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XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN JAN 02, 2005 21:25:35 ET XXXXX DEMS CONSIDER TORTURE SHOW 'N TELL AT GONZALES HEARING **Exclusive** During upcoming confirmation hearings for Attorney General-nominee Alberto Gonzales, senior Democrats want to screen infamous videotapes showing Iraqis being abused at Abu Ghraib prison, top sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT. The curtain is raised Thursday for the Senate Judiciary Committee's showdown with Gonzales. The Bush White House counsel will be grilled about his role in formulating the administration's legal policies on coercive techniques in interrogations -- techniques some Democrats believe led to outright torture! Yet it's the grainy prison...

In yet another example of why journalists are held in such low esteem by most Americans, the Associated Press finds itself under legal challenge from six Navy SEALs and two of their wives over a series of photographs that the news agency published this month. The pictures, taken from a public Web site that was located by an AP reporter using a Google search, seemed to show the SEALs mistreating prisoners. Because the photos carried a date stamp of May 2003, the AP story said, they might have constituted the earliest photographic evidence of prisoner abuse in Iraq. The problem,...

July 27, 2004 Pg. 1 Senators Satisfied With Their 'No' Vote On Iraq ‘We were all firmly convinced we’d done the right thing’ By Lauren Shepherd By 1 a.m. that Friday morning, almost every senator had left the Capitol for home. Three Democrats, though, were still on the Senate floor, waiting for the final vote count on a resolution that would allow President Bush to launch a pre-emptive strike on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) — had voted against the resolution along with 18 other Democrats, one independent and one...

Afghan forces arrested three Americans, including a purported former Green Beret, after raiding a jail they were allegedly running in the Afghan capital and finding prisoners hanging from their feet, officials said Thursday. The U.S. military, facing a widening inquiry into prisoner abuse, quickly distanced itself from the three, who had been posing as American agents before being detained Monday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday "the U.S. government does not employ or sponsor these men." Afghan officials also dismissed claims by the apparent ringleader, Jonathan K. Idema, that he was a "special adviser" to their security forces, saying...

Two years after the charges first surfaced, Kofi Annan has finally admitted that U.N. peacekeeping troops sexually abused war refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo. "I am really shocked by these accusations," the United Nations Secretary-General told reporters last week. He shouldn't be. Allegations of sex crimes committed by U.N. staff and troops date back at least a decade and span operations on three continents, in places like Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cambodia. But rather than showing the kind of "zero tolerance" toward sexual crimes that Mr. Annan now promises, the U.N. has treated such instances with cavalier...

JAMES CASON, head of the U.S. Interest Section in Cuba (the United States has no embassy there) has ignited a marvelous little propaganda war between the United States and Cuba, and Cuba is losing. Decrepit old dictator Fidel Castro has imprisoned 75 Cubans this year for political disobedience. Cason decided to use Christmas to remind the world of this crime. His office set up an outdoor Christmas display complete with white lights, candy canes, a Santa Claus and a large, red 75. As soon as the display was up, Fidel demanded the Americans take it down. Cason refused, and he...

TEHRAN (MNA) –- Expediency Council Chairman Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said here on Tuesday that Westerners, and particularly the United States, are in no position to comment on the issue of human rights in light of the “Guantanamo hell” and the scandals resulting from the U.S. administration of Iraqi prisons. Disclosures of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq created worldwide uproar and many international organizations have expressed serious concern over the abuse of prisoners in the U.S. military prison in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba. In a meeting with the new Swiss ambassador to Tehran, Philippe Welti, Rafsanjani stated that the aggressive...

LOS ANGELES - Actor Erik Anthony Aude, who was freed from a Pakistani prison after serving two years on a drug charge, returned home to an emotional reunion with family and friends. Aude, who had minor roles in the television show, "Reba" and the hit film "Dude, Where's My Car?" was freed last week from a jail in Rawalpindi, a city near Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. "I'm lucky to be here right now and I'm happy," Aude said upon his arrival Sunday night at Los Angeles International Airport. Aude had missed a scheduled Christmas Day flight, but a throng of supporters...

The high point of [Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez’s] career is, without a doubt, leading U.S. forces in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was captured. The low point, two words: Abu Ghraib.“What did you think when you first saw the pictures?” I asked him.“That could not happen in my Army,” he responded. “It was a situation that was impermissible; that is why we immediately ordered investigations.”. . . One report indicates the commander of the allied troops approved a series of questionable interrogation tactics in September 2003. During our interview, Sanchez denied any such orders were given. He said investigations are continuing,...

