NEO CON

BODY POLITICS

Four years ago, President George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence, simply by declaring them an "enemy combatant," on his say-so alone. This week, the assemblage of bootlickers and bagmen that befoul the U.S. Senate voted to codify the core of this global autocracy under the pretense of curtailing it.

With great self-fluffing fanfare, the Senate passed two measures ostensibly designed to stem the flood of torture and tyranny issuing from the White House. But the twinned amendments to a military spending bill have the curious effect of canceling each other out: The anti-torture measure leaves Bush's tyranny intact, while the anti-tyranny measure will allow torture to continue unabated. This switcheroo, we are told by one of the scam's sponsors, "will re-establish moral high ground for the United States," The Washington Post reports.

But what can we actually see from this lofty moral promontory? We see that all foreign captives in Bush's worldwide gulag have now been stripped of the ancient human right of habeas corpus. They will not be allowed to challenge "any aspect of their detention" in court -- until they have already been tried and convicted by a "military tribunal" constituted under rules concocted arbitrarily by Bush and his minions. Only then, after years of incarceration without rights or legal protection, will they be given access to a single federal appeals court that can review their conviction -- subject to the usual "national security" restrictions on challenging evidence gathered by secret means from secret sources in secret places. Remarkably, the Supreme Court is expressly prohibited from any jurisdiction whatsoever over any aspect of gulag captivity, The Washington Post reports. And of course, Bush can simply skip the tribunal and keep anyone he pleases chained in legal limbo until they rot. Neither of the ballyhooed amendments affects this raw despotism.

Meanwhile, U.S. citizens can also be arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. But for now, any Homelanders caught in Bush's net can at least appear briefly in court prior to their conviction, where they will enjoy a "judicial process" that Stalin or Saddam would have loved: Bush officials present the judge with a piece of paper declaring that the prisoner is one bad hombre, but all the evidence against him is classified and nobody can see it -- especially the prisoner, The Washington Post reports. And that's it. The captive is then plunged back into the gulag, to be disposed of according to Bush's whim. Again, this medieval mechanism of tyranny was left untouched by the Senate's actions.

The Senate originally voted to cast Bush's captives into outer darkness forever, without a single legal recourse. But then a few prissy hens and bleeding hearts made the usual squawk about rights and law and all that pinko jazz. So the compromise of allowing a post-conviction appeal for people who have been arbitrarily seized and held in isolation for years without charges, who have often been tortured, humiliated and driven to madness or attempted suicide before facing a kangaroo court -- was hastily cobbled together and presented to the world as a triumph of the human spirit and the American way.

Ah, but what about the anti-torture amendment, sponsored by the Republican "maverick," Senator John McCain, and hailed by editorialists across the land as a great leap forward in the evolution of political morality? The effusions that have greeted this measure are puzzling. It does nothing more than restate what is already the law of the land. American forces were already forbidden from subjecting any captive "to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" as prohibited by the Constitution and the UN Convention Against Torture. This regurgitation of existing law is the extent of the McCain amendment, along with an adjuration to interrogators to follow written guidelines for rough stuff set down by the Pentagon.

But the partisans of atrocity in the Bush White House knew these laws when they set up the gulag's torture regimen in 2001. They simply redefined "torture" to accommodate any brutal technique they cared to implement, then declared that the commander in chief is beyond the reach of law in wartime -- and that any underlings who commit crimes at his order are likewise absolved of legal liability. This sinister sophistry is still very much in operation and remains unchallenged by the toothless amendment of the "maverick."

The dual amendments are a cynical PR ploy: Torture will be condemned in public but quietly continued in the former KGB camps and other secret hellholes that Bush has strung across the world like a barbed-wire necklace. The Pentagon's own lawyers certainly understand the true nature of the game. As one told The Guardian: "If detainees can't talk to lawyers or file cases, how will anyone ever find out if they have been abused?" No one ever will, of course; that's the point. With habeas corpus denied up front, the worst cases of torture and false imprisonment can now be buried forever in "indefinite detention"; the tribunals, with their access to appeals, will be reserved for open-and-shut showpieces.

