‘We have lost respect’ – former US Senator. Published time: November 22, 2011 11:36 Edited time: November 23, 2011 12:46 US soldiers sit on a military plane travelling across Afghanistan on October 8, 2011. Afghanistan has marked 10 years since the start of the US-led war against the Taliban, amid heightened security and questions over what the next decade will hold (AFP Photo / Tauseef Mustafa) The US is like a drunkard who charges to war with anyone who might pose a threat, ex-Senator and former US presidential candidate Mike Gravel says. “I like the US. But at the same time I think my country is an imperial country that is going downhill, and our leadership does not even acknowledge the problem,” confesses Gravel. “Phony triumphalism has turned into a device to make Americans live in fear of a terrorist attack, yet you are a thousand times more likely to catch cancer than ever be hurt by that,” he points out.
“We Americans used to think ‘oh, what happened in Germany could never happen with us!’ Click to enlarge. Veterans attempt citizens arrest of Rumsfeld in Boston | Raw Replay. Several members of the group Veterans for Peace were escorted out of the Old South Meeting House in Boston Monday night after they attempted a citizen’s arrest of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “I went down in front and looked Donald Rumsfeld in the eye and said, ‘I’m making a citizen’s arrest,’” protester Nate Goldschlag told WCVB-TV.
“He lied us into Iraq. He lied about weapons of mass destruction. He lied about Saddam Hussein being involved in 9/11.” Three of the protesters removed from the event were with Veterans for Peace and a fourth was a member of Code Pink. One protester was arrested outside the event for allegedly using a bullhorn to assault a police officer. Most of the 300 people who had to buy a copy of Rumsfeld’s book, “Known and Unknown,” to attend the event appeared to be fans. “He’s one of the greatest Americans that has ever lived,” one woman said. Prosecute Dick Cheney for torture, human-rights group tells Ottawa. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch Call For Arrest Of George W. Bush. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demanded the arrest and prosecution of former president George W.
Bush before his appearance at an economic summit in Surrey, British Columbia on October 20th. The advocacy organizations have called on Canadian federal authorities to arrest Bush due to the "overwhelming evidence that Bush and other senior administration officials authorized and implemented a regime of torture and ill-treatment of hundreds of detainees in US custody. " Though both advocacy groups called for Bush's extradition, The Vancouver Sun reports that the Canadian government has no intention to comply with the demand, saying the organizations were "engaging in cheap stunts. " The ultimatum has also been dismissed in the US. "Bashar al-Assad visited Paris in 2008 and 2009: silence. When you talk too much for Twitter.
I Welcome Their Hatred. Dick Cheney's In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir is a book as dull and unimaginative as its title. Readers wouldn't have expected the former vice president and his daughter Liz (his co-author) to be a pair of subtle prose stylists, and they won't be disappointed. Slog through the early chapters on Cheney's life growing up in Wyoming (he fished, he played football), and you'll eventually reach more momentous events, which Cheney is able to render equally lifeless. That's in part because of the way Cheney confronts the controversies that have attended so much of his public life.
His descriptions of events tend to run as follows: Some things happened. Our critics said we were wrong. But they don't know what they're talking about, because we were right. Nevertheless, interesting tidbits pop up now and then, when scores are settled, enemies are skewered, and one can detect the occasional flash of something resembling human emotion. Take that, hippies! Really? Advertisement. Cheney's Kettle Logic. Sigmund Freud once mentioned the defense offered by a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all. That man's name? Dick Cheney. On "Morning Joe" on MSNBC on Thursday, the former Vice President claimed that the intelligence used to invade Iraq had been sound and accurate; the faulty intelligence was all Bill Clinton's fault; the invasion didn't do any damage but rather it was the Iraqis who damaged Iraq; and any invasion causes horrific things to happen, that just comes with the territory.
This incoherence was interspersed with gossip about Cheney's marriage and his friends and his whole lovable social self. Cheney claims he didn't transform into Darth Vader, and of course he didn't. Well, exactly. Downing Street memo. The memo recorded the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) as expressing the view following his recent visit to Washington that "[George W.] Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. " It also quoted Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying that it was clear that Bush had "made up his mind" to take military action but that "the case was thin". Straw simultaneously noted that Iraq retained "WMD capability" and that "Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.
