Newsweek Lied, People Died

Of course you completely discredit the account of the DoD spokeperson who explains that is EXACTLY what the suspected terrorists did.

Thursday, May 12, 2005
Not Again!
I got home yesterday to find that a car-bomb exploded just couple of hours before, about 100 meter away only from our house.
I entered the house and saw the pieces of glass and decorations on the ground...
"Not again!" I told myself.
I checked on the neighbors to see if they all were alright, and then went to the explosion site, in front of one of the most poplar markets in the area, one Iraqi woman died, few injured and many cars were burned, and heaps of broken glass shrapnel on the ground around the site.
"terrorists "....
I told myself...
"Criminal terrorists".
before the war, I don't remember having terrorists putting car-bombs in front of local markets.
before the occupation, I don't even remember that I knew the term car-bomb.
Since last year, a rate of 50-60 attacks per day against the occupation were recorded, and among these 50-60 attacks, a very small minority causes any loses in lives or damages to properties, but chose any day, like the day of this car-bomb, and you will find the occupation forces and the government reporting to the media almost only the attacks that hurt civilians or properties, just as a part of the government's/occupation's efforts to discredit resistance, as if resistance is responsible for all terrorism that is taking place in Iraq.
One day terrorism will go away, and by terrorism I mean the occupation, and all it's tails, and the rest of the terrorists right after.
resistance? Cool
terrorism? NOT cool!
Khalid*
posted by khalid jarrar at 7:36 AM 26 comments

Forget it, Chic. I want nothing to do with you.

Tico

Quote:

Of course you completely discredit the account of the DoD spokeperson who explains that is EXACTLY what the suspected terrorists did.

Are these the same DoD spokespeople who told the Jessica Lynch lies?

Are these the same DoD spokespeople who lied about Pat Tillman?

Are these the same DoD spokespeople who claimed that no torture was going on in US prisons?

et cetera....

FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran 53 minutes ago



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.

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The release of the declassified document came the week after the Bush administration denounced as wrong a May 9 Newsweek article that stated U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down a toilet to try to make detainees talk.

The magazine retracted the article, which had triggered protests in Afghanistan in which 16 people died.

The newly released document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made days earlier by a detainee, whose name was redacted, in two interviews with an FBI special agent, whose name also was withheld, at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.

The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and a series of other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

"Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet," the FBI agent wrote.

"The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the FBI agent wrote.

The Pentagon stated last week it had received "no credible and specific allegations" that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had put a Koran in the toilet.

The documents indicated that detainees were making allegations that they had been abused and that the Muslim holy book had been mishandled as early as April 2002, about three months after the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo.

In other documents, FBI agents stated that Guantanamo detainees also accused U.S. personnel of kicking the Koran and throwing it to the floor, and described beatings by guards. But one document cited a detainee who accused a guard of dropping a Koran, prompting an "uprising" by prisoners, when it was the prisoner himself who dropped it.

The Pentagon had no immediate comment on the documents.

The United States currently holds about 520 detainees at Guantanamo, a high-security prison it opened in January 2002 for non-U.S. citizens caught in the U.S. war on terrorism.

Former detainees and a lawyer for current prisoners previously have stated that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had placed the Koran in a toilet, but the Pentagon last week said it did not view those allegations as credible.

'MORE CREDIBLE'

"Unfortunately, one thing we've learned over the last couple of years is that detainee statements about their treatment at Guantanamo and other detention centers sometimes have turned out to be more credible than U.S. government statements," said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer.

Jaffer said the latest documents show the U.S. government had heard detainees complain as early as 2002 about desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, including at least one mentioning it had been placed in a toilet.

In another document, written in April 2003, an FBI agent related a detainee's account of an incident involving a female U.S. interrogator.

"While the guards held him, she removed her blouse, embraced the detainee from behind and put her hand on his genitals. The interrogator was on her menstrual period and she wiped blood from her body on his face and head," the memo stated.

A similar incident was described in a recent book written by a former Guantanamo interrogator.

The U.S. military launched an inquiry after the Newsweek article was published into whether Guantanamo personnel placed the Koran in a toilet, but the review was limited to searching through official day-to-day log entries.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week said Newsweek "got the facts wrong." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman last week called the article "demonstrably false."

Lol - probably, by the time they have flown aircraft into buildings, it is reasonable to consider them as actual, rather than suspected, terrorists.

Thing is - people lie.

If you, Tico, actually believe that DoD spokespeople would not sometimes lie if they believed it served America's (or the military's) cause, I think you to be displaying concerning signs of some sort of sudden mental decay.

