Archive for category Terrorism
Palling Around With…
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, John McCain, National Politics, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Terrorism, War on May 30, 2013
While engaged in making his own mavericky foreign policy over in Syria, Senator John McCain met with some Syrian rebels allied with al-Qaeda– including Mohammad Nour, an infamous terrorist who has been involved in the abduction of a group of Lebanese pilgrims. Nour is the man in the center of the photo above.
Does anyone else remember what Senator McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin said during the 2008 presidential election? She accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” I think the irony meter has been pegged.
Did President Obama Just Apologize for the Drone Campaign?
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Military, National Politics, Terrorism, This Blog, War, War Crimes on May 23, 2013
Via Spencer Ackerman and HuffPo.
Here’s the take-away from President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, in Washington DC.
The drone surge may finally be over. By some estimates, 98% of drone strike casualties were civilian noncombatants (50 for every one “suspected terrorist”). The Bureau of Investigative Journalism issued a report detailing how the CIA deliberately targeted rescuers who show up after an attack, and mourners at funerals as a part of a “double-tap” strategy eerily reminiscent of methods used by terrorist groups like Hamas.
In the months and years ahead, drone strikes once conducted by the CIA will become more of a U.S. military responsibility. The rules for launching the strikes will become stricter — there must be a “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed, for instance — and they’ll become less frequent. “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective,” Obama said… “is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.”
Yet neither Obama nor senior administration officials ruled out the most controversial aspect of Obama’s counterterrorism measures: so-called signature strikes, in which the CIA does not know the identities of the people it targets, but infers terrorist affiliation based on their observed patterns of behavior.
President Obama says he’s sorry.
Of the civilians who have died in the strikes, Obama said: “For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Of course, the other guys kill civilians too.
“Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes,” he added.
Alex Jones: Oklahoma Tornado Was An Inside Job
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), 9/11, Barack Obama, Liars (politics), National Politics, People Are Nuts, Republicans, Terrorism on May 22, 2013
Via Media Matters.
Conspiracy talk show host Alex Jones is best known for promoting the theory that the 9/11 attacks were really a “false flag” operation by the U.S. government. He said the same thing about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and the recent Boston bombings. Now he is making the claim that the Oklahoma tornado was a secret government plot.
Jones, a longtime proponent of the idea that the U.S. government can manipulate and even produce weather systems like tornadoes and hurricanes, went on to say that if people saw helicopters or small aircraft in the area, then “you better bet your bottom dollar they did this.”
“But, who knows if they did?” he asked. “You know, that’s the thing. We don’t know.”
Jones is being increasingly treated as a serious voice within the right-wing GOP. Republicans in the House, including Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), actually held a hearing last month to discuss Jones’ theory that that President Obama is trying to buy up all the bullets in the country.
UPDATE: Maddow: Will ‘weather weapon’ talk finally drive GOP away from Alex Jones? In an audio clip, Jones suggests the government is causing tornadoes to convince Americans about climate change:
“Tornadoes are way down. Of course, they lie that they’re way up to get carbon taxes, but I don’t know if this was a weather weapon or not. They can, with the right weather conditions, they can create and steer groups of tornadoes.”
Who Is Going To Federal Prison For The CIA’s Torture Program?
Posted by Richard Warnick in Afghanistan, Bush Administration, Human Rights, National Politics, Terrorism, This Blog, Torture, War Crimes on January 27, 2013
Last August, the Department of Justice ended a four-year criminal investigation by federal prosecutor John Durham into interrogation techniques used during the presidency of George W. Bush, including torture. At least two cases resulted in the deaths of detainees in CIA custody. This investigation began in 2008, after we learned about the CIA’s destruction of videotapes of interrogations of terror suspects. Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to initiate any prosecutions.
