5 - 2009 - Antiwar.com Blog

Hersh Details JSOC Killings

GulfNews.com has a fantastic interview with Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in which he discusses (among other things) former Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret assassination unit, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Hersh had previously revealed details about JSOC’s assassinations in March during a talk at the University of Minnesota. The group reportedly went to countries across the world, assassinating people suspected of planning anti-American activities.

Reports about JSOC’s activities had been floating around in the media for quite some time, but the issue is being revived by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decision to recommend Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal as the new commander of American troops in Afghanistan. Lt. Gen. McChrystal was the JSOC commander for the vast majority of the Bush era.

Swat’s Refugee Crisis Underscores Government Incompetence

If there’s one thing the private sector can’t compete with a modern military on, it’s the ability to drive millions of people from their homes in a matter of weeks. The situation in the Swat Valley is the largest migration the nation has seen since the 1947 partition with India – and while many are staying with relatives and hoping the war eventually comes to an end, others are scrambling for refugee camps.

It’s providing an interesting case study, for while there is no shortage of reporting on the squalor and desperation of the overcrowded government IDP camps, the Los Angeles Times is reporting on another kind of camp.

The Hazrat Usman camp is run by a religious group and depends on private donations. While the government camps are crowded and short on supplies, the private camp has food, medicine, and far more comfortable living conditions.

Some express concern that the private groups, critical of the government’s invasion of the Swat Valley, will increase sympathy for the Taliban-styled factions there. Yet it is hard to imagine that the private sector’s ability to provide desperate people with food and shelter will undermine government support more than the military’s indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas in the conflict.

Very Intriguing… Is Ross in Trouble?

Everyone knows that the Israelis are pressing hard for the Obama administration to set a a relatively short-term deadline for progress in its prospective diplomatic engagement with Iran to bear fruit, after which it would move to tighten sanctions, hopefully in coordination with the EU and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, against Tehran. If, after an additional period of time, Iran proved unresponsive, the Israelis hope that Washington would either take military action on its own or give the green light to Jerusalem to do so. By all accounts, Prime Minister Netanyahu will make some understanding about such a time line his Priority Number One in his talks with Obama in the White House Monday.

Now, on the eve of those talks, the administration appears to be preemptively rejecting this pressure, at least publicly. How else to interpret the following exchange today between reporters and State Department spokesman Ian Kelly about a report in Thursdayâ€™s Wall Street Journal headlined, â€œU.S., Allies Set October Target for Iran Progress: If Benchmarks on Nuclear Negotiations Arenâ€™t Met, Sanctions Would Followâ€¦â€ and an earlier â€” and remarkably similar â€” report that appeared May 10 in Haaretz? Read the rest of this entry Â»

McChrystal, Copper Green, Torture and Assassination

Check out this great Esquire article about the torture occupation of Iraq and new Afghan boss McChrystal‘s role. How’d I miss this in ’06?

It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in â€” they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.” …

To Garlasco, this is significant. This means that a full-bird colonel and all his support staff knew exactly what was going on at Camp Nama. “Do you know where the colonel was getting his orders from?” he asks.

Jeff answers quickly, perhaps a little defiantly. “I believe it was a two-star general. I believe his name was General McChrystal. I saw him there a couple of times.”

Back when he was an intelligence analyst, Garlasco had briefed Stanley McChrystal once. He remembers him as a tall Irishman with a gentle manner. He was head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the logical person to oversee Task Force 121, and vice-director for operations for the Joint Chiefs. That put responsibility right in the heart of the Pentagon.

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report “is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning” or that it was “read by SecDef.”

Muriel Kane wonders whether McChrystal ran Cheney’s global assassination hit squads.

Hersh: “…letâ€™s say Yemen, letâ€™s say Peru, letâ€™s say Colombia, letâ€™s say Eritrea, letâ€™s say Madagascar, letâ€™s say Kenya, countries like that…”

Thanks to Douglas Valentine.

Excellent Interview: Goodman-Barstow

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did an excellent interview last week with David Barstow, a New York Times reporter who recently won the Pulitzer prize for his April, 2008 story about Rumfeld’s “Force Multiplying” generals sent on combat missions to America TV news studios to lie us into war (and all the giant piles of cash money they made selling military hardware). In the interview Barstow discusses his story, the recently repudiated Pentagon Inspector General report which denied his claims and the TV networks’ continued blackout on his story.

US Finally Wins Bogus Conviction in Miami ‘Plot’

After two juries refused to convict or acquit 6 of the so-called “Miami 7” (which then became the “Liberty City Six” after one was acquitted in the first trial but then deported anyway), five were convicted today of involvement in an al Qaeda plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago.

From the very beginning it has been known to the general public that this entire case was cooked up by the cops, that the idiots they entrapped were just that and that said idiots were simply (they thought) playing the pretend terrorist informant for money when he was really playing them for a conviction and some hard taxpayer cash of his own.

The jurors who went along with this ought to be in prison themselves along with the judge who allowed this sham to proceed and everyone in the US attorney’s office who participated in this conspiracy to deny these Americans their liberty under the color of law.

But as every single one of us knows, that will never happen because there is no such thing as “the law.” It is simply the excuse for those who run the state to do what they want with us, while it never applies to them.

Facing decades in prison, I guess they should be thankful Obama hasn’t invoked the Military Commissions Act on them.

Update: The Miami Herald has a great editorial about the inustice of this case here.

Defense lawyers believe a juror who disagreed with the jury-panel majority should not have been removed from the trial. They are fighting an uphill battle in trying to persuade U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard, who dismissed the juror, to grant a retrial. …

Two jurors were dismissed in this trial, one because of illness and the other, a black woman, whom a majority of the panel said was uncooperative.

The jurors asked that she be removed. After interviewing all of the jurors, Judge Lenard removed the woman, Juror No. 4, from the panel. In her note to the judge, the woman complained of being disrespected. No one ”respects my answers, and I feel I’m being attacked every time I open my mouth,” she wrote. She told the judge: “To me all of the negativity is directed at me.”