Best Video yet of Bhutto Killing

Polish Troops Face War Crimes Charges

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Reports that Poland’s troops in Afghanistan may have committed a war crime against defenseless civilians has shocked the country’s public, which remains sensitive to the performance of the Polish military abroad.In August separate Polish and U.S. patrols were reportedly struck by explosive devices. Polish reinforcements soon arrived and opened fire on a nearby village. The mortar attack on the village of Nangar Khel, close to the Afghan-Pakistani border, killed eight Afghani civilians and left three women crippled. A pregnant woman and a child were among the dead.

“We are very concerned about a possible war crime — a lot of Poles cannot believe our soldiers could commit such a crime,” said Jacek Przybylski, deputy foreign editor of the leading Polish daily Rzeczpospolita.

Polish authorities have kept the flow of information about the incident under control, leaving the media the task of digging out the truth.

Many in Poland want exemplary punishment for the soldiers, a formal apology to Afghanistan and large sums to be paid to the victims’ families.

If the war crime is proven, six of the seven perpetrators, who have been held in state custody, could face life in prison. Even more officers might be accused as the investigation unfolds.

On Nov. 13 the military prosecution, citing secret evidence, ascertained that there was no exchange of fire, and that the civilians had been fired upon with the intent to kill them. The prosecutor’s office filed charges against seven soldiers, who stand accused of violating international law.

The prosecution sees no mitigating circumstances in the case and maintains that no error or hardware failure can account for the way the mortars were aimed by some of Poland’s supposedly best soldiers.

No Taliban members are believed to have been in the village, though initially the soldiers accused reportedly told their commanders that they had been shot at from the village. The officers involved are also accused of hindering the investigation.

Citing unnamed sources, the prestigious daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the evidence could include video footage of a Polish soldier entering the bombarded village. According to this report, the behavior of the Polish troops was appalling.

In statements to the press earlier, commander of the Polish military contingent in Afghanistan Gen. Mark Tomaszycki said soldiers did not enter the village and only fired from a distance.

Tomaszycki said the soldiers did not claim to have been fired upon but said there had been some contact with Taliban.

Questions have since arisen about why commanders gave the order to open fire on the civilian settlement and why these orders were followed. It remains unclear how informed the soldiers’ superiors were on the details of the operation and what their level of responsibility is.

Military prosecutors apparently have not interrogated senior officers yet, though this is required by North Atlantic Treaty Organization procedures, raising suspicion that responsibilities might be concealed and the soldiers used as scapegoats.

The daily Rzeczpospolita has based such claims on information given to it by an unnamed officer serving in Afghanistan.

The daily paper reports that the defense will consider responsibility by commanders and politicians, since it believes the contingent’s commanders could have coordinated a version of the story with the soldiers, promising them the case would die out.

Citing court documents, Polish radio station RMF said one soldier refused to follow his superiors’ orders and left, and that later a deputy commander told the remaining soldiers that they should not be concerned about rockets hitting the village.

The defense is also raising the possibility that the killing could have been caused by a faulty mortar gun or damaged ammunition.

“We have sources in the army that say that it was only an incident, and that they thought they were attacking the Taliban, getting their information from U.S. troops,” Przybylski said.

The wives of two of the soldiers accused of war crimes have said the “suggestion” to open fire came from a U.S. command.

According to the Dec. 3 edition of Rzeczpospolita, the Polish soldiers were told by the base “the village needs to be f***ed up” but said they were still aiming at the nearby hills where they supposed the Taliban members were hiding. It is believed that Taliban members often come down from the hills and hide among the civilian population in villages, especially at night.

The prosecution said there is no proof indicating U.S. responsibility, but in Poland disillusionment with the U.S. is on the rise.

Roman Kuzniar, the head of the strategic studies department at Warsaw University, said that while the Polish contingent in Afghanistan is part of NATO’s peacekeeping mission, Polish troops have been made subordinate to U.S. troops, impairing the quality of the Polish mission.

“It was certain that our soldiers would soon adopt the methods of combat of their American superiors and colleagues. These methods involve ignoring completely all rights and limitations under international humanitarian law,” Kuzniar wrote in the Nov. 21 edition of Warsaw Dziennik.

Recent statements by U.S. President George Bush have done little to improve Washington’s image in Poland.

“Bush recently forgot to mention Polish troops when mentioning U.S. allies in Afghanistan,” Przybylski said. “For Poles it is especially important to be recognized as allies of the U.S.”

