American Power Abroad

America Has a Foreign Policy?

Torture (Oops!)
So there are still countries that can't stomach torture, and they're backing away from the United States like it's a leper over our admission that we, err, pour waterinto peoples' lungs for sport, or whatever reason they give this weeek.

Copeland said the Canadian government's decision to drop claims about Harkat and Charkaoui that came from the CIA's interrogations of Abu Zubaydah indicates "the government of Canada, or at least the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has concluded that everything that came from Abu Zubaydah was obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

Asked why the statements from Zubaydah had been dropped from the dossiers against Harkat and Charkaoui, Bernard Beckhoff, a spokesman for Canada's public safety ministry, which oversees CSIS, said he could not comment on developments in either case because they are both still before the courts. But he then added, pointedly: "The CSIS director has stated publicly that torture is morally repugnant and not particularly reliable. CSIS does not knowingly use information which has been obtained through torture."

That's right, Canada is throwing out all the evidence we gave them that we got through torturing Zubaydah. Because they still pretend to have souls up there.

Meanwhile, look at all the great evidence they have left after they toss out the stuff we obtained from a guy under duress. Almost makes you wonder if it was all made up, doesn't it?

At least part of the case against the Canadian suspects was derived from the CIA-supplied statements of Zubaydah, the suspected Al Qaeda logistics chief who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and became the first high-value detainee subjected to waterboarding. A Canadian government dossier filed with the courts after Harkat's arrest, for example, stated that "a foreign agency" (an apparent reference to the CIA) "advised the Service [CSIS] in March 2003 that Abu Zubaida [sic] was able to identify the respondent [Harkat] by his physical description, including that he operated a guest house in Peshawar, Pakistan in the mid 1990s for mujahadeen travelling to Chechnya."

But last month, the CSIS filed a revised version of the dossier on Harkat as part of its case to deport the suspect. The new version deleted the detailed information from "the foreign agency" about Abu Zubaydah's identification of Harkat. Instead, in the new dossier, dated Feb. 22, 2008, the CSIS said simply that, "Based on its investigation, the Service concludes that HARKAT [sic] has associated with Abu Zubaydah [sic], one of [Osama] bin Laden's top lieutenants since the early 1990s." A footnote in the dossier attributes this information to news articles from the British press and to a counter terrorism newsletter published by a Chicago think tank.

I've done far better research for 2 page busywork papers for freshman classwork as an undergrad. This is shamefully ridiculous.

Source: Newsweek

Nitpicking
So a Rupert Murdoch propaganda outfit in Australia has been water-carrying for the Aussie government, saying that a man we tortured the crap out of was lying about it. (By 'We' I mean the Bush axis of various puppet states and what's left of America).

Apparently you can get away with it too, by nitpicking the precise details of how a person was abused.

A judge ruled Friday that claims by a former Guantanamo Bay inmate that he was tortured could not be fully believed because his testimony was inconsistent and may have been exaggerated to try to help him win a defamation lawsuit.

But Mamdouh Habib almost certainly was mistreated during his three years of detention without trial in four countries after being arrested in Pakistan in late 2001, during which he suffered extreme stress and trauma, the judge found.

...

Habib told the court he had been beaten and electrocuted by his captors while he was in Pakistan and Egypt, kept drugged and shackled, had his fingers broken, and was sexually molested.

He claimed that Australian officials were present during parts of his ordeal.

Habib said that while at Guantanamo he was regularly beaten before interrogation sessions, kept shackled and often naked, and had his cell sprayed with pepper spray.

In his ruling, McClellan said he could not accept a lot of Habib's evidence because it was inconsistent with previous statements he had made. The judge also found Habib was "prone to exaggerate," and "evasive" when pressed on details.

"I have no difficulty in accepting that the experiences which Mr. Habib suffered were traumatic" and were an "extraordinarily stressful experience," McClellan said.

"I also have little doubt that from time to time he was mistreated," he said, citing electric shocks, kicks and the use of hot and cold water as included in the likely abuse.

Oh, is that all? Water torture and electrocution? Pfft. What a whiner!

Source: Raw Story

Operation Merlin
It seems the CIA has been doing their usual bangup job overseas.

