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DD

[bucheon bum]

[igotthisguitar]

Torture "widespread" under U.S. custody: Amnesty
By Richard Waddington
Wed May 3, 1:07 AM ET

GENEVA (Reuters) - Torture and inhumane treatment are "widespread" in U.S.-run detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere despite Washington's denials, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

In a report for the United Nations' Committee against Torture, the London-based human rights group also alleged abuses within the U.S. domestic law enforcement system, including use of excessive force by police and degrading conditions of isolation for inmates in high security prisons.

"Evidence continues to emerge of widespread torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees held in U.S. custody," Amnesty said in its 47-page report.

It said that while Washington has sought to blame abuses that have recently come to light on "aberrant soldiers and lack of oversight," much ill-treatment stemmed from officially sanctioned interrogation procedures and techniques.

"The U.S. government is not only failing to take steps to eradicate torture, it is actually creating a climate in which torture and other ill-treatment can flourish," said Amnesty International USA Senior Deputy Director-General Curt Goering.

The U.N. committee, whose experts carry out periodic reviews of countries signatory to the U.N. Convention against Torture, is scheduled to begin consideration of the United States on Friday.

The last U.S. review was in 2000

It said in November it was seeking U.S. answers to questions including whether Washington operated secret detention centers abroad and whether President George W. Bush had the power to absolve anyone from criminal responsibility in torture cases.

The committee also wanted to know whether a December 2004 memorandum from the U.S. Attorney General's office, reserving torture for "extreme" acts of cruelty, was compatible with the global convention barring all forms of cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.

[Bulsajo]

Please excuse igotthisguitar- along with incontinence, he is unable to read thread topic headings.
And now back to the topic at hand.

[Bulsajo]

More food for thought- I don't think there's anything thing new in this analysis, but it is a nice precise summary:

Burning the bridges
Iran, U.S. on collision course over nuclear power

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

Gwynne Dyer

THE draft resolution on Iran's nuclear activities that the United States, Britain and France presented to the United Nations Security Council yesterday is designed to fail. By making it a Chapter Seven resolution (one that is mandatory under international law and can be enforced by sanctions or even by military action), the authors have guaranteed that it will ultimately face a veto by Russia and China, neither of which is convinced that such extreme measures are necessary.

They are not necessary, but this resolution burns the bridges on further negotiations (not that the U.S. was willing to talk directly to Iran anyway) and there have been heavy hints in Washington of military action against Iran. If U.S. President George W. Bush follows the same path that he took into Iraq, a "failure to act" by the Security Council is the necessary preliminary to an attack on Iran. Such an attack would make no military sense, but American foreign policy is still in the hands of neo-conservatives whose mantra used to be that "the boys go to Baghdad, the men go to Tehran."

Even if Iran does intend to build nuclear weapons eventually, there is no urgency. As Robert Joseph, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, said in March, the U.S. intelligence community believes that Iran is "five to 10 years away from a nuclear weapons capability." Attacking Iran is also a military nightmare for American strategic planners: Former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke pointed out last month that the Clinton administration also contemplated a bombing campaign in the late 1990s, but "after a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States."

Even massive U.S. air strikes that killed thousands of Iranian nuclear specialists (plus many hundreds of civilians) would only set Iran's program back a couple of years, and a land invasion is out of the question: The U.S. army is already stretched too thin by Iraq. Iran might be able to close the Gulf to oil traffic -- its sea-skimming and underwater anti-ship missiles are good enough to give the U.S. navy a run for its money. It could tip the world's oil markets into turmoil just by withholding its own oil exports. And it could set southern Iraq on fire by mobilizing its Shia allies there.

So Iran is unfazed by U.S. threats. Indeed, it has chosen this week to launch its new Oil Stock Exchange, an upstart rival to the London and New York exchanges where almost all of the world's exported oil is currently traded. This will involve the establishment of a new Iranian "marker" crude, and probably the denomination of its price in euros, not in U.S. dollars. There seems to be no fear of the U.S. reaction.

The prediction that this new oil bourse would attract an avalanche of customers eager to get out of U.S. dollars and lead to the downfall of that currency was always vastly exaggerated. Contracts made under Iranian law are not very attractive to the world's big traders, and the market will struggle to find its feet at first.

But Tehran is well aware of the conspiracy theorists who argue that the U.S. invaded Iraq to punish Saddam Hussein for demanding that his oil be paid for in euros, and warn that Iran might face a similar fate. It clearly doesn't give their warnings a second thought.

Iran will not back down and neither will the United States. The crash is probably still many months away, but these two countries are on a collision course. So it might be a good time to reconsider the question of what capabilities Iran is really seeking with its nuclear programs.

Iran's nuclear weapons program was started by the Shah but cancelled by Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution because weapons of mass destruction were "un-Islamic." It is not known when it started up again, but it certainly didn't go into high gear until the late 1990s, probably in response to the Pakistani nuclear weapons tests of 1998. For although Pakistan is a safe neighbour under its current regime, Shia Iranians worry about what might happen if the Sunni extremists, who are also present in considerable numbers, even in the army, ever gained power in Pakistan.

Iran's activities nevertheless remained legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, since all the early steps toward a nuclear weapons capability -- essentially, developing the ability to enrich uranium or to reprocess plutonium -- are identical to those you would take if you just wanted to have the full fuel cycle for civilian nuclear power generation under your own national control. And if Iran's major goal is the ability to deter attack if Pakistani nuclear weapons fall into the wrong hands, it is probably only seeking a "threshold" nuclear weapons capability for now: That is, to get to the point where it could build the actual weapons in six months or so if the local strategic situation suddenly went really bad.

There are many other counties with this kind of "threshold" capacity, from Japan and Brazil to Sweden and South Africa. It's a perfectly legal position to occupy, and given that Iran lives under the shadow of Israeli, American, Russian and Indian nuclear weapons as well as Pakistani ones, it's not unreasonable for Tehran to want to get there. There is obviously a diplomatic deal to be made here, if anybody's interested.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based
independent journalist.

� 2006 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.

Who is Gwynne Dyer?

[ddeubel]

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[bucheon bum]

[Gopher]

DD: your posting on the overthrow of Mossadeq does not reflect current scholarship on the event. It is also inaccurate and incomplete.

And being to Tehran does not enhance your credibility in and of itself anymore than living in Nazi Germany would make someone an expert on Hitler. You need to review the historical record and the documentary evidence bearing on any particular problem. And you can do that in most university libraries, at least in the U.S. You also need to do more than Google for information.

See Gasiorowski and Byrne, eds., Mohammad Mossadeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2004). Gasiorowski is a poly-sci professor and Byrne is deputy director and research director at GWU's National Security Archive, and a U.S.-Iranian relations specialist.

I should point out that you can rest easy because the National Security Archive is very critical of the U.S. and its foreign policy -- and, moreover, researchers there like Peter Kornbluh are well to the left, ideologically speaking. Hopefully, that will give Gasiorowski and Byrne the credibility they need with you and others who share your worldviews.

This notwithstanding, their work is still professional and useful, and I have no problem citing it as an authority, because, indeed, the NSA is an authority on U.S. foreign policy, particularly on CIA-sponsored covert operations.

Unless you can confront Gasiorowski and Byrne and treat the analyses and conclusions they and their contributors have published, you are not telling anyone here anything that they have not heard before.

[Hollywoodaction]

The Hidden Imam? Is that a real person, or a fabrication?

[bucheon bum]

Well there is the 12th imam who dissapeared. He's supposed to reappear right before judgement day I believe.

From wikipedia: