Friday, December 24, 2010

America Can’t Handle The Truth About War Crimes And War Criminals And They Are Proving It Every Day!









America Can’t Handle The Truth About War Crimes And War Criminals And They Are Proving It Every Day!







             
(A note about the author of the piece: David House is a 23-year-old researcher at MIT who helped set up the Bradley Manning Support Network, a group raising funds for Manning's legal defense. Glenn Greenwald has an account here of House being harassed at the border, like others associated in one way or another with Wikileaks.)

Last week, Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified materials to Wikileaks, spent his 23rd birthday in the brig of the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been convicted of no crime, but endures the kind of highly restrictive detention that's usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals in America's supermax prisons. He is kept isolated in his cell 23 hours a day, where he is cut off from most human contact, denied reading materials and personal items, prevented by the guards from exercising and regularly awakened from his sleep. He has been at Quantico for five months, following two months of detention in Kuwait.

The circumstances of Manning's detention gained prominence last week after Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing exposé of what he called “conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.” As AlterNet's Sarah Seltzer noted, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture has started a probe to determine whether Manning's solitary confinement constitutes torture under international law.

The Pentagon reacted to the story by claiming that Manning is “a maximum custody detainee” who can “receive the same privileges that a detainee classified as general population may receive … [including] daily television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical activity without restraint.” But David House, one of the few people able to visit Manning, said that Manning told him he'd only been allowed outdoors sporadically, and his exercise consisted of being placed in a room where he can only walk around in circles.

Manning also has a “Prevention of Injury” (POI) order that requires him to be constantly monitored by guards, and prevents him from having normal bedding. He has to strip down to his underwear and surrender his clothes to the guards each night before sleeping under a “suicide blanket” – he told House it's “similar in weight and heft to lead aprons used in X-ray laboratories, and similar in texture to coarse and stiff carpet.” Manning “expressed concern that he had to lie very still at night to avoid receiving carpet burns.” According to Greenwald, prison medical officials are administering him antidepressants.

POI orders are usually issued for brief periods of time for inmates who are judged to be suicidal or have not yet undergone a psychological evaluation. Manning has been evaluated, and there is no indication he is a threat to himself or others. He has been, by all accounts, a model prisoner.

Psychiatrist Jeff Kaye spoke to House after his visit with Manning, and while he stressed that a complete evaluation of Manning's well-being is impossible without personal contact, he predicted that “Solitary confinement will slowly wear down the mental and physical condition of Bradley Manning.”

Solitary confinement is an assault on the body and psyche of an individual. It deprives him of species-specific forms of physical, sensory and social interaction with the environment and other human beings. Manning reported last weekend he had not seen sunlight in four weeks, nor does he interact with other people but a few hours on the weekend. The human nervous system needs a certain amount of sensory and social stimulation to retain normal brain functioning. The effects of this deprivation on individuals varies, and some people are affected more severely or quickly, while others hold out longer against the boredom and daily grind of dullness that never seems to end.

Over time, isolation produces a particular well-known syndrome which is akin to that of an organic brain disorder, or delirium. The list of possible effects upon a person is quite long, and can include an inability to tolerate ordinary stimuli, sleep and appetite disturbances, primitive forms of thinking and aggressive ruminations, perceptual distortions and hallucinations, agitation, panic attacks, claustrophobia, feelings of loss of control, rage, paranoia, memory loss, lack of concentration, generalized body pain, EEG abnormalities, depression, suicidal ideation and random, self-destructive behavior.

According to Kaye, the detention is already having effects on Manning – he appears to have difficulty concentrating and his physical condition is deteriorating.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, prolonged solitary confinement is, “widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture.”

In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article-- entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?" -- the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as torture." By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture." 

It's important to recognize that Manning is a true whistleblower – according to chat logs obtained by Wired magazine, Manning saw what he viewed as serious crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq, and felt compelled to release the information in the hope that it would spark “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” “I want people to see the truth,” he wrote, “regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” He succeeded in that – the release of video showing an American helicopter attack on a group of unarmed civilians, and subsequent attack on rescuers rushing to evacuate the survivors, was an eye-opening look at the horrors of war that's never seen in the sanitized footage released by the military.

Given that Manning has not been shown to be suicidal or a threat to others, it's hard to disagree with Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange's claim that “Manning is being held as a political prisoner in the United States.”