LIBS SAY BUSH AUTHORIZED TORTURE: Some leftist over at DailyKos is now pushing the idea that it was President Bush who personally ordered "torture" in the prison scandals... Their source is the ACLU. They claim various FBI documents demonstrate that Bush signed off on techniques that were labeled "torture". The best they come up with is "sleep deprivation", "the use of military dogs", "sensory deprivation" and "stress positions". It's as though the people posting this stuff aren't even aware of the fact that we are fighting an enemy who wants to kill us. Anybody else besides me think that capturing the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A brazen daylight attack in the heart of Baghdad with rebels executing election workers in cold blood served as a chilling reminder Sunday of the deteriorating security situation in the Iraqi capital with just more than a month before crucial parliamentary elections. A series of pictures taken by an AP photographer show three pistol-wielding gunmen, who had earlier stopped a car carrying the election officials and dragged them into the middle of Haifa Street in the midst of morning traffic. The busy, traffic-clogged street has been the scene of almost daily gunfights between the insurgents and...

We've discussed Jimmy Carter's legacy of friendship and warm support for the world's dictators many times already, notably on Venezuela, but a return to Carter's Cuba legacy may be an even worse experience, because of an unmistakable whiff of treason. Where do we start? Remember Jimmy Carter's cabinet appointments? People like Andrew Young, who hung out with the hate-America crowd over at the United Nations and denounced America and Israel with the gamiest dictators on earth? Carter had a lot of these rabid blame-America-firsters on his coattails, and some are more active than ever. One is named Wayne Smith, who...

Report warning of possible abuses was sent to officials before Abu Ghraib photos surfaced. CIA officers in Iraq were ordered to stay away from a U.S. military interrogation facility last year because agency officials questioned the way detainees were being interrogated, according to a December 2003 report on a secret special operations unit. The report warning of possible abuses of Iraqi detainees in U.S. custody was sent to commanders in Iraq a month before the now infamous photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison emerged early this year, the Pentagon said Wednesday in confirming some of the findings. The report by...

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - Attorneys for Pfc. Lynndie R. England told a military judge yesterday that the young Army reservist was sleep-deprived and coerced when she told investigators that Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad had been humiliated and photographed "just for fun." Defense attorneys want three incriminating statements England made about the abuses thrown out by the presiding judge, Col. Stephen R. Henley, before she stands trial in January in military court. Her lawyers also want to exclude the now-infamous photographs that show England flashing a thumbs-up sign near naked Iraqis and holding a leash tied to...

...[T]he ICRC is alleging that the psychological conditions faced by Guantanamo detainees are "tantamount to torture."... Because--we kid you not--prisoners are being held for indefinite periods, and the uncertainty is stressful. And because some prisoners are subjected to psychological pressure techniques during interrogations aimed at thwarting further terrorist attacks. ...The basic idea behind granting POW status is that soldiers who surrender or are captured are not to be punished so long as they have behaved according to certain rules--such as fighting in uniform and doing their best to direct their own attacks at enemy soldiers rather than civilians. Part of...

FORT BRAGG, NC -- Lawyers for Pfc. Lynndie England moved Wednesday to throw out statements she made when first questioned about Iraqi prisoner abuse, including that reservists were just "joking around, having some fun." The motion was one of five taken up by military judge Col. Stephen Henley in a hearing in advance of England's Jan. 18 court-martial on abuse charges stemming from photos of her pointing and smiling at naked detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. Paul Arthur, an Army special investigator, testified that England was aware of her rights, including to have a lawyer present, when she was...

BERLIN (AP) - A group of American civil rights attorneys filed a criminal complaint in German court on Tuesday against top U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, for acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The complaint also names former CIA director George Tenet, the former commander in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and seven other military leaders. Attorneys from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights said they filed the complaint because they were disappointed in U.S. investigations into the Abu Ghraib abuses, and hoped the filing would prompt an investigation by German authorities....

UN: 150 Sex Abuse Charges in Congo Peacekeeping Mon Nov 22, 8:43 PM ET By Evelyn Leopold UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations (news - web sites) is investigating about 150 allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. civilian staff and soldiers in the Congo, some of them recorded on videotape, a senior U.N. official said on Monday. The accusations include pedophilia, rape and prostitution, said Jane Holl Lute, an assistant secretary-general in the peacekeeping department. Lute, an American, said there was photographic and video evidence for some of the allegations and most of the charges came to light since...

Hello Fellow FReepers. There is a situation here at Ft. Huachuca that requires our attention. This Sunday on 21Nov some anti-military folks are busing like-minded individuals to our front gate to protest our military training center. Here are some sweet things they had to say about our guys: “The Army Intelligence Training Center at Fort Huachuca educates military personnel in torture and these students go on to train people in torture all across the globe. The United States is responsible for using torture and training other governments in the most modern methods of torture.” ”Abu Ghraib is only one of...

The DC bureau chief of the Arab newspaper Salameh Nematt, is on Hannity and Colmes right now, and has said that most Arab media is "contributing to a distorted view" of events in Iraq, and criticized them for being "mouthpieces of governments" in the Middle East. Wow!