“FBI complicity in Pak ISI’s 26/11 Mumbai Rape”

"FBI complicity in Pak ISI's 26/11 Mumbai Rape"

Who needs Enemies with Friends like Washington                                 

 

"Mr Ambassador .You cannot trust Americans on even what they give you in writing", a Turkish Deputy Prime Minister to the author. "

 

"India disappointed that the name of David Headley was not provided (by US), if not pre-26/11 at least post 26/11", Indian Home Secretary GK Pillai , (Headley  visited India in March 2009 New Delhi could have nabbed him.[ Is Indian worm turning !].

 

In any case with 70% of allies war material for Afghanistan being sent up from the Karachi port, the place crawling with FBI and other agents ,US has unmatched control over communications in the region. So to believe that US did not have precise details of preparations and even departure of ISI trained terrorists is foolhardy. The revelations by Headley only confirm the author's suspicions held since 2611, which damaged India's reputation and brand equity, much to Beijing's delight.

 

Here is another example .US led West had supported Iraq's long war in 1980s against Khomeini's Iran, with the US granting loans to Baghdad worth billions of dollars .A few days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, US Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein in Baghdad that his dispute with Kuwait was a bilateral Arab affair. Something similar was said by the State department the next day ,thus giving green signal to Saddam to 'resolve the bilateral dispute.' The rest is history with a litany of lies .The author was posted at Amman ( 1989-92) with only Jordan's border open to Iraq with the country crawling with media and others . The details of Ambassador Glaspie 's talk with Saddam Hussein and the green signal was published by Baghdad .This was never clearly refuted by the US and Ambassador Glaspie disappeared from view.

 

Soon ally Riyadh too was misled by doctored evidence of Saddam's military intentions to invade Saudi Arabia while Iraq's forces were in a defensive posture .After the liberation of Kuwait ie  promoting US interests in the region ,Washington made Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other allies pay through the nose, costing over $150 billion.  

 

There is a litany of such examples how Washington will mislead and even deceive friends and allies. You do not need testimony from FBI agent David Goldman Headley's scorned and estranged 27 years old Moroccan wife Faiza Outalha who was told to "Get lost" by the US officials in Islamabad when she told him a year before 2611 that Headley was planning a terror attack in India with the help of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba .

"I told them, he's either a terrorist, or he's working for you," she recalled claiming that she showed them photos of Headley and her stay , twice , at the Taj Mahal Hotel ( confirmed by hotel records)

A senior US official confirmed Outalha's meeting but gave no details of her warnings. In a statement, National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer stonewalled that "The United States regularly provided threat information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.
"Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India," Hammer added.

The revelations came after a recent report by ProPublica followed by New York Times and The Washington Post that the FBI had been warned about Headley's terrorist ties a year before the Mumbai attacks. It was pointed out that "despite those warnings by two of his three wives, Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar's behalf." Despite a federal inquiry into the tip, Headley spent the next four years doing terrorist reconnaissance around the world. Between 2006 and 2009, he came on five spying missions to Mumbai , one after 2611 scouting targets for the attack by Lashkar that killed 166 people, including six Americans.

Headley was arrested 11 months after 2611 rape of Mumbai for three full days in world media glare .
See West Stirred-up Muslims Terrorize Mumbai by K. Gajendra Singh http://www.boloji.com/analysis2/0411.htm
Extracts -Quote
Mumbai 's Rape ; Shocked and in Disarray, India Watches with Impotent Rage
Would New Delhi get sucked onto Western Crusade!
"The United States has supported radical Islamic activism over the past six decades, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly," and is thus "partly to blame for the emergence of Islamic terrorism as a world-wide phenomenon." Robert Drefuss.

"It looks more like a classical special forces or commando operation than a terrorist one. No group linked to Al Qaeda and certainly not Lashkar has ever mounted a maritime attack of this complexity."- David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert and adviser to US Gen. David Petraeus of 'Surge fame' in Iraq. ."
[Which would be worse: if the Pakistani military knew about this operation in advance, or if they didn't?] - Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. [Quite clearly both Pak/ISI and FBI knew, Dr Watson-an approved Muslim in USA]
After Foreign Policy, would India Out-source Intelligence Inputs to USA, UK and Israel

As part of its 'strategic relationship' with USA , India has modified its foreign policy in tune with that of Washington ,like voting with USA against Iran in Vienna on Iran's legitimate nuclear fuel enrichment for power generation. As among the dead in Mumbai were 18 foreigners including Americans, Britons and Israelis : anti-terrorism officers from Scotland Yard, FBI experts and Mossad operators are coming over to India . Strategic affairs expert K Subrahmanyam , part of pro-US lobby in India tries to rationalize : "What we have here is an international problem with roots in Pakistan ... India's attacks were once just its problem. Now they are problems for the whole world."
Unquote
Mumbai Terror Attacks Expose India's Chronic Systemic Security Weakness
by K Gajendra Singh http://www.boloji.com/analysis2/0415.htm    8 January, 2009
Extracts Quote
"Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If, as Clausewitz wrote, war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means." - Patrick J. Buchanan
The 60 hour brutal rape of Mumbai, India's commercial and cultural metropolis, telecast around the world, which was carried out by Pakistan based Muslim terrorists (financed and trained at inception in 1980s by the West, Saudi Arabia and Muslim countries and allowed to fester), with New Delhi almost immobilized, exposed its dysfunctional security infrastructure and inability to hit back at Islamabad. Since then Indian leaders fulminations against Islamabad and West's blowing hot and cold with little likely effect on its long term ally Pakistan, highlights Indian state's abject failure to provide its citizens with even basic security, a basic social contract between the rulers and the ruled. Business Houses like Tatas are going in for their own private security. So what is the state for! Yes India's generally corrupt political elite is well protected by the National Security Guard commandos since the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament.

If another rampage takes place, would the outcome be any different ! There have been so many terror attacks in the last few years; in 2008 alone terrorists struck at many places Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Jaipur. Every time the same rhetoric is repeated and then central government accuses the opposition ruled state governments of failure and the states in return blame Delhi.

So What is New; India's History

Since millennia invaders have come down the passes of Hindu Kush and with few tens of thousands of horsemen indulged in loot and rapine and established dynasties all over India. European trading company with some armed sailors with Hindustan eternally divided along caste, regional or religious lines, colonized India for two centuries and sucked away its wealth. Before the arrival of the British East India Company, the sub-continent's share in world manufacturing was 24.5 percent in 1750. But by the time the British had finished with India, the sub-continent's share had fallen to 1.7 percent (in 1900) and that of the British increased from 1.9 percent (in 1750) to 22.9 percent (in 1880) - Rise and fall of Big Powers by Professor Paul Kennedy. In these figures lie recurrent famines in India and millions of deaths, not counting around ten million young Indians killed by the British forces after 1857 resistance to uproot the British company regime. Still, many Indians praise British colonial rule.

For the first time in Indian history, invaders penetrated the Himalayas from Xinjiang and Tibet in the 20th century and stay put. Now they came by boats again.

Collapse of Agencies and Institutions
What ever happened to various Indian agencies and institutions, established to ferret out advance information of terror plots, if possible pre-emptly disrupt them and counter even unexpected attacks through crisis management structures.                                                                                                  Unquote

Our not so intelligent Intelligence Agencies .

