Alyssa Peterson worked only two nights in a torture facility in northwestern Iraq called "the cage," before objecting and being reassigned.
A few days later, on September 15, 2003, she died from her own gun in what the Army is considering a suicide. Her personal notebook, which was found with her body, was redacted (the contents not released).
"Army spokespersons for her unit
have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected
to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."
According to the official report on her death released
the following year, she had earlier been "reprimanded" for showing
"empathy" for the prisoners. One of the most moving parts of that
report is: "She said that she did not know how to be two people; she
... could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire."
Peterson was then assigned to the base gate, where she
monitored Iraqi guards, and was sent to suicide prevention training. "But
on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she
shot and killed herself with her service rifle," the documents disclose.
Her parents, who live in northern Arizona, stated that they never received any official documents corroborating the report issued by the Army.
Alyssa was 27.
Why won't the Army reveal the "techniques" that Alyssa objected to? Why was her personal notebook redacted? What are they afraid of?
This clip of Shepard Smith moved me to tears. After all the bullshit, all the lies, all the equivocating and justifying of those who intentionally inflicted extreme torment on those who have not been convicted of any crime -- after all that, to hear one man say definitively that "We are Americans, we do NOT torture," it was a glorious thing to hear.
In contrast, Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, comes off as lacking several crucial body parts: spine, brain and heart. FDD is lousy with heartless neocons: Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich.
I hope Smith is not right now being tortured by Roger Ailes for speaking the truth.
An internationally renowned Spanish judge is attempting to prosecute six former Bush officials for their role in allowing torture at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. Despite being urged by the Spanish Attorney General to drop the case, Judge Baltasar Garzon has submitted the case to a lottery system which will now assign it at random to one of six high court judges. As one of those high court judges, Garzon has a one in six chance of getting the case back.
Spain has jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents claim to have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
The language used by Spanish Attorney General Conde-Pumpido, such as calling the case “fraudulent,” has led some observers to conclude that Conde-Pumpido bowed to pressure from the Obama administration. The AG also said "If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”
US Attorney General Eric Holder said that he isn't going to prosecute any Central Intelligence Agency employees who water boarded suspects. Holder said that it would be unfair to prosecute those who actually carried out acts of torture, because it was considered legal at the time by the Justice Department. Holder also said the U.S would defend the CIA torturers against attempted prosecutions from overseas.
The 1984 Convention Against Torture states: “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture…” Both Spain and the US are signatory to the Convention, which the US was involved in negotiating.
California Rep. and Democrat Jane Harman is apparently guilty of treason, it was reported last night. The story is reported by Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly here.
Knowing that all high ranking political players are kept in line by bribes and blackmail, I can only assume that Harman has now in some way disobeyed her handlers, and voila! this incriminating tape from October 2005 suddenly surfaces.
From Congressional Quarterly:
"Rep. Jane Harman
, the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence
issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli
agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce
espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli
Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in
Washington.
Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle
into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according
to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA
transcript.
In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi
, D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the
Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats
were heavily favored to win.
Seemingly wary of what she
had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA
transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t
exist.”
Jeff Stein addresses the obvious issue: Why are we just now hearing about this? but does nothing to calm my suspicion that they've been sitting on these tapes until they needed them to take out Harman for some reason:
Many of my friends, even fairly well informed people, fell for Obama's charm and vague promises and collapsed in tears on election night, believing that we would now get "change" and now had reason to "hope." It is understandable to want a Daddy figure to come swooping in out of no where to rescue us, but unfortunately there was never any good reason to believe that Obama was that person.
One can settle into a movie theatre and be swept away to a land of make-believe: ancient Japan, 19th century Wyoming, or a gritty story of inner city Baltimore. We silently exult when the hero escapes the bad guy and weep when he dies at the end in his lover's arms. But we won't be shocked when we see him alive and well at the Oscars, for we know it was just theatre. We know that if we saw him dancing with joy or sneering with contempt on the silver screen, it wasn't that he was really feeling those emotions. He was acting.
This incredible discovery has been published in a peer-reviewed science journal. Lead author Niels H. Harrit was interviewed for ten minutes on Danish television, and gave a concise and compelling explanation about the importance of this finding. Watch him here:
A team of scientists claim to have unearthed startling data from dust
and debris gathered in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center
towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.
In a study published by the Open Chemical Physics Journal
-- a peer-reviewed, scientific publication -- Steven E. Jones and Niels
Harrit level a stark allegation: that within the dust and rubble of the
World Trade Center towers lays evidence of "a highly engineered
explosive," contrary to all federal studies of the collapses.
"We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we
have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade
Center," reads the paper's abstract. "One sample was collected by a
Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second
WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The
properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy,
scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive
spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)."
