Cheney has been unshakable in defense of his decision to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read torture) including waterboarding. “I would strongly support using it again if we had a high value detainee and that was the only way we could get him to talk,’’ he said.

But Human Rights First (HRF), one of the advocacy groups weighing in against the book, said, “The former Vice President has long claimed that abusive interrogation methods yielded information that ultimately saved lives, but national security experts and retired military leaders – including Senator John McCain, CIA Director General David Patraeus and former Marine Corps Commandant General Charles Krulak (Ret.) – disagree.”

Numerous official and private investigations and congressional testimony by an FBI interrogator strongly suggest that conventional interrogation techniques yield far more reliable results.

In conjunction with the release of Cheney’s memoir, HRF is launching an online ad campaign featuring prominent voices denouncing torture and highlighting the detrimental effect it has had on the United States’ anti-terrorism efforts. The ad links to an original 30 second video and will be seen on Google and YouTube, as well as in messages sent by the New York Times’ “Today’s Headlines” and Politico’s “The Huddle.”

“Former Vice President Cheney can write and say whatever he wants, but torture is torture and there’s no disputing the harm its use brought the United States,” said Human Rights First’s Elisa Massimino. “Torture eroded the nation’s standing as an international leader in human rights. It undermined our ability to gather reliable intelligence, and it has no place in U.S. national security policy. Two days after he took office, President Obama closed the book on torture and it needs to stay shut.”

Other like organizations expressed similar disapproval of the new memoir, which was released this week.

Amnesty USA said “The failure to hold the architects of policies of torture and disappearance during the ‘global war on terror’ to account remains an enduring stain on the global reputation of the United States. Those most responsible for the shameful abuses at Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and other black sites around the world continue to boast of their ‘accomplishments’ with complete impunity.”

Since leaving office, AI said, “Cheney has been without question the most prominent apologist for the regime of indefinite detention and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ instituted by the Bush administration.

AI has revisited some of the former Vice President’s previous statements to “demonstrate how they contrast not only with the reality of the situation, but also with the United States’ obligations.” For example:

Speaking on September 16, 2001, on NBC’s Meet the Press Cheney “set the tone for the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks. He said ‘We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world… it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective’.”

AI counters with: “As a party to of a wide range of international human rights and international humanitarian law instruments, including the U.N. Convention against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, the United States is simply not free to use ‘any means’ at its disposal – it is constrained by the applicable international law to operate within lawful parameters.”

In an interview with CNN on June 24, 2005, AI says Cheney “spun a rosy picture of conditions in Guantanamo.” ‘We spent a lot of money to build it. They’re very well treated there. They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want’.”

The reality, says AI, is that “since January 2002, eight inmates have died while in custody at the U.S.-controlled detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Six of these deaths have been declared suicides. Hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay are known to have engaged in hunger strikes at the prison in protest of conditions and their prolonged confinement without trial.”

AI reminds us that Cheney said in 2005 of the 520 detainees then held at Guantánamo: “Hard-core terrorists is the only way to describe them. They’re unlawful combatants. They’re out to kill Americans. And if you put them back on the streets, that’s exactly what they’ll do… [W]e absolutely need to have a facility like that to house some very violent and evil people.”

It also reminds us that, by the end of President Bush’s second term, his administration had released 525 former Guantanamo detainees without charge. A January 2011 study of some 600 former Guantanamo inmates conducted by the New America Foundation put the recidivism figure at six percent.

Former Vice President Cheney has consistently maintained that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” prevented terrorist attacks and claimed that the release of classified memos would support his claim. In a speech delivered at the American Enterprise Institute in May 2009 Cheney stated: “I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed…The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”

Amnesty contends that “there is no evidence that hundreds of thousands of lives were saved as a result of the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. In August 2009 a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by Amnesty International and coalition partners resulted in the release of the two CIA memos that the former Vice President had claimed would vindicate his public statements. In fact, the memos confirmed that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information obtained.”

The organization charges that “Information obtained through coercion led directly to one of the greatest intelligence failures of the past decade – the assessment that Iraq posed an imminent security threat to the United States. Suspected Al Qaeda trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where he was tortured. To make his interrogators stop, he told them that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This intelligence was used in part to justify the Iraq War. No such link existed.”

In an October 2006 interview, former Vice President Cheney told radio host Scott Hennen that authorizing waterboarding was “a no-brainer” and denied that it amounted to torture. Similarly, in a February 2008 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Cheney told his audience: “The United States is a country that takes human rights seriously. We do not torture – it’s against our laws and against our values.”

Amnesty responds: “Torture is indeed against the law, and water boarding – or simulated drowning – has consistently been considered to be torture under both international and U.S. jurisprudence. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, Japanese officials were convicted of torturing captured U.S. pilots by subjecting them to waterboarding. In 1983, Texas sheriff James Parker and his deputies water-boarded a number of prisoners in an effort to elicit confessions. Parker was subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison for his actions and the judge presiding over the case repeatedly described waterboarding unambiguously as torture in his judgment.”

Amnesty adds, “In April 2009, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee issued the conclusions of its ‘Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody’. Among its findings is that “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

The organization makes similar claims regarding the issue of trials before military commissions v. trials in the civilian justice system. Cheney has repeatedly asserted that military commissions are the most appropriate venue for alleged terrorist trials. But Amnesty points out that Federal courts successfully prosecuted 523 terrorism-related defendants between September 11th, 2001, and December 31st, 2009. Approximately 235 defendants are still on trial. About 70 have been acquitted or had charges dismissed. The present conviction rate is 88 percent.

Military commissions have only convicted six people to date, which represents less than one percent of the inmates who have passed through GTMO.

Tom Parker, AI’s policy director for terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights, said in advance of the release of Cheney’s memoir: “One can only hope that former Vice President Cheney’s memoir will not serve as yet another vehicle through which to peddle the same discredited mix of half-baked assertions and dark threats that marked his time in office. These have been comprehensively debunked by every new piece of information that emerges about the Bush administration’s failed counterterrorism policies.

Amnesty is also reiterating its call to US citizens to urge US Attorney General Eric Holder to “immediately open a criminal investigation into the role former President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and other officials played in the use of torture on detainees held in U.S. government custody.”

A large number of human rights and justice organizations have taken similar positions. These include the Center for Constitutional Rights, the public service law firm that has provided many of the pro bono lawyers who volunteered to defend GTMO inmates. Cheney’s daughter Liz, a former Assistant Secretary of State, has attacked the loyalty of the volunteer lawyers.

Chip Pitts, former president of Amnesty USA, perhaps summed up the deeply held feelings of Cheney’s opponents. He told The Public Record, “By debasing the United States and its commitment to the rule of law, encouraging unjustified yet devastatingly expensive and corrupt foreign wars, and even attempting to re-legitimate torture in a way not seen since the Middle Ages, Dick Cheney has likely done more damage than any other Bush administration official – or indeed anyone else in US history — to our nation’s authentic security and future prospects.

“His continued obliviousness to the catastrophic consequences and severe harm he has caused to so many people evinces, at a minimum, an obstinate and pathological inhumanity. This memoir will no doubt serve to further incriminate him rather than exonerate him.”

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

In particular, HRW singled out “four key leaders” in the torture program. Besides former President George W. Bush, the report indicts former Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. But others remain possible targets of investigation and prosecution. According to the report:

Such an investigation should also include examination of the roles played by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as the lawyers who crafted the legal “justifications” for torture, including Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC).

But the key passage in the HRW report concerns the backing for international prosecutions, under the principle in international law of “universal jurisdiction,” which was used back in 1998 by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón to indict former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for genocide and murder.

Unless and until the US government pursues credible criminal investigations of the role of senior officials in the mistreatment of detainees since September 11, 2001, exercise universal jurisdiction or other forms of jurisdiction as provided under international and domestic law to prosecute US officials alleged to be involved in criminal offenses against detainees in violation of international law. [emphasis added]

Indeed, in an important section of the report, HRW details the failures and successes of pursuing such international prosecutions in the face of U.S. prosecutors’ failure to act and investigate or indict high administration officials for war crimes. This is even more important when one considers that the Obama administration has clearly stated its intention to not investigate or prosecute such crimes, going after a handful of lower-level interrogators for crimes not covered by the Bush administration’s so-called “legal” approvals for torture provided by the infamous Yoo/Bybee/Levin/Bradbury memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel.

