If Trump Wants a Swamp to Drain

Forget Hillary Clinton's emails. That was all nonsense anyway.

If Trump wants to "drain the swamp" the only way he'll do it, the only thing that will do his people any good, is to get money out of politics.

First thing would be to dismantle the collusion between government and Wall Street by which not one of those responsible for the '08 meltdown was ever prosecuted. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has done a ton of research that pretty much lays it all out.

Take it apart. Investigate it. Expose it to the light of day. Show the American public who perpetrated their economic nightmare, where the bailout money really went, how those responsible flourished in the wake of their perfidy, in the process driving wealth and income inequality to unparalleled heights.

That 9/11 Commission? Do the same thing to investigate, analyze and explain to the American people how their country got sucked into a ruinous debacle in the Middle East starting with the illegal conquest of Iraq. Lots of suspects there - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, Scooter - dust'em off.

And then force Congress into accepting campaign finance reform. Get big money out of the game. It should never have been allowed to become the lifeblood of Congressional politics. It's the vehicle by which Congress has become a "bought and sold" entity in service to special interests.

These are all things that Obama should have at least attempted and didn't. His failures rightly convinced many voters that the political apparatus in Washington is rigged, corrupt. That's not to say that he would have succeeded but at least he could have shown who was standing in the way.

Washington was always a malarial bog. There's no shortage of swamps at hand if Trump is in the mood for some draining. Only he's not. That was just electoral horseshit he used to feed the Gullibillies.

If Our Close Allies Do It...

Surely it can't be a crime. "It" is the now infamous "double tap." The Americans like to do it with Hellfire missiles delivered from their drones. The Saudis do it with airstrikes.

It works like this. First you hit a designated target - an enemy emplacement, a wedding, a funeral, a hospital, whatever.  Then you sit back and wait for people nearby to come running to help the original victims. Just to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, not when you're around, you then drop another weapon or two to clean out the rescuers too.

Which leads us to this finding by a UN panel investigating the Saudi airstrikes on a funeral in Yemen believed to have slaughtered over a hundred mourners and their rescuers:

IHL, international humanitarian law, not sure that cuts much ice with our allies especially our really good allies, the United States, the Saudis, or the Israelis. What's the point of having all that expensive hardware if you can't slaughter civilians, including medical personnel when the opportunity arises?

So What's Our Excuse?

Amnesty International is urging Britain's Cameron government to stop arms shipments to Saudi Arabia.  Amnesty claims the weapons are being used to deliberately slaughter civilians in Houthi-rebel controlled parts of Yemen.

Amnesty said it found a pattern of “appalling disregard” for civilian lives by the Saudi-led coalition in an investigation of 13 air strikes in north-eastern Saada governorate during May, June and July: these killed some 100 civilians – including 59 children and 22 women and injured a further 56, including 18 children.

Since last March coalition air strikes have hit homes, schools, markets and other civilian infrastructure, as well as miltiary objectives. Saada, a Houthi stronghold, has been badly hit. Thousands who remain in the governorate “live in constant fear of the airstrikes and dire humanitarian conditions”, Amnesty says.

Canada is also on the Saudi weapons of indiscriminate destruction/war crimes gravy train with Harper having inked a $15-billion deal for the sale of light armoured fighting vehicles (light tanks) presumably for democracy suppression patrols. The deal supposedly gags Harper from discussing (having to explain) the sale but seemingly leaves him quite free to excuse it on the basis that, if we didn't sell Saudis its instruments of carnage then some other nation would.

For the radical Sunni Muslim House of Saud, being a Shiite Muslim is enough to qualify you for live-fire target practice.  Fortunately, that exempts the devoutly Sunni al Qaeda, al Nusra and ISIS terrorists/insurgents from Saudi bloodlust. Yemen's Houthi rebels daily fight ISIS and al Qaeda forces while the Saudis, with the active support of Canada, Britain and the US, wage a ground and air war against the Houthis.

If you're interested in this curious murderous mess, check out this episode of VICE TV. The Houthi segment begins at the 17:00 minute mark. It's an eye-opener.



