crooks and liars – Page 35

Innocent Man May be Released after 10+ years in Guantánamo (maybe)

‘This young man should have been released years ago’

‘Oh what a gigantic stinking pile of human monstrosity.. Isn’t Obama a monstrous coward? ..Or simply a monster himself, but either way the US government and military are monstrous blots on humanity. Release them all, close the damned prison, return the base to Cuba, apologize to the world, and go crawl into a hole’.

The prisoner’s lawyer told the Miami Herald that “not only was he innocent of war crimes, Obaidullah did not speak Arabic before he got to Cuba, making him an unlikely al-Qaida fighter.” (Photo: Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty)

An Afghan man detained for 14 years in Guantánamo—without ever being convicted of a crime—was on Friday recommended by the Pentagon for release.

The man, known as Obaidullah, was arrested and detained in 2002, when he was about 19, but the U.S. government failed to successfully prosecute him for any crimes, AP reported. Charges were eventually made against him in 2008, but were dismissed in 2011.

“This young man should have been released years ago,” Marine Maj. Derek Poteet, who has represented him since 2010, told the Miami Herald. “He was taken from his bed at his home peacefully without resistance. He was subjected to real abuse at Bagram.”

Obaidullah was allegedly arrested by U.S. special forces in 2002 because unarmed land mines were discovered buried near his house. The U.S. government did not formally bring charges against him until 2008.

“He was charged in the military tribunals in September 2008 with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, which appeals courts have said cannot be pursued as war crimes at Guantánamo for conduct that occurred before 2006,” explained AP. “The government dismissed the charges in 2011 and his lawyers have been pressing for his release ever since.”

Poteet told the Miami Herald that “not only was he innocent of war crimes, Obaidullah did not speak Arabic before he got to Cuba, making him an unlikely al-Qaida fighter.”

The newspaper described the U.S. government’s stated rationale for Obaidullah’s years of detention:

A 2008 Guantánamo prison profile said he was brought there to provide information on al-Qaida recruiting, electronic devices, terrorism-related facilities and anti-tank land mines. An updated November 2015 intelligence profile, which was prepared for the parole board, said the Taliban trained him to handle explosives, and was part of an al-Qaida-linked improvised explosives device cell that targeted U.S. and allied troops

“In 2013,” the Miami Herald reports, “Poteet described the Afghan as having withered to a ‘bag of bones’ during the prison’s paralyzing hunger strike. Obaidullah also described for his lawyers the April 2013 raid by Guantánamo troops that forcibly moved hunger strikers into single-cell lockdown, something he considered collective punishment.”

The Pentagon parole board that made the determination (pdf) for Obaidullah’s release praised the detainee for his “positive constructive leadership in detention,” including “mediating concerns raised between other detainees and between other detainees and the guard staff” at Guantánamo.

The transcript of the parole board’s hearing was not made public, however, so it is unknown precisely what transpired to convince the board to recommend Obaidullah for release.

Guantánamo has lately seen an uptick in prisoners recommended for release, according to the Miami Herald:

The Pentagon released the decision Friday during a busy period for the Periodic Review Board. The Board has scheduled an unprecedented nine hearings this month, and released the Obaidullah decision exactly one month after he went before them.

With this approval, 28 of the 80 captives currently at Guantánamo prison are formally cleared to leave to security arrangements that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Ten others are in war crimes proceedings and the rest are awaiting hearings, their results or have had their indefinite detention upheld.

It remains to be seen when Obaidullah and other prisoners cleared for release will leave Guantánamo. As Common Dreams has previously reported, the Department of Defense has “routinely and deliberately undermined” President Obama’s efforts to move toward closing the notorious prison.

French Workers and NuitDebout Uprising grows despite State Repression

After Sunday’s worldwide NuitDebout demos the movement united with angry workers in a brilliant series of Strikes, Demos, Blockades, Occupations which continue to grow despite police and State Repression.

