Tag: rendition

Yes, We Can: The Case for Indefinite Detention & Rendition

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Twist as the president’s supporters might with the “look over here” tactic, the National Defense Authorization Bill (NDAA) does not change any existing law that Barack Obama has interpreted to mean he has the power to throw your sorry butt in prison anywhere in the world for as long as he chooses. Or he can just declare you a terrorist without providing evidence and have you executed without due process. Ignoring the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that was recently renewed giving the president the authority to send in the military to fight that ubiquitous enemy “terror”, the Obama loyalists, keep pointing to section 1022 of the NDAA, the section that makes military detention presumptive for non-citizens but doesn’t foreclose military detention of US citizens, while completely ignoring section 1021, the section that affirms the President’s authority to indefinitely detain people generally. As Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel points out while the NDAA does not authorize indefinite detention for American citizens, it does not foreclose the possibility either:

The NDAA doesn’t do anything to exempt Americans from indefinite detention. And the reason it doesn’t-at least according to the unrebutted claims of Carl Levin that I reported on over a month ago-is because the Administration asked the Senate Armed Services Committee to take out language that would have specifically exempted Americans from indefinite detention.

   The initial bill reported by the committee included language expressly precluding “the detention of citizens or lawful resident aliens of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.”  The Administration asked that this language be removed from the bill. [my emphasis]

So the effect is that (as Lawfare describes in detail) the bill remains unclear about whether Americans can be detained indefinitely and so we’re left arguing about what the law is until such time as a plaintiff gets beyond the Executive Branch’s state secrets invocations to actually decide the issue in court.

Nor did the amendment from Sen. Diane Feinstein clarify that point either, in fact, she may have codified it. So the only recourse is for some poor fool to have his civil liberties abrogated and try to fight in court without being allowed access to lawyers or courts. Those are some hurdles. Scott Horton, contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and New York attorney known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, discussed this with Keith Olbermann:

Constitutional expert and George Washington University law professor, Jonathan Turley, appeared on C-Span with his take on this discussion. He made it very clear that Obama says that he can assassinate American citizens living on U.S. soil:

(starting at 15:50):

President Obama has just stated a policy that he can have any American citizen killed without any charge, without any review, except his own. If he’s satisfied that you are a terrorist, he says that he can kill you anywhere in the world including in the United States.

Two of his aides just … reaffirmed they believe that American citizens can be killed on the order of the President anywhere including the United States.

You’ve now got a president who says that he can kill you on his own discretion. He can jail you indefinitely on his own discretion [..]

I don’t think the the Framers ever anticipated that [the American people would be so apathetic]. They assumed that people would hold their liberties close, and that they wouldn’t relax …

h/t Washington’s Blog

How quickly the president’s defenders forget Anwar al-Awlaki. Marcy points to the contortions of the law that Obama used to justify his assassination and then issued a “secret memorandum” which was conveniently “leaked” to New York Times reporter Charles Savage:

And, as Charlie Savage has reported, the legal justification the Administration invented for killing an American citizen in a premeditated drone strike consists of largely the same legal justification at issue in the NDAA detainee provisions.

           

  • The 2001 AUMF, which purportedly defined who our enemies are (though the NDAA more logically includes AQAP in its scope than the 2001 AUMF)
  •            

  • Hamdi, which held the President could hold an American citizen in military detention under the 2001 AUMF
  •            

  • Ex Parte Quirin, which held that an American citizen who had joined the enemy’s forces could be tried in a military commission
  •            

  • Scott v. Harris (and Tennesee v. Garner), which held that authorities could use deadly force in the course of attempting to detain American citizens if that person posed an imminent threat of injury or death to others
  •    In other words, Obama relied on substantially the same legal argument supporters of the NDAA detainee provisions made to argue that indefinite detention of American citizens was legal, with the addition of Scott v. Harris to turn the use of deadly force into an unfortunate side-effect of attempted detention.

    There is no question that the Obama administration, by signing the NDAA, believes that it has the broad power to indefinitely detain and assassinate American citizens and guarantees that the next president will too.

    The late George Carlin said it several years ago, “this country is circling the drain“.  

    The Reason We Need Wikileaks

    Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

    Now more than ever, the reason for Wikileaks to exist: the preservation of what remains of the rule of law and the US Constitution. From Marcy Wheeler at FDL:

    SCOTUS: Govt Can Use State Secrets to Hide Crimes

    SCOTUS just declined to take the Jeppesen Dataplan suit.

