Sir! No Sir! Exposing and Debunking Military Lies from Vietnam to Iraq

War Criminals in High Places: holding the bastards accountable for their crimes - Senate will advance torture commission

This article, by Mark Benjamin, was posted to Salon, Februuary 24, 2009

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WASHINGTON -- The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to move forward with a commission to investigate torture during the Bush administration. Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., told Salon Tuesday that his panel would soon announce a hearing to study various commission plans. His staff said the announcement could come as early as Wednesday.
While Michigan Democrat Rep. John Conyers and North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones drafted a bill to create a commission to review abuse of war powers during the Bush administration, Leahy's Senate commission would represent the first concrete steps forward toward a broad review of U.S. torture since 9/11.
Spearheading Senate efforts to establish a torture commission is Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. As a member of both the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, Whitehouse is privy to information about interrogations he can't yet share. Still, regarding a potential torture commission, he told Salon, "I am convinced it is going to happen." In fact, his fervor on the issue was palpable. When asked if there is a lot the public still does not know about these issues during the Bush administration, his eyes grew large and he nodded slowly. "Stay on this," he said. "This is going to be big."
Whitehouse admitted he had not discussed the plan yet with President Obama, who has been notably wishy-washy on the notion since taking office. On the one hand, Obama has consistently said that "my administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture." Yet on the other hand, he has insisted that "nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen; but that generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards."
According to Whitehouse, current politics dictate that Congress should take the lead on establishing a torture commission. "When you look at the economic meltdown that [Obama] was left by the Bush administration, you can see why he would want to reassure the American public that he is out there looking at these problems and trying to solve them and not focusing on the sins of the past," he said.
Whitehouse, however, predicted that Obama would not object to a torture commission moving forward in Congress. Besides, he said, "When push comes to shove, we are the legislative branch of government. We have oversight responsibilities. And we don't need the executive branch's approval to look into these things just as a constitutional matter."
Plans to establish the commission still remain in their infancy, as senators and staff look at previous panels, such as the 9-11 Commission, and investigations following Watergate. Whitehouse, a former U.S. attorney, noted that a torture commission might need the power to immunize witnesses on a case-by-case basis. The prospect of future prosecutions, he said, are beside the point. Most important was putting a spotlight on abuses committed by the Bush administration.
"We have this American government, which has an architecture and a shape and a system that drives it and constrains it and that keeps it honest," he said. "And what happened is that the Bush administration figured out a lot of ways to tunnel through the walls and sneak over the fences. So now we need to go back and say, 'We have got to plant those walls deeper so you can not tunnel under them.' We've got to spotlight how they did it," Whitehouse explained. "The ultimate goal in this is to protect and enhance American democracy."
Last week, retired Maj. Gen. Tony Taguba, known for conducting an honest investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, discussed his support for such a commission in an exclusive interview with Salon. Taguba joined a group of former high-level diplomats and law enforcement officials who also announced their support for a torture commission late last week, along with 18 rights groups.
During that interview, Taguba stated that any review must include close analysis of claims from Bush administration officials that abusive interrogations worked. "Some of those activities were actually not effective and those who thought so were in the academic or pristine settings of their offices," Taguba said. "What would they know?"
Whitehouse agreed, and depicted as ironic the fact that some members of the intelligence community saw themselves as "the Lance Armstrongs of interrogation," while some members of the military objected to abuse as ineffective. "In fact, the exact opposite was true," Whitehouse said about such claims from the CIA."It was amateur hour with them, and the career, tough, serious military interrogators said that this just was not effective," he said. "But it is important to prove the point, because they keep saying, 'We saved lives. We interrupted plans. We did this, that and the other.'" Whitehouse added, "Well, when you drill down, there is never a fact there. It turns into fog and evasion."