Lorry drivers have again blocked motorways in France in a wave of strikes and protests this week over a repressive neo-liberal labour law, which President François Hollande has pushed through by edict without Parliament and insists will be enacted regardless.After two months of brave protests,, the fresh action against the law, which will make it easier to hire, fire and abuse workers. Continue reading “French Workers and NuitDebout Uprising grows despite State Repression”

US troops to enter Libya to Boost Chaos and Sell Weapons

Next war begins: US To Send Troops, Weapons To Libya To “Fight ISIS”

by Tyler Durden Just two years after the US provided generous amounts of modern weapons to both the “moderate” Syrian rebels as well as the Iraq military, which then conveniently and almost immediately “fell into the wrong hands” and served to arm what was then a little known group of Muslim fundamentalists that went by the name of the Islamic State, the US is about to do it again. (see Yemen: US Weapons again “Landed Up in the Wrong hands” )

In a move which the AP notes is “fraught with risk” the United States and other world powers said they would supply Libya’s internationally recognized government with weapons to counter the perennial bogeyman (whom the US armed in the first place), the Islamic State and other militant groups gaining footholds in the chaos-wracked country’s lawless regions. silly

Adding to the irony is that until just five years ago Libya was a relatively peaceful and organized nation, at least until the CIA and Hillary Clinton successfully unleash the “Arab Spring” domino effect in the MENA region, toppling various long-time dictators and converting nations such as Libya into a hotbed of militant instability, terrorism, and millions of Europe-bound refugees.

However, Libya promptly descended into chaos after the toppling and death of Moammar Gaddafi five years which turned the country into a battleground of rival militias battling for powers. More recently, the power vacuum has allowed the mysteriously ubiquitous Islamic State to expand its presence, giving it a potential base in a country separated from Europe only by a relatively small stretch of the Mediterranean Sea.

Even more ironic is that there is an ongoing embargo to supply Libya with weapons, which however it about to be circumvented. As AP writes, “aiming at once to shore up the fragile government, and prevent Islamic State fighters and rival militias from further gains, the U.S., the four other permanent U.N. Security Council members and more than 15 other nations said they would approve exemptions to a United Nations arms embargo to allow military sales and aid to Libya’s so-called “Government of National Accord.”

In a joint communique, the nations said that while the broader embargo will remain in place, they are “ready to respond to the Libyan government’s requests for training and equipping” government forces. “We will fully support these efforts while continuing to reinforce the UN arms embargo,” the communique said.

What the UN meant is that by equipping government forces they are about to equip ISIS with even more state of the art weaponry and supplies as the Iraq fiasco is about to be repeated.

With support from all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the plan is unlikely to face significant opposition from any quarter.

The narrative is so worn out it can be seen from a mile away: “the step will boost the government’s efforts to consolidate power and regain control over Libyan state institutions like the central bank and national oil company.” As a reminder, this was the pretext used in virtually every failed US foreign intervention campaign. At least this time AP at least point out the obvious: the deployment of weapons “also comes with risks, not least of which is that the arms may be captured or otherwise taken by the Islamic State or other groups.”

Risk? We would call it the plan’s intention, a plan which, incidentally, John Kerry called the plan “a delicate balance.” 2014-01-31-libya-590

And just in case the Pentagon’s objective is unclear, defense officials told CNN that the US “is slightly expanding” its efforts to counter ISIS activity in Libya, sending in small teams of troops to try to establish relationships with groups that may be able to form a new nationwide government, according to a U.S. defense official familiar with the operation.

Translation: US arms for the “local government”, i.e., the current iteration of Syrian moderate rebels, are about to make the US military-industrial complex rich again.

CNN adds that the effort stops short of a formalized military presence on the ground, which means just one thing: yet another informal US military presence in a region which already has seen US troops in ever increasing amounts in both Iraq and Syria. We can now add Libya to the total.

