A British soldier has become the first to admit to a war crime after pleading guilty to inhumanely treating Iraqi civilians, at a court martial. Cpl Donald Payne, 35, of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment, pleaded guilty to the charge at the start of a court martial involving seven UK soldiers.
But Cpl Payne denied manslaughter and perverting the course of justice.
Six others have pleaded not guilty to charges relating to the death of Baha Mousa, 26, in custody in Basra in 2003.
The charges also relate to the alleged ill-treatment of other detainees.
Mr Mousa, a hotel receptionist, was among a group of detainees arrested following a counter-insurgency operation.
Julian Bevan QC, prosecuting, said the detainees had been arrested on 14 September 2003 at the Haitham Hotel, where the army had found weapons including rifles, bayonets and suspected bomb-making equipment.
They were subsequently taken to a temporary detention centre where they were held for 36 hours and repeatedly beaten while handcuffed and forced to wear sacks on their heads, Mr Bevan said.
He told the seven-man judging panel: "One civilian, Baha Musa, died as a result, in part, from the multiple injuries he had received.
"There were no less than 93 injuries on his body at the post-mortem stage, including fractured ribs and a broken nose."
Other prisoners received serious kidney injuries consistent with being kicked and punched, Mr Bevan added.
The court was not dealing with "robust or rough handling, which is bound to happen in the theatre that existed in Iraq" but with something "far more serious", he said.
"We are not dealing with the actions of a soldier or soldiers in the heat of the moment whilst on patrol in a hostile environment whose conduct is questionable.
"We are dealing with systematic abuse against prisoners involving unacceptable violence against persons who were detained in custody, hooded and cuffed and wholly unable to protect themselves over a very long period of time."
War crime
Earlier, as the case opened, Cpl Payne admitted a charge of inhumane treatment.
L/Cpl Wayne Crowcroft, 22, and Pte Darren Fallon, 23 - both also of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment - deny the same charge.
The inhumane treatment of persons charge faced by the three is being brought as a war crime charge under the International Criminal Court Act (ICCA) 2001.
The court martial, at the Military Court Centre at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, is the first time British military personnel have been prosecuted under the act.
The charge of inhumane treatment already existed in normal British military law before the Act was introduced in 2001.
Assault charge
All other charges against the men are being brought under the British Army Act 1955.
Sgt Kelvin Stacey, 29, of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment, is accused of assault occasioning actual bodily harm with an alternative count of common assault.
Maj Michael Peebles, 35, and Warrant Officer Mark Davies, 37, both of the Intelligence Corps, face charges of negligently performing a duty.
And Col Jorge Mendonca, 42, formerly commander of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment - which is now renamed as the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment - is charged with negligently performing his duties.
A strange Associated Press article about presidential scribblings makes a bizarre reference to a John F. Kennedy doodle in which he seemingly predicted a "9-11 conspiracy" 40 years before it happened.
"President Kennedy, known for separating his life into compartments, would enclose words and numbers inside circles and boxes. Events long after his death give one doodle an unintended chill: A small circle with the numbers "9-11" contained within. Just to the lower left on the page, the word "conspiracy" is underlined."
The doodle is part of a new book, Presidential Doodles, which analyses the jottings of eight commanders in chief.
What kind of astronomical coincidence could see JFK - himself the target of a conspiracy - accurately forecast a major world event decades beforehand?
Is this some kind of inside joke or is it a hat tip to the 9/11 truth movement?
One thing's for sure - it's weird.
George W. Bush's most infamous note making to date came during a UN Security Council meeting on September 14 2005, where he asked Condoleeza Rice if he could be given permission to take a toilet break. Reuters carried a photo of the message (above) and later had to clarify its reason for running the shot on its photo wire. Many Neo-Con blowhard baselessly accused Reuters of photoshopping the image, focusing on why the photo was carried and taking attention away from the importance of what it said.
The message perfectly illustrated the fact that Bush is a figurehead and a puppet who controls absolutely nothing and has to ask special his handlers simply to leave the room.
Bush Desperate To Legislate Mengele Style Torture Phony intelligence from false confessions needed to maintain Al-Qaeda myth, sexual mutilation of children advocated by White House legal architect
The Bush administration's desperation to legitimize and legislate torture in the face of revolt from Congress, the Senate and even Colin Powell, is an attempt to rescue the need to have a constant supply of phony intelligence obtained from torture to justify the war on terror - while the real horror of how the administration advocates sexually mutilating children under the same legal definition remains hidden from the U.S. public.
