Saturday, December 4, 2010

American Security actually Warlords?

A year-long Senate Armed Services Committee investigation has revealed that a number of private security firms working in Afghanistan under Defense Department contracts have hired Afghan warlords and powerbrokers with links to murder, kidnapping and bribery -- and the Taliban.



The investigation, detailed in an 89-page report, also revealed widespread failures in contractor performance, including untrained guards, insufficient and unserviceable weapons and unmanned posts, as well as gaps in government oversight that allowed the failures to persist.

Committee investigators reviewed more than 125 Defense Department security contracts in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009 and found systemic failures that have, at times, put U.S. military personnel and their mission in Afghanistan at risk.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

New Defects of Warren Commission Findings published


  • One Phillip Willis took a series of 12 photos of Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, in the minutes before and after the assassination. Mr. Willis' photos and testimony before the Commission appear in the report. He was not questioned about the eighth photo, a shot of the Book Depository entrance shortly after the shooting. As Willis later pointed out, one of the men in the photo "looks so much like (Jack Ruby), it's pitiful". F.B.I. agents questioning Willis agreed with him that the man bore a powerful resemblance to Ruby. When Willis mentioned this to the Commission, no interest was shown. When the photo was published in the Warren Report, a considerable part of the Ruby lookalike's face had been cropped away.
  • While the President's autopsy was underway at Bethesda Naval Hospital, federal agents removed the X-rays of the body from custody of the examining doctors. Though the X-rays undoubtedly would have been valuable in determining trajectories of the bullets hitting the President, and thus the shooter's location, they are neither published nor alluded to in the Warren Report. Thoughtfully, the Commission did provide in its report a dental chart made for Jack Ruby's mother 25 years before the assassination, as well as a detailed physical analysis of three of Oswald's pubic hairs.
  • According to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the Dallas Morning News for November 22 contained a map of the route President Kennedy's motorcade would take through the city that day. According to the map, the President was supposed to stay on Main Street while passing through Dealey Plaza, and would not have passed the Book Depository. In fact, the motorcade turned from Main onto Houston and then to Elm Street. This unplanned sharp turn not only brought the President into his assassin's sights, it also forced his car to slow down to ten miles per hour. Garrison says that a change in a parade route through such a large city would have required the acquiescence of the city police and government. The Mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell, presumably signed off the change.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

The New Iraq

   The U.S. invasion of Iraq, for both oil and profiteering, resulted in the violent deaths of no less than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, according to the most conservative estimate. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet found that up to that point there had been more than 650,000 “excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war,” factoring in the lack of medical supplies and the civil war the invasion set off. Polling firm Opinion Research Business estimated in 2008 “that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens” died as a result of the conflict.

   More than 4.7 million Iraqis were forced to flee their homes, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, with 2 million forced to leave the country entirely. Many Iraqi women, three million of whom are now widows according to their government, were forced into lives of prostitution, with one refugee telling The New York Times that if “they go back to Iraq they'll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.”

   Today, Iraq is ruled by a new strong man who has used his security forces to ethnically cleanse Baghdad, gun down non-violent protesters and torture dissidents. According to Transparency International, only three other countries in the world are more corrupt than Iraq – Afghanistan, Myanmar and Somalia – and unemployment is rampant, with nearly one in three men between 15 and 29 out of work.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Afghan War Cover Up FOILED

This week, the United States, the foremost advocator to the Globe on human rights and rule of law while accusing other nations of committing genocide, war crimes and other atrocities, was exposed how U.S. Special Operations forces killed an innocent family in Afghanistan last February and another civilian massacre in Iraq in 2007.

After initially claiming that two pregnant women and a teenage girl killed in a US Special Forces raid on an Afghan home in Khataba in February, 2010 had been discovered bound and slain by the Americans, the US military has admitted that they were actually shot and killed by those US troops--who then tried to cover up their "mistake" by carving the bullets out of the bodies with knives, removing other incriminating bullets from the compound's walls, and then washing away the bloody evidence with alcohol.

The U.S. military had previously insisted that they killed "terrorists," and claimed that the women were killed by knife wounds administered several hours before the raid.

The United States was forced to admit the massacre of these Afghan civilians following a report in The Times of London which said that the US Special Forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, and then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened. The news also brings evidence of another civilian massacre, this time from a July 27, 2007 incident near Baghdad in Iraq.

When our own military is capable of such deceit, how can we as human beings allow private corporations like AQMI Strategies and CACI free reign in war zones?

Monday, April 12, 2010

Project Rainbow NOT in History Books - No Surprise!


   “Project Rainbow” was an experiment conducted upon a small destroyer escort ship during World War II while the ship was in Philadelphia Harbor at the Navy Yard and while it was at sea.  The purpose of the experiment was to make the ship invisible to enemy detection.  The accounts vary as to whether the original idea was to achieve invisibility to enemy radar or whether the prize sought after was more profound:  optical invisibility.  
   Either way, it is commonly believed that the mechanism involved was the generation of an incredibly intense magnetic field around the ship, which would cause refraction or bending of light or radar waves around the ship, much like a mirage created by heated air over a road on a summer day.  The legend goes on to say that the experiment was a complete success ... except that the ship actually disappeared physically for a time, and then returned.  They wanted to “cloak” the ship from view, but they actually achieved was apparent de-materialization and teleportation instead.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Military Contractors Treatment of Prisoners in Iraq

A recent Army report charging that U.S. Military Police and other private personnel, including civilian contractor personnel, abused Iraqi prisoners held under the
authority of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has given rise to questions
regarding the applicable law. The report was the result of an Army investigation
initiated after a soldier turned over to military law enforcers photographs depicting
U.S. military personnel subjecting Iraqi detainees to treatment that has been
described as degrading, inhumane, and in some cases, tantamount to torture.

The international law of armed conflict, in particular, those parts relating to belligerent occupation, applies in Iraq. The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 related to the treatment of prisoners of war (POW) and civilian detainees, as well as the Hague Regulations define the status of detainees and state responsibility for their treatment. Other international law relevant to human rights and to the treatment of prisoners may also apply. For example, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The U.N. Declaration on Human Rights and the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT) may also be relevant. Federal statutes that implement the relevant international law, such as the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Torture Victim Protection Act, as well as other criminal statutes with extraterritorial application may also come into play.

Finally, the law of Iraq as amended by regulations issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) may also apply in some circumstances.

This report summarizes pertinent provisions of the Geneva Conventions Relative to the Treatment of Victims of War (Geneva Conventions) and other international agreements concerning the treatment of certain types of prisoners. The report begins with a discussion of international and U.S. standards regarding the treatment of prisoners. A discussion of accountability in case of breach of these
standards follows, including potential means of asserting jurisdiction over alleged violators, either in military courts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) or U.S. federal courts, by applying U.S. criminal statutes that explicitly apply extraterritorially or within the special maritime or territorial jurisdiction of the United States (as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 7) or by means of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Finally, the report discusses international requirements to provide redress for those whose treatment at the hands of U.S. officials may have fallen below the standards outlined in the first section of the report.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

End Game

Check your phone lines. Do you hear breathing?