As Strikes on Syria Loom, Is U.S. Ignoring a Diplomatic Track That Could Prevent More Violence? , August 28, 2013

Source: democracynow.org



Britain is set to introduce a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing military action in Syria as the United States and allies gear up for expected strikes on the Assad regime. The resolution condemns the Syrian government for allegedly using chemical weapons and authorizes "necessary measures for protecting civilians." Russia and China are expected to issue a veto, raising the prospect that a U.S.-led bombing could come through NATO.

 The Obama administration says military action in Syria would be aimed at responding to chemical attacks, not seeking regime change, but critics say similar claims were made at the outset of the NATO intervention in Libya. "There is no military solution," says Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. "Extra assaults from the United States are going to make the situation worse, put Syrian civilians at greater risk, and not provide protection." -democracynow.org

Read More

RT | After Snowden leaks NSA replaces people with computers, August 15, 2013

Source: RT.com



Late last week, President Obama addressed the NSA's surveillance program leaks and declared a thorough review of the agency's operations before Edward Snowden leaked the information to The Guardian, but now the NSA is going to fire 90 percent of its system administrators to minimize the number of people who have access to sensitive classified information. RT's Meghan Lopez has more. -RT.com

Read More

RT | Cold War Thinking? 'Obama's reaction on Snowden asylum infantile' , August 7, 2013

Source: RT.com



US President Barack Obama has cancelled a one-to-one with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin that was scheduled for next month. The decision, prompted by Moscow giving temporary refuge to the fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, was met with disappointment in the Kremlin. John Laughland, a director of studies at the Institute of democracy and cooperation in Paris, joins RT to discuss this. Read more at: RT.com

Read More

The EyeOpener Report | Obama's War on Whistleblowers (and what to do about it), July 2, 2013

Source: corbettreport.com, boilingfrogspost.com



The gulf that exists between the Obama of the campaign trail and Obama’s actions since taking office has been glaringly obvious since the very beginning of his presidency, from his promise to close Guantanamo to his promise not to employ lobbyists to his promise to increase governmental transparency; there have been no shortage of examples of Obama’s duplicity. Until recently, however, his arch defenders have merely covered their eyes and pretended not to see these glaring hypocrisies, decrying his opponents as racist and Obama as a well-meaning president who has been hampered by Republican interference.

One of the clearest and most remarkable signs that Obama was not what he claimed to be has always been the war on whistleblowers his administration has been waging since the moment he took office. This war, unprecedented in scale or scope in the history of the United States, has been waged quietly for years, apparently out of sight of the fawning media and Obama-supporting Democrats.

Join us for this week’s EyeOpener Report to examine Obama’s ruthless and belligerent war waged against whistleblowers and truth-tellers, and find out what to do about it. -corbettreport.com

Transcript & Sources

Read More

Election mandate in hand, Obama readies more Iran sanctions



 

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/news/iran-us-sanctions-drone-300/

Only days after President Obama won reelection, the US rolled out a new round of sanctions against Iran and accused it of attempting to shoot down an American drone in international airspace.

­The US State Department and Treasury announced on Thursday that the sanctions are aimed at senior Iranian officials and several related entities. US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said they are “responsible for the abuses carried out against their own citizens.”

The alleged abuses include the jamming of international satellite broadcasts, blocking Internet access to services like YouTube, eBay, Facebook and Gmail, and monitoring online activities to identify “users who published material insulting government officials,” a US Treasury statement said. Tehran is also accused of attacking foreign websites, shutting down newspapers in Iran and detaining journalists.

Other countries in the region, including US allies, have blocked Internet users from accessing services and materials they deemed impropriate. Turkey blocked YouTube over videos insulting its first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Pakistan blocked YouTube for “blasphemous web content.” The United Arab Emirates did the same, taking offense at ‘adult content’ on the video-sharing site.

The four individuals targeted by the sanctions include Tehran’s Communication and Information Technology Minister Reza Taghipour, deputy commander of the Basij militia Ali Fazli and Iranian police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam. The five entities include the country’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Press Supervisory Board and the Center to Investigate Organized Crime.

Iranian software companies AmnAfzar Gostar-e Sharif and PeykAsa – which are involved in monitoring and blocking Internet traffic – and the companies’ founder Rasool Jalili were also targeted by the sanctions.