 

I will comment on the role of National Security Advisor another time .But to appoint a policeman from Intelligence Bureau (IB) was a disaster as proved by 2611. Some years ago IB's chief of counter-intelligence was forced to resign for getting entangled into a honey trap.

 

The situation in RAW( so appropriately named ) is even worse .It has no accountability or any political overseeing. Reportedly it has become Family Inc , with nephews and other relations being quietly recruited .It was reported that one RAW chief had transferred discretionary funds to his son's business in USA. It is alleged that quite often when RAW officers in Indian Missions hand over they leave a note behind that his local contact is not willing to work with his successor .In fact there are few contacts and the discretionary funds are quietly mis-appropriated . Quite a few senior Raw officers have just gone over to America. In any case CIA are in many cases like their handlers .Many of Raw's Kaoboys have fallen victims to honey traps .One Raw chief in mid 1980s said in my hearing that he could make LTTE chief Prabhakaran do his bidding .The rest is history ending in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi .

 

As for their understanding of international events , fed by western material and well paid seminars etc ,many writing on international affairs had written in 2003-04 that like Iraq , Syria and Iran would also be taken care of by Washington . Iran's proxy nationalist Hezbullah in Lebanon defeated the famed Israeli commandos and destroyed their invincible Tanks in south Lebanon in 2006 war , a fact admitted by an Israeli Commission of enquiry headed by a judge after the war .With acting Iraqi PM Maliki begging for support in Tehran and Qom , it is Iran which will call the shots in Baghdad .

 

Will there be an overhaul of IB and Raw , rooted in Western outlook and trained and almost run by CIA,MIV and now their latest idol Mossad . Unlikely but fatal for India looking at their performance so far.

 

India's Somnath syndrome –

"--Mahmood reached Somnatha in the middle of January, 1025, and found there a strongly defended fortress on the seashore. The Hindus, who assembled on the ramparts of the fort, were passing their time in merrymaking, fondly believing that Somnatha had drawn the Muslims there only to annihilate them for the sins they had committed in demolishing idols elsewhere. Their morale was high even though their leader had  fled away in cowardice with his family to a neighbouring island. The following day the Sultan began the assault--Next day--  the brave resistance offered by Hindus was of no avail-- Bands of Hindus in succession entered the temple to pray with all their hearts for victory, and then coming out of it rushed against their enemies, only to be killed. In this way more than 50,000 Hindus sacrificed their lives to defend the honour of their deity. The Sultan made a triumphal entry into the temple, broke down the Sivalinga into pieces and took possession of vast wealth. The temple was then razed to the ground. The fragments of Sivalinga were –serve as steps at the gate of Jami mosque (in Gazni)--"

 

Page 20 ,The Struggle for Empire, The History and Culture of the Indian people ,Volume five (1966), Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay.Ed.K.M.Munshi

 

" Through out Indian history many Indian rulers and its elites have remained fascinated with the idea that a supernatural power would save them. Now they believe that a super power would come to their rescue and resolve their problems. Why take hard decisions or say bitter truths.

 

"So after 11 September, like those assembled on the  ramparts of the Somnath fortress , Indian policy makers , analysts , media pundits and politicians went on an orgy of celebrations. 'We had told you so '. Now that the infernal terrorists had attacked New York and Washington, the centre of supreme power on the earth, USA would rescue India too. With open support from Pakistan, terrorists had been hitting India in Jammu and Kashmir or where ever they want to. Now that they had attacked the sole super power in the universe, Lord George Bush would decimate them and India would be saved .After all India and USA were the biggest and the richest democracies and terrorists were now their common enemies, so went the argument. [It still remain much the same now]

 

"So without much thought or weighing pros and cons, Indian leadership went overboard and even offered India as the frontline state against terrorism in Afghanistan (and Pakistan.)[This wish has been fulfilled now] . Perhaps all intelligence material was passed on to USA, without much in return Pakistan continues with its short sighted policy of cutting the nose to spite the face ie India . It were the US and Saudi Arabia and CIA and ISI trained Jihadis in 1980s who had stunned the world by attacking Trade towers and the Pentagon. --  From India's Somnath syndrome –K.Gajendra Singh , 28 December, 2002 , Bucharest

 

The Kashmir Issue; Its Creation and Exploitation by the West

 

Kashmir has been very much in the news in recent months specially with its stone throwing youth and children , whose case has been taken up by Arundhati Roy ,with great liking for media attention and Zeelani , a Kashmiri hardcore , who would have been summarily dealt with in most countries specially in Muslim countries .Stone throwing began as part of Intifada in Gaza in 1987 and takes place in Kurdish regions of Turkey too, where it is suppressed with a heavy hand with long prison sentences to even school children .What does India media know about Gaza, Palestine ( on its anniversary Jordan TV used to telecast , available in Occupied Palestine  ,Israel and the region ,Attenborough's film Gandhi perhaps to exhort that Intifada be kept non-violent and the PLO movement be not divided ,or the Kurdish problem in Turkey , where till 1986 , a Kurd was called a mountain Turk and still cannot use mother tongue Kurdish in education etc .Are they not inter-related  at least in stone throwing .But as I maintain our media remains info-challenged , celebrity and trivia obsessed with recycling of the same suspects masquerading as experts on TV channels.

 

There are major terror attacks in Kashmir organized from the Pakistan side , whenever a senior US official visits India ie Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush in the past , to highlight and attract attention and keep the pot boiling with Western help.

 

Agreed ,that India is a highly corrupt and coercive state , which a policeman and a soldier joins by paying bribes (2 to 5 lakhs for policeman) whose repression should be condemned whether in JK, north East or Maoists belt .But the repression is not much less than in US and UK .Let Muslims raise voice against crimes of US and UK in Arab/Muslim lands or blacks against their maltreatment in USA .(Just look at the percentage of Blacks in US prisons)

 

Let us look around the Islamic world where many on religious basis support Pak on JK .In Cyprus, 18 percent Turkish Cypriot Muslims, recognized as an independent state only by Turkey, has occupied nearly 40 percent of its territory under Turkish guns since 1974. They cannot live with Christian Greek Cypriots, and want a separate state, while almost 50 percent Christian Lebanese who want a state of their own are denied one. Coptic Christians in Egypt, with the same percentage as Muslims in India, remain oppressed and persecuted. Christian Sudanese in the south of the country are bombed and killed. Christians from Lebanon, Sudan, Egypt and elsewhere have to lump it. There are innumerable such tragic and sad examples all over the Islamic world. Throughout history, Christian and other minorities in Islamic states have been generally oppressed, persecuted and eliminated, beginning with the Jews of Medina in the 7th century.

