Guantanamo Inmate Story Mohamedou Ould Slahi


The interrogation  and torture Technics  in Guantanamo Prison we all know.

This is one of the many facilities where terrorist suspects are held by the US.

US has more facilities abroad including UK,Poland(please read my blog on this)

The facilities are inhuman and the Technics are horrible.

One can see the brutality in Zero Dark Thirty, a Film(I have a post on this, a Review)

Now the interrogation and technics are declassified and Slate is publishing the document by an inmate, Mohamedou Ould Slahi.

This file photo shows an unnamed detainee in Guantánamo Bay in 2009 Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

This file photo shows an unnamed detainee in Guantánamo Bay in 2009 Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

The Story:

Mohamedou Ould Slahi began to tell his story in 2005. Over the course of several months, the Guantánamo prisoner handwrote his memoir, recounting what he calls his “endless world tour” of detention and interrogation. He wrote in English, a language he mastered in prison. Hishandwriting is relaxed but neat, his narrative, even riddled with redactions, vivid and captivating. In telling his story he tried, as he wrote, “to be as fair as possible to the U.S. government, to my brothers, and to myself.” He finished his 466-page draft in early 2006. For the next six years, the U.S. government held the manuscript as a classified secret…

Mohanedou Ould sahi papers

Mohanedou Ould sahi papers

We’re in the middle of the action. Slahi’s life in captivity had begun eight months earlier, on Nov. 20, 2001, when Slahi, then 30, was summoned by Mauritanian police for questioning. He had just returned home from work; he was in the shower when police arrived. He dressed, grabbed his car keys—he went voluntarily, driving himself to the police station—and told his mother not to worry, he would be home soon.

Slahi wasn’t alarmed because he had been questioned many times:

What followed was one of the most stubborn, deliberate, and cruel Guantánamo interrogations on record. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally signed Slahi’s interrogation plan. Like Mohamed al-Qahtani, the Pentagon’s other “Special Project,” Slahi would be subjected to months of 20-hour-a-day interrogations that combined sleep deprivation, severe temperature and diet manipulation, and total isolation with relentless physical and psychological humiliations. He was told his mother had been detained and would soon be at the mercy of the all-male population at Guantánamo. He was threatened with death and subjected to a violent mock rendition. Declassified files, including the Defense Department’s Schmidt-Furlow Report, the Justice Department’s investigation of FBI involvement in Guantánamo interrogations, and the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report on the treatment of detainees, document the Pentagon’s plan and its meticulous and malicious implementation…

We were put in about six or seven big barbed-wire cells, called after the operations performed against the U.S.: “Nairobi,” “U.S.S. Cole,” “Dar es Salaam,” and so on. In each cell there was a detainee called “English,” who benevolently served as an interpreter to translate the orders to his co-detainees. Our “English” was a gentleman from Sudan named [ ? ? ? ? ?]. His English was very basic, thus he asked me secretly whether I spoke English. “No,” I replied. But as it turned out I was a Shakespeare compared to him.

Now I am sitting in front of a bunch of dead-regular U.S. citizens; my first impression, when I saw them chewing without a break: “What’s wrong with these guys, do they have to eat so much?” Most of the guards are tall, and overweight. Some of them were friendly and some very hostile. Whenever I realized that a guard [was hostile], I pretended that I understood no English. I remember one cowboy coming to me with an ugly frown on his face..

Source:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/04/mohamedou_ould_slahi_s_guant_namo_memoirs_how_the_united_states_kept_a_gitmo.html

George Bush Convicted For War Crimes.Video


By Natural Law,he should be punished.

But he won’t be.

International law favours the  powerful Nations.

Just as the Nazis were unpunished  when they were in Power, so would Bush be Safe.

After all, Power talks.

Now the US is embarking on attacking Iran!

Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking that the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record.

The tribunal is the initiative of Malaysia’s retired Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who staunchly opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He sat through the entire hearing as it took personal statements and testimonies of three witnesses namely Abbas Abid, Moazzam Begg and Jameelah Hameedi. The tribunal also heard two other Statutory Declarations of Iraqi citizen Ali Shalal and Rahul Ahmed, another British citizen.

After the guilty verdict reached by five senior judges was delivered, Mahathir Mohamad said: “Powerful countries are getting away with murder.”

War crimes expert and lawyer Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in America, was part of the prosecution team.

After the case he said: “This is the first conviction of these people anywhere in the world.”

While the hearing is regarded by some as being purely symbolic, human rights activist Boyle said he was hopeful that Bush and Co could soon find themselves facing similar trials elsewhere in the world.

“We tried three times to get Bush in Canada but were thwarted by the Canadian Government, then we scared Bush out of going to Switzerland. The Spanish attempt failed because of the government there and the same happened in Germany.”

Boyle then referenced the Nuremberg Charter which was used as the format for the tribunal when asked about the credibility of the initiative in Malaysia. He quoted: “Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.”

The US is subject to customary international law and to the Principles of the Nuremberg Charter said Boyle who also believes the week-long trial was “almost certainly” being monitored closely by both Pentagon and White House officials.

Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, who headed the prosecution said: “The tribunal was very careful to adhere scrupulously to the regulations drawn up by the Nuremberg courts and the International Criminal Courts”.

He added that he was optimistic the tribunal would be followed up elsewhere in the world where “countries have a duty to try war criminals” and he cited the case of the former Chilean dictator Augustine Pinochet who was arrested in Britain to be extradited to Spain on charges of war crimes.”

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1873872/pg1

Related:

There have been many attempts over the last few years to prosecute former president Bush, vice president Cheney, and other senior members of his administration for war crimes of various sorts. None of those until recently were successful. Well, one of those prosecutions has now ended up in a conviction—in absentia, of course. And that took place in Malaysia.
Now joining us is one of the members of the prosecutorial team [snip] Francis Boyle. He’s a professor of law at the University of Illinois school of law, where he currently teaches courses on public international law and international human rights. He was a part of the prosecution team, as I mentioned, that tried President Bush—former president Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, their legal advisers, in Malaysia, and were successful, as I said. Thanks for joining us.
FRANCIS BOYLE, PROF. INTERNATIONAL LAW, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF LAW: Well, Paul, thank you very much for having me on, and my best to your audience.
JAY: Thank you. So what were the charges? And tell us a bit about the process.
BOYLE: Well, the charges were twofold: first, torture, and then, second, since torture in wartime constitutes war crimes, the second charge were war crimes. There was four days of hearings by the prosecution and the defense. And then, on the end of the fifth day, the tribunal issued a unanimous judgment to the effect that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and five of their top lawyers advising them on this, including Yoo, Bybee, Haynes, and Gonzalez, Addington, were personally responsible for and guilty of torture and war crimes as defined by the Convention against Torture, to which the United States government is a party, and the four Geneva conventions of 1949, to which the United States government is a party as well.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8348

Bird Flu Myth of The Medicines


I had, quite some time back, blogged that the avian Flu has no real threat in the sense that it had no scientific reason to become an epidemic.

Goalfinder Part2-Human--bird-flu--viru

Goalfinder Part2-Human–bird-flu–viru (Photo credit: gfinder)

I had stated that the scares of Avian Flu surface only when the Pharma Companies have huge supply of Avian Flu drugs inventory.

I had quoted some background materials for my assertion.

Now I add more details on this subject.

To know how the Companies are misleading people about Vaccines as well please read my blog ‘ Vaccine causes Autism”

s the West threatened?
There is no doubt that wild birds will eventually bring bird flu (A)H5N1 to domestic bird populations in every part of the world. Wild birds (well nourished with robust immune systems) are rarely made ill by the infection themselves, but are only ‘carriers’. The birds most prone to ‘catch’ the illness are those living in unhealthy, overcrowded conditions, such as in factory farming. However, the virus continues to mutate [2] and has now also infected pigs, horses, cats, tigers, leopards, whales, seals and (a very few) humans. In humans, only one ^I+possible^I- case of human to human transmission has been identified to date, between a child, a mother and an aunt in Thailand. All three family members, however, may have been exposed to, say, diseased poultry.

But how likely is it that (A)H5N1 bird flu will ‘marry’ with a human flu virus, creating a strain of flu which harms and spreads easily between humans living in more industrially developed countries who (a) are not massively exposed to flu type (A)H5N1-ridden animals living in overcrowded conditions, and (b) are relatively well-nourished and have reasonable immune systems? John H. Beigel thinks the likelihood is low: “The relatively low frequency of influenza (A)H5N1 illness in humans despite widespread exposure to infected poultry indicates that the species barrier to acquisition of this avian virus is substantial.” [3](This means that human resistance to the (A)H5N1 strain of flu is very high.)

World Health Organisation figures confirm that there is as yet little evidence of a growing human epidemic. In the first three months of 2004 there were 23 confirmed cases resulting in 16 deaths, nothing for four months, four cases resulting in four deaths from July to October 2004 and 64 cases resulting in 21 deaths in the first ten months of 2005, in effect a modest decline. Also, the Thai child-mother-aunt transmission spread no further, suggesting that the human form of (A)H5N1 bird flu is not very infectious.

