jimstaro's blog

26 People Arrested and Held in County Jail on Multiple Charges

21 November 2010 - Thousands Converge at the gates of Fort Benning for 20th Anniversary of November Vigil to Close the SOA

Nonviolent civil disobedience action followed by indiscriminate arrests and targeting of journalists. Among those arrested by Columbus police were three journalists, including a TV news crew from RT America and unrelated bystanders.

And it's is too bad this came from a Brit, bush is so arrogant and lacking in intelligence he would have thought England was a safe bet, he still thinks he's a great leader of the free world, to visit and add to his wealth. But it was the thoughts of millions around this planet, especially the International Lawyers who have been building cases now for years. There's enough, even though not a criminal inquiry nor about the U.S., in the Chilcot Iraq War Inquiry alone and still ongoing to hang that whole administration and anyone around them! Not to mention the other inquiries, Dutch etc., as well as the tons of evidence that have come out these years! Perp walks alone would have started the cleansing of what they did to the World community and minimized the blowback!

19 November 2010 - When a former Oklahoma Narcotics Bureau agent, Frank Reyes, pleaded guilty not long ago to running guns, it opened a window on the way Mexican drug cartels fill their arsenals.

The Americans buying guns for Mexican gangsters as part of Reyes' ring are a gamut of college students, jobless men, gun show employees, city workers — in short, the guy next door.

 

A victory for the rule of law

18 November 2010 - The verdict yesterday in the case of former Gitmo detainee Ahmed Ghailani, who stood accused of helping facilitate the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was a victory for the rule of law. Conservatives arguing that the trial was a failure because Ghaliani was acquitted on most of the charges are missing the point -- the integrity of American justice is more important than any single conviction, and, as it stands, Ghailani will very likely spend the rest of his life in prison for his crimes.

Well what do ya know, Justice {Civilian Courts} still works in the U.S.! Another of the Gitmo detainee's, only this one went to trial, was found that the U.S. Government didn't have much evidence of his guilt. Same for the hundreds let go after years being held and most likely tortured after the bush admin picked them off the streets or wherever and whisked them away to other countries prisons, so the U.S. could denie the torture, and to Guantanamo and held incommunicado from the outside world, human rights, defense of charges and any evidence of what they were charged with!

See we don't do that, certainly not for terror waged with death and destruction as well as now the World knowing we torture and hold others with no trials and miles from their Countries and Families!! Our society is geared to who's buying those we hire as we fear that word 'accountability', would mean the death of political opportunity for those hired reps to work for the wealthy and corporations while we whine about getting hand searched at airports {while our soldiers are getting killed and maimed, we also don't do 'sacrifice' even for the veterans}, seems many now are still seeking retaliation!

Accountability for Torture (in Britain)

November 16, 2010 - The contrast could not be more distressing.

START needs to be restarted, which was totally scrapped in the previous administration, and vigorously negotiated, with total common sense goals, to rid the planet of these Weapons of Total Mass Destruction!!

U.S., Kazakhstan complete secret transfer of nuclear materials

November 16, 2010 - Working under extraordinary secrecy, the U.S. and Kazakh governments in the past year have moved nuclear material that could have been used to make more than 770 bombs from a location feared vulnerable to terrorist attack to a new high-security facility.

In the largest such operation ever mounted, U.S. and Kazakh officials transferred 11 tons of highly enriched uranium and 3 tons of plutonium some 1,890 miles by rail and road across the Central Asian country.

Guantánamo payout deal is climax of years of denials of UK role in rendition

Analysis: Settlement means no more damaging documents or information will be released by the courts

16 November 2010 - The disclosure that UK citizens and residents incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay are to receive millions of pounds in compensation is the climax of years of official denials of Britain's role in the secret transfer of terror suspects to prisons where they risked being tortured – the CIA practice of "extraordinary rendition".

''These abuses occurred on European soil. We simply can't allow Europe to join the US in becoming an accountability-free zone.''

EU complicit in torture: report

November 17, 2010 - A LEADING human rights group has sharply criticised the European Union for failing to call to account member states, including Britain, for their complicity in the CIA's rendition and secret detention program.

The charge is made by Amnesty International ahead of an EU-US summit in Portugal on Saturday in a 53-page report, Open Secret, which, it says, contains evidence of European complicity in the program.

All the rendition victims interviewed by Amnesty say they were tortured or ill-treated in custody.
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Amnesty says EU 'failing' over CIA renditions

15 November 2010 - Amnesty International has accused the EU of failing to hold its members to account for their role in the detention of terrorism suspects by the CIA.

It calls for European governments to ensure justice for suspects who were interrogated under the programme known as extraordinary rendition.

Countries including Poland have been accused of hosting secret CIA prisons.

Many suspects are alleged to have been taken to other countries where they were tortured or disappeared.

Several European nations have been accused of co-operating by hosting secret CIA prisons or allowing CIA flights carrying the prisoners to use airports on their way to other countries.

Why this toadying to Bush the bungler?

{Lest we forget: George W. Bush is responsible for dragging us into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan}

15th November 2010 - As we mourned the dead of two world wars and more recent conflicts, our Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir David Richards said the ‘war on terror’ can never be won.

The best we can do is keep our Al Qaeda enemies at bay. We’ll be in Afghanistan (invaded in 2001) for the next five years, at least.

As for Iraq (invaded in 2003), that’s likely to remain a bloody mess into the foreseeable future.

Not to mention, of course, the ­everyday threat of terrorism in ­aviation, our transport systems and our cities.

Trying to hide our history by protecting elected or appointed government officials, and possibly even citizens, is not what a representative democracy should be. Doing so leads to being that which we condemn others for! History repeats if not learned and the rhetoric here lately, by certain groups, sounds like that from this same destructive time past!

Justice Department Censors Nazi-Hunting History

Archive FOIA request and lawsuit opens 45 redacted pages;
Breakdown of FOI system sparks leak of full 600-page report

Name of office head blanked out from text, also all "personal opinion" expressed;
Justice Department violates own Attorney General's directive on open government

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 331

Posted - November 13, 2010

More of what We Allowed to be Created, it's going to be a long couple of decades coming with tragic results on many levels! And the bush, in an interview this morning, said he's proud of what he left behind {Done in Our Names!}!

Why Iraqi Christians Are Running Scared — in Sweden

Nov. 13, 2010 - With numerous attacks against Iraq's Christians in recent weeks — including a Halloween day massacre in a Baghdad church, which left 52 dead — the country's religious minority fears for its survival within the boundaries of the Middle Eastern nation. Yet, a long way from their native land, many Iraqi Christians are also living in terror in a far more serene place: Stockholm.

America conducts subversive activities in friendly territories

13.11.2010 - The United States found itself embroiled in a major spy scandal. As many as five countries caught the Americans illegally spying on their citizens.

Nobody would think it was strange if we were talking about the citizens of Russia, China, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. With these five countries, everything is clear: U.S. officials constantly refer to them as those presenting threats to the national security. But this time the U.S. was caught by quite friendly countries of Northern Europe - Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.

He already did more damage in his term, along with his cronies, as to recruiting fighters in the fight to rid their countries of the occupying forces but he feels the need, apparently, to help recruit even more, coming under the banner of the feared al Qaeda, criminal international terrorist! The bush's work isn't done, oh 'bring 'em on' macho man others will fight!

Bush's admissions require investigation

12 November 2010 - So it's come to this.

Last week, I wrote about the mockery the Omar Khadr trial process has made of our commitment to international conventions and treaties.

This week we've been treated to the sight of a former United States president justifying his authorization of the use of torture on captured prisoners.

The show trial of Omar Khadr

MEPs pressing for Wikileaks Iraq torture follow-up at US summit

11 November 2010 - Euro-deputies on Thursday (11 November) called for a "transatlantic inquiry" into Iraqi torture cases described in US war logs published by Wikileaks and pressed EU leaders to follow up on the issue at a meeting with US President Barack Obama next week.

The European Parliament is "highly concerned over the recent serious allegations that torture has been condoned in Iraq" and demands an "independent transatlantic inquiry," a resolution adopted Thursday in the plenary reads. MEPs also call for this issue "to be raised in the context of the EU-US summit," which is set to take place on 20 November in Lisbon.