Nor has Congress shown even a smidgen of appetite for pursuing further accountability: not one Congressman or Senator has stepped forward as yet to endorse HRW’s new call. Instead, they demonstrated their obsequiousness by approving Obama’s nomination of General David Petraeus as new CIA director 94-0, despite the fact that Petraeus has been implicated in the organization of counter-terror death squads in Iraq, and was in charge of training Iraqi security forces who repeatedly were documented as engaging in widespread torture. It was during Petraeus’s tenure as chief of such training for the coalition forces, that the U.S. implemented the notorious Fragmentary Order (FRAGO) 242, which commanded U.S. forces not to intervene in cases of Iraqi governmental torture should they come across such it (which they often did). No one during Petraeus’s testimony in his nomination hearings even questioned him about this.

Why this report now?

I asked Andrea Prasow, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch, why this report was issued now, noting that some on the left had already questioned the timing of HRW’s action.

“Because it really needed to be done,” Prasow explained. She noted the recent admissions by former President Bush and Vice President Cheney that they had approved waterboarding. Furthermore, “following the killing of [Osama] Bin Laden, we saw the immediate response by some that torture and the enhanced interrogation techniques led to the capture of Bin Laden. And it became a part of normal debate about torture. It shows how fragile is the current commitment not to torture.”

Prasow also noted the recent closure of the Durham investigation, which resulted in the decision to criminally investigate the deaths of two detainees in CIA custody, while 99 other cases referred to his office were closed. I asked her whether she felt, as I do, that the announcement of the two investigations were meant to forestall attempts by European (especially Spanish) prosecutors to pursue “universal jurisdiction” prosecutions of U.S. officials for torture.

“I don’t see how there’s a defensible justification that the investigations Durham announced can do that,” Prasow said. “It’s pretty clear that there should be an investigation into the deaths of these detainees,” she added, “but it’s so clear the investigation is very limited. The scope of the investigation is the most important part. Even if Durham had investigated the 100 or so cases that exceeded the legal authorities, it wouldn’t be sufficient. What about the people who wrote the legal memos? Who told them to write the memos?” she said, emphasizing the fact that Durham’s investigation was limited by Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to only CIA crimes, and only those that supposedly exceeded the criteria for “enhanced interrogation” laid out in a number of administration legal memos. The torture, Prasow noted, was “throughout the military” as well, including “hundreds or thousands” tortured at sites in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

Prasow noted that the Obama administration has made it policy to block attempts by torture victims to get compensation for torture, asserting a policy of protecting “state secrets” to shut down court cases. “But there are other ways of providing redress,” she said, adding that “providing redress is part of international laws.” The HRW report itself states, “Consistent with its obligations under the Convention against Torture, the US government should ensure that victims of torture obtain redress, which may include providing victims with compensation where warranted outside of the judicial context.”

The new HRW report comes on the heels of a controversy roiling around a proposed United Kingdom governmental inquiry into torture. A number of British human rights and legal agencies have said they would boycott the UK proceedings as a “whitewash.” As Andy Worthington put it the other day:

As a result of pandering to the Americans’ wishes, the terms of reference are “so restrictive,” as the Guardian described it, that JUSTICE, the UK section of the International Commission of Jurists, warned that the inquiry “was likely to fail to comply with UK and international laws governing investigations into torture.” Eric Metcalfe, JUSTICE’s director of human rights policy, said that the rules “mean that the inquiry is unlikely to get to the truth behind the allegations and, even if it does, we may never know for sure. However diligent and committed Sir Peter [Gibson] and his team may be, the government has given itself the final word on what can be made public.”

Andrea Prasow echoed Metcalfe’s fears, saying HRW had “some concerns about how much information [in the UK inquiry] was going to be kept secret. I think transparency, making it as public as possible, is most important.”

The fight for transparency also makes HRW’s call for prosecutions of high government officials, along with “an independent, nonpartisan commission, along the lines of the 9-11 Commission, [that] should be established to examine the actions of the executive branch, the CIA, the military, and Congress, with regard to Bush administration policies and practices that led to detainee abuse,” very timely. In a column the other day at Secrecy News — Pentagon Tightens Grip on Unclassified Information — Steven Aftergood reported on a Department of Defense proposed new rule regarding classification. While the Obama administration is supposedly on record for greater governmental transparency, the new rule imposes “new safeguard requirements on ‘prior designations indicating controlled access and dissemination (e.g., For Official Use Only, Sensitive But Unclassified, Limited Distribution, Proprietary, Originator Controlled, Law Enforcement Sensitive).’”

According to Aftergood, “By ‘grandfathering’ those old, obsolete markings in a new regulation for defense contractors, the DoD rule would effectively reactivate them and qualify them for continued protection under the new Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) regime, thereby defeating the new policy.” Even worse (if possible), “the proposed rule says that any unclassified information that has not been specifically approved for public release must be safeguarded. It establishes secrecy, not openness, as the presumptive status and default mode for most unclassified information.”

Much of what we know about the Bush-era torture program is due to the work of the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, who have used the Freedom of Information Act to gather hundreds of documents, if not thousands, that document the paper trail surrounding the crimes of the Bush administration. Reporters and investigators like Jane Mayer, Philippe Sands, Alfred McCoy, and Jason Leopold have also contributed much to our understanding of what occurred during the Bush years. The work of investigators going back years demonstrates that U.S. research into and propagation of torture around the world goes back decades.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has also produced an impressive, if still partially redacted, investigation (large PDF) into detainee abuse by the Department of Defense. Their report, for instance, concluded regarding torture at Guantanamo that “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.”

When one puts together the accelerated emphasis on “state secrets”; the Obama political program of “not looking back” in regards to U.S. war crimes (while supposedly pursuing accountability for torture and war crimes committed by other countries); the political passivity, if not cowardice of Congress; the fact that Obama “has not been transparent on the rendition issue, not even saying what its policy is,” according to Andrea Prasow; and finally the lies and propaganda spewed forth by the former Administration’s key figures and their proxies, one can only agree with HRW that enough is enough. The time for investigations and prosecutions into torture and rendition is now.

And if they won’t listen in Washington, D.C., perhaps they will in Madrid. Or some other intrepid prosecutor in — who knows? — Brazil or Argentina or Chile will pay back America, as a matter of poetic but also real justice for the crimes endured by their societies when the U.S. helped organize torture and terror in their countries only a generation ago. There were no U.S. investigations into actions of government figures then, and now we are faced with another set of atrocities produced by our own government. If we do not act now, what will our children face?

Originally published at Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

According to a November 13 NSA press release:

The National Security Archive posted today its original FOIA request, the government’s response, our appeal by counsel David Sobel, the legal complaint in the case National Security Archive v. Department of Justice, the interim response from DoJ, the “Vaughn index” of withheld pages and alleged justifications for the withholding, and the 45 pages of partial and highly-redacted response.

The evocation of words like “accountability” in the context of suppressed documents, leaks, and war crimes has an eerie resonance in the context of the current struggle to gain accountability for current and recent U.S. war crimes surrounding the methods by which “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invading Iraq, the widespread use of torture and extraordinary rendition by the government and its allies, and a policy of illegal human experimentation on “war on terror” prisoners.

The fact that DoJ would still be trying to hide information from decades-old files surrounding the U.S. recruitment of Nazi war criminals does not bode well for those trying to force the U.S. government from President Obama’s “Don’t Look Back” policy towards war crimes. In fact, it took almost fifty years to get a significant opening of U.S. archives to look at government actions at the close of World War II. The NYT leaked document is but the latest in a string of revelations about the use of both high and low ranking Nazis by the U.S. government. Author Christopher Simpson wrote the first major book, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, documenting this history in 1988, followed by Linda Hunt’s excellent Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990, and other books, many of them unfortunately now out of print.

Anyone wanting to become an archival researcher in Nazi or Japanese war crimes can begin at the National Archives webpage for the Interagency Working Group (IWG), where there are links to tens of thousands of documents and millions of pages from the files of the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, OSS and other agencies. The IWG issued their Final Report of the Nazi War Crimes and [Japanese] Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group in April 2007, and is available online.

Revelations on U.S. Recruitment of Nazis

The OSI report is not without its new revelations. According to Lichtblau:

The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found “a smoking gun” in 1997 establishing with “definitive proof” that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerland’s culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue.

Another section describes as “a hideous failure” a series of meetings in 2000 that United States officials held with Latvian officials to pressure them to pursue suspected Nazis. That passage is also deleted.

