Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

INSIDE IRAQ Bush and Blair: Above the law?

Chomsky @ Brown University 4/20/10

Iraq and Afghanistan wars; where's the accountability?

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, in Washington, DC. Joining us now from Florida is Paul Craig Roberts. He was an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department under the Reagan administration. He was an associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. Welcome, Mr. Roberts. When President Obama decided not to prosecute, there were obviously a lot of considerations, both domestic politics and otherwise. But certainly one of the critical pieces of it, if you're going to prosecute, it seems to me that you start with the question of was the Iraq war illegal, was international law violated. And if in fact the Iraq war was waged on deliberate misinformation, it's hard to think of a crime that would be more serious than that. But if Obama were to open that can of worms that the Iraq war is illegal, then the continued occupation of Iraq's illegal, and it puts the entire US foreign policy in the region in a completely different light. So speak about President Obama, his view of the world as articulated in the campaign, this decision not to prosecute, and essentially not just continuing Bush policy in Iraq, but now we can see, more or less, a Bush policy in Afghanistan.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, ECONOMIST AND COLUMNIST: Yes. Well, I can't say why he made the decision he made. All I can say is that the consequence is that we now have a precedent that neither the president nor the vice president are subject to law, they're outside the law, they can violate the law with impunity. This is a [inaudible] development. I can't think of anything worse to happen to the United States than to establish legally that the rulers are not subject to law. The entire history of liberty in the Anglo-American world, it was to tie the rulers down and make them subject to law, to bring the king under the law. So now we've reversed this thousand-year struggle and we've made the rulers unaccountable to law. This is a terrible thing. I'm sure there are all kinds of political and other arguments made, all sorts of interest groups, but this is the outcome. But there was really no discussion of this. And what this shows is that the American people, the political people, the legal professions, that what was really at stake—they had no idea what was really at stake. And to say that some silly war, which actually probably was an act of treason, since it was apparently based on deception—. You know, the British right now are holding these inquiries. They already know that it was based on deception, and they're trying to find out how they can prevent that from happening in the future.

JAY: Part of what's come out early in the inquiry is that it was very clear that Blair and Bush had decided to invade Iraq as early, I believe, as 2002, and the idea that weapons of mass destruction would be more a rationale than an actual reason was clear as far back as 2002. But what do you make of the lack of American media coverage of the British inquiry?

ROBERTS: Well, what does the American media cover? If you're talking about the newspapers and the television, they don't cover anything. So we don't want the people to know that the war was contrived and that some other agenda was being served that we still have not been told. You know, we don't really know—the government's never told us why they invaded Iraq. They lied to us and said, oh, he has weapons of mass destruction, and yet the record is clear that the government [inaudible] did not have these weapons. This is a known fact now. We still don't know why they did it, and they're not going to tell us. And so probably if Obama was trying to gin up the war in Afghanistan, he doesn't want a lot of news coverage of the British inquiry into how Blair deceived his own cabinet in order to do Bush's bidding and provide cover for Bush's illegal war in Iraq.

JAY: How did you respond to President Obama's speech the other night on Afghanistan?

ROBERTS: Well, I didn't bother to listen to it. I mean, I already knew what he was going to do. [inaudible] interesting thing, because here we have millions of Americans, on that very day, lost their health insurance subsidies from COBRA [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985]. So all of a sudden, millions of Americans, no health coverage that day. Or 24 hours before, The Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement to the newspaper, listing all of the metro area foreclosures. In Michigan, 48 percent of the mortgages exceed the value of the homes. And yet Obama thinks we have money to escalate an eight-year-old war that serves no American purpose. You know, it's like the British ambassador Craig Murray said: what the war is about is protecting the pipeline route that the Americans wanted through Afghanistan so they could get the Central Asian gas out without it passing through Iran and Russia. So is this why we should be in Afghanistan? And how do we pay for this? Well, just the other day, Obie, the Democrat chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obie, says, "Oh, we're going to put an additional progressive income tax on every American earning more than $30,000 a year." So I call this trickle-up economics, where you tax the little guy and give it to [inaudible] companies and to the oil companies or the energy companies who would benefit from the pipeline.

JAY: But what do you make of the administration's argument that, one, al-Qaeda's a threat, a vital national security threat, and more than that—?

ROBERTS: That's a total lie.

