A court in Abu Dhabi has acquitted the man accused of beating an Afghan grain trader in 2004.
Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, a member of the UAE royal family, claimed he was drugged by two other men, and therefore unaware of his actions, which included torturing the man with electric prods, driving over him and [...]
From the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):
Mohammed Sulaymon Barre was released from Guantanamo on December 20, 2009, and returned to his family in Somaliland. Mr. Barre had fled Somalia during the civil war in theearly 1990s. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees granted Mr. Barre refugee status in Pakistan where he lived and worked [...]
Let’s face it, if James Cameron had made a movie with the Iraqi resistance as the heroes and the U.S. military as the enemies, and had set it in Iraq or anywhere else on planet earth, the packed theaters viewing “Avatar” would have been replaced by a screening in a living room for eight people and a dog. Nineteen years ago, Americans packed theaters for “Dances with Wolves” in which Native Americans became the heroes, but the story was set in a previous century and the message understated.
A disturbing new study released last month by the Army Mental Health Advisory Team has found that an increasing number of soldiers serving in Afghanistan are suffering from some type of mental health related injury and “significantly lower morale” compared with previous years due to an uptick in violence and multiple deployments.
President Obama has failed his mandate. It’s not a happy thing to have to say. Many won’t agree, desperately fending off the obvious. The campaign sloganeering, well, it turned out to be just that. All the worse that so many had hoped otherwise. Obama has been embarrassingly supine in dealing with the know-nothings. The end game of which is what, exactly?
So much for the First Amendment.
Morris Davis, the retired Air Force Colonel who served as the Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, has just lost his job at the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress) for writing, in his personal [...]
Last week, lawyer, ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter, described by Glenn Greenwald as “a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies,” suddenly resigned his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, which he had occupied since April. Carter claimed that he was leaving due to “personal issues,” which may be true, but as Greenwald noted, “the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter’s responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.”
While most U.S. war veterans tend to be supportive of their country’s military operations abroad, some have been voicing their opposition to any escalation.
For weeks, Washington has been debating whether to send more troops to Afghanistan but a growing number of veterans are lobbying U.S. politicians against a new war strategy for Afghanistan that Barack [...]
President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of strength.” And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.
With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop level in the Afghanistan War by 50 percent, we are about to have perhaps the ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western world as Armistice Day.