A large portion of Americans still support the use of 'rendition' and 'pressure' because they are told that the information obtained from such methods protects them from terrorists. Not only is that information crude, unreliable and often misleading - but the suffering inflicted on the victims is a horror show in comparison to the milquetoast edited version presented via the media.
The philosophy of the Bush administration's approach to torture is encapsulated by John “torture” Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor.
During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.
Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
By the very framework that has been established within this context, Bush's Rose Garden speech this past Friday was a tacit attempt to sell the justification of crushing a child's genitals in the name of the war on terror. No you haven't entered the twilight zone, you are witnessing the absolute sacking and moral decay of everything that used to be America.
They are actually arguing for the legalization of sadistic, serial killer style torture and sexual molestation of children - the same administration that labels its critics "fascists" is pursuing a doctrine that makes Dr. Josef Mengele look like Ronald McDonald in comparison.
The official US Army report listed all the abuses committed at the Abu Ghraib prison. These methods are standard use in the 'Copper Green' worldwide torture program.
a. (U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
b. (U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
c. (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
d. (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;
e. (U) Threatening male detainees with rape;
f. (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
h. (U) Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
.................
a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; [Rape]
l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees (after detainees were beaten to death).
Spun as the actions of "a few bad apples," the Abu Ghraib torture program was sanctioned from the very top.
Janis Karpinski was scapegoated as being party to the torture when she was in reality trying to put a stop to it. Since the Abu Ghraib scandal she has been blowing the whistle on who directed the torture program and how it continues to this day. During an interview on the Alex Jones Show, Karpinski stated,
"There is overwhelming proof that torture is going on, that it has been directed and is likely continuing, even to this day. I don't want to believe it is but the statements from the people just returning from the theater give every indication that in fact it is, they still don't know where to draw the line." The General said.
Karpinski identified the masterminds of the torture policy as occupying the highest rungs of the Bush administration.
"The orders came right from the top, filtered down from the secretary of defense, with the endorsement of the President, the Vice President, whatever advisors are surrounding them, filtered down through the Commanders in the field, these practices were not only endorsed, but were in use at Guantanamo bay and in locations in Afghanistan. And when General Miller visited Iraq he brought those techniques with him. And then he sent contract interrogators who had 'performed well' at Guantanamo Bay to Iraq as well."
Why is the Bush administration so feverish to gut the Geneva conventions and legislate torture?
It is common knowledge that evidence obtained from torture is completely unreliable and if anything only muddies the waters of intelligence. The Neo-Con architects of the war on terror could not care less whether the information obtained from torture is accurate or not, the agenda is to artificially manufacture the myth that there are numerous Al-Qaeda cells dotted around the world wanting to attack America.
This process is clearly evident in Uzbekistan, where racist dictator Islam Karimov, the man who enjoys boiling people alive, plays ball in helping Bush and Blair maintain the Al-Qaeda myth by providing a steady supply of tortured Muslims who would admit to being Osama Bin Laden's rent boy just to have the cattle prod removed.
Karimov, Bush and Blair have set-up a nice little back scratching society and it works like this - Karimov has his brownshirts snatch innocent Muslims off the streets, tortures them until they "confess" to being Al-Qaeda members, and then in return for financial kickbacks, hands the phony confessions to the CIA and British intelligence, who use them as propaganda to argue the threat of the Al-Qaeda menace. In addition, the manufacturing of an artificial 'Al-Qaeda threat' enables Karimov to propagandize his own population into supporting his savagery through fear.
The fact that the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray told the Blair government directly that false confessions were being obtained through violent torture, didn't concern MI6 or the CIA, who ordered the program to continue.
The hallmark of the worldwide detainee and torture camps is defined by repeated examples whereby proven top Al-Qaeda members are protected or released while completely innocent individuals are imprisoned for no reason and tortured.
For more than a decade, Osama bin Laden had few soldiers more devoted than Abdallah Tabarak. A former Moroccan transit worker, Tabarak served as a bodyguard for the al Qaeda leader, worked on his farm in Sudan and helped run a gemstone smuggling racket in Afghanistan, court records here show.