Dr. Stephen Jones explains what "peer reviewed" means here:
Since the days of Sir Isaac Newton, Science has proceeded through
the publication of peer-reviewed papers. Peer-review means a thorough
reading, commentary and even challenge before publication by "peers",
that is, other PhD's and professors. This paper was thoroughly
peer-reviewed with several pages of tough comments that required of our
team months of additional experiments and studies. It was the toughest
peer-review I've ever had, including three papers for which I was first
author in NATURE. (Please note that Prof. Harrit is first author on
this paper.) We sought an established journal that would allow us a long paper (this paper is 25 pages long) with many color images and graphs. Such a scientific journal is not easy to find. Page charges are
common for scientific journals these days, and are typically paid by
the University or by the first or second author (as is the case with this
paper) or by an external grant.
A peer-reviewed journal is also called a "refereed" journal.
Peer-reviewers are almost always anonymous for scientific publications
like this -- that is standard in the scientific world. While authors
commonly recommend potential peer-reviewers, editors choose the
referees and usually pick at least one or two reviewers that the
authors did not mention -- and that is almost certainly the case with
this paper (based on commentary we received from the reviewers). In the
end, all the reviewers -- who were selected by the editor(s) --
approved publication. Thus, the paper was subjected to peer review by
the editor or editors, and it passed the peer-review process.
Debunkers may raise all sorts of objections on forums, such as "Oh,
it's just paint" or "the aluminum is bound up in kaolin." We have
answered those questions in the paper, and shown them to be nonsense,
but you have to read to find the answers. I may also provide answers
here and in emails, often quoting from the paper to show that the
answers are already in it.
Here's what you need to know (especially if you are not a
scientist): unless an objector actually publishes his or her objection in a peer-reviewed established journal, (yes that would include Bentham
Scientific journals), then the objection is not considered serious in the scientific community. You should not worry about non-published objections either.
So how do you, as a non-scientist, discern whether the arguments are
valid or not? You should first ask, "is the objection published in an established peer-reviewd journal?" If not, you can and should say --
"I will wait to see this formally published in a refereed scientific
journal. Until then, the published peer-reviewed work by Harrit et al.
stands."
Butler
Shaffer, who teaches at the Southwestern University School
of Law, wrote this compelling essay about the illogical attacks on conspiracy theorists over seven years ago, in 2002. It was eeriely prescient and even more relevant today than it was then.
"Paranoia"
consists not in a fear of others, but in a baseless
fear. Would one regard a Jew, in Nazi Germany, as "paranoid,"
because he thought the government was out to do him harm? If so,
how would we characterize the state of mind of another Jew, similarly
located, who did not see any threat from his government?
When one further considers how preoccupied government officials
are with protecting themselves from those they imagine themselves
to represent– to the point of routinely having bomb-sniffing
dogs, armed security guards, and military helicopters and soldiers
accompany their public appearances – it should be asked: just whois being "paranoid?"
It is interesting to observe the psychological projection that takes
place in such dynamics. The defenders of statism attack their critics
as "paranoids" while, at the same time, fostering an endless
supply of "enemies" against whom they promise us protection!
Politics thrives on the mobilization of the fear of others. President
Bush’s unilateral declaration of a permanent war against the rest
of the world can only be premised upon the most paranoid assumption
that everyone else is involved in a conspiracy against American
interests!
Two California men who call themselves Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) have compiled impressive video evidence that the plane seen flying towards the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 could not have caused the death and damage at the Pentagon, nor the damage to five light poles outside the Pentagon.
Frustrated with the inability of 9/11 researchers to do anything other than speculate about what really happened that day, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis decided to take matters into their own hands. They have repeatedly flown in from southern California, canvassed the area near the Pentagon on foot to find people who saw a plane just prior to the fireball, and then quizzed these eye-witnesses extensively on camera to establish exactly what they saw, when they saw it and where they saw it from.
Their research is summarized at their website, as well as in four DVDs containing interviews with 13 people who attest that they saw a plane fly to the north of the Citgo gas station on Pentagon property, not south of the Citgo station as required by the official story.
CIT had each witness draw the flight path they saw on a map; the compilation from all the witnesses is shown below. The yellow lines clustered together towards the top of the map are from the witnesses, the straight blue line angling up from the bottom edge of the map is the official flight path of the plane, as described by the National Transportation Safety Bureau (NTSB).
Taken together, the 13 witnesses deliver a devastating blow to the official story about the Pentagon attack. Five 40 foot, 247 pound light poles were knocked down that day, and if the plane flew north of the Citgo station, it could not have knocked down those poles. The west side of the Pentagon was damaged as if it was hit by a plane heading north, with the zone of destruction angling north. If the plane flew to the north of the Citgo station before hitting the Pentagon, it would not have caused this kind of damage.
CIT’s evidence is compelling for a number of reasons. Three of their witnesses are Pentagon police officers who were on duty at the time of the attack. Most of the others were government employees at their jobs, and their presence at that place and time can be verified. This stands in sharp contrast to the witnesses who claim they saw the attack from their cars, as their presence on the road cannot be confirmed.
