torture

Canada’s genocide against 50,000 First Nation children. Truth and Reconciliation Commission report is a whitewash

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Posted on Global Research, June 4, 2015
By Dr. Gary G. Kohls

canadaidlenomore
“They have lost their legal and moral right to exist …” – Brussels Tribunal
Canada’s expensive, seven year attempt to whitewash its mass murder of aboriginal children ended in lies and shame yesterday, when the state-funded “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) released its final report into the murderous Indian residential school system that obscured more than it revealed – and held nobody liable for the worst crime in Canadian history.

The $68 million TRC report acknowledged that genocide had in fact taken place in Canada, but named no perpetrators, ignored the legal consequences of this crime, and effectively absolved Canada and its churches for the systemic rape, torture and killing of aboriginal children that spanned over a century.

Plagued by corruption and tampering, and openly snubbing international law and due process by muzzling eyewitnesses and destroying crucial evidence, the TRC concluded by reporting that thousands of children “may have” died in the Indian residential school system, despite its own confirmed evidence of tens of thousands of such deaths.

Justifying the evasion of this truth, TRC Chairman Murray Sinclair, who was indicted by an international court in 2013 for obstructing justice and concealing genocidal acts, lied publicly yesterday when he claimed that “the (Canadian) government stopped publishing residential school death records in 1920″. In fact, reports of students’ deaths, and a constant mortality rate of between 40% and 60%, were continually published by the government until at least 1969, as was proven by independent researcher Rev. Kevin Annett in 1998, and subsequently.

In a public statement issued today and to be broadcast on youtube, Kevin Annett remarked,

“The little of the truth of the Canadian Holocaust that the TRC has admitted is simply a rehashing of everything I first made public in June of 1998, at our own independent inquiry. The TRC has simply stage-managed a public absolution of the churches and government that together exterminated more than 50,000 children. No-one will go to jail for these murders: the TRC was set up to ensure that. This is yet another national crime!”

Commenting from Brussels on the TRC report, a spokeswoman for the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS), the body that prosecuted Canada and its churches for Genocide in 2012 and 2013, said today,

“Churches and governments that committed and concealed such horrible crimes have no right under the law of nations to conduct self-managed ‘inquiries’ of themselves, as has happened in Canada. So we consider the TRC report a clear obstruction of the law and of justice, and it does not diminish by one iota the criminal liability of Canada and its churches, and their sponsors in London and Rome, for these war crimes. Frankly, these bodies have lost the moral and legal right to exist.””

In Winnipeg, and in response to the TRC report, the Provisional Council of the lawfully-proclaimed Republic of Kanata announced a renewed campaign to “dismantle this criminal conspiracy called Canada, and enforce the standing Citizen’s Arrest Warrants against thirty leaders of church and state in Canada”, including TRC chairman Murray Sinclair.

“They’ve admitted their crime and stand condemned under the law. Now it’s up to We the People to punish those criminals and their system, to cleanse our country of their legacy of child killing” stated Kevin Annett today.

A complete broadcast of Kevin Annett’s commentary along with updates of the Republic’s Arrest and Disestablishment campaign will follow shortly on youtube. See www.itccs.org and www.kanatarepublic.ca .

A Joint Communique issued by the ITCCS (Brussels) and the Republic of Kanata.

2 June, 2015

Interview: Modern Day Concentration Camp Investigation

Kevin Annett and Alexandra Meadors review and provide a detailed account of an investigation in 2011 and 2012 in Brantford, Ontario with the purpose of uncovering forensic evidence of children buried at the oldest Indian residential school in Canada. This school was established by The Crown and The State in 1832 and unfortunately was not shut down until 1970. In approximately 140 years, over 50,000 children are still missing.

Kevin Annett was re-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. Messages for him can be left at 386-323-5774 (USA). His personal website is www.KevinAnnett.com.  

