McChrystal, Copper Green, Torture and Assassination

Check out this great Esquire article about the torture occupation of Iraq and new Afghan boss McChrystal‘s role. How’d I miss this in ’06?

It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in — they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.” …

To Garlasco, this is significant. This means that a full-bird colonel and all his support staff knew exactly what was going on at Camp Nama. “Do you know where the colonel was getting his orders from?” he asks.

Jeff answers quickly, perhaps a little defiantly. “I believe it was a two-star general. I believe his name was General McChrystal. I saw him there a couple of times.”

Back when he was an intelligence analyst, Garlasco had briefed Stanley McChrystal once. He remembers him as a tall Irishman with a gentle manner. He was head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the logical person to oversee Task Force 121, and vice-director for operations for the Joint Chiefs. That put responsibility right in the heart of the Pentagon.

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report “is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning” or that it was “read by SecDef.”

Muriel Kane wonders whether McChrystal ran Cheney’s global assassination hit squads.

Hersh: “…let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that…”

Thanks to Douglas Valentine.

Excellent Interview: Goodman-Barstow

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did an excellent interview last week with David Barstow, a New York Times reporter who recently won the Pulitzer prize for his April, 2008 story about Rumfeld’s “Force Multiplying” generals sent on combat missions to America TV news studios to lie us into war (and all the giant piles of cash money they made selling military hardware). In the interview Barstow discusses his story, the recently repudiated Pentagon Inspector General report which denied his claims and the TV networks’ continued blackout on his story.

US Finally Wins Bogus Conviction in Miami ‘Plot’

After two juries refused to convict or acquit 6 of the so-called “Miami 7” (which then became the “Liberty City Six” after one was acquitted in the first trial but then deported anyway), five were convicted today of involvement in an al Qaeda plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago.

From the very beginning it has been known to the general public that this entire case was cooked up by the cops, that the idiots they entrapped were just that and that said idiots were simply (they thought) playing the pretend terrorist informant for money when he was really playing them for a conviction and some hard taxpayer cash of his own.

The jurors who went along with this ought to be in prison themselves along with the judge who allowed this sham to proceed and everyone in the US attorney’s office who participated in this conspiracy to deny these Americans their liberty under the color of law.

But as every single one of us knows, that will never happen because there is no such thing as “the law.” It is simply the excuse for those who run the state to do what they want with us, while it never applies to them.

Facing decades in prison, I guess they should be thankful Obama hasn’t invoked the Military Commissions Act on them.

Update: The Miami Herald has a great editorial about the inustice of this case here.

Defense lawyers believe a juror who disagreed with the jury-panel majority should not have been removed from the trial. They are fighting an uphill battle in trying to persuade U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard, who dismissed the juror, to grant a retrial. …

Two jurors were dismissed in this trial, one because of illness and the other, a black woman, whom a majority of the panel said was uncooperative.

The jurors asked that she be removed. After interviewing all of the jurors, Judge Lenard removed the woman, Juror No. 4, from the panel. In her note to the judge, the woman complained of being disrespected. No one ”respects my answers, and I feel I’m being attacked every time I open my mouth,” she wrote. She told the judge: “To me all of the negativity is directed at me.”

Tom Ricks to Antiwar.com: Get Off of My Cloud!

Anointed Washington Surge scribe Thomas Ricks takes Antiwar.com to task for writing “about an area about which they know absolutely freaking nothing,” referring to my current piece on Gian Gentile: Exposing Counterfeit COIN. To his mind and of the COIN clique he runs with online, writing about the war should be left to practitioners and military theorists, and of course, Washington Post special war correspondents and senior fellows at the Center for a New American Security.

Certainly not any operation calling itself “Antiwar.” (Note to Ricks: Try to take more than two minutes to check out the site, then you’d find out how we feel about “predatory strikes” and “protecting the population.”)

Like many Washington types who ride a singular moment — say a war, a Surge, the rising stars of generals named Petraeus and Odierno –to such breathless heights of Washington success and sycophancy, there is a tendency towards peevishness when any of it is questioned. It’s territorial, and I can understand that. Thus Ricks reacts by reminding us of his bonefides in Iraq, and is so quick to defend the Washington think tank where he now hangs his hat. Don’t worry, we’ll get off of your cloud.

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