Antiwar.com Blog

Amidst this glowing account, Better days beckon for Baghdad’s weary postmen, about the dedication of the workers and all the improvements being made to the “new” Iraqi postal system, be sure not to miss the following sentence:

”Hopefully within the next few months we should be back to pre-war service levels.”

Although “major combat” ended over a year ago, the Coalition can’t seem to get the Iraqi post office up and running any more than it can get the electricity and water flowing at their pre-war levels.

Shame!

Today’s statement from Sibel Edmonds:

For over two years the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has been relentlessly engaged in actions geared towards covering up my reports and investigations into my allegations. His actions against my case include gagging the United States Congress, blocking court proceedings on my case by invoking state secret privilege, quashing a subpoena for my deposition on information regarding 9/11, withholding documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act, and preventing the release of the Inspector General’s report of its investigations into my reports and allegations

John Ashcroft’s actions are anti-freedom of speech and anti-due process. His actions are anti-transparency and anti-accountability. In short, John Ashcroft’s actions are anti-Constitution and anti-democracy.

To become an American Citizen I took the citizenship oath. In taking this oath I pledged that I would support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Therefore, not only do I have the right to challenge John Ashcroft’s anti-Constitution and Un-American actions, as an American Citizen I am required to do so. So are you.

Michael Froomkin parses the OLC’s Aug. 1, 2002 Torture Memo (“the Bybee Memo”.) This is a very helpful post to read especially if you’re becoming confused by the sheer number of various torture memo leaks bombarding us daily.

After explaining what the OLC is ( Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel) and sketching the relationships between the various legal offices and lawyers in the FedGov, Froomkin sets up his argument:

The memo is about what limits on the use of force (“standards of permissible conduct”) for interrogations conducted “abroad” are found in the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment ( Torture Convention) “as implemented” by 18 USC §§ 2340-2340A (the Torture statute).

The memo concludes that the restrictions are very limited — that only acts inflicting and “specifically intended to inflict severe pain or suffering”, whether mental or physical, are prohibited. Allowed are severe mental pain not intended to have lasting effects (pity if they do…), and physical pain less than that which acompanies “serious physical injury such as death or organ failure” (p. 46). Having opined that some cruel, inhuman, or degrading acts are not forbidden, only those that are “extreme acts” (committed on purpose), the memo moves on to “examine defenses” that could be asserted to “negate any claims that certain interrogation methods violate the statute.”

• This is not a draft, but it’s not an action document either. It’s legal advice to the Counselor for the President. The action document was Gonzales’s memo to Bush.
• This OLC document is a legalistic, logic-chopping brief for the torturer. Its entire thrust is justifying maximal pain.
• Nowhere do the authors say “but this would be wrong”.
• Lots of the (lousy) criminal law legal reasoning in this memo is picked up in the Draft Walker Working Group memo
• This memo also has a full dose of the royalist vision of the Presidency that informs the Draft Walker memo. In the views of the author(s), there’s basically nothing Congress can do to constrain the President’s exercise of the war power. The Geneva Conventions are, by inevitable implications, not binding on the President, nor is any other international agreement if it impedes the war effort. I’m sure our allies will be just thrilled to hear that. And, although the memo nowhere treats this issue, presumably, also, the same applies in reverse, and our adversaries should feel unconstrained by any treaties against poison gas, torture, land mines, or anything else? Or is ignoring treaties a unique prerogative of the USA?

Read the rest….

A particularly interesting bit from the end:

Ultimately, the best legal commentary on this memo may belong to Professor Jay Leno:

According to the “New York Times”, last year White House lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security – so if that’s legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?

In light of the information breaking in the White House’s torture scandal, along with the legal complications of their thousands of detainees in Iraq as well as the fact that the Iraqi insurgents are clearly winning, I’m wondering who the Republicans are going to run as their presidential candidate. Do they have time to find someone?

On the other hand, they could probably just support Kerry, anyway. Maybe the Republicans could swing a pardon deal for the Bush Administration with Kerry.

Video Shows Murder And Slaughter Of American Robert Jacob, In Riyadh

Click link above for video link on Information Clearinghouse.

Chanting glorifying Jihad, or holy war, is heard in the background on the tape as two men are seen chasing a Western-dressed man who screams: “Wait, wait! No, no!”

Seconds later about 10 gunshots ring out as the man falls to the ground.

The tape, then shows the two men rush to the body. One appears to be slitting the victim’s throat.

The two assailants, who are also dressed in Western clothes, are only ever shown from the shoulder down.

The killing takes place in the covered yard of a residential building where a four-wheel-drive vehicle is parked in a garage space. After the killing, the tape says: “Voice of Jihad – expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula.”

The footage is attributed to an al-Qaeda terror cell which claimed responsibility for the killing.

The video described the victim as “American Jew Robert Jacob, who worked for the spy group Vinnell”.

Mr Jacob, 44, who worked for the US Vinnell Corp, which helps train the Saudi National Guard, was shot dead at his home in Riyadh last Tuesday. He was reportedly shot nine times in the head.

Yesterday, an al-Qaeda cell said it had killed a US national in a drive-by shooting and kidnapped another American in the Saudi capital amid a bloody campaign by the network to drive Western “infidels” out of the kingdom.

Remember when Al-Douri was the focus of a manhunt in Iraq because the US was convinced that he was a leader of the insurgency?

Here’s a Sydney Morning Herald article from December, 2003:

With the capture of Saddam Hussein, US forces are focusing more attention on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a long-time Saddam deputy as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and now top of the shrinking list of Iraqi officials who have eluded capture. He is one of 13 former regime members from the US list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis to elude capture, and the only one with a $US10 million ($13 million) bounty on his head. The US says al-Douri is a leading force behind the Iraqi insurgency, but Iraqi officials say he has leukaemia and is probably expending his energy avoiding capture.

The US has stepped up the hunt for al-Douri in recent weeks, destroying one of his homes with missiles and detaining his wife and daughter in an attempt to pressure him to surrender.

Human rights groups condemned the detentions, saying family members should not be used as bargaining chips and that the arrests violated international law and the Geneva Convention, which guarantees rights for people under occupation.

Many Iraqis were bewildered when the $US10-million reward was announced, because al-Douri was the subject of much ridicule during Saddam’s regime. Atwan Rasul, 38, a Baghdad fish seller, said: “You couldn’t tell jokes about Saddam himself, but you could tell jokes about Izzat al-Douri. No one respected him. This man can’t be the leader of the Iraqi resistance.”

Knowing what we now know about the near-total absence of actual intelligence being gathered by the military in Iraq, despite their willingness to inflict pain and humiliation on their captives, and the tendency for torture victims to say whatever their torturers want to hear it seems likely that the focus on Al-Douri was inspired by the now-infamous “flow of information” from Abu Ghraib interrogations. Watching the Americans chasing a clown like Al Douri was probably the subject of much coffee-shop humor in Baghdad.

Less funny is the Keystone Kops like idiocy of the US’s “decapitation” strikes at the opening of the invasion. Much ado was made of the strikes aimed at Saddam Hussein (which managed to kill dozens of civilians instead of Saddam) but only today do we have confirmation that the US was trying to bomb many Iraqi leaders in that period, although they managed to miss them all, reduce the number of “hearts and minds” that were available for winning, and jump-start the insurgency that was to form in the wake of the pointless violence.

These strikes were apparently based on “intelligence” acquired from Iraqis on the ground which looks like it was about on par with Ahmed Chalabi’s “intelligence.” It’s interesting in hindsight to look back and see why some of the neocons’ trumpeted predictions about Iraq failed to materialize. Remember all the en masse surrenders that were supposed to happen? Sometimes they would even announce them and after a day or two of confusion it would become clear that they were about 180 degrees wrong. Remember this one? Iraqi army division surrenders to coalition forces, Pentagon officials say. Never happened. Basra “uprising?” Never happened. An Najaf “HUGE chemical weapons plant” that was supposed to have been discovered, breathlessly reported in screaming headlines by Fox News and the Jerusalem Post?? Nada. Zip. Nothing.

The extent of the wrongness of practically everything the neocons and Bushie warbots believed about Iraq would be amusing if it weren’t so destructive and fatal to thousands of people. Oh, and Al Douri’s family is still in one of the US’s Iraq gulags, and their detention is still a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.