Of course some suspected terrorists are terrorists, and will lie if they think it serves their cause.

However, to assume a DoD spokesperson is necessarily telling the truth, and all suspected terrorists in American custody are always liars, buggers belief.

Especially when American investigation has come up with rather a lot of times when their complaints about severe abuse at American hands seem to be true - you know, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan prisons....

Why take up such either/or positions?

Some allegations will be lies - some have proven to be very much the truth.

Some denials will be the truth - some will be white-wash - surely we can agree on that?

Yeah, I understand your point. You believe the people being held in Gitmo and other places by the US are all, ALL, guilty of the crimes they are suspected of being guilty of. They are guilty of being in league with the people who have done the things you describe, even though many of those events have little or nothing to do with each other; every one of them has to be guilty, in your mind, of one of them. Therefore nothing they say has any truth to it. You have tried and convicted these men in your mind.

This is convienent for you because it robs you of the responsiblity of actually thinking of them as human beings, and innocent ones. If that is true than maybe they are telling the truth. You know that a certain number of them are innocent, statistically; are they all liars as well?

Do you believe the gov't infallable?

Even after all the apparent mistakes, you don't believe this one as well?

I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere or here before...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20050525/ts_nm/security_guantanamo_koran_dc
...

Cycloptichorn

tico

Question for you this time: have the DoD lied to the Tillman family and to America regarding their son?

blatham wrote:

tico

Question for you this time: have the DoD lied to the Tillman family and to America regarding their son?

From the account I've heard, they seem to think so.

Tillman's family rips accounts by Army
Folks fear truth will never come

Josh White
Washington Post
May. 23, 2005 12:00 AM

Pat Tillman's family is lashing out at the Army, saying that the military investigations into Tillman's friendly-fire death in Afghanistan last year were a sham and that Army efforts to cover up the truth have made it harder for them to deal with their loss.

More than a year after their son was shot several times by fellow Army Rangers on a hillside near the Pakistani border, Tillman's mother and father said in interviews that they think the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country. They say the Army's "lies" about what happened have made them suspicious, and they are certain they will never get the full story.

"Pat had high ideals about the country; that's why he did what he did," Mary Tillman said in her first lengthy interview since her son's death. "The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

Tillman, a popular player for the Arizona Cardinals, gave up stardom in the National Football League after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to join the Army Rangers with his brother. After a tour in Iraq, their unit was sent to Afghanistan in spring 2004, where they were to hunt for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Shortly after arriving, Tillman was killed in a barrage of gunfire from his own men, mistaken for the enemy as he got into position to defend them.

The Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman's family and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill, barking orders. After a public memorial service, at which Tillman received the Silver Star, the Army told Tillman's family what had really happened, that he had been killed by his own men.

In separate interviews in their hometown of San Jose and by telephone, Tillman's parents, who are divorced, spoke about their ordeal with the Army with simmering frustration and anger. Several military investigations have offered differing accounts of Tillman's death.

The latest investigation, written about by the Washington Post earlier this month, showed that the soldiers in Afghanistan knew almost immediately that they had killed Tillman by mistake in what they believed was a firefight with enemies. The investigation also revealed soldiers later burned Tillman's uniform and body armor.

That information was slow to make it back to the United States, the report said, and Army officials here were unaware that his death on April 22, 2004, was fratricide when they notified the family that Tillman had been shot.

Over the next 10 days, however, Army officials, including the theater commander, Army Gen. John Abizaid, were told of the reports that Tillman had been killed by his own men, the investigation said. The Army waited until an investigation was finished before telling the family, which was weeks after a nationally televised memorial service that honored Tillman on May 3, 2004.

Patrick Tillman Sr., a San Jose lawyer, said he is furious about what he found in the volumes of witness statements and investigative documents the Army has given to the family. He decried what he calls a "botched homicide investigation" and blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting "outright lies" to the family and to the public.

"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this," Patrick said. "They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

Army spokesmen maintain the Army has done everything it can to keep the family informed.

Mary Tillman keeps her son's wedding album in the living room of the house where he grew up, and his Arizona State University football jersey, still dirty from the 1997 Rose Bowl game, hangs in a nearby closet. With each new version of events, her mind swirls with new theories about what really happened and why.

"It makes you feel like you're losing your mind in a way," she said. "You imagine things. When you don't know the truth, certain details can be blown out of proportion. The truth may be painful, but it's the truth. You start to contrive all these scenarios that could have taken place because they just kept lying. If you feel you're being lied to, you can never put it to rest."

