Here is a summary of developments and news over the last six months. You can get a quick overview from the higlighted headlines by scrolling down the page.
The bad news dominates, as usual. But here’s some good news: we can bring our convictions to bear on the world. How? For some suggestions, see A Portal to Activism.
For starters, this old alarum provides context for the story that follows it:
Greased for Rapid Release
Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark
February 16, 2004
Highlight:
… the president’s supporting command system is not actually geared to withhold retaliation in the event of enemy missile attack, real or apparent. It is so greased for the rapid release of U.S. missiles forces by the thousands upon the receipt of attack indications from early warning satellites and ground radar that the president’s options are not all created equal. The bias in favor of launch on electronic warning is so powerful that it would take enormously more presidential will to withhold an attack than to authorize it. The option to “ride out” the onslaught and then take stock of the proper course of action exists only on paper. That is what presidents never learn during their tenures. Their real control is illusory. What’s more, the truth has been kept from the presidents intentionally.
Bruce G. Blair, Ph.D, president of the Center for Defense Information, and former ICBM launch control officer.
This is the story to which the item above gives context:
Panel Cites Drop in U.S. Attention to Nuclear Arsenal
B-52’s 2007 Flight With Warheads Prompted Review
by Walter Pincus
Washington Post
February 13, 2008
The Defense Department is displaying a “precipitous decrease in attention” to the security and control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, according to a Defense Science Board task force that examined the broader causes behind the U.S. flight in August of a B-52 bomber that inadvertently carried six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads.
“The decline in DoD focus has been more pronounced than realized and too extreme to be acceptable,” the task force said in a report released yesterday by its chairman, retired Air Force Gen. Larry D. Welch, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
And now, survival versus doom highlights of the last six months (posted retroactively).
Planetary Prospects To Tank by 2012?
May 11, 2008
Who says so? It’s not religious prophets. It’s a scientist, specifically Rajendra Pachauri, “who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): ‘If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.’”
Will Earth remain “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted”? According to NASA’s Jim Hansen, perhaps America’s foremost climatolagist, only if CO2 is reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm before the onset of multiple “tipping points” such as the melting of Arctic ice (which is on the point of happening), the liberation of subterranean methane as the Siberian permafrost melts (which seems to have begun), and so forth. Read Bill McKibben’s article on this here.
A Breath of Fresh Air
Obama becomes presumptive Democratic nominee
May 6, 2008
Is the US at war with Iran?
Secret Bush “Finding” Widens War on Iran
By Andrew Cockburn
May 2, 2008
Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, “unprecedented in its scope.”
Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups.
Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or “army of god,” the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border — whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother in law’s throat.
Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi arabs of south west Iran. Further afield, operations against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.
All this costs money, which in turn must be authorized by Congress, or at least a by few witting members of the intelligence committees. That has not proved a problem. An initial outlay of $300 million to finance implementation of the finding has been swiftly approved with bipartisan support, apparently regardless of the unpopularity of the current war and the perilous condition of the U.S. economy.
Until recently, the administration faced a serious obstacle to action against Iran in the form of Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon, who made no secret of his contempt for official determination to take us to war. In a widely publicized incident last January, Iranian patrol boats approached a U.S. ship in what the Pentagon described as a “taunting” manner. According to Centcom staff officers, the American commander on the spot was about to open fire. At that point, the U.S. was close to war. He desisted only when Fallon personally and explicitly ordered him not to shoot. The White House, according to the staff officers, was “absolutely furious” with Fallon for defusing the incident.
Fallon has since departed. His abrupt resignation in early March followed the publication of his unvarnished views on our policy of confrontation with Iran, something that is unlikely to happen to his replacement, George Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus.
Read the full article here.
News blackout of Bush approval of torture (April 14, 2008)
There was no mention of Bush’s admission in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. There was nothing on the major wire services. And nothing on CNN, CBS or NBC.
BUSH APPROVES TORTURE
ABC News
President Says He Knew His Senior Advisers Discussed Tough Interrogation Methods
By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
April 11, 2008
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
“Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people.” Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.
The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
TOP BUSH AVISORS APPROVED TORTURE
ABC News
Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’
Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects
By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
April 9, 2008
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding….
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.
