Wednesday, Jun 25th
Last update01:51:51 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated.
TVNL Comment: When will Bush and Cheney and their entire gang of war criminals face justice? Just asking.
One of America’s NATO allies—which supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror by committing its troops to the struggle–has now opened formal criminal inquiries looking into the Bush team’s legacy of torture. The action parallels a criminal probe into allegations of torture involving the American CIA that was opened this week in the United Kingdom.
Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo.
The survey was disclosed as Benjamin Netanyahu, the incoming prime minister, presented himself as a peacemaker and assured Palestinians that his government would be their "partner".
Even as Mr Netanyahu was addressing the conference, however, Israel's Army Radio reported that he had agreed to build more homes inside Jewish settlements on the West Bank inside an area known as E-1, a few miles east of Jerusalem. Construction in this vital region could sever the West Bank in two, making the creation of a viable Palestinian state even more difficult.
The radio station said this was part of a secret agreement with Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, who is likely to be foreign minister in the new coalition.
Israeli soldiers routinely and intentionally put children in harm's way during their 22-day offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza, according to a United Nations report made public Monday.
The report said a working group had documented and verified reports of violations "too numerous to list."
Binyam Mohamed, 30, held by the US for nearly seven years, was told by the American military that he could win his freedom if he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, ended his High Court case to prove his claims of torture and agreed not to speak to the media about his ordeal. He rejected the deal.
The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime.
I went to our soldiers and said, "The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out . . . to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out. . . . This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves, throwing a grenade, all those things."
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