Thumbs up.

Haaretz:

Eight Palestinians were killed and dozens were wounded Wednesday afternoon when Israel Defense Forces helicopter gunships and tanks fired missiles and shells at a crowd of protestors in Rafah refugee camp, in the southern Gaza Strip.

The IDF said in a statement that it had not targeted the crowd; military sources one of the tank shells either passed through a nearby abandoned building or went off course and hit the demonstrators.

Palestinian witnesses said most of those killed were school children, The witnesses also said that four missiles were fired from the air.

At least sixty people, including many women and children, were wounded in the incident, witnesses said. The incident brings the day's death toll in the area to 13.

This comes after a few days of home demolitions and of course strong denounciation by the US here

House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Texas) told the AIPAC conference on Monday that he would urge passage of a House resolution saying there is no right of return for Palestinians "and that Israel will not retreat behind
the 1967 borders."

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) also said he would spearhead a resolution.

Bush said: "Finally, AIPAC elected a president I can kiss"

Rice, speaking in Berlin after a meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, said the United States had told Israel "that some of their actions don't create the best atmosphere."

For the last few days Israel has been demolishing homes in Rafah in the process killing dozens and leaving thousands homeless. Amnesty International reported that "More than 10% of Gaza's agricultural land has been destroyed in the past three and a half years" and destroyed "More than 3,000 homes"

Amira Hass: "Neither the armed men nor the weapons smuggled through the tunnels are a strategic threat to Israel. Rarely do they manage to strike successfully at the soldiers and cause real pain. Usually, they are merely a nuisance for the military patrols that routinely fire into Rafah, whether they have been fired on or not. But the danger posed by the armed men and the tunnels is so inflated that the statistics of destruction and death sown by Israel in Rafah go largely ignored - in Israel. In Rafah, on the other hand, it feeds the conclusion reached the other day by a religious lawyer. 'Everyone in Israel - opposition, left, Labor - bears responsibility for what their government is doing here.'"

Suprisingly Newsweek reports on the policies involved in bringing freedom and the american way to the evildoers of Afghanistan/Iraq:

"The White House was undeterred. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had 'requested that you reconsider that decision.' Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. 'As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,' Gonzales wrote to Bush. 'The nature of the new war places a �high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.' Gonzales concluded in stark terms: 'In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.'"

Sy Hersh: "The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror."

BBC: "An Islamic militant website has shown a video apparently showing the beheading of an American in Iraq.
The video showed five men in headscarves and ski masks cutting off the man's head with a knife.
Moments earlier the victim, bound and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, said he was an American from Philadelphia.
The group, thought to be linked to al-Qaeda, said it was carrying out the killing in retaliation for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers."

The brutality continues.

Another star is O'Reilly Factor in this case interviewing Sy Hersh and displaying his skills as a journalist

O'REILLY: Continuing now with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh from Washington, who has the cover story in 'The New Yorker' magazine about the Iraq torture situation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I see unfolding here from what you told me and then General Karpinski told me is that there is a tension between the interrogators who wanted to find out by you know, using means that are dubious information, and the military police who basically who objected to some of these techniques.
But you can understand that like Vietnam, you have people shooting at Americans, blowing them up, and then running into mosques and hiding behind children and all of that. So how far do we go to get the information that protects our own troops?
That I guess is the essential question that led to this scandal, correct?
HERSH: Yes, but one of the things, the problem you have, of course you have to go if you're dealing with hardened Al Qaeda. There's not much mercy. And none of us would have much mercy.
The problem here is they were picking on people that they hadn't made any differentiation on. They didn't know. And you know, and the kind of stuff that was going on, Mr. O'Reilly, when you take an Arab man and you make him walk naked in front of other men, this is the greatest shame they can have. And then you have them simulate homosexual activities. You have young women and young men, the women in particular, videotaping and photographing them doing this. This is actually a form of torture and coercion.
O'REILLY: No, there's no question about it. And there's no question. There's no justification for it. But how do you wind up in a prison if you're just innocent and didn't do anything? See, our commanders and ourembedded reporters tell me that they're way too busy to be rounding up guys in the marketplace and throwing them into prison.
So I'm going to dispute your contention that we had a lot of people in there with just no rap sheets at all, who were just picked up for no reason at all. The people who were in the prison were suspected of being either Al Qaeda or terrorists who were killing Americans and knew something about it.
HERSH: The problem is that it isn't my contention. It's the contention of Maj. Gen. Taguba, who was appointed by General Sanchez to do the investigation.
It's his contention, in his report, that more than 60 percent of the people in that prison, detainees, civilians, had nothing to do with the war effort.
O'REILLY: How did they get there then? Because I...
HERSH: Because how do they get into the prison?
I'll tell you how they get there. You bust the guy that doesn't have anything to do. You humiliate him. You break him down. You interrogate him. He gives up the name of you want to know who is an insurgent, who is Al Qaeda? He gives up any name he knows.
O'REILLY: Do you really believe that U.S. forces were sweeping Baghdad, and the others -- you're just picking people up off the street for no reason?
HERSH: Well, inevitably you get people in a sweep that have nothing to with what you're looking for.
O'REILLY: All right, now that's true. But to the number of...
HERSH: Of course.
O'REILLY: ...50 percent, I'm not buying that. I mean, I could be wrong. But I'm going on the basis of our reporters in the field. And I'm asking them, have you ever seen any of these -- no. These guys are way to busy. They got stuff to do all day long. They're not sweeping people up.
HERSH: We're talking about last fall, when things weren't as acute as they are now, certainly it's a terrible situation right now. And everybody -- nobody is sweeping anything. They're in forced protection.
O'REILLY: Right.
HERSH: But last fall, things were much calmer. People were being swept. This did happen.
O'REILLY: All right.

Senator Inhofe gets the prize for trying hard to get to the bottom of US crimes:

SEN. INHOFE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I -- well, first of all, I regret I wasn't here on Friday. I was unable to be here. But maybe it's better that I wasn't, because as I watched the -- this outrage, this outrage everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners, I was, I have to say -- and I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment. The idea that these prisoners -- you know, they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cell block 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents...
SEN. INHOFE: Mr. Chairman, I also am -- and have to say, when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners, that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisoners. When he was in charge they would take electric drills and drill holes through hands, they would cut their tongues out, they would cut their ears off. We've seen accounts of lowering their bodies into vats of acid. All these things were taking place. This was the type of treatment that they had...
SEN. INHOFE: I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons, looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heroes, are fighting and dying. And I just don't think we can take seven -- seven bad people.

Army Times: "Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.
Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.
But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.
There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.
But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.
The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes. "

Pretty incredible considering the source.

Got this from Empire Notes: "Pentagon. Time Magazine has obtained an email that warns Pentagon employees about the Taguba report:

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED; DO NOT GO TO FOX NEWS TO READ OR OBTAIN A COPY.

"

Magnificent. Read the actual report at F*X as a pdf document.

Amnesty International: "Shortly after the transfers of prisoners to Guantanamo Bay had begun, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld was asked whether ''hooding.., shaving, chaining, perhaps even tranquillizing some of these people is violating their civil rights''. He replied: ''It simply isn't.... all one has to do is look at television any day of the week, and you can see that when prisoners are being moved between locations, they're frequently restrained in some way with handcuffs or some sort of restraints''.(117) On 15 January 2002, reacting to criticisms of the treatment of the detainees, he said: ''They are being treated vastly better than they treated anybody else over the last several years... It's not going to be a country club, but it will be humane''.(118) On 8 February 2002, he said: ''Notwithstanding the isolated pockets of international hyperventilation, we do not treat detainees in any manner other than a manner that is humane.''(119) A few days later, President Bush said that the Guantanamo detainees were being treated ''incredibly humanely''. The President added that the USA ''is mindful of the need to respect people's rights.''(120)"

Guardian: "Mr Rumsfeld did not apologise for the Red Cross reports of unarmed Iraqi prisoners being shot to death by military personnel in watchtowers. He said nothing of the 'interrogation techniques' developed by US intelligence agencies and taught to security services the world over, including here. He expressed no regret for employing private contractors to question people who were accused of no crime, then hiding their sadistic behaviour from public scrutiny. He never mentioned how sorry he might be for turning over captives to other governments using even cruder torture methods. He showed no contrition for continuing to hide hundreds of people in Guant�namo Bay away from the law. Such leaders have placed themselves outside the bounds of international law, their own code of justice and their much-admired constitution. In doing so, they have also removed the protection of law from those who follow their orders. "

A reminder that torture is not quite as un-american as some would have us believe

Kubarkin: 'Faced with a FOIA lawsuit, the Central Intelligence Agency recently released an interrogation manual to the Baltimore Sun that details brutal methods of extracting information from resistant sources. The "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual does more than simply outline various psychological and physical torture tactics: it demonstrates a real-world application of the CIA's mind control research and offers clues on the agency's role in human rights abuses around the world. This report examines the historical context of the interrogation manual, the MKULTRA connection, and the manual itself, presented here verbatim for the first time online.'

Slightly newer is "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual' (1983)". Some interesting stuff here about it and its use in Honduras where Negropontre, our new ambassador to Iraq served.

The report itself (and more) is here, and a page with corrections.

Sy Hersh: 'No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them “to take greater risks.” '

washingtonpost.com: "Americans from President Bush down have been shocked by reports of abuse of detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and many would agree with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that such treatment is 'un-American.' But U.S. human rights activists say there is much evidence that similar abuse regularly occurs in our own prisons, without drawing nearly as much public outrage. "

News: "If anything, the story of these photographs is the story of the West's inability to believe the darkness at the heart of the occupation until it was staring them in the face. The Iraqis already knew, because most have a relative, a friend or an acquaintance who has been detained by the occupation forces at some time and has seen at first hand what goes on inside the prisons and detention centres.
...
Reports that the pictures have lost the US support among Iraqis are wide of the mark: there was no support left after the débâcle of their heavy-handed onslaught on Fallujah. But these pictures have heaped fuel on the fire - a fact not lost on the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who took advantage of the media attention following a US attack on his Mehdi Army to attack President George Bush over Abu Ghraib in his Friday sermon."

washingtonpost.com: A Sorry State: "To the rest of the world Bush's apologies are mere exercises in damage control. The same president who spoke of leading God's crusade against Evil and who basked in the self-congratulatory aura of his invincible warriors will have difficulty convincing the rest of humanity that he really cares about a few brutalized Arabs.
Given the president's simultaneous and reiterated insistence that neither he nor his staff have done anything wrong and that there is nothing to change in his policies or goals, who will take seriously such an apology, extracted in extremis? Like confessions obtained under torture, it is worthless. As recent events have shown, America under Bush can still debase and humiliate its enemies. But it has lost the respect of its friends -- and it is fast losing respect for itself. Now that is something to feel sorry about."

BBC: "One British source even said: 'I still don't despair that we can create a society which is better than that of Saddam Hussein' - a stunningly unambitious target compared to what was envisaged. "

Rumsfeld: "We're functioning with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise."

Not concerned with crimes but with the distribution of the images...
By the way, these guys all talk of this torture, murder, abuse as "wrongdoing". Is this different to "evildoing"?

Guardian On the US treatment of prisoners: "'Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people,' said President Bush plaintively. Indeed, but it is in the nature of the circumstances that Bush has authorised for holding 10,000 prisoners without trial, many in unknown, secret prisons. 'That's not the way we do things in America,' he says. Indeed, it is only the way America does things when it goes abroad; the American constitution protects its own citizens. The self-blinding American myth is that a 'freedom-loving nation' built on the ideals of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could never do such things. "

Since the US is the greatest, most advanced place on earth I was curious to see how it compares to Greece on certain statistics

Infant mortality rate:
CIA: US
total: 6.75 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 6.02 deaths/1,000 live births (2003 est.)
male: 7.46 deaths/1,000 live births
CIA: Greece
total: 6.12 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 5.57 deaths/1,000 live births (2003 est.)
male: 6.64 deaths/1,000 live births

Life expectancy at birth:
CIA: US
total population: 77.14 years
female: 80.05 years (2003 est.)
male: 74.37 years
CIA: Greece
total population: 78.89 years
female: 81.65 years (2003 est.)
male: 76.32 years

Literacy:
CIA: US
total population: 97%
female: 97% (1979 est.)
male: 97%
CIA: Greece
total population: 97.5%
total population: 97.5%
female: 96.5% (2003 est.)
male: 98.6%

GENERAL ASSEMBLY ADOPTS REVISED RESOLUTION ON QUESTION OF PALESTINE: "The General Assembly affirmed this afternoon that the status of the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, remained one of military occupation, as it adopted a revised resolution on the question of Palestine.

By a recorded vote of 140 in favour to 6 against (Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, United States), with 11 abstentions, the Assembly also affirmed that the Palestinian people had the right to self-determination and to sovereignty over their territory, and that Israel had only the duties and obligations of an occupying Power. (See Annex.)"

Just out of curiosity I wanted to see what these nations were so I pulled out the trusty CIA factbook.

Marshall Islands: "After almost four decades under US administration as the easternmost part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the Marshall Islands attained independence in 1986 under a Compact of Free Association. Compensation claims continue as a result of US nuclear testing on some of the atolls between 1947 and 1962. The Marshall Islands have been home to the US Army Base Kwajalein (USAKA) since 1964."

Micronesia, Federated States of: "In 1979 the Federated States of Micronesia, a UN Trust Territory under US administration, adopted a constitution. In 1986 independence was attained under a Compact of Free Association with the US. Present concerns include large-scale unemployment, overfishing, and overdependence on US aid."

