Here is the full text of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s speech following a vote that clears most major hurdles for the construction of a planned mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero:

by Mayor Michael Bloomberg

“We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We’ve come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever – this is the freest City in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.

Score one for Mayor Bloomberg. On second thought—score TEN!

This speech was eloquent, fair, scholarly, and open minded. It was in the moderate,  inclusive and forthright style of Barack Obama. That these grand words of peace and brotherhood came from the mouth of a Republican is, in this day and age, almost beyond belief. The Republican Party, which has become the party of bigotry, will be disowning the mayor when they read or hear these remarks.

Hats off to Mayor Bloomberg. He got it right! It should go a long way in toning down the vitriolic rhetoric coming from the so-called Christian patriots who don’t have a clue about the rule of law and the constitution.

“Our doors are open to everyone – everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants – by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life and it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.
“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.  ”Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue – and they were turned down.

“In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies – and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion – and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, (more…)

Audit: U.S. cannot account for $8.7B in Iraqi funds

Audit accuses Pentagon of lax oversight, weak controls over spending

By Tarek El-Tablawy

Associated Press

Published: Wednesday, July 28, 2010 12:32 a.m. MDT

BAGHDAD — A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.

The $8.7 billion in question was Iraqi money managed by the Pentagon, not part of the $53 billion that Congress has allocated for rebuilding. It’s cash that Iraq, which relies on volatile oil revenues to fuel its spending, can ill afford to lose.

“Iraq should take legal action to get back this huge amount of money,” said Sabah al-Saedi, chairman of the Parliamentary Integrity Committee. The money “should be spent for rebuilding the country and providing services for this poor nation.”

The report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction accused the Defense Department of lax oversight and weak controls, though not fraud.

The only surprise is that the public is being made vaguely aware of it. The Defense Department is managed just like Wall Street.

“The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss,” the audit said.

The Pentagon has repeatedly come under fire for apparent mismanagement of the reconstruction effort — as have Iraqi officials themselves.

Seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, electricity service is spotty, with generation capacity falling far short of demand. Fuel shortages are common and unemployment remains high, a testament to the country’s inability to create new jobs or attract foreign investors.

Complaints surfaced from the start of the war in 2003, when soldiers failed (more…)

(This report is taken from Huffington Post and was written by a representative of the legal group filing the suit, Loevy and Loevy out of Chicago.)

We are not sure why this has not appeared in the major news media yet. It is stunning news and its lack of national news coverage raises questions about its authenticity. Why would the national news not be covering this story? Instructions for access to the pdf’s of the complaint and ruling are listed at the end of the article.

Federal Judge Wayne R. Andersen issued a historic ruling Friday allowing a suit charging former Defense Secretary with authorizing torture.

Rumsfeld asked the court to dismiss the case because he is a high-placed governmental official and argued that he was immune from suit even for allegations of torture. Mr. Rumsfeld also argued that due to his position, the Constitution permitted him to order interrogation techniques that are widely considered by human rights experts to be torture. The Court rejected both of Rumsfeld’s arguments and held that high-placed placed cabinet officials can be held personally liable if they authorize the use of torture.

While many previous civil suit attempts to prosecute Bush-era cabinet officials for authorizing torture have failed, the suit brought by Chicago-based Loevy and Loevy Attorneys at Law, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel v. Donald Rumsfeld, United States of America and Unidentified Agents, will now proceed to discovery and (more…)

by Robert Parry

George W. Bush’s White House stage-managed the Justice Department’s approval of torture techniques by putting pliable lawyers in key jobs, guiding their opinions and punishing officials who wouldn’t go along, according to details contained in an internal report that recommended disciplinary action against two lawyers.

Though the recently released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concentrated on whether lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee deserved punishment for drafting and signing 2002 memos that permitted brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists, the report also revealed how the White House pulled the strings of Yoo, Bybee and others.

The report puts into sharper focus what former Vice President Dick Cheney meant when he told an ABC News interviewer on Feb. 14 that he has spoken out loudly against the Obama administration’s revised counter-terrorism policies to disrupt possible punishments of Yoo, Bybee and CIA interrogators.

America’s policy of torture under Bush, Cheney, etal, and possibly still continuing under Obama, is a moral disgrace, an outrage, disgusting. This is not the America that I grew up loving and admiring.

