Super K Board

US admits use of napalm in Iraq

I'm sure you haven't read this anywhere in the newspaper. Why you might ask? Maybe because it's more important to know that a wacko like Tom Cruise is getting engaged with Katie Holmes rather than the fact that the United States is using banned chemical weapons against innocent civilians in a war that was inititated through fabricated lies.

Free prees? My ass.

Here's also a BBC-reported article related to the topic. BBC article

Go ahead, make a search in US mainstream media. You will not find a single report on this story. Sad thing is this story was out two years ago.

  The Independent August 10, 2003

US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq

 

By Andrew Buncombe

American pilots dropped the controversial incendiary agent napalm on Iraqi troops during the advance on Baghdad. The attacks caused massive fireballs that obliterated several Iraqi positions.

The Pentagon denied using napalm at the time, but Marine pilots and their commanders have confirmed that they used an upgraded version of the weapon against dug-in positions. They said napalm, which has a distinctive smell, was used because of its psychological effect on an enemy.

A 1980 UN convention banned the use against civilian targets of napalm, a terrifying mixture of jet fuel and polystyrene that sticks to skin as it burns. The US, which did not sign the treaty, is one of the few countries that makes use of the weapon. It was employed notoriously against both civilian and military targets in the Vietnam war.

The upgraded weapon, which uses kerosene rather than petrol, was used in March and April, when dozens of napalm bombs were dropped near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris river, south of Baghdad.

"We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches," said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. "Unfortunately there were people there ... you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."

A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald who witnessed another napalm attack on 21 March on an Iraqi observation post at Safwan Hill, close to the Kuwaiti border, wrote the following day: "Safwan Hill went up in a huge fireball and the observation post was obliterated. 'I pity anyone who is in there,' a Marine sergeant said. 'We told them to surrender.'"

At the time, the Pentagon insisted the report was untrue. "We completed destruction of our last batch of napalm on 4 April, 2001," it said.

The revelation that napalm was used in the war against Iraq, while the Pentagon denied it, has outraged opponents of the war.

"Most of the world understands that napalm and incendiaries are a horrible, horrible weapon," said Robert Musil, director of the organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility. "It takes up an awful lot of medical resources. It creates horrible wounds." Mr Musil said denial of its use "fits a pattern of deception [by the US administration]".

The Pentagon said it had not tried to deceive. It drew a distinction between traditional napalm, first invented in 1942, and the weapons dropped in Iraq, which it calls Mark 77 firebombs. They weigh 510lbs, and consist of 44lbs of polystyrene-like gel and 63 gallons of jet fuel.

Officials said that if journalists had asked about the firebombs their use would have been confirmed. A spokesman admitted they were "remarkably similar" to napalm but said they caused less environmental damage.

But John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The US is the only country that has used napalm for a long time. I am not aware of any other country that uses it." Marines returning from Iraq chose to call the firebombs "napalm".

Mr Musil said the Pentagon's effort to draw a distinction between the weapons was outrageous. He said: "It's Orwellian. They do not want the public to know. It's a lie."

In an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Marine Corps Maj-Gen Jim Amos confirmed that napalm was used on several occasions in the war.

 

---

© Copyright 2003, Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Chaos in Haiti

Haiti Massacre

As if Haiti wasn't in bad enough shape...it's sad enough that the US staged the coup of Aristide last year, with no repurcussions as usual, based on some far-fetched rhetoric that Haiti needs new leadership to get out of its then violent and poverty-stricken state.

Yes, Haiti was in horrible condition, no thanks to the US policies that brought them there in the first place. But as always, whenever true democracy works its course particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, the US steps in to try to shut it down. If Venezuela were smaller I'm sure Chavez would've been long gone. I mean how many times does a guy have to get voted in before it counts? I guess democracy isn't democracy unless the outcome is agreeable to the United States.

And so fast forward almost one year. How's the situation in Haiti? More divided and violent than ever. No help from the outside.

Sound familiar? Because it's the same US policy that they've been enforcing upon the rest of the world over and over again.

Criminals The Lot Of Us

Link: ZNet |Iraq | Criminals The Lot Of Us.

A reminder of how hypocritical the world is, and the double standards that people accept. The war on Iraq was a crime, pure and simple. There was no reason to invade the country, none. The only reason that the current US administration still holds to is that the world is better without Saddam. No shit, but that's no reason for a war. But the world is not better with tens of thousands of dead innocent Iraqi civilians. The world is not better with over a thousand dead US soldiers. The world and the US is not better or safer from terrorism now that people from the middle east, south east asia, and across the world are united and even more strongly opposed to western ideas and the US.

The war was nothing more than a large scale terrorist attack by sovereign countries.

AP: Gitmo Soldier Details Sexual Tactics

Link: AP: Gitmo Soldier Details Sexual Tactics.

By all means necessary? I know to an average Western-educated or Asian guy they're probably thinking: I was locked in Guantanamo Bay and all I got was this lapdance? That's awesome! But obviously this is an extreme form of humiliation and torture for those of the Islamic faith. If one instigated a war based on what they believe is a high moral standard (although that thought obviously doesn't apply in this war anyway), then this moral standard should obviously carry on in all related matters as well. Which I guess is the problem.

Anyway, all this moral and religious crap spewed by the current US administration is just bullshit. I can't imagine feeling more helpless than those detained in Guantanamo with no trial, no option for appeal, indefinte sentence, and daily psychological and physical terror.

Did someone say we're fighting a war on terror as in we're fighting the war using terror? Well by all means then this war is one big success.

No WMD...no surprise...

No surprises here, the White House announced that the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has ended without the finding of any such weapons.

After two years, millions of dollars, thousands of meaningless deaths, and one ongoing war based on false premises, that's the best the current US administration could do.

If one would sit back and look at how insanely ridiculous the situation is, how the Bush Adminstration should immediately be tried for war crimes, how the mass media should quit in shame for their reporting, it just blows the mind the fucking absurdity of it all.

And yet some Americans still wonder why their government is hated everywhere.

Discussions and posts on Tsunami news stories

You take a look at the posts going on for the tsunami news stories on Yahoo, and you just gotta think...how can there be so many blind and ignorant motherfuckers in this world? How come so many seem to be from the US? The gap between informed people and ignorant people is now a big friggin' black hole.

Of course this in no way is a true sample of the population and reality, at least I hope not, but one has to wonder...

Link: Yahoo! News Message Boards World News.

By the way, the news story itself is a piece of crap. What kind of shit writing is this in the first few paragraphs...the article might as well have come from a highschool paper.

US considering detaining terror suspects for life without trial

My first reaction was what the fuck? You've got to be fucking joking. But no, apparently not. Now I can't see this actually passing, but you never know from one of the biggest human rights violators in the world.

This is absolutely ridiculous.

Mon 3 Jan 2005

US 'preparing to detain terror suspects for life without trial'

Plan for permanent US prison reported

JACQUI GODDARD IN MIAMI

THE Bush administration is preparing plans for possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including hundreds the government does not have enough evidence to charge in court, it was reported yesterday.

Citing intelligence, defence and diplomatic officials, the Washington Post said the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had asked the White House to decide a more permanent approach for those it did not plan to set free or turn over to courts at home or abroad.

Despite pressure from the international community and human rights advocates to end the holding of suspects without trial at Guantànamo Bay, Cuba, the newspaper said the United States Defence Department planned to apply for $25 million from Congress to build a 200-bed prison to house them permanently.

In addition, some of the Afghan, Saudi and Yemenis currently accommodated at Guantànamo and elsewhere could reportedly be filtered back to their home countries and held in prisons built by the US but operated by their national governments.

"Since the global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to be looking at solutions for long-term problems," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

"We are at a point in time where we have to say, ‘How do you deal with them in the long term?’"

While addressing calls to improve conditions for detainees, the proposals are bound to bring further outcry from human rights groups.

Leading senators from both political parties condemned the reported plan yesterday.

"It’s a bad idea, so we ought to get over it and we ought to have a very careful, constitutional look at this," said Senator Richard Lugar, Republican chairman of the senate foreign relations committee.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, senior Democrat on the armed services committee, said the system should be made more democratic. "There must be some modicum, some semblance of due process ... if you’re going to detain people, whether it’s for life or whether it’s for years," he said.

The plan could prompt new questions over Britain’s record on terrorist-suspect detentions, which was condemned in a Law Lords’ ruling last month. The Lords ruled that the detention without trial of nine Muslim suspects in Belmarsh Prison, London - nicknamed "Britain’s Guantànamo" - violated the European Convention on Human Rights.

"It calls into question the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention," wrote Lord Hoffman, one of nine Law Lords involved in the ruling. "The real threat to the life of the nation ... comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

The Home Office has refused to release the detainees, however, saying it is now up to Parliament to decide whether to legislate and that it considers the men - who include a Syrian cleric Britain believed to be a spiritual mentor to Mohammed Atta, a hijacker involved in the September 2001 attacks on the US - a "significant threat" to national security.

The London ruling paralleled a decision five months earlier by the US Supreme Court, which handed Guantànamo inmates the right to challenge their detention before a judge or "neutral decision-maker".

"A state of war is not a blank cheque for the president," the US court ruled in a scathing indictment of the administration’s policy.

About 500 inmates are currently housed at Camp Delta at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay. Under the proposals, a new facility called Camp 6 would be built to provide 200 of them with more comfortable and less stringent conditions, including the ability to socialise with each other rather than being held in isolation.

A solution also needs to be found for rehousing prisoners being held in secret by the CIA, to address concern from some corners of Congress and President George Bush’s administration itself over the lack of external scrutiny and risk of prisoner abuse, according to the Washington Post.

The CIA is believed to be holding about 30 of al-Qaeda’s top captured leaders, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida. Its detention facilities are operated under strict secrecy and are believed to include Diego Garcia island, a British territory in the Indian Ocean, and Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

Congresswoman Jane Harman, vice-chairman of the House intelligence committee, is among those who have called for a public debate on whether to open up the CIA detention system to outside monitoring, while also voicing concern that making it too public could blow counter-terrorism operations.

"This is complicated. We don’t want to set up a bureaucracy that ends up making it impossible to protect sources and informants who operate within the groups we want to penetrate," she said.

The plan to improve the conditions in which terrorism suspects are held may be part of a wider effort by the Bush administration to deflect accusations over its human rights record following reports of detainee abuse at facilities such as Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Last week, the US Justice Department widened its definition of torture from causing "excruciating and agonising pain" to include any physical suffering "even if it does not involve severe physical pain".

"Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms," the department stressed in a 17-page memo, which was released as the Senate judiciary committee prepares to consider Mr Bush’s nomination of his chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general.

Democrats have said they will question Mr Gonzales closely on previous memos he has written that appeared to justify torture.

TomDispatch - Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit on Sontag and Tsunami

Essay on death, Susan Sontag, and the tsunami...

Link: Rebecca Solnit on Sontag and Tsunami.

Media portrayal of the tsunami

Taking a second out to point out the obvious that there is such hypocrisy in the media...particularly US media. Unfortunately the years of conditioning have left most viewers naturally receptive to this type of double standards and brainwashing.

The extent to which people's views, actions, and beliefs are shaped by the mass media is frightening no doubt, but even more frightening is when the people have no idea that it is happening to them. Independent thought and freedom isn't just a human right and something handed to you, it's something you have to maintain. The right to wear whatever clothes you want, be rude and say obnoxious things, to buy whatever you want is only a minute fraction of what it means to be free and individual.

The coverage of the tsunami is extensive and detailed (maybe to a fault many would argue), and rightly so in that it is a natural disaster of unprecedented scale. At the same time, human death and suffering no matter the cause should be treated with equal compassion and scrutiny if the victims are innocent...as are the thousands killed in Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan...

See article below for a view on the hypocrisy of the media:

Link: Mainstream Media | Iraq Vs. Tsunami: The Duplicity Of The Media.

Tsunami in Asia

When I said I felt like something big was gonna happen this Christmas, I never expected anything like this. I'm sure many of you out there have been to the islands of Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka etc. for holiday, and I cannot imagine the carnage at these once beautiful vacation spots right now. I remember being in Phuket less than a year ago for one of my best friend's wedding...

I can't help but think to myself, why does it seem natural disasters always hit the already less fortunate the hardest? I understand that due to their poorer living standards they are more prone to casualties, but these tusnamis, earthquakes, etc. seem to always hit the developing countries the most often. It's almost sadistic.

What a terrible Christmas gift...the numbers are definitely going to rise way past the current estimate of 24,000. Those are incredible numbers...events like these put life in perspective, but also highlight the absurdity of it all. While I was in Macau watching Chinese highrollers throw down HK$30,000 - 50,000 per hand, tidal waves were ripping through neigborhoods where people may not make HK$50,000 in 10 years.

I can only say that my heart goes out to all those who lost in this tragedy...