20051206
Rice says US may make mistakes in war on terrorhttp://news.ft.com/cms/s/b23e069a-6654-11da-884a-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=d4f2ab60-c98e-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html
The statement, which officials said was carefully crafted by legal experts, denied categorically that the US used or condoned torture.
MONTHS OF TERROR FOR MAN HELD BY 'MISTAKE'
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16451364&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=months-of-terror-for-man-held-by--mistake---name_page.html
A FATHER of four said yesterday he was held for nearly five months because he had a similar name to a terror suspect. Khaled el Masri, 41 - Lebanese born but a German national for 10 years - was taken prisoner on holiday in Macedonia on December 31 2003. He was held there 23 days and told to confess he was an al-Qaeda terrorist.
He said: "I heard the door being closed and then they beat me from all sides with hands and feet. "With knives or scissors they took away my clothes in silence ... They stripped me naked. I was terrified."They tried to take off my pants. I tried to stop them so they beat me again. When I was naked I heard a camera." He was dressed in a nappy, a short sleeved, short legged suit and belt. His feet were shackled and his hands chained to the belt. His ears were plugged, ear defenders put over them and a clip on his nose. A hood was put over his blindfold. With his arms held high behind his back he was driven to a plane, thrown on the metal floor and given an injection.On landing he was put in the boot of a car and held in a jail in Kabul, Afghanistan, for four months. He discovered it was run by the US. El Masri faced regular interrogation by a masked man with a Lebanese accent, watched by seven or eight silent observers in black masks. He was repeatedly accused of taking part in terrorist training camps and released only when he went on hunger strike. He said: "It was a crime, humiliating and inhuman. Those responsible have to take responsibility and should be held to account."
Witness at Saddam Trial Tells of Abuse
http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=051206&cat=frontpage&st=frontpageap20051206_298&src=abc
Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial for the killing of more than 140 Shiites in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad and could be executed by hanging if convicted. Monday's session was a stormy one, as Saddam repeatedly stood to challenge the judge and witnesses. But on Tuesday, the ousted leader and his former officials sat largely silently, listening intently as Witness A spoke. She described four years in Saddam's prisons after she and other families were swept up in Dujail following the shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade. She said she was held and tortured at a detention facility there before being taken to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Later they were taken to a desert facility outside the southern city of Samawa. At the Dujail facility, she said she was thrown into a room with red walls and ceiling in an intelligence department building and that prisoners were given only bread and water to eat.
"I could not even eat because of the torture," she said. At Abu Ghraib, the guards stripped one of her male relatives, a deaf mute, and tied a rope to his genitalia, pulling him into the cells where the women were kept, she said. She said one of her relatives wanted to give birth in jail. "The baby was out. When some women tried to help her, the guards prevented them," and the baby died, she said.
U.S. missile parts at Pakistan al Qaeda target site
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L04730768.htm
Sat amid the ruins of his mud and concrete-walled home in the restive North Waziristan tribal agency, Haji Mohammad Siddiq told Reuters his 17-year old son and an eight-year-old nephew were killed in a missile attack, but denied there were any militants present.
Pakistan denied an attack happened while the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment. If a U.S. Predator drone did carry out Thursday's attack, neither the United States or Pakistan would be likely to admit it. Although Pakistan is a key ally in the war on terrorism, it refuses to allow foreign troops on its soil, particularly the sensitive semi-autonomous tribal areas.
Dean: US Won't Win in Iraq
http://www.woai.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=C36A87B9-63A0-4CDE-AA91-B41571AFD3AF
"What we see today is very much like what was going in Watergate," Dean said. "It turns out there is a lot of good evidence that President Bush did not tell the truth when he was asking Congress for the power to go to war. The President said last week that Congress saw the same intelligence that he did in making the decision to go to war, and that is flat out wrong. The President withheld some intelligence from the Senate Intelligence Committee. He withheld the report from the CIA that in fact there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq), that they did not have a nuclear program. They (the White House) selectively gave intelligence to the United States Senate and the United States Congress and got them to give the go ahead to attack these people."