In its paranoia and animus against its former Soviet ally (a paranoia and animus that ran in two directions), the United States turned to the recruitment of former Nazis in an attempt to gain intelligence and military superiority over the Soviet Union. The Times article describes how the report details the stories of infamous Nazi war criminals protected by the United States.

There was Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who used slave labor to operate Mittelwerk underground factories that produced the V-2 rocket. Twenty-five thousand slave laborers perished in the terrible conditions and treatment meted out at Mittelwerk. But Rudolph was protected from prosecution and went on to work for NASA as a primary designer of the Saturn rockets that took U.S. astronauts to the moon.

The article also notes the CIA’s recruitment of “Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans ‘to purge Germany of the Jews.’” The Times article gentlemanly forbears the whole story, which was revealed in a 2006 UK Guardian story on new information found in a massive release in that year of CIA documents on its Nazi past. (CIA watchers should note the ironies entailed in the fact the release was approved by then CIA director Porter Goss.) Von Bloschwing, it turns out, had also been Heinrich Himmler’s representative in Romania.

According to the UK Guardian:

After the war Bolschwing had been recruited by the Gehlen Organisation, the prototype German intelligence agency set up by the Americans under Reinhard Gehlen, who had run military intelligence on the eastern front under the Nazis. “US army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen’s offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red army – and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired,” said Robert Wolfe, a historian at the US national archives.

Of even more interest, perhaps, was the U.S. recruitment of Nazis and war criminals for its clandestine secret military groups after the war. Such secret armies were organized across Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and were later implicated in a number of right-wing terrorist actions and coups. The headquarters for this was ultimately centered in the NATO high command, and its various activities, including false flag operations to implicate leftists as terrorists became known as Operation Gladio.

Again, from the UK Guardian article:

Alongside the Gehlen Organisation, US intelligence had set up “stay-behind networks” in West Germany, who were supposed to stay put in the event of a Soviet invasion and transmit intelligence from behind enemy lines. Those networks were also riddled with ex-Nazis who had horrendous records.

One of the networks, codenamed Kibitz-15, was run by a former German army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, who was described by his own American handlers as an “unreconstructed Nazi”.

A more detailed description of the U.S. organization of stay-behind networks is told in an essay by Timothy Naftali at the University of Virginia (PDF).

The New York Times is to be commended for the release of this important new document, whose 600-plus pages will take awhile to be fully digested. The Times also was one of four news outlets to release, against considerable government pressure, the Wikileaks war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Times editorial stance for accountability for torture has not been met with action by the U.S. President, Justice Department, or Congress. The Democrats had two years of full control of both houses of Congress and never brought any substantive hearings or investigations on the issue of torture or the machinations behind the invasion of Iraq. While there is no doubt that much was withheld from Congress by the Pentagon and White House, the Democrats demonstrated no appetite to press for accountability, and this will be their ignoble legacy.

We must not wait fifty, sixty, or seventy years for the truth about recent and ongoing war crimes to come fully out, and for accountability for these crimes. It appears that will only happen if the citizens of the United States take history into their own hands and form new political entities or parties capable of handling the truth and meting out justice. Such new political forces will be unlikely to stop there, and turn towards implementing the kinds of change we desperately need in this society.

Originally published on Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Note: A detailed response to the 40-year sentence handed down by Omar Khadr’s military jury on Sunday will be published soon. Although largely symbolic, as Khadr’s plea deal involves an eight-year sentence instead, it nevertheless provided a suitably grim epitaph to a week of events in which the staggering injustices of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” were revealed to have been thoroughly revived and reinvigorated under President Barack Obama.

At Guantánamo last week, following Omar Khadr’s acceptance of a plea deal in which he followed a script dictated by the Obama administration and pleaded guilty to invented war crimes including being an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who had committed murder in violation of the laws of war, the Military Commission circus moved on to a sentencing phase, in which the prosecution and the defense produced witnesses for the deliberations of a seven-member military jury.

Following the often inexplicable rules of the Military Commissions, the jury members made their own decision about an appropriate sentence for the Canadian, delivering a sentence of 40 years on Sunday. This was a largely symbolic victory for the government, and would only have had any practical significance if it had been  less than the eight years negotiated as an open secret at the heart of the plea deal, but it was still deeply shocking, and particularly so in light of some little-reported facts about Khadr’s case that emerged during his sentencing hearings last week, regarding his appetite for learning and his openness to positive, constructive thinking about the world.

As I explained in a previous article, one of the prosecution’s key witnesses last week was a dubious psychiatrist, Michael Welner, who attempted to portray Khadr as an unrepentant terrorist, and, at one point during his generally hysterical appearance in the Guantánamo courtroom, claimed that Khadr had “read only Harry Potter and the Quran,” and had memorized the latter while “marinating inside [the] radical Islamic community” in Guantánamo.

Even leaving aside, for a moment, the slanderous nature of his comments about the atmosphere within Guantánamo (which is belied by the accounts of those released from the prison — most recently here), and also leaving aside the problems with al-Qaeda terrorists reading the pagan adventures of Harry Potter (which I discussed here), Michael Welner’s appraisal of Khadr’s reading habits was exposed as a lie by Khadr’s defense team.

In what was described by Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald as “a feisty and at times disorganized cross-examination,” one of Khadr’s lawyers, Air Force Maj. Matthew Schwartz, got Welner to “pull from his notes more of [Khadr’s] reading list,” revealing that he had also read Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, and “unnamed thrillers by John Grisham and steamy novels by Danielle Steel.”

If further proof was needed that the attempt to portray Khadr as an unreconstructed terrorist was thoroughly deceptive, this came with the exposure to the court, by Khadr’s defense team, of a two-year exchange of letters between Khadr and Arlette Zinck, an English professor at King’s University College in Edmonton.

In his letters, as the Edmonton Journal explained on Saturday, Khadr “expressed his gratitude” to Zinck “to know I am not alone now,” and discussed other books he had read, including Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. As the Journal also explained, having obtained copies of the letters, which are available here and here, “He often signed off saying he hoped to meet Zinck and King’s students one day and possibly attend the small Christian college.”

The fact that Nelson Mandela’s book left a deep impression on Khadr can be seen from his reference to Mandela in a statement he delivered to the court on Thursday, when he said, “During my time here, as Nelson Mandela says, in prison, the most thing you have is time to think about things. I’ve had a lot of time to think about things. I came to a conclusion that hate, first thing is, you’re not going to gain anything with hate. Second thing, it’s more destructive than it’s constructive. Third thing: I came to a conclusion that love and forgiveness are more constructive and will bring people together and will give them understanding and will solve a lot of problems.”

The Journal also noted that, in a letter in April this year, Khadr wrote a page on his thoughts about the book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, which must have affected him profoundly, as Beah was forced to fight in Sierra Leone as a boy soldier at the age of 13, and, as the Journal described it, “committed terrible violence but survived and was rehabilitated.”

Without dwelling on how neither the US nor Canadian governments had fulfilled their obligation to rehabilitate him, under the terms of the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which obliges signatories to “[r]ecogniz[e] the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities,” and to ensure “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” Khadr wrote:

After I’ve finished reading A Long Way Gone, I was struck by the simplicity, truthfulness and the straight-from-the-heart fact of it. A Long Way Gone is the best example to what humans have reached from horrors they committed to the way they cured it and especially in the child field, a treatment that guaranteed success and cureness, a way that leaves no traces of the horrors that have scarred the soul.

In the most powerful passage, which ought to cause undying shame to those in the United States who have persisted with prosecution of Khadr, or, like the Canadian government, have washed their hands of him, he wrote:

Children’s hearts are like a sponge that will absorb what is around it, like wet cement, soft until it is sculptured in a certain way. A child’s soul is a sacred dough that must be shaped in a holy way.

Describing the relationship between Khadr and Zinck, the Journal explained that Zinck “took on the role of professor, urging Khadr to do a lot of reading and writing so he can one day apply to university as a mature student. She also wrote from her faith, urging him to react to his difficult surroundings with love and strength and remember that ‘God keeps you close.’”

In a telephone interview from Guantánamo on Friday, Zinck said that she “began writing to Khadr in November 2008 because her Christian faith asks people to comfort those in need, including prisoners,” and explained that her inspiration came from the Gospel According to St. Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35, in which “Christ commands His disciples to comfort the sick, feed the hungry and thirsty and provide support for prisoners,” adding that, “Out of that grew the idea to encourage Omar to get an education.”

