May 15, 2009 archive

House Minority Leader John “I’m Orange” Boehner (R-OH)  

Is Shocked! Shocked!

That Anyone Would

Accuse The C.I.A Of

Misleading Congress

Yea, They Never Lied

Yellow Cake Anyone

A Single-Minded Focus on Dual Wars

Defense Secretary Is Reorienting the Military to Meet U.S. Troops’ Needs Now

By Greg Jaffe

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, May 15, 2009

On a rainy night in March, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to witness the military’s ritual for welcoming home its war dead.

In a small building next to the tarmac, an officer briefed the defense secretary on the four deceased troops arriving that evening. They had been driving along a rutted road near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, when their Humvee hit a powerful roadside bomb.

Gates flashed with anger, according to people with him that day.

Revealed: the inside story of the Tiananmen massacre

Secret memoir of Communist party leader who opposed crackdown is finally published

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing

Friday, 15 May 2009

The secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader ousted for opposing the military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, exploded into the open yesterday, four years after his death.

Dictated during his years of house arrest and smuggled out on cassettes disguised as children’s music or Peking opera, the book will be pored over for clues about the workings of the secretive group of men who make up the inner core of China’s Communist Party. The decisions made in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai compound have global impact as China is an emerging superpower, but little is known about how it functions. Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang may change all that.

The publishers, Simon and Schuster, were so worried about news of the Zhao book leaking that they listed it as Untitled by Anonymous in their catalogue. It was not supposed to go on sale until next Tuesday but several stores in Hong Kong broke the embargo and put it on the shelves. And the clamour – just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 4 June Tiananmen Square massacre, when tensions are high about political dissent in China – was intense.

USA

Obama to renew military tribunals

He had pledged during the presidential campaign to end the controversial trials of terrorism suspects. Human rights groups are outraged.

By Julian E. Barnes

May 15, 2009

Reporting from Washington — The Obama administration will announce plans today to revive the Bush-era military commission system for prosecuting terrorism suspects, current and former officials said, reversing a campaign pledge to rely instead on federal courts and the traditional military justice system.

Word of the decision infuriated human rights groups, which argued that any trials under the system created by President George W. Bush would be widely viewed as tainted. They said President Obama was duplicating Bush’s mistakes.

The announcement would follow other moves by Obama that have disappointed his administration’s liberal allies but heartened Bush supporters, including his decisions to withhold photos depicting alleged abuse of detainees by U.S. soldiers and to retain the option of using a limited form of rendition, the practice of turning terrorism suspects over to other countries for questioning.

It is after all THE stellar marketing ploy.  You are so backed into a corner you can not possibly call yourself a member of the human race if you don’t support prosecution of war crimes.  But.

Rachel Maddow and John Turley – May 13, 2009

Shorter Froomkin.

1. Nothing to see here.

Obama: “photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”

2. A few bad apples have been dealt with.

Obama: incidents “were investigated — and, I might add, investigated long before I took office — and, where appropriate, sanctions have been applied….[T]his is not a situation in which the Pentagon has concealed or sought to justify inappropriate action. Rather, it has gone through the appropriate and regular processes. And the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken.”

3. No good would come of this.

Obama: “the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.”

4. We have to protect the troops.

Obama: “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

5. There will be a chilling effect.

Obama: “Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.”

6. This is a new argument, not just the same old excuses.

Gibbs: “The President isn’t going back to remake the argument that has been made. The President is going — has asked his legal team to go back and make a new argument based on national security.”

You should read the whole article because Froomkin pretty much shoots down every one of these excuses.

Hat tip Glenn Greenwald, also worth reading (warning, graphic images).

By Abdul Malik Mujahid

During the last thirty years of wars in Afghanistan, Afghan civilians have had one safe place to escape to: Pakistan.

They fled the Soviet invasion. They fled civil wars. They fled US bombing.  Pakistan took care of millions of these Afghan refugees.  

Now that safe haven with its lush green valleys is burning with bombs.

And the hosts, the people who themselves welcomed Afghan refugees, at times literally into their homes or into campsites on their farms, are on the run. They are streaming out of Swat, Dir, and Buner, and registering as refugees in Mardan and the fertile valleys of Pakistan. The UN says about two million Pakistanis have been displaced during the last year of drone attacks, bombing and fighting.

Pakistan is bombing its own land and its own people who are caught between the Taliban and the Americans.

Whomever I talk to among Pakistanis, it seems, there is an emerging consensus. They hate both the Taliban who blast schools and the Americans who bomb Madrasahs. Both kill civilians.