War Criminals in High Places: holding the bastards accountable for their crimes - Rendition Case Enters "Bizarre" Realms of Secrecy

This article, by William Fisher, was published by IPS, February 13, 2009

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NEW YORK, Feb 13 (IPS) - A prominent British-American lawyer who represents an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee is charging that U.S. Defence Department officials are intentionally concealing evidence of his client's rendition and torture from President Barack Obama.
The lawyer is Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve. He says he sent a letter to Obama through the Defence Department detailing "truly medieval" abuse inflicted on Binyam Mohamed, but that much of it was blacked out, preventing the president from reading it.
In the letter to the president, Stafford Smith urges Obama to be aware of the "bizarre reality" of the situation. "You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by U.S. personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command."
The central figure in this British case is the same Binyam Mohamed who appealed a separate U.S. case, on behalf of himself and four other terror suspects, to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco last week.
In that case, government lawyers from the Obama administration sought a decision not to reinstate a case that was thrown out by a lower court last year because government lawyers argued successfully that allowing the case to go forward would jeopardise U.S. national security.
In opposing reinstatement of the case, Obama's lawyers used the same "state secrets" privilege used by Bush lawyers in the original case. The appeals court has not yet ruled in the case, which charges that a subsidiary of the Boeing Company, Jeppesen Dataplan, knowingly provided aircraft and logistical services to facilitate the Central Intelligence Agency's rendition of Mohamed to overseas prisons where he was tortured.
The letter and its blacked-out attachment were disclosed as two high court judges agreed to reopen the court case in which Mohamed's lawyers, the Guardian newspaper and other media are seeking disclosure of evidence of alleged torture against him.
Mohamed's lawyers are challenging the judges' gagging order, claiming that David Miliband, the foreign secretary, changed his evidence. The attachment is titled "Re: Torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed by US personnel." The entire body of the memo and the name of its recipient are also redacted.
Stafford Smith told IPS in an email exchange that his letter to President Obama speaks for itself. He says he doesn't know who redacted the materials he submitted to the Defence Department.
In a judgment last week, British Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones stated repeatedly that Secretary Miliband claimed the U.S. had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Britain if information relating to Mohamed's alleged torture was disclosed. Miliband subsequently denied the U.S. had applied such pressure, but a U.S. State Department spokesperson thanked the British government for respecting the confidentiality of shared intelligence. The British case will be reopened next month.
Stafford Smith's letter to Obama says: "I am writing with great urgency concerning the rendition and torture of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner represented by our charity. His name is Binyam Mohamed, and he is a British resident."
"You will doubtless have been informed about Mr. Mohamed's torture - he was abused in truly medieval ways over a period of more than two years in Pakistan (at the behest of the U.S.), then again in Morocco (where he had been rendered by the CIA), and then in the Dark Prison in Kabul. There has been a firestorm in the media of our closest ally, the United Kingdom because, according to two British judges, the Bush Administration 'threatened' to withdraw national security cooperation with the UK if the judges ordered the release of materials concerning the torture of Mr. Mohamed in U.S. custody."
"The British judges bowed to this 'threat'- but suggested at the end of their Judgment that your administration might reconsider the position taken by your predecessors....
"Since we, at Reprieve, are U.S. lawyers with appropriate security clearances, we have access to this classified material. We have therefore assembled a memorandum that collates the evidence of torture in question. It is attached...for now, to deal with the British judges' request, we are submitting this information to you with no reference to any agent's name, or even the location of the abuse. Thus, as the British judges suggested, there is nothing in the memo that divulges material that should be considered classified."
"We are submitting this letter and attachment to the Privilege Review Team established by the Department of Defense to deal with these issues...If the DOD is unwilling to forward this material to you, then we will send you only what we are allowed to send you - which will be a copy of this letter and a redacted version of the memo illustrating the extent to which it has been censored."
Earlier, Mohamed's U.S.-appointed military lawyer told a press conference that his treatment "would make waterboarding seem like child's play".
The Guardian newspaper reported that Stafford Smith and his military lawyer last week met in private with members of the British intelligence and security committee, the group of MPs and peers facing mounting criticism in Westminster over claims it failed to effectively scrutinise the activities of MI5, the British intelligence agency.
Stafford Smith said he told the committee it would have been "absolutely impossible" for it to have cleared MI5 of involvement in the torture of Mohamed had it seen 42 key documents in the case - as he has - that Miliband says cannot be released for reasons of national security.
Binyam Mohamed is a 30-year-old Ethiopian who was granted political asylum in Britain in 1994. In 2002, he was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned over to U.S. intelligence officials in connection with the Bush administration's extraordinary renditions programme. He was shuttled between CIA-operated facilities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Morocco.
During this period of U.S.-sponsored detention, according to court papers, Mohamed was "routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot tingling liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution, and death."
Mohamed, who had been scheduled for release from Guantanamo shortly, has been on a hunger strike for the past month. He is reported to be close to death.