During the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when al Qaeda leaders were pinned down by U.S. forces, Tabarak sacrificed himself to engineer their escape. He headed toward the Pakistani border while making calls on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as bin Laden and the others fled in the other direction.
Tabarak was captured and taken to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was classified as such a high-value prisoner that the Pentagon repeatedly denied requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to see him. Then, after spending almost three years at the base, he was suddenly released.
The article describes how Tabarak was a proven loyal and unceasing Al-Qaeda member with an unparalleled affinity for Osama bin Laden.
This website has repeatedly highlighted examples of where known terrorists, even in some cases individuals who were in the throes of carrying out terrorist attacks, are ordered to be released by the US government.
And yet Pakistani gangsters admitted to rounding up innocent people in street sweeps and selling them to the US government as terrorists for anything up to $25,000. These people are now at Guantanamo Bay.
Khaled Masri was abducted off the streets of Germany by the CIA for being a suspected terrorist, the case against him later collapsed and the U.S. government graciously apologized for ruining his life.
In a similar recent case, Ottawa software engineer Maher Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian nationality, was arrested for terrorist ties and deported to Syria, where he was tortured. An official inquiry concluded that Arar was completely innocent.
Only nine alleged terrorists have been brought to trial by the US government and none have been convicted, save the mental retard Zacarias Moussaoui who was tortured into whistling whatever tune his handlers demanded.
In many cases, alleged terrorists like Iyman Faris, the so-called Brooklyn Bridge bomber, turn out to be confidants of the US government. Faris was an FBI informant.
The so-called mastermind of the 7/7 London bombing, Haroon Rashid Aswat, was an MI6 informant whom British intelligence had repeatedly protected in the years before the attack in the face of attempts by intelligence agencies of other nations to arrest him.
The policy of the highest echelons of the American and British establishment is to torture the innocent and release the guilty.
The elite needs to maintain the facade that terrorist cells are everywhere and that only their smothering 'protection' will keep us safe. And yet time and time again the real terrorists are protected and given safe passage by the military-industrial complex handlers.
Though the torture program is being sold to the American people as a necessity in the "war of civilizations," it is in actual fact a trial balloon for the incarceration of political dissidents during a time of manufactured national emergency such as a biological terror attack or race riots.
It was announced earlier this year that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency.
The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used "as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency."
Discussions of federal concentration camps is no longer the rhetoric of paranoid Internet conspiracy theorists, it is mainstream news.
Under the enemy combatant designation anyone at the behest of the US government, even if they are a US citizen, can be kidnapped and placed in an internment facility forever without trial. Jose Padilla, an American citizen, spent over three years in a Navy brig before he was afforded any kind of hearing. The evidence against him was proven to be non-existent and he was transferred to a civilian jail.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says that the Bush Administration may have "planned and carried out" the 9/11 attacks, reports CNN international.
In a recent speech Chavez said:
The hypothesis that is gaining strength, which was said on television last night, and which could soon blow up, was that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack, or act, against its own people and against citizens all over the world. A transcript follows the video.
TRANSCRIPT
CLANCY: All right, turning now to Latin America. Well it's nothing new to say that the president of Venezuela is no friend of the United States, particularly the Bush administration. Hugo Chavez leading a crusade against U.S. dominance of Latin America for the past several years. Just after the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, well, he's added a bit of fuel to the fire.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HUGO CHAVEZ, VENEZUELAN PRES. (through translator): The hypothesis that is gaining strength, which was said on television last night, and which could soon blow up, was that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack, or act, against its own people and against citizens all over the world. Why? To justify the aggression that was immediately unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq and the threats against all of us, against Venezuela, too.
Alex Jones' Ground Zero Report Part 3 We have made available the MP3 of the entire Alex Jones Show today because of the importance of the broadcast. Alex is back in the studio to discuss his role in the 9/11 anniversary protests, and is joined by several truth activists who were there with him including Jason Bermas from the Loose Change crew. Also featured is a short interview with BBC reporter Greg Palast, who is being criminally charged with unauthorized filming of a "critical national security structure" in Louisiana.
Documentary film maker and radio host Alex Jones, coordinating today's 9/11 truth movement events in downtown New York City, says that the atmosphere around ground zero has dramatically changed, with the majority of firefighters and police officers now sympathetic to the claim that 9/11 was an inside job.