    The high court rejected an appeal by five men who claimed that U.S. operatives-with support from Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing unit-abducted them and sent them to other countries where they were tortured. They alleged Jeppesen provided critical flight planning and logistical support to the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program. The men were seeking unspecified monetary damages from the company.

    This effectively means that men like Binyam Mohamed, who the Brits have admitted was tortured after being rendered, cannot sue for redress. And the ruling is particularly egregious since a Jeppesen executive admitted that his company was flying rendition flights.

    In effect, SCOTUS’ decision not to take this case leaves in place state secrets precedent that allows the government to commit grave crimes, but hide behind state secrets.

    Update: The Brennan Center and a bunch of other crazy hippies who believe in rule of law wrote a letter in response to SCOTUS’ decision to DOJ reminding them that, per their purported state secrets policy, credible allegations of wrong-doing must be referred to the Inspectors General of the relevant agencies for investigation.

    snip

    This is me officially holding my breath for the Obama Administration to do what they promised on this front.

    Don’t hold your breath, Marcy. I have no expectations of the Obama administrations doing anything they promised regarding the rule of law and the Constitution. Dick Cheney must be proud.

    War Court vs. Civilian Trial

    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!

    Omar Khadr Trial SUSPENDED ! Defense lawyer collapses in court !

    Yesterday evening the news broke that Omar Khadr’s only attorney, Lt Col Jon Jackson, collapsed in the Guantanamo courtroom during the beginning of the trial !

    (previous diary on the trial & background history here: https://www.docudharma.com/diar…  )

    A witness posted this at Huffpo:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

    On Thursday afternoon I watched Omar Khadr’s sole defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapse in the Guantanamo Bay courtroom in the middle of conducting a cross-examination of a key government witness. He was taken away on a stretcher by ambulance, hooked up to an I.V. Fortunately Jackson, who’s only 39 years old, was breathing normally at the time, though as an observer in the courtroom I was stunned. It all happened so suddenly and he seemed to be in perfect health and in complete control of his questioning. I learned Friday morning that the trial has been suspended indefinitely.

    This morning’s update says that Lt Col Jackson suffered a gall stone attack (after having had surgery 2 months ago)  and is being evacuated from Guantanamo to a hospital in the US for medical treatment.   Reporters were told by an official that the trial has been suspended for at least 30 days.  

    Emptywheel at FDL also has this:

    http://emptywheel.firedoglake….

    There is a comment about removing one of the jurors from the case for having so called pre conceived notions


    He said he thought that some earlier policies had lost America its “reputation for being a beacon of freedom.”

    Asked specifically which policies had led him to this conclusion he authoritatively cited examples including; charge without trial, torture, rendition and the denial of access to members of the International Committee of the Red Cross to detainees held in secret locations. He went on to say that he believed a small number of detainees may have been killed while in American custody but added: “I don’t think my views differ from those of the President.”

    By the time he had admitted that he would be “suspicious” of any evidence obtained under torture his fate was sealed.

    Carol Rosenberg’s McClatchy Miami Herald

    http://www.miamiherald.com/201…

    We know from her report Khadr was in the courtroom after all,

    Jackson was put on “convalescent leave,” according to Broyles, a status that allows him to continue to draw a salary and not use up vacation days.

    He cited privacy reasons for not releasing the lieutenant colonel’s health condition but said he was likely being airlifted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Pentagon’s premier hospital. He was on a morphine drip Thursday night at the base hospital.

    Jackson, who has been on the case for about a year, became Khadr’s lone lawyer within a week of his surgery after the Toronto-born teen fired volunteer civilian attorneys Barry Coburn and Kobie Flowers from Washington D.C.

    Parrish ordered the Army defender to stay on the case, but the Pentagon Defense Office provided him no additional assistance beyond two enlisted paralegals who had already been on the case.

    Khadr, who sits in court with three guards behind him, leaped to his feet when his Army defender collapsed about 4 p.m. Thursday, according to Khadr family lawyer Dennis Edney, who functions in the war court only as a consultant because he is not a U.S. citizen. The guards didn’t interfere.

    “We were all shocked,” Edney said.