Where's the Outrage 126 - RIGHTS: Violations Privatised Away

This article, by David Cronin, was published by IPS, February 10, 2009

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BRUSSELS, Feb 10 (IPS) - The intimate involvement of the private sector in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq received international attention in September 2007, when staff with the security firm Blackwater shot dead 17 civilians in the vicinity of Baghdad's Nisoor Square.
Though the U.S. has made the most extensive use of such companies in the history of modern warfare, it is in Europe where they originated. Back in 1967, senior political and military figures in Britain formed Watchguard International as a response to a left-wing coup in Yemen five years earlier. Now recognised as the world's first private security firm, its original intention was to shore up governments that could otherwise be overthrown.
Four decades later, the European Union is being urged to introduce regulations so that better oversight of private security firms can be guaranteed.
According to Chris Kinsey, an academic with King's College in London who has studied private security firms for the past 10 years, such companies are easy to set up.
"You only need yourself, probably a fax machine, and to know how to bid for government contracts," he said at a debate in the European Parliament Monday.
While most of the firms in question work in parts of the world where they can be tried for any misdemeanours by local courts, they have been operating in something of a legal vacuum in Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo and Somalia during recent years. In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority that took charge after the country's president Saddam Hussein was toppled, went so far as to issue an order providing immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for international contractors.
The British government, meanwhile, has procrastinated in subjecting private security firms to tougher rules. This is despite the recommendation in a government policy paper in 2002 that "sound legislation" be developed in this area. That recommendation followed the so-called Sandline affair during the late 1990s, in which a private firm was implicated in breaking a United Nations embargo on providing weapons to Sierra Leone.
About 85 percent of private security firms are based in either Britain or the U.S., though the industry has also spread to France, Israel, South Africa, China and the former Soviet Union. Amnesty International has complained that Britain's private security firms can evade responsibility for human rights violations they are accused of as they cannot be tried in British courts.
Kinsey believes that the 27-country EU is better placed than national administrations to ensure that regulation occurs. Clearer rules are needed, he suggested, as private security firms are eager to widen the scope of their activities to include humanitarian and development aid tasks, increasing the potential for human rights violations.
"Regulation at national level allows companies to move around," he said. "If regulation is very restrictive, they will simply move to another country."
The International Committee of the Red Cross, perhaps the world's best- known humanitarian group, has joined with the government of Switzerland to study how private security firms can be monitored. Some 17 countries have taken part in their discussions so far.
Stéphane Kolanowski, a legal adviser to the Red Cross, described the granting of immunity from prosecution to certain private security firms as an "unjustified idea."
Among the most egregious breaches of human rights attributed to private security companies has been the involvement of their personnel in the administration of Abu Ghraib, the infamous prison in Iraq which has become synonymous with photographs of detainees being tortured.
Kolanowski raised questions about the delegation of tasks normally performed by public sector employees to private firms. "States cannot escape their obligations by the hiring of a private company," he said. "Some activities cannot be subcontracted - such as the power of an officer in charge of a prisoner of war camp or a place where civilians are interned."
J.J. Messner from the International Peace Operations Association, a Washington-based umbrella group for the private security industry, indicated that he would welcome being subject to more stringent laws. "The private sector desires clear rules and guidelines," he said. "Grey areas create unnecessary complications. The European Union is in a pivotal position to impress upon its member states the importance of regulation."
Hélène Flautre, a French Green member of the European Parliament (MEP), suggested in the course of the debate that all EU military operations should have officers who liaise between soldiers and private firms that have been hired to provide particular services.
"Where subcontractors are allowed, this shouldn't represent an evasion of international humanitarian law," she said.
Michael Gahler, a German Christian Democrat MEP, said: "It is very important that we shouldn't give private security companies a law-free area. Employing them should not be a way of avoiding international law. That has to be the yardstick."

