Abu Ghraib - Business as usual

As the abuses at Abu Ghraib became global common knowledge you could practically hear the wheels of the White House spin machine changing up into a higher gear. Administration mouthpieces worked overtime to denounce the few bad apples that had sullied the supposedly impeccable reputation of the US military.
When those same bad apples were put on trial for their actions the excuses and comparisons made to try and justify what occurred where many, varied, and in some cases downright crazy. Justin Raimondo's article The Scapegoat is a good primer on the subject. Charles Graner, the supposed 'ringleader' of the Abu Ghraib abusers probably should have pled insanity because after all he was having sex with Lynddie England which, in itself, is proof that he is completely deranged.
If William Calley was released after serving just 3.5 years of a life sentence imposed on him for the massacre of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai what expectations should we have for justice in US military courts in regard to Abu Ghraib? The answer if you haven't worked it out is NONE. They will hand down what appear to be stiff penalties and then either pardon them, change the law(my money is on this), or just release them regardless of the law.
US legal 'scholars' are already working at changing the legal view of the 'just obeying orders' defense as can be read in a paper entitled Defense of Superior Orders before Military Commissions by James B. Insco. A revealing sentence in the conclusion of this paper states;

The Bush Administration now possesses a valuable opportunity to influence the development of customary international law. The United States should take the lead in annunciating the defense of superior orders under international law by providing it to defendants before military commissions.

I guess we all want the Bush administration to be taking the lead when it comes to international law. The hypocrisy of refusing to sign up to the International Criminal Court and then thinking you have the right to be writing/influencing international law boggles the mind.
To understand why I gave this article the title I did you need to view the documentary Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons which demonstrates that the torture and abuse of prisoners is widespread within the US prison system. As anyone with an IQ over 80 must realise if they treat their own prisoners this way then how must they treat their prisoners in Iraq and the other prisoners of the war on terror. View Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons online by clicking here.

Tags: terrorism, Abu Ghraib, US, torture, Iraq

Goodbye Blue Sky

Look mummy, there’s an aeroplane up in the sky

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
Did you ever wonder
Why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
The flames are all long gone
But the pain lingers on
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye
Goodbye

-- Roger Waters

Tags: terrorism, US, bombs, Iraq, Pink Floyd

U.S. Using Anti-Terror War to Gain World Oil Reserves

On the pretext of fighting international terrorism the United States is trying to establish control over the world’s richest oil reserves, Leonid Shebarshin, ex-chief of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence Service, who heads the Russian National Economic Security Service consulting company, said in an interview for the Vremya Novostei newspaper.
Using the anti-terrorist cause as a cover the United States has occupied Afghanistan, Iraq and will soon move to impose their “democratic order” on the Greater Middle East, Shebarshin said. “The U.S. has usurped the right to attack any part of the globe on the pretext of fighting the terrorist threat,” Shebarshin said.
Referring to his meeting with an unnamed al-Qaeda expert at the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization in the U.S., Shebarshin said: “We have agreed that al-Qaeda is not a group but a notion.”
“The fight against that all-mighty ubiquitous myth deliberately linked to Islam is of great advantage for the Americans as it targets the oil-rich Muslim regions,” Shebarshin emphasized.
With military bases in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Shebarshin said, the United States has already established control over the Caspian region — one of the world’s largest oil reservoirs.

Mosnews.com.

Tags: terrorism, US, Russia, oil, al Qaeda

Where did the 911 energy come from?

Dust Clouds: Yet another common feature of controlled demolitions is the production of dust clouds, which result when explosions eject the dust from the building with great energy. And, as one can see by comparing videos on the Web, the collapses of the towers produced clouds that are very similar to those produced by controlled demolitions of other structures, such as Seattle’s Kingdome. The only difference is that the clouds produced during the collapses of the towers were proportionally much bigger.[30]
The question of the source of the needed energy again arises. Hoffman (2003), focusing on the expansion of the North Tower’s dust cloud, calculates that the energy required simply for this expansion---ignoring the energy needed to slice the steel and pulverize the concrete and other materials---exceeded by at least 10 times the gravitational energy available.
The official account, therefore, involves a huge violation of the laws of physics---a violation that becomes even more enormous once we factor in the energy required to pulverize the concrete (let alone the energy required to break the steel).

Read The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True by clicking here.

Tags: 911, wtc, demolition, new pearl harbor, terrorism