Kevin’s award winning documentary film Unrepentant can be viewed at UNREPENTANT: KEVIN ANNETT AND CANADA’S (NATIVE PEOPLES) GENOCIDE: 1 of 1 FULL . See also: Eyewitness to Coverup of Genocide in Canada

His weekly blog radio program, Radio Free Kanata, airs on Sundays at 3 pm pacific, 6 pm eastern. It is found at: http://bbsradio.com/radiofreekanata . 

The official website for the Republic of Kanata is www.kanatarepublic.ca . The Founding Proclamation of the Republic of Kanata (January 15, 2015) is here:
Canadian Republic Proclaimed

See the evidence of Genocide in Canada at www.hiddennolonger.com and at the website of The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State at www.itccs.org.

The complete Common Law Court proceedings of Genocide in Canada are found at:The International Common Law Court: Genocide in Canada – Common Law Court Proceedings – Genocide in Canada  (Part One) – 1 hr. 46 mins.

Second Session of The International Common Law Court of Justice – Common Law Court Proceedings – Genocide in Canada  (Part Two) – 1 hr. 47 mins.Verdict and Sentence: Genocide in Canada – Final Court Verdict and Sentencing – 8 mins. 30 secs.Endorsements of ITCCS and Kevin Annett by native eyewitnesses – Authorizations and Endorsements of ITCCS/Kevin Annett by indigenous eyewitnesses – 10 mins.Witness to murder at Indian Residential School – Irene Favel, Eyewitness to the incineration of a newborn baby by a priest at Muscowegan Catholic Indian school, Saskatchewan, 1944Preview of Evidence of Genocide in Canada – Other key testimonies from our Court case against genocide in Canada

The first excavation at a mass grave residential school site: Mohawk school, 2011
http://itccs.org/mass-graves-of-children-in-canada-documented-evidence/

An International, multi-lingual ITCCS site can be found at: http://kevinannettinternational.blogspot.fr/

See also an insightful personal interview “Who is Kevin Annett?” (2013) at:

Who is Kevin Annett?

and eyewitness to the crimes: Dr. Jennifer Wade

http://www.globalresearch.ca/canadas-genocide-against-first-nations-children-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc-whitewash/5453367

Ray McGovern: College of William & Mary honors a war criminal

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By Ray McGovern
Posted on War is a Crime, May 18, 2015

Exclusive: Condoleezza Rice has crossed the threshold into esteemed celebrity – a welcomed speaker at this year’s College of William and Mary commencement – despite her record as the liar who sold the illegal war in Iraq and choreographed the torture techniques for use at CIA “black sites.”

By Ray McGovern

Nothing better illustrates the extent to which the United States has turned its back on the rule of law than when the likes of Condoleezza Rice are asked to address graduates and receive doctoral degrees honoris causa at university commencements. Ms. Rice – in my view a war criminal – was accorded those honors Saturday by the College of William and Mary, the second-oldest college in the U.S.

Unlike Rice’s other university appearances in recent years, there was not the slightest sign of unhappiness, let alone protest. Most of the graduating seniors were not yet ten years old in 2003 when Rice played a key role helping President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney launch a war of aggression against Iraq. So, the graduates’ ignorance may perhaps be understandable, but it does not speak well for their grasp of recent history.

It is far less excusable for the patrician leadership of William and Mary to have bestowed this honor on Rice. Did the news not penetrate their ivory tower that last year Ms. Rice was prevented from being accorded similar honors by irate students at Rutgers University, who were sickened at the thought that their commencement would be sullied by Rice’s presence?

One of the leaders of the “No Rice” campaign at Rutgers last year (a senior at the time), Carmelo Cintrón Vivas, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that the “students felt that war criminals shouldn’t be honored. … Someone who has such a tainted record as a public servant in this country should not … get an honorary law degree for trying to circumvent the law. … That’s not fair to any student graduating or not graduating at Rutgers University.”

He found “ludicrous” the familiar argument that Rice’s academic achievements outweigh her political positions: “If we look into a lot of international criminals and just bad people in history, a lot of them had great academic careers or great medical careers. … Your career is one thing, and the way you act as a person, as a human being, is another one. And that’s why we make this an issue about human rights.”

