YES TO THE IRAN TREATY
DON'T LET THE WAR HAWKS DO IT AGAIN!
A large majority of USA Democrat voters favor the President's just-revealed, framework-Iran nuclear deal. Interestingly, there is also a plurality of Republican voters who also support the deal. (This data according to a recent April 9, 2015, "the Atlantic" article by Jeff Bourdon). Yet there is little evidence of this public sentiment in the Senate. The President is faced with a great deal of opposition there. He is sweating this one out. He needs all of his Democrats to hold steady to prevent a veto override vote in the Senate, yet even stalwarts of the Party, such as Chuck Schumer are acting and sounding like Dick Cheney Republicans on this deal.
The reason? AIPAC AND ADELSON MONEY. The effect of big money from AIPAC and slush funds from one-issue billionaires released into the political system (by the Supreme Court recent Citizen's United decision) are showing clearly how the nation's elected officials are controlled (bought and sold) by big money. Our great nation is sadly in the process of morphing from a democratic republic into a South American style oligarchy, where the monied elites and powerful foreign interests control the nation's policies...not its voting citizens.
If our President's Iran nuclear deal is thwarted by the Netanyahu and Neocon crowd we can expect only WAR to follow. The Iran hawks are calling for " more sanctions" and "a better deal" but what they want and are unable to say is:"bomb bomb bomb Iran". That --regime change--is their actual goal. They have poor memories. But the American public does not. After the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos the American people find another long term war in the Middle East a very unpalatable idea. But it is clear that is the goal of the McCain-Cotton-Graham triumvirate. With no nuclear deal, Iran would simply continue to move ahead with its nuclear enrichment and development. With the threats of bombing from Israel, and saber rattling from Washington, a constant drumbeat, while US and other sanctions imposed on its economy reach existential threat levels ....one wonders what other choices would Iran have but to attempt to build a bomb "a la North Korea". At that juncture war, either instigated or initiated by Israel or the Washington crowd would be almost inevitable. But this would be a much wider, devastating conflict unlike a"the few days of bombing" which Senator Cotton has disturbingly indicated. It would probably include China and Russia, and other nations which would clandestinely arm and support Iran. It's an ugly and fearsome prospect.
In the end as many parts of the Middle East lay smoldering again the world and the American people would know who to blame for the loss of American life, the massive costs and wide and awful devastation. They would only have to review the anti-diplomacy, saber rattling speeches of the Republican War Hawks, the sneaky invite of Speaker of the House John Boehner, and the tapes of Netanyahu's war speech to Congress. The American people will know who to blame. But at what a cost!
Friday, April 10, 2015
Friday, April 3, 2015
FRENCH PROSECUTE GUANTANAMO TORTURE CHIEF
GTMO TORTURE RESURFACES IN FRANCE
MILLER SHOULD NOT TAKE ALL THE BLAME
I read yesterday in the foreign press, that the French justice system may have caught up with one of the low-level perpetrators of torture at GTMO, the now infamous General Geoffery Miller.
Though somewhat of a former Francophile myself...at least up to the recent Hollande Administration, I must report that the French, the people who claim the national motto: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" were not the first to intervene legally on behalf of their own citizen victims of US torture. That honor goes to Germany. Way back in November 2006, the Berlin government brought war crimes charges against a host of American "Iraq Era" War Criminals (see "real criminals" list below). Later in the same year, a German prosecutor brought similar charges against Geoffery Miller. And In 2011, the EU brought war crimes offenses against many of these same American defendants as well.j
Sadly, here at home American leaders have seemingly abandoned any idea of meting out justice to the perpetrators of America's most heinous crimes of the century. Also as great an embarrassment to our nation is the pallid response of the insipid American press who have reported little or nothing concerning these issues. In the USA we prefer to sweep all the ugly stuff which does not conform to our myths under the rug. AMERICA ignores its real history. It rather continue to perpetuate it's fantasies and point the finger of blame elsewhere. But we do so at our own disservice.
France Has become the most ecent claimant against American torturers. According to the French Internet site "France 24", the French court of appeals in Paris ordered a hearing this past Thursday (April 2, 2015) to adjudicate the complaints of two French citizens and former Guantanamo detainees. The two men, Mourad Benchellali, and Français, Nizar Sassi, were detained in Afghanistan, hooded, manacled and flown to Guantanamo where they were tortured during the period (November 2002 to April 2004) when General Geoffery Miller was director of the prison. See (France 24 : "Témoignage de Guantanamo : 'Je peux pas... res... p... i... rer."). According to Mssr. William Bourdon, attorney for Mssr. Benchellali , it was General Miller who was "at the heart of the policy of torture practiced at Guantanamo. He added, "If he refuses to come to the hearing he must face the consequences".
Mourad Benchellali and Français, Nizar Sassi, were arrested at different times by American forces in Afghanistan, and were then transferred from there to Guantanamo in Cuba. At Guantanamo they were subjected to all the common forms of torture you have seen and read about, threats of death to them and their families, forced nudity, threatened with a pack of snarling attack dogs, sexual humiliation, cold temperatures, denial of sleep, shackled into stress positions, water boarding, etc., etc. After a harrowing incarceration period of two years they were deemed to have no information, or were mistakenly arrested, and were quietly released. Read here: France 24 : "Rapport de la CIA : une arme judiciaire pour les ex-détenus de Guantanamo ?"
" I have been tortured, and I want those responsible brought to account. I demand reparation," stated, Mssr. Benchellali to France 24. He added, Geoffrey Miller never actually tortured him personally but that Miller was present in the prison and Benchellali can attest to having seen him passing among the cell blocks. "Of this I am certain."
Benchellali and his attorney agree that this hearing is overall symbolically useful. The former detainee sees his appeal as a very strong case which he hopes will open the halls of justice to the appeals of other victims of American torture and help bring to justice those who were responsible for the disgrace and embarrassment of America and its military forces.
In his 2006 retirement photos Miller, who hails from Ohio, looks like a bland, overworked store manager or shoe salesman. Born in 1949, he seems to have missed serving in Vietnam. He attended Ohio State where he earned a degree in history, and joined the U.S. Army in 1972 probably as a member of the Ohio State, ROTC. He trained and served in US field artillery. Not a West Point graduate so he had to work a little harder for advancement. He appears to have been assigned some of the less than desirable military posts and must have served his superiors well, eventually rising to become a senior officer and Army "management" desk man. After a mostly quiet career with little or no battlefield experience Miller somehow morphed into the epitome of the evil torturer of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. One wonders, how did he undergo such a metamorphosis?
MILLER AT GUANTANAMO
Soon after the ill-conceived and disastrous "Bush-Cheny" invasion of Iraq, Miller was assigned the command of Joint Task Force Guantanamo. That office ran the US detention system's now infamous facilities in Cuba known as Camp X-Ray, Camp Delta and Camp Echo. While there, Miller was under pressure from his superiors to "produce" information. At that time Miller claimed that 400 prisoners out of the 600 prisoners incarcerated at GTMO had "confessed" to having been involved in terrorism. we know now that these so called "confessions" were extracted by torture. Miller used that tainted criterion to subject the remaining two-thirds of the inmate population so designated to even "harsher procedures" to gain what was termed "actionable intelligence". Geoff Miller diligently tried to please his bosses. To do so, he had to go way beyond the line of what was legal, and venture outside the moral circle of acceptance of our Constitution and Amdrican culture.
According to Wikipedia's site: "General Geoffery Miller", "It was not Geoff Miller, but the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who on December 2, 2002 authorized in writing the "First Special Interrogation Plan," listing 17 techniques to be used on the detainee Mohammed al Qahtani." (Rumsfeld had help. These "interrogation plans" (torture procedures). were developed in consultation with General Miller who carried them out.) "It was later revealed that such techniques were used more widely against other prisoners as well." Wikipedia also notes that " On September 22, 2003, Miller ordered the arrest of James Yee, an Army captain who served as a chaplain for the Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo". Captain Yee courageously attempted to bring the maltreatment of the detainees to the attention of his superiors. Miller falsely accused Yee of stealing classified documents and of smuggling them out of the prison. Those charges were later dropped. No evidence of espionage or malfeasance was ever produced against Captain Yee and he was honorably discharged on January 7, 2004.
MILLER IN IRAQ
In August of 2002 legal advisor John Yoo of President Bush's Office of Legal Counsel wrote a draft memo to the CIA, known widley as the "Torture Memos" which claimed (now discredited) that existing international laws on torture were "antiquated" and did not apply to the Iraq, Guantanamo situations. Less than a year later, and five days before the invasion of Iraq (March 19, 2003), the same John Yoo issued an opinion to the Department of Defense in which legal scholar Yoo concluded (a view that is also now discredited) that federal laws related to the use of torture would NOT apply to detainees outside US borders. Most legal,observers Now believe that Yoo was writing opinions based on premises derived not from US law and legal precedent but from the questionable needs and priorities of his White House superiors.