Greenwald wrote that what Manning's solitary confinement “achieves is clear.”

Having it known that the U.S. could and would disappear people at will to "black sites," assassinate them with unseen drones, imprison them for years without a shred of due process even while knowing they were innocent, torture them mercilessly, and in general acts as a lawless and rogue imperial power created a climate of severe intimidation and fear. Who would want to challenge the U.S. government in any way -- even in legitimate ways -- knowing that it could and would engage in such lawless, violent conduct without any restraints or repercussions?

Bradley Manning's detention is not comparable with the horrific measures imposed on Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was accused of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” and held as an “enemy combatant” for six years before being convicted on a lesser charge. Padilla's attorneys alleged that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and tortured with psychotropic drugs until he lost his mind. But Manning is also a 23-year-old who, whether he is right or wrong, thought he was doing the right thing, and has now run into the maw of a vindictive American security state.

Fyodor Dostoevsky famously said that "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." The Web site FireDogLake has asked people to sign a letter urging the military to stop its “inhumane” treatment of Bradley Manning. You can add your name here.



Tennessee Homeland Security Agency Lists The ACLU On Its 'Terrorist Events' Map

 

One of the most troubling aspects of the "war on terror" has been the Government's easy conflation of terrorism and Constitutionally-protected dissent.

According to reporter Jeff Woods, writing in the Nashville City Paper, an example of that dynamic appeared in Tennessee. After a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to local schools reminding them not to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, a state anti-terrorism agency placed the Tennessee ACLU on a map of “terrorism events and other suspicious activity.”

The ACLU expressed outrage Tuesday over its appearance on the Tennessee Fusion Center’s map, saying it “raises the specter that the government is once again tracking innocent Americans.”

“It is deeply disturbing that Tennessee’s fusion center is tracking First Amendment-protected activity,” said Hedy Weinberg, ACLU-Tennessee’s executive director.  “Equating a group’s attempts to protect religious freedom in Tennessee with suspicious activity related to terrorism is outrageous. Religious freedom is a founding principle in our Constitution — not fodder for overzealous law enforcement.”

This week, Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post reported that "fusion centers" like that in Tennessee are part of "a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators."

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

In an earlier report back in July, the Post described this emerging security state as "an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it."


Throughout this year I've devoted substantial attention to WikiLeaks, particularly in the last four weeks as calls for its destruction intensified.  To understand why I've done so, and to see what motivates the increasing devotion of the U.S. Government and those influenced by it to destroying that organization, it's well worth reviewing exactly what WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year:  the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world's most powerful factions.

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. 

The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them:  WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning.

A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. 

That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. 

Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. 

Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. 

But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well.  

In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the mindset that could lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that this should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded:


Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything

January 13, 2011 By: Christian Caryl

WikiLeaks changes everything. We can act as if the old standards of journalism still apply to the Internet, but WikiLeaks shows why this is wishful thinking. On November 28 the Internet organization started posting examples from a cache of 251,287 formerly secret US diplomatic cables. The few thousand journalists in this country who regularly track the State Department’s doings would have needed a couple of centuries to wheedle out this volume of information by traditional methods; the linkage of disparate government computer networks (a well-meaning response to the compartmentalization of data in the pre–September 11 period) apparently allowed one disgruntled Army private to pull it off in a few moments. As WikiLeaks itself boasts, this is “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain.”

The scale is unprecedented. So, too, is the intent—or, more precisely, the lack thereof. Raffi Khatchadourian on the New Yorker website speculates that the aim of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “is not to reveal a single act of abuse…, but rather to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system, to call the world in to help judge its morality.”1 This may indeed be Assange’s vision, but he doesn’t seem capable of articulating it himself. The WikiLeaks website contends that it’s out to expose “contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors” (as if a charge of hypocrisy were an adequate reason for exposing official secrets) and informs us that “every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington—the country’s first President—could not tell a lie.”

Among the cables released so far are revelations that have prompted headlines around the world, but there are also dispatches on Bavarian election results and Argentine maritime law. If the aim is to strike a blow against American imperial designs—as Assange has suggested in some of his statements—I don’t see how these particular cables support it. Assange has claimed to Time magazine that he wants to “make the world more civil” by making secretive organizations like the US State Department and Department of Defense accountable for their actions; he also told Time that, as an alternative, he wants to force them “to lock down internally and to balkanize,” protecting themselves by becoming more opaque and thereby more “closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.” This is, to say the least, a patently contradictory agenda; I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make sense of it. In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t see coherently articulated morality, or immorality, at work here at all; what I see is an amoral, technocratic void.

