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British troops face fresh charges of Iraq war torture and killings

Ed Vulliamy
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:29 UTC
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© Photograph: PA
A still from video of a British soldier screaming abuse at hooded Iraqi detainees played to the public inquiry into the death of of Baha Mousa.
Britain will face fresh charges of breaching international law over the alleged torture and killing of prisoners during the war in Iraq, which began almost exactly 10 years ago. The allegations will be unveiled in the high court, when Britain will stand accused of a "systemic" policy of abuse committed over five years, from 2003 to 2008.

At a hearing scheduled over three days from 29 January, lawyers for 180 Iraqis who claim they are victims of abuse, or that their family members were unlawfully killed, will place a file of statements before two judges presiding over the court in London accusing British soldiers and intelligence officers of unlawful interrogation practices. These include hooding and the use of "stress positions", sexual abuse, beating and religious abuse of illegally detained prisoners. In some cases, the testimonies allege, the torture led to the death of the prisoner.

The statements were compiled during meetings with victims and relatives, mostly in Lebanon, by human rights lawyer Phil Shiner of the Public Interest Lawyers group, based in Birmingham.
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Cowboy Hat

West Point study on 'violent far right' shows 'dramatic rise' in attacks

Samantha Kimmey
Raw Story
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:12 UTC
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© Shutterstock
Abortion Protesters At The Funeral Of Dr. George Tiller
A report published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy on Jan. 15 discusses the potential dangers of "violent far-right" organizations, which has angered some conservatives that believe the military should focus on international threats.

The executive summary of the paper, "Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America's Violent Far-Right," claims that "since 2007, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of attacks and violent plots originating from individuals and groups who self- identify with the far-right of American politics."

Written by Arie Perliger, Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, the paper asserts that three distinct ideologies exist in the "American violent far right." Those are "a racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement and a fundamentalist movement," the last of which "includes mainly Christian Identity groins such as the Aryan Nations."
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Treasure Chest

$240 billion amassed by 100 richest people enough to end extreme poverty four times over: Oxfam

Phillip Inman
The Guardian, UK
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:08 UTC
Rich Pig
© iStockphoto
The vast fortunes made by the world's richest 100 billionaires is driving up inequality and hindering the world's ability to tackle poverty, according to Oxfam.

The charity said the accumulation of wealth and income on an unprecedented scale, often at the expense of secure jobs and decent wages for the poorest, undermined the ability of people who survive on aid or low wages to improve their situation and escape poverty.

Oxfam said the world's poorest could be lifted out of poverty several times over should the richest 100 billionaires give away the money they made last year.

Without pointing a finger at individuals, the charity argued that the $240bn (£150bn) net income amassed in 2012 by the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to make extreme poverty history four times over.
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Bad Guys

Algeria: 32 militants killed, with 23 hostages

Paul Schemm and Karim Kebir
Associated Press
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 18:40 UTC
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© AP Photo/Canal Algerie via Associated Press TV
Unidentified rescued hostages pose for the media in Ain Amenas, Algeria, in this image taken from television Friday Jan. 18, 2013.
In a bloody finale, Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the Sahara desert on Saturday to end a standoff with Islamist extremists that left at least 23 hostages dead and killed all 32 militants involved, the Algerian government said.

With few details emerging from the remote site in eastern Algeria, it was unclear whether anyone was rescued in the final operation, but the number of hostages killed on Saturday - seven - was how many the militants had said that morning they still had. The government described the toll as provisional and some foreigners remain unaccounted for.

The siege at Ain Amenas transfixed the world after radical Islamists linked to al-Qaida stormed the complex, which contained hundreds of plant workers from all over the world, then held them hostage surrounded by the Algerian military and its attack helicopters for four tense days that were punctuated with gun battles and dramatic tales of escape.

Algeria's response to the crisis was typical of its history in confronting terrorists, favoring military action over negotiation, which caused an international outcry from countries worried about their citizens. Algerian military forces twice assaulted the two areas where the hostages were being held with minimal apparent mediation - first on Thursday, then on Saturday.
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Crusader

Brookings' Bruce Riedel urges intensified US support for Saudi despots

Glenn Greenwald
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 17:50 UTC
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© Photograph: Ho/REUTERS
Tony Blair meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
Every now and then, leading mavens of the Foreign Policy Community have an uncharacteristic outburst of candor.

When it comes to the US "foreign policy community", few if any people are more representative of it than Bruce Riedel. A 30-year CIA officer and adviser to the last four US presidents, he is now a senior fellow at the wing of the Brookings Institution funded by entertainment mogul Haim Saban (whom the New York Times described as "a tireless cheerleader for Israel" and who described himself this way: "I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel"). In 2012, Riedel contributed to a book on Iran by Brookings "scholars" which argued that the US could launch a war against Iran by covertly provoking its government into responses that could then falsely be depicted by the US to the world "as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression" - exactly what Brookings' Ken Pollack proposed be done in 2002 to deceitfully justify the attack on Iraq. According to Brookings, "in January 2009, President Barack Obama asked Riedel to chair a review of American policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, the results of which the president announced in a speech on March 27, 2009."