Book Review - Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan — Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations

This review, by Carolyn Kellogg, was published in the Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2009

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One of the challenges new President Obama will face is how to manage the ongoing war in Iraq. In "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan — Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations," Iraq Veterans Against the War speak out about their experiences there. The book is taken from live testimony — at Winter Soldier events — of soldiers who started out enthusiastic but eventually found themselves opposed to the war. Their perspective, just one take on the war, is notable for its sense of committment that turns to regret and loss.
Logan Laituri, a medic and forward observer from New Jersey, served in Iraq in 2004-05. He was part of a patrol that came across a U.S. convoy that had had an accident; Laituri found a soldier trapped under the wrecked Humvee who was judged to be too far gone for help. The badly injured man held on for 90 minutes as others around him were attended to; he died later on the way to a clinic. Laituri says:

For some reason that hit me pretty hard. For nine nights I didn't sleep. I realized that there's a great possibility that he had died hearing everybody around him and knowing that nobody was coming to his aid. In the tents at night, in the pitch dark, I couldn't stop thinking about how it felt being trapped under a Humvee and possibly not being able to catch a breath and cry for help. And then I realized that, despite all the Iraqi bodies I had seen throughout Iraq, it was an American soldier that made me disturbed. I still wrestle with that. What does that mean? That I saw these dead Iraqis, but it took an American soldier, someone my own race and creed and skin color, to wake me up out of slumber.
Michael Prysner, from Tampa, Fla., served in 2003-04. His early assignments included removing Iraqis from their homes; later, he became an interrogator.
I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame....
We were told we were fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.
I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families thrown into the street in this country, in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away, they are right here at home, and if we can organize and fight, we can stop this war... and we can create a better world.
Today may have seen the largest inaugural celebration ever, but our soldiers are still at war in Iraq. And figuring out how to best manage that difficult war will be only one of Obama's many new responsibilities.

Upcoming Events - Cage Prisoner Tour (UK)

The Cage Prisoner Tour, highlighting conditions in Guantanamo Bay, began in London on the 11th of January and will end on the 3rd February at Cardiff University. Despite the fact that President Obama has announced that Guantanamo will be closed, a year is a long time and 242 prisoners remain incarcerated at Guantanamo.
Please show them they have not been forgotten by the world

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Two Sides, One Story - Cageprisoners National Tour

Cageprisoners Presents:

TWO SIDES - ONE STORY:
GUANTANAMO FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE WIRE

A national tour to mark seven years of unlawful detention, abuse and torture

January 11th 2009 - 4th February 2009

SAMI AL HAJ (Ex Guantanamo Detainee and Aljazeera Journalist)

CHRISTOPHER ARENDT (Ex-Guantanamo Guard)

MOAZZAM BEGG (Ex-Guantanamo Detainee, Spokesman for Cageprisoners)

Guantanamo Bay stands as one of the most potent symbols of unlawful detention in the world today. The detention of suspected terrorists as the prison camps has evoked emotion from those seeking its closure and continuance.