House Democrats reject telecom amnesty, warrantless surveillance
March 14, 2008
After not merely acceding to, but actively enabling, the crimes of the Bush administration for over a year, the Democratic congress took a significant step in opposition by denying retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecommunications megacorporations and refusing to legalize warrantless surveillance. The significance of this legislative upset? In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey stated that then Attorney General Ashcroft had concluded that the NSA program of warrantless spying on Americans was illegal; that the White House nevertheless continued with the program anyway; and that Comey, Attorney General Ashcroft, the head of the FBI (Robert Mueller) and several other DOJ officials therefore threatened to resign. In other words, the program was so outrageous that even these arch facilitators of Administration policy threatened to resign unless it was curtailled. Had the telecom companies been granted immunity, as the Democratic leadership, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, originally were doing their best to engineer, the particulars of the domestic spying program, which are still unknown, would never come to light (through the lawsuits that are being brought against the telecoms). Now these lawsuits are proceeding. (And the warrantless spying on Americans carried out in this program has not been legalized, as the legislation also called for.)
Study Finds Over 100 Harmful Contaminants In Maine Bird Eggs
Rachel’s News
Environmental Research Foundation
March 13, 2008
GORHAM — The BioDiversity Research Institute this week released the report in early March:
Flame retardants (PBDEs), industrial stain and water repellents (PFCs), transformer coolants (PCBs), pesticides (OCs) and mercury were found in all 23 species of birds tested. The bird species were studied in a variety of habitats, including on Maine’s ocean, salt marshes, rivers, lakes and uplands.
FALLON RESIGNS
On c. March 12, The top US commander in the Middle East Admiral William Fallon resigned, later to be replaced by General David Petraeus, whom Admiral Fallon had reportedly described as “an ass-kissing little chickenshit.” Fallon was an implacable foe of plans to make war on Iran, saying it “isn’t going to happen on my watch.”
Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say
From the Washington Post, March 10, 2008:
The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.
GLOBAL WATER SHORTAGE PERMANENT––
––WATER BEING PRIVATISED
Blue Covenant: Maude Barlow on the Global Movement for Water Justice
February 27, 2008
The entire interview is must reading. Here is the first part of it:
MAUDE BARLOW: This notion that we’ll have water forever is wrong. California is running out. It’s got twenty-some years of water. New Mexico has got ten, although they’re building golf courses as fast as they can, so maybe they can whittle that down to five. …
You know those movies where there’s the comet coming at the earth, and all of a sudden the governments of the world say, “Gee, we’re not—our differences aren’t so big anymore, because we’re about to all die”? That’s really where we are. There is a comet coming at us. It’s called water shortage….
There are private corporate interests that have decided that water is going to be put on the open market for sale. It’s going to be commodified and treated as any other saleable good….
MAUDE BARLOW: ….Very simply, …the story is that as we have polluted the world’s surface water, we are taking water from the ground, from ground water or from wilderness or from watersheds, and we’re moving it where we want it to be, so to water great big huge cities that then dump it into the ocean, so don’t return it to the watershed, or we pave over what’s called water-retentive lands, so we don’t have the hydrologic cycle able to fulfill its responsibility and bring water back. We’re doing something called virtual water trade, which is where we use our water to grow or produce something that then is exported. In the United States, you export a third of your water, domestic water, every day out of the United States in terms of these exports. You don’t have enough water to do that. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Who exports it?
MAUDE BARLOW: Mainly large agribusiness. …
Well, basically, if there was lots of water, it wouldn’t matter, I suppose, if some people were getting wealthy from it. But the fact is that we’re living in a world of diminishing water. We’re actually running out. And I want to make this point so clearly. And you’re running out in many parts of the United States. It is not cyclical drought. This is the end of water in many parts of the world unless we change our behavior.
….The Colorado is in “catastrophic decline”—is the language of one scientist. And we need to understand this isn’t cyclical drought.
So if this is the case—and it is the case—then the question of who owns and controls water is very important. Who’s going to make the decisions around water in the future? And what’s happened is that a large number corporations are now coming into the field saying—actually creating a kind of global water cartel, just as there exists for energy now, a cartel of corporations that control every drop of oil before it’s taken out of the ground. These companies are either big utility companies, like Veolia and Suez from Europe, that run municipal water systems on a for-profit system, and in the third world they deny millions of people who can’t afford it.
There’s also bottled water. We put something like fifty billion gallons of water in plastic bottles around the world last year, dumping those bottles everywhere.
AMY GOODMAN: That they’re not biodegradable.
MAUDE BARLOW: Mostly not biodegradable. About 95 percent of them don’t get recycled. But the newest corporate player on the block is the whole water reuse and recycling industry. And this is—the biggest water company in the world is probably General Electric now. Who knew, right? Dow Chemical—
AMY GOODMAN: General Electric, which owns NBC.
MAUDE BARLOW: Which owns—yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Among many other companies.
MAUDE BARLOW: And is now getting heavy-duty into the water recycling industry. Now, let me be very clear, there’s a very important place for water recycling, of course. And we’ve got to—
AMY GOODMAN: What is water recycling?
MAUDE BARLOW: Water recycling is either toilet-to-tap recycling of water or there’s now—or desalination. There’s many forms water recycling, and it’s the big industry. It’s the fastest-growing part of the water industry. And this is the cleanup of dirty water.
And my concern—and the more research I did on this, the more concerned I got—was that this government, in particular, the United States, but many governments, are putting all their water eggs in the basket of cleaning up dirty water, instead of conservation, instead of protecting water at its source. What they’re coming at—the way they’re coming at it now is to clean up water after it’s been polluted. And there’s huge amounts of money to be made. And my concern is, who’s going to control that? Who’s going to own the water itself? If Coca-Cola can own the water it sells you, why wouldn’t General Electric or Suez be able to say, “Well, we own the water that we cleaned up, and we will decide how much money we make, and we will decide how much—who gets it and who’s not going to get it”? So it’s very much an issue of control, and also control about regulation at the other end….
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Maude Barlow. Her latest book is called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. So you’re describing the water hunters. You also talk about the water warriors.
Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean
By Martin Redfern, February 24, 2008
Rothera Research Station, Antarctica
UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica.
If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level.
The new evidence comes from a group of glaciers covering an area the size of Texas, in a remote and seldom visited part of West Antarctica.
The “rivers of ice” have surged sharply in speed towards the ocean.
David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, explained: “It has been called the weak underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the reason for that is that this is the area where the bed beneath the ice sheet dips down steepest towards the interior….
The Guantanamo Trials
Gitmo Charges: Why Now? And What About the Torture?
by Andy Worthington, February 13, 2008
Finally, then, nearly six and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has charged six Guantánamo detainees with, among other things, terrorism, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, and conspiracy – adding, for good measure, that it will seek the death penalty….
Described by former military defense lawyer Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift as fatally flawed because they included “no right to habeas corpus, no attorney-client privilege, forced guilty pleas for charges never made public, secret and coerced evidence, juries and presiding officers picked by executive fiat, [and] clients represented even if they declined legal counsel,” the commission process was supposedly cleaned up during the passage of the MCA, so that prosecutors are prevented from using secret evidence or evidence obtained through torture (although the use of information obtained through “controversial forms of coercion” – torture, perhaps, by any other name – remains at the discretion of the government-appointed military judge), but they have failed, to date, to secure a single significant victory.
As Time magazine revealed in an interrogation log (.pdf) made available in 2005, Qahtani was interrogated for 20 hours a day over a 50-day period in late 2002 and early 2003, when he was also subjected to extreme sexual humiliation (including being smeared with fake menstrual blood by a female interrogator), threatened by a dog, strip-searched and made to stand naked, and made to bark like a dog and growl at pictures of terrorists. On one occasion he was subjected to a “fake rendition,” in which he was tranquilized, flown off the island, revived, flown back to Guantánamo, and told that he was in a country that allowed torture.
In addition, as I explain in my book The Guantánamo Files, “The sessions were so intense that the interrogators worried that the cumulative lack of sleep and constant interrogation posed a risk to his health. Medical staff checked his health frequently – sometimes as often as three times a day – and on one occasion, in early December, the punishing routine was suspended for a day when, as a result of refusing to drink, he became seriously dehydrated and his heart rate dropped to 35 beats a minute. While a doctor came to see him in the booth, however, loud music was played to prevent him from sleeping.”
Scientists Identify ‘Tipping Points’ of Climate Change
By Steve Connor
The Independent (UK)
February 5, 2008
Nine ways in which the Earth could be tipped into a potentially dangerous state that could last for many centuries have been identified by scientists investigating how quickly global warming could run out of control.0205 09
A major international investigation by dozens of leading climate scientists has found that the “tipping points” for all nine scenarios - such as the melting of the Arctic sea ice or the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest - could occur within the next 100 years.
The scientists warn that climate change is likely to result in sudden and dramatic changes to some of the major geophysical elements of the Earth if global average temperatures continue to rise as a result of the predicted increase in emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.
Most and probably all of the nine scenarios are likely to be irreversible on a human timescale once they pass a certain threshold of change, and the widespread effects of the transition to the new state will be felt for generations to come, the scientists said.
“Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic [man-made] climate change,” they report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study came out of a 2005 meeting of 36 leading climate scientists who drew on the expertise of a further 52 specialists. It is believed to be the first time that scientists have attempted to assess the risks of what they have termed “tipping elements” in the Earth’s climate system.