When they speak publicly, the mavens of the Foreign Policy Community - whose primary function is to justify US militarism and aggression - typically disguise their real beliefs and objectives with specialized obfuscating jargon. But every now and then, they have an outburst of uncharacteristic candor that clarifies their actual worldview. Such is the case with a remarkably clear memorandum to President Obama that Riedel just authored and Brooking published regarding the extremely close US alliance with the regime in Saudi Arabia.
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Vader

Algeria, Mali, and why this week has looked like an obscene remake of earlier Western interventions

Robert Fisk
The Independent
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 17:36 UTC
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Mali's Special Forces receive advice 'humanitarian aid and assistance' from US Special Forces
We are outraged not by the massacre of the innocents, but because the hostages killed were largely white, blue-eyed chaps rather than darker, brown-eyed chaps

Odd, isn't it, how our "collateral damage" is different from their "collateral damage". Speaking yesterday to an old Algerian friend in the aviation business, I asked him what he thought of his country's raid on the In Amenas gas plant."Brilliant operation, Robert," he shouted down the phone. "We destroyed the terrorists!" But the innocent hostages? What about their deaths, I asked? "Poor guys," he replied. "We had thousands of women and children killed in our war [in the 1990s] - terrible tragedy - but we are fighting terrorism."

And there you have it. Our dead men didn't matter in the slightest to him. And he had a point, didn't he? For we are outraged today, not by the massacre of the innocents, but because the hostages killed by the Algerian army - along with some of their captors - were largely white, blue-eyed chaps rather than darker, brown-eyed chaps. Had all the "Western" hostages - I am including the Japanese in this ridiculous, all-purpose definition - been rescued and had the innocent dead all been Algerian, there would have been no talk yesterday of a "botched raid".
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Sheriff

Egyptian activists teargassed during police brutality trial


RT.com
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 17:44 UTC
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© Image from twitter user@_amroali
Riot police have used tear gas to disperse a crowd of demonstrators outside an Alexandria courtroom where a former police chief and five other officers are on trial over the killing of civilians during the 2011 uprising that ousted Mubarak.

Dozens of family members of those killed during the uprising along with activists led the demonstration outside the Alexandria courthouse.

Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd that had become outraged by the idea of the police officers on trial walking free.

So far, nearly 100 police officers have been brought to trial for killing and wounding protestors during the revolution that deposed Hosni Mubarak in 2011 - all of them have been acquitted or received suspended sentences.
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Star of David

U.S. and Israeli leaders locked in tension as threats loom


Raw Story
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 17:27 UTC
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US President Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu will have to bury past hostilities if the Israeli prime minister is re-elected to jointly face looming threats such as Iran, analysts say.

The two men have never warmed to each other, and ties have remained frosty. Obama pointedly failed to make time to meet the Israeli leader on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September.

Netanyahu also made little secret of the fact that he was rooting for Obama's Republican rival, Mitt Romney, in November's US presidential election.

Yet another spat made public headlines this week when Netanyahu reacted angrily to comments attributed to Obama that "Israel doesn't know what its own best interests are."

"I think everyone knows that the citizens of Israel are the only ones who can decide who will faithfully represent the vital interests of the state," Netanyahu snapped back.
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Sheriff

Guatemala's president: 'My country bears the scars from the war on drugs'

John Mulholland
Raw Story
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 17:19 UTC
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Guatemala's president says that leaders of drug-consuming countries in the west have to accept it has brought Latin countries to their knees

In any war there are innocent victims. In the 40-year war on drugs, the central American state of Guatemala can lay claim to being just such an innocent casualty. It has been caught in the crossfire between the nations to the south (principally Peru, Colombia and Bolivia) that produce illegal narcotics and the country to the north (America) that has the largest appetite to consume them. Guatemala does little of either.

The problem is that the drugs - principally cocaine - have to be transported from the producing countries to the US, from the south to the north. Unfortunately for Guatemala, it's in the way.

But Guatemala's location at the tip of Central America did not always present a problem. As recently as 2008 the US National Drug Intelligence Centre estimated that less than 1% of the estimated 700 tonnes of cocaine that left South America passed through Central America. But that was before the war on drugs intervened, and Guatemala was caught in the fallout.

Prior to 2008 the favoured method of transporting drugs from South America to the US was by sea (via the Caribbean or the Pacific) or by air; land-based smuggling was rare. But two things happened to radically change that, both initiatives of the "war on drugs".
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Snakes in Suits

Anderson Cooper 'debunks' Sandy Hook massacre as government psy-op

Sott.net Editors
Sott.net
Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:12 UTC
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In the following Anderson Cooper 360 talkshow, aired on CNN on January 11th, the former CIA internee turned journalist 'debunks' the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories by drawing attention to the nonsense proliferating on the Internet about Sandy Hook being an out and out "HOAX!".

Just as the mainstream media relished the opportunity to portray anyone who is dissatisfied with the contradictory official story of a lone gunman being responsible for the Sandy Hook massacre when rabble-rouser Alex Jones was given primetime attention on Piers Morgan's TV show, Cooper gave nationwide airtime to the lunatic fringe's half-baked theories about 'actors' being cast in the role of the child victims' parents and singled out arguably the most credible sceptic of the official version of events, tenured professor James Tracy, who must be kicking himself for mentioning - in an otherwise balanced article analysing the event - the possibility that actors played roles on that horrific day.

In doing so, Cooper and his employers are killing two birds with one stone: conflating intelligent criticism with kooky and insensitive conspiracy-mongering, and pouring more fuel on the conspiracy bandwagon to the point that "Hoax!" videos on YouTube are garnering millions of views.


Tune in to Sott.net's radio talk show 'SOTT Talk Radio' tomorrow at 8pm CET when SOTT editors Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley will be discussing the Sandy Hook massacre.

Comment: See also: Anderson Cooper's CIA Secret

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