Cageprisoners presents Two Sides – One Story­, a tour of the UK that brings those on opposite sides of wire at Guantanamo together for the first time.

Chris Arendt, a former guard at the base has agreed to speak about his experiences in detaining suspected terrorists and bring new insights into the way the US administration carried out policies against them.

Also for the first time the detained Al Jazeera journalist Sami El Haj will be speaking with Moazzam Begg as they both reflect on life at the prison on the opposite to Chris.

This unique tour is a historic moment in the continued War on Terror and will be launched on 11th January 2009, exactly seven years after the first transfers to Guantanamo Bay.

Visit Guantanamo Voices, http://www.guantanamovoices.org the new blog by Sarah Mirk, a reporter based in Portland, Oregon. Sarah is travelling around the UK with Cageprisoners as part of our UK tour.

23/01 - Blackburn, 2pm - 3:30pm:

Blackburn Cathedral, Cathedral Close, Blackburn BB1 5AA
Contact: 07903731106/01254 503081

23/01 - Bolton, 5pm - 7:30pm:

Bolton Council of Mosques, Conference Suite,, 1 Vicarage Street ( off Cannon St)
Bolton, BL3 5LE
Contact: 01204 363680 / [email protected]

26/01 - Leeds

Contact Leeds University Islamic Society, for more information

27/01 - Hull

Quaker Meeting House, Bean Street, Hull HU3 2PR
Contact: John Beardmore and Martin Dean, 01482 327574
[email protected]

28/01 - York, 6-8pm

With the University of York Law Society, P/X/001 (Physics Exhibition Centre), York Campus, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD
Contact:07825751494 / [email protected]

29/01 - Newcastle, 7:30 PM

Herschel Building, Newcastle University (opposite Haymarket Metro), Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU
Contact: 0771 994 6814/ [email protected]

30/01 - Glasgow, 7 PM

Adelaides, 209 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4HZ.
Contact: [email protected] 07936432519
This event is supported bySACC and Glasgow Stop the War Coalition

31/01 - Edinburgh, 2:30 PM

Augustine Church, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh
Contact: [email protected] 07936432519

02/02 - Oxford, 8 PM

The Oxford Union, Frewin Court Oxford, OX1 3JB
This event is supported by the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Islamic Society

03/02 - Belfast

Stay tuned to the blog http://www.guantanamovoices.org for more information

04/02 - Cardiff, 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales
Contact: [email protected]
This event is supported by Cardiff Stop the War Coalition

Nonfiction reviews: Soldiers' stories

These book reviews, by Gerald Nicosia, were published in The San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 2009

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• The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans, By Aaron Glantz, University of California Press; 254 pages; $24.95
• Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations, By Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz, Haymarket Books; 236 pages; $16 paperback