Describing how it became clear that Khadr is a “voracious reader,” Zinck also explained that the young man she came to know through the letters was a “polite, thoughtful, intelligent person.”

As a result of the exchange of letters, a group of students at King’s University College organized a public meeting to discuss Khadr’s case, at whch 700 people turned up, who “actively pushed” for him to receive a fair trial.

Moreover, on Friday, Khadr told his sentencing hearing at Guantánamo that he would like to attend King’s University College, and Zinck told the hearing she would “write a letter of recommendation for Khadr if he applied to attend the college.”

The following are excerpts from the letters between Zinck and Khadr.

October 23, 2008, Khadr to Zinck:

I got your letter and picture, was very surprised by them. So thank you very much for them, I’m in your debt and what you showed is more than I expected and that you are a true friend and as they say: The true friend is not in the time of ease but in the time of hardship.

January 22, 2009, Khadr to Zinck:

I have received your response so thank you very much … Your letters are like candles, very bright in my hardship and darkness. About myself, what can I say? We hold on to hope in our hearts and the love from others to us and that keeps us going until we reach our happiness.

October 18, 2009, Zinck to Khadr, as part of “a long letter with daily lesson plans and writing assignments, urging him to choose a novel, Huckleberry Finn or Harry Potter, and write an essay”:

See if you can do a little bit each day. You want to strike a balance between challenging yourself and to do a little more than is easy and putting undue pressure on yourself … [D]on’t feel discouraged about the time you are spending in Guantánamo right now. Live it fully. Be kind to those around you. Know that there are many of us here at home who are thinking about you. Right now you have time to read slowly and think deeply. Believe it or not this is a blessing if you will see it as such. I hope this modest plan will help to give your studies shape. Everything is an opportunity to learn, Omar. Some of the world’s most important stories have been written by men in prison. Your circumstances will teach you things that other people will never know. Be a good student of the lessons that life is presenting to you right at this moment. They are precious, uniquely yours and irreplaceable.

February 5, 2010, Zinck to Khadr:

Whenever you are lonesome, remember you have many friends who keep you in their prayers. Each morning at 9 o’clock, I include you in mine. I know you are likely busy and preoccupied these days but I hope you have had time to do some reading. Reading provides an education that no school can provide. Will you take a few minutes sometime before Mr. Edney [one of Khadr’s Canadian civilian lawyers] leaves to write me a one-page essay on whatever aspect of Huckleberry Finn most interests you. Attached are a few words on how to write a good essay … When you come home you can apply to university as a mature student. I wish we could correspond more regularly. I have tried to send a letter by way of Amnesty International but I suspect that did not reach you. Take care, dear Omar, and let me know which books you are going to read next.

February 17, 2010, Khadr to Zinck:

About me, I’m OK. More nonsense (novel) reading than good reading. Here is the list of books I’ve read since our last letter: Great Expectations, The Broker (John Grisham,) A Long Way Gone, Three Cups of Tea, the four books of Twilight series. [Khadr added that he was reading Grisham novels before he got back to “school stuff”]. The problem is some things here are so stressful you need some novels to get you out of this place. Educational things need more peace of mind. But I guess I have to do with what I have, some of this and some of that. On a separate paper, I will try to write something about the book you asked me but don’t get surprised. It’s my first time to write such a thing.

May 23, 2010, Khadr to Zinck:

Thank you for your letter and thanks for the compliment, I don’t think I deserve it. Before I end, I say again your letters are one of the most important things for me down here. I treasure them and reread them, they mean a lot.

July 18, 2010, Zinck to Khadr, on the eve of pre-trial hearings:

Omar, are you sure that this is the moment to fire your US lawyers? … The problem is that the moment you fire your lawyers, the forces of evil and injustice win … [T]hings are moving behind the scenes even if we can’t see them. We need to have faith that something good may yet happen. As you know, Omar, you are a pawn in a high stakes game of chess. If you quit before the trial begins, you lose … Be strong, Omar. Stand tall … Choose to be loving, patient, kind. As Mahatma Gandhi has said, we each need to be the change that we want to see in the world … You have done a wonderful job to date of seeing the best in everyone around you and finding ways to be fully human in an environment that seeks at every turn to deny your humanity. The strongest, most compelling thing you can do is react with LOVE to everything and everyone you encounter. This will take every ounce of strength you have but you will not be alone as you do this important work. God keeps you especially close when people are mean. He takes our suffering and makes something beautiful with it. If you ask for God’s help, He will provide you with strength you did not know you could muster.

The picture of Omar Khadr above is a courtroom sketch by Janet Hamlin, and is reproduced courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

Originally published on Cageprisoners.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Henry Kissinger at the World Economic Forum's 'India Economic Summit', November, 2008, New Delhi. Phot/Wikicommons

There was also a deficiency in imagination likely to circumscribe the value of any study by Kissinger of Kissinger. Asked about his role in the Cambodian war, in which an estimated five hundred thousand people died, he’d said, “I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved.” — Joseph Heller, Good as Gold (Kissinger’s original quote is from William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia)

Fred Branfman has a great article up over at AlterNet pillorying the State Department’s invitation to Henry Kissinger to address a conference on “the American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975.” The conference was scheduled for September 29-30 at the George C. Marshall Conference Center at the U.S. Department of State. Along with bona fide war criminal Kissinger, the other invitees included current Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, and Former Deputy Secretary of State, and Former Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

It was only last April here at The Seminal/Firedoglake that I reported on the declassification of a 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger to “his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor.” Only five days later, former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronnie Moffat were assassinated on the streets of Washington, D.C. by a CIA-supported Chilean secret police killer.

But, as the Obama administration rehabilitation of the odious Kissinger demonstrates, memory is short in Washington, even when there is blood on the streets… unless that blood can be turned in for demagogic currency, as is the case with the deaths on 9/11. To have Kissinger honored as an authority on the Indochinese War is an obscenity of the first order. Branfman recalls some of the essential history:  . . .

Kissinger orchestrated the most massive bombing in world history, dropping 3,984,563 million tons on an area inhabited by some 50 million people, twice the 2 million tons dropped on hundreds of millions through Europe and the Pacific in World War II. He dropped 1.6 million tons on South Vietnam, as many as Lyndon Johnson at the height of U.S. involvement; quadrupled the bombing of Laos, from 454,200 to 1,628,900 million tons; initiated widespread bombing of previously peaceful Cambodia, including B52 carpet bombing of undefended villages, for a total of 600,000-1 million tons; and vastly expanded the bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam….

In Cambodia, Kissinger told Alexander Haig to undertake “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies or anything that moves,” the clearest possible violation of international law requiring the protection of civilians. Two million people in Khmer Rouge zones, as estimated by the U.S. Embassy, were driven underground by massive U.S. bombing that featured regular B52 carpet-bombing of undefended villages.

But when it comes to crimes, we’re just getting started here. Christopher Hitchens positioned part of his career as a would-be prosecutor for war criminal Kissinger. A quick review of just the first part of his March 2001 article at Harpers, “The Making of a War Criminal,” notes Kissinger’s activities. For instance, there was the “recruitment and betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, who were falsely encouraged by him to take up arms against Saddam Hussein in 1972-75, and who were then abandoned to extermination on their hillsides when Saddam Hussein made a diplomatic deal with the Shah of Iran…” Or consider “Kissinger’s orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover for apartheid in South Africa.” Or read Hitchen’s detailed, documentary discussion of Kissinger’s brain-trusting for assassination and coup plotting in Chile.

What Has Hillary Wrought?

Of course, Hillary Clinton deserves her own share of obloquy for inviting Kissinger and friends, including former Kissinger protege Holbrooke and the latter’s former Saigon Foreign Service roommate, the unsavory John Negroponte. (Negroponte worked at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon from 1964-68… uh huh.) One could write an entire column about the war crimes of Mr. Negroponte, who, according to the introduction by the National Security Archive (NSA) to a slew of documents implicating him, as former U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s “sought to undermine regional peace efforts” in the Nicaraguan Civil War. NSA also cites “multiple reports of meetings and conversations [by Negroponte] with Honduran military officers who were instrumental in providing logistical support and infrastructure for CIA covert operations in support of the contras against Nicaragua.”