The Bush administration is prolonging the hunting season against journalists. The latest victim is James Risen, The New York Times reporter for national security and intelligence affairs. About three months ago, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena against him, ordering Risen to give evidence in court. A heavy blackout has been imposed on the affair, with the only hint being that it has to do with sensitive matters of "national security."

But conversations with several sources who are familiar with the affair indicate that Risen has been asked to testify as part of an investigation aimed at revealing who leaked apparently confidential information about the planning of secret Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad missions concerning Iran's nuclear program.

Risen included this information in his book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," which was published in 2006. In the book, he discusses a number of ideas which he says were thought up jointly by CIA and Mossad operatives to sabotage Iran's nuclear capabilities.

One of these ideas was to build electromagnetic devices, smuggling them inside Iran to sabotage electricity lines leading to the country's central nuclear sites. According to the plan, the operation was supposed to cause a series of chain reactions which would damage extremely powerful short circuits in the electrical supply that would have led to failures of the super computers of Iran's nuclear sites.

According to the book, the Mossad planners proposed that they would be responsible for getting the electromagnetic facilities into Iran with the aid of their agents in Iran. However, a series of technical problems prevented the plan's execution.

Right, right. Magic EMP bombs will be snuck into Iran!

Nevermind the physics, we can power them with pixie dust!

Naturally, it doesn't stop there.

Another of the book's important revelations, which made the administration's blood boil about James Risen, appeared in a chapter describing what was known as Operation Merlin, the code name for another CIA operation supposed to penetrate the heart of Iran's nuclear activity, collect information about it and eventually disrupt it.

Operation Merlin

The CIA counter proliferation department hired a Soviet nuclear engineer who had previously, in the 1990s, defected to the United States and revealed secrets from the Soviet Union's nuclear program. His speciality was in the field of what is called weaponization, the final stage of assembling a nuclear bomb.

The scientist was equipped with blueprints for assembling a nuclear bomb in which, without his knowledge, false drawings and information blueprints were planted about a nuclear warhead that was supposedly manufactured in the Soviet Union. The plan's details had been fabricated by CIA experts, and so while they appeared authentic, they had no engineering or technological value.

The intention was to fool the scientist and send him to make contact with the Iranians to whom he would offer his services and blueprints. The American plot was aimed at getting the Iranians to invest a great deal of effort in studying the plans and to attempt to assemble a faulty warhead. But when the time came, they would not have a nuclear bomb but rather a dud.

However, Operation Merlin, which was so creative and original, failed because of CIA bungled planning. The false information inserted into the blueprints were too obvious and too easily detected and the Russian engineer discovered them. As planned, he made contact with the Iranian delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and handed over to them, also as planned, the blueprints.

But contrary to the CIA's intention, he added a letter to the blueprints in which he pointed out the mistakes. He did not do this with ill intent or out of a desire to disrupt the operation and harm his operators. On the contrary, he did so out of a deep sense of mission and in order to satisfy his American operators. He hoped that in this way he would simply increase the Iranians' trust in him and encourage them to make contact with him for the good, of course, of his American operators.

The result was disastrous. Not only did the CIA fail to prevent the Iranians in their efforts to enhance their nuclear program, this operation may also have made it possible for them to get their hands on a plan for assembling a nuclear warhead.

So the CIA thought they could fool an ex-Soviet expert on nuclear weapon assembly by fudging the details on some paperwork and sending him overseas without his knowledge. Nevermind that the man risked his life to betray the USSR when the KGB would have moved heaven and earth to rub him out; we can't trust him.

Lolz.

Thank you CIA, for giving Iran the bomb know-how!

Source: Haaretz

Bush Torture
El Presidente sure loves him some depravity.

WASHINGTON — Despite Congressional efforts to force a change in course, President Bush further cemented his legacy of establishing strong executive powers Saturday, giving the Central Intelligence Agency broad latitude to use harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists that are prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies.

Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the agency from using such interrogation methods, which include waterboarding, a technique that suffocates a restrained prisoner and has been the subject of intense criticism at home and abroad.

So *this* is what it feels like to live in a dying empire that will resort to anything no matter how sickening in an attempt, however feeble, to hold onto power for a few more years.

Huh. No wonder the Soviets drank so much.

Source: Firedoglake (from NYTimes)

KBR Brand Poison Water
So the former subsidiary of Halliburtion, KBR, that landed all those juicy no-bid contracts, has been caught screwing over American soldiers.

Again.

WASHINGTON: Dozens of U.S. troops in Iraq fell sick at bases using "unmonitored and potentially unsafe" water supplied by the military and a contractor once owned by Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, the Pentagon's internal watchdog says.

A report obtained by The Associated Press said soldiers experienced skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea and other illnesses after using discolored, smelly water for personal hygiene and laundry at five U.S. military sites in Iraq.

The Defense Department's inspector general's report, which could be released as early as Monday, found water quality problems between March 2004 and February 2006 at three sites run by contractor KBR Inc., and between January 2004 and December 2006 at two military-operated locations.

It was impossible to link the dirty water definitively to all the illnesses, according to the report. But it said KBR's water quality "was not maintained in accordance with field water sanitary standards" and the military-run sites "were not performing all required quality control tests."

...

The inspector general's study confirmed AP reports on the contaminated water in early 2006 and provided additional details on the scope of the problem at the Iraq bases. In January that year, interviews and internal company documents disclosed the problems at Ar Ramadi and showed that KBR employees could not get the company to inform base residents.

Halliburton Co., then KBR's parent company, disputed the allegations even though they were made by its own employees and documented in company e-mails. In March 2006, the AP obtained an internal Halliburton report that, in one instance, the company missed contamination that could have caused "mass sickness or death" at Ar Ramadi.

The report said the event at Ar Ramadi could have been prevented if KBR's reverse osmosis units on the site had been assembled, instead of relying on the military's water production facilities.

...

Medical records for troops at Camp Q-West indicated 38 cases of illnesses commonly attributed to problem water. These include skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections and diarrhea. Doctors diagnosed 24 of the cases in January and February 2006, the same period when medical officials warned of a rise in bacterial infections at the base.

In addition, military medical records — tied to no particular base in Iraq — showed 26 cases of food and waterborne diseases, including hepatitis, giardiasis and typhoid fever.

Ahh, Republicans sure know how to support the troops.

I mean, do you know how hard it is to give people typhoid these days?

Source: International Herald Tribune

Aha
Here's that policy statement I was looking for at the start of this entry!

Knew I had it around here somewhere.

Source: Glumbert

Tase the World

Edison Would Be So Proud

Our Electrified World

First, a bit of light tech news out of the Consumer Electronics Show, because you wouldn't want to have to kill and torture helpless people without a soundtrack.

Today at CES, Taser International introduced the Taser MPH -- the first combination hand-held music player and Taser.

The player, which has a 1-GB capacity that can hold about 150 songs, is embedded in a holster that slips on your belt. Feel the need to zap someone and you can unholster the Taser, use the built-in laser pointer to aim, and blam -- a couple of darts carrying 50,000 volts hits your victim.

And you don't have to miss a beat.

Guffaw, guffaw, don't have to miss a beat. Hilarious.

Not like these things have any negative consequenc--what's that?

A man in his 20s died after a Coral Gables police officer used a Taser stun gun to subdue him Friday morning.

..

Miami-Dade police said Jones displayed ''aggressive and combative behavior'' so a police officer used a Taser stun gun to restrain him.

After the discharge, Jones became unresponsive, and paramedics took him to Doctor's Hospital in Coral Gables, where he was pronounced dead.

What about something with a little 'local flavor'?

After an ambulance had been dispatched to Borden's Bedford home last Nov. 6, he was transported to the jail for violating house arrest. Borden was disabled and a diabetic. While in the jail, he was observed talking to inanimate objects.

In trying to subdue Borden, as he lay handcuffed on the floor, jailers shocked him three times with a Taser, which delivers a 50,000-volt shock. Borden's pants were around his ankles at the time he was shocked.

The county coroner ruled Borden's death a heart attack brought on by electric shock, an enlarged heart and pharmaceutical drugs in his body.

Ah, the highlights of our own local Bloomington police using tasers. In that case, they took a mentally ill man with an enlarged heart out of the back of an ambulance and then tasered him to death. "Oops."

But surely that's an isolated incident, and the police don't routinely use tasers to torture or dominate people... oh geez.

But, Andrews points out, using the TASER to bring down a threatening suspect isn't always the way the gun is used.

