Another Gitmo Believe it Or Not!
October 26, 2009 WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has ordered the release of a Kuwaiti man held at Guantanamo Bay and rebuked the United States government for relying on scant evidence, witnesses that were not credible and coerced confessions to hold him for more than seven years.
In an opinion declassified Friday, the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Federal District Court here, said government lawyers had presented a “surprisingly bare” record in four days of classified hearings last month to oppose the man’s request for release.
She said that the man, Fouad Al Rabiah, an aviation engineer; was being held almost exclusively based on confessions that were obtained through abusive techniques and that his own interrogators repeatedly concluded were not believable.
“Incredibly, these are the confessions that the government has asked the court to accept as truthful in this case,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 65-page opinion that was partly redacted to remove classified material. She called the coerced confessions “entirely incredible” and said they “defy belief.”
“If there exists a basis for Al Rabiah’s indefinite detention, it most certainly has not been presented to this court,” the judge found.
The War on Terra
by Hamid Golpira
What is the “War on Terror” all about anyway?
Every time a military operation is carried out that leaves scores of children and other civilians dead but fails to hit the professed targets, the self-proclaimed pundits say it is another indication that the War on Terror is a bungled, inefficient campaign. But is it an inefficient War on Terror or a very efficient war — on Terra?
Terra is Latin for Earth. Terran and Earther are the correct terms for a person from Earth. Never call yourself an Earthling. When you use the word Earthling, you disempower yourself. Earthling is a diminutive like sapling or duckling. Earthling actually means “little Earth person” — which is how the global ruling class views the majority of the people of Earth.
And the powers that be are actually implementing a global depopulation program to eradicate many of the little Earth people. However, some will be allowed to live a marginalized existence.
The masses that are deemed to be useful workers — as opposed to useless eaters — are being reduced to serfdom. Globalization is actually global pauperization. The current global economic meltdown, which is destroying the middle class, is a part of this plan.
This is the War on Terra.
When Torture Kills
by Andy Worthington
Excerpted from “When Torture Kills”
Often, the premise of media discussions of torture is that “torture” is something that was confined to waterboarding and used only on three “high-value” detainees accused of being high-level al-Qaeda operatives.
The reality is completely different.
The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the US has resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in US custody. Many of these were caused by “authorized” methods, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Here are some of the stories that have been uncovered thus far.
Murders in Bagram airbase
Many of the new recruits had no experience in interrogation. They were given few guidelines about how to behave, and had virtual carte blanche to treat the prisoners as they saw fit. It became standard procedure to use stress positions and sleep deprivation, with interrogation sessions lasting 32 to 36 hours.
It also became standard policy that new prisoners were hooded, shackled and kept in isolation for the first 24 hours of their imprisonment, and sometimes for the first three days. Writing for the New York Times in May 2005, journalist Tim Golden noted that prisoners were handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for several days.
Bagram became a place of random brutality. Golden described how sometimes “the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.” In statements to army investigators, soldiers mentioned a prisoner who was “forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went,” and another who was “made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.”
Obama’s War Machine Needs $800 Billion For 2009
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Barack Obama’s election promise to bring “change” to Washington and reverse the juggernaut of the Bush war machine has proven to be nothing more than a cruel hoax, emphasized by his recent actions on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and his latest demand for a total of around $800 billion in war funds and subsidiary costs just to cover the rest of 2009.
“According to the US defense officials, Obama needs USD 75.5 billion for 2009 to cover the cost of the additional troops deployed in to Afghanistan this year and an another USD 130 billion for the rest of fiscal 2009,” reports Press TV.
An additional $534 billion is required for the Defense Department, added to another figure of $65.9 billion that has already been approved by Congress, bringing the total figure to over $805 billion dollars.