The effort has been underway since late last year. In December, U.S. troops were photographed inside Libya but left after local militias objected. At that time, U.S. officials said it was not a regular task for U.S. troops to go to Libya. Now, that appears to have changed.The official noted teams do travel to both western and eastern Libya but insisted, “they have not established a permanent presence or anything like an outpost.”

The idiocy behind the official narrative is beyond commentary: 11951799_1522588931365249_7372040002461435589_n

[US troops on the ground] are approaching militias and other groups around Benghazi, Misrata and Tripoli. The hope is that somehow groups like the declared Libyan House of Representatives and Government of National Accord, along with what is left of a military element plus powerful militias, can somehow band together to form a unity government.

The narrative behind the latest US troops deployment is so grotesque, that one should just call the US army on the ground “meeters and greeters”:

The U.S. troops, which the Pentagon is calling “contact teams,” are traveling into key areas and meeting with leaders from all groups to see about possible cooperation and eventually what assistance the U.S. could provide if a government can be formed.

So much for the justification for the deployment of thousands of more US troops in the region and the arming of local “moderate” militants.

see also: War Preparations in Iberia: Nato the Spearhead of Capitalist Terror

The question then is what happens next? Our expectations is a rerun of the Syria fiasco, which will see a resurgent ISIS this time not in the middle east but operating in oil-rich and divided country of Libya, which in turn will unleash yet another refugee fiasco, which will impact Europe in the coming months. AP’s take is similar: “Worrying for Europe is the potential threat of a mass influx of refugees amassing in Libya, now that the earlier route from Turkey into Greece has been essentially shut down.” That may, however, change if tensions between Turkey and Germany are rekindled in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary David Hammond said his government had received a request from the Libyan government to bolster its Coast Guard — a project “which will address Libyan concerns about smuggling and insecurity on their border but will also address European concerns about illegal migration.”

In Libya, meanwhile, the U.N.-established presidency council on Monday effectively gave the go-ahead for 18 government ministers to start work, even though they have not received backing from the parliament.

The council was created under a U.N.-brokered unity deal struck in December to reconcile Libya’s many political divisions. It won the support of a former powerbase in the country’s capital, Tripoli, but failed to secure a vote of confidence by the country’s internationally recognized parliament, based in Tobruk, a city in eastern Libya.

The real wild card, however, is who ends up controlling Syrian oil now that ISIS can no longer trade freely with Turkey, and more importantly, who will end up buying ISIS oil via Libya.

Last week the US also admitted it has troops in Yemen promoting a genocidal war by their Saudi arms clients against the shia Houthi minority. See here: Media Silent As US-Backed Saudis Starve Half Million Yemeni ….. Pentagon Acknowledges U.S. Troops on the Ground in Yemen… .. U.K. ILLEGALLY AT WAR IN YEMEN*

US backed rightwing ‘Coup’ to Destroy Amazon

Ecocide in Brazil: new laws to devastate Amazon

by Jan Rocha … via the ecologist with thanks.. Amidst the turmoil of the presidential impeachment, writes Jan Rocha, right wing members of Brazil’s Congress are set to pass new laws that would build new roads across the Amazon, open up indigenous reserves to industrial exploitation, and create a surge in carbon emissions from burning forests.

see also: US takes control of Brasil as Corrupt Left replaced by US Spies… Brazil’s new president is U.S. [+CIA?] informant http://wp.me/pIJl9-7UJ

The bill’s rapporteur is Senator Blairo Maggi, a soya magnate, who has cleared thousands of hectares of rainforest in his home state of Mato Grosso, and is tipped to be the minister of agriculture in the new government.

Taking advantage of Brazil’s present political turbulence, as the battle to impeach President Dilma Rousseff reaches its climax, reactionary politicians are quietly rolling back environmental and indigenous protection laws in defiance of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement.

Neoliberal Capitalist Ecocide

Environmentalists say that if the bill known as PEC 65/2012, now at the Senate committee stage, is approved, it means that major infrastructure projects will be able to go ahead regardless of their impacts on biodiversity, indigenous areas, traditional communities and conservation areas.

Instead of a careful if somewhat slow licensing process which involves scientific assessments including biological, botanical, anthropological and archaeological studies, developers will merely have to present a proposed study of environmental impact to be allowed to begin – without actually having to carry out the study.

And once a project is under way it cannot be cancelled or suspended by the environmental protection agencies.

A chorus of protest – but who’s listening?

Environment organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, have protested strongly at the bill’s implications. For Marilene Ramos, the president of the official agency for the environment and renewable resources, IBAMA, (in Portuguese only) it means Brazil is going in the opposite direction to developed countries and will no longer be able to control infrastructure projects.

teleSUR English In just 24 hours, the senate-imposed government lead by Michel Temer has lead an assault on a decade of progressive policies. He has eliminated 9 ministries, and some 4,000 public sector jobs will be cut. https://www.facebook.com/telesure

Indigenous leader Nara Baré, of COIAB – the Coordination of Indian organisations in the Brazilian Amazon – said: “Brazil presented targets in Paris but doesn’t do its homework, protecting the forest and us who live in it.”

Carlos Bocuhy, the president of PROAM, an environmental NGO, says the effect of the bill will be to end environmental licensing: “It is completely absurd; it is as though the act of applying for a driving licence entitled you to drive a lorry.”

The Climate Observatory (in Portuguese only) sees the bill as “a bad joke”, even more so in a country that has just suffered the worst environmental disaster in its history, the bursting of a dam of toxic mud in Minas Gerais state on 5th November last year. The calamity destroyed all animal and plant life and a major river nearby, and could be the world’s worst disaster after Chernobyl.

Greenpeace director Marcio Astrini said of the bill that “if it becomes law, it will act as a factory of tragedies.”

Senators’ enormous personal stakes in environmental destruction

Its author, Senator Acir Gurgacz, has a personal interest: his family owns a transport company which would benefit hugely from the paving of the 900 km BR319 highway, linking two Amazon capitals, Porto Velho and Manaus.

At present the project cannot go ahead because IBAMA has embargoed the work, alleging environmental damage. The road runs through conservation areas, indigenous lands and areas of largely unspoiled rainforest.

Environmentalists are already expressing deep concern about the government planned by vice-president Michel Temer. They note that his policy paper, A bridge to the future, which laid out his plans for government, made no mention of the environment, climate change or the Amazon rainforest

Instead the big farmers’ and ranchers’ lobby, FPA, or Parliamentary Farming Front, presented the president-to-be with a ‘positive agenda’: a list of demands which included the abolition of the ministry of land reform, the halting and revision of the demarcations of indigenous reserves and quilombos (territories inhabited by the descendants of runaway slaves), and more funds for agribusiness, which already enjoys substantial subsidies.

Besides the bill to end environmental licensing, other damaging bills are in the pipeline.

Ignoring local wishes

One, known as PEC 215, has been doing the rounds in Congress for over 15 years, but with the imminent arrival of the new, pro-farmer government it is expected soon to be voted into law. If it is, it will mean that the power to decide further demarcations of indigenous areas – nearly 400 are under consideration – will pass from the executive to the Congress.

With both houses dominated by members of the rural lobby, this is regarded as tantamount to ending demarcations. Another 1,611 quilombo areas will also be affected. The importance of the indigenous and quilombo territories is that they tend to conserve forested areas, instead of clearing them for mechanised agriculture or cattle grazing.

By law certain areas contained within each rural property (which, especially in the Amazon, are often vast) must be left wild. But another measure on the table (bill 4508/16) will allow them to be used for cattle grazing.

Others will permit mining and hydroelectric dams in indigenous areas without any need for permission from their inhabitants. Reducing controls on pesticides – Brazil is the world’s biggest consumer – is yet another target.

The government of Dilma Rousseff has in no way been a model of protection for the environment and indigenous areas, but it seems that the government of Michel Temer is much much worse.

Jan Rocha is a freelance journalist living in Brazil and is a former correspondent there for the BBC World Service and The Guardian. She now writes for Climate News Network where this article was originally published (CC BY-ND).

British killed 5 million Irish in Colonial ”famine”.

Read this site and weep. Weep for the agonies and deaths of your people at the hands of genocidists.

The authorities who imposed the curriculum, the teachers and professors who funneled it into you, have carefully kept you uninformed as to which British regiment, or that any regiment, murdered your people. Until now, that information was kept from you. You had no access to it. You do now – you read it on your computer screen! Commit the regiment’s name to memory…..

(Click Map )

Never, ever, forget it!

Learn its British HQ town. As no Jewish person would ever refer to the “Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 – 1945”, so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine……..

The cover-up is accomplished by the same British terrorism and bribery that perpetrated the genocide. Consider: why does Irish ex-President Mary Robinson call it “Ireland’s greatest natural ¹ disaster” while she conceals the British army’s role? Potato blight, “phytophthora infestans”, did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn’t cause famine anywhere. Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food.

On Sunday 22nd May there will be a memorial event in London to the Irish Famine which many refer to as a genocide.. CLICK HERE

Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment).

The attached map shows the never-before-published names and locations in Ireland of the food removal regiments (Disposition of the Army; Public Record Office, London; et al, of which we possess photocopies). Thus, Britain seized from Ireland’s producers tens of millions of head of livestock; tens of millions of tons of flour, grains, meat, poultry & dairy products; enough to sustain 18 million persons.

The Public Record Office recently informed us that their British regiments’ Daily Activity Reports of 1845-1850 have “gone missing.” Those records include each regiment’s cattle drives and grain-cart convoys it escorted at gun-point from the Irish districts assigned to it. Also “missing” are the receipts issued by the British army commissariat officers in every Irish port tallying the cattle and tonnage of foodstuff removed; likewise the export lading manifests. Other records provide all-revealing glimpses of the “missing” data; such as: …

read much much more…Continue

also more at: http://www.irishholocaust.org/home

Turkey Threatens Europe: ‘free entry for only Turks.. or we Send Refugees’

EU/TURKEY REFUGEE SCAM: SICK, OBSCENE, SHAMEFUL, STUPID OR WHAT?! Turkish to get free EU entry while Syrians, Afghanis, etc condemned to concentration campserdogan the terrorist uses refugees as blackmail

Turkey Threatens Europe: “Unless Visas Are Removed, We Will Unleash The Refugees”

by Tyler Durden Following months of appeasement of Turkey’s dictator Recep Erdogan, Europe has found itself surprised that as it yields to every incremental demand, Turkey simply asks for more and more. refugee EU Turkey deal

One such example was chronicled by the FT earlier today in “Turkey demands EU hands over €3bn for refugees” in which we read that “a row has erupted between Turkey and the EU over billions of pounds in aid for Syrian refugees, casting fresh doubt on a fragile deal to halt the flow of people towards Europe.”

Erdogan’s argument is that he wants the money to be transferred over to him directly to dispense with as he pleases, while Europe insists that UN agencies oversee that the money be spent as designated for refugee needs, instead of funding another wing for Erdogan’s palace.

Gaziantep, Turkey, Syrian refugee camp: mass rapes of Syrian women, slave trade, criminal trafficking with complicity between Turkish authorities and jihadist-terrorists

Of course, the only reason why Erdogan is confident he has leverage is because Turkey is currently hosting over 3 million Syrian refugees that is holding back from flooding into Europe once more, potentially resulting in the most acute episode of Europe’s refugee crisis. Continue reading “Turkey Threatens Europe: ‘free entry for only Turks.. or we Send Refugees’”