How to explain the contrast between the apathy prevailing at William and Mary and the awareness and activism at Rutgers? Perhaps one clue is the marked difference between the costs of attending. Tuition and fees are significantly higher at William and Mary, located in Williamsburg, Virginia. Another clue might be seen in the remarkable “tradition” of asking predominantly conservative Republican speakers to do the honors, and to get the honors, at commencement.

In contrast to the scene at William and Mary, this year’s commencement at Rutgers awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters to Frances Fox Piven, a highly respected scholar and advocate for poor working people. Piven’s recent books include The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush’s Militarism. Piven also won the Shirley Chisholm Award for “leadership toward social and economic justice.”

Looking at the assembled graduates at William and Mary, I could not help but mourn the fact that they were being sent off into life by Rice instead of Piven. I would expect Piven to address the pressing challenges facing the “99 percent” – and the injustices behind the growing unrest in Baltimore, St. Louis and other troubled cities. Rice did not mention any of that on Saturday. It was all about her – a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that, although black in Birmingham, Alabama, she nonetheless grew up relatively privileged.

Worse Still: War Crimes

Rather than some profile in courage or a person of steadfast principles, Condoleezza Rice represents malleability in the face of criminality and evil. She is a profile in cowardice and expediency, the opposite sort of lesson in how to live one’s life than Piven or many other worthy commencement speakers would be expected to present.

When President George W. Bush told Ms. Rice to scarf up any and all “evidence,” no matter how sketchy or deceptive, to prove that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), she led the fraudulent campaign to present the “intelligence” needed to deceive Congress into supporting a war that fits the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal’s definition of a “war of aggression as the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Rice played her role as drum majorette for war with exceptional enthusiasm – conjuring up the danger of “mushroom clouds” from Iraq’s (nonexistent) nukes; “yellowcake” uranium from darkest Africa (based on crudely forged documents); and aluminum tubes (that turned out to be standard Iraqi artillery tubes) but she said were for refining uranium.

Rice led the parade, with Dick Cheney’s indispensable help, promoting the various manufactured “evidence” against Iraq. The fraudulent nature of those spurious claims was laid bare in a July, 23, 2002 British document, The Downing Street Memorandum, published by The London Times on May 1, 2005. Established as authentic, the memo exposed the unconscionable attempt to “fix” the intelligence to justify a U.S./U.K. attack for “regime change” in Iraq.

For the rest of the article:
http://warisacrime.org/content/tis-season-fete-war-criminals

Comments: McGovern states later in the article: 

“The William and Mary experience on Saturday is hardly the first time a university has succumbed to the “prestige virus” and given some powerful celebrity high honors at a commencement despite the person’s deplorable actions. There are, sad to say, numerous examples, including an earlier one involving Ms. Rice.

 …’Thus compromised,’ warned [Daniel] Berrigan, ‘the Christian tradition of nonviolence, as well as the secular boast of disinterested pursuit of truth — these are reduced to bombast, hauled out for formal occasions, believed by no one, practiced by no one.’”

It is not just Catholic colleges that have invited Rice. In 2011, she was invited to speak at Westmont College, a Protestant Christian college in California, at the annual President’s Breakfast and later to students.
http://blogs.westmont.edu/magazine/2011/04/26/an-extraordinary-ordinary-woman/
An Extraordinary, Ordinary Woman

Westmont followed this by hosting Robert Gates in 2012, Colin Powell in March 2013, and stunningly, Henry Kissinger in a special event on October 2013. The Kissinger event took place one month after the release of declassified documents detailing Kissinger’s role in the US-backed Pinochet coup in Chile, which overthrew Salvador Allende.
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/resurgence/2013/276-277/world3.htm

Clearly, this brand of Christianity and these institutions have difficulty with the values of peace, justice, truth, love, wisdom, or that over-used word though under-used value, righteousness.

