``Khadr, a Canadian citizen, has already spent more than eight years in US military custody. The terms of the plea deal have not yet been made public. Khadr was facing life in prison on the charges against him, which included murder and attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism, and spying...
After Khadr was captured, he was taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. While there he was forced into painful stress positions, threatened with rape, hooded, and confronted with barking dogs. The government's own witnesses confirmed some of this treatment when they testified that Khadr was interrogated while strapped down on a stretcher just 12 hours after sustaining his life-threatening injuries. They also testified he was threatened with rape if he did not cooperate''
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/10/25/us-khadr-sentencing-should-reflect-juvenile-status
It's interesting to track why/how Khadr was charged with murder. He was suppected of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier during a firefight. He was apparently the only survivor. The evidence for attempted murder is a video tape that shows him making and planting IEDs.
Khadr's battlefield activities were not considered crimes in a war zone under UN Geneva Conventions. They are invented crimes under the legal trickery of the Bush era installed to justify otherwise illegal activities on the part of the US government and military. The proper way of handling Khadr was to treat his wounds and turn him over to a POW camp. His recruitment as an under age soldier was also a crime.
I keep asking myself, why does the Obama administration continue the wars and this blatantly illegal justice system? They didn't have to keep them going. Now they own them. And they also own a double tiered intelligence and justice system in the Dept of Defense. What is this bullshit?
I think the answer is simple: cover-up. The Obama administration has covered-up the criminal activities of the financial sector, covered-up the environmental crimes of the oil/energy industry, covered-up the war crimes of the US military and government.
The cover-ups are a pretty amazing list. The wars were not only illegal to begin with, but as wikileaks war logs show, the entire way they were and still are being waged is illegal and criminal by intent and design. On Aljazeera I watched a clinic in Falluja where mothers and infants go, and the levels of deformed and disfigured babies has some alarming percentage of disabled childbirths. The cause of these deformaties seems pretty clear to me, depleated uranium used as ammunition.
There are other aspects to this state of the nation that are puzzling. For example, why does the US media make themselves complicit and or proactive participants in these cover-ups? Why is the US public either apathic or insane?
I think the answer to those questions is mass denial. The Tea Baggers represent the insane wing of the denial syndrome, and the mass silence represents the apathic wing. They are two extreme poles of a sort of mass denial psychosis syndrome. Overmastering this denial syndrome is the constant fear and hate mongering nonsense that passes for daily `news': tea party, muslim terrorists, Iran gets the bomb, cut government spending to `fix' the economy....
LBO just came to today and reminded me of the other dire threat to our way of life, and a fear mongering favorite, Social Security. Austerian panic... (Nice word.)
Found this on Pen-l:
from SLATE: The Slatest Edition
WikiLeaks Founder Is Paranoid, Increasingly Alone
``Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, should be celebrating. His whistleblowers Web site has achieved the notoriety and profile he has long craved, particularly after it released almost 400,000 secret documents on the Iraq war. Yet he sees potential threats in every move he makes...''
If Assange isn't subjected to massive intelligence service's black operations, then they are not doing their job. Let's see, remember Rumsfeld's mis-information plan? I think we have one here, directed at wikileaks.
So I looked up the original story in the NYT. It was by John Burns. Fuck you Burns. Some of us have long `nostalgic' memories, like the Nixon Plumbers. What was their job? Break into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist office to find `mental disease' dirt to smear Ellsberg, discredit him and soften the public impact of the Pentagon Papers. For those of us on left, the Pentagon Papers were a real let down, because we already knew the entire US war machine was lying. One of the big lies of the Vietnam era, was that Joe Public Didn't Know. Excuse me? It took about six months of reading newspapers to figure out they were lying, because they kept `correcting' the same story, just a few kills more and we will win. Has anybody ever examined this logic?
My conclusion, Burns is an agent, or even more desirable, an eager collaborator who doesn't require payments. Here is an hilarious example of smear by indirection:
``The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.''
The NYT has spoken to dozens of people? What people? You mean military intelligence officers who tell you the state of things? Now there is a trusty source.
So the issue at point is Julian Assange's mental state, and not the eight year long war atrocity production system creating thousands upon thousand of dead, disfigured, traumatized, and fucked up people as a matter of course, in illegal wars in the first place?
Really, John B. Dude, can we say you have your journalistic priorities inside out? Metaphor of choice, head up ass, strangulation by anal sphincter, fear response by exposure...
I think of Burns as an example of the ultimate form that journalistic embedding produces, i.e. total corruption.
CG