London partitioned Hindustan in 1947 to create a weak and a reliant on the West Pakistan to protect Western oil wells in the Middle East from USSR (it is based  on Whitehall documents) .Also to allow no link between India and central Asia even vis Afghanistan (Wakkan corridor ) ,because  India under Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru would not join any Western alliance against the Communist block ,Then London and later Washington went out of their  way to openly and covertly support Pakistan in its aggression in Kashmir and later in UN , where a naïve New Delhi went complaining against Pakistani aggression . Kashmir is crucial for India's strategic defense from where many rivers of Hindustan originate .It shall remain part of India .Period .India should tell the world clearly .Yes ,Kashmiris can have more autonomy and move freely into 'Azad Kashmir'(Some Azadi –ruled by a junior official from Islamabad. Does West or China say anything about it )

Since 1948 , UK and USA and later China too joined ,have used the Kashmir question to keep New Delhi off balance , tied down to the subcontinent raising it or threatening to raise the Kashmir issue .(Pakistan and its officials are well paid by the West and China to keep yelling at India ). Likes of Ms Roy with her international reach , audience and perspective might consider  raising her voice against China in Tibet and Xinjiang .Has Zeelani and his ilk ever protested against US,UK and Europe for their crimes in Gaza and Palestine or Turkey or against Uighurs , who also want Azadi since other Turkic people have got it in central Asia from communist hegemony . If China raises the Arunachal case and gives stapled passport , why our media not highlight suppression of Uighurs voice in Xinjiang and of oppressed Tibetans.

London and Washington have extracted concessions by underplaying or threatening to raise JK issue As one Turkish PM told an Indian Minister that it is a problem one should learn live with as Ankara does with the Kurdish problem (Korea, Kurdish and Turkic lands and umpteen peoples in Africa remain divided )

The West keeps the pot boiling like the then British Foreign Minister David Milliband suggesting last year on Indian soil that Kashmir issue be resolved to stop terror attacks on India from Pakistan .He should have been escorted out by the ears. Such statements provide oxygen to separatists .Indian media should have gone after him .Why should Indian media not raise the question of north Ireland when London raises Kashmir .The Catholics in Ireland would prefer independence or join adjoining Catholic Ireland .The problem of Ireland is still the problem of decolonization as is of faraway Falklands next door to Argentina and is really Malvinas.

Barring a few I think very poorly of most of our ill-informed journalists in India , who are lazy and do not go beyond propaganda by western corporate media .One Barkha Dutt on NDTV was still interviewing the criminal US poodle lying exPM Tony Blair. Like Pinochet he should be arrested and charged .He could be one day.

As for the Kashmiri Pandits why are they not fighting for their land and rights in Kashmir as Palestinians are doing against Israel occupation. Brahmins have kept Hindu polity obscurantist and  divided on caste based identity with thriving feudal times killer Khaps and are at the core of the many ills of the Indian polity.

 

Conclusion

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche , 19th cent German philosopher , inspired by Plato's Utopia aka Republic , in turn inspired the evil genius and 20^th  Century political philosopher Leo  Strauss (1899-1973)., at whose feet sat the influential Neo-Cons and Zeo-cons ,had  stated that the Christian love and piety was an outcome of fear. The fear of the strongly built neighbour or the fear of a criminal from a policeman. Is Hindu's timidity out of fear or inferiority complex against Whites !

Nietzsche believed that it was not possible that a man could genuinely feel universal love, perhaps because of his self-created halo of a 'noble' man . That was perhaps meant for two combatants or knights matching their valour on level ground, not like F-16 bombers against kids armed with slingshots or rudimentary guns .

Would Nietzsche have called the bombers 'noble'!

The noble martial combat was over after the second siege of Vienna in late 16th century , when high tech killing started taking over from Janissaries valour. The final result now is the complete take over of the US by consumerist Military Industry complex , which gobbles up as much in 'defence ' expenditure as the rest of the world put together ,of which the generals and soldiers are consumers paid for by the people of America and now of the world with an iniquitous economic order where in US just prints greenbacks . US power has morphed into world financed-techno-barbarian brute.

In his book on what Bertrand Russell calls history of Western Philosophy ( West has generally produced linear thought , its real philosophers are ridiculed ) he quotes from Shakespeare's King Lear , on the verge of madness

"I will do such things –
What they are yet I know not – but they shall be
The terror of the earth.
( Exactly what the top US leadership has achieved and threatens doing more of the same. )

This is Nietzsche's philosophy in nutshell. Russell says there are two sorts of saints, saints by nature and saints by fear. The first have spontaneous love of mankind. Because to do so gives him happiness and the second , a frightened man afraid of fear. ( Western leaders like Henry Kissinger , Dick Cheney ,Tony Blair would fit the bill )

The use of deception and manipulation in current US policies flow directly from the doctrines of Leo Strauss. His disciples including Paul Wolfowitz and other Neo-conservatives had driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration.Obama led by banksters and military-industry complex is following more or less the same political agenda and policy .

K.Gajendra Singh 28 October, 2010.Mayur Vihar, Delhi.

Wikileaks Confirm--Part II-AFTER FAST FOOD AND STREET GANGS, NOW US FRANCHISED TORTURE

Wikileaks Confirm Western Culture of Torture & Lies

Part II

AFTER FAST FOOD AND STREET GANGS, NOW US FRANCHISED TORTURE     by K. Gajendra singh ,  11 December, 2005

http://www.mwcnews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2854&Itemid=143

Tell us about the CIA flights.
The US does not torture.
Tell us about the black sites.
The US does not torture.
 
"Let me be clear," has been a popular Ms Condi Rice refrain this week about US rendition of terrorism suspects. For many, she has been everything but clear. [From Der Spiegel]

At the end of her 4 day, European safari Rice reached Brussels for a meeting with NATO foreign ministers to explain the US position on torture .But she dodged questions on secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. At the dinner, according to German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, she reiterated, "in the United States, international obligations are not interpreted differently than in Europe." NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the next day, "it is my impression that Secretary Rice ... cleared the air. You will not see this discussion continuing" at the NATO headquarters.
 
The revelations of CIA franchised torture centers in east Europe and elsewhere, worse than Abu Gharib and Guantanamo has exposed the lawlessness permeating the Bush Administration, whether on the legality of US led invasion of Iraq ,violation of Human Rights and Geneva conventions . Or for that matter other international Treaties.
 
Ms Rice and the Bush administration were hoping for a fresh start with Germany after an acrimonious relationship with the previous government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which had vociferously opposed the illegal US invasion of Iraq .In the new broad based German coalition led by US friendly right wing leader Chancellor Angela Merkel there was a hope of making up, but the visit ended in confusion and Merkel was put on the defensive.
 
Gerhard Schröder's Socialists are part of the coalition and the German media and people had questions about covert prisons and secret arrests including of an innocent German citizen, who overshadowed Rice's talks with Merkel at the start of the visits in Berlin on 6 December, and then to Bucharest and Kiev, ending with discussions in Brussels.
 
In Berlin Rice declined to answer most questions, even after Merkel called for "a certain degree of transparency" on the issue regarding any possible knowledge by the previous government of CIA activities in Germany involving German citizens These questions have erupted following a cascade of media reports led by the Washington Post and Der Spiegel about US use of airports in Europe for CIA flights to transport terror suspects to a network of secret jails for questioning. Khaled Masri a German citizen on holiday in Macedonia was picked up for questioning as a suspected terrorist and tortured in Afghanistan for five months last year before being released on grounds of mistaken identity. Merkel said that the United States had acknowledged responsibility.
 