Holbrooke, of course, was recently implicated in a controversy with General Stanley McChrystal over policy in Afghanistan. MrChrystal got the heave-ho for being injudicious in his comments to a Rolling Stone reporter, and even though Holbrooke has been critical of U.S. goals in Afghanistan, it’s Holbrooke on the State Department podium, while McChrystal is out in the wilderness (for the time being). Branfman notes the ironies, and political agenda, behind the invite:

Clinton has also invited Richard Holbrooke, who as State Department head of Afghanistan/Pakistan policy has learned nothing from history and is repeating precisely the same policies that caused the U.S. to lose in Indochina — support of a corrupt and unpopular regime that cannot stand on its own. Inviting Holbrooke is particularly egregious, because following Obama’s strategy review, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, “perhaps the most pessimistic view came from Richard Holbrooke. “It can’t work,” he said. Lacking even a fraction of the integrity and moral courage of a Daniel Ellsberg, Holbrooke continues to promote in public a policy he privately believes is doomed to fail.

Branfman also notes that Kissinger is on hand to promote his “we lost Vietnam” garbage, claiming it was Congressional betrayal that failed the U.S. mission in Vietnam at the end. And sure enough, Kissinger was true to form at the conference, as reported by WRGW News:

“I believe most of what went wrong in Vietnam we did to ourselves,” said Kissinger, speaking candidly about his Vietnam experience in front of a capacity audience, including the Vietnamese Embassy….

Henry Kissinger… explained that during the Vietnam War “the faith of Americans in each other became destroyed in the process” of America reaching the limits of its foreign policy….

“America wanted compromise, Hanoi wanted victory,” he stated.

According to Dr. Kissinger, lack of support at home ultimately lost the war for South Vietnam and the United States.

Kissinger, Holbrooke, and Negroponte at the podium represent the true face of U.S. diplomacy today, which relies on the nostrums and machinations of an entire post-WWII generation which saw nothing wrong in ruling American Empire by means of mass murder, assassination, and the bombing of civilians. Today, the Obama administration steps up bombings in Pakistan, escalates the war in Afghanistan (as an exit strategy?), and conducts a world-wide Murder, Inc., which grants itself the right to execute without due process American citizens by Hellfire missiles, even as it trumpets secrecy for everything it does.

Obama’s embrace of Kissinger tells you all you need to know about what this administration is about. Behind the special treatment for war criminal Kissinger is the current administration’s aggressive pursuit of war in Afghanistan and military and covert operations around the world.

I try to imagine how the left would have responded if Bush had invited Kissinger to reflect for history upon the Vietnam War. I’d like to think there would have been universal derision. Today, there’s very little outrage expressed by this official government appearance by a bona fide war criminal. Whether it is fealty to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or a U.S. military and national security apparatus that says it stands for democracy but really stands for endless war, the state right to assassinate U.S. critics, and to intervene anywhere in the world that U.S. “interests” are involved, what stands for politics in this country is a joke. Something is very, very rotten at the core of this country. The falsification of history by the very criminals who conducted crimes against humanity is a primary exhibit of the degeneration of political discourse in America.

Originally published on Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Omar Khadr at the age of 14

On August 12, the US administration’s intention to proceed with the war crimes trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, was temporarily delayed when Khadr’s military lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapsed in the courtroom in Guantánamo while cross-questioning a prosecution witness on the first full day of Khadr’s trial by Military Commission.

Lt. Col. Jackson’s collapse was attributed to complications resulting from a gall-bladder operation six weeks previously, but as he was airlifted off the island, and deputy chief defense counsel Brian Broyles acknowledged that Khadr’s trial would be suspended for at least a month, no one in a position of authority — either in the United States or Canada — appeared willing to take the opportunity to find a last-minute way to avoid proceeding with a trial that, to critics, demonstrates only that the Obama administration is incapable of resisting the kind of sweeping and often indiscriminate desire for vengeance that fueled the Bush administration in its response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

If this sounds unnecessary, just consider two salient facts:

1. In the face of international concern about the recruitment of child soldiers in other countries, and attempts to recognize, through treaties and other agreements, that they are deserving not of punishment, but of rehabilitation, the Obama administration — and Stephen Harper’s government in Canada — are making a clear exception in Khadr’s case. This not only flies in the face of their commitment to the United Nations’ Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which includes the agreement that all States Parties who ratify the Protocol “[r]ecogniz[e] the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities,” and are “[c]onvinced of the need [for] the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” but also involves them tacitly subscribing to the outrageous position regarding juvenile prisoners that was adopted by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a press conference in May 2003, after the story first broke that juveniles were held at Guantánamo. On that occasion, Rumsfeld stated, chillingly, “these are not children,” and Gen. Myers, in a weird sporting analogy, added that they “may be juveniles, but they’re not on the Little League team anywhere. They’re on a major league team, and it’s a terrorist team, and they’re in Guantánamo for a very good reason — for our safety, for your safety.”

2. Although Khadr is charged with murder in violation of the law of war for allegedly throwing a hand grenade that killed a US Delta Force soldier, Lt. Col. David Frakt, defense attorney for two other Guantánamo prisoners, Mohamed Jawad and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, explained in April this year that even if Khadr did throw the grenade, “there is no evidence that he violated the law of war in doing so.” In an important analysis of the Commissions’ Congress-approved failings, Lt. Col. Frakt explained that the confusion arose initially because the Bush administration wanted to find a way to ensure that “any attempt to fight Americans or coalition forces was a war crime,” and that Congress, in enacting two pieces of legislation relating to the Military Commissions in 2006 and in 2009, maintained this unjustifiable position by refusing to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate actions during wartime. As Lt. Col. Frakt explained, the Bush administration’s original invented charge for the Commissions — “Murder by an Unprivileged Belligerent” — was, essentially, replaced by the Congress-endorsed “Murder in Violation of the Law of War,” even though it “conflated two different concepts — unprivileged belligerents and war criminals.” He continued:

Under Article 4 of the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention it is clear that while a member of an organized resistance movement or militia may be an unprivileged belligerent (because of not wearing a uniform or failing to carry arms openly, for example) he may still comply with the laws and customs of war, so not all hostile acts committed by unprivileged belligerents are war crimes. Attacks by unprivileged belligerents which comply with the law of war (in that they attack lawful military targets with lawful weapons) may only be tried in domestic courts. In Iraq, for example, insurgents who try to kill Americans by implanting roadside bombs are properly arrested and tried before the Central Criminal Court of Iraq as common criminals. Attacks by unprivileged belligerents which violate the law of war, such as attacks on civilians or soldiers attempting to surrender, or using prohibited weapons like poison gas, can be tried in a war crimes tribunal.

In Khadr’s case, whoever threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer was attacking a lawful military target with a lawful weapon, which makes a mockery of his war crimes trial, but this inconvenient truth remains hidden behind a smokescreen of colorful, though fundamentally irrelevant distractions: whether Khadr actually threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer (which seems impossible to prove), whether he could not have thrown the grenade because he was buried face-down under a pile of rubble (which the prosecution claimed, on that abortive first day of the trial, was a long-standing fiction maintained by the defense), and whether Khadr’s supposed confessions about his involvement in al-Qaeda were tainted by torture.

In a nine-page ruling issued on August 17 (PDF), Judge Parrish turned down Khadr’s motion to suppress any self-incriminating statements as “the product of torture, involuntary [and] unreliable,” finding that “There is no credible evidence that the accused was ever tortured,” and adding, “While the accused was 15 years old at the time he was captured, he was not immature for his age,” but all this really demonstrates is how spectacularly he has missed the point. Held for two years without access to a lawyer, for three years without ever being charged, and at no point treated as a juvenile deserving of rehabilitation, Khadr’s entire experience of US detention has been lawless and abusive, and, in any case, it should be irrelevant whether a 15-year old apparently made self-incriminating statements, when the focus should be on his father, Ahmed Khadr, an alleged fundraiser for Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for indoctrinating his child in the first place.

There are no circumstances in which President Obama comes out of this well. Instead, the decision to proceed with Khadr’s war crimes trial will forever stand as a stark example of his inability to stand up and publicly repudiate the wayward policies of his predecessor. However, as much blame must attach to the government of Stephen Harper, which has persistently refused to demand Khadr’s return to Canada, even though, in January this year, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that the involvement of Canadian agents in interrogations of Khadr at Guantánamo constituted “state conduct that violates the principles of fundamental justice.” The Court added, “Interrogation of a youth, to elicit statements about the most serious criminal charges while detained in these conditions and without access to counsel … offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.”