Get ready, America: The Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are starting to make their voices heard. Just as it took decades for us to learn the full extent of the damage wrought by the Vietnam War, we are just now starting to glimpse the hurt and suffering and enduring wounds created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With "The War Comes Home" and "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan," independent journalist Aaron Glantz puts himself at the forefront of those who are bringing this new generation of veterans into public view. Not only did Glantz spend several years in Iraq, covering the war and reporting on the lives of Iraqis, but he was deeply affected by the conflict to the point of suffering post-traumatic stress disorder when he returned.
What makes "The War Comes Home" such a powerful plea is that Glantz admits his initial bias against the vets - they were the ones who caused all the misery among the poor Afghans and Iraqis. But his eventual realization that both reporter and soldier are common victims of a government that wages such wars allowed him to identify with the vets and to empathize with their struggles.
Like the Vietnam vets, these vets return to face their own people who wish to put these unproductive wars behind them. One of the most poignant observations comes from Shad Meshad, a Vietnam veteran who spent decades counseling troubled vets. Meshad tells Glantz: "When I go through airports I see soldiers just sitting up against a wall - you may see hundreds of them in a large airport - just by themselves. No one goes up to them, that positive energy toward them is faded ... No one is spitting or shouting, but they're still left with the fact that they're responsible for what they did or didn't do and they're supposed to think about that alone."
Depression, suicide, homelessness, jail, PTSD - the statistics for the veterans are as staggering as they were for Vietnam vets. A 2008 Rand Corporation study claims that "at least 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, while another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury." It also claims that "a majority of the injured are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA."
The scandal over the horrible conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was the most dramatic manifestation of what is daily reality for most vets seeking treatment: A VA backlog of tens of thousands of claims, interminable waits to see a doctor and general bureaucratic apathy. In one of the more wrenching stories, Glantz relates how the parents of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey watched helplessly as his mental health deteriorated after his return from Iraq - while the VA refused to treat him for PTSD because of his chronic drunkenness - until one day Lucey's father found him hanging dead from a garden hose tied to a beam in their cellar.
The vets are victims not of some sinister plot, but of a government forced to cut back VA staffing and programs to pay for the very war that is disabling so many of them. Glantz shows that the problem stems ultimately from the way our society uses, then discards, its warriors.
"Nobody really knows how to deprogram a soldier," Glantz quotes former Army instructor Karl Risinger. Even more to the point are the words of a veteran who spent 15 years homeless and in prison: "I needed to learn how to live again." The military, as Glantz points out, teaches well how to kill and how to survive in the most adverse and threatening circumstances, but not at all how to get a job, keep a family together, or live "life on life's terms."
The reader will get a concentrated, almost unbearable dose of soldiers' pain in "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan," a book that Glantz put together with the help of the organization Iraq Veterans Against the War. The book comprises selections of the testimony given by about 50 veterans at a four-day event staged by IVAW in Silver Spring, Md., in March. IVAW modeled its hearings on the Winter Soldier Investigation held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit in 1971, whose goal had been to show that atrocities such as the My Lai massacre had not been freak occurrences perpetrated by a "few bad apples," but the product of official military policy. Similarly, IVAW wanted to show that "high-profile atrocities like the torture of prisoners inside Abu Ghraib and the massacre of twenty-four innocent civilians at Haditha were ... part of a pattern of increasingly bloody occupations."
The vets' words in "Winter Soldier" are at times so shocking that many Americans will not want to believe them. In fact, the public got no chance to assess the truthfulness of the testimony because most of the national media refused to cover the hearings. But all of the vets who testified were checked out ahead of time. Moreover, the terse, understated way that many of the vets related unthinkable horrors testified to the banality of these experiences.
Not all of the stories related in "Winter Soldier" are gruesome, and it may be hard sometimes to tell whether the shelling of a mosque, say, or the tearing apart of an old woman's house in the middle of the night were "atrocities" or simple military necessity. But in a way that is what the "Winter Soldier" hearings set out to show: that in this endless so-called war on terror, the "rules of engagement" eventually loosened to the point where American soldiers were told they could use lethal force against any Iraqi showing "hostile intent."
Like "The War Comes Home," "Winter Soldier" makes us feel the pain and despair endured by those who serve in a military stretched to the breaking point by stop-loss policies, multiple combat tours, and a war where the goals and the enemies keep shifting. But these books also make us admire the unbreakable idealism and hope of those men and women who still believe that by speaking out they can make things better both for themselves and for those who come after them.
"We were all good people," said Army scout Steven Casey. "We were just in a bad situation and we did what we had to do to get through."