"The American government admitted its mistake," Merkel said. Rice said she could not talk about the case specifically but added, "Any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it happens we will do everything we can to rectify it." "The American government admitted its mistake," Merkel said. Rice said she could not talk about the case specifically but added, "Any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it happens we will do everything we can to rectify it."
 
Facing an angry Parliament, Merkel said her foreign minister, Steinmeier, an ex- top aide of Schröder, would face a special parliamentary committee to answer questions about how much he knew about the covert prisons and the practice called rendition, in which terrorist suspects captured by the United States were sent to other countries, some of which with records of torturing prisoners. Steinmeier reportedly had access to all intelligence dossiers and cases including those with the interior minister Otto Schily, who was reportedly told about the Masri case but has remained silent.

It may be recalled that in May 2004, the White House had dispatched US Ambassador Daniel R. Coats to Schily to tell that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, with a request that the German government not disclose what it was told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of covert action programs designed to capture terror suspects abroad on thin or speculative evidence and transfer them to countries with secret bases would have serious ramifications .The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaida, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.

Masri says he underwent coercive interrogation and confinement for five months before being released, two months after the CIA concluded it was a case of mistaken identity. He is suing former CIA director George Tenet with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In filing the suit in Washington, the ACLU said it was seeking to "reaffirm that the rule of law is central to our identity as a nation".

In another instance, according to the Washington Post, the CIA seized Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasir, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar, from a street in Milan. The agency then told Italian anti-terrorism police that he had fled to the Balkans - a piece of disinformation. The deception worked for more than a year, until the Italians discovered that the CIA had whisked off to Egypt, where he was reportedly interrogated and tortured.

US refused the Red Cross access to all detainees

The state department's top legal adviser, John Bellinger admitted for the first time in Geneva that the US has not given the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to all detainees in its custody. But he gave no details about where such prisoners were held. He said ICRC had access to "absolutely everybody" at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which holds suspects detained during the US war on terror.

On Friday, Adam Ereli, the State Department's deputy spokesman, said the United States would not alter its position after the ICRC president said in Geneva that his organization was holding discussions to gain access to all detainees, including those held in secret locations.

Ereli said that the Geneva Conventions requiring humane treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to certain terrorism suspects seized as "unlawful enemy combatants," but that, in any case, the United States treats most of them as prisoners of war. "We're going the extra mile here," Ereli said, by allowing the Red Cross access to Al Qaida suspects and others held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The Red Cross also has access to prisoners held in Iraq.

Commentators said that this is likely to increase suspicions that the CIA has been operating secret prisons outside international oversight.

UN against US led detentions in Iraq;

John Pace, human rights chief for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), said that the US military is abusing its United Nations mandate in Iraq by detaining thousands of people without due process of law. The Iraqi Government, installed after the US invasion of 2003, is also guilty of major human rights abuses, including holding people without charge in secret jails "littered" across the country, John Pace added. Referring to accusations of corruption among Iraqi justice officials and police, Pace said illegal detentions were fuelling rather than curbing revolt.

"There is no question that terrorism has to be addressed. But we are equally sure that the remedies being applied … are not the best ways of eliminating terrorism," he said. "More terrorists are being created than are being eliminated." UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has also voiced concern about mass detentions without charge, which US commanders say are a legitimate response to security threats under UN Security Council Resolution 1546, their mandate for occupying Iraq.

But Pace said that the system, including the pattern, duration and conditions of detention, were "not consistent with what is foreseen in 1546" and complained of "total breakdown" in individuals' rights.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said that the U.S.-led war on terror has undermined the global ban on torture. This did not please U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, appointed by Bush against the wishes of the US Congress. Bolton called Arbour's statement "inappropriate and illegitimate." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's spokesman said that Annan wants to take the matter up with Bolton as soon as possible.

--- Reports of the existence of the secret prisons have caused a trans-Atlantic uproar. The European Union has asked the Bush administration about these reports.  Britain, the current EU president, sent a two-paragraph letter to Washington late last month for clarifications.

Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot said Rice's  comments about secret CIA flights and detention centers for terrorist suspects outside the United States were "unsatisfactory," Bot told MPs that "rendition" was not kidnapping as some critics claimed but a speedy process of extraditing suspects to the US. Normal extraditions through the courts can last for years, he said. Media reported that the CIA regularly made use of Dutch airports for secret flights.

The European Union (EU) has threatened to sanction any EU member countries, which had such prisons on their territories.

US admits policy of renditions;

Ms Rice's successor as National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, told CNN that "we do not move people around the world so they can be tortured". Thus dittoing the official line. But Hadley added that the policy of renditions "has been a practice before 9/11, before this Administration", as well as "a practice engaged in by a number of countries".

What is 'rendition'?

Rendition is an old western practice beginning perhaps from the days of the Spanish inquisitions if not earlier. In his memoirs, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel  wrote that during the World War II the secret abduction and 'rendition' from Third Reich occupied countries  to Germany of suspected Resistance members - otherwise known as the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree - was the worst of all of the orders issued by Adolf Hitler . Nacht und Nebel-type practices were used by the French to suppress successive uprisings by Algerian freedom fighters in the 1950s. Since then the practice of "disappearances" has spread around the globe - according to Human Rights Watch. Iraq and Sri Lanka accounted for the most cases between 1980 and 2003.

In Latin America, the technique was successfully internationalized under "Operation Condor". The operation, conceived and effectively implemented under Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, brought together the intelligence agencies of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay, as well as Pinochet's own secret police chief, Manuel Contreras, in 1975. Although not a charter member, Brazil also participated. The objective was to "enhance communications among each other and integrate tactical operations in tracking down, secretly detaining, torturing and terminating [the lives of] critics or suspected militants, who were often referred to as 'terrorists'," according to Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the Washington-based National Security Archive (NSA).

So what is new !Yes , Western leaders and media keep on maligning eastern governments for similar practices .In many cases the techniques have been taught by western agencies to the agencies of their allies in the East e.g. CIA to Savak or to Pakistan's ISI and Jihadis during the Afghan war against USSR. Israel's Mossad almost openly implements and teaches rendition techniques to any takers.
Important Rice visit to Romania;

Ms Rice's 4 hour stop over in the Romanian capital Bucharest, was an important bilateral visit .She signed with the Romanian Foreign Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu a bilateral agreement for use of Romanian military bases at Mikhail Kogalniceanu, Babadag, Cincu and Smardan, with President Traian Basescu watching at the Cotroceni Palace. Ms Rice also had talks with President Basescu on bilateral relations and cooperation within the Black Sea region and in the Balkans, as well as the cooperation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Romania also announced that it would not withdraw troops from Iraq.

--- For USA and EU, the Romanian location is very important militarily and as a vantage point for trade with Caspian basin and Central Asia across the Black Sea. USA had used Romanian air bases during the March 2003 war on Iraq , when Nato ally Turkey had refused to let US open a second front against north Iraq from South east Turkey and permitted its Nato Inchirlik air base only for humanitarian flights .