 

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 30 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

This article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com

 

Former CIA official on the secret wars of the CIA — Part 2

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From The Other Americas Radio
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info//article4069.htm

Transcript: THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA

by John Stockwell

A lecture given in October, 1987

Part II – Part I Here

I just got my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial – blow off juries and all that sort of thing – for having violated our censorship laws….

In that job [Angola] I sat on a sub-committee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done….

When the world’s gotten blocked up before, like a monopoly game where everything’s owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erased the board and started over has been to have big world wars, and erase countries and bomb cities and bomb banks and then start from scratch again. This is not an option to us now because of all these 52,000 nuclear weapons….

The United States CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in the world today….

By the way, everything I’m sharing with you tonight is in the public record. The 50 covert actions – these are secret, but that has been leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I urge you not to take my word for anything. I’m going to stand here and tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously I could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is to educate yourselves. The French have a saying, `them that don’t do politics will be done’. If you don’t fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig it out from the records, go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized and excited to do things that are not in your interest to do….

Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous one. Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We’ve spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua….

[When the U.S. doesn’t like a government], they send the CIA in, with its resources and activists, hiring people, hiring agents, to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country, as a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can make the government come to the U.S.’s terms, or the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d’etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly textbook-ish. What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market, where children can’t go to school, where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside their homes, where government administration and programs grind to a complete halt, where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If you ask the state department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say it’s to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they’re attacking a lot more.

To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza’s ex-national guardsmen, calling them the contras (the counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist until we allocated money. We’ve armed them, put uniforms on their backs, boots on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we’ve sent them in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction they have systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can’t get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.

If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA’s involvement in this, and their approach to it, dig up `The Sabotage Manual’, that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt, how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the sewage so it won’t work, things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.

Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced in 1984. It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror. This is a technique that they’re using to traumatize the society so that it can’t function.  Continue reading →

Former CIA official on the secret wars of the CIA — Part 1

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From The Other Americas Radio:

Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly, and the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible for the conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the militarization of the conflict.

And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was originated in the sub-committee of the [National Security Council] that I sat on as we managed this thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to the press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, `call us 10 minutes before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we’ll tell you which paragraph to read. And all four paragraphs would be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to create this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When they were in fact responding to our initiatives.

And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA director Bill Colby – the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam – he gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it’s a felony to lie to the Congress.
— John Stockwell, former CIA official
October 1987

 Transcript:THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:

by John Stockwell

A lecture given in October, 1987

Audio: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info//article4068.htm

Part I – Part II

John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell’s book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.

“I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done…

I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us….

What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.

What we’re going to talk about tonight is the United States national security syndrome. We’re going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the press. We’re going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so directly. I’m going to try to explain to you the other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing this, we’ll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.

Continue reading →

Argo vs. Waking up in Tehran — what happened in 1979? Hollywood propaganda vs. historical reality

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The book Waking Up in Tehran by Margot Lachlan White, which David Swanson describes as a “magnificent modern epic”, was apparently never published. What happened to her and the book? It is not hard to imagine the pressure from Israel and the United States to make sure it did not see the light of day, especially in light of the experiences she describes. There are a few reviews online and a podcast interview.

It’s more timely than ever to get this book published and/or posted online.

Posted on War is a Crime.org, January 11, 2013
Waking up in Tehran
by David Swanson

According to one theory, U.S.-Iranian relations began around November 1979 when a crowd of irrational religious nutcases violently seized the U.S. embassy in Iran, took the employees hostage, tortured them, and held them until scared into freeing them by the arrival of a new sheriff in Washington, a man named Ronald Reagan.  From that day to this, according to this popular theory, Iran has been run by a bunch of subhuman lunatics with whom rational people couldn’t really talk if they wanted to.  These monsters only understand force.  And they have been moments away from developing and using nuclear weapons against us for decades now.  Moments away, I tell you!

