US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

Gelisgesti wrote:

Quote:

Good Intentions Gone Bad
NEWSWEEK's Baghdad bureau chief, departing after two years of war and American occupation, has a few final thoughts.
Hard roads: Marines search for mines and IEDs on a remote desert track near the Syrian border with Iraq
Scott Nelson / WPN for Newsweek
Hard roads: Marines search for mines and IEDs on a remote desert track near the Syrian border with Iraq

By Rod Nordland
Newsweek

Newsweek.............isn't that the organization what just apologized for telling lies?????

The apology was for not double sourcing, not for telling lies ..... as you just did.

Quote:

"Pentagon admits to Koran abuse

Guantanamo prisoner takes back toilet claim

May 27, 2005

BY ROBERT BURNS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON ---- U.S. officials have substantiated five cases in which military guards or interrogators mishandled the Koran of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Investigators, however, found "no credible evidence" to confirm a prisoner's report that a holy book was flushed in a toilet, the prison's commander said Thursday.

At a Pentagon news conference, Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, who commands the detention center in Cuba, said a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Koran in the toilet has told Hood's investigators that he never witnessed any form of Koran desecration.

The unidentified prisoner, reinterviewed at Guantanamo on May 14, said he had heard talk of guards mishandling religious articles but did not witness any such acts, Hood said.

The prisoner also stated that he personally had not been mistreated but that he heard fellow inmates talk of being beaten or otherwise mistreated.

Hood would not offer details about the five substantiated incidents of mishandling the Koran.

Allegations of Koran abuse have stirred worldwide controversy. After Newsweek magazine reported earlier this month that U.S. officials had confirmed a Koran was flushed in a toilet, deadly demonstrations were held in Afghanistan, although it is not clear what role that story played in sparking the violence. Newsweek later retracted its report.

In an indication of the Pentagon's eagerness to discredit the allegation, Hood briefed reporters on the interim findings of the investigation. Typically, the Pentagon withholds comments on an official investigation until it's completed. Hood did not say when the inquiry would be done.

"

Source

Specter to Push for Foreign Detainee Rules

By JESSE J. HOLLAND
The Associated Press
Saturday, June 4, 2005; 4:34 PM



WASHINGTON -- The continuing uproar over U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib has a top Senate Republican looking at the need to clarify in law the rights of foreign detainees.

On the heels of Amnesty International calling the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our time," Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., will hold hearings this month on the treatment of foreign terrorism suspects there.

Earlier this week Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described Amnesty's characterization as "reprehensible."

Late Friday, the Pentagon for the first time confirmed several incidents in which the Quran had been mishandled at Guantanamo Bay prison. The incidents included a soldier deliberately kicking the Muslim holy book, an interrogator stepping on a Quran, and a guard urinating near an air vent splashing urine on a detainee and his Quran.

The Pentagon is working on new guidelines for handling people captured during wartime, including an explicit ban on inhumane treatment. The 142-page draft document is being written by the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is not intended to set policy but rather to provide the military with guidance to implement detainee policies set by civilian authorities.

Specter, according to an aide, is in the preliminary stages of drafting a bill to establish procedures for detentions and exploring the possibility of making the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court the venue for challenging them.

Amnesty International has called on the United States to close its Guantanamo prison, where about 540 men are being held on suspicion they have links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network.

While the human rights watchdog worries about Congress putting into law "enemy combatant" status, which it says is a category of prisoner not sanctioned by international and humanitarian treaties, it applauded Specter for looking into the issue.

"Any kind of sunshine would be a good antiseptic for this situation," said Jumana Musa, advocacy director for human rights and international justice at Washington-based Amnesty International USA.

Specter's hearing will focus on the detention of enemy combatants at both Guantanamo and in the United States, and whether trying them before military tribunals provides them adequate due process, the senator's aide said.

Witnesses from the Justice Department and Defense Department are expected to be called to testify, the aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the hearing hasn't been announced.

The Bush administration created the detainee category of "enemy combatant" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and applied it to members or associates of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The administration argues that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to suspected members of al-Qaida _ a position spelled out in a January 2002 memo to President Bush from then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who is now attorney general.