Keeping with the theme of "So What's Our Excuse?" let's talk bitumen and the armada of supertankers that may soon ply British Columbia's coast.  Roger Annis has written an important report, "The Canadian Election and the Global Climate Crisis," for CounterPunch that should be required reading for every British Columbian before they vote in the federal election.  The only party that's even partly standing up for this province and our incredibly fragile ecosystems is Elizabeth May's Green Party and even May is a bit wobbly on bitumen trafficking.

Which brings us to the first segment of the VICE TV episode above concerning the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and how BP used a highly toxic chemical, Corexit, that, instead of dispersing the oil as promised simply made it far more lethal and sank it to contaminate the bottom and the marine life that is found there. Watch it. It's a genuine call to arms.

h/t Northern PoV

Well, That's a Relief!

Israel has officially absolved itself of any wrongdoing in the murder of four Palestinian kids killed on a Gaza beach last summer.

The kids - they were children - had a soccer ball in play when an Israeli patrol boat opened fire on them with explosive shells. Unfortunately, for the Israelis, foreign journalists witnessed the slaughter.

The New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Tyler Hicks, who witnessed the incident, though from a different angle to the Guardian, wrote in a blog at the time: “A small metal shack with no electricity or running water on a jetty in the blazing seaside sun does not seem like the kind of place frequented by Hamas militants, the Israel Defence Forces’ intended targets.

“Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from an explosion, doesn’t fit the description of Hamas fighters, either.” 

Oh well, it was only four kids and, besides, they were Palestinian kids, worse yet they were Gazans.  All three Canadian parties supported Israel's "Dahiyeh" campaign against Gaza that saw civilians butchered by the hundreds so what's four kids in the greater scheme of things?

And, yes, those are news photos of those kids (the three who survived the first round) running for safety just seconds before they too were killed.  

Shoot to Kill - Anyone, Everyone

Israeli soldiers willfully targeted civilians in last year's war on Gaza.

Testimonies provided by more than 60 Israeli soldiers who fought in last summer’s war in Gaza have raised serious questions over whether Israel’s tactics breached its obligations under international law to distinguish and protect civilians.

The claims – collected by the human rights group Breaking the Silence – are contained in dozens of interviews with Israeli combatants, as well as with soldiers who served in command centres and attack rooms, a quarter of them officers up to the rank of major.

They include allegations that Israeli ground troops were briefed to regard everything inside Gaza as a “threat” and they should “not spare ammo”, and that tanks fired randomly or for revenge on buildings without knowing whether they were legitimate military targets or contained civilians.

..Post-conflict briefings to soldiers suggest that the high death toll and destruction were treated as “achievements” by officers who judged the attrition would keep Gaza “quiet for five years”.

The Israeli campaign itself was one giant war crime.  It featured the now-standard Israeli tactic of Dahiyeh, the deliberate targeting of essential civilian infrastructure - water plants, sewage treatment plants, power utilities before moving on to hospitals, schools and finally residential neighbourhoods.  This is outrageously contrary to the laws of war and international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions.  

Yet the Liberal Party supports these atrocities, masking it under the guise of "self defence."  Let's not forget that Mulcair also was on side with this at first until he sensed that the wind had shifted and conveniently reversed himself.  

Fair and Balanced? Of Course, It's Israel!

Let's keep this in perspective.  That takes us back to 2010 when an Israeli court acquitted an army captain of all charges related to his slaughter of a 13-year old Palestinian school girl.  It's too obscene to recite.  You can follow the link to get the details.

So consider, in the context of that atrocity, a new Israeli law intended to crack down on Palestinian kids who are in the habit of throwing stones at Israeli forces and settlers.

There would be two major sentences for stone throwers - those who endanger the safety of someone inside a vehicle could be jailed for 10-years without proof there was intention to harm; those throwing stones at people could be sentenced to 20-years in prison without the need to prove they intended to cause serious bodily harm.

I suppose it all makes sense in the fascist state of Israel or in the inner sanctum of Canada's Conservative and Liberal leadership.

How Dick Cheney Buried the Truth of His Iraq War

Dick Cheney has buried the truth of America's conquest of Iraq so deep that he will himself be long dead and buried before the facts are ever exhumed.