JAY: And the other piece of it is the issue of dissolution of Pakistan. So what do you make of all that?

ROBERTS: Pakistan is falling apart because we forced our puppet government to attack its own people. All this stuff about al-Qaeda is a lie. It's a hoax.

JAY: Why? Why do you say so?

ROBERTS: Because it doesn't exist in any way that it means anything to us.

JAY: But what's the evidence for that? Because—.

ROBERTS: But what's the evidence that it means anything?

JAY: Well, the evidence—they say the evidence is 9/11, the attacks on the US embassies, and so on. There's certainly been attacks in Europe.

ROBERTS: Oh, you mean they object to our aggressive policies and our hegemony in their own lands. And if this organization exists, it's nothing to do with a state. It's nothing to do with Taliban. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. Pakistan is not al-Qaeda. The whole thing is some kind of a hoax. It's an excuse.

JAY: So what's the—so the real objective is pipelines.

ROBERTS: [inaudible] the 9/11 Commission report. We've had the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission, who apparently drafted the thing, he's written a book and said, you know, the military lied to us. People lied to us who were supposed to be helping us. We've had both cochairmen of the commission say the same thing. The 9/11 truth movement is very large. There are very many very distinguished, intelligent people—architects, engineers, scientists—and they point out all kinds of problems with this report. There's [inaudible] never been an examination. There was a political commission that was denied most of the relevant testimony and information according to their own chairman and legal counsel, and they produced a political document. We don't know what happened. I mean, people can say, "Oh, we believe this because the government did it," but it's the same government that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda connections when we know for a fact he didn't.

Judge Goldstone Defends Gaza Inquiry Alleging Israeli War Crimes

In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council held a one-day debate Tuesday on a recent inquiry finding Israel committed a number of war crimes in its assault on the Gaza Strip. The head of the inquiry, Judge Richard Goldstone, said all but one of the individual Israeli attacks examined by investigators had no military purpose.

Judge Richard Goldstone: “We detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks.”

Around 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, most of them civilians. Goldstone rejected Israel’s claim that it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza.

Judge Richard Goldstone: “If ‘infrastructure’ were to be understood in that way and become a justifiable military objective, it would completely subvert the whole purpose of international humanitarian law built up over the last hundred years and more. It would make civilians and civilian buildings justifiable targets. These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.”

Goldstone’s report also accuses Palestinian fighters of committing war crimes in firing rockets at nearby Israeli towns and urges both sides to conduct investigations or face prosecution by the International Criminal Court.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/30/headlines

Torture Investigation Gets Gonzo's Okay

It would seem that former Attorney General Gonzalez finally remembered something. He remembered the law and what a prosecutor is suppose to do when someone is suspected and accused of breaking it.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Cheney's Memoirs - a pop-up book for neo-cons

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I particularly love the statement made by John Dean at 3:12 "He (Cheney) is all but a self-confessed war criminal."

Spanish Court May Indict Bush Officials

From "Indict Bush Now.org":

The indictment and prosecution of Bush administration officials is becoming a reality.

"A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials," the Associated Press confirmed.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes are under scrutiny for sanctioning torture in violation of the Geneva conventions. Under Spanish law, the courts have jurisdiction to prosecute war criminals and torturers anywhere in the world. A judge has already called on prosecutors to review the charges.

Clearly, millions of people worldwide stand with the mission of IndictBushNow and all those who are fighting for accountability.

First, you go after the smaller fish. Then, the bigger fish are easier to nail!

The Old Bastard Squawks on, Cooking his Own Goose (part 6)

The Annotated Interview Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times

Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
Vice President's West Wing Office