Hard Evidence of US Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/ustorture.htm
US Media Dodging Air War in Iraq
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120505Y.shtml
The Bad News Is That the Good News Is Fake
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=8213
Editor,
In his letter in Thursday's Daily Lobo, Brian Fejer shows once again that he is long on rhetoric yet lacking in the due diligence department. He says the 25th Amendment should be invoked in order to install a caretaker government. Has he ever even read the 25th Amendment? It says absolutely nothing about dissolution of government pending an election or other occurrence. It is an amendment that deals with filling the vacancy of the office of vice president and conferring the powers of the presidency to the vice president when the president is unable to discharge the duties of the office.Anyone who is willing to do some work before shooting off a letter can read the text of the 25th Amendment at wikipedia.org.Second, he demonstrates his great grasp of emotionally charged rhetoric when he wrote, "The time has come to invoke the 25th Amendment, install a caretaker government, put the present United States government and corporate media on trial for war crimes, and get some rope until we find some honest people who don't want to swing from lamp posts for lying to the American people." Yet his statement, especially about the corporate media, sounds eerily like the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century that abolished the idea of a free press owned by private individuals. This sounds like someone who, if ever placed into power, would dissolve the idea of a free press because of his sheer hatred for the corporate media. I am sorry, but if I wanted to live in a society where the media was the sole domain of the people, which is just a euphemism for the ruling party, I would move to North Korea or Cuba. It may be of interest to Fejer that the regimes of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong felt similar to him on the issue of the media - that the media was the domain of the bourgeoisie and therefore had to be eliminated as a free and individual entity and absorbed into the state itself.Upon diligent review, Fejer has been measured, weighed and found quite wanting when it comes to being able to offer up rational analysis - his letter is long on rhetoric and emotions, and short on anything resembling substance.
Brandon Curtis
UNM alumnus
http://www.dailylobo.com/media/paper344/news/2005/12/06/Opinion/Letter.Arguement.Lacks.Facts.Full.Of.Emotional.Rhetoric-1122288.shtml?norewrite&sourcedomain=www.dailylobo.com
Editor
Brandon Curtis believes we have a free press, owned by private individuals.
Before the attack on Iraq many private individuals called bloggers on the internet exposed the lies the American people were being told about Iraq. The "news" rooms with their big budgets and staffs just rolled over, put out an orange alert, and broadcast the propaganda about 9/11 and WMD.
We have a Corporate State Controlled Media owned by Zionist Hoodlums and I stand by my comment about getting enough rope until we find some honest people who don't want to swing from lamp posts for lying to the American people. My loyalty lies with the Constitution of the United States, not Israel.
Sumner Redstone owns $8 billion dollars worth of Viacom, which gives him the controlling interest in CBS, Viacom, MTV worldwide, and most recently he bought Black Entertainment Television and proceeded immediately to cut down its public-affairs programming. The president of CBS is Leslie Moonves, the great nephew of David Ben-Gurion.
Michael Eisner is the major owner of Disney-Capitol Cities, which owns ABC. David Westin is the president of ABC News. Although it has lost viewers, Nightline host Ted Koppel is a strong supporter of Israel. Lloyd Braun is chair of ABC Entertainment. And there is the perennial Barbara Walters.
Neil Shapiro is the president of NBC News. Jeffrey Zucker is the head of NBC Entertainment and Jack Myers has some important post there, as well.
Although Rupert Murdoch of Fox is not Zionist, Mel Karamazin, the president of the corporation is, as is Peter Chernin, the second in command at Murdoch's News Corps.
Sandy Grushow is chairman of Fox Entertainment, and Gail Berman is president.
Jamie Kellner is chair and CEO of Turner Broadcasting.
Walter Issacson is the News Director of CNN which also has Wolf Blitzer, host of Late Edition, Larry King of Larry King Live, Paula Zahn, and Andrea Koppel, Ted's daughter.
Jordan Levin is chairman of Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Howard Stringer is chair of Sony Corp. of America.
Robert Sillerman is the founder of Clear Channel Communications,
Ivan Seidenberg is chair of Verizon Communications
Terry Semel, former co-chair of Warners is CEO of Yahoo.
Barry Diller, former owner of Universal Entertainment, is the chair of USA Interactive.
Joel Klein is chair and CEO of Bertelsmann's American operations, the largest publishing conglomerate in the world.
Mort Zuckerman, the Chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, owns US News and World Report and the NY Daily News.
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. publishes the NY Times, the Boston Globe and a host of other publications.
Marty Peretz publishes the New Republic, which is unabashedly pro-Israel, as is William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard.
Donald Graham, Jr. is the chair and CEO of Newsweek and the Washington Post.
Michael Ledeen, of Iran-Contra fame, edits National Review.
Ron Rosenthal is the Managing Editor of the SF Chronicle and Phil Bronstein is the Executive Editor.
David Schneiderman owns the Village Voice and a number of other "alternative" weeklies.
Columnist William Safire, Tom Freidman, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, Jeff Jacoby, are among the most widely syndicated columnists.
There are a number of widely syndicated talk show hosts such as Michael Savage (ABC) on more than 100 stations, Michael Medved, 124 stations, and Dennis Prager who has an Israeli flag on his website. Others include Ron Owens, Ben Wattenberg, and former ZOA official Jon Rothman, all in San Francisco on ABC.
In Hollywood, there is Stephen Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Kranzberg of Dreamworks, Eisner of Disney, Amy Pascal, chair of Columbia, and many, many more.
The truth is only anti semitic to those with something to hide.
Brian Fejer
UNM Student
¶ 6.12.05
