Dick Bennett's second newsletter on terrorism

WAR ON TERRORISM NEWSLETTER #2‏
From: Omnicenter Communications (omninews@listserv.uark.edu) on behalf of Dick Bennett (jbennet@uark.edu)
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OMNI NEWSLETTER #2 ON THE WAR ON “TERRORISM,” August 4, 2008, FOR WE, THE PEOPLE AND A CULTURE OF PEACE, COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT (Number 1 Jan. 8, 2008)



OMNI SEEKS A WORLD FREE OF WAR AND THE THREAT OF WAR, A SOCIETY WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, A COMMUNITY WHERE EVERY PERSON’S POTENTIAL MAY BE FULFILLED, AN EARTH RESTORED. GRASSROOTS NONVIOLENCE, WORLD PEACE, HUMAN RIGHTS, SOCIAL and ECONOMIC JUSTICE, ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP PROTECTING SPECIES AND THE EARTH. These are OMNI’s ideals. Read our brochure and our newsletters, attend our Steering Committee, become an active member of one or more of our committees, participate in our dozens of activities to see how these broad goals are realized in action.



SEE IMPERIALISM AND TORTURE NEWSLETTERS.

SENATOR LINCOLN (202) 224-4843 Fax: (202) 228-1371.

Fayetteville office: 251-1380

Senator Mark Pryor: Phone: (202) 224-2353 Fax: (202) 228-0908

CONGRESSMAN Boozman: Lowell office: 479-725-0400.

DC address: 1708 Longworth House Office Bldng., Washington, DC 20515; 202-225-4301.



CONTENTS

Political Prisoners

Prison Ships

Blum’s Anti-Empire Reports

Permanent War

Rigged Trials at Gitmo

An Innocent Man in Guantanamo

Al-Qaeda Myth

Blame Anthrax on Al-Queda

“War on Terror”: 5 Years of US Terror

US War Crimes/Wars of Aggression

Repression USA: Martial Law

Al-Marri

Homegrown Terrorist

Two Books

War Crimes



80,000 POLITICAL PRISONERS FOR US WAR ON TERRORISM?

[See my Political Prisoners and Trials: A Worldwide Annotated Bibliographjy, 1900 through 1993. If you ask the average U.S. citizen if the US has or had political prisoners, the reply is likely to be no. But our leaders have imprisoned thousands of our fellow citizens for their beliefs—trade unionists, suffragettes, communists, socialists, conscientious objectors, anti-war demonstrators, civil rights protestors, and many more. Since the beginning of WWII, concern for morality and rights have often collapsed before one illegal invasion and intervention after the other against one fabricated enemy after the other. The rhetoric of morality and rights remained but the reality was war and empire. The latest enemies are the “terrorists.”]



Subject: US rendition, detention of suspected terrorists
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 12:32:13 +0200

"By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have
been 'through the system' since 2001..."

from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights

“US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships”
· Report says 17 boats used, · MPs seek details of UK role, · Europe attacks 42-day plan
By Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, Monday June 2 2008

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an
attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention
without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and
related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.
[These are the opening paragraphs of a longer article.]
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday June 02 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 00:01 on June 02 2008.


WILLIAM BLUM

Anti-Empire Report, March 3, 2008
http://killinghope.org/aer55.htm

Blum authored Rogue State and Killing Hope on the long history of illegal US aggressions/invasions. See Imperialism newsletters for more of Blum’s Reports.



PERMANENT WAR

“Tom Ridge, the former chief of the Homeland Security Department, said… that the war on terror is likely to last for decades, much like the Cold War, adding: ‘For every [Osama] bin Laden, there’s a bin Laden wannabe. And for every al-Qaida, there’s a like organization.” ADG (6-23-08).



“Rigged Trials at Gitmo” by Ross Tuttle, The Nation (March 10, 2008). This is a powerful indictment of the moral and legal outrages committed by the Bush Admin. at Guantanamo. Google: Tuttle Ross Rigged Trials and Gitmo. Call our Congressional deleg. Write a letter to editor. Raise the necessary noise until this cancer is excised and the perpetrators, beginning at the top, are removed from the government and exposed for war crimes.



“Five Years of My Life” by Peter Meroth and Uli Rauss in Amnesty International (Spring 2008), about the innocent German national Murat Kurnaz kidnapped in Pakistan , sold as a terror suspect to the U.S. military for $3000, and sent to Guantanamo, where en suffered 5 years of torture and not released until in 2006 even though US and German authorities had determined in 2002 that he was innocent. Watch for his memoir, soon to be published in the U.S. For news and action opportunities from AI USA’s Denounce Torture campaign, visit www.amnestyusa.org/torture.



THE AL-QAEDA MYTH

“The Power of Nightmares”: Excellent BBC production dissecting the Al Quaeda myth. Bo



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2081592330319789254&q=the+power+of+nightmares&total=582&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2



“FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials,”BY JAMES GORDON M EEKS, DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Saturday, August 2nd 2008, 6:32 PM

WASHINGTON - In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

"They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, "There may be some possible link" to Bin Laden, adding, "I wouldn't put it past him." Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden's henchmen were trained "how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together."

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. "Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with," the ex-FBI official said. "They couldn't go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next."jmeek@nydailynews.com


“WAR ON TERROR”: FIVE YEARS of SL AUGHTER

Speech by Abel Tomlinson March 6, 2008, at UA Student Union for OMNI UA’s Drop Books Not Bombs rally.