Based on John Yoo's quasi-legal findings, the Defense Department, in August 2003, transferred General Miller, who they knew had experience in "extracting" information from Guantanamo detainees from Cuba to Iraq. Miller was tasked with developing "more productive" interrogation procedures for Iraqi prisoners. Besides dumbly following orders from Rumsfeld and others, Miller had his own insidious ideas as well. He submitted a report which recommended using the same harsh treatment (torture) methods he had employed in Guantanamo (GTMO) to Iraq. He referred this to this process as "GTMO-ising" the Iraq detainee prison system. Further, he proposed and implemented a staff utilization plan which combined two formerly separate detention and interrogation units at Abu Ghraib prison into one unit. Under this plan, the prison military police (detention) staff would be used (according to Miller) to "soften up" the prisoners for the actual interrogation process. This "plan" ultimately backfired on Miller. In a subsequent report on the Abu Ghraib scandal filed by General Antonio Taguba (2006), Taguba concluded that the degrading and brutal prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of Miller's use of untrained, poorly officered prison military police guards for the "softening up" interrogation purposes.
Miller was also accused of introducing the use of attack dogs to intimidate, and in some cases to maul prisoners, a procedure he had used at Guantanamo. And according to one of his Iraq-theater colleagues, General Janis Karpinski, he (miller) was quoted as advising senior prison officials "to treat detainees like dogs". Karpinski Attributes to Miller the statement: "If you permit them to think that at any point they are more than a dog then you have lost control of them." Miller denies these accusations. Though during the time Miller was commandant, several photographs released from the Abu Ghraib file do show naked, apparently screaming prisoners being threatened by snarling German Shepard dogs handled by military police.
THE REAL CRIMINALS
The case against Miller is a strong one. The Frenchman Benchellali's attorney, William Bourdon claims that Geoff Miller was "at the heart of the policy of torture" practiced at Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib. That statement seems well justified. However, Miller was the low man on the chain of command. He was "only following orders" and attempting with little thought about right or morality to do the bidding of his just as evil superiors. In part Miller is a fall guy for more vicious and dangerous types, who remain unrepentant and unpunished. In my view the actual higher up perpetrators who set up the system with a so called legal rational for torture and abuse designed to sooth the concerns of those such as Miller (and others like him) are as morally repugnant and guilty as Miller. Those that participated in the subterfuge of creating legal cover for torture and falsity are more or equally guilty. Miller's superiors in the Defense establishment and in the White House have thrown Miller under the bus. While Miller suffers the infamy of his past...they bask in the limelight Of power, many still holding down good positions and remaininvestors mostly outside of public scrutiny and calumny. It is not fair. Justice requires more than that.
The real criminals are those who made policy, for the CIA and the Defense Department, who legally tried to justify this horrid anti-American, illegal and immoral program and gave orders to put it into motion. The truly guilty according to most accounts are: Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Stephen Cambone, Ricardo S. Sanchez, Walter Wojdakowski, Thomas M. Pappas, Barbara Fast, Marc Warren, John Yoo, William J. Haynes, II, David Addington, and Jay Bybee.
When will their day for retribution come?
And let us not forget the actual interrogators or "torture perps", yes working "under orders" of the above, but certainly guilty of horrible acts of illegal and unwarranted brutality. These faceless unknowns also must be discovered and punished. And finally, we come to those foul, complicitous so-called "professionals", I refer here to the psychologists, psychiatrists, and sadly even some physicians who abandoned their professional dignity, honor and their professional oaths to give aid, support and advice to the criminal torturers of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Your denoument and retribution also awaits.
MILLER SHOULD NOT TAKE ALL THE BLAME
I read yesterday in the foreign press, that the French justice system may have caught up with one of the low-level perpetrators of torture at GTMO, the now infamous General Geoffery Miller.
Though somewhat of a former Francophile myself...at least up to the recent Hollande Administration, I must report that the French, the people who claim the national motto: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" were not the first to intervene legally on behalf of their own citizen victims of US torture. That honor goes to Germany. Way back in November 2006, the Berlin government brought war crimes charges against a host of American "Iraq Era" War Criminals (see "real criminals" list below). Later in the same year, a German prosecutor brought similar charges against Geoffery Miller. And In 2011, the EU brought war crimes offenses against many of these same American defendants as well.j
Sadly, here at home American leaders have seemingly abandoned any idea of meting out justice to the perpetrators of America's most heinous crimes of the century. Also as great an embarrassment to our nation is the pallid response of the insipid American press who have reported little or nothing concerning these issues. In the USA we prefer to sweep all the ugly stuff which does not conform to our myths under the rug. AMERICA ignores its real history. It rather continue to perpetuate it's fantasies and point the finger of blame elsewhere. But we do so at our own disservice.
France Has become the most ecent claimant against American torturers. According to the French Internet site "France 24", the French court of appeals in Paris ordered a hearing this past Thursday (April 2, 2015) to adjudicate the complaints of two French citizens and former Guantanamo detainees. The two men, Mourad Benchellali, and Français, Nizar Sassi, were detained in Afghanistan, hooded, manacled and flown to Guantanamo where they were tortured during the period (November 2002 to April 2004) when General Geoffery Miller was director of the prison. See (France 24 : "Témoignage de Guantanamo : 'Je peux pas... res... p... i... rer."). According to Mssr. William Bourdon, attorney for Mssr. Benchellali , it was General Miller who was "at the heart of the policy of torture practiced at Guantanamo. He added, "If he refuses to come to the hearing he must face the consequences".
Mourad Benchellali and Français, Nizar Sassi, were arrested at different times by American forces in Afghanistan, and were then transferred from there to Guantanamo in Cuba. At Guantanamo they were subjected to all the common forms of torture you have seen and read about, threats of death to them and their families, forced nudity, threatened with a pack of snarling attack dogs, sexual humiliation, cold temperatures, denial of sleep, shackled into stress positions, water boarding, etc., etc. After a harrowing incarceration period of two years they were deemed to have no information, or were mistakenly arrested, and were quietly released. Read here: France 24 : "Rapport de la CIA : une arme judiciaire pour les ex-détenus de Guantanamo ?"
" I have been tortured, and I want those responsible brought to account. I demand reparation," stated, Mssr. Benchellali to France 24. He added, Geoffrey Miller never actually tortured him personally but that Miller was present in the prison and Benchellali can attest to having seen him passing among the cell blocks. "Of this I am certain."
Benchellali and his attorney agree that this hearing is overall symbolically useful. The former detainee sees his appeal as a very strong case which he hopes will open the halls of justice to the appeals of other victims of American torture and help bring to justice those who were responsible for the disgrace and embarrassment of America and its military forces.
In his 2006 retirement photos Miller, who hails from Ohio, looks like a bland, overworked store manager or shoe salesman. Born in 1949, he seems to have missed serving in Vietnam. He attended Ohio State where he earned a degree in history, and joined the U.S. Army in 1972 probably as a member of the Ohio State, ROTC. He trained and served in US field artillery. Not a West Point graduate so he had to work a little harder for advancement. He appears to have been assigned some of the less than desirable military posts and must have served his superiors well, eventually rising to become a senior officer and Army "management" desk man. After a mostly quiet career with little or no battlefield experience Miller somehow morphed into the epitome of the evil torturer of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. One wonders, how did he undergo such a metamorphosis?
MILLER AT GUANTANAMO
Soon after the ill-conceived and disastrous "Bush-Cheny" invasion of Iraq, Miller was assigned the command of Joint Task Force Guantanamo. That office ran the US detention system's now infamous facilities in Cuba known as Camp X-Ray, Camp Delta and Camp Echo. While there, Miller was under pressure from his superiors to "produce" information. At that time Miller claimed that 400 prisoners out of the 600 prisoners incarcerated at GTMO had "confessed" to having been involved in terrorism. we know now that these so called "confessions" were extracted by torture. Miller used that tainted criterion to subject the remaining two-thirds of the inmate population so designated to even "harsher procedures" to gain what was termed "actionable intelligence". Geoff Miller diligently tried to please his bosses. To do so, he had to go way beyond the line of what was legal, and venture outside the moral circle of acceptance of our Constitution and Amdrican culture.
According to Wikipedia's site: "General Geoffery Miller", "It was not Geoff Miller, but the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who on December 2, 2002 authorized in writing the "First Special Interrogation Plan," listing 17 techniques to be used on the detainee Mohammed al Qahtani." (Rumsfeld had help. These "interrogation plans" (torture procedures). were developed in consultation with General Miller who carried them out.) "It was later revealed that such techniques were used more widely against other prisoners as well." Wikipedia also notes that " On September 22, 2003, Miller ordered the arrest of James Yee, an Army captain who served as a chaplain for the Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo". Captain Yee courageously attempted to bring the maltreatment of the detainees to the attention of his superiors. Miller falsely accused Yee of stealing classified documents and of smuggling them out of the prison. Those charges were later dropped. No evidence of espionage or malfeasance was ever produced against Captain Yee and he was honorably discharged on January 7, 2004.
MILLER IN IRAQ
In August of 2002 legal advisor John Yoo of President Bush's Office of Legal Counsel wrote a draft memo to the CIA, known widley as the "Torture Memos" which claimed (now discredited) that existing international laws on torture were "antiquated" and did not apply to the Iraq, Guantanamo situations. Less than a year later, and five days before the invasion of Iraq (March 19, 2003), the same John Yoo issued an opinion to the Department of Defense in which legal scholar Yoo concluded (a view that is also now discredited) that federal laws related to the use of torture would NOT apply to detainees outside US borders. Most legal,observers Now believe that Yoo was writing opinions based on premises derived not from US law and legal precedent but from the questionable needs and priorities of his White House superiors.
Based on John Yoo's quasi-legal findings, the Defense Department, in August 2003, transferred General Miller, who they knew had experience in "extracting" information from Guantanamo detainees from Cuba to Iraq. Miller was tasked with developing "more productive" interrogation procedures for Iraqi prisoners. Besides dumbly following orders from Rumsfeld and others, Miller had his own insidious ideas as well. He submitted a report which recommended using the same harsh treatment (torture) methods he had employed in Guantanamo (GTMO) to Iraq. He referred this to this process as "GTMO-ising" the Iraq detainee prison system. Further, he proposed and implemented a staff utilization plan which combined two formerly separate detention and interrogation units at Abu Ghraib prison into one unit. Under this plan, the prison military police (detention) staff would be used (according to Miller) to "soften up" the prisoners for the actual interrogation process. This "plan" ultimately backfired on Miller. In a subsequent report on the Abu Ghraib scandal filed by General Antonio Taguba (2006), Taguba concluded that the degrading and brutal prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of Miller's use of untrained, poorly officered prison military police guards for the "softening up" interrogation purposes.
Miller was also accused of introducing the use of attack dogs to intimidate, and in some cases to maul prisoners, a procedure he had used at Guantanamo. And according to one of his Iraq-theater colleagues, General Janis Karpinski, he (miller) was quoted as advising senior prison officials "to treat detainees like dogs". Karpinski Attributes to Miller the statement: "If you permit them to think that at any point they are more than a dog then you have lost control of them." Miller denies these accusations. Though during the time Miller was commandant, several photographs released from the Abu Ghraib file do show naked, apparently screaming prisoners being threatened by snarling German Shepard dogs handled by military police.
THE REAL CRIMINALS
The case against Miller is a strong one. The Frenchman Benchellali's attorney, William Bourdon claims that Geoff Miller was "at the heart of the policy of torture" practiced at Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib. That statement seems well justified. However, Miller was the low man on the chain of command. He was "only following orders" and attempting with little thought about right or morality to do the bidding of his just as evil superiors. In part Miller is a fall guy for more vicious and dangerous types, who remain unrepentant and unpunished. In my view the actual higher up perpetrators who set up the system with a so called legal rational for torture and abuse designed to sooth the concerns of those such as Miller (and others like him) are as morally repugnant and guilty as Miller. Those that participated in the subterfuge of creating legal cover for torture and falsity are more or equally guilty. Miller's superiors in the Defense establishment and in the White House have thrown Miller under the bus. While Miller suffers the infamy of his past...they bask in the limelight Of power, many still holding down good positions and remaininvestors mostly outside of public scrutiny and calumny. It is not fair. Justice requires more than that.
The real criminals are those who made policy, for the CIA and the Defense Department, who legally tried to justify this horrid anti-American, illegal and immoral program and gave orders to put it into motion. The truly guilty according to most accounts are: Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Stephen Cambone, Ricardo S. Sanchez, Walter Wojdakowski, Thomas M. Pappas, Barbara Fast, Marc Warren, John Yoo, William J. Haynes, II, David Addington, and Jay Bybee.
When will their day for retribution come?
And let us not forget the actual interrogators or "torture perps", yes working "under orders" of the above, but certainly guilty of horrible acts of illegal and unwarranted brutality. These faceless unknowns also must be discovered and punished. And finally, we come to those foul, complicitous so-called "professionals", I refer here to the psychologists, psychiatrists, and sadly even some physicians who abandoned their professional dignity, honor and their professional oaths to give aid, support and advice to the criminal torturers of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Your denoument and retribution also awaits.
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