10 June 2004 | UN Wire Human Rights Watch said yesterday that the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib was a near-inevitable consequence of the Bush administration’s rejection of international legal norms. The 38-page report, The Road to Abu Ghraib, says U.S. policies created the climate for the abuses in three ways: by using the war on terror to circumvent international law and set up “offshore, off-limits” detention centers; by employing coercive interrogation methods to elicit information from detainees; and by ignoring reports of detainee mistreatment. “The horrors of Abu Ghraib were not simply the acts of individual soldiers,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Abu Ghraib resulted from the decisions made […]
Daily Archives: June 10, 2004
[ As the Pentagon budget grows, so does the waste: “employees have been reimbursed for tickets they didn’t purchase in the first place — reimbursed for tickets the government paid for” — to the tune of $8 million. And worse. –BL ] $100 Million Wasted: While Some Soldiers Paid Their Own Way, Thousands of Pentagon Airline Tickets Went Unused June 8, 2004 | ABCNEWS.com by Lisa Stark and Michelle Stark W A S H I N G TO N — The Department of Defense spent at least $100 million for airline tickets it did not use, a new congressional report found, […]
[ From the BBC article below: “If the real figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets, in the end that would suit no one.” George Monbiot’s piece in the June 8 Guardian fills in important context: The world’s problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in 2007 and three in […]
by Brendan Lalor Michael Rupert, of “From The Wilderness,” believes George Tenet to have resigned in order to be free “to give testimony in a legal case against a sitting President,” he revealed in a June 8 article. In fact, he argues, the CIA has been planning a coup for at least two years, and intends to “remov[e] or replac[e] the entire Bush regime prior to the Republican National Convention this August.” His theory features uncovered CIA agent Valerie Plame, Halliburton, the Saudi royal family, past-peak oil production, and more. Click here to see how Rupert makes his case.
[ Many Iraqis may be uncomfortable with the foreign, especially U.S., ties of the new, nonelected Iraqi government: Although about a third of the new government’s leaders spent most of their lives under Saddam Hussein’s rule, five of the six leading posts in the government are held by people who lived a significant part of their lives abroad, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. At least two cabinet members are U.S. citizens. In addition to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who was involved in a CIA-backed coup attempt against Saddam, at least seven others were members of exile groups financed […]