Every War Begins with A Lie : is Taliban = 911?

Google it and you'll find the Times report repeated and amplified 5,785 times more.

Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

Your eyelids are getting heavy. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

And every war begins with a lie.

As the poet T.S. Eliot warned,

"The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right thing for the wrong reason."

Taliban = 9/11? Innocents, by the thousands and thousands, have paid and will pay in blood for this treasonous falsehood.

Read further Afghanistan by Hypnosis.

Children tortured before parents, raped, all covered up by Bush/Cheney

Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

This PDF obtained by The Washington Post tells the whole story.

Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq

A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

The five-page document, written by Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK's ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war.

Text taken from here.

Water Boarding of Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed

According to new transcripts from of a 2007 Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at Guantanamo Bay, detainee Abu Zubaydah said that his CIA captors told him after he was subjected to torture that “they had mistakenly thought he was the No. 3 man in the organization’s hierarchy and a partner of Osama bin Laden.” “They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’” Zubaydah said. Zubaydah, who was subjected to waterboarding 83 times in one month, also said that he nearly died in prison:

Abu Zubaida, a nom de guerre for Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, told the 2007 panel of military officers at the detention facility in Cuba that “doctors told me that I nearly died four times” and that he endured “months of suffering and torture” on the false premise that he was an al-Qaeda leader.

Despite President Bush’s rhetoric, Zubaydah’s torture “foiled no plots,” a point that one of his interrogators confirmed during a congressional hearing last May. The portion of the 2007 Combatant Review Status hearing transcript in which Majid Khan — an alleged associate of Khalid Sheik Mohammad — discussed his treatment at CIA black sites was “blacked out for eight consecutive pages.”

The Bush administration has also long justified its use of torture by claiming that it obtained valuable information from torturing 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Late last year, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “Did it produce the desire results? I think it did.” He explained:

I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information.

But according to documents released by the Obama administration in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, Cheney was lying. Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA after withstanding torture:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA that concerned the location of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me,” Mohammed said. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’”

The torture of Mohammed, who we know was waterboarded 183 times in one month, “underscores the unreliability of statements obtained by torture.”

In an interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume earlier this year, President Bush admitted that he personally authorized the torture of Mohammed. He said he personally asked “what tools” were available to use on him, and sought legal approval for waterboarding him:

BUSH: One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. … And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

Watch it:

How Important is Cheney's Admission that There was NEVER Any Evidence Linking Iraq and 9/11?

Cheney said in an interview on Fox News:

"On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that," he told the Fox host. "There was "some reporting early on ... but that was never borne out... [President] George [Bush] ... did say and did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9-11."

How important is Cheney's admission?

Well, 5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".

He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

Moreover, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".

And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.

And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed,Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Moreover, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this and this.

Article taken from here.

Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice.Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

There can be little doubt now that President Bush's reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam's Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse can only inflame suspicions across the Middle East that the United States is on a crusade against Islam.

Text taken from here.

Torture Continues under Obama

by Washington's Blog

While torture under the Bush administration was horrible, at least it has stopped. Right? Wrong. Jeremy Scahill (the reporter who broke most of the stories on Blackwater) says that a military police unit at Guantanamo regularly brutalizes unarmed prisoners, including gang-beating them, breaking their bones, gouging their eyes and dousing them with chemicals. Specifically, whenever there is "disobedience" by the detainees - which can include praying, or having 2 styrofoam cups in their cell instead of 1, or refusing medication or failing to immediately respond when spoken to - the "Immediate Reaction Force" (IRF) is sent in. Scahill describes what happens next: When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to "Darth Vader" suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg... [The IRF teams then mete out brutal punishment, including] gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them -- sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end... [One prisoner was sprayed directly in the eyes with mace and gouged in the eyes and was then refused medical treatment, which resulted in permanent blindness in one eye. He also endured a "sexual attack". Another prisoner had a third prisoner's feces spread on him.] There was also torture using water: The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present, and they would join in. Scahill says that these are not "a few bad apples": The IRF teams "were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside consultation of the Justice Department," says Scott Horton, one of the leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law. This force "was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be free from physical assault while in U.S. custody," he says. "They were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify" the beatings. Scahill's allegations are being confirmed by the Spanish torture investigation. Indeed: "Up to 15 people attempted to commit suicide at Camp Delta due to the abuses of the IRF officials," according to the Spanish investigation. One particular incident shows how brutal the IRF interrogators are: In January 2003, Sgt. Sean Baker [an active-duty U.S. soldier and Gulf War veteran] was ordered to participate in an IRF training drill at Guantánamo where he would play the role of an uncooperative prisoner. Sgt. Baker says he was ordered by his superior to take off his military uniform and put on an orange jumpsuit like those worn by prisoners. He was told to yell out the code word "red" if the situation became unbearable, or he wanted his fellow soldiers to stop. According to sworn statements, upon entering his cell, IRF members thought they were restraining an actual prisoner. As Sgt. Baker later described: They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he -- the same individual -- reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.' … That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: 'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.' Sgt. Baker said his head was slammed once more, and after groaning "I'm a U.S. soldier" one more time, "I heard them say, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' you know, like … he was telling the other guy to stop." According to CBS: Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. "I said, 'Go get the tape,' " recalls Baker. " 'They've got a tape. Go get the tape.' My squad leader went to get the tape." Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, "There is no tape." The New York Times later reported that the military "says it can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident." Baker was soon diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. He began suffering seizures, sometimes 10 to 12 per day. "This was just one typical incident, and Baker was recognizable as an American," says Horton. "But it gives a good flavor of what the Gitmo detainees went through, which was generally worse." If they did that to a U.S. soldier during a training exercise, one who was given a special code word to have the interrogation stop, what they did to actual detainees had to have been much worse. The torture by IRF teams is continuing under the Obama administration. In fact, it is actually getting worse: The Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected.