Flu jabs and drugs
Despite what many people appear to believe, there is no drug on the market which reliably stops people catching flu, let alone a human A(H5N1) flu. As all efforts to date to develop an anti-flu drug against known flu strains appear to have failed, what are the chances of making a drug which will protect against an, as yet, non-existent strain in time to protect people in a fast-moving pandemic? Also, the performance of current flu vaccines (again, against known strains) are nowhere near what the authorities crack them up to be. And virologists estimate that the minimum time to develop a vaccine from a newly isolated human A(H5N1) flu virus would be six months. The UK Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Davidson recently expressed his hope that a vaccine would be available to fight the (probably milder) ^I+second wave^I- of a pandemic. However, to test the effectiveness and safety of a new vaccine takes many years, so it is difficult to know whether a hastily prepared vaccine will do more good than harm. Some analyses of past ‘flu epidemics‘ where vaccines were rushed out suggest that we have reason to be concerned (see ‘Spanish Flu’ below).

Not the scout motto
The UK and US Departments of Health have turned a blind eye to the problem for 40 years, and have done too little too late, so now possess no tested protection against the hypothetical possibility of what they characterise as “a bird flu pandemic like the one that killed 20 million people in 1918″. Given that they could not be seen to stockpile anything which would not make profits for their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, their last straw to clutch is Tamiflu.

Tamiflu
Both countries are now stockpiling the ‘anti-flu virus’ drug oseltamivir (brand name Tamiflu) for key workers (especially health workers) to use in the case of a human (A)H5N1 flu pandemic. The evidence is conflicting as to whether Tamiflu reduces the risk of catching existing strains of human flu in normal conditions, but it did appear to protect poultry workers from catching a human form of bird flu H7N7 during the 2003 epidemic in the Netherlands. Also, in laboratory tests carried out in 2004, it appeared to be effective against cell cultures of both current human flu A strains and (A)H5N1 bird flu.[4] In other studies, Tamiflu also appeared to reduce both the severity and duration of current human flu attacks if taken within 48 hours of symptoms appearing.[5] Speedy reaction was of the essence. The sooner Tamiflu was taken, the more effective it was.

This is the principal reason for stockpiling a planned 90+ million courses of Tamiflu. Infection with a human form of (A)H5N1 appears to trigger an immune system response so strong that it kills the patient’s body before it beats the disease. If Tamiflu has any effect at all on some future human form of (A)H5N1, it might literally make the difference between life and death.

In the final analysis, neither Government is likely to offer the majority of its citizens any protection against the first (most virulent) wave of a pandemic.

Conspiracy
Conspiracy theorists have noticed that Tamiflu sales will make US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld immensely richer. He is the chairman of Gilead, the company which developed Tamiflu, and now receives royalties from every sale of Tamiflu made by manufacturer-under-licence Roche Laboratories Inc. He probably just struck lucky. Although Tamiflu’s equally effective rival, Relenza, [6] is slightly cheaper (£32 rather than £38 a course), it is delivered by an inhaler, presenting problems for people with asthma or other chronic lung diseases.

Post script – Killing two birds …
Neither the US nor the UK Government could let the opportunity to boost their questionable winter flu vaccination campaigns go by. They have now added another (community-spirited) reason why all vulnerable people* should have their jab. Apparently, if someone already has flu and is exposed to bird flu, the two viruses might interact in their body, resulting in the human-killing virus everyone fears. In reality, the US and UK authorities must consider the chance of this happening pretty remote. If not, surely they would already be (a) working to vaccinate their entire populations against flu every two or three months and (b) donating billions of flu vaccine doses to developing countries worldwide.

In the UK, at least, they need not have worried. Although the current flu jabs afford no protection against a human form of (A)H5N1, the heavily promoted possibility of millions of deaths from a human bird flu mutant was sufficient to empty the entire flu jab stock for winter ’95/’96.

* those over 65 or who suffer from illnesses that put them at higher risk of serious illness from flu, such as asthma, diabetes or serious heart and lung conditions.

References:

[1] Infectious Diseases Society of America Web site. Avian Influenza (Bird Flu): Implications for Human Disease
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site. Information about Avian Influenza (Bird Flue) and Avian Influenza A (H5N1) Virus.
[2] Hien TT et al. New England Journal of Medicine 2004;351:2363-2365
[3] Beigel JH, New England Journal of Medicine 2005;353(13):1374-85
[4] Oxford J et al. Antiviral Activity of Oseltamivir Carboxylate Against a Human Isolate of the current H5N1 chicken strain. Poster 3839, presented at the InterScience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), Washington DC, USA on 31 October 2004
[5] Aoki,F et al. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 2003;51:123-29
[6] Elliot M. Zanamivir – treatment and prevention of influenza A and B. Retroscreen Abstract 2001
Govorkoa,EA et al. Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy 2001;45(10):2723-32

(12008) Nick Anderson. Green Health Watch

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