Late last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled German citizen Khaled el-Masri was tortured by CIA agents. He was seized in Macedonia in December 2003, tortured, and secretly flown to Afghanistan. Then he was released in April 2004. after the CIA admitted he was wrongly detained. El Masri’s lawsuit in U.S. court for illegal detention was dismissed in 2006 when the court accepted the government’s position that it could invoke the so-called “state secrets privilege” in order to avoid having to admit what the CIA did.
The US Senate’s select committee on intelligence conducted a three-year review of CIA treatment of detainees, producing a 6,000-page classified report that is believed to conclude that the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” adopted by the CIA during the Bush years did not produce any major breakthroughs in intelligence, contrary to previous claims. This report is likely to remain secret. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the intelligence committee chair, says the report contains “startling details” about waterboarding, stress positions, forced nudity, beatings and sleep and sensory deprivation.
Torture and conspiracy to commit torture is a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in a federal penitentiary, or by the death penalty if it results in the victim’s death. So who is going to prison now that the CIA torture program has been thoroughly investigated?
1. Someone who conducted “enhanced interrogation” torture sessions.
2. Someone who destroyed evidence of torture.
3. Someone who wrote a legal memo justifying the use of torture.
4. Someone high up in the Bush administration who authorized torture.
5. Someone who opposed torture within the CIA and later blew the whistle on the terrible crimes committed in our name.
If you guessed #5, you’re correct.
Last Friday, ex-CIA officer John C. Kiriakou became the first person to be sentenced to prison for issues related to CIA torture. Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison after pleading guilty to one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for revealing the name of a former operative involved the Bush era’s brutal interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo to a reporter.
Kiriakou worked as a CIA operative for more than two decades and led a March 2002 raid that captured high-ranking Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah. He was also a vocal torture opponent who revealed his knowledge of U.S. enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, in an ABC interview in 2007.
UPDATE: From Roots Action: Free John Kiriakou
On June 18, 2009, President Obama declared that no one in the CIA would be prosecuted for torture. But now a CIA officer is finally going to prison in connection with torture. However, this CIA officer didn’t torture anyone — he blew the whistle on torture.
In 2007, John Kiriakou was the first person to publicly acknowledge that the CIA was waterboarding people. The retribution for that act of whistleblowing began immediately.
The CIA began filing crime reports with the Department of Justice against Kiriakou. The IRS audited him in 2007 and has done so every year since. His wife was forced out of her job at the CIA. In 2010 an FBI agent pretending to be a foreign spy tried to entrap Kiriakou, who reported the incidents to the FBI. The same FBI follows him everywhere, including into his children’s school.
The DOJ tried unsuccessfully to prosecute Kiriakou under the Espionage Act as a supposed enemy of the state. He became unemployable and racked up a million dollars in lawyers’ bills.
Now Kiriakou is finally going to prison for 30 months for the act of telling an author the name of someone to interview, even though the name was already known and Kiriakou’s prosecution has made it better known.
Kathryn Bigelow’s Torture Movie #1 At Box Office
Posted by Richard Warnick in Bush Administration, Entertainment, National Politics, Terrorism, This Blog, Torture, War Crimes on January 13, 2013
It’s the height of irony that after the CIA illegally destroyed nearly 100 video recordings of torture sessions to avoid being held accountable, the number one movie in American theaters this weekend devotes most of its first hour to a Hollywood re-creation. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-nominated film “Zero Dark Thirty” [Full disclosure: I haven't seen the film and don't intend to] turns torture into entertainment:
Those scenes …show terrified, disoriented and bloodied detainees kept awake for days on end by having their arms painfully suspended from the ceilings of secret jails; stuffed into tiny wooden boxes when they don’t cooperate with their inquisitors; and waterboarded on soiled mattresses while interrogators bark questions.
Bigelow ignores both the illegality and immorality of using torture. As if that’s not bad enough, “Zero Dark Thirty” delivers the message that it was CIA torture that led to finding Osama bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan. This is factually wrong. The statement “based on first-hand accounts of actual events” is deceptive because it causes the viewer to think the story is accurate, when what it really means is “based on CIA propaganda.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program concluded that the CIA did not first learn about the existence of the bin Laden courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and that the CIA detainee who provided the most accurate information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.
