Tagwar crimes

Fine collection of 9/11 links

Trevor Blake has a fine collection of links regarding 9/11. My favorite is Verbatim Quotes from Republicans when Clinton was Prez. Examples:

“Domestic terrorism is not a cause we have to fight or a project we need to fund. We are not interested in capturing bin Laden. Even though he has been offered to us. We are not the world’s policemen. It’s not our job to clean up other countries messes or arrest it’s bad guys.” – Senator Mitch McConnell […]

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.” – Governor George W. Bush (R)-TX

OVO: 9/11

There are those who would say that now is not the time to look to past to place blame and point fingers. In most cases, those are the people who are to blame. Some are guilty of neglect, some are guilty of war crimes. None, to my knowledge, have been brought to justice.

See also: The Fifty Top U.S. War Criminals Who Need To Be Prosecuted

Blackwater Contractor Saw Killing Iraqis as 9/11 Payback – Justice Department

For sport, they rolled through the streets of Baghdad hurling frozen oranges and water bottles at civilians and nearby vehicles, trying to smash windshields and injure bystanders. Convoying through the city in armored vehicles, the contractors fired their weapons indiscriminately. One member of the Blackwater security team known as Raven 23 regularly bragged about his body count and viewed killing Iraqis as “payback for 9/11.”

These allegations are contained in court records [PDF] filed on Monday by Justice Department lawyers prosecuting five Blackwater contractors for the September 2007 shooting frenzy in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that killed 14 Iraqis and wounded 20 others. Anticipating that lawyers representing the contractors will argue that they were acting in self defense, the prosecution is seeking to introduce evidence that “several of the defendants had harbored a deep hostility toward Iraqi civilians which they demonstrated in words and deeds.” The charges are similar to those that recently emerged in civil lawsuits against Blackwater, stemming from the Nisour Square episode.

Mother Jones: Justice Dept.: Blackwater Contractor Saw Killing Iraqis as 9/11 Payback

(see also: Blackwater founder accused of murder)

Glenn Greenwald: American media complicit in war crimes

That was typical of Beltway media behavior even as revelations of war crimes and high-level lawlesness proliferated: oh, calm down with your extremist, unhinged rhetoric. Broder boasts that he called for Clinton’s resignation over a sex scandal and “had no problem with” Nixon’s impeachment over what was, by comparsion to Bush scandals, a relatively minor infraction. As revelations of torture mounted, did he call for Bush’s impeachment or even resignation? No. Like most of his colleagues in the media, he did the opposite: he dismissed objections to what was happening as hysterical and fringe and insisted that Serious and Good People were in charge.

This is a vital reason — I’d say the central reason — why people like David Broder and his media colleagues don’t want investigations and prosecutions: because they were complicit in most of it, and such proceedings would implicate them as much as the criminals themselves. Think about it: what would happen if Dick Cheney were “in the dock,” if high-level American officials were adjudicated in formal proceedings as war criminals and felons? The question would naturally arise: how was that allowed to happen? What did the American media do about it while it happened? What was the Dean of the Washington Press Corps saying and doing to stop it and to alert the citizenry as to what was going on? And the answer, of course, is: nothing. They supported the war criminals and mocked and demonized those who objected.

Salon: Who are Broderian anti-investigation journalists really protecting?

Seven Points on the CIA Report

The worst is yet to come. Yesterday the CIA released a fresh copy of the report with roughly half of the “case study” discussion now unmasked. But context and placement suggest that the material that remains concealed contains some of the worst discussion of abuse in the report. The heavy redactions start around page 25, and the redactions cover discussion of the origins of the program and the approval process, as well as the discussion of specific prisoners, notably Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. Although cases in which the guidelines provided by the Justice Department were exceeded have been discussed, it’s likely the case that the still blacked-out passages cover instances where Justice gave a green light but the conduct was so gruesome that CIA wants to keep it under wraps. That means we haven’t heard the last of the Helgerson report, and further disclosures are likely.

Harper’s: Seven Points on the CIA Report

(via Jorn Barger)

What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report

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Specifically the report describes the following treatment of detainees:

(a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle — all things that we have always condemend as “torture” and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies.

Glenn Greenwald: What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report

(via Johnny Brainwash)

Calley Apologizes for 1968 My Lai Massacre

Over forty-one years after the My Lai Massacre, when US troops killed more than 500 men, women and children in Vietnam, the former Army lieutenant who was convicted for his role in the killings has publicly apologized. William Calley was the only US soldier held legally responsible for the slayings. He was convicted on twenty-two counts of murder, and his sentence was later commuted by President Reagan. Last week, William Calley publicly apologized for the first time, saying, “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai.” He added that he had been following orders.

Seymour Hersh describing the My Lai Massacre and the role of the former Army lieutenant William Calley:

In any case, one mother tucked a child, a two- or three-year-old boy, under her stomach, and somehow he survived all the bullets. And they heard a keening noise, the soldiers told me. And this little boy climbed his way up through the ditch full of other people’s blood, got to the top and began to run across the—you know, just to run away. And Lieutenant Calley turned to Meadlo, his most dependable shooter—others had stopped at a certain point or shot high—and said, “Meadlo, plug him.” And Meadlo looked at one person and couldn’t do it. And Calley then, with a great—you know, very saucy-like—grabbed his carbine—officers had a smaller rifle called a carbine—ran behind him and shot him.

Everybody remembered that, because the next morning, Meadlo was walking on patrol with the soldiers—they moved on to a few clicks away, a mile or so away, and began to patrol again, as they always did—just another day’s work, I guess. I don’t know. And he stepped on a land mine—Meadlo did—and blew his right leg off at the knee. And when the medevac was coming—they called in a chopper to take him away—he began to issue an oath: “God has punished me, Lieutenant Calley, and God will punish you. God has punished me.” And the kids, in telling me about this a year and a half later, all remembered how angry they were. “Get him out of here! Get him out of here!” They didn’t want to hear this.

Democracy Now: Calley Apologizes for 1968 My Lai Massacre

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