Q You would disagree that policy on detainee treatment was made opaque enough that these abuses at Abu Ghraib were–
(WTF am I trying to say without saying it?)
-- obviously not directed from the top,
(No. Obviously not from the top… cuz then that would mean that you and the ‘Dee-cider’ made the wrong dee-cisions. Better to lay the blame on a handful of moronic, under-educated yokels who don’t know any better than to follow orders.)
but under pressure for more intelligence
(More pressure but NOT from the top, aheh-heh…, like we said. Gotta get more intelligence, better intelligence. )
-- were allowed -- not allowed, but basically
(Oh, cripes, I’m in deep doo-doo and you got the shovel. Eeep…)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Abu Ghraib, like I say, I don't think had anything to do with policy, as I understand it.
( I say, ‘I don’t think’ but actually you know, it’s more like ‘I think but don’t say’. And as I understand it, I can say whatever the fuck I want because you two dweebs ain’t gonna press me on anything. Otherwise I would never have set up this phoney-baloney Q&A session with your bosses.)
And the people that they were –
(We’ll call them ‘people’ for the sake of their mothers.)
the people that were subjected to abusive practices there
(Not torture or cruel and inhuman punishment – ‘abusive practices’.)
I don't think had any special intelligence understandings, or if you will, special intelligence information that we needed.
(But since we couldn’t torture the ‘special intelligence understandings’ out of them, who’s to say?)
I mean, this was not --
(Maybe I’d better not bring that up…)
as I say, I don't think it was related to policy.
(And as I say, I think my opinion is Law around here so if it were policy – or related to policy – than that policy is Law and therefore I can do whatever the fuck I want to do and not worry about trifles like ‘legality’.)
I think it was, in fact, a case of individual personnel
(Not even members of a group; just individuals in a military hive.)
who were perhaps not properly supervised.
(I’m banking on you being so stupid as to ignore what patent nonsense this is: improperly supervised, individualistic, military security personnel who were acting outside of the chain of command even though they were constantly monitored by the CIA and their own superior officers in direct contact with the Pentagon on an almost daily basis. To put it another way – everybody knew about it from top to bottom but it’s nobody’s fault. Nevertheless, we’ll blame the enlisted bastards. )
And I think the military deserves a lot of credit for the way they handled it because they're the ones that cleaned it up.
(Like they had any choice in the matter.)


Q Foreign perception of the United States as we've had to fight these dual wars,
(Forced upon us as they were by unfortunate unforeseen circumstances, our own righteous honor and sense of duty as the appointed guardians and saviors of the Free world compelled us to use military force. If only those ‘Foreigners’ would come to realize how much America sacrifices for the common good the weight that we’ve been ordained to bear would feel lighter. Sigh…)
can you talk -- what you think has happened?
(Oops, I dropped my syntax again and it’s shattered to smithereens.)
Why has America – the perception of America changed so much in the last eight years?
(After all, in your administration, we’ve invaded two separate sovereign nations under the flimsiest of pretenses which were supported by bold-faced lies, overthrown the respective governments, slaughtered tens of thousands, forced the displacement, starvation and destitution of hundreds of thousands, destroyed the lives of millions more. Why would they change their perception of us? )
And what do you think will happen over the next few years?
(Oh, Great and Knowledgeable OZ! [Stoop here to lick boot])