Nauru: "Nauru's phosphate deposits began to be mined early in the 20th century by a German-British consortium; the island was occupied by Australian forces in World War I. Nauru achieved independence in 1968 and joined the UN in 1999. Nauru is the world's smallest independent republic."

Palau: "After three decades as part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific under US administration, this westernmost cluster of the Caroline Islands opted for independence in 1978 rather than join the Federated States of Micronesia. A Compact of Free Association with the US was approved in 1986, but not ratified until 1993. It entered into force the following year, when the islands gained independence. "

Azmi Bishara: The dynamic of occupation: "I find it absurd that US officers grumble about how the resistance fighters mingle with civilians so that occupation forces cannot distinguish between the two. Well, these combatants are actually civilians under arms. What does the US army expect them to do, set up a camp outside Falluja? The combatants mix with the civilian population because they are civilians, because they live in civilian homes. The occupation comes without civilians because it is far removed from home, because its soldiers are not sleeping in their own homes -- they only bomb the homes of others. The aerial bombardment of a civilian house leaves mutilated bodies. The media has just carried scenes of the Israeli bombardment and its effect on the bodies of Al- Rantisi and his companions. What was that if not mutilation?"

washingtonpost.com: "But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable. "

President Bush Meets with Al Arabiya Television on Wednesday: "We will deal with his militias, as will the Iraqi forces deal with these militias. Militias are people who are willing to kill, intimidate and try to take matters into their own hands, which is not the way democracy functions. Free societies do not allow thugs to roam streets and hold people hostage to their whims. The Iraqis will deal with Mr. Sadr. "

Article II of the US bill of rights says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So, is he going to get rid of that, or more likely, "democracy"? After all this article is probably the most important one to him...

washingtonpost.com: The pictures keep on coming in.

A Wretched New Picture Of America (washingtonpost.com): "Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us."

Guardian: "I've seen a photo of a young American soldier with two Iraqi boys. There is no nakedness or torture, but it is no less nasty for that. The boys are holding a cardboard sign. They and the soldier are smiling and doing a thumbs up. He is pointing at the cardboard sign, on which he's written: 'Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad. then he knocked up my sister!' Imagine the scene: Lance Corporal Boudreaux, a soldier on a liberating, civilising mission, asks the natives to pose for a 'memento'. He gives them the sign to hold. What lie did he tell them about its message? 'Iraq is liberated', or 'Mission accomplished'? And who, in this scene, is the more civilised?"

Here is the purported picture.

Of course this could just be a Photoshop creation. Snopes has no definitive answer.

Guardian: 'Among the most stunning decisions taken is the handover of the interrogation of prisoners of war to private firms. Employees from the firms Caci and Titan now reportedly fill such roles as interrogators and translators...

This leaves a vacuum. Phillip Carter, a former US army officer now at UCLA Law School, notes: "Legally speaking, they [military contractors] fall into the same grey area as the unlawful combatants detained at Guantánamo Bay."'

Guardian: 'NAJAF, Iraq (AP) - Dhia al-Shweiri spent several stints in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, twice under Saddam Hussein's rule and once under American. He prefers Saddam's torture to the humiliation of being stripped naked by his American guards, he said Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press.'

But remember Bush told us they hate us because they hate freedom and that people are no longer disappearing into political prisons, torture chambers, and mass graves so why worry?

Gideon Levy: 'When will the soldiers at long last start talking? When will their consciences get the better of them? When will they sit at home and tell the truth about what they did in their army service in the territories?'

As usual Levy describes the reality of Israeli occupation with humanity and anger.

Robert Fisk: "Why are we surprised at their racism, their brutality, their sheer callousness towards Arabs? Those American soldiers in Saddam's old prison at Abu Ghraib, those young British squaddies in Basra came -- as soldiers often come -- from towns and cities where race hatred has a home: Tennessee and Lancashire."

Bush: "Because free societies do not harbor terrorists; free societies do not threaten people or use weapons of mass destruction."

Now, the only use of nuclear weapons so far is that of the US against Japan in 1945. In Bush's terms, the US was a 'free society' so he lies on the WMD issue. The US also harbors terrorists, for example Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, so he lies on the terrorist issue too.

Bush Lies? Yes, he constantly lies.

Sy Hersh: 'Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community... Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.'

photos

Bush: "One year later, despite many challenges, life for the Iraqi people is a world away from the cruelty and corruption of Saddam's regime. At the most basic level of justice, people are no longer disappearing into political prisons, torture chambers, and mass graves -- because the former dictator is in prison, himself."
Also: 'A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we'd accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq'