.
As Jamie Doran's film Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death records, some
hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were loaded into container
lorries at Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, on November
26 and 27. The doors were sealed and the lorries were left to stand in
the sun for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan
prison, 80 miles away. The prisoners, many of whom were dying of
thirst and asphyxiation, started banging on the sides of the trucks.
Dostum's men stopped the convoy and machine-gunned the containers.
When they arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives were dead.
The US special forces running the prison watched the bodies being
unloaded. They instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of them before
satellite pictures can be taken". Doran interviewed a Northern
Alliance soldier guarding the prison. "I was a witness when an
American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever
they wanted. We had no power to stop them." Another soldier alleged:
"They took the prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned
them to the prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they
disappeared.
Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the
corpses, then driven to a place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili. In
the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead
were dumped into ditches. Anyone who moved was shot. The German
newspaper Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one
doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there
are no doubts on this issue." The US group Physicians for Human Rights
visited the places identified by Doran's witnesses and found they
"all... contained human remains consistent with their designation as
possible grave sites".
Source: George Monbiot
March 25, 2003
http://www.guardian
December 9, 2007
Secretly briefed, Pelosi did not object to waterboarding in 2002
"In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first
look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from
reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody," the Post wrote. "For
more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's
overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had
devised to try to make their prisoners talk."
http://www.rawstory
During this virtual tour, Nancy Pelosi did not object. On the
contrary, the Post reports that "no formal objections were raised by
the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in
which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats
and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter.
From 2002 to 2003, "lawmakers who held oversight roles during the
period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob
Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep.
Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan)."
Furthermore, Pelosi engaged in some dirty politicking with Jane Harman
when she took over the Speaker of the House position in 2007.
According to RAW Story, "only Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) -- then the
second-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee who would
supplant Pelosi in 2003 -- formally objected" to the interrogation
techniques discussed. "Harman, who was set to lead the House
Intelligence Committee when the Democrats retook the chamber in 2006,
was pushed aside by Pelosi when she took over as Speaker.
http://www.opednews
__._,_.___
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