Quote:

Iraq bombs kill 14; 'Chemical Ali' gets second death sentence Times Wire Services December 3, 2008 Reporting from Baghdad -- Bombings Tuesday killed 14 Iraqis, including a child hit by a blast outside his primary school in the northern city of Mosul, police said. Students were leaving the school when a bomb in a wooden cart detonated, killing the pupil, along with a 2-year-old girl and two adults at an adjacent market. The 12 people injured included students. In a second attack, a roadside bomb targeting an army patrol killed five soldiers in Hillah, south of Baghdad, police and a witness said. "It hit the first vehicle. The whole thing exploded and burned," witness Ali Jubouri said. In the northern city of Tall Afar, a car bomb killed five people and wounded 30, including five children, a senior medic in the city's main hospital said. The violence came on a day when Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan Majid received a second death sentence, this one for crushing a Shiite uprising after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," muttered "thanks be to God" as chief judge Mohammed Oreibi Khalifa declared him guilty and sentenced him. Majid was sentenced to death on a conviction last year for his role in the killing of tens of thousands of Kurds in a crackdown in the late 1980s. Chemical weapons were used against civilians in that attack. Meanwhile, the United Nations expressed concern Tuesday about overcrowding and "grave human rights violations" of detainees in Iraqi custody -- in one case, 123 men crammed into a single 540-square-foot cell. "There is no secret that the prisons are overcrowded and frankly not in very good condition," U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said at a news conference where the findings were released. Reports of widespread mistreatment and torture of detainees also continue, and a thorough investigation is needed, he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq3-2008dec03,0,420990.story

Quote:

The violence came on a day when Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan Majid received a second death sentence, this one for crushing a Shiite uprising after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

So does this mean, if in a western country, say the US or Australia or England, there is an anti government uprising, and the government of the day uses force to crush that uprising, precedent has been set where we can now have the rulers of the day executed? I like where this is going.


Quote:

Majid was sentenced to death on a conviction last year for his role in the killing of tens of thousands of Kurds in a crackdown in the late 1980s. Chemical weapons were used against civilians in that attack.

Haven't the Kurds been arming up and training in northern Iraq/Turkey for many years and engaging what they deem to be enemy forces with deadly force?

If this also happens in a western country, where militia groups attack government forces, and the government resists them, has precedent been set where if the government fights back they are set up for a legal execution?

The winners get to pass judgement on the losers.

And that is why we need to say a big bugger you to the UN, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, the UK, USA et al, and defect to the 'enemy', like Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and the others who try and gain a bit of autonomy at the expense of the major bankers who then get their cronies to announce to the world that they are evil and need to be destroyed.

The only problem is, if we go down that road, will the necessary different forms of government corruption significantly alter the current lifestyle we live? We would never know, and it is very risky.

Just because you're the winner doesn't mean you'r doing the wrong thing.

Re-writing history can be pretty convenient.

Like the Japs who don't know about ww2, Changi, Burma railway etc.

How in many European places you can't even say Nazi, or display a Swastika.

How when at the end of WW2 allied/British soldiers committed rape, murder, robbery, torture of German citizenry, on a massive scale which isn't hardly mentioned anywhere because it makes the winners look bad.

There are still things classified TOP SECRET from WW2. Why? The war is over. Disclosure would be great. But it doesn't happen.

I know, for a fact, the Free French Forces/French Foreign Legion, when kicked out of France and staging from North Africa, were sent in to Norway, if memory serves me right, and destroyed Nazi heavy water plants which the Nazis were planning to make the bomb with.

At least one of them was from Belfast.

How do I know?

I've seen an official letter providing very brief details of the operation. The chap from Northern Ireland, his son, can, on Bastille Day, go to any French Embassy/Consulate, whatever, and be treated like royalty. The French look after their own, yet this guy wasn't even French.

Why are operations like that still classified? It's absurd.

Quote:

How when at the end of WW2 allied/British soldiers committed rape, murder, robbery, torture of German citizenry, on a massive scale which isn't hardly mentioned anywhere because it makes the winners look bad.

Where is it mentioned?

How does this all justify jumping ship to our current enemys? You seem to be making a massive assumption that because they are an enemy of a regime you dislike, they will take the higher moral ground.