Both the Iraqi and the Afghani missions are unpopular among Poles. The withdrawal from Iraq has been scheduled for 2008, but there are still no plans to reduce the 1,200-strong contingent in Afghanistan. It could, however, be changed into one of a more civilian nature.

A poll conducted shortly after the prosecution announced its findings shows that the Afghani mission has almost equaled the Iraqi mission in unpopularity, with 85 percent of Poles opposing both missions.

Poles also overwhelmingly supported an official apology to the Afghanistan government. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has made that conditional on the investigation’s conclusions.

The villagers have been given medical assistance, food and money, but some say the compensation is insufficient and could be interpreted as an attempt to buy their silence.

“One might get the impression that an attempt was made to cram these people’s mouths shut with rice and rolls of banknotes,” the Warsaw Dziennik wrote on Nov. 15. “Real compensation should be paid out to the families of those killed and injured, rather than our resting satisfied by tossing scrap to them.”

U.S. seen internationally as an ‘Endemic Surveillance Society.’

In the recently released annual survey of worldwide privacy rights by Privacy International and EPIC, the United States has been downgraded from “Extensive Surveillance Society” to “Endemic Surveillance Society.” As Glenn Greenwald notes, this is “the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia.” In general, “the 2007 rankings indicate an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world, reflecting an increase in surveillance and a declining performance of privacy safeguards.” 

CIA tapes were destroyed to ’save image.’

The New York Times reports that the CIA’s “every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.” The Times adds:

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice.

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.

The tapes recorded a program “so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with intelligence officials’ advice that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons.

Navy JAG Andrew Williams Resigns Over Torture

Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the U.S. Naval Reserve, recently resigned his commission over the alleged use of torture by the United States and the destruction of video tapes said to contain instances of that torture.

As ThinkProgress reported in December, Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, repeatedly refused to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture.

Explaining his resignation in a letter to his Gig Harbor, WA, newspaper — the Peninsula Gateway — Williams said Hartmann’s testimony was “the final straw”:

The final straw for me was listening to General Hartmann, the highest-ranking military lawyer in charge of the military commissions, testify that he refused to say that waterboarding captured U.S. soldiers by Iranian operatives would be torture.

His testimony had just sold all the soldiers and sailors at risk of capture and subsequent torture down the river. Indeed, he would not rule out waterboarding as torture when done by the United States and indeed felt evidence obtained by such methods could be used in future trials.

Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition.

In the middle ages, the Inquisition called waterboarding “toca” and used it with great success. In colonial times, it was used by the Dutch East India Company during the Amboyna Massacre of 1623.

Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai. In World War II, our grandfathers had the wisdom to convict Japanese Officer Yukio Asano of waterboarding and other torture practices in 1947, giving him 15 years hard labor.

Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.

General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either.Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out.

Williams’ resignation follows on the heels of several high profile issues relating to the JAG corps. In 2006, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was passed over for promotion and forced out of the Navy after he vigorously defended Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. And just this month, the Bush administration planned to take control of the promotion system for military lawyers, a plan which was dropped due to the uproar it caused in the military and in Congress.

Antarctic base staff evacuated after Christmas brawl

Two men, one with a suspected broken jaw, have been airlifted from the Antarctic’s most remote research facility after an incident described as a “drunken Christmas punch-up”.The brawl happened at the US-operated Amundsen-Scott South Pole station, located at the heart of the frozen continent. The station, where staff carry out a range of scientific investigations from astrophysics to seismology, is currently being rebuilt in a £76m project.

After reports of the fight reached staff at McMurdo station, the headquarters of the US Antarctic Programme, which is located on Ross Island, a US Air Force Hercules was sent to pick up the injured man and the other worker.

They were flown back to McMurdo, but it was decided the man’s injuries were too serious to be treated in Antarctica and he was taken on to Christchurch, New Zealand, accompanied by a nurse and a paramedic.

Many of the McMurdo staff had been expecting a day off for Christmas but support workers returned to work to deal with the rare emergency medical evacuation.

A spokeswoman at Christchurch Hospital said a man was admitted on Christmas Day and discharged the following day.

“There was an altercation between two people — there’s no indication of the cause or of the background between the two folks,” said Peter West, spokesman for the National Science Foundation which manages the US Antarctic programme.

The injured man is an employee of Raytheon Polar Services, one of America’s largest defence contractors. A company spokeswoman, Val Carroll, said an investigation into the incident would be held. She said it was company policy not to release names of the two men.

The other man involved in the incident has flown back to the United States.