    Canadian:

    http://www.torontosun.com/news…

    Ottawa Citizen

    We Should Be Embarrassed 8/13/2010

    http://www.ottawacitizen.com/n…

    A United Nations special representative for children and armed conflict issued a statement on Aug. 9, saying “the Omar Khadr case will set a precedent that may endanger the status of child soldiers all over the world.”

    “Even if Omar Khadr were to be tried in a national jurisdiction, juvenile justice standards are clear; children should not be tried before military tribunals,” the statement from Radhika Coomaraswamy explains. “The United States and Canada have led the way in creating and implementing these norms. … I urge both governments to come to a mutually acceptable solution on the future of Omar Khadr that would prevent him from being convicted of a war crime that he allegedly committed when he was a child.”

    Canada’s government has ignored this, as it has ignored questions about the implications of Khadr’s age all along.

    His age, though, is not the only factor that makes many observers of his trial queasy.

    There is also the fact that the judge has ruled that statements Khadr made to his interrogators are admissible, even though they were, as Khadr’s defence argued, “fruit of a poisonous tree.” Khadr was, in the words of a defence submission, “asphyxiated, terrorized by dogs, doused with freezing water and left in the cold.” He was threatened with rape.  

    More Canadian opinion from Chantal Hébert at Toronto Star 8/11/2010


    Canada’s top court described Khadr’s treatment as “. . . state conduct that violates the principles of fundamental justice.” It added: “Interrogation of a youth, to elicit statements about the most serious criminal charges while detained in these conditions and without access to counsel (. . .) offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.”

    About violations of Khadr’s Charter rights, the Court found that: “. . . their impact on Mr. Khadr’s liberty and security continue to this day and may redound into the future.”

    Despite those prescient words, the ruling stopped short of prescribing a remedy to the federal government.

    On the face of it, the absence of Supreme Court prescriptions in the Khadr case falls short of its own, recently reaffirmed, deterrence principle. In a matter that involves state abuse of the right to liberty and security of a person in a fundamental way, that absence has ultimately tipped the scale towards virtually unfettered government discretion.

    Got to love our northern sisters and brothers, “unfettered government discretion” is used to describe being held without charges or legal counsel, then put on trial in a foreign country in front of a jury of military officers, apparently selected to have no pre conceived notions about whether your age was relevant years ago, or how the “confessions” or just witness statements were obtained –  by shooting you in the back, first, then isolating you for years in the disgrace of Bush & Cheney’s little waterboarding gulag where you no doubt heard what happened to the prisoners who didn’t cooperate– or sometimes did.

    No wonder poor Lt Col Jon Jackson might be feeling some physical stress attempting to navigate this.  Kids don’t get to select their parents.  

    “Kildeer” Gibbs and Omar Khadr Trial

    My contention is that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is doing the Kildeer maneuver, like the bird who cries to draw you away from its nest,  as a distraction from what is going on with the trial of Omar Khadr, who has been held in U.S. custody as an enemy combatant for 8 years and since he was only 15 years old.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O…

    Since Khadr was not yet of legal age when he was nearly killed then revived by the U.S. military, then used as part of Bush and Cheney’s sadistic little game to “prove” that this country needed to invade Iraq on false pretenses, it looks really awkward, not to mention immoral, to be trying the prisoner with the idea of permanent incarceration or the death penalty. (if the prosecution is to be believed, the maximum penalty in this case is life imprisonment)  Even more so that he was born in Canada.

    Hence Kildeer Gibb’s dig about not being satisfied until we had Canadian healthcare.  Obviously we have the finest healthcare in the world because we can revive almost indefinitely people who have nearly been tortured to death.

    Because I checked the usual suspects on the kick a hippie sh*t stirring list, the OFA/DNC paid campaigner and Beltway insider types, the ones who like to use the word “firebaggers,”   and they’re all ignoring this like it’s his turn.  Like they radioed in the strike coordinates to the WH @ PressSec office.

    Or they are going to actually proxy bomb Iran next.  But then I remembered the game right wing people like to play called “you’re insincere in your concerns.”

    Maybe Kildeer Gibbs could diss the Canadians’ troops next and they could pull out of Afghanistan like the Dutch did.

    http://www.aolnews.com/world/a…

    Aug 3 2010


    “This is the start,” an Afghan political analyst, Haroon Mir, told Agence France-Presse. “It’s a chain — the Dutch start to withdraw, followed by the Canadians, then the British by 2014. In the middle I think we will see a number of other NATO members… setting a timetable to leave.”

    The Dutch will be replaced by U.S. and Australian, Slovak and Singaporean soldiers.

    Canadian press, this am:

    Montreal Gazette Aug 12, 2010

    Khadr trial to hear first arguments

    http://www.montrealgazette.com…


    More than eight years after U.S. forces captured a 15-year-old Omar Khadr on an Afghan battlefield, prosecution and defence lawyers present their opening arguments today in his war crimes trial -the first such case proceeding under the Obama administration.

    Seven U.S. military officers will sit in judgment of the Canadian-born terror suspect after the military judge in the case yesterday excused eight others from the initial jury pool, acting on requests and challenges from either the defence or prosecution.

    Postmedia News has also learned that the defence has been seeking to present two Canadian government officials as defence witnesses – a request likely to rankle the Conservative government, which has resisted calls from human- rights and other activist groups calling for Khadr’s immediate repatriation.

    The officials – Sabine Nolke and Suneeta Millington – have over the years been dispatched to visit Khadr at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as part of the Canadian government’s bid to monitor his confinement conditions and other aspects of his treatment.  

    Omar Khadr is so far intending on being tried in absentia because he considers the entire proceedings a sham and has fired his U.S. civilian lawyers. He has a Pentagon appointed attorney.

    Tuesday Truffles: WH Press Sec Gibbs Shares The Love

     As the House convenes today, Tuesday, August 10, to vote on some Senate last minute leftovers, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs shows the House members hesitating on voting for more stuff how to communicate effectively with the voters when they resume their 6 week August vacation and fundraising break.


    http://thehill.com/homenews/ad…

    “I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

    The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

    Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

    Gibbs said the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.

    Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington “in America,” and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.

    In the spirit of bipartisanshipthingee, I’ll quote Fox News now on what happened next:


    http://www.foxnews.com/politic…

    Tues Aug 10

    WASHINGTON — In a rare moment of bipartisanship Tuesday, the House approved $600 million to pay for more unmanned surveillance drones and about 1,500 more agents along the troubled Mexican border.

    Getting tougher on border security is one of the few issues that both parties agree on in this highly charged election season. But lawmakers remain deeply divided over a more comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem, and it’s unclear if Congress will go beyond border-tightening efforts.

    The House passed the bill by an unrecorded voice vote after brief debate.

    In fact, although Pelosi was supposedly calling the House back into session during break to vote on a “jobs” bill, ( which went flying under the radar as some Senate amendment to a House Amendment to a Senate Amendment,)   the HR 6080 Emergency Supplemental for Border Security for Fiscal Year 2010 was the very first thing they debated and suspended the rules and passed by voice vote today, at 10:54 am EDT.  You can see the Clerk of the House’s record here, look up Aug 10, 2010, because there will be NO ROLL CALL VOTE RECORD of this.  http://clerk.house.gov/floorsu…

    text of bill from THOMAS here:  http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/…

    Adorable Lindsey Graham Threatening to Prosecute NYT, Guardian UK, & der Speigel- oh, wait a second

    This past weekend July 25, saw 3 major on line news publications, the      New York Times  ,  The Guardian UK, and Germany’s    der Speigel publish the Afghanistan War Logs, 90,000+ documents from wikileaks, which show that the United States and NATO forces have been killing many more civilians in the Afghanistan occupation than has been previously acknowledged.  The war of the air vs the ground explosives has also ramped up in neighboring Pakistan, where, since January 2009, according to the BBC, nearly 2,500 people have been killed by either American drone attacks or by Islamic or Pakistani ISI forces- and “extremists” have killed more than 1,700 in Pakistan.  There have been more than 2000 Afghan casualties from roadside bombs.  Adding up all the numbers and then some, there’s at least 7,000 dead from the war in this border region.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl…

    https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

    Using a theory I read about elsewhere, if each one of these deceased casualties has at least 6 surviving relatives, parents, siblings, and/or offspring, the United States has just created, with the aid of whatever factions they’re paying in Pakistan, at least 36,000 more angry people whose religious warrior culture teaches them that it’s okay to extract revenge upon the invading enemy.    

    An Opening to Indictments and Accountability?