These draconian measures reach far beyond a handful of hard-core terrorists. According to the Pentagon's own figures, more than 21,000 innocent people have been caged without due process in Iraq alone, The Guardian reports. Hundreds more have been unjustly imprisoned around the world. A regime that thrives on fear requires a steady stream of "enemy combatants" to justify its unlimited "war powers." The belly of this beast will never be full.

Senators Agree on Detainee Rights
Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2005

Senate Rebukes Bush on Iraq Policy
Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2005

McCain Amendment to 2006 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill
United States Senate, Nov. 11, 2005

Detainees Deserve Court Trials
Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2005

Democrats Provided Edge on Detainee Vote
New York Times, Nov. 12, 2005

Rumsfeld can authorize exceptions to new "humane" interrogation directive
Agence France Presse, Nov. 9, 2005

Guantanamo Inmates to Lose All Rights
The Observer, Nov. 13. 2005

Who They Are: The Double Standard that Underlies our Torture Policies
Slate.com, Nov. 11, 2005

Jose Padilla and The Death of Liberty
Information Clearinghouse, Sept. 10, 2005

White House declines to totally rule out torture
Agence France Press, Nov. 13, 2005

We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
New York Times, Nov. 13, 2005

Habeas Corpus
Wikepedia

Court Rules Military Panels to Try Detainees
Washington Post, July 16, 2005

Domination by Detention
Deep Blade Journaly, July 16, 2005

Ruling Lets U.S. Restart Trials at Guantanamo
Miami Herald, July 16, 2005

Alberto Gonzales' Tortured Arguments for Reigning Above the Law
LA Weekly, Jan. 14-20, 2005

Torture Treaty Doesn't Bar `Cruel, Inhuman' Tactics, Gonzales Says
Knight-Ridder, Jan. 26, 2005

Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill Terrorists
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2002

Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003

Coward's War in Yemen
Spiked, Nov. 11, 2002

Drones of Death
The Guardian, Nov. 6, 2002

Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005

The Secret World of US Jails
The Observer, June 13, 2004

The Torture Memos: A Legal Narrative
CounterPunch, Feb. 2, 2005

CIA Takes on Major Military Role: 'We're Killing People!
Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2002

Our Designated Killers
Village Voice, Feb. 14, 2003

A U.S. License to Kill
Village Voice, Feb. 21, 2003

CIA Weighs 'Targeted Killing' Missions
Washington Post, Oct. 27, 2001

US Again Uses Enemy Combatant Label to Deny Basic Rights
Human Rights Watch, June 23, 2003

[Bush Order] Lets CIA Freely Send Suspects to Foreign Jails
New York Times, March 6, 2005

Review: Torture and Truth and The Torture Papers
The New Statesman, March 7, 2005

The Torture Papers: Full Faith and Credit of the U.S. Government
San Diego Union-Tribune, Feb. 27, 2005

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

U.S. Military

 attempts to deny

While Confirming

 Use of White Phosphorus  

 On Iraqi civilians in Fallujah

By: Tom Scott

The documentary, which was shown on Italian state television on Tuesday, November 8th, cited evidence that U.S. Armed Forces had used the incendiary chemical white phosphorus, also know as “Willy Pete” or “Whiskey Pete” in military jargon, against innocent civilians in the November 2004 offensive on the Iraqi town of Fallujah immediately following the U.S. Presidential election.

The RAI documentary shows images of bodies recovered after a November 2004 offensive by U.S. troops on the town of Fallujah, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against innocent men, women and children who were burnt to the bone.A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad had said earlier on Tuesday he did not recall white phosphorus being used in Fallujah.

Sounding a lot like Scooter Libby in his total lack of recall of the Vice Presidents actions on the outing of Covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Bolin said "I do not recall the use of white phosphorus during the offensive operations in Fallujah in the fall of 2004,”

This reporter was expecting Bolins next statement to place the use of “Willy Pete” squarely on the shoulders of Tim Russet. 

Bolin also denied the use of “Willy Pete” against “civilians” in Fallujah despite numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary.

Interestingly, the Marine spokesman did take time Wednesday, November 9th, to make the statement that he would describe white phosphorus as "conventional munitions" used primarily for smoke screens and target marking. He then went on to state that “U.S. forces do not use any chemical weapons in Iraq.”

If he, like the Bush Administration considered everyone in Fallujah as “enemy combatants”, which Bush and the military did at the time that would technically be a true statement, but that wasn't the reality. 

Bolin did confirm however, in an about face from previous statements to the contrary, that U.S. forces had dropped MK 77 firebombs, which the documentary on Italian broadcaster RAI compared to napalm, against military targets only in Iraq in March and April 2003.

However,  a March ‘05 publication by the US Army confirms that US soldiers used white phosphorus offensively in the Battle of Fallujah. This directly contradicts the statements made by the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as a previous statement by the US State Department that Willy Pete was used “very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes”.

Also a story on artillery use in Fallujah from the March/April edition of the US Army’s “Field Artillery Magazine” states that “The munitions we brought to this fight were illumination and white phosphorous (WP, M110 and M825), with point-detonating (PD), delay, time and variable-time (VT) fuses.”

“WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with High Explosives (HE). We fired ’shake and bake’ missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.” 

What the article does not say, however, is that there is no way you can use white phosphorus at ground level without forming a deadly chemical cloud that kills everything within a quarter of a mile in all directions from where it hits. Obviously, the effect of such deadly clouds weren't just psychological in nature. 

This claim of “shake and bake” is further confirmed in a news article reported on NCTimes.com on April 10, 2004 by an embedded journalist at the time.

“Bogart is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused. . . they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call “shake ‘n’ bake” into a cluster of buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week.”

Why were "round after round of Willy Pete needed if it were used for illumination purposes only? When used in this manner Willy Pete will form a toxic chemical cloud which will kill within a quarter mile radius. 

It feels like the American people have been hit by a barrage of “shake ‘n’ bake” with the smokescreen and High Explosive denials that the Pentagon and the Bush Administration puts out on a consistent basis.

The documentary had cited a letter it said had come from British Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram; admitting 30 MK 77 weapons were used on military targets in Iraq between March 31 and April 2, 2003.

The Defense Minister admitted that the US had misled the British high command about the use of napalm, but he would not comment on the extent of the cover up.

"The only instance of MK 77 use during (Operation Iraqi Freedom) occurred in March/April 2003 when U.S. Marines employed several bombs against legitimate military targets," Keefe said.

He also stated that the chemical composition of the MK 77 firebomb is “different from that of napalm.” The documentary has also accused U.S. forces of using the Mark 77 firebomb on Fallujah.

The use of firebombs puts the US in breach of the 1980 Convention on Certain Chemical Weapons and is a violation the Geneva Protocol against the use of white phosphorous and napalm, "since its use causes indiscriminate and extreme injuries especially when deployed in an urban area." 

Regrettably, "indiscriminate and extreme injuries" are a vital part of this Administration’s terror campaign in Iraq. It is a well-coordinated strategy designed to spawn panic throughout Iraq with random acts of violence. 

It is clear that the U.S. military never needed to use napalm in Iraq.

Their conventional weaponry and laser-guided technology were already enough to run roughshod over the Iraqi army and seize Baghdad almost unobstructed. Napalm was introduced simply to terrorize the Iraqi people and to pacify through intimidation.

The Geneva Convention has banned the use of incendiary weapons against civilians but interestingly enough the United States did not sign the relevant protocol to the convention, a U.N. official in New York has confirmed.  

The Fallujah offensive in November 2004, had aimed to crush followers of al Qaeda's Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said to have linked up with local insurgents in the Sunni Arab city west of Baghdad.