{Click on banner to view the trailer, film clips and more}

Veterans Day 2010: "Caring for the invisible wounds"

{This video is some twenty two minutes long so you might want to visit the stories at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and view each separately, links below, as you have the time}

November 10, 2010 - Don Bankosh stands next to the bathroom door in his bedroom and points to large holes he punched into it during a fit of rage several years ago.

He could have replaced the door. Instead, he keeps it damaged so he won't forget that day and others like it.

It is a daily reminder of his shame at that outburst, a warning to hold at bay the anger, fear, guilt and other effects of the post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, he acquired after nearly two decades as an Army helicopter medevac soldier rendering aid to casualties.

But we, veterans of other conflicts, do know at least one major reason, multiple tours. The others come from what they've lived through and until very recently the DoD, the previous administration, bush, and those congresses, republican, ignored. As well as the citizens of who refuse to pony up for the results of the wars they want and send us into.

Who We Now Shut Out

05 November 2010 - By definition, they’re the people nobody wants. Conflict, disaster, persecution and other crises uprooted about 43 million people from their homes last year. Many millions were displaced by conflicts directly linked to U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. But despite its historical promise of refuge to the world’s huddled masses, America keeps its humanitarian floodgates tightly guarded.

Recently, the Obama administration proposed an annual cap of 80,000 on refugees entering the U.S.—a generous number by international standards but a tiny fraction of the unrelenting wave of displacement.

UK troops tortured Iraqis 'systematically'

Nov 6, 2010 - Lawyers of over 200 Iraqi civilians have presented the High Court in London with “credible” evidence of their “systemic” torture and abuse by British forces.

The evidence showed that British troops tortured those incarcerated in "the UK's Abu Ghraib" by denying them food and water, depriving them of sleep and exposing them to mock executions at secret facilities, including one near Basra in southeastern Iraq.

The documents also revealed that prisoners were physically and sexually abused, kept in long-term solitary confinement, forced to kneel in painful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and subjected to electric shocks at the Basra facility run by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT) among others.

Nov 05, 2010 - He's accused of smuggling weapons from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and selling them to others here in the United States. On Friday, 33-year-old Navy SEAL Nicholas Bickle was ordered held without bail.

As Bickle's family and friends left his arraignment in federal court Friday, they refused to comment on the host of weapons charges the Coronado-based Navy SEAL now faces.

According to a criminal complaint, the active-duty special warfare operator smuggled in more than 100 firearms from Iraq and Afghanistan and conspired to sell them with two others -- Richard Paul, 34, of Colorado and Andrew Kaufman, 36, of Las Vegas.

 

The occupiers and the occupied, both theaters, within and regional!!

New generation of troops inherit long Afghan war

November 06, 2010 - The war is also being passed down among Afghan generations - most of whom have spent their entire lives watching their country engulfed in fighting that stretches back to the Soviet invasion in 1979

LANCE Cpl. Jacob Adams was in 5th grade math class when hijacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His parents took him out of school early that day.

Adams, 20, is now serving in a Marine battalion battling Taliban gunmen, many of whom were also just kids on Sept. 11, 2001. He’s part of a new generation of U.S. troops inheriting the wars spawned by the terror attacks.

Unanswered questions in 8-year Omar Khadr saga

{In this image released by the U.S. Defence Press Operations, Pentagone, on Oct. 31, 2010, shows a file photo of Canadian Omar Khadr constructing an IED (an improvised explosive device). Canadian extremist militant Omar Khadr was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Oct. 31, 2010, but only faces eight years under a plea deal. Courtesy U.S. Defence Operations/AFP/Getty Images}

Interrogation techniques at 'Britain's Abu Ghraib' revealed

Video showing brutal mistreatment is submitted during high court proceedings brought by former Iraqi inmates

5 November 2010 - Evidence of systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as the UK's Abu Ghraib emerged today during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was informed that there is evidence detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT).

November 5th 2010 - Maine Veterans for Peace kicked off their Maine Walk for Peace, Human Needs, and Veterans Care in Farmington on Tuesday.

Today, they made a stop in Bangor.

 

The VFP says the goal of their walk through the state is to bring light to the amount of money Mainers have put into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

They say that money could have been put to better use on the home front. {read rest}