". The military asked "what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one". Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith also warned that justifying the invasion on legal grounds would be difficult. Introduction[edit] A group of 131 members of Congress led by John Conyers, repeatedly requested that President George W. Outline[edit] Addressees of the memo Copies of the minutes were sent to: Dutch state liable over Indonesia massacre - Asia-Pacific. A Dutch court has ordered the government to compensate the widows of seven villagers who were summarily executed and a man shot and wounded in a notorious massacre during Indonesia's bloody battle for independence from colonial rule. The Hague Civil Court ruled on Wednesday it was "unreasonable" for the government to argue that the widows were not entitled to compensation because the statute of limitations had expired. According to Indonesian researchers, Dutch troops wiped out almost the entire male population of Rawagede, a village in West Java, two years before the former colony declared independence in 1949.
"Justice has been done," said Liesbeth Zegveld, lawyer for the plaintiffs. "This means that the state can't just sit in silence for 60 years waiting for the case to go away of the plaintiffs to die and then appeal to the statute of limitations. " The only living witnesses are now in their 80s, and illiterate, after having to fend for themselves following the deaths of their husbands. Donald Rumsfeld Al Jazeera Interview Video. Halfway through the Obama tenure, his predecessors are still running into trouble about their legacies in interviews. This week, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sat down with Al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara to talk about the Bush legacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and found Foukara’s questions so infuriating that he flat out refused to answer them, instead decrying Foukara for “haranguing.” Foukara asked Rumsfeld to elaborate on how he saw the policies in Iraq, namely, whether he felt “responsible for the killing of innocent Iraqis.”
The mere formulation of the question resulted in much crosstalk, with Rumsfeld arguing that Foukara’s assertions were “fundamentally false” and asking him whether he “want[s] to yell or do you want to do an interview?” Rumsfeld replied to that last bit by suggesting that “you can characterize my answers any way you want, and you’re doing it in a pejorative way.” The segment via Al Jazeera below: Canadian protesters greet Bush with song ‘praising’ his unending wars.
By Eric W. DolanThursday, October 20, 2011 20:16 EDT Protesters outside the fourth annual Surrey Regional Economic Summit in Canada on Thursday mockingly praised former President George W. Bush’s “unending war on drugs and terror and the poor” with a hymn. He was invited to speak at the summit by Mayor Dianne Watts.
The demonstration came after Amnesty International urged Canadian authorities to arrest Bush for his role in the torture of detainees. “Canada is required by its international obligations to arrest and prosecute former President Bush given his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture,” said Susan Lee, Americas Director at Amnesty International. The group submitted a memorandum to the Canadian authorities outlining Bush’s legal responsibility for a series of human rights violations.
Watch video, courtesy of The Straight, below: Copyright 2011 The Raw Story Eric W. Eric W. Lightning Rod - An FP Roundtable. The publication this week of Dick Cheney's fiery memoir, In My Time, has a lot of tongues wagging, including those of many of his former colleagues in George W. Bush's administration. The former vice president's book has reopened festering wounds in Washington and sparked a ferocious debate over everything from the Iraq invasion to domestic surveillance to Condoleezza Rice's tears. If anyone expected the hard-nosed Cheney to have softened in his retirement, think again: The book is an unapologetic recapitulation of neoconservatism, power projection, American exceptionalism, and brass-knuckle politics -- in short, all of what made Cheney the most feared, hated, and influential vice president in recent history.
Foreign Policy asked an all-star line up to debate his legacy. James Traub: He was a maniac Elliott Abrams: A man of principle Kori Schake: Biting the hand that fed him Dahlia Lithwick: A torturous rigidity Tom Malinowski: His cruel and unusual legacy Thomas E. Obama Team Feared Coup If He Prosecuted War Crimes. Two longtime critics of the 2003 war against Iraq delivered memorable lectures last week on the war's tenth anniversary.
Anti-war crusader David Swanson and Iraq-born bookstore owner Andy Shallal exemplified the long-run positive impact individuals can have against the war machine and its media arm -- even as the United States ramps up supplies for rebels against Syria's government in a new war. While war critics looked backward, a secret journalistic drama unfolded elsewhere last week in the nation's capital. The Washington Post editorial staff spiked an assigned Sunday opinion column about the war by author and longtime journalist Greg Mitchell. Mitchell published the column instead at The Nation. Over the weekend, Mitchell exposed the Post's bad faith when he saw that the Post claimed in a staff-written Sunday column that its reporters responsibly covered the 2003 run-up to the Iraq war.
My column today provides a snapshot of these developments and an appendix of relevant coverage.