The Nuremberg Trials were a highlight of America’s calm justice that earned us respect around the world. The Bush-Cheney era has turned that upside down, a complete reversal from calm justice to that of paranoid injustice.

“I thought it was important for some senior person in the administration to stand up and defend those people who’d done what we asked them to do,” Cheney said.

A little-noticed subplot in the OPR’s 289-page report [1] was how the Bush administration got the legal opinions that it wanted from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the President and the Executive Branch on the limits of their legal powers.

An important first step for the White House was to make sure that the work on legal opinions regarding harsh interrogations was done by a lawyer like (more…)

by Ken Thomas and Dan Strumpf

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing tough questions in Congress, Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday that federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into the company’s safety problems and the Securities and Exchange Commission was probing what the automaker told investors.

Lawmakers pledged to ask executives about internal documents showing that Toyota visited with regulators who “laughed and rolled their eyes in disbelief” over safety claims.

The twin developments created new challenges for Toyota officials scheduled to testify at hearings Tuesday and Wednesday amid concerns that the company and federal regulators failed to take safety problems seriously. Congressional investigators are reviewing the Japanese automaker’s recall of 8.5 million vehicles since fall to deal with safety problems involving gas pedals, floor mats and brakes.

In a new filing with the SEC, Toyota said it received the grand jury request from the Southern District of New York on Feb. 8 and got the SEC requests Friday.

The investigations raised the possibility of hefty fines for the automaker or possible indictments against executives in the United States or even in Japan. The latter would require executives to be extradited to the U.S. to face trial.

This will be very interesting. What has been covered up? What will be revealed? Who will talk? Who will walk? Did the regulators do their job? Who received campaign cash from Toyota? Who didn’t?

“As a general matter, prosecutors will look at whether individuals may have violated the law and bring charges against them as individuals, rather than seeking to build a case against the corporation itself,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey who leads the government investigations and white collar criminal defense practice group with McCarter & English in Newark, N.J.

It wasn’t immediately clear what U.S. laws Toyota might have broken. A subpoena (more…)

Washington » Justice Department lawyers showed “poor judgment” but did not commit professional misconduct when they authorized CIA interrogators to use waterboarding and other harsh tactics at the height of the U.S. war on terrorism, an internal review released Friday found.

The decision closes the book on one of the major lingering investigations into the counterterrorism policies of George W. Bush’s administration. President Barack Obama campaigned on abolishing the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding and other tactics that he called torture, but he left open the question of whether anyone would be punished for authorizing such methods.

With this landmark ruling the Obama Justice Department will become known as the ‘No Justice Department.’

All the crimes that have been committed by the Bush Administration during the Iraq War, and there are plenty, have been buried. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Bush lawyers all go scot free.

America should hang its head in shame. It is not the America of truth and justice that we were taught as kids.That was all bravado. All an illusion. At Nuremburg we weren’t so great—just powerful.

Obama’s message of hope has become a message of Nope. A devastating disappointment.

An initial review by the Justice Department’s internal affairs unit found that former government lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo had committed professional misconduct, a conclusion that could have cost them their law licenses. But, underscoring just how controversial and legally thorny the memos have become, the Justice Department’s top career lawyer reviewed the matter and disagreed.

“This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda,” Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis wrote in a memo released Friday.

Margolis, the top nonpolitical Justice Department lawyer and a veteran of several administrations, called the legal memos “flawed” and said that, at every opportunity, they gave interrogators as much leeway as possible under U.S. torture laws. But he said Yoo and Bybee were not reckless and did not knowingly give incorrect advice, the standard for misconduct.

Lawyer, BYU alum

Jay Bybee, now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco, earned an undergraduate and law degrees from Brigham Young University. He served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chile.

Published on Sunday, February 7, 2010 by Toronto Sun/Canada

Wars Sending US into Ruin

by Eric Margolis

U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America’s economic health.

In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug – debt.

More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks.

Washington’s deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, to which the U.S. already owes $1.5 trillion. Debt service will cost $250 billion.

To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today.

Obama’s total military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret black programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan; 225,000 military “contractors” (mercenaries and workers); and veterans’ costs. Add $75 billion (nearly four times Canada’s total defence budget) for 16 intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far), will cost $200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and indirect expenses. Obama’s Afghan “surge” of 30,000 new troops will cost an additional $33 billion – more than Germany’s total defence budget.

No wonder U.S. defence stocks rose after Peace Laureate Obama’s (more…)

Published on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 by Salon.com

The Sanctity of Military Spending

by Glenn Greenwald

Administration officials announced last night [1] that the President, in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, will propose a multi-year freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs.  This is an “initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit,” officials told The New York Times.

But the freeze is more notable for what it excludes than what it includes.  For now, it does not include the largest domestic spending programs:  Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  And all “security-releated programs” are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid.  As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos.  What possible rationale is there for that?

The facts [2] about America’s bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known.  The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China.  Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously.  That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus (more…)

Published on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

by George Monbiot

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry [1] won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called “the supreme international crime”: the crime of aggression. [2]

But there’s a problem with official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their members and sets their terms of reference. It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury. As a senior judge told the Guardian in November [3]: “Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government wants. And actually, it’s the last thing the opposition wants either because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political pressure to explore the question of legality – they have not asked because they don’t want the answer.”

The Brits are more angry than the Americans over the illegal invasion of Iraq. Bush and Cheney are clearly more culpable than Blair, who was  just clay in the hands of Bush and Cheney. He was so love sick he couldn’t think straight. Oh, the glory of it all.

He thought, “It will be such an easy victory. We’ll be war heroes. The American people will love us for being their partners.”

No thought about legality. No thought about innocents being slaughtered. No thought about terrorists created. Just blood thirsty glory—-of course, at a distance. You won’t find Bush, Cheney, or Blair fighting any wars—-but hopefully they will worry the rest of their lives about being thrown in the brig.

Let the stench surround them the rest of their days.

Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry [4], led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”. Last month Lord Steyn, a former law lord, said that “in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal [5]“. In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was “a serious violation of international law and (more…)

by Carl Bildt,

Former Prime Minister of Sweden and current Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs

A decade and a half ago, when I was prime minister of Sweden, then-President Bill Clinton and I had the first e-mail exchange between heads of state. Already our two nations were at the forefront of the technological revolution about to transform our world.

We had just left an era in which communist dictatorships had tried to control fax machines and the Moscow phone directory was a closely held secret. Today, fax machines are definitely yesterday, and classical phone directories are more or less out of business.

Since that groundbreaking e-mail exchange we have seen the revolution in mobile communication coming out of Europe and the Internet revolution coming out of the United States transform the politics and economics of our world.

Today there are approximately 4 billion mobile phone users worldwide. The number of Internet users is approaching 2 billion. For several billion people, the village has become a truly global one.

This is another outstanding essay published by the Salt Lake Tribune. Today’s edition, January 26th, is full of valuable information. What a great service. Everyone in Utah should be subscribers and reading it from cover to cover daily.

What a sad turn of events that newspapers aren’t being read by the next generation. We need to change that. It is important for a functioning democratic government that the newspaper is being  read by a large segment of the population

Two decades ago a wall made of concrete, built to divide the free and unfree, was torn down.

Today it is the freedom of cyberspace (more…)

Washington » ABC News is reporting that some U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are using high-powered rifle sights containing coded references to New Testament passages, including these words attributed to Jesus in John 8:12: “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

G.I. Jesus? Imagine the uproar in Congress if it was reported that U.S. soldiers were using rifles encoded with references to the Koran. The Joint Chiefs would be falling over themselves to rid the military of the rifle sights and the Michigan contractor who produced them. Rush Limbaugh would be apoplectic. Glenn Beck would be weeping.

U.S. soldiers can scratch or paint whatever scripture references they like on their own weapons, but these U.S.-issue, Bible-cite sights (cleverly added to the serial numbers) would seem to violate U.S. military rules against proselytizing. Don’t they also violate the unconditionally loving spirit of the New Testament? I don’t think weapons of war were what the Prince of Peace (more…)

Published on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Harper’s Magazine

by Scott Horton

When a cover-up is exposed, nothing is more telling than the first reactions from those who are involved. Do they maintain their stories and face potentially aggravated consequences? Or do they simply remain silent? In making this choice, they often telegraph the depth of their anxiety and concern.

Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I focused on the first responses to “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides.’” Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the former commander at Camp America, had sent an email to the Associated Press, the text of which AP confirmed to me, in which he said he would have to get clearance from the Defense Department to speak, but then stated:

This blatant misrepresentation of the truth infuriates me. I don’t know who Sgt. Hickman is, but he is only trying to be a spotlight ranger. He knows nothing about what transpired in Camp 1, or our medical facility. I do, I was there.

This statement merits closer inspection. The first sentence is a classic nondenial denial. It appears on the surface to deny part of the account, but in fact denies nothing. Bumgarner needs to state specifically what allegations he considers inaccurate. His failure to do so is telling.

The key question is: Has the Obama Administration become complicit in the coverup?

There is little question that a massive coverup has taken place, and the fact that there is a coverup indicates foul play. The Bush Administration clearly condoned torture, and Cheney is damned proud of it. Sadly, much of America has been willing to turn a blind eye to it.  If America discovers that these ’suicides’ were actually murder (more…)

by Associated Press

Article and headline that was banner headline news in the Salt Lake Tribune, Monday, January 18, 2010

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti » Prayers of thanksgiving and cries for help rose from Haiti’s huddled homeless Sunday, the sixth day of an epic humanitarian crisis that was straining the world’s ability to respond and igniting flare-ups of violence amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince.

Haitian police struggled to scatter hundreds of stone-throwing looters in the city’s Vieux Marche, or Old Market. Elsewhere downtown, amid the smoke from bonfires burning uncollected bodies, gunfire rang out and bands of machete-wielding young men roamed the streets, faces hidden by bandanas.

A leading aid group complained of skewed priorities and a supply bottleneck at the U.S.-controlled airport. The general in charge said the U.S. military was “working aggressively” to speed up deliveries.

Beside the ruins of the Port-Au-Prince cathedral, where the sun streamed through the shattered stained glass, the priest told his flock at their first Sunday Mass since Tuesday’s earthquake, “We are in the hands of God now.”

In the midst of one of the world’s worst natural disasters there are still believers in a God who cares about us! How can that be? How is the human mind so nimble as to find God in the rubble? Many of those who survived are saying, “thanks be to God that I am still alive.’ They can’t help but look around and see the thousands upon thousands of dead bodies and the tons of rubble and yet, somehow think that God saved the ones who lived, which conversely means that God deliberately didn’t want the others to live.

What is it with this religion stuff that (more…)

Published on Monday, January 18, 2010 by ABC News

by Joseph Rhee, Tahman Bradley and Brian Ross

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.

This has apparently been going on for quite sometime, perhaps even before the Iraq War. Why is it just now coming to light? Who has known about this in the military and done nothing about it? Who has known about this in the previous and current administrations and done nothing about it? Thanks to ABC News for bringing it to light now. Big, huge kudos to ABC News. Any bets on how Fox News will treat this story? (More WC comments will attach at the end of the story.

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as “the light of the world.” John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the (more…)

by Jeremy Scahill

The Nation

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. “The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence,” said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. “Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?”

In December, the CIA announced that the agency had canceled its contract with Blackwater to work on the agency’s drone bombing campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said Director Leon Panetta ordered a review of all existing CIA contracts with Blackwater. “At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any CIA operations other than in a security or support role,” CIA spokesman George Little said December 11.

But Schakowsky said the fact that two Blackwater personnel were in such close proximity to the December 30 suicide bomber–an alleged double agent, who was reportedly meeting with CIA agents including the agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan when he blew himself up–shows how “deeply enmeshed” Blackwater remains in sensitive (more…)

by Kristen Moulton

Salt Lake Tribune

Utah’s top Roman Catholic leader joined a New York colleague Wednesday in launching a nationwide campaign urging Catholics to press for comprehensive immigration reform this year.

“We believe it is the most practical and humane solution,” said the Rev. John C. Wester, bishop of Salt Lake City’s diocese. “We say this has to be done.”

Utah activist Tony Yapias applauded the move and said he and other Latino leaders call on the Beehive State’s predominant faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to weigh in on immigration.

“For too long, they have stayed quiet,” said Yapias, who is LDS. “They have skirted around the issue without taking a position. If they believe this is a moral issue, they have a responsibility to have a position.”

A spokesman for the LDS Church did not return a phone call Wednesday evening seeking comment.

Wester, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration Committee, was joined in Wednesday’s telephone news conference by the Rev. Howard Hubbard, bishop of Albany, N.Y., and chairman of the U.S. bishops’ International Policy Committee.

Nuns in Cleveland and Philadelphia who work with immigrants also spoke of the imperative of American Catholics, whose heritage is rooted in immigration, to get behind reform (more…)

January 4, 2010

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NABLUS, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian security forces in the West Bank have stopped torturing Hamas prisoners, ending two years of systematic abuse, Hamas inmates said in jailhouse interviews.