In Glendale, Colo., Glen Leyba was on his apartment floor, thrashing violently. A police officer, hoping to control him, stunned him three times, before he died. While the coroner blamed a drug overdose, the family blames multiple, unnecessary electric shocks, Andrews reports.

Shelly Leyba, Glen's sister, says, "Glen was in a medical emergency, down on the ground, no threat."

..

On Long Island, David Glowczenski was suffering a mental breakdown, so his family called police for help.

His sister, Jean Griffin, says, "We called them for safety because he was disoriented. …And an hour later he was dead."

Glowzenski died after a confrontation in which an officer stunned him nine times with a TASER, and he wasn't on drugs or alcohol, Andrews notes. "He committed no crime; he didn't do anything wrong," Griffin says.

I'm not even going to go into the whole 'Don't Tase Me Bro' thing, where a peaceful political event was turned into a ghoulish freakshow as a student who simply asked one too many questions was himself put to the question, so to speak, by overzealous cops.

Despite the speaker he was interrogating asking him to be allowed to finish.

Sigh.

Americans have a fascination with military technology. We, as Jon Stewart said this week on A Daily Show in his GW voice, 'love the boomy-boomy'.

It's one of our greatest failings that we believe not only that we CAN solve almost any problem with the application of grotesque amounts of force, but that we're right to do so; more than justified, *called* to put the world to order at the end of a gun, the blast of a thermobaric bomb, or the barbs of a Taser.

Look folks, here's how this works. A taser sends 50,000 volts down two long fires with barbed fishooks at the end, which puncture the victim's skin and pump about 1000+ volts of that into their nervous system. Waves of excruciating pain and paralysis pass through them, and they fall to the ground.

That's if all goes according to plan. Often, the police then proceed to Taser them. Again. And again. And again.

Then, perhaps, they die. But so what if they don't?

Lately we've seen a lot of argument about these new, meticulously designed torture methods, Tasers, waterboarding, and the like, that don't kill, at least most of the time, because of precise engineering. If they live, the Conservatives ask, what's the harm?

We no longer live in a world where it's crazy to ask if you can torture someone as long as they live.

This substitution of precise bio-physical engineering for ethics is happening across the entire spectrum of US executive power. The Army is developing their so-called 'Agony Ray', a microwave gun that heats the nerves in your skin so that you feel like you're on fire. They can blast an entire crowd of people at once with this, and there's only a SLIGHT risk that it will boil your eyeballs and blind you. Which makes it ok.

The CIA has famously been deploying waterboarding, but they have many other nasty tools, often engineered at one point or another by our lovely German friends, to wrack the body and mind. The 20th Century didn't just see advances in guns and planes and cannon, it also saw a quantum leap in inquisitions.

Of course, in a move that would have pinhead Thomas Friedman giddy with glee, we're outsourcing much of these torture sessions overseas. Cuts down on overhead, what without courts, lawyers, or civil rights getting in the way of the bottom line.

The book opens with a description of the basement of the Syrian secret police's "Palestine Branch" interrogation centre. It is called "The Grave"thanks to its coffin-like cells. with barely enough room to lie down.

The torture masters here employ a device called the "German chair", an empty metal frame used to stretch a prisoner's spine to near breaking point. Moroccan jailers allegedly used a scalpel to cut the genitals off Ethiopian student Binyam Mohamed. While incarcerated in Cairo, Mamdouh Habib was placed in a cell which filled with water until it reached his neck. Egyptian Abu Omar became incontinent after he was hung upside down and given electric shocks to his genitals. Worse still, there is evidence that some prisoners in Uzbekistan were boiled alive.

In this way, the US outsourced torture and gained intelligence through extreme methods its own agents were not able to use.

So it goes, as we indulge our bloodlust without getting our hands dirty, ever looking for the neater, cleaner, faster, whizzier way to induce human suffering. Whether it's handing our victims off to third world shops to do it in our name or using high technology to hide the scars of our work, the end result is the same. We have become a nation of torturers, sophisticated and cynical, unwilling to even sully ourselves while brutalizing others.

Finally, on the Taser front, Amnesty International, noting that more than 200 people have died after being Tasered, has called on the device to be severely restricted in use, treating it more like a gun than a fist. Ideally of course, it would be recalled entirely.