Alex is featured at the end of the Associated Press video above imploring viewers to understand that 9/11 was "a self-inflicted wound designed to create a police state in the U.S. and capture us as an engine for world government and world domination."
Alex was assigned to lead a protest march today which he described as over 1000 strong as it snaked across ground zero and through lower Manhattan.
Saying that the "entire atmosphere had changed," Alex explained how police support for protesters at ground zero had gone from 20% support two years ago to around 60% support now - with many willing to affirm that sentiment on camera and many knowledgeable about Alex Jones' work and the 9/11 truth movement.
"Police just saying 'keep your investigation going, we appreciate you' on video," said Jones.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "TerrorStorm sets a new standard in documentary filmmaking. Alex Jones knocks it out of the park yet again." -Dylan Avery, Director, "Loose Change" - Click here to get the DVD or click here to watch online now! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The firemen we've been talking to - a hundred per cent are on our side and have seen the documentary films....it is just incredible what's happened at the grass roots."
Jones said that the few debunkers who were spewing Bush administration style propaganda were met with distain from the police.
"I think that thing that triggered it was the fact that the government lied about the dust, the asbestos all of it," said Jones in citing why first responders and police have become increasingly skeptical about anything the government says about 9/11.
Alex later commenced a vocal bullhorning of ground zero and led a chant of "9/11 was an inside job," more on that to come tomorrow.
Click here to listen to Alex Jones' groud zero report.
A benchmark of the wildfire success of the 9/11 truth movement can be measured with a new CNN poll released today that shows the amount of American citizens who "blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks," has risen from a third to over a half over the past four years.
The 9/11 truth movement is characterized by an increasingly credible veneer - largely thanks to the 9/11 scholars. As media attention builds to a deafening crescendo in anticipation of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, it is necessary to step back and distance ourselves from the more outlandish 9/11 theories and offset their damaging effects.
Over the course of the next week we will continue to take a critical and discerning look at the 9/11 truth movement, celebrating both its obvious measured progress while also highlighting areas of concern that need to be resolved before the next rung on the ladder to bringing criminal charges against the guilty parties can be climbed.
Our sole purpose in this piece is to weed out and discredit an element of 9/11 embraced by 'conspiracy theorists' as oppose to 'skeptics' of the official story. We will treat conspiracy theories that are as implausible or more so than the government version, which in itself a conspiracy theory, with the same contempt - because they are harmful to the 9/11 truth movement as a whole.
It is not the intention of this article to create in-fighting or bickering nor is it advantageous to attack anyone's character and that is why we refrain from citing any individuals by name. Many speculative tenets of what happened on 9/11 have been courted - including by this author - and then dropped after the evidence evaporates and common sense kicks in. We should be loathe to jettison reason and logic even in times of unparalleled absurdity.
Advocates of the 'blue screen' or 'hologram' theory hold that the planes that hit the World Trade Center, or at least Flight 175, were ghost aircraft and that sophisticated image projection technology was used to fake the illusion of them entering the towers.
The evidence they present to validate this notion is the contention that Flight 175 should have "bounced off" the tower yet sliced through it like a knife through butter.
The vast majority of the evidence is supported not by scientific analysis of what one would expect to happen when a large commercial airliner impacts a skyscraper at over 500 miles per hour, but with grainy Internet videos and hastily interpreted statements made by news reporters at ground zero.
If we are to believe, and the evidence suggests it to be so, that western intelligence agencies are carrying out acts of terror, to go to such lengths mandates the necessity of multi-layered fallback options if the criminals are caught red-handed. This is why a large scale terror attack is always shadowed by an almost identical government drill, as was the case with 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings. If significant and damning evidence were to be presented in a court of law powerful enough to have any impact that implicated high officials in acts of gross treason - the fallback option that it was "just part of the drill," remains as a last chance saloon.
If we are to consider that some form of high-tech hologram technology was utilized as part of a David Copperfield style sound and lights magic show that only made it appear as if Flight 175 had hit the south tower - then we are seriously entertaining the notion that the criminals who ran the attack did not bother to construct any fallback explanation if this massive public stunt had gone wrong.
What if the bombs inside the tower had failed due to faulty wiring or had only detonated a second after the hologram had been sent into the tower? How could that one be explained away? Who in their right mind would make such a huge gamble with no fallback option?