The change in practice, said to have taken effect in October, was confirmed by a West Bank Hamas leader, human rights activists and the Palestinian prime minister. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said the decision to halt any abuse was part of an effort to make sure a future state is built on the right foundations.

This article fails to mention that the United States has been closely involved in the training of Palestinian security forces. This is a welcome change. Was Obama behind the policy change? If so, good on him.

Hamas legislators and human rights researchers said the worst behavior — prisoners beaten with clubs and cables; suspended from the ceiling while tied up in painful positions; and forced to stand for days — had ended.

But they said they still received sporadic reports of prisoners being slapped or forced to stand for several hours during interrogations. And security forces often arrest Hamas activists and hold them for lengthy periods without charge.

Mr. Fayyad confirmed a “dramatic change for the better” in West Bank prisons and said that 43 officers had been jailed, fired or demoted for abusing prisoners. In an interview, he denied that torture was ever official policy but acknowledged past “excesses” that he said stemmed from a flawed culture of revenge. He said interrogations could be done legally. “If that means we get less information, so be it,” he said.

Palestinian security forces under President Mahmoud Abbas, dominated by supporters of his Fatah movement, have been clamping down on Hamas in the West Bank since June 2007, when Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian leader. Since then, about 4,000 Hamas followers have been arrested in the West Bank, and 500 are in detention, according to Hamas. In Gaza, Hamas has rounded up hundreds of Fatah (more…)

Click here for the PDF version.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA  :

MEMORANDUM OPINION
GRANTING THE DEFENDANTS’ MOTION TO DISMISS THE INDICTMENT; DENYING AS MOOT THE GOVERNMENT’S MOTION TO DISMISS THE INDICTMENT AGAINST DEFENDANT SLATTEN WITHOUT PREJUDICE
[T]he basic purposes that lie behind the privilege against self-incrimination do not relate to protecting the innocent from conviction, but rather to preserving the integrity of a judicial system in which even the guilty are not to be convicted unless the prosecution
1
shoulder the entire load.

I. INTRODUCTION
The defendants have been charged with voluntary manslaughter and firearms violations arising out of a shooting that occurred in Baghdad, Iraq on (more…)

By Matthew D. LaPlante

The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune

He was a loving son. An Eagle Scout. A former Marine. A hardworking security guard.

But for the past nine months, Donald Ball has carried the burden of another description: Alleged killer.

No more.

A federal judge has ruled that all charges should be dismissed against the West Valley City man and four other former Blackwater security guards accused in the Sept. 16, 2007, killings of at least 14 unarmed civilians in Baghdad’s Nissoor Square.

But while the ruling will likely bring an end to a legal case that has inflamed tensions between the United States and Iraq and ignited debate over the role of private security contractors in U.S. war zones, it does not resolve the question of what happened in the busy traffic circle on that day.

The Blackwater group, the USA’s corporate mercenary, gets off free. And perhaps that’s just as well.  Why should those who tortured at Abu Ghraib be in jail and not Cheney? Why is Libby guilty and Cheney free?

Will the prosecutors who sabotaged the case (perhaps deliberately?) be subject (more…)

by Maureen Dowd

Columnist, The New York Times

It is the greatest example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

In a bit of unpoetic justice, Bob Gates helped create the mess in Afghanistan decades ago and now has to try to clean it up.

At the CIA in the ’80s, Gates conspired with Charlie Wilson and the Saudis to help the insurgents in Afghanistan turn back the occupation of a superpower.

Now he’s guiding the attempt of the occupying superpower to turn back the insurgents, some of whom are the same ones he armed to defeat the Soviet Union.

Trying to do a good thing that also seemed like a strategically brilliant thing — help the Afghan Davids repel the raw aggression of the Soviet Goliaths — we created the monsters that have come back to haunt us, and we learned how little control we have over history.

We trained a whole generation of jihadists and armed them. We paved the way for the Taliban takeover and the rise of Osama bin Laden. We created the Islamist power in the northwest frontier of Pakistan, swelled by millions of Afghan refugees.

We enabled the conditions for bin Laden’s safe haven. We contributed to the instability of Pakistan.

On a rainy day in Kabul last week, I watched Gates climb into the cockpit of a Soviet-era helicopter that Americans use to teach Afghans (more…)