The nine elements range from the melting of polar ice sheets to the collapse of the Indian and West African monsoons. The effects of the changes could be equally varied, from a dramatic rise in sea levels that flood coastal regions to widespread crop failures and famine. Some of the tipping points may be close at hand, such as the point at which the disappearance of the summer sea ice in the Arctic becomes inevitable, whereas others, such as the tipping point for the destruction of northern boreal forests, may take several more decades to be reached.
While scenarios such as the collapse of the Indian monsoon could occur within a few years, others, such as the melting of the Greenland ice cap or the West Antarctic ice sheet, may take several centuries to complete. “Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point in this century under human-induced climate change,” said Professor Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia, who led the study.
A tipping point is defined as the point where a small increase in temperature or other change in the climate could trigger a disproportionately larger change in the future. Although there are many potential tipping points that could occur this century, it is still possible to avoid them with cuts in greenhouse gases, said Professor Lenton.
He added: “But we should be prepared to adapt … and to design an early-warning system that alerts us to them in time.”
Irreversible changes
* Arctic sea ice: some scientists believe that the tipping point for the total loss of summer sea ice is imminent.
* Greenland ice sheet: total melting could take 300 years or more but the tipping point that could see irreversible change might occur within 50 years.
* West Antarctic ice sheet: scientists believe it could unexpectedly collapse if it slips into the sea at its warming edges.
* Gulf Stream: few scientists believe it could be switched off completely this century but its collapse is a possibility.
* El Niño: the southern Pacific current may be affected by warmer seas, resulting in far-reaching climate change.
* Indian monsoon: relies on temperature difference between land and sea, which could be tipped off-balance by pollutants that cause localised cooling.
* West African monsoon: in the past it has changed, causing the greening of the Sahara, but in the future it could cause droughts.
* Amazon rainforest: a warmer world and further deforestation may cause a collapse of the rain supporting this ecosystem.
* Boreal forests: cold-adapted trees of Siberia and Canada are dying as temperatures rise.
© 2008 The Independent
One of the biggest airstrikes of the war
MSNBC
U.S. warplanes flatten ‘safe havens’ in Iraq
c. January 11, 2008
BAGHDAD - U.S. bombers and jet fighters unleashed 40,000 pounds of explosives on the southern outskirts of Baghdad within 10 minutes Thursday in one of the biggest airstrikes of the war, flattening what the military called safe havens for al-Qaida in Iraq.
In an article in The Nation on January 10, 2008, Tom Hayden noted that, according to a pro-war op-ed piece in the New York Times, the number of Iraqis in prison doubled in 2007, and the number of US air strikes increased seven-fold.
The most significant and underreported political fact in the United States
The bipartisan consensus on U.S. military spending
by Glenn Greenwald
January 2, 2008
Global Security has taken the Fiscal Year 2008 U.S. budget and prepared a new chart illustrating the most significant and under-discussed political fact in the United States, one that substantially affects every other issue:
Our military spending exceeds the rest of the world’s spending combined, and we spend almost 10 times what the second-place country, China, spends. “Only” about $150 billion of the total U.S. amount is attributable to the two active wars we’re fighting, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, even if one wants to excludes those amounts, the basic picture remains the same. Nor do these amounts include the billions of dollars in military aid we give to fund the armies of other countries, such as Israel and Egypt, which alone comprise substantial portions of those countries’ defense budgets….
The complete absurdity of this state of affairs is self-evident…
In indisputable sum, we are the world’s empire, in a state of permanent war readiness. In American politics and policy, there is no distinction between “peacetime” and “war.” We’re the most militarized country in the world by far, on permanent war footing, far beyond what anyone could ever remotely argue is necessary for “defense” or a “strong defense,” no matter how broad a definition one wants to adopt for those terms.
Our permanent war culture not only means that we fight far more wars than anyone else, with far less of a threat required to trigger such wars, though that is true. It is also the case that the opportunity costs for this state of affairs are enormous….
See Greenwald’s blog post (linked above) for revelatory charts illustrating the facts cited, and the near doubling of the military budget over the last ten years. And there’s this related fact from Flying Potlatch by Werther (December 29, 2007)
Does one American in a thousand know that the Federal government is buying 23 VIP helicopters, each one of which will cost more than the extravagantly expensive F-22 fighter aircraft? A half-billion dollar helicopter – a half billion dollars each! – to ferry political hacks to their campaign events?
If the reader was unaware of that fact, we welcome him to Washington. The helicopter in question, the VH-71, is the government’s planned replacement for its current allegedly deficient presidential helicopter fleet. (One might well ask why even an elected monarch like the U.S. president needs twenty-three helicopters.