There is one video that soundly debunks the blue screen theories and should be used to put this deception to bed for good. Japanese news footage of Flight 175 striking the south tower shows the fuselage of the aircraft briefly exiting the opposite face of the building before the entire plane is engulfed in flames from the exploding jet fuel (located well behind the nosecone). Watch the clip below.
To maintain that this was a hologram necessitates that the "ghost plane" was also somehow superimposed inside the tower so it could be seen exiting at the exact right moment. This is a ridiculous concept.
Here is a close-up frame of the nose exiting the tower.
Here is debris from the fuselage of Flight 175 at ground zero.
I could spend hours attempting to dismiss the multitude of claims made by blue screen advocates but I don't doubt that for every point I make they could uncover another grainy video or edited piece of eyewitness testimony to counter my argument. This is why I can only try and appeal to reason and rational thinking.
If the criminals who organized and carried out 9/11 could execute the operation -
a) in a manner that would have more or less the same psychological impact they were trying to achieve even if the planes had missed their targets (which one of them did)
and
b) by using the most straightforward means available and minimizing the potential that the plot would fail (using giant holograms and attempting to hoodwink millions watching both on television and in person is not the most straightforward means)
Then they would choose those options.
A great deal of the hit pieces we have already encountered and several more that will undoubtedly emerge on or around the fifth anniversary on Monday excel in setting up straw man arguments, attributing minority fringe theories to the entire 9/11 truth movement and then using them to debunk the entire field. Popular Mechanics seized upon the no planes at the WTC theory and dishonestly exhaulted it as a core argument of the 9/11 truth movement.
Therefore it is our remit to distance ourselves from completely unsubstantiated theories which have the effect of eclipsing proven holes in the official story. The hologram theory is severely damaging to the credibility that the 9/11 truth movement has fought so hard to obtain and should therefore be sidelined and shunned at all costs.
An upcoming book about presidential advisor Karl Rove reports allegations of anti-semitism by President George W. Bush, RAW STORY has learned.
In The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power, Austin-based journalist James Moore and Wayne Slater, senior political reporter for the Dallas Morning News, will allege that Bush once made anti-semitic comments to a reporter.
"You know what I'm gonna tell those Jews when I get to Israel, don't you Herman?" a then Governor George W. Bush allegedly asked a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman.
When the journalist, Ken Herman, replied that he did not know, Bush reportedly delivered the punch line: "I'm telling 'em they're all going to hell."
Bush's thoughts on the fate of non-Christian souls became a minor source of controversy after he told the Houston Post in 1993 that only those who "accept Jesus Christ" go to Heaven. However, the future president was also earlier briefly engaged to a half-Jewish woman.
The quip never received wider media attention, even though the Austin American-Statesman reported it in December of 1998.
"As he gazed out a hotel hallway at the Superdome and waited for an elevator, Bush -- clearly going for a laugh at his own expense -- said the first thing he was going to say to Israeli Jews was that they were all 'going to hell,'" Herman had reported. "Bush, who has both a quick wit and generally good judgment on when to use it, made the comment to the same Austin American-Statesman reporter who had reported his 1993 comments about his religious beliefs."
The authors of The Architect assert that religion and ethnicity have been manipulated by Bush and Rove to "divide" and "conquer" the nation. RAW STORY obtained a copy of The Architect late this week.
A man who starred in a video released by al-Qaida's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri on Saturday, inviting Americans to convert to Islam, has been identified as Adam Yehiye Gadahn, an American with Jewish ancestry.
According to Wikipedia, he was born Adam Pearlman on September 1, 1978, the grandson of a prominent Jewish surgeon and the son of musician Phil Pearlman, who converted to Christianity and changed his named to Gadahn (apparently derived from the Biblical figure Gideon.) He grew up in Santa Ana, California, converted to Islam and, in 1995, posted an essay on the USC Web site describing his conversion. According to his parents, Gadahn moved to Pakistan in 1998, where he married an Afghani refugee.
The FBI believes he attended al-Qaida training camps in Pakistan and served as an al-Qaida translator and English spokesman.
It was the second time Gadahn has appeared in the same video with Zawahri. In a July 7 video marking the one-year anniversary of bombings against the London transit system, Gadahn said no Muslim should "shed tears" for Westerners killed by al-Qaida attacks.
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