Polar medivac flights are rare occurrences, one of the most dramatic being a midwinter flight in 1999 for a woman doctor who developed breast cancer and needed urgent treatment.

It is currently summer in Antarctica, with light snow falling and daytime temperatures hovering around freezing, making it relatively easy to fly back and forth to New Zealand.

Priest sued over seminar ‘curing’ homosexuality

A Spanish clergyman is to be investigated after complaints that he is holding seminars which aim to “rehabilitate homosexuals”. Protestant minister Marcos Zapata, head of an organisation running youth centres for troubled children in Galicia, prompted the row after reports surfaced of a recent seminar he led entitled “How to Raise Heterosexual Children”.According to a journalist who attended the seminar, Zapata likened homosexuality to alcoholism and called it an illness, but said healing was possible through family therapy. In his family, he said, he reinforces masculine roles by watching professional wrestling with his two sons. Zapata also advised the audience to “hug your sons as much as you can, because if you don’t, perhaps another man will”.

Yesterday the Galician regional government said it would investigate Zapata to make sure the youth centres his organisation runs do not employ “any type of proselytising or homophobic attitudes” when dealing with minors.

Spain’s gay and lesbian groups are planning legal action.

“After so many legal victories in this country, and for the first time people are talking openly about homosexuality in schools, we have to deal with fundamentalist groups which take us back to the Franco dictatorship,” said Toni Poveda, the president of the National Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals. “And of course we are going to try to stop this from happening. Sexual orientation is innate and there’s no way to change it.”

Despite progress against discrimination in Spain, several websites promote similar methods for “exorcising” homosexuality. Esposibleelcambio.org (“Change is possible”) is run by Grupo Juan Pablo II, a lay group in Cadiz in southern Spain.

Fallujah: The hidden massacre

Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets.

Truth or a lie?

Al-Qa’ida Remains Intent on Defeating US Immigration Inspections (U//FOUO) Valid Passports: Al-Qa’ida’s Preferred Option

(U//FOUO)

Al-Qa’ida’s preferred method remains using a valid

passport containing a legitimate US visa or one

requiring no visa. Al-Qa’ida has instructed

operatives to travel to the United States on original

passports with no indications of dubious travel.

Operatives may also be encouraged to marry

women who possess US visa or European

documentation—whether visas or passports—

thinking it will make it easier for them to obtain

legitimate US visas.

Al-Qa’ida may be recruiting Asians who possess

visa-waiver status in the United States and Canada

and have non-Arab appearance. (U//FOUO)

Fraudulent Visa-Waiver Passports: Next Best

Thing (U//FOUO)

If unable to enter the United States on a clean

document, operatives are instructed to travel in alias,

impersonating innocent individuals whose visawaiver

passports have been lost or stolen but unlikely

to be on a watchlist. (U//FOUO)

A large number of al-Qa’ida members have acquired

passports from countries whose citizens are permitted

to enter the United States without a visa:

In 2002, we had reporting on more than 300 known

or suspected al-Qa’ida members and other

extremists who possessed passports—false and

genuine—from visa-waiver countries

Nearly 10 percent of Guantanamo detainees admit

to having used false Canadian, British, and other

Western passports, the majority of which qualify for

the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP). (U//FOUO)

Using Computer Software for Alterations

(U//FOUO)

Operatives use advanced computer graphic programs

like Paintshop Pro, Photoshop, and Adobe Printshop

to copy and alter passports. Forensic analysis of

captured materials indicates that al-Qa’ida uses

software to scan and replicate travel stamps, visas,

and passport security features. (U//FOUO)

Terrorists could use internet chat rooms that provide

tutorials on how to use the technology to alter

documents.

Jihadist chatroom Sada al-Jihad has participants

willing to supply forged documents or access to

those who can assist in procuring them.

Isam—the chatroom’s supervisor who claims to be

the brother of Mullah Krekar—is organizing an

online course on document forgery in the

“Intelligence, Security, and Techniques to Combat

Crusaders.”

As of mid-March 2003, Isam had received eight

responses, including one giving information on the

alteration of images, according to the FBIS

translation. (U//FOUO)

Coaching Operatives To Circumvent Our Borders

(U//FOUO)

Recent information demonstrates al-Qa’ida’s ongoing

interest to enter the United States over land borders

with Mexico and Canada—although it is unclear

whether operatives have been advised to present

credentials to border authorities or sneak across. The

information obtained includes:

Ron Paul: 95 percent of black men are ‘criminal.’

Kos highlights a 1992 article from Ron Paul’s self-published newsletter, The Ron Paul Political Report:

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action…. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.