US in lowest category for privacy rights
Glenn Greenwald (December 30, 2007) comments:
the annual survey of worldwide privacy rights conducted by Privacy International and EPIC has been released for 2007, and the U.S. has been downgraded from “Extensive Surveillance Society” to “Endemic Surveillance Society,” the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia. The survey uses a variety of objective factors to determine the extent of privacy protections citizens enjoy from their government, and the U.S. now finishes at the bottom for obvious reasons.
Evidence that we are becoming a lawless surveillance state is abundant. But let’s forget all of that and figure out how we can best micro-manage the internal affairs of Pakistan and Iraq and Russia and Iran so that we can preserve Freedom and Democracy for the world.
Oceans’ Growing Acidity Alarms Scientists
By Les Blumenthal
McClatchy Newspapers
December 16, 2007
WASHINGTON - Seven hundred miles west of Seattle in the Pacific at Ocean Station Papa, a first-of-its-kind buoy is anchored to monitor a looming environmental catastrophe.1216 03
Forget about sea levels rising as glaciers and polar ice melt, and increasing water temperatures affecting global weather patterns. As the oceans absorb more and more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, they’re gradually becoming more acidic.
And some scientists fear that the change may be irreversible.
At risk are sea creatures up and down the food chain, from the tiniest phytoplankton and zooplankton to whales, from squid to salmon to crabs, coral, oysters and clams.
The oceans are already 30 percent more acidic than they were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as they absorb 22 tons of carbon dioxide a day. By the end of the century, they could be 150 percent more acidic.
“Everything points to dramatic effects,” said Richard Feely, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. “There are suggestions the entire ecosystem could change over time.”
Overview of Torture
December 14, 2007
Naomi Wolf reported on an “extraordinarily important book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Columbia University Press, New York 2007), which presents dozens of original formerly secret documents - FBI emails and memos, letters and interrogator “wish lists,” raw proof of the systemic illegal torture of detainees in various US-held prisons — the typical “harsh interrogation” of a suspect in US custody reads like an account of abuses in archives at Yad Vashem….” She found evidence to support this sweeping conclusion:
“We torture, illegally, by directive; the directives come from the top; those who torture know it is probably criminal; when we torture prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, they will tell us anything they think we want to hear — including implicate themselves falsely, as many reports from Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations testify to — to make the torture stop; and the White House routinely uses that faked or coerced unverifiable “intelligence” to buttress its wholesale assault on our liberties.”
Highlights of what the FOIA documents report…:
Late 2002 — the FBI objects to the illegality of abuses being put into place by the Defense Department in its “special interrogation plan” to use isolation, sleep deprivation and menacing with dogs against prisoners.
Dec 2, 2002 — Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally issues a directive authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding, removal of clothing, and the terrorizing of inmates at Guantanamo with dogs.
Dec 3, 2002 — at Baghram, interrogators kill an Afghan prisoner “by shackling him by his wrists to the wire ceiling above his cell and repeatedly beating his legs. A postmortem report finds abrasions and contusions on the prisoner’s face, head, neck, arms and legs and determines that the death was a “homicide” caused by “blunt force injuries.”
April 16, 2003 — Rumsfeld approves yet another directive for abusive interrogation.
This directive for Afghanistan restores to the interrogators’ arsenal many forms of torture that had been resisted by the FBI. [Notably, the FBI had resisted complying with the direct commission of torture since as early as 2002…
Oct 22 2003 — Final autopsy report relating to death of “52 y/o Iraqi Male, Civilian Detainee” held by U.S. forces in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Prisoner was found to have “died as a result of asphyxia…due to strangulation.” …
Putin Withdraws Russia From Major Arms Treaty
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
December 1, 2007
MOSCOW, Nov. 30 — President Vladimir Putin signed a law Friday suspending Russia’s participation in a major conventional arms treaty that had limited NATO and Russian military deployments in Europe.
The Kremlin had been threatening all year to scrap the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, and on Friday Putin signed a law passed this month by parliament providing for that step. The suspension takes effect Dec. 12.
Putin’s decision comes two days before parliamentary elections and after a campaign marked by harsh anti-Western rhetoric and claims that the president has restored Russia’s ability to stand up to the United States and the NATO alliance.
Climate Change Threatens Humanity
United Nations Development Program report
11-27-07
The report, “Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world”, provides a stark account of the threat posed by global warming. It argues that the world is drifting towards a “tipping point” that could lock the world’s poorest countries and their poorest citizens in a downward spiral, leaving hundreds of millions facing malnutrition, water scarcity, ecological threats, and a loss of livelihoods.
