Category: Human Rights

Fear and Torture in Iraq

A ‘restrained”  news article  by  Ian Cobain in  the Guardian entitled  “Camp Nama: British personnel reveal horrors of secret US base in Baghdad” explores in a little detail,  what was known to every  “allied’  soldier  during the invasion and demolition of Iraq; that systematic  brutal  torture was ( and in  Afghanistan -’is’) being  used by  the invaders to attempt to  extract information from  Saddam sympathisers , and subsequently Sunni/Salafist insurgents.

What is surprising is not that it occurred, but that now, somehow, British  soldiers are now willing and able to confess their supposedly  limited involvement in  this brutality. The report makes clear that  there was an ongoing method  at a senior military  and political  level in the British  to  firstly, avoid any legal  implications of breaching the Geneva Convention, and secondly to  threaten  or  cajole those who attempted to  speak out.

Perhaps there is some misguided belief by  those in  power in the US and UK that enough time has passed for  these abuses to appear as some historical  anomaly.   The reality is that  both UK and US soldiers are well  trained in  viciousness,  brutality and torture to those who  they  see as “other”- whether its the “commies’ in Korea, “charlie’  in Vietnam,  “gooks” or “towel-heads”;  the language is all  the same- to  de-humanise and legitimise inhuman behavior.

What  might be hoped for now  is that  British police will now immediately round up those military officers and politicians who would likely have been party to  this abuse, and put them before a court of law to  be tried as innocent before being proven guilty for complicity in   murder and torture. Is it  going to  happen?…..yeah right…

 

The Syrian Connection

France and the UK are pressing  the EU for approval to   directly arm the Syrian rebels,  and for now, are being rebuffed by  fellow EU members. The reality is that  France (ex-coloniser of Syria and Lebanon)  and the UK  have been  arming and supporting the rebels since the war’s  inception via their “intelligence”  departments; either directly via “discreet”  arms shipments into Turkey and  Jordan by air , or indirectly, via weapons bought and shipped  through  the  hereditary (Sunni) dictatorships in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with the CIA also mounting extensive weapons distribution and training  programmes inside Turkey and now Jordan.

Why then the EU request for direct  military  assistance of the rebels?. By committing  the formal  military networks that the various EU countries possess, into the war, Britain  and France will be able to seamlessly  pull in  the other European countries into  an ongoing military occupation of Syria/Lebanon to combat the extremist risks they have done so much to create. This will  create yet another combat zone where civilians  will have to subsist in  a land  without the necessary infrastructure of adequate food water and sewage systems to survive-another Palestine, Libya or Afghanistan  in other words. By doing so, it will  deprive the Iranians of one more of their state allies in  the region and one less supporter of a Palestinian state. This  will however also  inevitably lead the two  Shi-ite governments of  Iraq and Iran into closer alliance.

Israel, with its  rascist  government in  some dissaray, is wavering in its support of the rebels; havering between the  risks of having  Salafists on  its borders and having an opportunity to remove one more of its arch-enemies who dares to block its advance into, and occupation of,  “Greater Israel”.

On the other side, Russia is carefully supporting the Assad regime with  “top-up”  armaments and  training, and giving  moral  and tactical support through  its Mediterranean naval  exercises  out of the Russian Tartus naval  base on  the Syrian coast. Similarly Iran appears to be  using its informal military network ; the Iran Revolutionary  Guard or ‘Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution’ (IRGC), with the likely support of Hezbollah, to supply and train the paramilitary and Shi-ite/Alawite units supporting Assad. For now, China appears to be offering moral,  but not much  else, support to  the Assad regime. This is unlikely to change.

Iraq’s Shi-ite  government is also very keen to ensure that the  Salafist  groups (affiliated or not to Al Qaeda) supported by  Qatar and Saudia Arabia, (and rather more directly by  the Western powers than they would care to admit),  do  not gain  a long-term foothold in Syria with unimpeded transport lines to the Arabian peninsula and  Turkey from the Mediterranean and the Muslim entities of the former Soviet Union; thereby significantly  improving their  strategic position in Iraq.

As always, the Western powers are attempting a divide and rule approach; using their long term hereditary  dictatorship Sunni allies of Saudi Arabia, Yemen  and Qatar to  offset  the growing influence and power of the Iranians, and the Shi-ite disaster they created for themselves  in  Iraq. The risks of blowback this time however are even more enormous. The growing salafist influence in the Turkish border region and beyond, the growing  power of the Kurds straddling  so many different  ‘middle east’  countries,  the potential for a massive upswing in  Sunni versus Shite violence in Iraq, let alone the potential  overthrow  of the current Iranian theo-demo-cracy  with something unknown and likely more radical, has the potential  to lead to  the establishment of a real Salafist caliphate in  the region; with all its violent, expansionist medieval and misogynist  cultural impacts, and a  real “clash of civilizations” with the West.

