Well, there goes year eight of war and occupation in Iraq, welcome to YEAR NINE!

We, the few, the proud, the PEACEMAKERS commemorated the passing with a Free Bradley Manning solidarity demo and anti-war vigil in front of the old Capital in Tallahassee.

Obligatory group shot -

The Peace Hounds made another appearance. These dogs have protested for peace hundreds of times during the past ten years. How 'bout you?...

There was also a rare sighting of long lost peacemaker and friend Ed

Eight Years of War: What WikiLeaks Has Revealed on the US Occupation of Iraq
By Kevin Gosztola
March 19, 2011 at 09:24:02

This date, March 19, 2011, marks the beginning of the ninth year of the US war in Iraq. The war, which began in 2003 with a bombing campaign of "shock and awe," has for years been more of an occupation than a war. Despite the fact that many believe the war is over (especially Americans), the US still has 47,000 troops in Iraq and, despite a 2011 withdrawal date, will likely continue to have tens of thousands of soldiers based in Iraq for years to come.

The past year has seen the world learn a great deal about the US war and occupation of Iraq. With the WikiLeaks release of US State Cables, the Iraq War Logs, and a "Collateral Murder" video showing US soldiers firing on journalists and innocent civilians from an Apache helicopter, the criminal nature of the war and occupation has become more evident. To mark the end of eight years of US troops in Iraq and the beginning of a ninth year, it is worth noting the many revelations on Iraq that have become known thanks to WikiLeaks.

On October 22, 2010, 390,000 field reports, which became known as the Iraq War Logs, showed the regular use of abuse, brutality and torture used on Iraqis by Iraqi Police and Iraqi Security Forces. The logs revealed, despite US claims, a tracking of civilian deaths had been going on, and, in fact, 66,000 civilian deaths (15,000 which were previously unknown) had occurred.

George W. Bush: Torturer-in-Chief
David Cole
November 10, 2010
In an uncoerced confession in his new memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush proudly admits that he personally signed off on the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in 2003. Former Vice President Dick Cheney made the same admission in a televised interview shortly before he left office. In one sense, this is nothing new. It had long been reported that the CIA's use of what the Bush administration euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation techniques" had been approved at the highest levels of the administration. But now both Bush and Cheney have publicly admitted to specifically signing off on the CIA's torture tactics. Their direct personal admissions now seal the case against them.

What case, you might ask? There is in fact no criminal or civil case against the former president or vice president for these actions. And both men no doubt felt comfortable admitting they had authorized what the world recognizes as torture because they believe they are politically immune from being held accountable. Even before the midterm elections, Barack Obama had insisted that he wanted only to look forward, not backward. With a strengthened Republican Party after the elections, it is even less likely that Bush or Cheney will be held accountable by the Obama administration. On November 9 the Justice Department announced that no criminal charges would be brought against the CIA agents who destroyed videotapes of the torture interrogations; that part of the cover-up, it seems, has succeeded...

No charges for CIA tape destruction: Justice Dept
By Jeremy Pelofsky
Tue Nov 9, 2010 5:16pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - No CIA personnel will face criminal charges for destroying videotapes of harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.

While the decision will spare the CIA and the Obama administration the potential backlash and embarrassment that a trial could have generated, another federal probe continues into possible abuse of detainees by CIA personnel.

The videotapes probe was launched in January 2008 by then-U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey after revelations that the CIA in 2005 had destroyed hundreds of hours of videotapes of the interrogations of terrorism suspects Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Zubaydah was one of three terrorism suspects who was subjected to waterboarding, a procedure in which the person experiences simulated drowning. It was believed that the tapes included footage of the waterboarding...

War Crimes of General Stanley McChrystal - #24 of the top 25 Censored news stories of 2011

Sources:

Seymour Hersh, "Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Countries, Including in Latin America," Democracy Now!, March 31, 2009

Seymour Hersh, "You Can't Authorise Murder," interview with Abbas Al Lawati, Gulf News, May 12, 2009

PressTV, "McChrystal Was Cheney's Chief Assassin," May 16, 2009

A little more than a year before he was fired on June 23, 2010, for making potentially insubordinate remarks in a Rolling Stone profile, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed by President Barack Obama as commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan. He had been formerly in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Most of what General McChrystal has done over a thirty-three-year career remains classified, including service between 2003 and 2008 as commander of the JSOC, a special black operations commando unit of the Navy Seals and Delta Force so clandestine that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh claims that the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and that Congress had no oversight of it whatsoever. The JSOC team would go into countries, without talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, find people on a to-be-killed list, execute them, and leave. There was an ongoing list of targeted people, cleared by Vice President Cheney's office, who had committed acts of war or were suspected of planning operations of war against the United States. Hersh asserts that there have been assassinations in a dozen countries in the Middle East and Latin America. "There's an executive order, signed by President Ford, in the '70s, forbidding such action. It's not only contrary-it's illegal, it's immoral, it's counterproductive," he added...

