Wikileaks Exposes American Torture, Murder, Terror,
Rendition, and Rape
Bradley Manning, who gathered
incriminating evidence from U.S. computers, said an “Iraq war event
log” was among the items he’d passed to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.
The Iraq release follows other high-impact, U.S.-focused leaks from
WikiLeaks, beginning in April with the controversial classified
“Collateral Murder” video of a 2007 Army helicopter attack in
Baghdad, that Manning also claimed to have leaked to the
organization. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed
Iraqi man who stumbled onto the scene and tried to rescue one of the
wounded. The man’s two children suffered serious injuries in the
hail of gunfire. WikiLeaks titled the video “Collateral Murder,” and
raised $150,000 from supporters in two days following its release.
Then in July, the site published 77,000 documents from a
92,000-entry database of events from the Afghan War, similar to
Friday’s Iraq database.
The Army has formally charged Manning under the Espionage Act for
the “Collateral Murder” leak, and the Pentagon describes him as a
“person of interest” in the Afghan War log leak, though Manning did
not mention leaking a database of events from the Afghan War in his
chats with Lamo. Manning is also charged with exceeding his lawful
access to the Secret-level SIPRNET to collect 150,000 diplomatic
cables. WikiLeaks has denied receiving those cables. more...
Report on America's brutal
torture and murder of Iraqi civilians with original documentation
link
Investigation initiated after Playboy Magazine published an
article in May 2004, titled ?Death and Dishonor,? alleging that
soldiers of the 1/15th Infantry Battalion, 3d Brigade, 3d Infantry
Division (Ft. Benning, GA), committed numerous war crimes. Soldiers
quoted in the article alleged that soldiers assigned to the 1/15th
Infantry Battalion had, among other things, raped Iraqi women while
on patrol and while guarding a mall in Baghdad, shot an unarmed
Iraqi while he was fleeing, hog-tied him and physically assaulted
him, ?dug inside wounds of EPWs [enemy prisoners of war] while they
were incapacitated; indiscriminately shot unarmed civilian women and
children; and shot wounded Iraqi
soldiers (8347). In a signed statement.
more
Rendition and the "Global War
on Terrorism": 28 Nations Have Supported the US in the Detention
and Torture of "Suspects"
Twenty-eight nations have cooperated with the U.S. to detain
in their prisons, and sometimes to interrogate and torture,
suspects arrested as part of the U.S. “War on Terror.”
The complicit countries have kept suspects in prisons ranging
from public interior ministry buildings to “safe house” villas
in downtown urban areas to obscure prisons in forests to “black”
sites to which the International Committee of the Red Cross(ICRC)
has been denied access.
According to published reports, an estimated 50 prisons have
been used to hold detainees in these 28 countries. Additionally,
at least 25 more prisons have been operated either by the U.S.
or by the government of occupied-Afghanistan in behalf of the
U.S., and 20 more prisons have been similarly operated in Iraq.
As the London-based legal rights group Reprieve estimates the
U.S. has used 17 ships as floating prisons since 2001, the total
number of prisons operated by the U.S. and/or its allies to
house alleged terrorist suspects since 2001 exceeds 100. And
this figure may well be far short of the actual number.
Countries that held prisoners in behalf of the U.S. based on
published data are Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Djibouti, Egypt,
Ethiopia, Gambia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Libya,
Lithuania, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar,
Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, South Africa, Thailand,
United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zambia. Some of the
above-named countries held suspects in behalf of the Central
Intelligence Agency(CIA); others held suspects in behalf the
U.S. military, or both.
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University
of Illinois, Champaign, termed the detention policies used by
the U.S. “Crimes against Humanity”:
“These instances of the enforced disappearances of human beings
and their consequent torture, because they are both widespread
and systematic, constitute Crimes against Humanity in violation
of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, which
have been ordered by the highest level officials of the United
States government…”
more...
Obama
Continues Extreme Rendition Including Torture and Other War
Crimes
Analysis of the executive orders US President
Barack Obama signed on January 22 shows that the Untied States
will continue to be heavily involved in illegal practices
including kidnapping, secret detention and torture. The orders
ostensibly ended torture and a network of secret Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) prison camps.
The Los Angeles Times published a
report on the executive orders, however, showing that they allow
the continued use of "extraordinary rendition" by the CIA,
whereby the US secretly abducts individuals it claims are
terrorists, sending them to nations that practice torture. (See
"Obama
preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool.")
Obama is not only contemplating preserving
rendition; he foresees using it more than the Bush
administration. The Los Angeles Times cites unnamed US
intelligence officials who say, "The rendition program might be
poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the
main remaining mechanism—aside from Predator missile strikes—for
taking suspected terrorists off the street."
more...