The Guantanamo operation, which began in January 2002 with the arrival of prisoners captured in Afghanistan, has been under widespread criticism. So far, only four detainees there have been charged with a crime, and their military trials have been stalled because of appeals in U.S. courts.

The problems at Guantanamo were compounded by the April 2004 revelations about mistreatment of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. Photographs taken by U.S. military personnel and published around the world depicted scenes of sexual humiliation and physical abuse.

So far, only two U.S. citizens have been designated as enemy combatants.

Jose Padilla, a former gang member who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., has been held since 2002 without being charged.

Louisiana native Yaser Hamdi was released in October after the Justice Department said he no longer posed a threat to the United States and no longer had any intelligence value. Hamdi, who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2001, gave up his American citizenship and returned to his family in Saudi Arabia as conditions of his release.

Mario Lamo Jiménez: Botero Immortalizes Bush
"Dante with a Brush
Botero Immortalizes Bush

By MARIO LAMO JIMÉNEZ

Every presidency leaves its marks on history. For George W. Bush, these marks now include an immortalization by one of the most celebrated painters in the world, Fernando Botero -- but the memories immortalized may not be the ones the president wants remembered.

Highlighting the human rights abuses and acts of torture committed under Bush, an exhibition of 50 paintings by Botero will open June 16th at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. The exhibit focuses on the horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison, and marks a new theme for Botero's work, including his famous "gordos", which has previously been shown in museums and galleries from New York to Paris.

Colombia's "Diners Magazine", in a worldwide exclusive, recently reproduced samples of Botero's latest exhibit . Therein, readers can experience, in Botero's inimitable style, the images that have made up one of the most shameful, cruel, and inhuman episodes of Bush's regime, and of United States military history: the base humiliation and torture of countless Iraqis, guilty of nothing more than occupying the wrong space at the wrong time. These images will doubtless join the collective human psyche, adding another layer to the strata of man's inhumanity to man, joining previous chapters, from the Spanish Inquisition to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Through the smoke and mirrors of the neo-conservative ideology, what was once regarded by some as "the foremost democracy on earth" has been made into the foremost representation of torture in our time, and been captured by Botero's brushes, exemplifying on canvas how quickly the thin layers of civilization can be peeled away to reveal emotions and motives so recently believed to have no place in our modern world.

But Botero is not the first world-class artist to denounce the injustices of his time by way of brush-strokes. Francisco JosÈ de Goya depicted Napoleonic massacres and Inquisitorial horrors of the 19th century, and Pablo Picasso showed the world the horrors of war crimes in Guernica, through his work by the same name denouncing Francisco Franco's nod to the Nazis, who bombed it to ruins in 1937.

Following this honorable tradition of artists compelled to keep the unsavory aspects of their era from fading out of mind, Botero has proven that, from Medellin to Baghdad, he is quite capable of reflecting the full range of human nature, from the most noble to the most abominable. Ironically, it was Bush himself who once stated "The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it." But for you, the reader, there's good news: you won't have to wait 50 years to see the history of this administration. Should you show up on a certain date in June, at a particular art exhibit in Rome, you'll be able to see its history painted in full color, with its acts exposed for all the world to judge. It has been painted on history's wall of shame, so that we may never forget that those who would call themselves our benefactors can sometimes be the cruelest of all.

Mario Lamo Jiménez is a founding member of the Colombian Alliance of Writers and Journalists and coeditor of its publication "La Hojarasca". He can be reached at [email protected].

"
http://www.counterpunch.org/lamo06042005.html

That's no breed I've ever seen and reflects no image I've seen come out of Abu Ghraib. Perhaps you can help me out here.

It seems to me this artist has a fantasy and he is using his art to bring ot to the surface. He can probably find a support group for that particular Fetish.

... The thread has moved on from this, but I feel the need to address this. You can find all the same stats at the CIA world factbook, where all of the population figures are marked *estimate*. Clear as day. Here's a handy reference. http://library.louisville.edu/government/goodsources/factbook.html

Then we agree that sometimes art for the sake of drama is sometimes a bad idea.

In my opinion, Botero has done just that, had a bad idea.