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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Knighty Tin who wrote (119874)11/6/2009 11:46:50 AM
From: Pogeu Mahone  Respond to of 132070
 
A muslim psychiatrist in our evangelical army, of course it is a joke..



To: Knighty Tin who wrote (119874)11/6/2009 5:44:01 PM
From: Broken_Clock  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 132070
 
"and there are indications that he was becoming more radical. "

Yeah, I guess in this culture when one adopts a more sane approach to life(opposing unjust wars) it can indeed be called "radical".

Why is it surprising that a Muslim would freak out and unhinge when he is being told to support a war against his own religion? A war fabricated upon a pack of continuing lies?
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Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’

By Daniel Tencer
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 -- 3:31 pm
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The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is "endemic" to the country's justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a "totalitarian" state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Story continues below...


Suspects in Uzbekistan's gulags "were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."

"I was absolutely stunned -- it changed my whole world view in an instant -- to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves," Murray said.

IT'S THE PIPELINE, STUPID

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

"The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan," Murray noted.

Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.

"There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."

The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.

Murray was dismissed from his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence.
rawstory.com



To: Knighty Tin who wrote (119874)11/6/2009 11:11:49 PM
From: Madharry  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 132070
 
how does a guy in his 40s untrained in combat, manage to get the drop on a bunch of guys ready to be deployed for combat duty ( i assume) and can kill or wound 40 of them before being taken down?

Just curious.



To: Knighty Tin who wrote (119874)11/10/2009 10:13:12 PM
From: Pogeu Mahone  Respond to of 132070
 
FT. HOOD TERRORIST ON BUSH PRESTIGIOUS HOMELAND SECURITY TRANSITION TEAM

HASAN TIES TO GOP SUBJECT TO MASSIVE DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN AND COVERUP

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

"Lucy, you got some splainin' to do."

The task force at George Washington University designated with establishing transitional procedures in the Global War on Terror included Major Hasan, mass murder and terrorist, and, as we now learn, long time terrorist suspect. Where do we start? Do we wonder why our troops have a psychiatrist who is not only a potential terrorist but known to be extremely mentally unbalanced? Who, in the Bush Administration chose Hasan and helped him pass America's highest security clearances?

Do any of us wonder why President Bush would have a terrorist helping with his transitional policy? This put Hasan, under investigation for ties to Al Qaeda, at the heart of our government's counter-terrorist planning organization with full daily access to nearly all major leaders in Homeland Security, Defense, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other key agencies. He was one of them, along with representatives of conservative "think tanks" that advised the Bush Administration on a daily basis. Was he there because he reminded them of an Islamic version of Dick Cheney? Please, someone, let's hear an explanation for this.

Below is a cutout from the membership roster of those advising the Bush Administration. You will note Hasan's name among some of the best known security experts in America. We were told he was an Army psychiatrist with severe psychological problems who belonged to a mosque run by terrorists.

(document source)

Hasan served with these individuals. Why was he here?

Richard V. Allen Former National Security Advisor
Stephen E. Flynn Ira A. Lipman Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism & National Security Studies Council on Foreign Relations
Charles B. Curtis President & Chief Operating Officer Nuclear Threat Initiative
Judge William H.Webster Former Director of Central Intelligence and Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
James Lee Witt Former Director Federal Emergency Management Agency
R. James Woolsey, Former Director Central Intelligence Agency
Edwin Meese, III Former U.S. Attorney General
General Edward "Shy" Meyer Former Chief of Staff U.S. Army
General Edward L. Rowny Former Ambassador and Lt. General USA (Ret.)
Judge William S. Sessions Former Director Federal Bureau of Investigation
Bobbie Greene Kilberg Member President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
E. Floyd Kvamme Former Co-Chair President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
Senator Connie Mack (R-FL) Former United States Senator, Florida
Secretary John O. Marsh, Jr. (D-VA) Former Secretary of the Army Former U.S. Congressman
and many others
Major Hasan was briefed by these individuals:
Michael Alexander, Majority Staff Director, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate
John Cohen, Senior Advisor, Office of the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment , Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Rosaline Cohen , Chief Counsel, Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives
Beth Grossman, Senior Counsel, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate
Alethea Long-Green, Program Area Director, National Academy of Public Administration
Mark Lowenthal, President and CEO of the Intelligence & Security Academy, LLC, Former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production
Monica Schoch-Spana, Senior Associate, Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases
Fran Townsend, Former Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism


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The question we ask, is why was a simple low ranking military officer with a disasterous career, horrible security baggage and a Palestinian background placed at the center of the decision making apparatus of the Bush presidency?
The entire text of the procedings report and full membership are listed below. Hasan's name stands out like a rapper at a Klan rally. It doesn't take a genius to believe that Hasan had friends in high places, and that, despite every imaginable reason to see he shouldn't even practice medicine, much less be in the American military or treat troops suffering from combat stress, he was placed among the most influential and powerful Americans.

One could suggest that, since Hasan was in town and had nothing to do for the few months other than to work with thousands of patients returning from Iraq and, in the process, mingle with terrorist sympathizers and prove himself to be dangerously unstable and utterly useless as a physician and psychiatrist, he might as well be included in intelligence planning at the highest levels.

I can see where this could make sense to some, really, I do. After all, if you were choosing the absolute last person on Earth to include in such a group, the last person to expose to that much intelligence planning and the most dangerous individual imaginable to the safety of so many of our leaders, Hasan is a perfect choice.

Why did he choose to kill soldiers at Ft. Hood when so many of the top members of the Bush Administration would have been available to him at any time? If none of this makes any sense to you, I think you are beginning to understand.

Who was Major Hasan? Who was he really?

SOME AREAS OF SPECULATION ABOUT MAJOR HASAN:

Hasan joined the Army at 18, entered and completed, not only college, but medical school and a residency in psychiatry at Walter Reed Hospital. This is an amazing accomplishment.

His attendance at the above mentioned meetings based on a careful analysis of subject matter and the expertise level of everyone involved made the likelihood of a junior officer specializing in combat stress being invited unlikely. Hasan would have to have been an intelligence asset of some kind.

Were this the case, as it most likely is, and taking into account that at least some of the accusations made against him are other than part of a coverup, Hasan was unstable. Stating this about a psychiatrist is not much of a stretch.

His first targets were coworkers. Were Hasan cross trained in intelligence and tasked with communicating with insurgents prior to deployment, the stress could have been enormous. Hasan seems to have responded to having to pretend to be a terrorist by actually becoming one.

The more we read about his attendance at a 'terrorist Mosque" and connections with Al Qaeda, the more likely our assumptions are the correct ones. It is far more likely that a double agent would become suicidally unbalanced than for a terrorist to, not only be promoted to Major in the US Army, but to be put on a high security intelligence transition team.

There may have been a time when the US Army believed Major Hasan would be of enormous value to them in ways quite unrelated to practicing medicine. The Major Hasan we now know is a terrorist. He may not always have been so.

This evening, the Associated Press states:

"Investigators from the Fort Hood shootings say that Nidal Malik Hasan acted alone and that no evidence supports the theory that Hasan had outside help or orders about the massacre. Though in late 2008 Hasan did communicate with radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni who now lives overseas and has ties to terrorist groups, the messages "did not advocate violence or threaten violence." Sources say that the communications were consistent with Hasan's research as an Army psychologist on post-traumatic stress disorder. The FBI has launched an investigation into how it handled, or perhaps mishandled, the information it had on Hasan."

In a very few hours, the truth has danced like a marionette, across one side of the stage to another. What can we expect? We will get an endless supply of interim stories until a commission is appointed to interview witnesses and come to a convenient conclusion that will best serve political necessity. The same among us will be sickened by the process.

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VeteransToday Senior Editor Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.






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(full text of report below)more veteranstoday.com