This was in marked contrast to Judge Parrish’s view of Khadr’s interrogations by American operatives, but sadly Canada’s Supreme Court stopped short of ordering the government to demand Khadr’s return, limply concluding that it was up to the government to “shape a response that reconciled its foreign policy imperatives with its constitutional obligations to Khadr,” as columnist Chantal Hébert explained in the Toronto Star as Khadr’s trial spluttered briefly to life.

Stephen Harper, of course, put Canada’s “foreign policy imperatives” above Khadr’s rights, just as President Bush did with America’s “foreign policy imperatives” after the 9/11 attacks, and as President Obama has continued to do — although in his case, his refusal to do the right thing seems to be driven more by a desire not to stir up uncomfortable domestic troubles.

The result, while Lt. Col. Jon Jackson recuperates, is that most commentators are still entranced by the sideshow of grenades and torture, and very few people have, like Lt. Col. David Frakt, gazed resolutely at the lawless void at the heart of the circus, and concluded that the show must not go on.

Originally published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Doctors of the Dark Side exposes the scandal behind the torture scandal — how psychologists and physicians devised, supervised and covered up the torture of detainees in U.S. controlled military prisons. Writer/Director Martha Davis (Interrogation Psychologists) spent four years investigating the controversy. Lisa Rinzler (Pollock), award-winning Director of Photography, gives the feature length film a dark and haunting quality. Actors demonstrate enhanced interrogation methods and the doctor’s role according to declassified CIA and Department of Defense documents. The stories of three detainees and the doctors involved in their torture reveal, both for detainee health care and the integrity of the professions, the cost of putting doctors virtually in charge of detainee interrogations. Visit the Doctors of the Darkside website at: www.doctorsofthedarkside.com.

Omar Khadr at the age of 14

In the last week, Omar Khadr, the only Western citizen still held in Guantánamo, has sacked his US lawyers and stated that he will boycott his forthcoming trial by Military Commission, scheduled to begin on August 10. He has also refused to have anything to do with a plea deal that was being negotiated between the prosecution and defense lawyers, which apparently involved him serving five years of a 30-year sentence if he were to plead guilty to throwing a grenade that killed a US Delta Force soldier, Sgt. Christopher Speer, on the day of his capture after a firefight in Afghanistan nearly eight years ago, on July 27, 2002.

From a legal point of view, Khadr’s decision to boycott his forthcoming trial appears resolutely counter-productive. Of the three prisoners convicted in the Commissions’ miserable eight-year history (a fourth, Ibrahim al-Qosi, awaits sentencing after a plea deal last week), only one — Ali Hamza al-Bahlul — received a punitive sentence, being sentenced to life in prison in November 2008, after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense.

Khadr’s rebellion may yet play to his advantage, but before considering that, it is worth recounting how he reached this point, and what his rebellion means.

At the time of his capture, Khadr was just 15 years old. Seriously wounded after the firefight in which Sgt. Speer — and all of Khadr’s companions — were killed, he was then accused of having thrown the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer, even though subsequent accounts have indicated that he was face-down and unconscious under a pile of rubble at the time, and was subjected to interrogations, threats and insensitive and sometimes abusive treatment until his transfer to Guantánamo, soon after his 16th birthday on September 19. 2002. In Guantánamo, the same pattern of interrogations, threats and abusive treatment continued.

Khadr’s abuse as a juvenile, in defiance of international treaties

At no point was Khadr treated as a juvenile prisoner (those under 18 years of age when their alleged crimes take place), caught up in war at the instigation of an adult — in this case, his father, Ahmed Khadr, an alleged financier for Osama bin Laden, who had repeatedly shuttled his family from Canada to Afghanistan and Pakistan during Khadr’s childhood. It was, after all, Ahmed Khadr who bore the ultimate responsibility for letting his son spend time with a group of men who, on July 27, 2002, took him with them when they went to visit colleagues in Ab Khail, a small village outside Khost, where they were subsequently ambushed by US soldiers.

Of particular relevance here is the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which was adopted by resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations on May 25, 2000, and entered into force on February 12, 2002. The US ratified the Optional Protocol on December 23, 2002, five months after Khadr was seized, but then spectacularly failed to fulfill its obligations, which includes the agreement that all States Parties who ratified the Protocol “[r]ecogniz[e] the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities,” and are “[c]onvinced of the need [for] the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

The US also ignored a detailed plan for the care of juveniles in Guantánamo, “Recommended Course of Action for Reception and Detention of Individuals Under 18 Years of Age” (PDF), dated January 14, 2003, which was drawn up by four doctors at Guantánamo, and provided detailed guidance on how juveniles should be treated. The document, which I discussed in an article in October 2008, began by noting, “All efforts should be made to keep those in the pediatric age range [those under 18] from undergoing detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” and pointed out, “People less than age 18 years are emotionally, psychologically, and physically dynamic and complex. If it is determined that they must be detained, then all aspects of their transport, in-processing, and detainment should be specific for this age group.” Much of the rest of the document described, in detail, how juvenile prisoners must be housed and treated, and how to meet their psychological and educational needs.

However, instead of being rehabilitated, Khadr was subjected to the full weight of the oppressive and illegal regime at Guantánamo, and was also abandoned by the Canadian government, which sent interrogators to Guantánamo in February 2003. As his Canadian lawyers, Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney, noted when they released a video of the interrogations in July 2008 (which was provided to them during Canadian court proceedings), although Omar was clearly “suffering from severe emotional problems connected with his detention and interrogation, crying heavily on more than one occasion,” the Canadian officials “dismissed his claims of abuse on the flimsiest of pretexts,” writing, in one of the reports, that his allegations of torture at the US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan “did not ring true,” even though, as we now know, at least two prisoners were killed by US soldiers just months after Khadr was transferred to Guantánamo.

Khadr’s only power – the power to dismiss his lawyers

As a result of all these factors, when two US lawyers, Muneer Ahmad and Rick Wilson of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at American University, finally got to meet him in October 2004, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2004, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights, “[s]ecuring [his] trust did not prove easy,” as I explained in a profile of Khadr in November 2007, “primarily because suspicion and paranoia were built into the fabric of Guantánamo.” Ahmad recalled that, when he finally met Omar, his first thought was, “He’s just a little kid.” In August 2006, an article in Rolling Stone explained, “Omar was gaunt and pale, in a state of everlasting exhaustion, his senses starved by solitude. He had large gunshot-wound scars on his back and chest, and smaller scars over most of his body, several parts of which still held shrapnel.”

Significantly, as Ahmad also explained, although Khadr gradually opened up to them, “reveal[ing] himself to be very shy and curious and, in most ways, still a child, with a child’s sweetness and credulous charm,” he also realized, as Michelle Shephard explained in the Toronto Star on Wednesday, that “the only control [he] could wield in prison was whether he saw his lawyers, and if he would let them represent him. Interrogations and daily routines were non-negotiable. Even hunger strikes were unsuccessful due to Guantánamo’s policy of force-feeding striking detainees.”

In November 2005, just over a year after his first visit from his lawyers, Khadr was charged in the first incarnation of the Military Commission trial system, which, in November 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisors thought would be a useful method for trying terror suspects without due process, using material derived from torture, and, if required, subjecting them swiftly to the death penalty. It didn’t work out that way, of course, In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that the Commissions violated the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they were then revived by Congress, and in February 2007 Khadr was charged again. This time around, proceedings limped on until January 2009, when, on his first day in office, President Obama suspended the Commissions, but by May he had concluded that they ought to be revived with the aid of Congress, and in November last year Khadr was charged for the third time.

As the Commissions have struggled to establish their legitimacy, and have stumbled from one disaster to another, plagued by resignations, internal problems and inconsistencies, and a fundamental misconception that any of the charges faced by the prisoners are recognizable as war crimes, Khadr has repeatedly resorted to the only power he has — the power to dismiss his lawyers — even as those men and women did their best to defend him, both in court hearings and in the media, pointing out that he was a child when seized, that he was tortured, that he did not throw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer, and that the United States ought to be ashamed for even contemplating putting a former juvenile prisoner on trial for war crimes.

Khadr’s defiance and his sense of justice

Khadr’s actions may seem counter-intuitive, and in some ways may be nothing more than a frustrated child in a man’s body lashing out in a manner that reveals the anguish beneath his generally calm exterior. Looked at another way, however, it is easy to understand why Khadr has just sacked his US lawyers (again), and why he believes that the Commissions are rigged and that the US government is incapable of delivering justice in his case. His reasoning permeates the statement he read out in court on Monday, in which he declared:

[Y]our honor I’m boycotting this Military Commission because:

* Firstly the unfairness and unjustice of it. I say this because not one of the lawyers I’ve had, or human rights organizations, or any person, ever say that this commission is fair or looking for justice, but on the contrary they say it’s unfair and unjust and that it has been constructed to convict detainees, not to find the truth (so how can I ask for justice from a process that does not have it or offer it) and to accomplish political and public goals. And what I mean is when I was offered a plea bargain it was up to 30 years which I was going to spend only five years so I asked why the 30 years. I was told it makes the US government look good in the public’s eyes and other political causes.

* Secondly: The unfairness of the rules that will make a person so depressed that he will admit to all[e]gations made upon him or take a plea offer that will satisfy the US government and get him the least sentence possible and l[e]gitimize this sham process. Therefore, I will not willingly let the U.S. gov use me to [fulfill] its goal. I have been used [too] many times when I was a child and that’s [why] I’m here taking blame and paying for things I didn’t have a choice in doing but was told to do by elders.

* Lastly I will not take any plea offer because it will give excuse for the gov for torturing and abusing me when I was a child.

It’s all there: Torture and abuse by the US when he was a child; the refusal by the US authorities to recognize that he was manipulated by those older than him; and a refusal to accept a plea deal that would make the US look good, that would appear to validate an unjust process, and that would involve him confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.

US discomfort, Canada’s shameful history – and why the Harper government needs to act now

I don’t doubt that Khadr’s defiance is mixed with confusion, but it just may be that boycotting his pending trial will force both the American and the Canadian governments to think long and hard about what to do now.

For Barack Obama, the boycott threatens to turn a situation that is already problematical into one that is beyond contemplation. When Ali Hamza al-Bahlul refused to mount a defense and was convicted in the dying days of the Bush administration, no one cared, but in Khadr’s case it is different. As Michelle Shephard explained on Wednesday, his status as a child soldier “has already made many in Washington uncomfortable,” and a decision to boycott his trial may make it “politically untenable.” Jennifer Turner, a researcher who was observing Khadr’s hearing for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Shephard by email, “Politically, it’s a nightmare. Instead of restoring the rule of law, Obama would be presiding over the one-sided prosecution of a child, taken to a conflict zone by his family and mistreated for years in US detention.”

Even more pertinently, Khadr’s boycott may finally provoke action from the Canadian government, which, throughout this whole sordid story, has behaved appallingly. Despite signing the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict on July 7, 2000, and advocating on the world stage for the rights of child soldiers from other countries, the government has persistently refused to call for the return of Khadr to Canada, and has, over the years, faced mounting condemnation in the courts.

In April 2005, critics of the government’s stance in Canada were appalled when William Hooper, the assistant director of operation for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, admitted that the information obtained from Khadr’s interrogation at Guantánamo had been shared with the US authorities, without any attempt having been made to ascertain whether it would be used in a case involving the death penalty, and in July 2008, when Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney released the video of Khadr’s interrogations by Canadian agents, they were able to do so because, on May 23, 2008, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that the government had acted illegally, contravening Article 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice,” and ordered the videotapes released.

A month later, on June 25, 2008, there was more trouble for the government, when Mr. Justice Richard Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada ruled (PDF) that a report from a visit to Khadr in March 2004 by Jim Gould of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, which nonchalantly mentioned how Khadr had been subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation for three weeks before his visit, “in an effort to make him more amenable and willing to talk,” constituted a breach of the UN Convention against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.

In April 2009, the Federal Court of Canada revisited the case, reiterating that Khadr’s rights had been violated, and concluding that the government had a “duty to protect” Khadr and should request his return to Canada as soon as possible. In August 2009, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the ruling, and in January 2010, in another unanimous 9–0 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada also upheld the ruling, concluding:

The deprivation of [Khadr's] right to liberty and security of the person is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.

The Supreme Court stopped short of ordering the government to seek Khadr’s return, accepting, lamely, that it was up to senior officials to ascertain how to balance foreign policy requirements with the need to respect Khadr’s constitutional rights. Predictably, given its past behavior, the government decided that Khadr’s rights counted for nothing, prompting another round of litigation. Last week, Mr. Justice Russell Zinn gave the government seven days to come up with a list of ways in which they intended to protect Khadr’s rights, but on Monday, as Khadr prepared to deliver his statement in Guantánamo, the government filed another last-minute appeal.

Whether evasion on the part of the government is endlessly possible remains to be seen, but it now seems likely that, with Khadr’s boycott looming, the Obama administration may finally seek to exert pressure on Prime Minister Stephen Harper. As Michelle Shephard explained on Wednesday, such has been the Canadian government’s aversion to dealing constructively with Khadr’s case that government officials were not even involved in the discussions regarding a plea deal, meaning that the whole arrangement of serving five years of a 30-year sentence “was never guaranteed.”

Khadr may not have known this when he sprang his surprise on his latest lawyers, but, as Dennis Edney explained, “The deal was dependent on a number of things, including whether Canada would take him. And Canada was never at the table.”

With a chronic travesty of justice looming, it is time for Canada to sit at the table with the Americans, and to work out how to secure Khadr’s release without the embarrassment of a war crimes trial. Unlike every other Western citizen, Omar Khadr has been spurned for too long by his home country, and it is time for Stephen Harper to secure his return, and to bring to an end the desperate defiance, born of frustration and isolation, of a former child prisoner who has lost a third of his life in an experimental prison outside the law.

Originally published on Cageprisoners.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

#1) Wherever there is a war, look for CIA/IMF/private military war profiteers covertly funding and supporting BOTH sides in order to keep the wars raging and the profits rolling in. As former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell explained: “Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn.”

Here’s an important glimpse of truth to seep through last week in the NY Times, via Raw Story:

US-backed ‘bribes’ in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban

On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies “are using American money to bribe the Taliban” to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a “series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents,” the Times said.

“The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops,” [Kucinich] said…. The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who “believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.” [read more]

#2) On top of that report, Sunday’s headlines read, “Pakistani spy agency supports Taliban:”

Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.

The findings could heighten tension between the two countries and raise further questions about U.S. success in Afghanistan since Pakistani cooperation is seen as key to defeating the Taliban, which seized power in Kabul in the 1990s with Islamabad’s support.

U.S. officials have suggested in the past that current or former members of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, have maintained links to the Taliban despite the government’s decision to denounce the group in 2001 under U.S. pressure. [read more]

First off, these two reports are really not news at all. Reports of American tax dollars ending up in the hands of the Taliban have been coming out since the start of the war and the ISI, as the CIA has been well aware of for years now, has been playing both sides of this war and is pivotal in keeping the war going. Secondly, I have long wondered when the CIA / US military would start exposing all of this in the mainstream propaganda press as a pretext to further expand the war into Pakistan.

#3) As a result of all this, and not surprising at all to people who were paying close attention to Obama’s surge strategy, costs and death counts are quickly rising. Jim Lobe reports from Afghanistan that the “News is Bad.”

While U.S. officials insist they are making progress in reversing the momentum built up by the Taliban insurgency over the last several years, the latest news from Afghanistan suggests the opposite may be closer to the truth.

Even senior military officials are conceding privately that their much-touted new counterinsurgency strategy of “clear, hold and build” in contested areas of the Pashtun southern and eastern parts of the country are not working out as planned despite the “surge” of some 20,000 additional U.S. troops over the past six months.

Casualties among the nearly 130,000 U.S. and other NATO troops now deployed in Afghanistan are also mounting quickly. [read more]

#4) In a propaganda effort to spin away from all the latest bad news, the desperate US military has pulled this dusty old news report out of their back-pocket and launched a psychological operation in the NY Times to give a positive spin in hopes of further manipulating US public opinion:

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves…. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. [read more]

In the process of this latest propaganda campaign, the Pentagon has unwittingly exposed two things that I will now jump on. A) The real reason why we are in this war to begin with: it’s all about natural resources. And B) All the BS statements about these “previously unknown deposits” clearly prove, yet again, that the NY Times is only too happy to play the role of a straight-up propaganda paper. For those of us paying attention, we’ve been reading reports about these minerals for the past decade! Roland Sheppard just sent this along:

“The New York Times, when it was beating the drums of war in 2002, failed to mention that the USGS published a report, at that time, Mines and Mineral Occurrences of Afghanistan Compiled by G.J. Orris and J.D. Bliss. Open-File Report 02-110. On page 16, they list as ‘Significant Minerals or Materials’ magnetite, hematite, chalcopyrite, covellite, chalcocite, cuprite, malachite, azurite, molybdenite, and native gold – lithium is mentioned on page 10 under ‘References.’”

