Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus was removed as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, commander in 2002 for refusing to use tougher interrogation tactics, a PBS documentary suggests.

The Frontline program, “The Torture Question,” traces how the Bush administration developed aggressive interrogation policies following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — policies that allowed detainees to be stripped and humiliated, The Providence (R.I.) Journal reported.

The PBS program suggests Baccus was reassigned in October 2002 because military higher-ups believed he stood in the way of tougher interrogation tactics.

Retired U.S. Army Gens. Paul Kern and Jack Keane said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was upset about the lack of information from Guantanamo prisoners.

Baccus, 53, of Bristol, R.I., would not criticize President Bush’s policies, but he said command failures led to prisoner mistreatment at Guantanamo after he departed as well as the Abu Ghraib prison torture case in Iraq.

“Those people (commanders) are the ones who need to be publicly charged. I don’t know how high it needs to go,” Baccus told the newspaper.
prisonplanet.com

Watching that Frontline report last night, it was clear that Rumsfeld was intimately involved in the running of Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib, that Rumsfeld replaced Baccus with Miller, who told Karpinsky at Abu Ghraib that the only way to establish control and extract info was to ‘treat them [the detainees] like dogs.’ What was also striking was the sheer number of whistleblowers interviewed for the program, and how many senior members of the military have retired in the past couple years. Any soldier who is not insane or criminal knows there is no good information to be gotten from torture. Again, it is hard to escape the conclusion that at the very least, the flames of the ‘insurgency’ are being deliberately fanned. Chaos is the policy and chaos has been achieved.

The war with Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place and London a target for terrorist attack, according to one of Britain’s most senior judges.

Lord Steyn, who retired last month as a judge sitting in the UK’s highest court, described the invasion of Iraq as “military folly” and accused the Government of “scraping the legal barrel” in trying to justify it.

The former law lord told an audience of lawyers and civil rights campaigners in London that it was wrong for the Prime Minister to have called the rule of law a “game”.

He said: “The maintenance of the rule of law is not a game. It is about access to justice, fundamental human rights and democratic values.”

He added: “After the recent dreadful bombings in London we were asked to believe that the Iraq war did not make London and the world a more dangerous place. Surely, on top of everything else, we do not have to listen to a fairy-tale.”
independent.co.uk

US soldiers in Afghanistan burnt the bodies of dead Taliban and taunted their opponents about the corpses, in an act deeply offensive to Muslims and in breach of the Geneva conventions.

An investigation by SBS’s Dateline program, to be aired tonight, filmed the burning of the bodies.

It also filmed a US Army psychological operations unit broadcasting a message boasting of the burnt corpses into a village believed to be harbouring Taliban.

According to an SBS translation of the message, delivered in the local language, the soldiers accused Taliban fighters near Kandahar of being “cowardly dogs”. “You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be,” the message reportedly said.

“You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Taliban but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion, and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are.”

The burning of a body is a deep insult to Muslims. Islam requires burial within 24 hours.

Under the Geneva conventions the burial of war dead “should be honourable, and, if possible, according to the rites of the religion to which the deceased belonged”.

US soldiers said they burnt the bodies for hygiene reasons but two reporters, Stephen Dupont and John Martinkus, said the explanation was unbelievable, given they were in an isolated area.
sydneymorning herald

SAN FRANCISCO – In an unprecedented move, a UN committee has asked human and civil rights groups to submit reports and testify on U.S. breaches of international law, filling a gap left by the U.S. government’s failure to submit its own report.

The 18-member United Nations Human Rights Committee, which reviews nations’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, began reviewing country reports Monday and will complete its session on October 24.

But for the third time since ratifying the treaty in 1992, the United States has failed to submit its five-year report to the committee on U.S. violations of the treaty.

The treaty, which entered into force in 1976 and has been signed by 155 countries, outlaws torture or degrading treatment, protects self-determination, and ensures that all people everywhere are treated within the law.

Without a U.S. report, the committee usually skips over discussions of U.S. compliance.

But anticipating an absent U.S. report, the Human Rights Committee took precautions this year.

Last August, the committee sent a letter to a number of U.S.-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the World Organization for Human Rights USA, requesting reports on U.S. transgressions of the treaty, to be used in case the U.S. itself failed to report.

Specifically, the committee’s letter requested documentation relating to, “the fight against terrorism following the events of 11 September 2001 and notably the implications of the Patriot Act on nationals as well as non-nationals; and problems relating to the legal status and treatment of persons detained in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Iraq, and other places of detention outside the USA.”
commondreams.org

“SEPARATE BUT equal”–the doctrine from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling that solidified the system of racist segregation–was always a lie. The reality of schools under Jim Crow was always separate and unequal.

Now, 50 years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down “separate but equal” as inherently unfair, schoolchildren in the U.S. are again suffering the consequences of segregation–an all the more odious reality because segregation has been outlawed on paper.

In his new book Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol rips the veil off of America’s “apartheid schools.”

Schools have been re-segregating for the past dozen years, Kozol explains, so that “the proportion of Black students in majority-white schools has decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968.” Gary Orfield and the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University show that 2 million students attend these “apartheid schools” (a term Kozol uses for schools where the student body is more than 99 percent non-white). Overall, almost three-quarters of Black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority.

Kozol says that “the four most segregated states, according to the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In California and New York, only one Black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.
zmag.org

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 – The Red Cross and federal government said Tuesday that they had been significantly overreporting the number of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in hotels. Instead of 600,000 people, 200,000 remain in hotels, the charity said.

Although the lower number means that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and cities receiving evacuees will find new housing for far fewer people, the count shows the lack of knowledge that FEMA has about the relocations and its limited oversight over the money it is committed to spend on such housing.

“FEMA still does not know any more about what it was doing last week than it was a month ago,” Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said. “It is still, as far as I am concerned, an incompetent agency.”
nytimes.com

Faulty Hotel Tally Adds to Complaints Against the Red Cross

…In this constitution, Iraqi Kurds don’t get the state that 98% of them want, according to a recent referendum, but they do get gains – vast legislative powers, control of their own militia and authority over discoveries of oil – which in effect consecrate the quasi-independence they have enjoyed since western “humanitarian” intervention on their behalf in the 1991 Gulf war and which Kurds regard as a way station towards the real thing. The Iraqi republic is to be “independent, sovereign, federal, democratic and parliamentary”; but one thing, explicitly, it is no longer, is “Arab”. For that, says its Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, would be to deny the right of Kurdish citizens to look to membership of a greater Kurdish nation, just as its Arab citizens look to the greater Arab one. Yet more shocking, and potentially rending, to Sunni Arabs everywhere, than this ethnic separatism is the new, intra-Arab, sectarian one. Not only have the Shia established political ascendancy in a single Arab country for the first time in centuries but they are doing so, like the Kurds, in the context of a constitutionally prescribed autonomy which, if Shia leaders such as Abdul Aziz Hakim mean what they say, will incorporate central and southern Iraq, more than half the country’s population and the bulk of its natural assets.

The adoption of a federal formula is seen by the Arab world not as a remedy for Iraq’s inherent divisiveness, but, in conditions of rising intercommunal tensions and violence, as a stimulus to it. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the veteran Saudi foreign minister and voice of the Sunni Arab establishment, told Americans that it is “part of a dynamic pushing the Iraqi people away from each other. If you allow for this – for a civil war to happen between Shias and Sunnis – Iraq is finished forever. It will be dismembered.” What makes it more alarming is that, unlike the Kurds, Iraqi Shias, however ambivalently they feel about it, enjoy the strong support of a powerful neighbour. Now, under its new president, in something of a neo-Khomeinist revivalist mode, Iran is clearly accumulating all the Shia-based geopolitical assets it can, from Iraq to south Lebanon, in preparation for the grand showdown that threatens between it and the US.

Arabs have long warned of the “Lebanonisation” of Iraq, automatically mindful of the fact that virtually every western-created state in the eastern Arab world contains the latent ethnic or sectarian tensions that produced that archetype of Arab civil war. But whereas, in concert with the US, the Arabs finally managed to put out the Lebanese fire before it spread, their prospects of achieving the same amid the violence in Iraq are slight indeed. The inter-Arab state system – and its chief institution, the Arab League – has long been incapable of concerted action against what, like Iraq, are perceived as threats to the Arab “nation”. Now the system itself is threatened by the growth of non-state activities, the cross-border traffic in extreme Islamist ideology – along with the jihadists and suicide bombers who act on it – or ethnic and sectarian solidarities of the kind that threaten to tear Iraq apart.
guardian.co.uk

Nine-Second Coverage For Dozens of Dead Iraqi Women and Children
Last night’s BBC Newsnight programme reported the deaths of 70 “Iraqi militants” in US air raids on the western Iraqi city of Ramadi. The item lasted just nine seconds. This included three seconds of scepticism from an Iraqi doctor who reported that in fact civilians were amongst the dead. Viewers’ attention was then rapidly diverted elsewhere; a familiar pattern of mainstream news coverage.
A BBC news online report titled “US strikes kill ’70 Iraq rebels'”, also led with the US military version of events. Perhaps by way of a nod to increasing levels of public frustration with ’embedded’ journalism, the phrase “Iraq rebels” at least appeared in quotes. The report also added a cursory note of caution in the second paragraph: “eyewitnesses are quoted saying that many [of the dead] were civilians”. (BBC news online, October 17, 2005; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4349032.stm)

A Media Lens reader wrote to Pete Clifton, the BBC’s news online editor:
“Regarding the BBC article ‘US strikes kill “70 Iraq rebels”‘, isn’t it biased to include the US quote in the headline?

“I’m sure you’d agree an alternative such as ‘Iraqis: many civilians die in US attack’ is biased and would be avoided.

“Why not choose a neutral headline to avoid contentious claims, such as ‘Dozens killed in US strikes’?” (Darren Smith, message board, www.medialens.org, October 17, 2005)

Compare the emphasis and extent of the Newsnight and BBC online reports with today’s press release from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN):
“Two days of US air attacks against insurgents in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi have caused heavy casualties among the city’s civilian population, a doctor and a senior Iraqi government official in Ramadi said.”

IRIN go on to quote Ahmed al-Kubaissy, a senior doctor at Ramadi hospital:
“We have received the bodies of 38 people in our hospital and among them were four children and five women. The relatives said they had been killed by air attacks in their homes and in the street.”
IRIN also quote a senior Iraqi government official in the city, who reported: “three houses had been totally destroyed in the air attacks on Sunday and Monday and 14 dead civilians had been found inside them. A further 12 civilians had been critically injured in the same air strikes.”

The official described the US attack as “a cowardly action… [adding] that if any insurgents have been killed, many more civilians have been buried with them over the past two days”. (IRIN, ‘Iraq: Women and children killed in US air strikes on Ramadi, doctor says,’ October 18, 2005)
medialens.org

BEIJING (Reuters) – World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz prodded China on Tuesday to give more power to the people for the sake of sustaining strong economic growth.

Wolfowitz, a staunch conservative who served as deputy U.S. secretary of defense before joining the bank, said China had made progress in giving a voice to ordinary citizens but needed to do much more.

Skip to next paragraph “Such issues as the rule of law and the role of civil society are important non-economic factors in development — as important or perhaps more important than the traditional inputs of labor and capital,” Wolfowitz said.
nytimes.com
Ah irony of ironies…

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Africa is the most corrupt continent in the world, with Chad the worst offender and Botswana its cleanest nation, a survey said on Tuesday.

The Transparency International watchdog said that out of 44 African nations covered in its 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), 31 scored less than three — “a sign of rampant corruption” — on a scale of zero to ten.

Skip to next paragraph “Africa is the continent with the lowest average in the CPI,” it added, confirming widespread perceptions that the world’s poorest continent is also its most graft-ridden.

Topping an expanded list on Africa this year as the most corrupt nation in the continent — and the world — was Chad.

It was followed by Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Ivory Coast, all with scores of under two.

The continent’s least corrupt nation was Botswana, with a score of 5.9, followed by Tunisia, South Africa, Namibia and Mauritius.

The list is closely watched by an international community that is increasingly impatient for improved governance and less corruption in Africa in return for aid and debt relief.

Regional expert Richard Dowden noted that three of the four African countries scoring worst were oil producers, meaning it was not only locals involved in the kickback trade.

“We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders at this. Western oil companies should be held to account as well,” Dowden, director of the British-based Royal African Society, told Reuters.

But the main responsibility was among Africa’s ruling elites, he added. “The prime changes have to happen in Africa itself but it does seem to be getting worse.”
nytimes.com

The Royal Africa Society, architects of centuries of genocide. The WORST offenders on the world corruption list…hmmm