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, has the perception of America changed?
(Didn’t think I’d turn the question back on itself, now, did you? Oh… you expected that, eh? Right…)
I suppose it has in some quarters.
(The hind-most, heh-heh.)
I think that some of the things we had to do after 9/11
(We were forced by panic, fear and greed. We had no choice.)
to respond to it and to protect the nation against a further attack
(Since we hadn’t see 9/11 coming, we were flying blind in a shitstorm.)
clearly generated controversy in some quarters.
(Limp-dicked, bleeding-heart liberals. Always whining about civil rights and due process. Makes me sick.)
But what a lot of our friends overseas never really understood,
(Because so many of them cling hopelessly to a shared outmoded concept of international law.)
at least not initially,
(Not until we agreed to spread the profits around.)
was that 9/11 fundamentally changed the way we looked at this question of terror attacks.
(Since this is one of the lynch-pins of our over-arching rationalization of the horrific and unlawful things we’ve done, let me recite it chapter and verse. Ahem…)
Prior out-of-date 9/11,
(Say what?)
we looked upon terrorist incidents as a law enforcement problem.
(Got that?: international terrorists; Black September, Bader-Meinhoft, Hamas, the PLO, Hezbollah, the IRA, al Qaeda, etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_organization ; the Cole, the embassy bombings, the first WTC, the whole violent enchilada was left to the cops – not the Marines, or the Army or the Air Force, the Navy or the CIA . Can you swallow that?)
You go out and find the bad guy, try him and put him in jail.
(Simple as a Tom Mix movie.)
That's the way we dealt with the World Trade Center bombing in '93.
(Never mind all of the other governmental organizations (State Department, CIA, etc) that went into the tracking, arming and infiltration that went before and after the act and the apprehension of the perpetrators. This was strictly ‘Barney Miller/Joe Friday stuff. Try to keep in mind these two gross distortions of facts that we’ll distill into this little catch phrase, ‘cops & robbers’. Otherwise the next set of bull-shit will leave you in the dust and I hate to repeat myself. )
After 9/11, we made a decision, and I think it was exactly the right decision,
(Of course it was exactly the right decision because I made it. Ergo: it was the Right one.)
and that when you -- when these actions result in the deaths of 3,000 people here on the homeland,
(Again, who’s counting ? The real emotional hook is that it happened on our homeland! The one we stole from the red savages and the Mexicans.)
more than we'd ever before lost in this kind of incident, more than Pearl Harbor,
(Actually, 2,402 were killed and 1,282 were wounded in that ‘Day of Infamy’. So, the 9/11 attacks yielded a roughly similar level of death and mayhem. No need to quibble, though. Both were disastrous. We just don’t want to cloudy the murk with verifiable information when falsely aligning two completely dissimilar events.
The apples-to-oranges elephant that you’ll have to ignore in the room, is the fact that Japan, a sovereign, imperialistic nation, attacked colonial military installations and targets with its own imperial military forces under its national battle flag whereas, al Qaeda, which is not a sovereign country or governmental or diplomatic entity, hijacked 4 commercial airliners with a force of 19 civilians armed with box-cutters.
Are you keeping the ‘cops & robbers’ concept in mind? Now, we’ve juxtaposed the Pearl Harbor ‘meme’ with all its strong emotive qualities with the false comparison of that event to attacks on 9/11 to shut down logical thought completely. A skillful blend of ‘Does not compute’ and cynically manipulated cinematic patriotism. Here comes the kicker - )
then this was a strategic threat to the United States.
(There’s no need to justify, quantify or in any way substantiate or support this preposterous statement with fact or argument. If I say, it was a strategic threat, that’s just what it was. Even though, tragic as the loss of 3,000 people is, their loss and the destruction of property did not cripple the functioning of state, local or federal government, the economy, nor the preparedness of the national armed services. Americans were stunned – the whole world was shocked – but the loss of less than 3,000 people from a population of over 200,000,000 does not constitute a strategic threat. )
And when you view it in those terms,
(Which are in near total disregard to the facts...)
then we believed we were fully justified, and indeed obligated, to use all the resources at our command
(And many that were legally outside of our command…)
to defeat that enemy so that they couldn't do it again.
(Which on the face of it – apart from the byzantine illogical blend of sophistry, non sequitur and red herring - would seem a reasonable aim.)
And that means you're prepared to use military force,
(No need to justify this statement for the reasons cited above. But if you idiots had brain ‘One’ between you, you’d have asked yourselves: ‘Why would the 9/11 attacks mean we’d prepare to use military force to forestall subsequent attacks by an undetermined group or groups of expatriated, stateless militant radicals who have no central command, air or naval forces when obviously the attacks of 9/11 were not deterred by the mightiest, best equipped military juggernaut in human history.)
use your intelligence asset
(Military intelligence; the original oxymoron.)
to go after those who support terrorism financially,
(Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for example but never mind that or why two ill-advised and illegal invasions and two violent coup d’états were necessary to ‘go after those who support terrorism financially’.)
to go after those states that sponsor terror and provide sanctuary or safe harbor to terror. And that's what we did.
(Even though proof for such sponsorship by either Iraq or Afghanistan was tenuous at best at the times of the respective invasions.)
I think some of our friends overseas didn't agree with those policies.
(Most of the member countries of the United Nations, as a matter of fact.)
I think over time that has -- the situation has improved.
(But don’t quote me on that. I give two shits either way.)
And after people saw what happened here, but then saw what happened in London when the -- I guess the subways were bombed and buses and so forth,
(I wasn’t paying much attention to the internal security matters of our closest lap-dog... uh… ally. Of course, the bombings in July, 2005 were a direct response to Britain choice to go to war in Iraq.)
or what happened in Madrid, the train bombings,
(In 2004, also as a direct result of the Spanish joining the ‘Coalition of the willing’. After massive demonstrations against the ruling party, Spain withdrew from the coalition, so I’m really stretching the argument by referencing this.)
or more recently, what's happened in Mumbai,
(Though not on the same scale of any of the aforementioned attacks .)
that this kind of international terrorism is indeed a threat to those of us who lived in the developed world.
(Lived? Did I just let that slip? Lived?)
And tough, aggressive policy is what's required to succeed against it, and that's what we put in place.
(And if we get tough enough and aggressive enough with a large enough military force we could lock down the world and dare anybody to raise their head to protest. The fact that it hasn‘t worked so far should be proof that we aren’t tough or aggressive enough yet. Global gulags – that’s the answer; built by Halliburton.)
As I say, some of our friends weren't all that happy with it, but a lot of them were, in fact, and supported it.
(Our noble ‘Coalition of Patsies’)
And even as we went into Iraq, while some of our historic friends and allies criticized that, an awful lot –
(The pussies with their goofy ‘international law’ and stupid ‘multi-lateralism. Diplomacy is for the weak.)
for example, the NATO states, especially the new member states,
(The ones feeding at the trough of US ‘aid’ that we bought memberships for.)
sent troops to serve alongside our guys.
(Our guys. Oh, yeah, I guess there are girls there, too. Probably dykes, But that’s better than faggots, so far as I’m concerned.)
So I think it's evolved over time.
(From being a disaster in the making to a grade ‘A’ double-prime generational cluster-fuck.)
I think that it's less controversial now than it was,
(When we were still able to keep a tight lid on the whole mess.)
although there's still, obviously, controversy about things like Guantanamo and so forth.
(Silly, foreigners and their antiquated sense of morality and due process.)