So, from the very beginning, as I went into further detail in the past, the war in Afghanistan is all about resources. I’ll get back to the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” in a minute, here’s a brief excerpt from my prior report on another key resource in the region:

ORIGINS OF THE AFGHANISTAN OCCUPATION: “STRATEGY OF THE SILK ROUTE”

Up until 9/11, oil companies, with the help of the Bush administration, were desperately trying to work out a deal with the Taliban to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. One of the world’s richest oil fields is on the eastern shore of the Caspian sea just north of Afghanistan. The Caspian oil reserves are of top strategic importance in the quest to control the earth’s remaining oil supply. The US government developed a policy called “The Strategy of the Silk Route.”

The policy was designed to lock out Russia, China and Iran from the oil in this region. This called for U.S. corporations to construct an oil pipeline running through Afghanistan. Since the mid 1990s, a consortium of U.S. companies led by Unocal have been pursing this goal. A feasibility study of the Central Asian pipeline project was performed by Enron. Their study concluded that as long as the country was split among fighting warlords the pipeline could not be built. Stability was necessary for the $4.5 billion project and the U.S. believed that the Taliban would impose the necessary order. The U.S. State Department and Pakistan’s ISI, impressed by the Taliban movement to cut a pipeline deal, agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war for control of Afghanistan. [read more]

Then of course we have the war in Iraq, again from my previous report:

ORIGINS OF THE IRAQ OCCUPATION: CHENEY ENERGY TASK FORCE

As an AlterNet report put it: “In January 2000, 10 days into President George W. Bush’s first term, representatives of the largest oil and energy companies joined the new administration to form the Cheney Energy Task Force.”

Secret Task Force documents that were dated March 2001, which were obtained by Judical Watch in 2003 after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, contained “a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects…” They also had: “… a series of lists titled ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts‘ naming more than 60 companies from some 30 countries with contracts in various stages of negotiation.

None of contracts were with American nor major British companies, and none could take effect while the U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iraq remained in place. Three countries held the largest contracts: China, Russia and France — all members of the Security Council and all in a position to advocate for the end of sanctions.

Were Saddam to remain in power and the sanctions to be removed, these contracts would take effect, and the U.S. and its closest ally would be shut out of Iraq’s great oil bonanza.”

Project Censored highlighted a Judicial Watch report that stated: “Documented plans of occupation and exploitation predating September 11 confirm heightened suspicion that U.S. policy is driven by the dictates of the energy industry. According to Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, ‘These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public.’”

So that’s the oil angle of this resource war, now back to the lithium angle. This longest war in US history is very similar to the even longer wars raging in Northern Africa, another resource rich paradise of death and destruction. In the late 1990s, CIA-connected corporations like Bechtel worked with NASA to conduct infrared satellite studies to discover mineral rich regions throughout the world. Other than the discoveries in South-Central Asia (Af-Pak region), Northern Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo region), emerged as a key source for future resources. In particular, the mineral coltan, which like lithium, is vital to powering most computer technology. Since Bechtel and NASA made these discoveries, a report from The International Rescue Committee revealed that an astonishing 5.4 MILLION Africans have been killed in the region. For some background, here’s an excellent report from July 2001, in Dollars and Sense magazine:

The Business of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan

“This is all money,” says a Western mining executive, his hand sweeping over a geological map toward the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is explaining why, in 1997, he and planeloads of other businessmen were flocking to the impoverished country and vying for the attention of then-rebel leader Laurent Kabila. The executive could just as accurately have said, ‘This is all war.’

The interplay among a seemingly endless supply of mineral resources, the greed of multinational corporations desperate to cash in on that wealth, and the provision of arms and military training to political tyrants has helped to produce the spiral of conflicts that have engulfed the continent – what many regard as “Africa’s First World War.” These minerals are vital to maintaining U.S. military dominance…” [read more]

For further detail, here’s Project Censored’s 2003 report:

American Companies Exploit the Congo:

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been labeled “the richest patch of earth on the planet.” The valuable abundance of minerals and resources in the DRC has made it the target of attacks from U.S.-supported neighboring African countries Uganda and Rwanda.

The DRC is mineral rich with millions of tons of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium, niobium, and tantalum also known as coltan. Coltan has become an increasingly valuable resource to American corporations. Coltan is used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and capacitators used to maintain the electrical charge in computer chips….

The DRC holds 80% of the world’s coltan reserves, more than 60% of the world’s cobalt and is the world’s largest supplier of high-grade copper. With these minerals playing a major part in maintaining US military dominance and economic growth, minerals in the Congo are deemed vital US interests.

Historically, the U.S. government identified sources of materials in Third World countries, and then encouraged U.S. corporations to invest in and facilitate their production. Dating back to the mid-1960s, the U.S. government literally installed the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, which gave U.S. corporations access to the Congo’s minerals for more than 30 years. However, over the years Mobutu began to limit access by Western corporations, and to control the distribution of resources. In 1998, U.S. military-trained leaders of Rwanda and Uganda invaded the mineral-rich areas of the Congo. The invaders installed illegal colonial-style governments which continue to receive millions of dollars in arms and military training from the United States. Our government and a $5 million Citibank loan maintains the rebel presence in the Congo. Their control of mineral rich areas allows western corporations, such as American Mineral Fields, to illegally mine. Rwandan and Ugandan control over this area is beneficial for both governments and for the corporations that continue to exploit the Congo’s natural wealth….

San Francisco based engineering firm Bechtel Inc. established strong ties in the rebel zones as well. Bechtel drew up an inventory of the Congo’s mineral resources free of charge, and also paid for NASA satellite studies of the country for infared maps of its minerals. Bechtel estimates that the DRC’s mineral ores alone are worth $157 billion dollars. Through coltan production, the Rwandans and their allies are bringing in $20 million revenue a month. Rwanda’s diamond exports went from 166 carats in 1998 to 30,500 in 2000. Uganda’s diamond exports jumped from approximately 1,500 carats to about 11,300. The final destination for many of these minerals is the U.S.” [read more]

And to close this out, let me return to “The Business of War” report by Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan. As you will see, you always have to follow the money, the bankers and our friends at the IMF are always at the root of global death and destruction, and are the true Masters of War:

“Today, the United States claims that it has no interest in the DRC other than a peaceful resolution to the current war. Yet U.S. businessmen and politicians are still going to extreme lengths to gain and preserve sole access to the DRC’s mineral resources. And to protect these economic interests, the U.S. government continues to provide millions of dollars in arms and military training to known human-rights abusers and undemocratic regimes. Thus, the DRC’s mineral wealth is both an impetus for war and an impediment to stopping it….

During his historic visit to Africa in 1998, President Clinton praised Presidents Kagame and Musevini as leaders of the ‘African Renaissance,’ just a few months before they launched their deadly invasion of the DRC with U.S. weapons and training….

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have knowingly contributed to the war effort. The international lending institutions praised both Rwanda and Uganda for increasing their gross domestic product (GDP), which resulted from the illegal mining of DRC resources. Although the IMF and World Bank were aware that the rise in GDP coincided with the DRC war, and that it was derived from exports of natural resources that neither country normally produced, they nonetheless touted both nations as economic success stories….

In January 2000, Chevron – the corporation that named an oil tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice – announced a three-year, $75 million spending program in the DRC, thus challenging the notion that war discourages foreign investment…. As one investor put it, “It is a good moment to come: it is in difficult times that you can get the most advantage.”….

In April 2001, a scathing UN report argued that Presidents Kagame and Museveni are “on the verge of becoming the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The two leaders, the report alleged, have turned their armies into armies for business….

According to East African media reports, U.S. diplomats continue to view Rwanda and Uganda as “strategic allies in the Great Lakes region” and “would not want to upset relations with them at this time.” …. The IMF and World Bank have also indicated that their policies toward Rwanda and Uganda will remain unchanged….”

Famed two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient US Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler accurately summed up the situation when he said: “I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism…. The general public shoulders the bill. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones, Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

Sing it with me:

“Come you masters of war…

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know,

I can see through your mask…”

Read more of David DeGraw’s work at DavidDeGraw.org.

David DeGraw, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is an investigative journalist who has been featured in many publications and websites. He is the founder and editor of AmpedStatus.com, editorial director of MediaChannel.org and author of The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States.