The attack on free speech continues unabated around the world. The latest violation occurred in Tunis where a military court has handed down an absurd three year jail sentence to a blogger, blogger Yassine Ayari, for “insulting” Army officers. That is what free speech means in Tunisia. You can be criminally sentenced for “undermining” the Army through criticism.
Category: Military
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw) Weekend Contributor
The instances of reported abuse of our country’s laws by our Intelligence services seems never-ending. The National Security Agency, or NSA is at the top of the list when it comes to violations of our laws and even its own rules and procedures that are allegedly designed to protect our privacy.
Pursuant to a court order in a case brought by the ACLU, the NSA is required to provide a list of its abuses on a quarterly basis. Of course, the NSA redacts most of what it puts in its own disclosures. Continue reading “NSA Abuses Never End”
Mark Oberholtzer, owner of Mark-1 Plumbing in Texas City, has suddenly found his business advertised internationally. However, it is not quite the exposure that he was hoping for. A recent picture of the Islamic extremist brigade Ansar al-Deen Front in Syria shows their fighters firing an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a truck proudly displaying his name and logo. Can anyone say “misappropriation of name or likeness”? My expectations is that a tort lawsuit is not troubling these extremists as a priority concern.
I have long argued in my column as well as numerous blog postings that our country is legally bound to prosecute people responsible for ordering torture during the Bush Administration. There is no question that water boarding is torture as recognized by President Obama, Attorney General Holder, the United Nations and virtually every expert in this field. However, while you may want to try to rewrite legal precedent (as did John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous Torture Memos), you should not try to rewrite history. That is what former Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be doing this month. He told Chuck Todd on Sunday that we never prosecuted anyone for water boarding — an assertion that I and others have repeatedly raised over the years. The statement is simply false and adds historical revisionism to legal revisionism in our sordid foray into torture.
Continue reading “Cheney Offers Tortured View of History In Defending Waterboarding”
Despite the public pledge of President Obama to pull out of Afghanistan, we continue to spend huge amounts of money in the war and the Obama Administration has fought to keep U.S. troops in the country. Now an estimate from the Financial Times and independent researchers put the cost of the war at roughly $1 trillion with a commitment of hundreds of billions more in the coming years. There continues to be no serious debate over our ongoing losses both in personnel and money in this war.
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Weekend Contributor
This past week’s news reports of the Senate report on the CIA Torture program were both distressing and enlightening.  I was dismayed to not only read what the full extent of the CIA’s Torture program was, but also when I read pundits and former CIA officials claim that rectal rehydration was merely a medical procedure! I was further discouraged when commenters on this blog made claims that waterboarding and other torture tactics were either necessary or what the devils deserved.
Very few pundits or commenters seem to care if the so-called Enhanced Interrogation techniques were legal or ethical when the CIA resorted to them shortly after 9/11. This “debate” over the actions taken in our name by the CIA has gone from a report based on the CIA’s own words to denials that the techniques were torture, to claims that great intelligence value was gained using the torture and claims that it was a biased report written by Democrats. Continue reading “The CIA Lost Its Soul and Took Ours With It”
Below is my column today in USA Today on the torture report. This is the slightly longer version that ran on the Internet.
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Continue reading “TRUTH WILL OUT: THE SENATE REPORT CONTAINS SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS”
In movies like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, a ghost army can be a decisive advantage for a besieged army. It appears that Iraq has not just a ghost army but one that is 50,000 strong. The “ghost soldiers” were discovered in an investigation as the latest example of corruption in the country where literally billions of dollars in U.S. aid have disappeared without a trace.
Continue reading “The Iraqi Ghost Army: The Equivalent Of Four Divisions Found To Be Nonexistent”
It has been a virtual mantra of U.S. policy for decades that we do not negotiate with terrorists and never never pay ransoms. That is why a new report is so startling even though it has received relatively little attention. The Pentagon reportedly gave an unspecified but large amount of money to an Afghan for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and then found out the money and the Afghan disappeared without a trace. The Pentagon is denying that it tried to pay a ransom for Bergdahl.
We have previously discussed how filmmakers are releasing fake videos such as the recent profiling video out of New York — a practice that is not only dishonest but highly counterproductive for groups seeking to address such abuses. Now it appears that a moving video of a Syrian boy heroically rescuing a little girl under fire is a fake, but director Lars Klevberg, 34, is heralding his hoax as a wonderful success and is entirely unapologetic for misleading millions of people.
We previously discussed how the White House opened admitted that it was delayed the increasingly unpopular immigration plan until after the election. Now it appears that another radioactive issue is being slow marched until after the election. The Army has completed its investigation into Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s disappearance from his base in Afghanistan five years ago. However, Pentagon sources have said that any release will have to come after the election and there is no guarantee that the findings will be made public.
Continue reading “Bergdahl Report Delayed Until After The Election”
We have been discussing the trillions of dollars spent on Iraq and Afghanistan while we cut environmental, scientific, and educational programs on the state and federal levels. Now, we are only a couple of weeks into the newest war against Islamic State but we have already spent an estimated $1.1 billion. Of course, President Obama has stated that he does not require any congressional approval for the war, which has been described by his Administration as having an indefinite duration. In the meantime, our latest war has been a bonanza for weapons manufacturers, including a $251 million deal to buy more Tomahawks from Raytheon Co after we unloaded on the Islamic State.
Continue reading “Campaign Against Islamic State Now Tops $1 Billion”
There is an interesting dimension to the ongoing circumvention of the Constitution over our latest undeclared war. While some Administration officials are finally calling our attacks in Syria as a “war,” the discomfort over defining this indefinite campaign has led to equal discomfort over naming it. After two months of airstrikes and statements that the campaign will likely go on for years, the Administration still have not named this war. The choice would now seem obvious: Operation Voldemort, the war which must not be named.
Continue reading “Operation Voldemort: The War Which Must Not Be Named”
While the outgoing Afghan President continues to denounce the United States and praise China and Iran, the Obama Administration has been pressuring Afghanis to allow it to keep roughly 10,000 troops in the country with the obvious commitment to spend billions and billions more on the war. The agreement has now bee signed. This is being heralded as a long-awaited success for the Administration – a curious achievement for those who want us out of the country and money spent on badly needed domestic programs of education, science, and infrastructure.
Iraqi pilots are rechecking their coordinate calculations after they mistakenly dropped food, water and ammunition to Islamic State militants rather than besieged Iraqi forces fighting the militants. It is the latest blunder by a military that, despite billions and billions in U.S. training and equipment, continues to face regular desertions and defeats in the field.