from www.IndictBushNow.org -
UN calls on Obama to Investigate and Prosecute U.S. Torture Charges
Wikileaks Documents Prove Torture, Abuse and Criminal Acts Were Systematic

In the wake of the release of 400,000 documents by Wikileaks, the United Nations has called on U.S. President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of crimes committed against the Iraqi people following the invasion and occupation that was directed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak declared that the Obama administration had a legal and moral obligation to fully investigate credible claims of US forces' complicity in torture. Nick Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister in the UK has, in the wake of the recent revelations, also called for an investigation into the reports of mass torture disclosed in the newly released documents...

WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs Expose US-Backed Iraqi Torture, 15,000 More Civilian Deaths, and Contractors Run Amok

Iraq War-logs
The online whistleblower WikiLeaks has released some 390,000 classified US documents on the Iraq war—the largest intelligence leak in US history and the greatest internal account of any war on public record. The disclosure provides a trove of new evidence on the violence, torture and suffering that has befallen Iraq since the 2003 US invasion. Despite US government claims to the contrary, the war logs show the Pentagon kept tallies of civilian deaths in Iraq. The group Iraq Body Count says the files contain evidence of an additional 15,000 previously unknown Iraqi civilian casualties. The number is likely far higher as the war logs omit many instances where US forces killed Iraqi civilians, including the US assault on Fallujah in 2004. The war logs also show the US imposed a formal policy to ignore human rights abuses committed by the Iraqi military. Under an order known as "Frago 242" issued in June 2004, coalition troops were barred from investigating any violations committed by Iraqi troops against other Iraqis...

Wikileaks

Full coverage of the Iraq war logs - Guardian UK
The Iraq War Logs - Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The War Logs - NY Times
Iraq War Logs - SPIEGEL ONLINE - Nachrichten
The Secret Iraq Files - Al Jazeera

The Iraq War Logs

Biggest Document Leak in History Exposes Real War

US troops fail to record civilian deaths in one of Iraq’s biggest battles

Allegations of prisoner abuse by US troops after Abu Ghraib

Hundreds of civilians gunned down at checkpoints

Iraq’s bloodiest month: December 2006

15,000 new civilian deaths uncovered in leaked files

Syrian intelligence agents linked to al Qaeda in Iraq


Guardian UK

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture

Iraq war logs: US turned over captives to Iraqi torture squads

Iraq war logs: Operation Steel Curtain and its 25 ignored civilian casualties

Iraq war logs: Battle for Samarra killed dozens of innocent people

Iraq war logs: UN calls on Obama to investigate human rights abuses

Iraq war logs: Apache crew killed insurgents who tried to surrender


NY Times

The Iraq Archive: The Strands of a War - WikiLeaks Documents... More below the fold

US turned blind eye to torture
Leaked documents on Iraq war contain thousands of allegations of abuse, but a Pentagon order told troops to ignore them.
Gregg Carlstrom Last Modified: 24 Oct 2010 15:31 GMT
An alleged militant identified only as "DAT 326" was detained by the Iraqi army on July 7, 2006 at a checkpoint in the town of Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. When US forces interrogated him later that night, he described hours of brutal abuse at the hands of the Iraqi soldiers, an allegation apparently backed by the findings of a medical exam.

DAT 326 states he was told to lay down on his stomach with his hands behind his back, which is when the Iraqi soldiers allegedly stepped, jumped, urinated and spit on him.

[…] DAT 326 was evaluated and treated for his injuries at Cobra Clinic. Injuries include blurred vision, diminished hearing in left ear, bleeding in ears, bruising on forehead, neck, chest, back, shoulders, arms, hands, and thighs, cuts over the left eye and on the upper and lower lips, hemorrhaging eyes, blood in nasal cavities, and swollen hands/wrists.

A review of the leaked documents reveals more than 1,000 allegations of abuse committed by Iraqi security forces. Not all of them are credible, as some detainees showed no physical evidence of abuse, while others changed their stories during multiple interrogations.

But hundreds of them – like "DAT 326" – are supported by medical evidence and other corroboration. Those reports demonstrate a clear pattern of abuse and torture in Iraqi jails, one that a high-level Pentagon directive barred US forces from investigating.

"Only an initial report will be made"

The instruction not to investigate was handed down in fragmentary order (FRAGO) 242, first mentioned in a report filed on May 16, 2005...

170 Organizations Request Special Prosecutor for Bush-Cheney

A movement is building around a simple statement at http://prosecutebushcheney.org

Organizations and individuals are signing on, and 170 organizations have already taken the lead.

Next week United for Peace and Justice will ask its 1,400 member groups to consider signing on.

Most of the 170 national and local groups signed onto this movement before the release of seven Justice Department memos from 2001-2002 in which top officials claimed the right to disregard the Fourth Amendment, Habeas Corpus, and Posse Comitatus:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/40420

Most of these groups signed on before learning that the CIA had destroyed 92, not 2, "interrogation" tapes:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/40360

Most of these groups signed on before the release of Emails in which we discover that British intelligence thought the Iraq weapons claims were laughably dishonest: http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/40684

Most signed on prior to the United Nations declaring rendition illegal:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/40627

Would you or your organization like to be cutting edge?
You can sign on at http://prosecutebushcheney.org

ProsecuteBushCheney.org
WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Federal:
Add your organization or individual name to joint statement requesting a Special Prosecutor. Ask organizations you're in touch with to sign on. The demand for prosecution has been supported by many members of Congress.


Sign a petition asking Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in war crimes. Sign now.


Collect signatures in the real world by printing out this PDF. Please enter the data you collect on the petition online and/or mail the completed (or partially completed) forms to JDS, 4407 Garrison Street NW, Washington DC 20016.


Phone and Email and fax the Office of the Attorney General at 202-514-2001 AskDOJ@usdoj.gov fax:202-307-6777 to request a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in war crimes.


In June 2008, 56 Democratic Congress members, led by Congressman John Conyers, wrote to Attorney General Mukasey asking for a Special Prosecutor. Conyers and Congressman Jerrold Nadler wrote to Mukasey again in December 2008. Please ask them to re-send these letters to the new Attorney General, Eric Holder. Conyers 202-225-5126, Nadler 202-225-5635. Nadler says he's drafting a new letter.


Congressman John Conyers has proposed extending statutes of limitations on Bush-Cheney crimes. Help make this happen.


Contact the State Department's Office of War Crimes Issues and urge them to ask Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in war crimes.


Here are tips and info. on contacting Congress.


State and Local:
Bush and others can be indicted at the state or district level for murder. Please take these steps. They have also violated state laws against warrantless spying and various other crimes. Persuade or elect a decent prosecutor!

C. Rosenberg's latest story about Adel Hamad #940 with a picture & paragraph about Lydia participating in last year's protest at SouthCom:

YouTube-aided detainee released, sent home to Sudan
Posted on Thu, Dec. 13, 2007 BY CAROL ROSENBERG
The military has sent home from Guantánamo Bay a Sudanese hospital worker whose lawyers campaigned in cyberspace for his freedom, in part by enlisting television's West Wing president to make a YouTube video.

Adel Hamad, 49, was among 15 long-held detainees whose release was announced by the Defense Department Wednesday night. Thirteen captives went to lockups in Afghanistan and two were set free in Sudan.

The transfer lowered the prison camp population at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba to ''approximately 290,'' or below 300 for the first time since an airlift filled the crude open-air compound called Camp X-Ray on Feb. 15, 2002.

Hamad, a charity worker in Peshawar, Pakistan, claims he was wrongly captured by Pakistani security forces and handed over to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2002. Thursday, he took part in a government-sponsored news conference in Khartoum, Sudan, to protest his five-year confinement....

Dear all,
Sometimes we wonder if what we do is helping. Is dressing up and street theater going to make a difference? Are we wasting our time in thinking we can change things?
I'm here to say that EVERYTHING we do is helping. I've been standing in orange jumpsuit and hood/chains for a Guantanamo detainee named Adel Hamad, #940, for some time now. After 5 years in GITMO he still had never been charged, never been tried and was going blind from looking thru chain link fence for so long.
He was released from GITMO last Thursday. He is home with his family.

CodePINK Protest Torture at the White House on International Human Rights Day.

bonus video below the fold, Col. Ann Wright interview...

Keith Olbermann gets it. With a not insignificant dose of irony he narrates the protesters being led off the stage at Alberto Gonzales' speech at UF. First, civil liberties were led off the stage w/o noticeable reaction from Gonzo. Second, Habeas Corpus was dragged away to the same lack of effect...