Tehran is engaged in a campaign to curtail freedoms and “prevent the free flow of information both into and out of Iran,” Nuland said. “Countless activists, journalists, lawyers, students and artists have been detained, censured, tortured or forcibly prevented from exercising their human rights.”

The US and some of its allies have leveled increasingly harsh sanctions against Iran. The restrictions have crippled Iranian oil exports, a major source of income for the country, by targeting any organizations worldwide that buy crude from the Islamic Republic.

Western countries are pressuring Iran in a bid to force it to stop enriching uranium. They allege that Tehran is trying to stockpile the material to produce a nuclear weapon. Tehran insists that it produces enriched uranium for civilian purposes only.

­Drone debacle

­On Tuesday, the Pentagon said that Iranian warplanes shot at a US Predator drone over the Gulf region, but failed to take it down. The encounter reportedly took place on November 1, about 16 nautical miles off the Iranian coast and in international airspace.

Pentagon spokesperson George Little said that this was the fist time the Iranian military had fired on a US drone. The incident initially went undisclosed because the US military does not discuss classified surveillance missions, he explained. The attack was officially confirmed only after it was reported in the US media.

Two Iranian Sukhoi Su-25 jets intercepted the unarmed drone as it was performing a routine – but classified – patrol over Persian Gulf waters.

The aircraft shot “multiple rounds” at the Predator, and after it moved away from the Iranian border they shadowed it “for some period of time before letting it return to base,” Little said.

The American military claimed the Iranian pilots intended to shoot down the drone.

"Our working assumption is that they fired to take it down. You'll have to ask the Iranians why they engaged in this action," Little said. He did not explain why the Iranian jets failed to hit their target, as drones are incapable of performing elaborate evasive maneuvers.

He said that the American drone “was never in Iranian air space,” which begins 12 nautical miles from the country’s coastline.

In December 2011, a CIA RQ-170 Sentinel stealth done was monitoring Iranian nuclear and military facilities when it was brought down and captured in eastern Iran. The US said it malfunctioned, while Tehran claimed they had downed the aircraft. The Iranian government later published photos of the captured drone, which appeared undamaged.

“The United States has communicated to the Iranians that we will continue to conduct surveillance flights over international waters over the Arabian Gulf, consistent with longstanding practice and our commitment to the security of the region,” Little said.

Chief of Staff Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri, the Deputy Chair of the Iranian Armed Forces, said there would be a “firm response” to any air, ground and sea aggression against Iran. He vowed to confront any foreign aircraft that violated the country’s airspace, Iranian news channel Press TV reported.

US President Barack Obama (AFP Photo / Jewel Samad) 

Read More

US-Canada “Terror Justice”: I Will Never Forget Omar Khadr

 

By: Nulwee

Original Source: Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/29/1137892/-I-Will-Never-Forget-Omar-Khadr

I’ve known about Omar Khadr since he was a boy. He’s 26, like me. At age 15, U.S. military found Khadr face-down, unconscious, under a pile of rubble in Afghanistan. When Khadr regained consciousness a week later, he was at Bagram air force base, “one of the worst places on Earth“:

Damien Corsetti, who was known as “Monster” at Bagram, based on a tattoo on his chest, and also as “The King of Torture,” described himself as “a disabled veteran suffering post traumatic stress disorder as a result of his interrogation work in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” and explained how, on seeing Khadr on July 29, 2002, just two days after his capture, he was struck by how he was an injured “child” detained in “one of the worst places on Earth.” He added, “More than anything, he looked beat up. He was a 15 year-old kid with three holes in his body, a bunch of shrapnel in his face. That was what I remember. How horrible this 15 year-old child looked.”

The well-circulated photo of Khadr at age 14, only a little younger than he was at his capture, still haunts me, not unlike the photo of the bombing victim Ali Ismael Abbas which I used to wave at Iraq Occupation protests. It has been alleged that Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was a child soldier, used as a pawn first by terrorists and then punished by the U.S as if he were an adult with agency.Khadr is being released to Canada after a decade long battle by civil rights groups. He will serve out his sentence in Canadian prison, with eligibility for parole in 2013.