America
Torture Chambers at Guantanamo Bay Violate Geneva Convention,
But No One in Authority Seems to Bother With That
Prisoners held at Camp Delta and Camp Echo have been
labeled "illegal enemy combatants", but a number of observers
such as Human Rights Watch maintain that the United States has
not held the Article 5 tribunals specified by the Geneva
Conventions. The International Committee of the Red Cross has
stated that, "Every person in enemy hands must have some status
under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as
such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the
Fourth Convention, [or] a member of the medical personnel of the
armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no
intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the
law." Thus, if the detainees are not classified as prisoners of
war, this would still grant them the rights of the Fourth Geneva
Convention (GCIV), as opposed to the more common Third Geneva
Convention (GCIII), which deals exclusively with prisoners of
war.
A further concern is that most detainees were captured and
transferred to the camp from non-U.S. soil. International laws
regarding warfare would allow the United States to do so, but
only if the persons can be classified as prisoners of war.
Unless they are classified as prisoners of war, they fall under
the protection of the GCIV and thus would qualify for protection
against individual or mass forcible transfer under Article 49 of
the GCIV. Because the detainees are not classified as prisoners
of war, the legality of U.S. actions remains questionable.
more...
Canicattì massacre: killing of Italian civilians by
Lieutenant Colonel McCaffrey. A confidential inquiry was made,
but McCaffrey was never charged with an offence relating to the
incident. He died in 1954. This incident remained virtually
unknown until Joseph S. Salemi of New York University, whose
father witnessed it, publicized it.
The
Dachau massacre: killing of German prisoners of war and
surrendering SS soldiers at the Dachau concentration camp.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert Panebianco (ed).
Dachau its liberation 57th Infantry Association, Felix L.
Sparks, Secretary 15 June 1989
In the
Biscari massacre, which consist of two instances of mass
murders, U.S. troops of the
45th Infantry Division killed roughly 75 prisoners of war,
mostly Italian.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Weingartner, James (November
1989). "Massacre at Biscari: Patton and An American War Crime".
The HistorianLII (1): 24–39.
Operation Teardrop: Eight of the surviving, captured crewmen
from the sunk German submarine
U-546 are tortured by US military personnel. Historian
Philip K. Lundeberg has written that the beating and torture of
U-546's survivors was a singular atrocity motivated by
the interrogators' need to quickly get information on what the
US believed were potential missile attacks on the continental US
by German submarines.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Lundeberg, Philip K. (1994).
"Operation Teardrop Revisited". In Runyan, Timothy J. and Copes,
Jan M. To Die Gallantly : The Battle of the Atlantic.
Boulder: Westview Press.
ISBN0813388155.,
pp. 221–226; Blair, Clay (1998).
Hitler's U-Boat War. The Hunted, 1942–1945 (Modern Library
ed.). New York: Random House.
ISBN0679640339.,
p. 687.
MORE ON WAR CRIMES AGAINST GERMAN SOLDIERS BY U.S.
TROOPS
In the aftermath of the Malmedy massacre a written order from the HQ
of the 328th US Army Infantry Regiment, dated December 21, 1944,
stated: No SS troops or
paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight.[33]
Major-General
Raymond Hufft (U.S. Army) gave instructions to his troops not to
take prisoners when they crossed the Rhine in 1945. "After the war,
when he reflected on the war crimes he authorized, he admitted, 'if
the Germans had won, I would have been on trial at Nuremberg instead
of them.'"[34]
Stephen Ambrose related: "I've interviewed well over 1000 combat
veterans. Only one of them said he shot a prisoner... Perhaps as
many as one-third of the veterans...however, related incidents in
which they saw other GIs shooting unarmed German prisoners who had
their hands up."[35]
Near the French village of
Audouville-la-Hubert 30 German Wehrmacht prisoners were
massacred by U.S. paratroopers.[36]
Historian Peter Lieb has found that many US and
Canadian units were ordered to not take prisoners during the D-Day
landings in Normandy. If this view is correct it may explain the
fate of 64 German prisoners (out of 130 captured) who did not make
it to the POW collecting point on
Omaha Beach on D-Day.[37]
According to an article in
Der Spiegel by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied
soldiers have been willfully ignored by historians until now because
they were at odds with the "Greatest
Generation" mythology surrounding WWII, but this has recently
started to change with books such as "The Day of Battle" by
Rick Atkinson where he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and
"D-Day: The Battle for Normandy," by
Anthony Beevor.[37]
Beevor's latest work is currently discussed by scholars, and should
some of them be proven right that means that Allied war crimes in
Normandy were much more extensive "than was previously realized".[36]
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