Framing George Bush's Legacy - "WAR CRIMES TIMES" HANDED OUT AT NEWSEUM

click here for a .pdf copy of the paper

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The following article was originaaly published on the War Crimes Times website

The "War Crimes Times," was officially launched Saturday, January 17, at an action in Washington, DC. At 11:30 AM, Saturday, January 17th, at the Newseum, 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, activists surprised and delighted tourists as they distributed the Inaugural Issue and displayed a huge banner saying:

“ARREST BUSH AND CHENEY CORPORATE MEDIA: PARTNERS IN CRIME? READ WarCrimesTimes.org”

Tarak Kauff, former army paratrooper and coordinator of the action, told reporters,“The Newseum, the showpiece home of the corporate media, was chosen as the initial distribution point of the War Crimes Times to highlight the mass media's negligence. The WCT is a newspaper created to fill the void left by the corporate media’s failure to report the Bush Administration’s numerous and severe war crimes. The pre-inauguration timing and Washington DC location were also chosen to demand that the Obama Administration vigorously and unconditionally prosecute Bush and all members of his administration responsible for these crimes.”

Framing George Bush's Legacy - Artists Respond to Bush's War[s] (2003 - 2006)

These posters were originally published as part of the + War + Iraq Poster Exhibition

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Target Amerika - Adam Faja

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Pretzels Not Bombs - juan felipe rubio

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Blood for Oil - Jonathan Gurvit

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Who Would Resist - adrianus

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Stop the Oil War - Daniel Pownall

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Uncle Sam - Dennis R.

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No A La Guerra - Manu

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Smart Munitions - Miguel Sanchez Vega

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I'm right and you're wrong - Yi

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TaTaTaTa - Xose Gar

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11.09.01 - Vadim Roger

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Murder - ultraobscene

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Murder - ultraobscene

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Special Delivery - Timothy Webb

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War on Iraq Oil - Smart Graphic

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Homeland Security - Sean Greathead

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Liberty - Sean Greathead

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Skulls and Bars - David Martin Anton

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Cultura contra la guerra - Rafael Arjona

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Blood is cheaper - Farah Khan

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In Lies We Trust - Farah Khan

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Colonialism - Wayne Acree

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Oil and Blood - Peter Fine

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Raising Death - Jadran Boban

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Global War Energy - Un Mundo Feliz

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No blood - Un Mundo Feliz

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It's Toasted - Kristin Freeman

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Skulls and Wire - Las Madres Del Cordero

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Terrorists Wear Suits - Doug Minkler

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The Un-Holy Trinity - Doug Minkler

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US Lawmakers Never Lie - Doug Minkler

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Hearts on Fire - Jonathan McIntosh

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Framing George Bush's Legacy - Artists Respond to Bush's War[s] (2003 - 2006)

These posters were originally published as part of the + War + Iraq Poster Exhibition

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America, where have you gone? - Adrienne Burk

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American Peace - Moncho

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Amerika Drills - Daniel Matarazzo

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Bombing for Peace - Melanie Goux

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Cartoon of a war - Liquid

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Col-Laterals - Carles Bellver Torlà

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Don't Be A Puff - Daniel Maclaren

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Don't Be A Puff - Pere Castaño

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Fighting for Peace - Aki Carpenter

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FM 21-76 - Jordan Rishel

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Freedom Busssh - Rodrigo Maia

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I Want You - Isidro

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If there are no witnesses - Golfus

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La Bolla - Diego Camino

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Let's Bomb Texas - Kelly Griebl

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Stop the New World Order - Albert Ruiz

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Stop the War - Eugene Petrov

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Texas-No! - Neo:k

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The Art of Distraction - Rubén Sánchez

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Unconstitutional State of America - Chuck Beers

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Victory - Ajubel

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War. Don't Do It - George Samsoun

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World's Grave - Eugene Petrov

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Framing George Bush's Legacy - Artists Respond to Bush's War[s] (2003 - 2008)

These posters were originally published as part of the + War + Iraq Poster Exhibition

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Fill Her Up - Michael Rdding

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Make ... not war - Michael Rdding

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Freedom - Dani Reina

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The Depression of Nature - eggie

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Reverse Psychology - ghetto bastard

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War is not pretty - Tom Borges

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Signs of War - Fiona Hmilton

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With Glory and Gold - Brian Monzingo

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