Such would be the delight of the neo-conservatives!

And just  to make things slightly more complex!- it would appear the power balance is swinging-as the current desperate gas shortage in  freezing  temperatures in  the UK demonstrates. The  oil/gas-rich Sunni  dictatorships are acquiring considerably more leverage in  cash-strapped Western states then ever before, even while their own societies implode.

Postscripts:

Read Moon of Alabama’s current relatively considered take on  the Syrian  situation  here

Or Tony Cartalucci’s more radical  view of the  weapons shipments issues here  calledCONFIRMED: US Shipping Weapons to Syria – Al Nusra’s “Mystery” Sponsors Revealed

Or  Henry  Precht  at Lobe Log’s “Syrias civil war and its unintended consequences”

http://www.lobelog.com/syrias-civil-war-and-its-unintended-consequences/

 

 

We are all Immigrants

This post is prompted by  a comment on  Facebook  saying (paraphrasing); those who are truly English or Scottish should stop allowing new immigrants into “our”  country (the UK).

I am reminded that I too am  an immigrant,; some of my family immigrated to these southern isles  from far-off England and Scotland more than 150  years ago, but I am in  native Maori terms,  still not tangata whenua (people of the land).

Should we all then return to our “homelands”,  wherever they may be?  My guess is that  there would be none of the   current population of people living in  the United Kingdom , much of Europe and almost none in the United States if that  was the case. The reality is that  homo sapiens have always been wanderers, moving from place to place, from continent to continent, island to island, since we first walked on our hind legs.

Our little world
                     Our little world

 

These  borders that define the countries of the world, the pretty colours on the globe of the world, are simply fictional; defined for those who  need to collect  taxes,  define what  is “right” and “proper”, or control others in  so many  ingenious ways.

Don’t get me wrong, any Illuminati, Bilderberg  Group , or other global  world conspiracies, real or otherwise, are fortunately doomed to fail.  The incompetence, venality and sheer  stupidity of those who  attempt ultimate power is a salutary lesson to  the species.

But, when it comes down  to it; we are all just  visitors on  this little blue ball.  Lets all look after it-together.

 

 

Kill Anything That Moves: Vietnam and beyond

Peter van Buren of the Huffington  Post  reviews Nick Turse’s latest book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

Sadly, van  Buren’s parting lines are not about the  millions of tortured, raped,  and murdered civilians of that trail of “dark skinned’ countries the US has invaded over the past 50 years; it is commiseration for those few hundred thousand US soldiers who have been put  in “impossible”  environments  by those in the “highest seats of power”.

As van Buren notes: The issue is not so much how/when/should we assign blame and punishment to an individual soldier, but to raise the stakes and ask: why have we not assigned blame and demanded punishment for the leaders who put those 19-year-old soldiers into the impossible situations they faced? Before we throw away the life of a kid who shot when he should not have done so, why don’t we demand justice for those in the highest seats of power for creating wars that create such fertile ground for atrocity? The chain of responsibility for the legacy left behind in our wars runs high.

Every one of those soldiers had the opportunity to refuse to fight; every one of those soldiers had the opportunity to  refuse to commit atrocities- but failed to do so. The responsibilities for murder and massacre run at all levels of our white-skinned colonial  societies. The assumptions of superiority, of “rightness” and ultimately simply pure racism, are endemic at every level of  Western society.  They  are our sins which  cannot be absolved, and  for which we are likely to pay dearly once the tables are turned in  another decade or two, when  western economies will no longer rule the world and determine the ‘game’.

Even now, almost forty years after the end of the Vietnam war, the US government and most of  it’s  citizens,  refuse to  acknowledge the massive war crimes of at  least  a million Vietnamese deaths carried out by  the US in the name of rolling back  a fictional  red tide of asian dominos, through carpet bombing, chemical  warfare and systemic atrocity after atrocity.

It is time for all  countries to acknowledge that  for us all to live peaceful fulfilled  lives on  a sustainable  planet, that  we have no rights to control other human beings to behave in the way  we think they  “should” behave through force-nor indeed any  rights of force over any  other species on this planet.

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Postscript:

40 years on, Laotians tell of US war legacy  By MATTHEW PENNINGTON | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forty years after the secret U.S. bombing that devastated Laos, heirs to the war’s deadly legacy of undetonated explosives are touring America to prod the conscience of the world’s most powerful nation for more help to clear up the mess.

Note the casual throwaway  line ” The U.S. dropped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos over a nine-year period up to 1973 — more than on Germany and Japan during World War II.”

World’s Most Evil and Lawless Institution? The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government- Alternet by  Fred Branfman

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/executive-branch-evil-and-lawless

Executive Branch leaders have killed, wounded and made homeless well over 20 million human beings in the last 50 years, mostly civilians.

June 26, 2013  |

America has a secret. It is not discussed in polite company or at the dinner tables of the powerful, rich and famous.