According to another theory — a quaint little notion that I like to refer to as “verifiable history” — the CIA, operating out of that U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1953, maliciously and illegally overthrew a relatively democratic and liberal parliamentary government, and with it the 1951 Time magazine man of the year Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, because Mossadegh insisted that Iran’s oil wealth enrich Iranians rather than foreign corporations.  The CIA installed a dictatorship run by the Shah of Iran who quickly became a major source of profits for U.S. weapons makers, and his nation a testing ground for surveillance techniques and human rights abuses.  The U.S. government encouraged the Shah’s development of a nuclear energy program.  But the Shah impoverished and alienated the people of Iran, including hundreds of thousands educated abroad.  A secular pro-democracy revolution nonviolently overthrew the Shah in January 1979, but it was a revolution without a leader or a plan for governing.  It was co-opted by rightwing religious forces led by a man who pretended briefly to favor democratic reform.  The U.S. government, operating out of the same embassy despised by many in Iran since 1953, explored possible means of keeping the Shah in power, but some in the CIA worked to facilitate what they saw as the second best option: a theocracy that would substitute religious fanaticism and oppression for populist and nationalist demands.  When the U.S. embassy was taken over by an unarmed crowd the next November, immediately following the public announcement of the Shah’s arrival in the United States, and with fears of another U.S.-led coup widespread in Tehran, a sit-in planned for two or three days was co-opted, as the whole revolution had been, by mullahs with connections to the CIA and an extremely anti-democratic agenda.  They later made a deal with U.S. Republicans, as Robert Parry and others have well documented, to keep the hostage crisis going until Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan.  Reagan’s government secretly renewed weapons sales to the new Iranian dictatorship despite its public anti-American stance and with no more concern for its religious fervor than for that of future al Qaeda leaders who would spend the 1980s fighting the Soviets with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan.  At the same time, the Reagan administration made similarly profitable deals with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, which had launched a war on Iran and continued it with U.S. support through the length of the Reagan presidency.  The mad military investment in the United States that took off with Reagan and again with George W. Bush, and which continues to this day, has made the nation of Iran — which asserts its serious independence from U.S. rule — a target of threatened war and actual sanctions and terrorism.

Ben Affleck was asked by Rolling Stone magazine, “What do you think the Iranians’ reaction is gonna be?” to Affleck’s movie Argo, which depicts a side-story about six embassy employees who, in 1979, avoided being taken hostage.  Affleck, mixing bits of truth and mythology, just as in the movie itself, replied:

“Who the FUCK knows – who knows if their reaction is going to be anything? This is still the same Stalinist, oppressive regime that was in place when the hostages were taken. There was no rhyme or reason to this action. What’s interesting is that people later figured out that Khomeini just used the hostages to consolidate power internally and marginalize the moderates and everyone in America was going, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with these people?’ You know, ‘What do they want from us?’ It was because it wasn’t about us. It was about Khomeini holding on to power and being able to say to his political opponents, of which he had many, ‘You’re either with us or you’re with the Americans’ – which is, of course, a tactic that works really well. That revolution was a students’ revolution. There were students and communists and secularists and merchants and Islamists, it’s just that Khomeini fucking slowly took it for himself.”

The takeover of the embassy is an action virtually no one would advocate in retrospect, but asserting that it lacked rhyme or reason requires willful ignorance of Iranian-U.S. relations.  Claiming that nobody knew what the hostage-takers wanted requires erasing from history their very clear demands for the Shah to be returned to stand trial, for Iranian money in U.S. banks to be returned to Iran, and for the United States to commit to never again interfering in Iranian politics.  In fact, not only were those demands clearly made, but they are almost indisputably reasonable demands.  A dictator guilty of murder, torture, and countless other abuses should have stood trial, and should have been extradited to do so, as required by treaty.  Money belonging to the Iranian government under a dictatorship should have been returned to a new Iranian government, not pocketed by a U.S. bank.  And for one nation to agree not to interfere in another’s politics is merely to agree to compliance with the most fundamental requirement of legal international relations.

Argo devotes its first 2 minutes or so to the 1953 background of the 1979 drama.  Blink and you’ll miss it, as I’m betting most viewers do.  For a richer understanding of what was happening in Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s I have a better recommendation than watching Argo.  For a truly magnificent modern epic I strongly encourage getting a hold of the forthcoming masterpiece by M. Lachlan White, titled Waking Up in Tehran: Love and Intrigue in Revolutionary Iran, due to be published this spring.  Weighing in at well over 300,000 words, or about 100,000 more than Moby Dick, Waking Up in Tehran is the memoir of Margot White, an American human rights activist who became an ally of pro-democracy Iranian student groups in 1977, traveled to Iran, supported the revolution, met with the hostage-takers in the embassy, became a public figure, worked with the Kurdish resistance when the new regime attacked the Kurds for being infidels, married an Iranian, and was at home with her husband in Tehran when armed representatives of the government finally banged on the door.  I’m not going to give away what happened next.  This book will transport you into the world of a gripping novel, but you’ll emerge with a political, cultural, and even linguistic education.  This is an action-adventure that would, in fact, make an excellent movie — or even a film trilogy.  It’s also an historical document.

There are sections in which White relates conversations with her friends and colleagues in Iran, including their speculations as to who was behind what government intrigue.  A few of these speculations strike me as in need of more serious support.  They also strike me as helpful in understanding the viewpoints of Iranians at the time.  Had I edited this book I might have framed them a little differently, but I wouldn’t have left them out.  I wouldn’t have left anything out.  This is a several-hundred-page love letter from a woman to her husband and from an activist to humanity.  It is intensely romantic and as honest as cold steel.  It starts in 1977.

Continue reading →

Report: War crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine: torture of the Donbass region residents (English) — PDF

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Posted on Fort Russ

Please post and distribute.

March 13, 2015
Democracyfund.ru
Published November 24, 2014

This report was written by a non-state organization ‘The Foundation for the Study of Democracy’ (headed by M. Grigoriev) and the Russian Public Council for International Cooperation and Public Diplomacy (presided by S. Ordzhonikidze) with the assistance of V. Dzhabarov, S. Mamedov, I. Morozov, S. Markov and other members of the Committee for Public Support of the Residents of South-Eastern Ukraine. For the purposes of investigating specific cases of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, experts of the Foundation interviewed the ex-prisoners released by the Ukrainian side, in some cases five or ten minutes after the exchange. The report written by the Foundation includes the results of interviews with over 100 prisoners released by the Ukrainian side. Experts of the Foundation conducted the interviews in the period from 25 August to 4 November 2014. It should also be noted that, according to those interviewed, the Ukrainian side releases only those prisoners who are in relatively satisfactory physical condition. Thus, one may conclude that the situation in Ukraine regarding torture is more serious than the one described in this report.

1 The majority of the interviewees are still afraid of possible punitive and unlawful measures by the Ukrainian side against their families, most of their names in this report have been changed. However, as part of legal procedures, a video of each interview has been recorded and personal data – first and second names, age, and place of residence – collected. 

 As the European Court of Human Rights opined, the Convention on Human Rights prohibits in absolute terms torture, irrespective of other circumstances. Moreover, it is assumed in the law of the European Union that ‘the State is responsible for the actions of all of its agencies, such as the police, security forces, other law enforcement officials, and any other State bodies who hold the individual under their control, whether they act under orders, or on their own accord.’ Unlike other clauses of the Convention related to rights, Article 3 makes no provision for derogation (reservations) in the event of a war or other emergency threatening national security. Article 15 paragraph 2 explicitly states that there can be no derogation from Article 3 within the Convention. The information collected by the Foundation for Democracy Studies gives grounds to believe that the Ukrainian armed forces, the National Guard and other military units of the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine, as well as the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) systematically and on purpose violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights that reads, ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’ The extent to which torture is being used and the fact that this is done systematically prove that torture is an intentional strategy of the said institutions, authorized by their leadership. Commenting on their practice of committing torture, Liliya Rodionova, deputy head of the Committee for Refugees and Prisoners of War (Donetsk), who is personally engaged in the exchange of prisoners, says the following about the prisoners that the Ukrainian side releases:

“Almost everyone released comes back with their ribs and legs broken and teeth ripped out. There is not a single person with no marks of beating. Treatment does not begin until right before the exchange. There is a guy with eight gunshot wounds. Even at the hospital, he was beaten. They stuck fingers in his wounds. They use pliers to rip out teeth and beat right in the wounds. Many come back with fractured skulls. One of the torture tools is an awl that they use for stabbing prisoners. Lately, they have been seizing ordinary people, not members of the self-defence forces. They use gunpowder and electroshock to torture people, they brand them. Some were thrown into a pit with dead bodies, crushed with a shovel bucket, had a smouldering iron stuck in their mouth. People were kept in iron containers with no source of oxygen. The torture techniques are sophisticated and brutal, they leave the victims maimed. Those in need of medical treatment, even with diabetes, receive no medical assistance. Prisoners from our side can be told by the color of their skin. It is greyish. Each time an exchange is to take place, we draw up a list of acute patients, but the other side won’t release them.”

Simon Verdian, a volunteer helping the Committee, who was himself released in September 2014, says, ‘I know of cases when prisoners had gunpowder spread over their genitals, were branded with hot iron, executed by shooting in front of other prisoners, sent to a mine field, crashed with shovel buckets into the ground and left in a pit of dead bodies for the whole night. Most of their meals consist of bread and water.’

1 «Prohibition of Torture, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment under the European Convention on Human Rights (Article  3)», Council of Europe, Interights, 2008.
Please read and share the full 49 page PDF report (in English) here:

 Part I.Methods and circumstances of torture committed by the Ukrainian armed forces and security forces

 

http://www.fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/03/pdf-report-war-crimes-of-armed-forces.html

ICC may consider Moscow Red Cross’ report on Kiev war crimes in Donbas

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From Sputnik News, January 13, 2015

MOSCOW, January 13 (Sputnik) – The Hague’s International Criminal Court (ICC) has received a report by the Moscow Red Cross on the crimes Kiev officials committed in Donbas, the organization’s chairman lawyer Igor Trunov told RIA Novosti Tuesday.

“An answer came from the public prosecutor of the ICC in The Hague, that our application of an investigation into the facts of crimes against humanity, committed by Ukrainian officials, has been accepted for consideration…,” Trunov told RIA Novosti.

“We are putting a question regarding the murder, massacre, enslavement, bombing of settlements, pressure by starvation, committed by Ukrainian officials towards civilians,” Trunov added.

Ukrainian authorities have also been accused of “persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, the torture of prisoners and other crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC tribunal.”

Headquarters of the Russian Red Cross in Moscow
© Sputnik/ Andrei Telichev
Moscow Red Cross Office to Send Humanitarian Aid to Luhansk on December 15

Last month, the Moscow Red Cross sent a statement to the UN Security Council, listing war crimes committed by Kiev officials in Donbas, all of which were in the Court’s jurisdiction.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, in turn, is investigating a number of cases of genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Donetsk and Luhansk.

According to the latest UN data, more than 4,7 civilians fell victim to the armed conflict in Donbas, more than 10 thousand were injured. Kiev and independence supporters signed a ceasefire agreement on September 5 in Minsk with the mediation of Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), but the truce has been regularly violated.

Source:
http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150113/1016847584.html

Kiev regime’s official policy of genocide for East Ukraine: starvation, torture, rape, and murder

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From Global Research, December 30, 2014
by George Eliason

Imagine a sign pinned to the podium on the floor of the US Senate that reads Ferguson will be ours! Pictured on it is an armored personnel carrier with the United States flag driving over a mountain of corpses. This picture shown below says just that about Donbass. This is Kiev’s official statement on mass murder for the area. This was pinned to the podium on the floor of the Ukrainian Senate (Verkhovna Rada).

President Petro Poroshenko and his government have run out of wiggle room to deflect charges of genocide any more.

On December 18th the newly appointed Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Senate) deputy Semen Semenchenko, formerly commander of the battalion “Donbass” warned that Ukraine intends to pursue terrorists from Donbass anywhere in the world. The terrorists from Donbass Semenchenko wants to pursue is anyone that did not leave when the ATO began.

Andrey Biletsky, former “Azov” battalion commander, Ukrainian nationalist ideologist, and a favorite in Victoria Nuland’s circles ( Biletsky was made a Verkhovna Rada deputy by Arseni Yatsenyuk) made clear who those terrorists are in an interview with Foreign Policy .

“Unfortunately, among the Ukrainian people today there are a lot of ‘Russians’ (by their mentality, not their blood), ‘kikes,’ ‘Americans,’ ‘Europeans’ (of the democratic-liberal European Union), ‘Arabs,’ ‘Chinese’ and so forth, but there is not much specifically Ukrainian… It’s unclear how much time and effort will be needed to eradicate these dangerous viruses from our people.”

Biletsky, a new Senator who is being groomed for the Ukrainian presidency thinks even his American handlers are part of the virus infecting Ukraine.

Rape is Official Policy in Ukraine?

His Azov battalion (with Nazi insignia)  are showing their true American and European values in Mariupol by gang raping women prisoners at prison every night, torturing, and murdering some of them. This is someone that describes Americans and democratic values as a dangerous virus that need to be eradicated making sure your US tax dollars hard at work again.

According to an article that was published in the Kharkov News by Rita Samoilov on December 25th 15-20 women prisoners at penal colony #107 are taken to the military camp every night and raped by the Azov battalion. Earlier in the year I reported the same behavior at the mines in Lower Krynka by Aydar battalion which resulted in reports of mass rape, torture, and mass graves found on the site where over 5000 Ukrainian cleansing troops and national guard were camped. Upon checking the allegations the OSCE found them to be true. Kiev responded by making Aydar the new model of policing in Ukraine. Continue reading →

Former CIA officer says the CIA won the midterm elections

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The grounds for such a reversal of fortune has been well prepared by the intelligence community’s persistent overhyping of what Clapper refers to as a “perfect storm” of “diverse” threats currently confronting the United States, most notably ISIS and associated groups together with the manufactured crisis in Ukraine

From American Conservative, November 13, 2014
The CIA Won the Midterms
By Philip Giraldi

Note: Midterm elections are the elections halfway through an American president’s 4-year term.

Incoming intel committee chair Richard Burr will end any hope of holding out of control spy agencies accountable.

The wheels up party is a venerable CIA tradition, normally celebrated at overseas stations when a particularly incompetent Chief of Station or a hostile ambassador was in the process of permanently leaving post. The drinking would begin at a time estimated to coincide with the moment when the dearly departed’s aircraft lifted off from the tarmac on its way to Washington.

Wheels ups are rarer at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., though celebrations were reported when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980; but as a number of senior officers in the Agency actually had a hand in that development, there was probably a measure of self-congratulation at a job well done.

One might well imagine that the partying began at Langley shortly after the polls closed last Tuesday, as soon as it became clear that there would be a GOP Senate majority. More to the point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein would be performing her own wheels up, relinquishing her position as Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) chair to be replaced by the little known Richard Burr of North Carolina. Burr is regarded by the Agency as a good friend, someone who had already staked out a position in favor of protecting government secrecy, stating “I personally don’t believe that anything that goes on in the intelligence committee should ever be discussed publicly.” He also basically supports the CIA position that torture produced information critical to the killing of Osama bin Laden, commenting that “The information that eventually led us to this compound was the direct result of enhanced interrogations…” Burr is regarded as a right-wing conservative and has earned the ultimate accolade of a zero rating from the American Civil Liberties Union. Continue reading →