Patrick said he believes he will never get the truth, and he said he is resigned to that. But he wants everyone in the chain of command, from Tillman's direct supervisors to the one-star general who conducted the latest investigation, to face discipline for "dishonorable acts."

"Maybe lying's not a big deal anymore," he said. "Pat's dead, and this isn't going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has."

Mary says the government used her son for weeks after his death, perpetuating an untrue story to capitalize on his altruism, just as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was erupting publicly. She said she was particularly offended when President Bush offered a taped memorial message to Tillman at a Cardinals football game shortly before the presidential election last fall.

blatham wrote:

tico

Question for you this time: have the DoD lied to the Tillman family and to America regarding their son?

From the account I've heard, they seem to think so.

FBI documents show repeated detainee complaints over Koran mistreatment

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Detainees interviewed by FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba complained repeatedly that military guards and interrogators mistreated the Koran, with one alleging that the Muslim holy book had been flushed in a toilet, documents show.

The documents -- FBI summaries of interviews with detainees at the military-run prison in 2002 and 2003 -- show that the treatment of the Koran was a key point of contention between detainees and their guards, one that prompted hunger strikes and threats of mass suicide.

Most complaints dealt with the handling of the Koran by guards or its being taken away from detainees as a form of punishment. In some cases, the detainees admitted to not having witnessed the alleged mistreatment themselves.

But detainees also alleged that the Koran had been thrown or kicked by guards, and one said it had been flushed in a toilet, according to the documents.

In a summary dated August 1, 2002, a detainee told his FBI interviewer that he personally had nothing against the United States but that the guards at the detention facility "do not treat him well.

"Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet. The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the summary said.

Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, said investigators conducting a "commanders inquiry" into a Newsweek report of a Koran being flushed down a toilet recently found a log entry from August 2002 that recorded a similar allegation by the same detainee.

Brigadier General Jay Hood, the military commander in Guantanamo, questioned the detainee who had made the allegation on around May 14, he said.

"Apparently the inmate was very cooperative and would not reassert this particular allegation," DiRita told reporters.

He said other allegations of mistreatment of the Koran were looked into at the time by the commander of the guards, but he insisted "they just weren't credible on their face" because they ran counter to the policies in place at the prison.

Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander in Guantanamo at the time, said there was a small group of hard-core detainees who knew that allegations of the Koran being mistreated would agitate other detainees, DiRita said.

"They were very aware that this was a sensitive issue, and the practice was to be sensitive about it," he said.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan called Wednesday for a congressional investigation into the reports of desecrations of the Koran.

"As Muslims, we say enough is enough," the influential African American leader said from the pulpit of his south Chicago mosque.

Farrakhan said a delegation of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders should participate in the investigation.

Farrakhan also demanded that the US military either charge and try the detainees at Guantanamo Bay or release them to their families.

The latest FBI documents were released in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which posted them on its website. The names and other information were blacked out by censors.

The interview summaries contain a litany of other allegations by detainees -- that they were beaten by guards, sexually molested by female interrogators, shown pornographic images or had their heads and beards shaved as punishment. The theme that the detainees' religion or culture was under assault by guards runs through many of the summaries.

In an FBI interview on March 6, 2004, a detainee charged that military police "have been mistreating the detainees by pushing them around and throwing their waste bucket to them in the cell, sometimes with waste still in the bucket, and kicking the Koran."

A summary dated March 11, 2004 said that "some unknown detainees are not talking in retaliation to an incident where a guard kicked the Koran."

Another on July 30, 2002 said an uprising at the prison earlier that month started when a detainee claimed a guard had dropped a Koran.

"In actuality, the detainee dropped the Koran and then blamed the guard. Many other detainees reacted to this claim, and this initiated the uprising," the summary said.

One detainee "stated he had heard a detainee had been severely beaten by a guard and had died. (The detainee said) he heard the altercation between the detainee and the guards began when the guards disrespected the Koran," according to a summary dated January 21, 2003.

In a February 4, 2003 summary, another detainee was reported to have commented that younger guards were a source of the problem. "They often disgrace the Koran by throwing it on the cell floor and frequently use profanity which many of the detainees find extremely offensive," it said.

The treatment of the Koran at Guantanamo came under scrutiny after four days of riots in Afghanistan earlier this month which claimed the lives of at least 14 people.

Pentagon officials angrily blamed Newsweek for triggering the riots with what they said was a "demonstrably false" report that investigators had found that interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran in a toilet to rattle Muslim prisoners.

Newsweek later retracted the story after its main source, an unnammed senior US official, backed away from it.