How ever ,as the author pointed out to the Romanian leaders in his recent meetings along with the foreign media based in Bucharest that Romania must avoid showing too close an affinity with US policies of torture .There are around 100,000 Muslims , mostly Tatars  and tens of thousands of Israelis visit Romania for rest and recreation . Over a few hundred Romanian Jews had migrated to Israel. Romania has a history of anti-Semitism. The November 2003 bombings of a Synagogue in Istanbul were to punish for the pro Israel policy of Turkey, which also hosts hundreds of thousands of Israeli tourists .When President Basescu, soon after his election, visited Iraq to show solidarity with USA, three journalists accompanying him were kidnapped. Their capture and release remains a mystery.

Poland;
 
Romania and Poland are two very pro US countries, described by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as new Europe (an appellation the countries rejected) which was chided by French President Jacque Chirac when they had sided with USA on the question of US invasion of Iraq, against the general EU policy of opposition and neutrality.
 
Poland appears to be centering the CIA's secret detention network in Europe, with bases there holding a quarter of the 100 detainees estimated in such camps worldwide.

"Poland was the main base for CIA interrogations in Europe, while Romania played more of a role in the transfer of detained prisoners," Marc Garlasco, a leading analyst at Human Rights Watch, was quoted by Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

Garlasco said that the CIA maintained two detention centers in Poland, which were closed only after the Washington Post broke the story last month. He said the allegations were based on information from CIA sources and other documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. "We have leads, circumstantial evidence to check but it's too early to reveal them," Garlasco added.

Polish authorities have repeatedly denied the existence of secret jails of any form on Polish territory, with Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkieicz saying this week he would fully cooperate in human rights probes into the allegations. On 11 December, he ordered a detailed probe to "check if there is any proof that such an event took place in our country. It is necessary to finally close the issue because it could be dangerous to Poland." Said Marcinkiewicz's spokesman, Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz.

Rice in Ukraine of US franchised revolution;
 
Ms Rice visit to Kiev was to express solidarity with US protégé President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine. US organizations across the board had spent hundreds of millions of US dollars last year to get him elected in a US franchised election organized through street revolutions , a process which was begun with the overthrow of Milosevich in Serbia and then perfected in Georgia . Street revolutions failed dismally in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan with Russia and China with central Asian states vociferously opposing US led franchised revolutions.
 
The sheen has come off the so called Orange revolution with Yushchenko's rich partner the Prime Minister quitting his company .The Ukrainian masses are unhappy with the results of the revolution with bribery and other scandals on increase. Russia on which Ukraine is dependent for its energy needs is squeezing Kiev. Next year's Parliament elections would be a litmus test for the Yushchenko regime.

Shift in US Policy?
 
By the time Ms Rice reached Kiev, there was apparent shift in her position. She said that Washington now viewed its responsibilities under a UN treaty as banning the cruel or inhumane treatment of prisoners anywhere. She appeared to give the torture question a clear and broad interpretation. Referring to the UN Convention against Torture (CAT), ratified by USA in 1994, Rice said that "as a matter of U.S. policy, the United States' obligations under the CAT, which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment - those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States."
 
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, described the new approach by Rice as "existing policy." But when pressed repeatedly by reporters, he would not say whether the United States took steps to ensure that countries to which it transferred prisoners lived up to promises against using torture.
 
Rice's shift produced some confusion in Washington, possibly reflecting tensions among the State Department, White House, Congress and the Pentagon on how narrowly to define some tools available .These can include techniques known as water boarding, in which a prisoner is strapped to a plank and dunked into water to create a sense of being drowned. Rights groups say that these methods have been used on prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. 
 
No rendition for torture –George Bush;
 
President Bush, referring to the process known as rendition, under which the United States has turned detainees over to other countries reiterated: "We do not render to countries that torture. That has been our policy, and that policy will remain the same."

But wrote Naomi Klein in the Guardian "It's [ torture] a history exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his forthcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes this evidence, producing a riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture", based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then applied in Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training.

"It is not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples". A startling number of torture's most prominent opponents keep telling us that the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11 2001, at which point the methods used in Guantanamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact."---

"Illegal detention and torture are also war crimes. Starting with the exposure of prisoner abuse at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo, cascading revelations have established that these cases exemplify a pattern of abuse authorized at the highest levels of government. Human rights groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights First sued in U.S. and foreign courts against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others for breaching the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. The Senate's 90-9 vote to restore the military's traditional prohibition against torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners prompting the Bush administration to threaten a veto, sets the stage for a major confrontation over adherence to both the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution. "

Paul Craig Roberts, Hoover Institution senior fellow and assistant secretary of the treasury under Ronald Reagan, has charged Bush with "lies and an illegal war of aggression, with outing CIA agents, with war crimes against Iraqi civilians, with the horrors of the Abu Gharib and Guantanamo torture centers" and calls for the president's impeachment. Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and former president of the American Society of International Law, declares: "These policies make a mockery of our claim to stand for the rule of law. [Americans] should be marching on Washington to reject inhumane techniques carried out in our name." Cindy Sheehan, mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, whose single handed resistance to US policies, including sit-ins near Bush's Texas ranch ,brought various opposition groups together ,insists: "We cannot have these people pardoned. They need to be tried on war crimes and go to jail."

 

 

 

Wikileaks Confirm Western Culture of Torture & Lies

Wikileaks Confirm Western Culture of Torture & Lies

Gen Taguba's Abu Ghraib Report & US Franchised Torture Revisited.

Part I  http://tarafits.blogspot.com/2010/10/wikileaks-confirm-western-culture-of.html

 

'It would be a good idea.' Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about his views on western culture.

Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world : Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims -"Robert Fisk on Wikileaks in 'Independent '

Hosting by WikiLeaks on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports on Iraq over the period 2004-2009,can be divided in five heads:

 

Reliance on private contractors aka mercenaries ; the so-called "surge" of 30,000 additional US troops; the deaths of Iraqi civilians - killed mostly by other Iraqis, but also by the US; a litany of prisoner abuse by Iraqis - which US officials ignored - even more lurid than the infamous photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004; and the so called "aggressive" intervention of Iran's military providing "weapons, training and sanctuary" to Shia combatants.

 

Robert Fisk highlights the main points as follows

Prisoners abused, raped and murdered; Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.

Civilian death toll cover-up; Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.

The shooting of men trying to surrender; In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."

Private security firm abuses; Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.

Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing ;A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.

Hundreds of civilians killed at check points; Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.

Iranian influence; Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

But the WikiLeaks give little information on the mistreatment of prisoners in US-run detention facilities, or in CIA franchised torture centers in east Europe and elsewhere, worse than Abu Gharib and Guantanamo ,while chilling details of abuse of Iraqis by Iraq's own army and police.

 

[ On abuse of Iraqis by US, (Gen Taguba's report) and US franchised torture see below] .

Reaction to the Leaks

The Wihileaks have unleashed bickering among Iraqi politicians. For example, a senior member of the Iraqiya bloc led by former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi called for an investigation into possible connections between torture operations in Iraqi prisons and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

 

US Defense Department ; Geoff Morrell, the US Defense Department press secretary, strongly condemned both WikiLeaks and the release of the Iraq documents.

"We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies," he said.

Iran's Press TV declared, "Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has released documents suggesting that the Pentagon instructed US-led forces to 'secretly' torture detainees in Iraq."