The U.S. defence department issued a statement Saturday referring to the five war crimes to which Khadr pleaded guilty before a military commission: murder in violation of the law of war attempted murder in violation of the law of war conspiracy providing material support for terrorism spying

There are too many ironies and outrages to catalogue in this diary entry. Khadr was still injured when the torture began. The interrogators pried open his mind and used fear to transform him:

There is much more in the affidavit – casual cruelty, whereby guards made Khadr do hard manual labor when his wounds were not healed, and, significantly, threats “to have me raped, or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped.” He also noted, “I would always hear people screaming, both day and night,” and explained that other prisoners were scared of his interrogator. “Most people would not talk about what had been done to them,” he declared. “This made me afraid.”Khadr also described what happened to him in Guantánamo, where, as I explained last week, he “arrived around the time that a regime of humiliation, isolation and abuse, including extreme temperature manipulation, forced nudity and sexual humiliation, had just been introduced, by reverse-engineering torture techniques, used in a military program designed to train US personnel to resist interrogation if captured, in an attempt to increase the meager flow of ‘actionable intelligence’ from the prison.”

At various points in 2003, while the use of these techniques was still widespread, Khadr stated that he was short-shackled in painful positions and left for up to ten hours in a freezing cold cell, threatened with rape and with being transferred to another country where he could be raped, and, on one particular occasion, when he had been left short-shackled in a painful position until he urinated on himself:

Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me, and then, with me lying on my stomach and my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil on the floor. Later, I was put back in my cell, without being allowed a shower or a change of clothes. I was not given a change of clothes for two days. They did this to me again a few weeks later.

Khadr was subjected to a ‘Palestinian hanging’:

The first to reveal a glimpse of the regime at Bagram was, ironically, a medic called as a witness by the prosecution. “Mr. M,” as he was identified, who testified by video link from Boston, countered Khadr’s claims that, while he was at Bagram, “five people in civilian clothes would come and change my bandages,” and that they “treated me very roughly and videotaped me while they did it,” stating that he alone changed his bandages twice a day, and that no rough treatment was involved. He did, however, note that, on one occasion, he found Khadr hooded and chained to a cage by his wrists with his arms “just above eye level,” and that when he lifted the hood, Khadr was visibly upset. The medic added, as Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald, that “he didn’t object to Khadr’s treatment, because chaining was an approved form of punishment” at Bagram, “adding that he didn’t know the reason for the punishment nor how long Khadr had been chained.”

This rather nonchalant description of “chaining” may not have shocked the medic, especially as the chains were apparently “slack enough to allow Khadr’s feet to touch the floor,” but the only reason for this was because of the severity of his wounds, as Khadr explained in his affidavit, in which he also stated that he was chained up “several times.” Otherwise, like numerous other prisoners, including Dilawar (the subject of “Taxi to the Dark Side”) and Mullah Habibullah, the two prisoners who were killed at Bagram in December 2002, he would have been fully suspended by his wrists, in a torture technique more commonly known as the “strappado” technique or “Palestinian hanging.”

Nevertheless, as Barry Coburn, Khadr’s lead lawyer, explained, the medic’s testimony provided “critically important validation” of statements in his client’s affidavit, and another of his lawyers, Kobie Flowers, added, “Had this been an American soldier in North Korea, people would be outraged. Here we have a 15-year-old individual who was nearly killed with bullets in his back who was left up there to hang as punishment.”

There’s more in the long, sad, tale of Omar Khadr. But that gives you some idea.This is a critical story and its embers have to remain hot. These are the stakes. The U.S. can choose to forget that it captured and tortured a boy for years, physically and psychologically. That it tortured many people, some Middle Eastern, some Western. I guarantee you that the price of forgetting will revisit us in the future. Or we can remember the stain on our nation, like many other countries have to each day

Notes:

Common Dreams: The Torture of Omar Khadr, a Child in Bagram and Guantánamo

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/13-8
CBC News: Omar Khadr returns to Canada September 29^th, 2012
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/09/29/omar-khadr-repatriation.html
Daily Kos: “I was naked in the bright light and you couldn’t see me…”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/07/15/752236/--I-was-naked-in-the-bright-light-and-you-couldn-t-see-me

 

Read More