Apparently a former Vice President spoke last night and said he kept the world safe and the current President doesn’t. Sort of like my Dad saying each time we meet, “You know in my day 1) there was no crime 2) kids knew their place 3) music was much better.”
Praise be to God, Who created people to worship Him, ordered them to be just, and permitted the wronged to mete out fair punishment to the wrongdoer.
American people: This address to you is a reminder of the causes of 11 (September) and the wars and consequences that followed and the way to settle it once and for all. I mention in particular the families of those who were hurt in these events and who have recently called for opening an investigation to know its causes. This is a first and important step in the right direction among many other steps that have deliberately gone in the wrong direction over eight barren years that you have experienced.
A colleague and veteran watcher of all matters politically off-beat sends us this reminder from Google searches in 2003/4.
These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed
The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. The country might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspectors mandate.
Please try the following:
Click the Regime change button, or try again later.
If you are George Bush and typed the country’s name in the address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly. (IRAQ).
To check your weapons inspector settings, click the UN menu, and then click Weapons Inspector Options. On the Security Council tab, click Consensus. The settings should match those provided by your government or NATO.
If the Security Council has enabled it, The United States of America can examine your country and automatically discover Weapons of Mass Destruction.
If you would like to use the CIA to try and discover them,
click Detect weapons
Some countries require 128 thousand troops to liberate them. Click the Panic menu and then click About US foreign policy to determine what regime they will install.
If you are an Old European Country trying to protect your interests, make sure your options are left wide open as long as possible. Click the Tools menu, and then click on League of Nations. On the Advanced tab, scroll to the Head in the Sand section and check settings for your exports to Iraq.
UPDATE (18 May): Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Il Corriere della Sera have now published some of the photos. (Hat tip to Nur al-Cubicle via UJ).
When the scandal over the Abu Ghraib abuse photographs broke in 2004, it was reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was worried over “hundreds” more, as well as videotapes, that had not been revealed. It is probable that these photographs are among those whose release is being challenged by President Obama.
After a great deal of discussion, Enduring America has decided to post the two “most moderate” photographs. We do so not to be sensationalist or voyeuristic but to show the “enhanced interrogation” carried out in America’s name not only in Iraq but from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan to unnamed countries from 2002. We do so as an expression of concern that, in the name of “national security”, the seriousness of this torture will be minimised by hiding it from us. We do so in the belief that acknowledgement of the past does not endanger America in the present but begins to redeem it.
On Friday, The Independent of London put together some pieces of a military puzzle, linking US special operations and Afghan deaths from American bombing and missiles, to declare, “The US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, or MarSOC…was behind at least three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents.”
Reporter Jerome Starkey explained that the unit, “created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld,…call[ed] in air strikes in Bala Boluk, in Farah, last week – believed to have killed more than 140 men, women and children”. In March 2007, after a suicide bombing close to the Pakistan border, a MarSOC company “fired indiscriminately at pedestrians and civilian cars, killing at least 19 people”, while in August 2008 “a 20-man MarSOC unit, fighting alongside Afghan commandos, directed fire from unmanned drones, attack helicopters and a cannon-armed Spectre gunship into compounds in Azizabad, in Herat province, leaving more than 90 people dead – many of them children”. Read the rest of this entry »
Ironically, as President Obama was trying to tuck away any more photographs revealing the US Government’s torture of detainees, former Bush Administration official Philip Zelikow was dissecting the legal and political cover for “enhanced interrogations” in testimony to a Senate committee. He reiterated that the techniques was approved at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including by his immediate boss, Condoleezza Rice, and that his memorandum objecting to the torture (still classified by the US Government) was blocked by other Bush officials. And he offered this pertinent point: if the torture methods were considered legal in their application against “foreign” detainees, then they would also be legal in application against US citizens.
C-SPAN has decided to charge $60 for the videos of the hearings before the Senate committee, which also included testimony by Ali Soufan (posted in a separate entry), the FBI agent who questioned 9-11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So we offer two videos — a summary of the Soufan and Zelikow testimonies and Zelikow’s interview with Rachel Maddow — and the transcript of Zelkow’s statement:
For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces — still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney — this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constituted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF.) Read the rest of this entry »
In January, just after the US Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, we had a go at the construction in The New York Times of a “violent semi-peace”. It seemed to us that the authors were trying to salvage a back-slapping congratulations of a US accomplishment even though violence and political instability were likely to continue in Iraq.
After the series of bombing in the last 48 hours that have killed more than 150 people, it is not a question of returning to that exchange with a “see, we told you so”. The situation is far too serious for that.
Juan Cole, as always, has been incisive in his analysis, noting that there has been almost 30 major bombings in Iraq this month. Yesterday’s assault on the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim in northern Baghdad is “much more dangerous”, however, because of the symbolism: Musa Kazim is the seventh of twelve Imams for Shi’a. If the shrine had been destroyed, the incident could have sparked retaliations such as those that followed the destruction of the Samarra mosque in 2006.
What is more disturbing is her blame of “rejectionist efforts” for violence: that is uncomfortably close to Donald Rumsfeld’s confidence in 2003 that it was only “dead-enders” causing trouble in Iraq.
Praise be to God, Who created people to worship Him, ordered them to be just, and permitted the wronged to mete out fair punishment to the wrongdoer.
Detect weapons
Bomb
On Friday, The Independent of London 
In January, just after the US Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, 
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