The shocking Italian documentary showed images of bodies recovered after a November 2004 offensive by U.S. troops on the Iraqi town of Fallujah, which it said, proves the use of white phosphorus against innocent men, women and children who were burnt to the bone.

"I do know that white phosphorus was used," said Jeff Englehart in the RAI documentary, which identified him as a former soldier in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Iraq. "Burnt bodies. Burnt children and burnt women," said Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Falluja offensive. "White phosphorus kills indiscriminately."

Western newspapers had also reported at the time that white phosphorus had been used during the offensive. But not one American newspaper or TV station picked up the story.

This is the extent to which the American "free press" is yoked to the center of power in Washington. As we have seen with the Downing Street memo, which was reluctantly reported 5 weeks after it appeared in the British press, the airtight American media ignores any story that doesn't embrace their collective support for the war.

So far, none of this has appeared in any American media, nor has the media reported that the United Nations has been rebuffed twice by the Defense Department in calling for an independent investigation into what really took place in Fallujah. The US simply waves away the international body as a minor nuisance while the media scrupulously omits any mention of the allegations from their coverage. 

Unfortunately Cheney, Rumsfeld and many others in the Bush Administration are old hands at terrorism dating back to their counterinsurgency projects in Nicaragua and El Salvador under the Reagan Administration.

We can assume that the order to use white phosphorous came straight from the office of Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. No one else could have issued that order, nor would they have risked their career by unilaterally using banned weapons when their use was entirely gratuitous.

These directives are consistent with other decisions attributed to the Bush Administration. Much like the authorizing of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison, the targeting of members of the press and the rehiring of members of Saddam's Secret Police to carry out their brutal activities under new leadership.

Rumsfeld and Cheney’s offices have always been the headwaters for most of the administration's treachery. White Phosphorous and Napalm simply adds depth to an already prodigious list of war crimes on the Bush Administrations resume'. 

They know that the threat of immolation serves as a powerful deterrent and fits seamlessly into their overarching scheme of rule through fear. Terror and deception are the rotating parts of the same axis and are the two imperatives of the Bush-Cheney Administrations foreign policy strategy. 

We have to wonder when that terror and deception will spill over to the American people.

If it hasn't already.

Tom Scott is Senior Investigative Reporter for Choice America Network.

He is a Vietnam Veteran.

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

The Internet's Future

Ownership:

 World leaders meet today to discuss regulation;

 US fighting to regain control of global network.

Censorship:

State power increasingly used to limit access;

 Dissenters beaten outside summit site  

Over the next three days a United Nations summit, in the unlikely setting of Tunisia, will attempt to thrash out the future of the Internet.

More than 40 world leaders, including Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, are set to attend, and the ownership of the World Wide Web itself is at stake. What the delegates won't discuss is the creeping spectre of censorship.

What began as a military research project at the Pentagon has exploded into the most powerful network in the world and an entity upon which the global economy increasingly relies. Its future character is now in question.

At present, the closest the Internet has to a governing body is an obscure American, non-profit corporation called Icann. This quasi-independent body has, for years, quietly regulated domain names and allocated addresses. But its lease is nearly up. And the world's rich and powerful will join battle for control of what they see as a gold mine.

The Bush administration wants Icann turned into a private corporation, on US soil and subject to US controls. Much of the rest of the world objects to that but the loudest opponents are countries with a history of censorship and repression, such as China and Iran. The likely balance of power in that struggle rests with the European Union, whose position is not clear.

The summit was originally conceived to address the digital divide - the gap between people who can get online and those, primarily in developing countries, who can't. Instead, it has been dominated by an argument over who controls the Internet. The decisions of Icann - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - may seem very technical, but that does not mean they don't have direct political repercussions. The unelected Californian corporation could, in theory, block access to entire country domain names (all sites ending in .co.uk, for example, could be taken offline). But the alternative to that so far benign hegemony could, its defenders argue, be much worse. The countries leading the calls for control of the Internet to be internationalized, under the aegis of the UN, are the same ones that have led the way in censoring their own citizens.

Remarkably, for a meeting called the World Summit on the Information Society, there will not be a single seminar or discussion panel held on freedom of expression. "The Internet is not just a technical issue," Julian Bein, of the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, told The Independent yesterday.

"How can countries like China, Iran and Cuba be discussing Internet governance?" Mr Bein asked. "It's not only China any more, this is a worldwide problem. Now every dictator or repressive regime in the world is attempting to control what their citizens can access."

The host of the summit, expected to attract 12,000 to 15,000 delegates and up to 50 world leaders, has hardly reassured those concerned that the spectre of censorship is being ignored.

Already, rights watchdogs say, both Tunisian and foreign reporters covering the summit have been harassed and beaten. Fears of a crackdown have led some civil society groups who plan to hold their own summit on the fringe of the gathering to conceal their plans.

At the weekend, a reporter with the French daily Libération, Christophe Boltanski, who had been investigating the recent beatings of human rights activists in Tunisia, was stabbed and kicked outside his hotel in Tunis. He was not seriously injured.

The Tunisia Monitoring Group has highlighted the cases of seven men now on a hunger strike in the country and estimates that about 500 more have been jailed for expressing opinions.

Robert Menard, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, has been banned from attending the summit. He said: "Banning the head of an organization that defends free expression from attending a summit about the information society is absurd and unacceptable."|

The exponential expansion of the Internet has been accompanied by staunch resistance from countries anxious to prevent their own people from getting greater access to information. In the two years since the last Internet summit, held in Geneva, the rise of filtering technology - deployed by states to control what they don't want people to see - has been dramatic and insidious.

Ben Edelman, an Internet researcher at Harvard University, says countries using blocking technologies have found they can cut off web content they dislike, while still obtaining the Internet's commercial benefits. "Go to, say, Thailand and request a banned site on politics or pornography. Thanks to blocking technologies like IP filtering, you probably won't get the web page you asked for," he said. "Neither will you get a warning saying 'This content is blocked.' Instead, your browser is likely to say ' host not found'. In fact things are just as the censors intended: the site is working fine, but you can't see it."

CONTACT:  www.cdt.org  TODAY!!!!!!

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Let’s not try to Shift the Blame

 Mr. President

By: Tom Scott

Mr. President George W. Bush is firing a parting shot at Iraq war critics as he heads to Asia with hopes of improving his image on the world stage.

Bush is stopping in Alaska and speaking to troops at Elmendorf Air Force Base during a refueling stop for Air Force One on the first leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.

As expected he will try once again to defend himself against Democrats' criticism that he manipulated intelligence and misled the American people about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction as he sought grounds to go to war against Saddam Hussein in 2003.

In a speech on Friday, Bush said his critics were "deeply irresponsible" and were making "false charges.

 Oh Really Mr. President?

Let’s stop and examine a few points for your consideration Mr. President.

Mr. Bush, you are the President and you and your senior advisors have a special obligation to describe accurately the national security threats facing the nation.

This special obligation derives in part from the nature of the subject. There is no decision that is more grave than sending our armed forces to battle. This special obligation also derives itself, in part, from the unique access that the President and his advisors have to classified information.

On matters of national security, only the President and his advisors have full access to the relevant classified information.

Members of Congress and the public see only a partial picture based on the information the President and his advisors decide to release.

Mr. President as you are very aware, serious questions have been raised regarding whether you and your Administration met this special obligation.

Numerous news reports and columns have questioned the accuracy of specific statements by you Mr. President and other of your Administration’s officials.

Your White House has maintained that any misstatements were “only a small part of an ‘overwhelming’ case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.”

But many of us that are paying attention Mr. President, have detected a pattern of consistent misrepresentation by you and your Administration.

Your attempted shifting of the blame to democrats bring us occasion for comprehensively assessing whether you and your senior advisors have presented accurate intelligence to the American public.

We want to examine a few of the statements from your top five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on the Iraq war including you Mr. President George Bush, your Vice President Richard Cheney, your Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, your Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and your former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who is now your new Secretary of State.