As Alan Cowell has written in The New York Times, the careers of some foreign officials—and not necessarily high-level ones—have already been destroyed or threatened by these revelations.2 In at least one case the person’s name had been redacted, but his identity was clear enough from the context. One is justified in asking: Will deaths occur as these and other statements are published? We do not know, and we may not hear about them if they do. But damage of various kinds is sure to result. (For his part, Assange seems remarkably unable to discuss these very real dangers; in the Time interview he claims that “this sort of nonsense about lives being put into jeopardy” is simply an excuse.) Can WikiLeaks at least tell us why this was necessary?

In the old days, journalists would have done what WikiLeaks’s print media partners, like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, are attempting to do now: make judgments about which documents to release and whether or not to redact the names mentioned in them based on the larger public interest and the risk of inflicting harm on innocent bystanders. Yet one cannot escape the feeling that the entire exercise is rendered tragicomically moot by the mountain of raw material looming, soon to be equally accessible, in the background. Khatchadourian contends that WikiLeaks is evolving into something more like a conventional journalistic organization, one that will make value judgments about what it’s doing rather than simply dumping documents into cyberspace willy-nilly. But the sheer scale of what the group does suggests that this is something of a fool’s errand. Assange says the organization has been releasing the cables at the rate of about eighty a day. (By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means that we have three thousand days of revelations to go as this article goes to press.)

The comparison some people have been making between the WikiLeaks document dumps and the Pentagon Papers affair back in the 1970s is illuminating precisely because it shows how little the two stories have in common. As pointed out by Max Frankel, an ex–New York Times editor who was one of those overseeing publication of the papers, the leaker in that case, Daniel Ellsberg, was not breaching secrecy for its own sake, unlike the WikiLeakers of today; he was looking to defeat a specific government policy. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of the risks of disclosure and did not distribute documents betraying live diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting. And it took him years to find a credible medium of distribution, which is now available at the push of a button.3

I’m fully aware that Daniel Ellsberg has lent his support to Julian Assange. That’s his right. But I think he might be overlooking a few vital points.

One of the most obvious is that WikiLeaks is posting these raw documents on the Web, the most permissive information medium we have yet to invent. As a result we are now experiencing yet another jump from the ploddingly analog to the explosively digital. Just as the concept of “privacy” fades into obscurity when sixteen-year-olds can present their innermost thoughts to an audience of billions, so, too, the Internet distribution of official secrets changes the rules of the game. Once all the documents are online they will be subjected not only to the often clumsy ministrations of journalists and historians but also to the far more efficient data-mining programs and pattern- analysis software of foreign governments and private companies (the extent of which, in the case of China’s handling of Google, the cables themselves make clear). The implications for the conduct of government policy (not to mention individual lives) are monumental. I wish I could predict what they might be, but I can’t. I’m not sure anyone can.

The Internet has brought countless benefits to mankind, but as we see now, it also creates incalculable potential for mischief: it amplifies the threats of schoolyard bullies, empowers terrorists and fringe groups, and opens up huge new spaces to technologically savvy criminals. Now that data can be shared, linked, and exploited with near-instantaneous ease, the risks entailed by the publication of information mushroom out of all recognition; there is simply no way that any editor, however well-meaning, can make an informed judgment about the potential repercussions entailed by the release of vast amounts of confidential data of this sort. But this is where we are, and I wonder whether preaching restraint can have much effect. The technology has outpaced the ethics, and it seems justified to ask whether the ethics can ever catch up again.

Advocates of total information freedom might object that I am overlooking the fact that the tug-of-war between journalists and governments remains a deeply lopsided one. They might contend that government bureaucracies, with their enormous resources and closed cultures, still have far more power to control information than any Julian Assange. The Web’s guerrilla leakers are merely trying to even the playing field. I do have some sympathy with this argument. The WikiLeaks revelation that the State Department urged its employees to collect biometric data on foreign diplomats serving at the United Nations, while chilling, confirms what we already knew: that the modern-day national security state has at its disposal information technologies and resources that enable it to map our lives with a precision and power that will be extremely difficult to constrain by the rule of law. (Indeed, I may be particularly sensitive to this fact, since I’m one of the few American citizens to have had my biometric data recorded by the US government; that was a precondition for receiving a press card during my last visit to Iraq. I am allowed to be skeptical, I think, about whether the Department of Defense deleted this information when my accreditation ran out.)

So, yes, journalists should certainly strive to prevent abuses of the culture of secrecy. To some extent, of course, the United States still offers plenty of room for precisely that by allowing for the possibility of political competition and public accountability—including disclosure of secret documents through the Freedom of Information Act. But the journalists (or whatever we decide to call them) who perform this justified oversight can only do so by exercising clarity in their own right—about their own motives, methods, and intentions. (One of the sad ironies of this latest chapter in the WikiLeaks saga is the revelation that Assange chose to punish The New York Times by denying it direct access to the cables because the paper had earlier published a story examining his management style and the personal controversies surrounding him; presumably Assange would denounce this as censorship if one of his targets were to indulge in such behavior. The Guardian ended up sharing its own copies with the Times, thus, in effect, leaking the leak.)

What, precisely, are the criteria by which WikiLeaks is deciding to release the cables it opts to publish? How is WikiLeaks selecting the cables it chooses to publish first, and how is it editing them? According to a vetting process described by The Guardian and The New York Times, Wikileaks has been deleting the names of some of the people mentioned in the cables—but not others. Why, precisely? If their goal is simply “to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system,” then shouldn’t they be publishing everything? And now we hear that Assange has uploaded a huge file of other confidential documents to various supporters around the world as “insurance,” to be published in the event that hostile governments succeed in silencing him. (He is now in custody in London on charges of rape and faces possible extradition to Sweden for prosecution.) The targets of that megaleak appear to include Bank of America and BP. Will the revelations in these files include commercial data on the firms’ customers? Perhaps their account numbers and credit card information? That might be justified if the aim is to throw light on the workings of these closed systems, but it could also cause enormous harm.
What’s really at stake is whether the technology, with all its intrinsic power and instantaneity, will allow for the introspection necessary for an enterprise like the one that confronts us here. So far, though, I don’t see any convincing answer. And this is a much bigger question than the fate of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.

Wikileaks Wars: Digital Conflict Spills Into Real Life - Tech - 15 ...
A leaderless army of activists is wreaking havoc on the internet. Is this a sign of cyberwars to come?
www.newscientist.com/.../mg20827913.400-wikileaks-wars-di...


As someone whose job is to study hackers, I have nothing but admiration for the journalists and authors who have penned wonderful books on hackers. Bruce Sterling is one of those luminaries and without fail, I always assign a few chapters from The Hacker Crackdown, which reveals in stunning and humorous ethnographic detail the cultural logic of the hacker underground. Given that WikiLeaks can only be understood in light of hacker values and traditions, I was wondering when Bruce Sterling would chime in to connect the dots between WikiLeaks, the organization, and the wider culture of hacking from which it emerged.

He finally did, and like most of his writing, it is a tour de force: lyrical and seductive, thought provoking with many excellent points. It is important to read. But by the end, I felt Bruce Sterling the fiction writer's presence was too strong in painting a problematic, one-dimensional and static picture of the role of hacker culture in the WikiLeaks saga; the gist is that once a black hat hacker, always a black hat hacker…

…Personally I find myself sympathetic toward the purported mission behind OpenLeaks. They are seeking to do something similar to WikiLeaks but transforming it by injecting a dose of much needed transparency and accountability. And yet, due to the obsessive media spotlight on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (including Sterling's piece) the public may be led to believe that there is only one way to spread leaks, when in fact WikiLeaks helped to usher a paradigm that can be tweaked and hacked to better serve democratic goals…


Statement by World Can't Wait
From World Can't Wait | Original Article
Wikileaks Published Nothing But the Truth About Your Government
The truth is in your hands now.” 
      -Julian Assange, Founder of Wikileaks




Over the past months, hundreds of thousands of confirmed U.S. military and State Department documents and video have been published on the internet by Wikileaks, a not-for-profit media organization, under the headings Collateral Murder, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, and Cablegate.

Both victims and opponents of the U.S. wars and occupations, and innumerable others who value and demand freedom of the press, freedom of speech, welcome and support the publication of the classified documents by Wikileaks and other media outlets such as The Guardian and The New York Times, which are also publishing the Cablegate documents.

The value of the “leaks” lies in their truth and in their truths. The leaks quote the unlawful words and reveal the illegal actions of military leaders, foot soldiers, administration officials and the diplomatic corps. They confirm U.S. involvement and complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war. The leaks bring to the forefront all that is outlawed by national and international law, but which the U.S. flaunts with impunity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere around the globe on a daily basis, including here in the United States.

The recently released “diplomatic” cables take the underlying commission of these unlawful acts to new heights as they reveal the American government seeking to intimidate and otherwise pressure into silence those who could or already have righteously exposed it. Demands by the Obama administration and Republican war-mongers for the prosecution of Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and in some cases for his execution as a “terrorist” or “enemy combatant” are outrageous and make press freedom impossible.  Attorney General Eric Holder, who had no time or inclination to prosecute George Bush for self-confessed war crimes, has a “very serious criminal investigation” under way targeting Mr. Assange.

Through direct pressure from the US government, financial giants Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa are each making it impossible for any person to make a financial donation to Wikileaks through their service.  Julian Assange was arrested December 7 and is is under house arrest in London based on a warrant from Sweden to question him about alleged sexual abuse.  In Assange’s case, the prosecution’s investigation appears to be influenced little by finding the truth in such matters, and much more by U.S. pressure to get its hands on him and shut Wikileaks down. 

In answer to this governmental repression, people across the globe are supporting Wikileaks and demanding Assange’s freedom.  Almost 2000 “mirror” sites have been put up in solidarity, so that Wikileaks’ content can still be accessed via wikileaks.ch.

We all must support the truth and the truth tellers.  But more is required here. The truth that is revealed in these documents calls on all people of conscience to step out now, more than ever, in a mass and visible way to oppose and resist the crimes of our government and to protect those who have the courage to expose those crimes.  Although the original source or sources that provided Wikileaks with the allegedly classified documentation is not known, Private Bradley Manning awaits court martial as the Army’s main suspect. A movement in support of Brad Manning demands his freedom at bradleymanning.org.

World Can’t Wait is the organization whose mission it is to build such a movement.  Please join us in doing so.  As Assange and Wikileaks have said, “The truth is your hands now.”  What you do with the truth you know can make a difference for millions across the world.

Join in protests to free Assange & support whistle-blowers and resisters!  Stop these wars now!  Protest your government’s crimes!  Demand prosecutions for war crimes, not Assange!  Download this statement as a flier  Next >

The Year of Right-Wing Terrorists? | CNSnews.com
The Year of Right-Wing Terrorists? Wednesday, December 22, 2010. By L. Brent Bozell III. There is some very dangerous – as in red-hot incendiary – hatred ...
www.cnsnews.com/commentary/.../year-right-wing-terrorists



Seattle nixes bus ads decrying Israeli war crimes
By Philip Weiss
Seattle Jewish groups say that bus ads blasting 'Israeli war crimes' foment… violence (2). Shingo: The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and StandWithUs. ...Mondoweiss - http://mondoweiss.net/



“Israeli War Crimes” Bus Ad Censored Due To Pressure From Right ...
By Alex
“Israeli War Crimes” Bus Ad Censored Due To Pressure From Right Wing Jewish Groups · Woman Arrested at ABIA After Refusing Enhanced Pat Down · The Intel Hub : Happy Holidays · White House Issues Warning of Unspecified Homeland Terror ...- http://theintelhub.com/


New Nazi War Crimes Report Released - National Coalition for History
By lwhite
The National Archives has released to Congress a new report on Nazi War Crimes: Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. The report is based on findings from newly-declassified decades-old Army and CIA ...
National Coalition for History - http://historycoalition.org/


New Nazi War Crimes Report Released


The National Archives has released to Congress a new report on Nazi War Crimes: Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. The report is based on findings from newly-declassified decades-old Army and CIA records released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 (the Act).

These records were processed and reviewed by the National Archives-led Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), and written by IWG historians Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda.

The report highlights materials opened under the Act, in addition to records that were previously opened but had not been mined by historians and researchers, including records from the Office of Strategic Services (a CIA predecessor), dossiers of the Army Staff’s Intelligence Records of the Investigative Records Repository (IRR), State Department records, and files of the Navy Judge Advocate General.

Hitler’s Shadow augments the IWG’s 2007 final report to Congress, and includes wartime and postwar US intelligence documents on the search for and prosecution of Nazi war criminals; Allied protection or use of Nazi war criminals; and the postwar activities of war criminals both in the United States and abroad.

Background

The passage of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in October, 1998, set into motion the most intense, large-scale U.S. government effort yet to declassify records relating to a single subject. Preliminary surveys by twelve Federal agencies yielded a universe of more than 600 million pages of potentially relevant records, with more detailed surveys narrowing the universe to about 100 million pages.


Fifteen years later, more than eight million pages have been identified as relevant and declassified under the law. These records are now available to researchers to fill in the historical record, round out personal histories, answer longstanding questions about U.S. use of war criminals during the Cold War, and aid in tracing looted valuables. These answers may help to provide a measure of justice to some of the surviving victims of horrific World War II crimes.

President Clinton established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Work Group (IWG) by Executive Order on January 11, 1999, and charged it with coordinating and expediting this immense undertaking among Federal agencies. He named the group’s members from the major agencies holding classified records and appointed three members to represent the public. Soon after its formation, the group set out to accomplish the tasks outlined in the statute: to locate, inventory, recommend for declassification, and make available all classified records of Nazi war criminal records.

In 2005, following the declassification and review of thousands of files containing newly-disclosed information about war crimes and war criminal documentation of the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Government, the National Archives issued a final historians report summarizing insights gained as a result of the National Archives-supervised review of these documents. However, a large number of additional U.S. Army and CIA/OSS documents were received too late in the processing to be included in the 2005 report.

Subsequently, Congress provided funding to be used to report separately on these remaining documents – which may total as many as 2,000,000 more pages. Congress directed the National Archives to complete the review and historical analysis of these documents and to release a supplemental report to the 2005 IWG report U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis.

Alleged Crimes;

During the second World War, there were persistent and substantiated reports of the killing of unarmed civilians or prisoners of war by US forces.
These included;

The Canicattì massacre, where at least eight Italian civilians, including an eleven year old girl, were killed, though the exact number of casualties is uncertain.

The Dachau massacre: U.S. soldiers shot and killed up to 100 German injured SS soldiers (who had no connection with the death camp) as they attempted to surrender.
The Biscari massacre, U.S. troops killed roughly 75 prisoners of war, mostly Italian.
Rheinwiesenlager prison camps for German POWs where credible sources estimate from about 3,000 to 10,000 German POWs died, mostly from starvation, dehydration and exposure to the weather elements.

Operation Teardrop: Eight of the surviving, captured crewmen from the sunk German submarine U-546 were tortured by US military personnel.

In Vietnam, US forces and their allies were accused of widespread torture of prisoners, rape of civilian women, mutilation of bodies and killing of unarmed civilians, among other acts.

The US also routinely used chemical weapons in Vietnam, namely Agent Orange and Napalm in civilian areas.

The US has also been accused of indiscriminately bombing civilians outside of a declared war situation, and targeting civilian populations. This has happened so often that a new phrase has been coined by the US military to describe it – “collateral damage”.

These include the following places;

Japan (1945) China (1945-46) Korea & China (1950-53) Guatemala (1954, 1960, 1967-69) Indonesia (1958) Cuba (1959-61) Congo (1964)
Peru (1965) Laos (1964-70) Vietnam (1961-1973) Cambodia (1969-70)
Grenada (1983) Lebanon (1983-84) Libya (1986) El Salvador (1980s)
Nicaragua (1980s) Iran (1987) Panama (1989) Iraq (1991-2000)
Kuwait (1991) Somalia (1993) Bosnia (1994-95) Sudan (1998)
Afghanistan (1998) Pakistan (1998) Yugoslavia (1999)
Bulgaria (1999) Macedonia (1999)

The US has refused to sign Conventions against the development and use of chemical and biological weapons.

Recently, the US military has been accused of using white phosphorus bombs (which burns the skin to the bone on contact) in Fallujah and possibly elsewhere in the Iraq.
Depleted uranium warheads are also regularly used by US forces in modern-day war zones. The radiation produced by depleted uranium in battle is a poison, a carcinogenic material that causes birth defects, lung disease, kidney disease, leukemia, breast cancer, lymphoma, bone cancer, and neurological disabilities.

The US has been accused of using and testing chemical or biological weapons (without informing the civilian populations) in the following places abroad;

Bahamas (late 1940s-mid-1950s) Canada (1953) China and Korea (1950-53) Korea (1967-69) Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (1961-1970)
Panama (1940s-1990s) Cuba (1962, 69, 70, 71, 81, 96).

And in the US itself;

Watertown, NY and US Virgin Islands (1950) SF Bay Area (1950, 1957-67) Minneapolis (1953) St. Louis (1953) Washington, DC Area (1953, 1967) Florida (1955) Savannah GA/Avon Park, FL (1956-58) New York City (1956, 1966) Chicago (1960).

The US has launched a series of military and political interventions since
1945, often to install puppet regimes. The following are the sampling of estimated deaths either from direct US military interventions or support of the states responsible for the crimes (using the most conservative estimates);

Nicaragua (30,000 dead) Brazil (100,000 dead) Korea (4 million dead)
Guatemala (200,000 dead) Honduras (20,000 dead) El Salvador (63,000 dead) Argentina (40,000 dead) Bolivia (10,000 dead) Uruguay (10,000 dead) Ecuador (10,000 dead) Peru (10,000 dead) Iraq (1.3 million dead) Iran (30,000 dead) Sudan (8-10,000 dead) Colombia (50,000 dead) Panama (5,000 dead) Japan (140,000 dead) Afghanistan (10,000 dead) Somalia (5000 dead) Philippines (150,000 dead) Haiti (100,000 dead)

Dominican Republic (10,000 dead) Libya (500 dead) Macedonia (1000 dead) South Africa (10,000 dead) Pakistan (10,000 dead) Palestine (40,000 dead) Indonesia (1 million dead) East Timor (1/3-1/2 of total population) Greece (10,000 dead) Laos (600,000 dead) Cambodia (1 million dead) Angola (300,000 dead) Grenada (500 dead) Congo (2 million dead) Egypt (10,000 dead) Vietnam (1.5 million dead) Chile (50,000 dead).

The US has also developed and distributed training manuals for foreign military personnel or foreign nationals, including instructions on assassination, subversion, sabotage, population control, torture, repression, psychological torture, death squads, etc.

Successive US administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have used assassination as a tool of foreign policy. Assassination attempts have been made against at least 40 foreign heads of state (some several times), a number of which have been successful, including: Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dihn Diem (Vietnam) Salvador Allende (Chile).

The US is the world’s largest seller of weapons abroad, arming
dictators, militaries, and terrorists that repress or victimize their
populations, and fueling scores of violent conflicts around the globe The US is also the world’s largest provider of live land mines which, even in
peacetime, kill or injure at least several people around the world each day.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
DO THESE CONSTITUTE WAR CRIMES OR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY?
SHOULD ANYONE BE PROSECUTED FOR THEM?
IF SO, WHO?

Fascism In America....Courtesy Of The TSA....

Say something bad about the TSA and they send the feds to your house to confiscate stuff. Four Air Marshalls and law enforcment.

http://www.news10.net/news/article.a...=top&catid=188

Quote:
"And the message was you've angered us by telling the truth and by showing America that there are major security problems despite the fact that we've spent billions of dollars allegedly to improve airline safety," Werno said.


Gee Lookie Here.......Fascism Defined. See How Many You Can Attach To Our Country.

Oh Wait, The Entire List Applies To Us


Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

 Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

 Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

 Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.



Does Any Of This Ring Alarm Bells? Of Course Not. After All, This Is America, Officially A Democracy With The Rule Of Law, A Constitution, A Free Press, Honest Elections, And A Well-Informed Public Constantly Being Put On Guard Against Evils.

Historical Comparisons Like These Are Just Exercises In Verbal Gymnastics. Maybe, Maybe Not.

Cables, Cables, Cables; What's Hidden Under The Tables, Abducted ...
By Ed. Dickau
In Soviet Russia, we saw an endless parade of fascists, Socialists, Trotskyites, and "reactionaries" used as justification for massive military expenditures, arrests, executions, and "re-education" camps. ...
Le Café Politique De Camus De Café - http://lecafpolitiquedecamusdecaf.blogspot.com/


                                                      
 


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