Unlike in Syria, there is documented evidence of civilian murder, war crimes, and use of chemical weapons use in Israel, yet the US chooses to remain entirely silent and, in fact, voices their outspoken support for the regime.
The post As the US Starts a New War in Syria With No Evidence, Israel Is Murdering Civilians—On Video appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The U.S. government is responsible for conducting one of the largest human experiments in history by simulating a germ warfare attack on thousands of unsuspecting Americans.
The post U.S. Gov’t Exposed for Conducting Bio-Warfare Experiments in San Francisco that Killed US Citizens appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The new head of the CIA has been a part of the deep state apparatus since 1985. In her tenure, she"s carried out unspeakable torture and was complicit in destroying evidence of US war crimes.
The post First Woman to Head the CIA is an Infamous War Criminal Who Destroyed Evidence of US Torture appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Known as Elsa-Gate on internet message boards, a dark series of videos exploiting children and preying on them on YouTube has flourished -- until now.
When five former presidents came together for a photo-op with Lady Gaga, the internet forgot all about one title the men have in common—War Criminal
It’s hard feeling sympathy for someone supporting decades of high crimes of war and against humanity – along with likeminded extremists in Washington.
Perhaps brain cancer at age 80 is payback time, hardly compensation for imperial lawlessness he supported throughout his political career – mindless of the enormous harm to millions.
Instead of denouncing his ruthlessness, the neocon/CIA-connected Washington Post disgracefully called him “a hero…a maverick and a man of courage throughout his life.”
Years earlier, after evaluating him while a North Vietnamese POW, psychiatrist Fernando Barral called him “an insensitive individual without human depth,” adding:
He “does not show the slightest concern…(He doesn’t) appear to have thought about the criminal acts he committed against a population from the absolute impunity of his airplane, and that nevertheless those people saved his life, fed him, and looked after his health, and he is now healthy and strong.”
“I believe that he has bombed densely populated places for sport. I noted that he was hardened, that he spoke of banal things as if he were at a cocktail party.”
His vicious temper is well-known in Washington. He’s disliked by many of his Senate colleagues on both sides of the isle.
He’s been Washington’s leading neocon/war-monger for years. His speeches have been called wooden, halting, mechanical, bumbling, uninspiring, and mean-spirited.
The more people get to know him, the less he’s liked. He’s hard right, pro-war, pro-business, and anti-government serving everyone equitably.
He’s a war hero in his own mind alone – with considerable help from his father, Admiral John (Jack) McCain Jr., commander-in-chief Pacific Command (CINCPAC) from 1968 – 1972.
His grandfather, John McCain Sr., was an admiral and naval aviator, both achieving four-star rank.
During visits to Syria, McCain III posed with ISIS commanders. On return in May 2013, he said “it was a very moving experience to meet these fighters who have been struggling now for over two years.”
He called cutthroat killers moderate rebels. “I know who they are. I was in Syria and I met with them,” he said – explaining nothing about US aggression against a sovereign independent country threatening no one, using imported terrorists as imperial foot soldiers.
In February 2017, he returned to Syria, again showing support for US-backed death squads. His spokeswoman said he “traveled to northern Syria…to visit with US forces…and to discuss the (so-called) counter-ISIL campaign…(His) visit was a valuable opportunity to assess dynamic conditions on the ground in Syria and Iraq.”
He “looks forward to working with the administration and military leaders to optimize our approach for accomplishing ISIL’s lasting defeat.”
Throughout years of US aggression, McCain expressed support for the scourge he pretends to oppose.
WaPo’s praise was contemptible, turning truth on its head, calling McCain “a straight talker (willing) to take on presidents of his own party” – meaning Trump like most others in Washington for the wrong reasons.
WaPo calling his spirit “indomitable” ignores his viciousness, his contempt for peace, equity and justice, his support for all US wars of aggression with other independent nations in mind to attack.
Millions affected by policies he supports won’t mourn him when his end time comes.
(ANTIMEDIA Op-Ed) Social media outrage erupted Wednesday after President Trump announced his decision to reinstate a ban on transgender individuals in the military. But as many condemned the move as discriminatory, another widely overlooked sentiment is far more pressing: the ban didn’t go far enough. Everyone should be banned from the military.
Though military service is often regarded as the highest form of patriotism and the institution and its veterans are considered by many Americans to be immune from criticism — and owed unquestioning respect — the facts on the ground paint a very different picture.
Over the decades, the United States military has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent civilians. This isn’t an honorable opportunity that should be extended to all variations of Americans. It should be extended to none.
This doesn’t mean it isn’t noble to advocate tolerance and equality for transgender individuals. Societal discrimination and phobia of transgender individuals are real, and as trans individuals struggle to gain recognition as human beings, it is a valiant effort to recognize their plight and their humanity.
But to argue that doing so requires equal access to military service is to deny the humanity of other human beings. In the Trump era, over 2,000 civilians have already been killed in U.S. military operations. His secretary of defense, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, has made it clear he is unconcerned with civilian casualties, and a recent report found as many as 40,000 civilians were killed in the recent months-long battle for Mosul – one ultimately deemed a “liberation” by the military and its media lapdogs (though not all the deaths were caused by the U.S. military, ISIS’ domination of Iraq in the first place is a direct consequence of U.S. military operations).
This type of carnage was commonplace under Barack Obama, who received glowing praise for his “tolerant” policy toward transgender individuals in the military as he blew up wedding parties and funerals in Yemen and directly caused the deaths of children in multiple countries while escalating the war in Afghanistan. He drew the U.S. military into even more countries than George W. Bush with the drone program, exponentially expanding robotic warfare.
But it isn’t just presidents who have made the military a moral dumpster fire.
The ruling establishment in the U.S. military has punished soldiers who objected to their Afghan allies raping children. It has been responsible for the loss of weapons that ended up in the hands of ISIS. It strategically desired the proliferation of that terror group for the purpose of gaining geopolitical dominance in the region. The military’s soldiers have killed journalists — as exposed by transgender former soldier Chelsea Manning. Soldiers have tortured individuals never charged with a crime. They have terrorized and murdered innocent women and children.
Further, the military’s top ally in the Middle East brutally oppresses trans individuals domestically.
This is not a concern for the U.S. military, which has military officials in the command room of the Saudi military’s operations in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have been slaughtered or forced to the brink of starvation because of the Saudis’ unrelenting assaults on infrastructure and agriculture. Their war there is largely intended to strengthen the monarchy’s power in the region — the same monarchy that “has carried out arrests for cross-dressing and ordered the imprisonment and flogging of men accused of behaving like women, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch,” Newsweek has noted.
All of this serves not only to preserve American hegemony and control of resources, but to keep profits flowing for massive military-industrial conglomerations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, who currently have officials making calls in the Pentagon (American defense companies are also selling the Saudis weapons they use in their assault on Yemen).
The American crusade is not a humane one and has no place for individuals fighting for their own humanity or the betterment of mankind — and it hasn’t been for decades.
Rather than begging a violent institution to validate trans individuals, Americans — regardless of sexual identity — should ban themselves from joining a military that has become a force for corporate hegemony, resource grabs, and war crimes around the world, rather than a force for freedom. Doing so would do far more to promote the cause of universal acceptance than indulging in jingoistic nationalism behind the barrels of guns and joysticks of remote-controlled bombers and calling it progress.
Those who want to serve their country should exercise their rights to oppose the inhumane actions of the military rather than seek to partake in them. After all, it matters little to innocent victims of American violence whether the person dropping bombs on them identifies as straight, gay, transgender, or anything else.
Opinion / Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo
Newly released historical documents are giving insight into a mass killing during the World War II era that is not covered in public schools. Japanese Unit 731, a group that specialized in biological warfare, committed horrifying atrocities during the Japanese Army’s occupation of northeast China—and the United States was complicit in its cover up.
According to a report from Xinhua Net News, 24 documents were collected in Japan on Thursday that were written by members of Unit 731. This adds to the current public information on the unit, categorized in the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731, which was opened in 2015.
Image via Unit731.orgJin Chengmin, a curator for the museum, described the main purpose of the unit’s activities as “human experiments, production, experiments and use of germ weapons.” He told Xinhua News that more than 3,000 people were subjected to experimentation at Unit 731, including prisoners of war and civilian men, women and children. The victims suffered gruesome deaths at the hands of a variety of cruel experiments carried out by their captors.
According to a report from Sinosphere, published with the New York Times, Unit 731’s biological warfare included committing atrocities such as breading plague microbes and then deliberately infecting thousands of men, women and child to study the results; transfusing humans with horse blood and testing the effects of different weapons on the body; and experiments in vivisection, air pressure and frostbite.
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Image via Unit731.orgStories from the days of Unit 731 include a mother and daughter who were locked in a gas chamber while doctors waited and watched from safety to see how long it would take them to die; live bodies locked in chambers with dead bodies to see how long it would take diseases to spread; and a man who was deliberately infected with the plague, and then operated on with no sedatives.
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“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly,” An anonymous former doctor told the New York Times, describing his first vivisection on a Chinese prisoner. “But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”
Image via Unit731.orgUnit 731 was established in Harbin, China, in 1935. The memorial museum showcases information on the group’s production scale, which included thousands of kilograms of deadly pathogens each month, such as 300 kg of plague bacillus, 600 kg of anthrax bacteria, and 900 kg of typhoid bacteria. The Unit also produced more than 2,000 germ bombs loaded with fleas infected with plague bacillus between 1937 and 1942.
“If war had not ended in 1945 and Japan had begun large-scale germ warfare, that could lead to the disappearance of humans, given the production capacity of Unit 731,” Yang Yanjun, associate researcher at the Unit 731 Research Center of Harbin Academy of Social Sciences, told Xinhua News.
While Nazi doctors who were accused of similar practices were prosecuted for “crimes against humanity” during the Nuremburg Trials following World War II, it should be noted that no one involved with Unit 731 has ever been tried for war crimes.
One of the most notable elements about the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731, is that it includes exhibition notes that hold the United States accountable for its involvement, with one note reading: “Out of considerations of its national security, the U.S. decided not to prosecute the leader of Unit 731 and the criminals under him. They all escaped trial for war crimes.”
One of the main reasons the U.S. never pursued action against the Japanese—even though there were reports of U.S. Prisoners of War included in the experiments—was detailed in a declassified U.S. military counterintelligence file, which revealed that the U.S. struck an immunity deal with the Japanese that gave the U.S. reports on human experimentation, in case it ever pursues biological warfare against Russia.
READ MORE: N. Korea Warns Against US Presence -- Stop Now or Face a “Merciless & Annihilating” Nuclear Strike
“for the first time … clear evidence that American military intelligence officers maneuvered to suppress reports indicating U.S. prisoners of war in Manchuria were the victims of grotesque biological warfare experiments.heir unwillingness to pursue the allegations apparently stemmed from a secret deal granting the Japanese immunity from prosecution in exchange for tissue samples and reports on human experimentation that might help give the U.S. a germ warfare advantage over the Russians.”
An unprecedented report from the corporate press claims U.S. forces have participated in extreme torture and abuse of detainees accused of affiliation with Al Qaeda in Yemen — including “the ‘grill,’ in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire,” the Associated Press finds.
A network of secretive prisons in southern Yemen provide the backdrop for the alleged barbaric acts allegedly carried out by forces from the U.S. and United Arab Emirates — many of those detention facilities remain hidden in plain sight.
That some of the covert prisons sit inside military bases might not be much of a shock, but others are located in ports, an airport, private villas, and even a nightclub — and all, according to the AP, remain untouchable by the embattled Yemeni government.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden weighed in on the new revelations, tweeting,
“Biggest @AP scoop in a long time: US government behind UAE torture in Yemen, with some reportedly grilled alive.”
Biggest @AP scoop in a long time:
US government behind UAE torture in Yemen, with some reportedly grilled alive. https://t.co/2ggHLcgZzM— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) June 22, 2017
American officials unsurprisingly balked at the accusation troops have participated in the astonishingly heinous behavior described in the AP’s report.
Reports the AP:
“Senior American defense officials acknowledged Wednesday that U.S. forces have been involved in interrogations of detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in or knowledge of human rights abuses. Interrogating detainees who have been abused could violate international law, which prohibits complicity in torture.
“The AP documented at least 18 clandestine lockups across southern Yemen run by the United Arab Emirates or by Yemeni forces created and trained by the Gulf nation, drawing on accounts from former detainees, families of prisoners, civil rights lawyers and Yemeni military officials. All are either hidden or off limits to Yemen’s government, which has been getting Emirati help in its civil war with rebels over the last two years.”
Notably, this is the first ‘official’ acknowledgment the United States participates in interrogations inside the borders of Yemen.