Google got me these, but you can talk to old soldiers and they might tell you a thing or two.


Quote:

The postwar photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden · Treatment of suspected communists revealed · Four court martialled after police inspector's inquiry For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain's clandestine torture programme in postwar Germany has lain hidden in the government's files. Harrowing photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered too shocking to be seen. As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners "in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps". Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published. The pictures show suspected communists who were tortured in an attempt to gather information about Soviet military intentions and intelligence methods at a time when some British officials were convinced that a third world war was only months away. Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former members of the SS. At least two men suspected of being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite. The appalling treatment of the 372 men and 44 women who were interrogated at Bad Nenndorf between 1945 and 1947 are detailed in a report by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. He had been called in by senior army officers to investigate the mistreatment of inmates, partly as a result of the evidence provided by these photographs. Insp Hayward's report remained secret until last December, when the Guardian secured its release under the Freedom of Information Act. The photographs seen here were removed before the Foreign Office released the report, apparently because the Ministry of Defence did not wish them to be published. That decision was reversed last week, following an appeal by the Guardian. One of the men photographed, Gerhard Menzel, 23, a student, was arrested by British intelligence officers in Hamburg in June 1946. He had fallen under suspicion because he was believed to have travelled to the British-controlled zone of Germany from Omsk in Siberia, where he had been a prisoner of war. His weight, measured several weeks after his arrest at 10st 3lb, had fallen to 7st 10lb by the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf to a British-run internment camp eight months later. In the meantime, he told Hayward, his hands had been chained behind his back for up to 16 days at a time, periods during which he was repeatedly punched in the face. He had also been held in a bare, freezing cell for up to two weeks at a time and doused in cold water every 30 minutes from 4.30am until midnight, a practice the detective discovered to have been common. A doctor at the internment camp reported that Mr Menzel was one of a group of 12 inmates transferred from Bad Nenndorf, all emaciated and dressed in rags. Previous arrivals had also been half-starved. Some had facial scars, apparently the result of beatings. A few had scars on their shins, said to be the result of torture with shin screws which had been retrieved from a Gestapo prison at Hamburg. Mr Menzel "was only skin and bones," the doctor wrote. "He could neither walk nor stand up without assistance, and could only speak with difficulty because his tongue and lips were swollen and broken open. "It was impossible to take his body temperature because it was not higher than 35 degrees Celsius and the thermometer only starts at 35." The prisoner was also confused, anxious and suffering memory loss, his lungs were badly infected and his blood pressure was dangerously low. Only after being washed, fed and heated with lamps could his body temperature be raised to 36.3C, but the doctor feared his chances of survival were slim. Another man pictured, Heinz Biedermann, 20, a clerk, had been arrested in October 1946 because he was in the British zone, while his father, who lived at Stendal in the Russian zone, had been identified as "an ardent communist". By the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf four months later his weight had fallen from 11st 3lb to 7st 12lb. He said he had been held in solitary confinement for much of the time, threatened with execution, and forced to live and sleep in sub-zero temperatures while barely clothed. One British army guard told Inspector Hayward that Mr Biedermann had "wasted like a candle" during his imprisonment. Another, a private in the Essex Regiment, told the detective that he complained that he and his comrades were behaving as badly as Germans. "I became very unpopular after this ... the sergeant appeared to take a poor view of my remarks." On Mr Biedermann's transfer to the internment camp, an officer at Bad Nenndorf requested he be detained "for an adequate time" to prevent him giving the Soviets "detailed information on this centre and methods of interrogation".

continued...

Quote:

Foreign Office records show that the navy officer commanding the internment camp, Captain Arthur Curtis, was so shocked by the condition of the men being sent to him that he ordered these photographs be taken to support his complaints about the treatment of these "living skeletons". Photographs of several other prisoners, taken at the same time, appear to have vanished from the Foreign Office files. On the other side of the British zone, meanwhile, a Royal Artillery officer was complaining about the state of Bad Nenndorf inmates who were being dumped from a truck at the entrance to a military hospital. Some weighed little more than six stones, and two died shortly after their arrival. The records show that Bad Nenndorf was run by a War Office department called the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC). By late 1946, CSDIC appears to have lost interest in Nazis, and was targeting communists. It appears the prisoners were questioned about Soviet methods and intentions, rather than about the Communist party itself. Some of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were indeed spying for the Soviets: one prisoner, who was half-Norwegian and half-Russian, told Hayward he was an officer in the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, and had been operating continuously in Germany since 1938. Another, a German journalist who had been freed by the Soviets from a Gestapo prison, was caught flying into Croydon aerodrome with false British papers. Both men were starved and badly tortured. Others clearly were not spies, however. One man who was starved to death was a gay ex-soldier caught with forged papers while crossing into the British zone in search of his lover, while the other was a young German who was being interrogated because he had volunteered to spy for the British in the Russian zone, and was wrongly suspected of lying because of an official error over his medical records. Four British officers were court martialled after Hayward's investigation. Declassified documents show that the hearings were held largely behind closed doors to prevent the Soviets from discovering that Russians were being detained. Another consideration was admitted to be the determination to conceal the existence of several other CSDIC prisons. While it is now known that one interrogation centre was in central London, little is known about those in Germany, other than their locations. Following the courts martial, the prison at Bad Nenndorf, which was in a converted bath-house, was replaced with a purpose-built interrogation centre near an RAF base at Gütersloh, and orders were issued for inmates to be examined by a doctor before interrogation. It is unclear when this centre closed. The only officer at Bad Nenndorf to be convicted was the prison doctor. At the age of 49, his sentence was to be dismissed from the army. The commanding officer, Colonel Robin Stephens, was cleared of a charge of "disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind" and told he was free to apply to rejoin his former employers at MI5.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/apr/03/uk.freedomofinformation

---

I didn't see anything there about rape.

We don't know how bad the 'enemy' are, but we do know how bad our team is, and what they want us to think of the 'enemy'. Why should we stick with the bad we have, why not try something new, and if that doesn't work, throw that away too. We don't need to box ourselves in.


Quote:

The Irish potato famine was not simply a natural disaster. It was a product of social causes. Under British rule, Irish Catholics were prohibited from entering the professions or even purchasing land. Instead, many rented small plots of land from absentee British Protestant landlords. Half of all landholdings were less than 5 acres in 1845. Irish peasants subsisted on a diet consisting largely of potatoes, since a farmer could grow triple the amount of potatoes as grain on the same plot of land. A single acre of potatoes could support a family for a year. About half of Ireland's population depended on potatoes for subsistence.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/irish_potato_famine.cfm

Talk to Irish people, from Ireland, and they will tell you the British imported the blight in to kill the Irish off, and then wouldn't help the Irish when they needed it. You don't read about that anywhere either though.

freediver wrote on Dec 4^th, 2008 at 2:46pm:

I didn't see anything there about rape.

Yeah neither do I, but that's worse, it's not undisciplined soldiers, it's official policy at work here.

Like I wrote, talk to old soldiers and you might learn a thing or two.

Google got me this, a bit of oral history which can no doubt be researched further.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/697876789

Quote:

We don't know how bad the 'enemy' are, but we do know how bad our team is, and what they want us to think of the 'enemy'. Why should we stick with the bad we have, why not try something new, and if that doesn't work, throw that away too. We don't need to box ourselves in.

Better the devil you know. I'm not sure why are are rejecting offhand our ability to compare the two sides, or why you are assuming the enemy would be somehow better. It's an absurd argument from ignorance.

Well I have met some 60's era former/current government workers who worked internationally for the USA, born and raised in Australia, who call each other comrade and hate the USA and its' media, things like sitcoms and news broadcasts.

These guys have been in there and seen it all, and if they call each other comrade, that's a safe enough bet for me.

That being said, I despise communism. But I think the KGB is seperate from USSR politics, only connected.

What do you deduce from the fact that they call each other comrade?

That they like the Russians more than the Americans.

And the part where they said "We always lied to the Americans." repeatedly, and would laugh, makes me think, these people, who were instrumental in US global politics behind the scenes, were totally against what they were doing.

That said, they despised communism.

But guys like that aren't really in to politics, it's more above that.

I have a CIA badge somewhere near me. You can't get them unless you have worked for them or know someone who has. Good if you want to breach customs laws. Just stick it in your luggage bags, on top of all your clothes.