Instead, the Taser people are bundling mp3 players inside, so you can listen to your favorite songs while you protect the public from themselves and their freedom.

God Bless America.

Sources: The LA Times
Miami Herald
The Bloomington Alternative
CBS News
Amnesty International
The Courier-Mail
Engagdet

Vintage Phoenix Takes My Money News

So Close To a Complete Marvel Zombies Collection

Only Black Panther #27 to go and I have every issue either in hardback or single issue. Huzzah!

Phillip Agee and the non-Kage Baker Company
So Phillip Agee, the ex-spy who wrote a tell-all book on the CIA that exposed many of its less savory assets to public scrutiny in the 70s, has died in Cuba after illness.

His legacy is an odd one. Aside from a law banning ex-spys and government types from doing just what he did, which Scooter Libby et al broke on Valerie Plame without consequence, he certainly put a wrench in some of our CIA activities in that era... which were almost universally bad, bad things.

On the other hand, he's spent much of his later years as something of a mouthpiece for the Cuban government, which is neither as bad as Americans think, nor as good as they themselves profess. Odd for a civil libertarian, at least a supposed one, to become a shill for a country without a great record on liberty.

He apparently has been making his money arranging trips for Americans to Cuba in spite of the embargo. I approve of this as well, but on the whole, the guy seems sort of skeezy.

Ah well. Life goes on, for the rest of us at least.

Full Disclosure: I had a great-uncle who was CIA and supposedly had his career ruined by Agee's book. The family still thinks this is a horrible scandal. From what they've also told me about his 'work', I can't say I agree.

Source: Raw Story

Fox Noise: Factually Challenged
So on primary day in New Hampshire (Motto: A Rifle in Every Hand, We Matter Every Four Years), Fox ran a story saying that Paul Begala of CNN had joined the Clinton campaign, based it seems on anonymous sources. Without calling him to confirm it.

Ok, not a great practice, but not a huge deal?

Turns out the story was false, so Begala contacted Fox to tell them so, tell the 'journalist' in particular that he was not joining the campaign.

They refused to retract it, saying their sources were, err, better than Begala. They then added to the story, expanding it by saying he'd been on a conference call with the Hillary camp. That he hadn't.

Fox's official response to Begala's request not to, er, lie about him?

After I told Fox it wasn't true -- and this is the surreal part -- they kept reporting it anyway. In fact, Fox's Garrett told me he'd "take it under advisement." Take it under advisement? I realize I'm generally seen as just another liberal with an opinion, but this was not a matter of opinion, it was a matter of fact. Fox now knew their story was flatly, factually wrong, and they took it "under advisement."

Fox Noise, ladies and gentlemen.

Source: The Huffington Post

Do I Own Anything Orange?
The ACLU wants Americans to wear orange to protest the sixth anniversary of our legal netherworld in Guantanamo.

I guess I'll be making a run to Target for a nice orange t-shirt.

Source: Talk Left

Hillary Hecklers
From before the primary, some hecklers who apparently think because Hillary is a woman, that she should iron their clothes.

I don't own any clothes to iron. Or an iron. But if I did, I'd get punched a lot for trying to make the roommate do it for me.

Source: Raw Story

More Ballot Wackiness
So it seems in New Hampshire, people have very short attention spans, and will tend to vote for the name at the top of the list slightly more just because it's there.

Keep in mind in the primary this list is like 6 lines long.

Until this year, they solved this problem by having different ballots at different polling places, same candidates, different order. Studying the returns at these places is what allowed some political sciency guy to determine that the top listed viable candidate gets a 3% boost from being there.

This year, they went by random letter alphabetical order; the alphabet started at Z and wrapped around. Hillary was thus the first 'viable' candidate listed.

As the article notes though, Obama didn't lose by a 3 point swing; he lost by like a 12 point swing from early polling. Many theories are being advanced, including the old 'white guilt' one, where supposedly white voters lie in the entrance/exit polls because they don't want to be seen as voting against the black guy.

Shrug.

Whatever the case, just another random oddity of elections, and people who hate to read and yet turn out to vote. Yes, I know, there's bound to be a slight psychological effect on undecideds just seeing the name first. But if you're undecided, don't go vote! Yeesh. Random voting does not actually help the process.

Source: Raw Story