    Turning the innocent, not only those who were grabbed and held for years but their countrymen and women, into potential foreign criminal terrorist, not winning hearts and minds and not being the law abiding country we not only claim but attack others for doing same!

    Indecent treatment at Gitmo?

    Obama Continues Bush/Cheney’s Persecution of Abu Zubaydah

    On March 28, 2002, Abu Zubaydah was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan by the FBI, “identified” as a high-ranking operative of al Qaeda, and subsequently tortured by American agents at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

    Abu Zubaydah’s treatment at the hands of the CIA has been called torture by Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who witnessed part of Abu Zubaydah’s CIA interrogation, multiple U.S. officials including President Obama, and by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

    Media and DOJ reports about torturing Mr. Zubaydah were always careful to mention his connection to al Qaeda.

    The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

    Obama: 3/5 of a President

    While we were all shopping and arguing over whether or not fruitcake is fit for human consumption, Obama decided to go to bat and fight for someone.   Who was he fighting for?   The torturers of the Bush administration, that’s who.   Oh, and anyone else in the United States government who wants to torture and violate the human rights of others.

    As Chris Floyd reports, The United States is now legally free to torture whomever it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court of the land, and the political power weilded by Barrack Hussein Obama.

    It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

    Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.”  They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

    And people wonder what this “hatred” is towards Obama.   “I didn’t get my pony?” they ask?   Ha.  They have no idea.   I hate Obama for the same reasons I hate Bush.  Why?  Because Obama IS Bush.   His administration is one and the same as the Bush administration, and I mean that quite literally when it comes to justice, human rights, and the wars.    ALL THE SAME PEOPLE are running the show, and we know that Bush’s Justice Department is a bunch of corrupt, human rights-violating  flunkies recruited from the ranks of the “religious right”.    And they are still in office, fighting for their hatreds

    Now Obama is not just passively letting these people continue the Bush/Cheney yearas, he is going out of his way to enable  them.  

    He is putting his name to the most egregious violations of human rights in this nation’s history.  

    What’s really pathological is that he is shitting on the very system that freed African American people, of which he is a gene-carrying member.  

    More from antiwar.com:


    US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’

    by William Fisher,

    In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that “torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use.”

    The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

    Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

    Ironically, the first African American president is promoting a policy frighteningly familiar to the Dred Scott decision of yesteryear:


    “Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow,” he added.

    The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants – whether or not they were slaves – were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

    Thanks, Obama.   Next time someone calls you an “Uncle Tom” I simply won’t cringe.  I might even nod.   I might even say “hell yeah.”

    Inside a Prison Outside the Law

    Mother Jones {MoJo} Drumbeat brings the link to the site for the book The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law

    Read exclusive excerpts from narratives by the attorneys who have represented Guantanamo Detainees, at above link

    Fmr Ambassador to Uzbekistan: CIA had people raped with broken bottles


    “I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.

    Craig Murray was the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan until 2004, when he was let go for bringing up his concerns about these heinous and disgusting crimes.


    “I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

    So this is your “war on terror”.   Torture people until they confess to whatever you want, then call it “intelligence” and send your forces, the guys who would take a bullet for you, the guys who think they’re doing what’s right, off on wild goose chases.

    Nice.

    What’s really disgusting is that the United States thought this would all be nice and legal since it was outsourced.  You know, it’s like thinking that hiring the hitman to kill your wife makes it ok, since you’re not the one pulling the trigger.

    How the HELL could these idiots think this was legal?

    It sure as hell isn’t legal if I hire someone to do something extremely illegal.  Not if it’s little old me, here in the United States.  But I guess the wizards like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo were paid big bucks to come up with ways that we could torture people in the most medivel ways and get away with it.  

    Oh, and if you thought somehow this was actually about a “war on terrorism”?  

    Wrong.  It’s about natural gas, and pipelines.


    Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

    Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

    “The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.

    Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.

    “There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”

    The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.

    What this means is that the “war on terror” isn’t even real.  The terror isn’t even real.  People are being boiled alive, and watching their children being tortured in front of them, so they’ll CONFESS to being terrorists, so we have an EXCUSE to keep our military there, and take over the country.

    That’s about as evil as evil gets.

    And our guy Obama seems to think it’s just a-ok to keep covering this up.  To do nothing about it.  Doesn’t that make him an accomplice?   I think it does.

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