It might have something to do with the annoying fact that the invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression waged on the flimsiest of pretences and, hence, the sort of war crime for which people have danced at the end of a rope.   People with that sort of problem like to keep the details quiet.

Cheney's office, according to  [William Leonard, former director of the Information Security Oversight Office] took secrecy to excessive lengths -- attempting to classify as much as possible, and often bypassing the system altogether by inventing classification markings. Even documents as ordinary as Cheney's talking points were marked Treated as Top Secret/SCI or Treated as Top Secret/Codeword.

"That's not a recognized marking," said Leonard. "I have no idea if it was the intent, but I can guarantee you what the consequences of those markings are. When any of this material eventually does end up at a presidential library and access demands are being made, or it's being processed for release, when some poor archivist sees material marked Handle as SCI, it's going into the bottom of the pile, and it is going to get much more conservative review. Whether it was the intent to retard the eventual release of the information, I know that's going to be a consequence of it."

In one instance, the marking appeared on notes from a 2003 meeting of Cheney and his staff. They were discussing Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat, who had just written an editorial in the New York Times. In the piece, Wilson argued that there was no evidence that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. That same year, Cheney's office stopped filing annual reports on its classification activities. When the ISOO moved to inspect his office -- as it was authorized and compelled to do by executive order -- Cheney's people argued that because the Office of the Vice President has duties with both the executive and legislative branches, the executive order on classified material doesn't apply. (The White House counsel, unsurprisingly, concurred.)

As Leonard told us, "Putting aside the constitutional position of the vice president, the very concept that non-elected government officials working in the White House, accessing the most highly sensitive information, and weren't obligated to follow the rules set forth by the president, I found chilling, to tell you the truth."

Brits Reject Bush Claim Waterboarding Saved UK Lives

A key part of George w. Bush's new autobiography is his admission that, while President, he committed the war crime of authorizing waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects.   Long settled American law holds that waterboarding is torture and, as such, a criminal act.

To justify his war crime Bush made the claim that information tortured out of these suspects,  "helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States."

According to The Guardian, British officials say there is no evidence to support Bush's claims that waterboarding saved the lives of any Britons.

" It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction."

Oopsie!   If you're going to confess to a war crime and then seek to justify it, you really need to have your facts straight.   Don't try to justify it with things that happened a month before the crimes were actually commenced.   But wait, there's more.

Der Spiegel reports that former German chancellor, Gerhard Shroder, has come right out and accused George of deliberately lying.

" In his memoirs, called "Decision Points" and released on Tuesday, Bush writes that Schröder told him in January 2002 that the US president had his full support when it came to his aggressive Iraq policy. Bush wrote that Schröder indicated he would even stand behind Bush should the US go to war against the country.


On Tuesday evening in Berlin, Schröder denied that he ever made such a promise. "The former American president is not telling the truth," he said. He said the meeting in question focused on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and whether those responsible were supported by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
.
"Just as I did during my subsequent meetings with the American president, I made it clear that, should Iraq ... prove to have provided protection and hospitality to al-Qaida fighters, Germany would reliably stand beside the US," Shröder said. "This connection, however, as it became clear during 2002, was false and constructed."

Oh, my goodness, there goes another of Bush's balloons shot down - his claim that he had no idea his intelligence on Iraq was flat out wrong.   Of course it was wrong, it was "false and constructed."   That's constructed as in plainly made up.

Tony Blair, War Criminal

Then British PM Tony Blair was told months before the fact that invading Iraq would violate international law and the UN Charter. He got that warning, in writing, from his most senior legal adviser, Lord Goldsmith. How did Blair react? According to The Guardian, he took away Goldsmith's place at the cabinet table:

Lord Goldsmith, then attorney general, issued the warning in an uncompromising letter in July 2002, eight months before the invasion. It was becoming clear in government circles that Blair had had secret meetings with George Bush at which the US president was pressing Britain hard to join him in a war to change the regime in Baghdad.

The hitherto unpublished letter has been given to the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war. Goldsmith is due to be questioned about it early in the new year with other senior government lawyers who questioned the legality of an invasion at the time. Goldsmith warned Blair that "as things stand you obviously cannot do it [invade Iraq]", a source familiar with the dispute told the Guardian.

Increasingly concerned that Blair was ignoring his earlier advice that regime change was "not a legal basis for military action", on 29 July 2002 Goldsmith wrote to Blair on what the Mail on Sunday described as "a single side of A4 headed notepaper".

The typed letter was addressed by hand, "Dear Tony", and signed by hand, "Yours, Peter". In the letter, whose existence was confirmed by other sources, Goldsmith warned that the UN charter permitted "military intervention on the basis of self-defence", but it did not apply here because Britain was not under threat from Iraq; that the UN allowed "humanitarian intervention" in some circumstances, but such was not the case in Iraq; and that it would be very difficult to rely on earlier UN resolutions approving the use of force against Saddam.

Bush is all but immune from prosecution but Blair isn't. Shouldn't somebody be putting this man on trial for an illegal war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis?

Is Cheney Strongarming Bush for a Pardon?

Dick Cheney has admitted that he worked to obtain clearance for waterboarding terrorism suspects.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared."

I think Dick Cheney has just handed George w. Bush his very own Christmas list - presidential absolution for Cheney, Rumsfeld and their minions for waterboarding and other acts of torture undertaken in the Quixotic name of Bush's "War on Terror."

US courts have considered waterboarding cases before and held them to be torture. America's War Crimes Act defines torture as a war crime punishable by life in prison or, if the victim dies, the death penalty.

So what's Cheney up to? Is he questing for martyrdom? I think not. Anyone who managed to score five, FIVE, deferments during the Vietnam War isn't the sort for martyrdom. That's Grade A prime Chickenhawk all the way.

I suspect Cheney is setting up the "we did what we had to" narrative the Repugs will cling to as the Bush/Cheney Middle East fiasco slips, in failure, straight through their fingers. That should grease the way for Bush to issue a general pardon to Cheney, Rummie and right down the line to the people who actually got their hands wet.

Scotch and Waterboarding

Back from a few days in the mountain backwoods of Beautiful British Columbia to find Red Tory's reminder that there are few things as stomach churning as a once, seemingly enlightened man who turned to the dark side of neo-conservatism. When it comes to that descent, the poster boy is surely Vanity Fair's own neo-American, Christopher ("Bitch") Hitchens.

In the latest VF, Bitchens samples what he claims to be the "technique" of waterboarding for a whole eleven seconds. That, it seems, is enough for the lard-assed clown to declare it full-fledged "torture."

In reality, Bitchens never got close to actual waterboarding, not even remotely. Chubbo's taste of the "technique" was as sanitized, safe and serene, yes serene, as it could possibly be made. He was brought into a room, blindfolded, and gently laid on a board. He was strapped down and given metal rods to hold in each hand, the release of which would immediately end the demonstration. He was also given a "safety" word which would likewise immediately call the whole thing off.

Bitchens started off knowing that it was all a stunt and nothing more. It was like Ronald Reagan's experience with actual combat - non-existant, completely staged (unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, Rice, Feith, Perle et al who didn't even stage it but zealously waged it vicariously).

What Bitchens didn't experience, in his manful 11-seconds of resistance, was the real red-hot poker of all torture - the psychological part, the abject fear and helplessness. He wasn't bullied and tormented, for weeks or months; beaten and deprived of dignity, sleep or sanity; being made to believe he'd either be killed or that death was possible, even likely; before being manhandled into the place of torture or seeming execution, thrown on a board and relentlessly tortured, again and again.

In January, 2007, I did this post on waterboarding, an account that Bitchens and his ilk chose to ignore:

In Germany there is a complaint before the courts against former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld over torture during his time at the Pentagon. Included in the materials is this account of waterboarding taken from the 1958 memoir of French journalist Henri Alleg. Any doubts about waterboarding as full-bore torture are put to rest by Alleg's account:

"Together they picked up the plank to which I was attached and carried me into the kitchen. They rested the top of the plank, where my head was, against the sink. Lo - fixed a rubber tube to the metal tap, which shone just above my face. He wrapped my head in a rag and held my nose. He tried to jam a pice of wood between my lips in such a way that I could not close my mouth or spit out the tube. When everything was ready, he said to me, 'When you want to talk, all you have to do is move your fingers.' And he turned on the tap.

"The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs as long as I could. But I couldn't hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save myself from suffociation. In spite of myself, the fingers of my two hands shook uncontrollably. 'That's it! He's going to talk,' said a voice.

"The water stopped running and they took away the rag. I was able to breathe. In the gloom, I saw the lieutenants and the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips, was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw up the water I had swallowed. Befuddled by the air I was breathing, I hardly felt the blows. "Well then?' I remained silent. 'He's playing games with us! Put his head under again!'

"This time I clenched my fists, forcing the nails into my palm. I had decided I was not going to move my fingers again. It was better to die of asphyxiation right away. I feared to undergo again that terrible moment when I felt myself losing consciousness, while at the same time fighting with all my might not to die. I did not move my hands, but three times I again knew this insupportable agony.

"In extremis, they let me get my breath back while I threw up the water. The last time, I lost consciousness."

Bitchens, who revels in the expanse of his superior intellect, completely overlooks the real issue about torture - the link between the humanity of people and the real justice of their cause. Torture is abandonment of humanity and virtue and reduces what might have been a just cause to a sordid, mass infliction of carnage.

Yes, waterboarding is torture as anyone who has bothered spending even a couple of hours on Google will know beyond any doubt. Yes, the United States has used waterboarding and a vast repertoire of other torture techniques on "suspects" in its War on Terror. And, yes, our own government has taken sides, falling in with the waterboarders in January of this year:

"ForeignAffairs Minister Maxime Bernier lashed out Saturday at a controversial document identifying the U.S. and Israel as countries it suspects of practising torture, calling it "wrong" and demanding it be rewritten.

"I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department's torture awareness training," said Bernier in a statement.

"It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten," said Bernier."

After his publicity stunt on a plank, Bitchens came back to his senses, essentially dismissing waterboarding as torture "foreplay" and praising the heroes of the "highly honorable group" who serve as the practitioners of these Dark Arts:

"The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Safely back at the shop with his whiskey and cigarettes, the neo-con poster boy wasted no time in shredding any notion of contrition and instead lavished praise on torturers. This final paragraph, full of its own deceptions, speaks volumes for the character of this hack.

What is "heroic" about being a torturer? Is it that they run the risk of getting soiled by the bodily fluids of their victims? They don't man ramparts, they scurry about the deepest cellars like vermin.

Bitchens presumes to speak for "a man who has been waterboarded" while not truly having been waterboarded himself, not even remotely. He uses his 11-second stunt as a benchmark by which torture can be measured, even dismissed. He even presumes that those actually waterboarded have undergone the same experience as he did - no softening up, no beatings, no alternate forms of torture - when that's precisely what they get for days, for weeks or even longer. And sorry Bitch but a guy waterboarded will tell you anything, anything he thinks you want to hear and what you hear will bear little resemblance to fact. Even the FBI has shown that.

In Bitchens' view, so long as the United States remains just shy of those who tormented and ultimately beheaded Daniel Pearl, any call to indict America's leaders for torture is "lame and diseased."

I don't think eleven seconds was nearly enough.

Bolton Dodges Arrest for War Crimes

Okay, it was mainly high drama, but it took security guards yesterday to keep British environmental writer George Monbiot from placing neo-con John Bolton under arrest for war crimes.

From The Guardian:

"Bolton had defended the US's right to launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks and to promote regime change or, if necessary, a military attack on Iran to prevent it acquiring nuclear weapons. As a lawyer, he said, he was not prepared to offer a view either on rendition or torture of suspects, because he had not studied the issues - a claim that provoked dismay.

Afterwards, Monbiot, a contributor to the Guardian, said: "I'm disappointed I couldn't reach him, but I made what I believe to be the first attempt ever to arrest one of the perpetrators of the Iraq war, and I would like to see that followed up."