End of part 6

Indict 'W' Now

Bush Guilty by His Own Admission of War Crimes

I'm not a big Olberman fan. But this 'Special Comment' is well worth watching.

Ask Eric Holder to Appoint a Special Prosecutor for Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, et alia

Copy this and email it the new Attorney General:
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Mr Eric Holder
Attorney General of the United States
950 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-001
Dear Eric Holder
As President Barack Obama took his oath of office on Tuesday, January 20, 2008, and assumed the total responsibilities of his high office, tackling the absolute mess left to him by his predecessor, George W. Bush got to fly out of town in style on Air Force One, never being held accountable for any potential and probable high crimes, misdemeanors, and misdeeds, during his two terms.
George W. Bush will now get to live a life of comfort, safety, and security, most probably believing he is beyond the reach of the law, having concealed his dastardly crimes by a long trail of deception, lies, and the deceptive use of his former high position as president.
Over 4,100 brave American soldiers, and over 1,000,000 innocent Iraqis, were killed in George W. Bush's war against Iraq on false pretenses, his big lies, which are unlawful deaths, each and every one, requiring that George W. Bush be indicted and prosecuted on murder and conspiracy to commit murder charges, as noted and carefully documented by former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder".
This is to implore you to indict, prosecute, and charge George W. Bush with one or more of four charges: conspiracy to commit crimes alleged in other counts; crimes against peace; war crimes; or crimes against humanity.
Specific charges include the murders of over 4,100 brave American soldiers, and over 1,000,000 innocent Iraqis, pursuing an aggressive war, the brutality of the invasion, occupation, and detention centers, and the use of illegal weapons.
Sincerely,
Reference:
1. It was not faulty intelligence, it was not an innocent blunder, it was not even self-defense, it was his deliberate big lies that took our deceived nation to war with Iraq on false pretenses. George W. Bush made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda and 9/11 in his diabolical orchestrated campaign of deception and lies on his path to war with Iraq, Link http://projects.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/
2. "The preferable venue for the prosecution of George W. Bush for murder and conspiracy to commit murder would be in the nation's capital, with the prosecutor being the Attorney General of the United States acting through his Department of Justice. This book, however, establishes jurisdiction for any state attorney general (or any district attorney in any county of a state) to bring murder and conspiracy charges against Bush for any soldiers from that state or county who lost their lives fighting Bush's war, which as you can see applies to every state in this nation", excerpt from "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder".
3. In October, 1946, the victorious Allies executed ten former Nazi leaders in Nuremberg following their trial for war crimes. Each defendant was charged with one or more of four charges: crimes against peace; war crimes; or crimes against humanity, United States Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson prosecuting, Link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSJcXPCxlzI