While most people weren’t looking, America’s controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay turned ten years old a few weeks ago; for some reason, the President didn’t mention this during the State of the Union. I used the occasion of Guantanamo’s birthday party in Washington, D.C. to meet, and to arrange an interview with, retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, once the Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions, and now one of the most outspoken critics of our nation’s entire “indefinite detention” regime. The interview is here (and cross-posted at the talking dog blog.)
Col. Morris Davis (USAF, Ret.) is a professor at the Howard University School of Law. From 2005 until 2007, Col. Davis was the Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions. He resigned from that post in 2007 in protest of political interference in prosecutorial functions. He retired from active military service in 2008 and became the head of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division in the Congressional Research Service. He served in that post until January 2010, when he was terminated after publishing op-ed articles critical of Guantanamo and war on terror policies.
On January 12, 2012, I had the privilege of interviewing Col. Davis by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected by Col. Davis.
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Co. | Op-Ed
We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far: “Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff.”
When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile — but the smile didn’t last long. There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.
The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff — arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House. Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.
From beginning to end, Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was replete with delusion and falsifications. His promise of building an “America that lasts” was predicated on a sentimental, but utterly disingenuous notion of selfless teamwork. The invocation of American military “heroes” and their “achievements” during nine years of waging war on Iraq as an exemplar of how to salvage his nation from economic and social catastrophe was both sickening and laughable.
“These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America's Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations,” said Obama in praise of US troops fresh from their destruction in Iraq.
If that’s what Obama and the American people believe will resolve the deep-seated problems of American society then good luck to them in harbouring such crass delusions.
But what is sickening is how a truly gargantuan criminal war and blot on humanity is deified as a paragon of virtue to provide inspiration.
Incredibly, the day before Obama made is syrupy, American-pie paean, the world was reminded, in an oblique way, of the reality of what “American heroes” did to Iraq.
At the conclusion earlier this week of an American military court prosecution over the 2005 Haditha massacre in Iraq, none of the US Marines involved in the incident were found guilty of anything worse than “dereliction of duty”.
All but one of the eight “American heroes” was acquitted or had the charges dropped in spite of the fact that on 19 November 2005 the Marines led by Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich butchered 24 Iraqi civilians in the Western Iraqi city of Haditha. The victims included women and children, shot at close range in their beds as the US Marines ran amok in homes.
In a scene reprised elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan, the killers urinated on the mutilated bodies of their victims.
The “conclusion” of the American military court martial has sparked outrage across Iraq and the world. Here was a clear case of mass murder, and yet the American troops who committed this despicable crime walk free. The case is just one of countless others in which Iraqi civilians were shot or blown to pieces by American and NATO troops during nine years of illegal occupation. The Haditha trial is reminiscent of the British court martial over the killing of hotel worker Baha Moussa in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra; Moussa was beaten to death while in custody by British squaddies, all of whom were later cleared, despite patent evidence of cold-blooded murder.
If such cases of egregious war crimes can be committed with impunity, what chance is there for justice and truth in the plethora of other crimes committed by American, British and other Western troops and mercenaries in Iraq – the checkpoint shootings, other murderous house raids, helicopter and drone attacks on villages, the use of death squads?
After nine years of terrorizing a country that left more than one million dead and one-in-three children orphans, an American president refers glowingly to the army of criminal occupation as “heroes”. More disturbingly, the president seems to think, and wants the US public to think, that with that kind of American “achievement” and “courage” their country can overcome the moral and material meltdown that it faces.
That is tantamount to urinating on the public’s intelligence.
Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa correspondent
The Ayatollah ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was the work of the devil
Robert Fisk, Independent
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West's (or Israel's) forces attack.
Michael Ross is a former deep-cover officer with the Israel Secret Intelligence Service (Mossad).
National Post, 24 January 2012
I have to admit that the arrest of alleged spy Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle has made me somewhat nostalgic for the Cold War. Intelligence services of all stripes and nationalities practice the same expedient amorality in the name of national security, but there was a sense of higher duty that seemed to transcend the moral indefensibility of the profession itself. There was a time when spying was more a chess match than a fist-fight and the essence of espionage was like opening one of those Matryoshka dolls that progressively reveal another doll hidden within another doll and so on.
. . . . . . .
While I’m not “read-in” on the detailed circumstances of Sub-Lt. Delisle’s case, I can make a few guesses where things went wrong for the Russians based on what’s been reported in the media so far. No modern intelligence service operates out of an embassy any more. This anachronistic practice has gone the way of the Dodo and diplomatic cover is now considered useless. The counter-intelligence component of every domestic security service worth its salt (such as CSIS) knows all the personnel and everything that goes on in the Russian embassy in their country. Progressive thinking intelligence services have taken to setting up in commercial and non-governmental entities that have no official connection to their home state or nationality. All CSIS had to do was watch and listen to the staff at the Russian embassy to see with whom they have contact.
Phi Beta Iota: CIA does not do discomfort, nor does it have a clue how to do non-official cover (NOC) at scale. According to open sources, of the twenty-one cover companies it set up, twenty had to be closed as abject failures. There are singleton NOC officers that are spectacularly successful but all too often blown by lazy official cover officers who fail to do counter-surveillance–the best NOCs have learned not to do in country meetings. It is rather amusing to learn that the last two really rotten clandestine services are the Russians and their erstwhile counterparts, the Americans. As wags have long maintained about CIA, it does not live cover, it lives immunity (or obliviousness), and the only people it keeps secrets from are those in Congress.
Killing Obama – Andrew Adler in an Emotional Video Apology
Update: Atlanta Jewish Times Editor Andrew Adler – a Victim of Israeli Iran Threat Hype – Classic Game Theory Warfare on Steroids
Jim W. Dean
Veterans Today, 24 January 2012
Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasters got an exclusive interview with Andrew Adler, below. They are a long time non profit broadcast booster to the Atlanta faith community, providing a pooled resource platform. VT is happy to offer you a front row seat to hear his story.
What you are about to view is a classic broken man…with no acting going on. Those of us who have seen this numerous times, you can always tell. So I think now that we have a true blue believer here that got wound up a little too tight. More on that later.
Please pay close attention to the part where he let says that in an interview show he had with the Deputy Israeli General Consul for the Southeast, that he was upset by her description of the dire threat that Israel was living under…the 15,000 rockets.
This is pure Israeli-Iran threat hype, of course. It should be prosecutable under the Nuremberg precedents, ‘waging an offensive war’, and all of us here look forward to the day where we can watch the trials online.
We have written many times that Iran is of no offensive threat to the U.S. or Israel, with their military totally deployed in a defensive mode which it has to be from the threat of Israel’s Weapons of Mass Destruction umbrella.
Phi Beta Iota: Fascinating at multiple levels, including the exploration of current best-selling book in Israel, Israeli political crime families, and more.