CONSEQUENCE OF “WAR ON TERROR”: MARTIAL LAW USA



“Martial Law, Inc.: KBR: A Halliburton Subsidiary

By Andrew G. Marshall

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8258

Global Research, March 5, 2008 (from Tom M)

KBR, or Kellogg Brown & Root, was a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation until 2007, when bad publicity and indictments against KBR forced Halliburton to sell its shares in KBR.

"As the preparations of martial law are being put in place, it is of vital important to identify the specific corporations involved in this process. Administrations change, politicians go in and out of power, but the corporation is a consistent powerhouse. In this case, KBR has been a force to be reckoned with since the rise of Lyndon Johnson. Today, it has reached new heights. It was necessary to examine the recent history of this company’s activities, much the same as identifying a person’s own history and experiences to account for their present personality: so as to better understand their actions today. Given KBR’s history related to war and violence, more light should be shed on their current activities with the Department of Homeland Security, as morality is not a concept KBR seems to understand."





AL-MARRI HELD FOR SIX YEARS IN A MILITARY BRIG
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer

If his cell were at Guantanamo Bay, the prisoner would be just one of hundreds of suspected terrorists detained offshore, where the U.S. says the Constitution does not apply.

But Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is a U.S. resident being held in a South Carolina military brig; he is the only enemy combatant held on U.S. soil. That makes his case very different.

Al-Marri's capture six years ago might be the Bush administration's biggest domestic counterterrorism success story. Authorities say he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent living in middle America, researching poisonous gasses and plotting a cyberattack.

To justify holding him, the government claimed a broad interpretation of the president's wartime powers, one that goes beyond warrantless wiretapping or monitoring banking transactions. Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely. [I excised a large section from this point on to the last par.]

Whatever the decision, the case seems destined for the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the first military trials are set to begin soon against detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Marri may get one, too. Or he may get put back into the civilian court system. For now, he waits. On the Net: Documents and information from al-Marri's defense team: http://tinyurl.com/6kp58o (from Mike T)




(From Tom M)

Are You a Homegrown Terrorist?





TWO BOOKS
War with No End by John Berger, et al., protesting the “war on terror.” Verso, 2008.
The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn. Verso, 2008. Recounts the devastation of post-Saddam Iraq, new edition through 2007.
US administrations have scattered cluster bombs throughout the world, where they continue to kill. Work to ban all use in civilian areas. Templates at www.fcnl.org
War Crimes: Goose and Gander
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 13 March 2006
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his jail cell at The Hague Saturday. Since 2001, he had been on trial for genocide in Bosnia, and war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Although many have already adjudged him guilty, we will never hear the official verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
We will also never see a trial in the ICTY for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright or Wesley Clark for the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Nor will George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld be prosecuted by an international tribunal for their war crimes in Iraq.
NATO's invasion of Yugoslavia was a war of aggression that violated the United Nations Charter. It was not undertaken in self-defense nor did it carry the approval of the Security Council. Between 1500 and 2000 civilians were killed and many thousands injured. When I visited Belgrade a year after the NATO bombing, I saw schools, hospitals, bridges, libraries and homes reduced to rubble. The ICTY statute prohibits the targeting of civilians. And even though it also forbids the use of poisonous weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering, NATO used depleted uranium and cluster bombs, whose devastating character is widely known. NATO also targeted a petrochemical complex, releasing carcinogens into the air that reached 10,600 times the acceptable safety level.
The American Association of Jurists and a group of Canadian lawyers and law professors filed a war crimes complaint against NATO leaders in the ICTY. Yet that tribunal conducted only a perfunctory investigation of the serious charges. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticized the ICTY for failing to thoroughly investigate.
By denouncing the International Criminal Court, Team Bush has ensured that US leaders will never be held to account for war crimes. Although virtually every Western democracy has ratified the statute under which the Court operates, the United States has thumbed its nose at this monumental international justice system.
Bush has reason to fear prosecution. He has used cluster bombs, depleted uranium, white phosphorous and napalm. And the torture of prisoners in US custody also constitutes a war crime. His war on Iraq is a war of aggression.
After the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing ... to initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal, labeled the crime of aggression "the greatest menace of our times."
For the first time, at Nuremberg, individuals were held criminally accountable for war crimes and waging a war of aggression. Japanese leaders were also tried for atrocities committed during World War II, in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
Yet US leaders who were responsible for some of the most heinous war crimes ever committed - the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and 66 other Japanese cities - were never brought to justice.
Only the vanquished Germans and Japanese were put on trial. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, dissenting at the Tokyo Tribunal, called this "victor's justice."
Indeed, Robert McNamara, who participated in the bombing of Japan during World War II, admitted in the film Fog of War that he and General Curtis LeMay would have been tried for war crimes if the US had lost the war. He said, "LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He ... and I'd say I ... were behaving as war criminals."
It is no accident that the Iraqi Special Tribunal where Saddam Hussein is currently on trial only has jurisdiction over Iraqi citizens for acts committed prior to May 1, 2003, the day the US-UK occupation of Iraq began. The United States opposed sending Hussein to an international tribunal, and manipulated the Iraqi tribunal to prevent any US leaders from being tried for their war crimes in Iraq.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. But the leaders of the world's most powerful country continue to enjoy "victor's justice."
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. She writes a weekly column for t r u t h o u t.









SENATOR LINCOLN (202) 224-4843 Fax: (202) 228-1371.

Fayetteville office: 251-1380

Senator Mark Pryor: Phone: (202) 224-2353 Fax: (202) 228-0908

CONGRESSMAN Boozman: Lowell office: 479-725-0400.

DC address: 1708 Longworth House Office Bldng., Washington, DC 20515; 202-225-4301.

END OF NEWSLETTER #2 ON “War” on “Terror”


Dick Bennett
jbennet@uark.edu