Robert Fisk in London's 'Independent'

The western leadership and subservient corporate media pretend not to know. They countered every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some general – that " ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: We have nothing on that."

Those who went around torturing the Iraqis were undisciplined gunmen aka mercenaries, many recruited from criminal elements , so that they could be shown as outside the US armed forces and also military discipline under international law. Veritable outlaws ,a gang of criminals , well paid , with license to torture and kill ;they murdered their way around the cities of Iraq ,apart from protecting diplomats and generals. Though written in bleak militarese ,this material can be used by lawyers in courts ,continued Fisk.

But it always happens like this. In Kuwait, after the 1991 liberation , US troops heard Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations with a Kuwaiti royal family member involved. US forces did nothing. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. But then the Israeli army was told in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," said battalion commander about the criminal enterprise of Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacres.

Throughout history compared to the invaders and the rulers from the East, the Western culture and rule has been based on Cartesian material outlook on life .The Nazi crematoriums was an acme of western economic optimization of using even human resources ( Jewish and other bodies )to the last bone and the drop of blood.

What else to expect from the people of USA whose history is a narrative of landmarks like the Massacre at Wounded Knee, who have morphed from savagery to high-tech savagery and gave to the last generation, Mai Lai massacre, and during brutal occupation of Iraq , Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Falluja. Nevertheless, instead of looking at themselves, they pontificate to the rest of the humanity, with their uncivilized discourse.

Americans at home

In America, African Americans have been deprived of the most basic rights and opportunities. This was especially true in the southern states, which were once a byword for poverty and backwardness among people of all races. For a long time US refused to act at a national level to stop lynching, often arguing that it was a local problem thus everyone suffered the consequences of shutting off a huge segment of the population from equality and justice.

Lynching were barred quite late in last century  .But in New Orleans and the region, white America's putrid underbelly one can see the reality. How American Africans were treated and are still being treated .Those who visited the region at the time of September , 2005 Katrina disaster say that there has been no change in the pitiable conditions of the Blacks and poor in USA for the last two centuries.

London's Observer on Katrina;

London's Observer noted "Perhaps nothing else so encapsulates the endless paradoxes of being black in America. Never have blacks had so much legal freedom, yet there are record numbers in jail.

Traditional black neighborhoods have collapsed into drug-ridden crime strongholds, even as the black middle class is the biggest in history.

"It is now 40 years since the Voting Rights Act that secured the black vote. [In Florida 2000!] It is 10 years since hundreds of thousands of blacks came to Washington in the Million Man March to demand a way out of poverty. It is a single month since Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial fault lines that fracture the big cities.

"Almost four decades after King was killed, there are still two Americas. One is largely white and wealthy, one largely black and poor. They live cheek by jowl in the same country yet in separate worlds. The shocking thing about the TV pictures from New Orleans was not black poverty; it was the reaction of whites. 'Most whites were shocked about the amount of poverty in New Orleans, but black media have talked about poverty for the past 20 years,' said David Canton, professor of history at Connecticut College.

"Bare statistics tell the story. Black life expectancy is six years shorter than that of whites. Black unemployment is twice as high. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to die from disease, accident or murder at every stage of their lives. About 24 per cent of black families live below the poverty line, compared with 8 per cent of the white population."

Following the Katrina hurricane, when the truth could not be hidden, US corporate news networks soon started a cover up, with boring repeat visits of the President and statements. However, it has fooled no one except the usual suspects, info-challenged US population.

Below  is an article on abuse by US troops and interrogators in report by US Gen Antonio Taguba

The author had met with and heard the testimony of the victims of Abu Gharaib and Guantmano at the hearings of the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal on War Trials in October , 2009 .

Gajendra Singh 26 Octobeer, 2010,Delhi

                     

Gen Taguba Unveils Abu Ghraib, US Gulag 27 June, 2007

 "The abused are only Iraqis," a US Gen to Gen Taguba by K Gajendra Singh

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m34046&hd=&size=1&l=e    

 

"From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service. And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values."US Gen Antonio Taguba.

A senior US General in Iraq to Gen Taguba --" the abused detainees were 'only Iraqis.'"

"US Soldier Sodomised Female Iraqi Detainee". Former British Ambassador Craig Murray's blog headline.

"--we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable." Gen Taguba.

"It must always be remembered that whatever is happening in Iraq is the responsibility of US which led the illegal invasion of Iraq and continues forced occupation against the will of its people, acquiesced in by an impotent and dying United Nations under Sec Gen –What is his name !"-Author

Seymour Hersh , the well known US investigative journalist has done it again –methodically chipping away at United State administration's blatant lies and spins to further unveil the torture and abuse of Iraqis at US created 'Gulag' at Abu Ghraib and US Administrations effort to muzzle an honest US voice .

In an interview with Hersh in New Yorker , Major General Antonio Taguba who led the first military investigation in 2004 into human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has bluntly questioned the integrity of former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting he misled the US Congress by downplaying his own prior knowledge of what had happened. Gen Taguba also claimed in the interview that President George Bush also "had to be aware" of the atrocities despite saying at the time of the scandal that he had been out of the loop until he saw images in the US media.

As usual the White House denied it and –"the President said over three years ago that he first saw the pictures of the abuse on the television," added Scott Stanzel, a spokesman.

There has been little reaction in US main line media ie corporate controlled ' be the first ' purveyors of spins and lies. Or among honourable members of the US Congress who had sanctioned the illegal invasion of Iraq opening up the gates of hell on hapless Iraqis. As if the well documented US ugliness belongs to some one else . Even the US electorate's demand last November to bring back US troops home from Iraq has been totally ignored. Some government of the people this!

Such things were to be expected after an invasion launched to grab Iraqi oil . The men should be impeached and tried for misleading the world and the American people .The naked ugly truth is being slowly but relentlessly being exposed .Libby's conviction , illegal doings of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. and a Vice President who even claims immunity from the law of the land . Verily USA has created a lawless jungle abroad and at home too.

The New Yorker interview has only amplified what was partially known .Gen Taguba, who investigated Abu Ghraib, confirms details of the abuse not previously known thus publicly giving them official authority . It also confirms that the torture was sanctioned from the top.

Not part of the interview , but General Janis Karpinski has testified that she saw a memorandum on "Interrogation techniques" pinned to the wall by military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, signed by Defence Secretary Rumsfeld himself. Karpinski was at the top of the line of command of the guards - the military police - but not the interrogators. Doubtless more of the details of the war crimes at Abu Ghraib, and of extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo, will continue to emerge in the next few months as the war party in Washington becomes totally discredited.

Sexual aggression is not really about sex or gender, but about power: the powerful humiliating the powerless.

The General's 53-page report, first written in February 2004 , had found Iraqi detainees in a cellblock of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad subjected to "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at the hands of their U.S. jailers. The abuses included sodomizing of prisoners, pouring cold water and chemicals on naked bodies, threatening detainees with rape and dog attacks, hitting them with chairs and broomsticks and locking them in isolation without food, water or a toilet for three days. The report also found a virtual collapse of the command structure in Abu Ghraib with Army reservists being urged by military intelligence and CIA employees to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."

Chairman of the Joint Cheifs of Staff Gen Richard Myers had then denied the contents to the media but gave conflicting answers . And when pressed, he acknowledged that he had not even read the report.

Gen Taguba noted that Rumsfeld not only denied advance knowledge, but even denied afterwards having seen Taguba's report or knowing what had happened. Rumsfeld testified before Congress that he had no idea of the extent of the abuse.

"He's trying to acquit himself and a lot of people who are lying to protect themselves," the magazine quoted Taguba as saying, referring to Rumsfeld's May 7, 2004 testimony in the Congress.

Taguba affirmed , "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff"—the explicit images—"was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this." He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented in the Congress what he( Rumsfeld) knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

The photographs that became public at the time of enquiry and created worldwide reprehension, revulsion and condemnation - showed US jailers humiliating inmates who were naked, hooded, on leashes or piled into a human pyramid.

Gen Taguba said that other material not yet public or mentioned in trials included a video showing "a male American soldier in uniform sodomising a female detainee". The first wave of images also included images of sexual humiliation between a father and his son.

Gen Taguba also added he was ordered to limit his inquiry into the conduct of military police at the jail even as he became convinced they had a green light from higher up. "Somebody was giving them guidance but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box." He declares ,"Even today ... those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

Gen Taguba was victimized for doing his duty as he was subsequently forced to retire early. His conclusion was that he was being punished for honest investigation. "They always shoot the messenger," Gen Taguba told Seymour Hersh. "To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal - that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracised for doing what I was asked to do." And he did that as an honest and upright officer and as a decent human being .

The politicians in the Congress could not care less. A Quinnipiac University poll this month found Congress with an approval rating of just 23 percent. "People voted for change. But they don't think they got it," said Peter Brown, an assistant director of the poll. A Gallup poll last month had put Congress's approval rating at 29 percent. The number had fallen to 21 percent last December, just when Republicans were sent packing by the electorate.

Some extracts from the New Yorker interview ;

"Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ( J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet." Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. "General," he asked, "who do you think leaked the report?" Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. "It was just my speculation," he recalled. "Rumsfeld didn't say anything."

Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. "Here I am," Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, "just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this." As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, "He's looking at me. It was a statement."

At best, Taguba said, "Rumsfeld was in denial." Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld's conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, "I don't want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?"--

On January 20th, the chief of staff at Central Command sent another e-mail to Admiral Keating, copied to General Craddock and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq. The chief of staff wrote, "Sir: update on alleged detainee abuse per our discussion. DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4 confessions implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST? Yes. A CD with approx 100 photos and a video—CID has these in their possession."

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information about the photographs had been given "to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described."

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. "It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn't say, 'Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,' " Rumsfeld told the congressmen. "I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn't."

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, "it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge." As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, "I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them"; at the House hearing, he said, "I didn't see them until last night at 7:30,"wen asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs.

US Army – A veritable Mafia

Taguba got a different message, however, from other officers, among them General John Abizaid, then the head of Central Command. A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid's driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: "You and your report will be investigated."

"I wasn't angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me," Taguba said. "I'd been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned "to back off" on the investigation, because "it would spill over to more important things." A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary's great displeasure.---

In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army's Vice-Chief of Staff. "This is your Vice," he told Taguba. "I need you to retire by January of 2007." No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, "He offered no reason." (A spokesperson for Cody said, "Conversations regarding general officer management are considered private personnel discussions. General Cody has great respect for Major General Taguba as an officer, leader, and American patriot.")

Richard Armitage, a former Navy counter-insurgency officer who served as Deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush term, recalled meeting Taguba, then a lieutenant colonel, in South Korea in the early nineteen-nineties. "I was told to keep an eye on this young guy—'He's going to be a general,' " Armitage said. "Taguba was discreet and low key—not a sprinter but a marathoner."

General Taguba is a slight man with a friendly demeanor and an unfailingly polite correctness. "I came from a poor family and had to work hard," he said. "It was always shine the shoes on Saturday morning for church, and wash the car on Saturday for church. And Saturday also for mowing the lawn and doing yard jobs for church."

The Perfidious Brits are equally guilty in Iraq ;

The Brits too are very much in the business of torture ..The reserve stiff upper lip keeps the ugliness under covers but too much has happened and the world has seen enough .

Robert Fisk of 'The Independent who "had seen British military brutality in Northern Ireland had hopes that things might have improved but the heart wrenching case of Baha Mousa , who died of abuse and torture , proved that the dark, sinister ways employed by the British in the Irish conflict have continued . He concluded that something had gone terribly wrong in the British Army in southern Iraq.

British Playing football with human beings

Fisk went to see Kifah Taha, who was beaten so badly by British troops in the presence of Baha Mousa with terrible wounds in the groin. Baha Mousa, son of a policeman Daoud Mousa in Basra , British area of occupation died from the brutal injuries he received in British custody, was a young, decent man who worked as a receptionist in a Basra hotel. Daoud Mousa and others will carry the grief of their son's killings or rapes of their daughters with them for ever.

Fisk was told how "the soldiers would call their Iraqi prisoners by the names of football stars - Beckham was one name they used - before kicking them around the detention headquarters in Basra. There were stories of Iraqi prisoners being forced to kneel on sharp stones, of being kicked and punched in the groin, the kidneys, the back, shoulders, forced to sit with their heads down lavatory holes."

There's an old rule of thumb applied to armies in the field said Fisk. "If you find out about one abuse, you can bet there were a hundred others that will never be revealed. New stories of "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture in British custody are emerging from Basra. US troops are still being questioned about unlawful killings and torture in Iraq. If one girl is raped and murdered and her family slaughtered by a US unit south of Baghdad - all of which is true - how many others have died in circumstances we shall never discover?", added Fisk.

But there would be blow back too. Accounts would be settled.

American detainees in Iran

For Americans, it would be a surprise to see the word "detainee" suddenly appear in a different country, in a different context , this time to a group of Americans. After all, "detainee" is the word the Bush administration coined to deal with suspected terrorist captives who, they argued, should be subjected to extra-legal treatment as part of the Global War on Terrorism. As feared the terminology is, being turned against American citizens under detention in Iran now.

The Iranian government currently holds in custody Haleh Esfandiari, Kian Tajbakhsh, Parnaz Azima, and Ali Shakeri, Iranian-American scholars and activists accused of being spies and/or employees of the U.S. government intent on fomenting dissent and disruption within Iran. (A fifth American, Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent engaged in business of an unknown nature in Iran, disappeared on March 8th.) The four are reportedly behind bars at Tehran's notorious Evin prison, meant for political prisoners including human rights activists. The Americans had abducted 6 Iranian diplomats in Kurdistan from the Irbil Consulate arousing much anger and dismay in the Kurdish regional government.

Any way who carries out US overt and covert policies of regime change inside Iran , for which the Congress regularly apportions many tens of millions of US dollars .

Sexual sadism of Western culture –In peace and war
At the time of hearings in May 2004 ,Katharine Viner wrote in 'The Guardian' about 'The sexual sadism of our culture, in peace and in war" She had received some horrific photographs from Iraq, depicting " the sexual abuse of women by US servicemen. On some, chadors were hitched up over the women's heads. On others, the women were naked while they were raped by groups of men. ----- They make you sick to your stomach. And they look strangely familiar - like the XXX films in hotel rooms, like those "live rape!" emails sent to internet users, like porn.

"--We know that such images exist, because a US government report confirmed it. And we know that Iraqi women are being raped throughout the country, because both Amal Kadham Swadi, the Iraqi lawyer, and the US's own internal inquiry say that abuse is systemic and widespread. We also know this because all wars feature the abuse of women as a byproduct, or as a weapon. The ancient Greeks considered rape socially acceptable; the Crusaders raped their way to Constantinople; the English invaders raped Scottish women on Culloden Moor. The first world war, the second world war, Bosnia, Bangladesh, Vietnam - where the gang rape and murder of a peasant woman by US soldiers was photographed in stages by one if its participants.

"The poses, the large numbers of men to one woman, the violence - they have all the hallmarks of contemporary porn. Indeed, there is suspicion that the photos are part of a gruesome new trend There's a difference, of course, between the making of pornography for money and the photographing of pornographic poses as war trophies: the consent of the woman involved? But to the consumer of these images, there's no way of knowing if there's been consent or not. They look the same."

In February,2004 US soldiers were accused of raping more than 112 colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan --- seem to have to prove that they are one of the guys by sexually humiliating the only people less important than they are: Iraqi prisoners, of whatever sex. It's a chilling lesson, that women can be sexual sadists just as well as men. Just give them the right conditions - and someone weaker to kick. It's proof that sexual aggression is not really about sex or gender, but about power: the powerful humiliating the powerless.?

==appear on pornographic websites. They will be used for sexual gratification.-- Of course we are horrified by these images. But we should be horrified too by their familiarity, and how much they tell us about our own societies."

Pornography is worth tens of billions dollars business in USA .Is this the civilization the rest of the world in envious of as US leaders constantly proclaim ie superiority of their civilization .

Conclusions ;

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche , 19th cent German philosopher , inspired by Plato's Utopia aka Republic , in turn inspired the evil genius and 20^th  Century  political philosopher Leo Strauss , at whose feet sat the still influential Neo-Cons and Zeo-cons , had stated that Christian love and piety was an outcome of fear. The fear of the strongly built neighbour or the fear of a criminal from a police man .

Nietzsche believed that it was not possible that a man could genuinely feel universal love, perhaps because of his self-created halo of a 'noble' man . That was perhaps meant for two combatants or knights matching their valour on level ground, not like F-16 bombers against kids armed with slingshots or rudimentary guns .

Many in the West are not even ashamed describing the US "victory" over Iraq in 2003 an example of military valour when US defence expenditure was S$ 450 billion vs Iraq's 2.5 billion after US-UK implemented sanctions had decayed Iraqi defences .The sanctions also killed half a million children of malnutrition according to UN reports. .

Kemal Ataturk , the great strategician ,would have laughed his head off at this spurious claim. Even Montgomery who believed that 4 to one superiority was enough when attacking .Only ignoble deeds by ignoble men shine in the US led West .The so called western 'noble' is now likely to be a poor American from rural areas, a high tech brute ensconced in his armour afraid to come out of his humvee against motivated bombers with just their body to sacrifice against all odds . Would Nietzsche have called the bombers 'noble'!

The noble martial combat was over after the second siege of Vienna in late 16th century , when high tech killing started taking over from Janissaries valour. The final result now is the complete take over of the US by consumerist Military Industry complex , which gobbles up as much in 'defence ' expenditure as the rest of the world put together ,of which the generals and soldiers are consumers paid for by the people of America and now of the world with an iniquitous economic order where in US just prints greenbacks . US power has morphed into world financed-techno-barbarian brute.

In his book on what Bertrand Russell calls history of Western Philosophy ( West has generally produced linear thought , its real philosophers are ridiculed ) he quotes from Shakespeare's King Lear , on the verge of madness
"I will do such things –
What they are yet I know not – but they shall be
The terror of the earth.
( Exactly what the top US leadership has achieved in Iraq and threatens doing more of the same. )

This is Nietzsche's philosophy in nutshell. Donald Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns or Bush's all options including tactical weapons when there is no danger of an Iranian nuke in near future .No wonder a worried and wizened El Bardai in Vienna called for a control on 'crazies 'in USA.

Russell says there are two sorts of saints, saints by nature and saints by fear. The first have spontaneous love of mankind. Because to do so gives him happiness and the second , a frightened man afraid of fear. ( Western leaders like Henry Kissinger , Dick Cheney ,Tony Blair would fit the bill )

It is existential fear of Jesus Christ's saying turned devilshly on its head .Do not do unto others what you would not like done unto you . The fear what Iran would do after 5 years or ten years .What Iraqis would do . Would Assassins emerge from the Middle East and Asia or Muslim citizens in Europe and Black Muslims in USA . What north Korea with nukes and missiles threatened to do to stop a menacing US. Humans and the world has now been reduced by USA to lawless jungle.

Leo Strauss was an admirer of the British Empire and Winston Churchill as an example of the will-driven statesman. Recent Churchill admirers are ; the extinguished poodle Tony Blair and lame duck George Bush . After being part of killing of over 666,000 Iraqis Blair said history will judge him. He has been judged and the Brits would pay the price .If the Brits could not remove Blair early enough ,then why blame poor Iraqis for not removing late President Saddam Hussein of Iraq , and why .Whom , now faced with acute security deficit and instability Iraqis miss , even Shias. And perhaps in their hearts the Americans too. Certainly before March 2003 USA was a hyper power , a phrase rarely used now for a degenerated ogre .

The use of deception and manipulation in current US policies flow directly from the doctrines of the Leo Strauss (1899-1973). His disciples including Paul Wolfowitz and other Neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration. Wolfowitz, acknowledged that the evidence used to justify the war was "murky" and added that weapons of mass destruction weren't the crucial issue anyway. Grabbing Iraqi oil for nothing was !He had told US Congress that Iraq's development would be financed by Iraq oil revenues ( which US is trying to gift to US multinationals ). Paul also tried to finance his love nest from the World Bank funds and refused to resign when caught with his hand in the till or where ever it should not have been.

Another Neo-Con Douglas Feith recently told one Wolf Blitzer last year if he had no car accident did not mean that he should not take out car insurance this year .So "operation Iraqi freedom" was an insurance policy ! Some Straussian reasoning . On mere suspicions one could attack another country .Suppose some one is reading a book on fundamentals of nuclear Physics. Attack his country according to Straussian or Feith logic . Even Taimur lung , in those lawless days ,attacked only if sure of a threat building up, not on suspicions alone .Wolf the Blitzer was so easily convinced . These are West's top journalists!

Did the US system reach its zenith of power and now lie exposed an abyss of cheating, chicanery , corruption ,hypocrisy and total lawlessness .

The current direction of US led Western civilization , if you can call it so, is hurtling along retrograde evolution of human animal ; away from the divine and spiritual moorings and identity as all religions discovered intuitively over millennia to a world of heedless and headless consumerism like an unerring laser to wards self destruction, Nuclear bombs and cold nights or climate atastrophes and apocalypse.      Bucharest (Romania) 28 June, 2007.