Prosecute sins of Bush-Cheney era

By Jack Cafferty, Currently employed by CNN but how long can that last?

(CNN) -- It doesn't go away by itself. Watergate "went away" when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace and left town never to be heard from in an official capacity again.

The Bush presidency is thankfully over...but the damage he and Dick Cheney did continues to press on the nerve of the American people like an impacted wisdom tooth. And until the questions surrounding arguably the most arrogant and perhaps most corrupt administration in our history are addressed, the pain won't go away.

From Nancy ("Impeachment is off the table") Pelosi to President Barack ("I want to look forward, not backward") Obama, the country is being poorly served by their Democratic government. And on this subject President Obama is dead wrong.

George W. Bush and his accomplices damaged this country like it's never been damaged before. And it's not just the phony war in Iraq or the torture memos that justified waterboarding. It's millions of missing emails and the constant use of executive privilege and signing statements.

It's the secretive meetings with Enron and other energy executives and the wholesale firing of federal prosecutors. It's trying to get the president's personal attorney seated on the Supreme Court and that despicable Alberto Gonzales sitting in front of congressional investigators whining, "I don't remember, I don't know, I...etc."

It's the domestic eavesdropping in violation of the FISA Court, the rendition prisons, and the lying. It's looking the other way while the City of New Orleans drowned and its people were left to fend for themselves.

It's the violations of the Geneva Conventions, the soiling of our international reputation and the shredding of the U.S. Constitution. It's the handing over of $700 billion to the Wall Street fat cats last fall, no questions asked. Where is that money? What was it used for?

It's the no-bid contracts to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater and the shoddy construction and lack of oversight of reconstruction in Iraq that cost American taxpayers untold billions.

If the Republicans were serious about restoring their reputation, they would join the call for a special prosecutor to be appointed so that at long last justice can be done.

It's too late for George W. Bush to resign the presidency. But it's not too late to put the people responsible for this national disgrace in prison.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jack Cafferty.

"My interest to hit Saddam Hussein"

5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".

He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

And yet, the government knew that Al Qaeda and Iraq were not linked. For example, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".

And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.

And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed and continue to claim that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Indeed, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this.

The War Crimes Act of 1996: Bush, Cheney and the Boys could be Indicted under US Law

The War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2441, makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment.

The statute applies not only to those who carry out the acts, but also to those who ORDER IT, know about it, or fail to take steps to stop it. The statute applies to everyone, no matter how high and mighty.

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.

The penalty may be life imprisonment or -- if a single prisoner dies due to torture -- death. Given that there are numerous, documented cases of prisoners being tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan (see for example this report), that means that the death penalty would be appropriate for anyone found guilty of carrying out, ordering, or sanctioning such conduct.

The general in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stated this week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials ORDERED that inhuman treatment and torture be conducted as part of a deliberate strategy. This confirms what the Pullitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam previously wrote.

Indeed, an FBI email declassified in December 2004 states that Bush signed an Executive Order authorizing torture (here is the list of documents obtained through a freedom of information act request, and take a close look, for example, at this one, which mentions the "executive order").

An expert on Constitutional law said that only Bush could have authorized the torture which has occurred.

It has also recently come out that, even after the torture at Abu Ghraib hit the news, torture still continues at that prison and, indeed, the U.S. is still torturing people worldwide. Even to the casual observer, it is obvious that the administration has no plans to stop, but has instead been working tirelessly to make it easier to carry out torture in the future.

Read further the article here from George Washington's Blog.

How Bush Abused Power?

Traces of explosives in 9/11 dust, scientists say

Tiny red and gray chips found in the dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center contain highly explosive materials — proof, according to a former BYU professor, that 9/11 is still a sinister mystery.

Physicist Steven E. Jones, who retired from Brigham Young University in 2006 after the school recoiled from the controversy surrounding his 9/11 theories, is one of nine authors on a paper published last week in the online, peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal. Also listed as authors are BYU physics professor Jeffrey Farrer and a professor of nanochemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

For several years, Jones has theorized that pre-positioned explosives, not fires from jet fuel, caused the rapid, symmetrical collapse of the two World Trade Center buildings, plus the collapse of a third building, WTC-7.

The newest research, according to the journal authors, shows that dust from the collapsing towers contained a "nano-thermite" material that is highly explosive. Although the article draws no conclusions about the source and purpose of the explosives, Jones has previously supported a theory that the collapse of the WTC towers was part of a government conspiracy to ignore warnings about the 9/11 terrorists so that the attack would propel America to wage war against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jones made headlines in 2005 when he argued that the rapid and symmetrical fall of the World Trade Center looked like the result of pre-positioned explosives. He argued that fires alone wouldn't have been hot enough to crumble the buildings; and that even if struck by planes, the towers should have been strong enough to support the weight of the tops as they crumbled — unless they were leveled by explosives.

Celebrating Bush's Failures

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The Bush Six to Be Indicted

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantanamo. By Scott Horton.

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human rights community on other points: they will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

Both Washington and Madrid appear determined not to allow the pending criminal investigation to get in the way of improved relations.

The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington and former Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. “The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation,” one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

Read further the article from here.

Could Bush Be Next?

Mr. Cheney, What About This 'Executive Assassination Squad'?

Canada breaking the law by hosting war crimes suspect George W. Bush

Protesters threw shoes at a billboard image of George W. Bush outside the Telus Convention Centre, where the former U.S. president was speaking. (Andree Lau/CBC)

The Canadian government has knowingly allowed the violation of both Canadian domestic law and international human-rights law by failing to stop former U.S. president George W. Bush from crossing the border for a paid speaking engagement with a private Calgary audience.

Many competent international authorities have concluded that the available evidence establishes that Bush and the Bush administration committed torture and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. Therefore Canada now has a duty to condemn, investigate, prosecute and punish those crimes.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Attorney General Rob Nicholson and other responsible ministers were notified on March 11 of specific evidence clearly demonstrating there are reasonable grounds to believe Mr. Bush has been complicit in torture and other war crimes.

Under Canada's immigration laws, if there are reasonable grounds to believe a person is complicit in these crimes, entry to Canada must be denied.

The test is not whether a person has been convicted, but whether there are reasonable grounds to think they have been involved in such crimes.

Even though Canadian officials were referred to the overwhelming evidence of Bush's involvement in torture government officials apparently took no action to bar Bush or commence an investigation.

"In a letter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police war crimes section and copied to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and other federal ministers and opposition MPs, the Lawyers Against the War group claims that Bush is 'inadmissible to Canada . . . because of overwhelming evidence that he has committed, outside Canada, torture and other offences' as detailed in Canada's War Crimes Act," reported Canada.com.

The letter asks the mounted police to "begin an investigation of George W. Bush for aiding, abetting and counseling torture between November 13, 2001 and November 2008 at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Bagram prison in Afghanistan and other places."

"The letter also alleges that Bush has engaged in 'systematic or gross human rights violations, or a war crime or a crime against humanity' under subsections 6(3) to 6(5) of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act," reported Straight.com.

Watch the angry crowd.

Ray McGovern: A Nation of Torturers

BUSH WAR CRIMES ARE JEOPARDIZING PUBLIC HEALTH IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ

By Sherwood Ross

As commander-in-chief of the military, former President George W. Bush was responsible for U.S. attacks on hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mistreatment of their personnel and patients, and the denial of medical supplies to them and to the general populations of those nations, an authority on war crimes says.

One of the most egregious of the Bush war crimes, the force-feeding of prisoners, is being continued by the Obama administration even though it is in violation of medical ethics and the first Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1977, the authority notes.

In a new book that compiles the war crimes committed by U.S. forces, “George W. Bush, War Criminal?”(Praeger), political scientist/author Michael Haas writes:

“In 2001, the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, and the hospital in Herat (both in Afghanistan) was targeted, resulting in about one hundred deaths.. The al-Nouman Hospital in Baghdad was hit in the initial bombing in 2003 resulting in the deaths of five persons” and the Central Health Center in Falluja (Iraq) was bombed in November, 2004, killing 35 patients and 24 hospital employees.

Moreover, the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in Falluja, run by a Saudi Arabian Islamic charity, “was reduced to rubble,” Haas writes, and when U.S. troops entered Falluja’s General Hospital, they forced all hospital employees and patients to lie on the ground and tied their hands behind their backs.”

The above acts violated the Red Cross Convention of 1864, which requires that “ambulances and military hospitals shall be acknowledged to be neutral…and shall be protected and respected by belligerents so long as any sick or wounded may be therein.” The acts also violate the 1929 Geneva Convention that says personnel ministering to the sick “shall be respected and protected under all circumstances.”

What’s more, on March 4, 2007, U.S. marines left the Jalalabad, Afghanistan, battlefield “without attending to those whom they had wounded,” Haas writes, and in July, 2008, U.S. soldiers blocked Afghan villagers from rescuing wounded civilians they sought to take to the hospital. This violates Article 1 of the Geneva Convention of 1949 that states “The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.”

Haas also notes that when Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld issued an order denying prisoners the right to see a physician for six weeks from December 2, 2002, to January 15, 2003, even though the Geneva Convention of 1949, Article 15, states, “The Power detaining prisoners of war shall be bound to provide free of charge for their maintenance and for the medical attention required by the state of health.”

Haas writes that prisoners suffering from asthma, diabetes, heart conditions, hepatitis, leg wounds, and other maladies went untreated in the Middle Eastern countries invaded by the U.S. and that doctor visits also have been denied to Guantanamo prisoners “to induce cooperation.”

“Medical facilities, medicines, staff, and supplies were inadequate for the large number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (Iraq),” Haas writes, and prisoners at Guantanamo were force fed even though the Tokyo Declaration of 1975 prohibits physicians to interfere medically with those who want to stop eating.

And where the Geneva Convention of 1949, Article 55, states, “the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population,” American and British vetoes in the Security Council blocked the release of $500 million in funds from the UN’s Iraqi oil-for-food account. Instead, they diverted the money to the Coalition Provisional Authority(CPA), “which failed to purchase needed supplies,” Haas writes..

And where the Geneva Convention of 1949, Article 56, states “Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties,” on May 23, 2003, the CPA fired top-level Iraqi government employees, including medical personnel. “The best hospital in Baghdad was converted into an American military hospital,” Haas writes, and the health administrator sent by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Frederick Burkle, was fired after one week “because he lacked political connections..” Haas adds that his replacement “failed to authorize funds for emergency rooms to treat victims of the insurgency, the most important medical problem at the time.”

According to Haas, a Belgian physician that visited 25 medical facilities in April, 2004, concluded, “Nowhere had any new medical material arrived since the end of the war” and that there was no sterile treatment at Al Nour Hospital, “as a result of which all patients with major burns are doomed to die.”

Haas states “the main result of the misoccupation of Iraq is an actual reduction in the state of public health.” He notes U.S. authorities actually “reduced the number of medicines available while occupying the country” and that children continue to be stricken with leukemia because the U.S. military “refuse to use Geiger counters to locate and dispose of ordnance containing depleted uranium despite pleading from the World Health Organization. “In matters of health, the Americans have descended like a plague of locusts on Afghanistan and Iraq,” Haas concluded.

Haas’s book lists 269 separate categories of war crimes for which former President George W. Bush was responsible. The book is arranged so that each category and the applicable war crimes statutes appear together. While those crimes concerning torture and the absence of due process are best known, the Haas book includes a wide range of war crimes violations from the failure to respect the legal framework of the invaded countries to the failure to promptly repatriate prisoners of war to the failure to protect public property.

Article taken from here.

The Oil Factor - Blood for Oil?

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski explains the locations of America oil bases overseas.

The Middle-East holds 70% of the world's oil reserves while North America and Europe will run out of oil in 2010 at their current rate of production. Current technologies might provide alternatives to oil for energy but not to oil for plastics.

In the wake of Vice-President Dick Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force, is it a coincidence if George Bush targeted Iraq in its so called "war-on-terror", a country known to possess the second largest oil reserves in the world? Is it another coincidence if U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Central Asia are based near Central Asian oil and natural gas? Was invading Iraq and Afghanistan really meant to reduce terrorist threats against the United States or was it a ploy to guarantee that the average American can go on for a little while consuming 4 times more energy that the average European or 32 times more energy than the average African?

After a year-and-a-half investigation and a three-month trip to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, "THE OIL FACTOR" looks at both the human cost and the greater geo-strategic picture of George Bush's "war-on-terror". With solid facts & figures, maps and graphics and original footage shot on location, the doc features such personalities as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Noam Chomsky, The Project for the New American Century Director Gary Schmitt, best-seller "Taliban" author Ahmed Rashid and the Pentagon's Karen Kwiatkowski.

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The Oil Factor - Blood for Oil? | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com