Senators John McCain, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin have requested information and documents related to the CIA’s cooperation in the making of this film, which lies to the American people about one of the most critical issues of the Bush administration: the criminal use of torture by the CIA, for which no one has ever been prosecuted. We know that on many occasions, detainees were tortured to death in secret CIA prisons.
Sony Chairman Amy Pascal tried to refute criticism of “Zero Dark Thirty” by a member of the Oscar voting academy on Friday, saying her studio’s movie “does not advocate torture.” No one has claimed that it does – only that it lies about torture.
UPDATE: Kevin Gosztola on FDL:
[I]t is impossible not to conclude that this film is the kind of production that greatly pleases the national security state especially because it does not question what they do.
…This is the hunt for Bin Laden told with information from officials in government, who have no objection to America’s increased reliance on secret war or covert operations. Bigelow and Boal wanted the information necessary to tell the version of the story that they believed to be true in a way that would garner them high praise. The CIA gave them that while at the same time manipulating them into presenting torture tactics used to create learned helplessness in prisoners as part of the timeline of events that eventually led to Bin Laden. They showed the NSA intercepting communications and the dolly shot past hardware with wires and cords popping out is made completely innocuous and acceptable. A scene shows a video screen with imagery from a drone striking a target and Maya looks on coldly, completely numbed by the lethal use of force.
The filmmakers played their part. They were given access and what Americans are flocking to this weekend is nothing that would alienate the officials they collaborated with and nothing less than a conventional story of revenge on an American enemy.
Palling Around With Terrorists: Obama Administration Embraces MEK
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Hypocrisy, Iran, National Politics, Terrorism, This Blog on September 26, 2012
The Bush administration cited MEK as a reason to invade Iraq
Four years after Sarah Palin famously accused then-candidate Barack Obama of “palling round with terrorists,” it can be said truthfully. Last Friday, news leaked that the U.S. State Department is going to remove the Iranian terrorist group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) from its list of foreign terrorist organizations.
MEK’s ideology is a mixture of Islam and Marxism with cult-like practices. The group once called itself “the People’s Holy Warriors of Iran.” They supported the Islamic revolution in Iran and later allied with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. During the 1970s MEK conducted numerous attacks on American officials, including an attempted assassination of the U.S. ambassador in Tehran. Six Americans were killed. It has been listed as a terrorist organization since 1997. The MEK fought in the Iran-Iraq War, made use of chemical weapons, and brutally put down Iraqi Kurdish people in the early 1990s. The Bush administration cited Saddam’s support of MEK as a reason to invade Iraq, and the group was forcibly disarmed by the U.S. Army. In recent years, the MEK is believed to be involved in a wave of terrorist attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists.
The Obama administration’s decision was made with bipartisan support. MEK has many prominent U.S. political figures on its payroll, including Howard Dean, Rudy Giuliani, Wesley Clark, Bill Richardson, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former National Security Advisers Frances Townsend and General James L. Jones, and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.
Note to all U.S. Attorneys: Everyone associated with MEK can be charged with providing material support for terrorism, a federal crime under the USA PATRIOT Act (18 U.S.C. §2339A and §2339B) punishable by 15 years in prison.
Now that the United States has de-listed the MEK as an international terrorist group, our government can overtly fund them to conduct terrorist attacks on Iran. According to some reports, MEK has received covert U.S. and Israeli assistance for years.
[W]ith the MEK, we have a group that, at least according to some reports, appears to have intensified its terrorism, and yet they are removed from the list. Why? Because now they are aligned against the prime enemy of the US and Israel – and working closely with those two nations – and are therefore, magically, no longer “terrorists.”
More info: Five lessons from the de-listing of MEK as a terrorist group
UPDATE: It’s official: U.S. Takes Iranian Exile Group MEK Off Terror List
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