U.S. Military, Mercenaries Torture Iraq Prisoners,” The Wisdom Fund, April 30, 2004.

“Dirty War: Our Monsters In Iraq,” The Wisdom Fund, November 18, 2005

["The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding," [McCain] told reporters at a campaign event. . . . Read more »

Trouble was, Bush-Cheney couldn’t even get someone they waterboarded six times a day for a month to “admit” that their allegations about Saddam and terrorists were true.

Why was getting those “admissions” so important to Bush-Cheney? more…

9-11 Mystery Solved - Italian president confirms it is Mosad and CIA  - Cossiga / Italy reports Read more »

And where are the world resources going: See here.

Chris Floyd

….Obama has not only decided to let the actual, ground-level waterboarders, wall-slammers and child torturers get off scot-free; he is also going to let the gilded creators and framers of the system live on untroubled in peace, prosperity and privilege. Obama’s chief gatekeeper and hatchet man, Rahm Emanuel, made this clear over the weekend, telling Beltway waterboy George Stephanopoulos: “But those who devised the [torture] policies – [Obama] believes that they were — should not be prosecuted either.”)

….Of course, the political imbroglio ignores the fact that Obama is absolutely obligated under the law to investigate and prosecute credible allegations of torture by government officials. Despite the deep, wise analysis of Rahm Emanuel, prosecuting torture is not a “decision” that Obama can make or not as he sees fit. It is a legal requirement under the UN Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed, thereby making it part of binding U.S. law. Read more…

By Phil Hazlewood
April 17, 2009 10:21pm

THE suspected Pakistani gunman on trial in India for last year’s Mumbai attacks wants to retract his confession, claiming it was extracted by torture.

….The lawyer said Mr Kasab claimed that the confession, made to a local magistrate while he was in police custody, was “extracted out of coercion and force and it was not a voluntary confession”.

He quoted Mr Kasab as claiming he had been “physically tortured”.

During Friday’s hearings Mr Kasab, identified by Indian authorities as a 21-year-old, claimed to be under the age of 18 and to apply to have his case transferred to a juvenile court.

Rejecting the application, the judge added: “In my considered opinion, the plea is frivolous and intended to delay the trial.”  Read more…

Watch video >here<.

Tom Engelhardt

April 08, 2009 “TomDispatch” – In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a “terminator,” back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet’s time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future machine war — of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape — are unforgettable.

Since then, as Hollywood’s special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don’t mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven’t waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines.  Read more…

The full disclosure of a confidential International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on CIA treatment of detainees confirms what PHR has been alleging for years. Health professionals violated their ethical duties by participating in the torture and abuse of detainees in US custody.

Also see: Doctor nominated for Nobel – Making a Mockery of Palestinian Suffering
Daughters and Sons of Palestine - The faces of Western Human Rights!

by Robert Parry

….By all accounts, Kristof is a well-meaning journalist who travels to dangerous parts of the world, like Darfur, to report on human rights crimes. However, he also could be a case study of what’s wrong with American journalism.

While Kristof writes movingly about atrocities that can be blamed on Third World despots like Bashir, he won’t hold U.S. officials to the same standards. Read more…

Once again confirming that Israel, “the Middle East’s only democracy”, can get away with anything, especially murder.

Read article.

Press TV reports that Interpol has issued arrest warrants for 15 Israelis.

At a news briefing on Sunday, Tehran’s Public Prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, said that Iran had referred the case to the organization, known as Interpol, drawing on the Interpol charter and Israel’s violation of the Geneva Conventions. “ICPO has notified governments of 180 countries to arrest the suspects,” who were involved in the 23-day Israeli offensive on Gaza in December and January he said.

…. Mortazavi said the charges included war crimes, invasion, occupation, genocide and crimes against humanity.

The 15 Israelis are:

1 Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
2 Defense Minister Ehud Barak
3 Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni
4 Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi
5 Commander in Chief of the Israeli Air Force Ido Nehoshtan
6 Commander of the Gaza war — Operation Cast Lead — Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant
7 Head of Military Intelligence Directorate Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin
8 Commander of Battalion 13 in the Golani Brigade Lt. Col. Oren Cohen
9 Deputy to the Givati Brigade Col. Ron Ashrov
10 Commander of the Israel Paratroopers’ Brigade in Gaza Col. Hertzi Halevy
11 Commander of 401st Armored Corps Brigade convoy Col. Yigal Slovik
12 Commander of the 101st Battalion in the Paratrooper Brigade Lt. Col. Avi Blot
13 Lt. Col. Yoav Mordechai, who served as a commander of the Golani infantry brigade’s 13th Battalion in Gaza
14 Givati squad commander Col. Tomer Tsiter
15 Brigade commander in Battalion 51 Col. Avi Peled

Currently no notice or news of this could be found at the Interpol website.

UPDATE: In a web press statement issued this morning (3 March), Interpol said:

“INTERPOL has neither been requested to issue by Iran, nor has it issued on behalf of Iran or any of its 187 member countries any Red Notices for persons wanted internationally or other requests seeking the arrest of senior Israeli officials for alleged war crimes in relation to the Gaza offensive in December and January.”

Scott Horton, Harper’s

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story….

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.  Read more…

The Forgotten Terrorist Attack
by Jeff Archer

….On the morning of February 14, 1991, when I turned the TV on to see the latest lies being told to the public about the U.S. bombing of Iraq, I saw a chaotic situation in Baghdad. The Amiryah bomb shelter had just been struck by two 2,000-pound superbombs. Information was sketchy, but it was evident that many people lost their lives. Read more »

from Abiding In Bolivia

Bolivians have not forgotten. Government Minister Alfredo Rada has opened the Ministry’s basement to fact finding excavation. These rooms were used during the US backed dictatorships of the 1960s, 70s and 80s to torture prisoners and political opponents. Torture is a crime which cannot be buried.

Update: Memory in Latin America was already on this story.

Below is a documentary as relevant today as when it was made in 1997 on Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch who had his own run in with the Hugo Banzer dictatorship as a Catholic missionary.

Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins

For the past several weeks, dozens of family members have been reaching out to the Iraqi government in a fragile gesture meant to save the lives of their sons. In January 2009, Saudi courts convicted 25 young Iraqi men of trespassing into Saudi Arabia. Their punishment: beheading. Among the Iraqi prisoners are at least several men suffering from tuberculosis, all of whom are being denied medical attention by the Saudi judiciary. Read more>>

US and its allies human rights and democracy are like prostitutes for them. They use them when they need. Otherwise, you hear a deafning silence when their allies are responsible for crimes against humanity.

Matthew Taylor, The Guardian
4 February 2009

….Yesterday members of the joint committee on human rights (JCHR) heard that British officials put pressure on the Pakistani authorities to get information and “knew very well” they were using torture during their investigations.

Ali Dayan Hasan, from Human Rights Watch, said: “Pakistani government officials and security officials in particular were very open about this. In many private conversations they have told me they were asked to do this by the UK - this is what they say, not once but repeatedly.”  Read more…

by Fareena Alam, Press TV, London

With more and more evidence that Israel may have committed war crimes and contravened the Geneva Convention during its recent 3-week assault on Gaza, concern is also brewing over whether any British subjects were involved  Read more…