Forces transported some detainees to an Emirati base in Eritrea, according to Yemen Interior Minister Hussein Arab.
Unnamed and unverifiable U.S. defense officials told the Associated Press ‘senior U.S. military leaders’ have been aware of alleged torture taking place in Yemen for some time — but have investigated the charges, and apparently found nothing amiss, as U.S. troops, they claim, were never present during detainee torture.
Perhaps beyond tellingly, neither the AP nor the anonymous officials elucidated on whether the lack of U.S. troop presence during the alleged grilling alive of detainees meant senior military leaders indeed discovered forces from other nations roasting people alive and said nothing, or that the torture allegations were completely baseless.
Those defense officials further “told AP that American forces do participate in interrogations of detainees at locations in Yemen, provide questions for others to ask, and receive transcripts of interrogations from Emirati allies.”
Torture this horrific, if proven true, harkens immediately back to Bush-era implementation of barbaric human rights violations by the CIA — which included waterboarding and other acts the agency, itself, knew to be utterly inefficacious — which temporarily halted adherence to the law and all semblance of ethics under the premise of extracting information from detainees following the attacks of 9/11.
“We always adhere to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct,” chief Defense Department spokeswoman, Dana White, told the AP on perusal of its report. “We would not turn a blind eye, because we are obligated to report any violations of human rights.”
READ MORE: Secret Docs Reveal Allies Knew About Holocaust, Allowed it to Happen -- For Years
In a statement, the UAE government also balked, insisting, “There are no secret detention centers and no torture of prisoners is done during interrogations.”
“The UAE was one of the countries involved in the CIA’s torture and rendition program,” reminds New York University Professor of Law Ryan Goodman. “These reports are hauntingly familiar and potentially devastating in their legal and policy implications.”
To repeat, the U.S. Department of Defense must report violations of human rights — yet the vagueness of the claim senior military brass investigated allegations of excruciating torture, but would only offer that U.S. troops had not been present. Without further explanation, that detail could indicate a troubling sin of omission — in short, a failure to report violations of human rights.
Not one of the dozens interviewed by the AP accused U.S. troops of witnessing torture, but the malicious, degrading, deplorable, torturous abuses described by former inmates of the secret prisons would seem impossible to have taken place without their cognizance.
AP continues:
“At one main detention complex at Riyan airport in the southern city of Mukalla, former inmates described being crammed into shipping containers smeared with feces and blindfolded for weeks on end. They said they were beaten, trussed up on the ‘grill,’ and sexually assaulted. According to a member of the Hadramawt Elite, a Yemeni security force set up by the UAE, American forces were at times only yards away. He requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
“‘We could hear the screams,’ said a former detainee held for six months at Riyan airport. ‘The entire place is gripped by fear. Almost everyone is sick, the rest are near death. Anyone who complains heads directly to the torture chamber.’ He was flogged with wires, part of the frequent beatings inflicted by guards against all the detainees. He also said he was inside a metal shipping container when the guards lit a fire underneath to fill it with smoke.”
READ MORE: In the Wake of Brussels Attack -- The US Quietly Admits to Their Own Act of Terror that Killed 42
As in the first revelations on the renewed use of the gross physical and psychological abuses comprising torture, human rights advocates admonished such practices cannot be carried out without the broad knowledge of military and intelligence officials at the scene — particularly not for the duration described.
“It would be a stretch to believe the US did not know or could not have known that there was a real risk of torture,” Amnesty International Director of Research in the Middle East, Lynn Maalouf, told the Associated Press. Amnesty called for a swift investigation by the United Nations into the torture allegations against the UAE and other possible participants or knowledgeable parties.
Torture has been championed as acceptable by the president and other U.S. officials, despite its illegality internationally — almost exclusively as a tool of the War on Terror to extract information from prisoners — but torture has been proven repeatedly to be ineffective for that very purpose.
At least 2,000 people have vanished in Yemen — their families left agonizing over their fate, tragically wondering whether a torturous interrogation took their lives.
“Wives, mothers, and daughters in the north and south of Yemen want to know whether their husbands, sons, and brothers are all right, if they are even alive,” noted Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, after issuance of a similar report on torture in Yemen by her organization, on Thursday.
“Yemen, the UAE, Houthi-Saleh forces, and any other party disappearing people should immediately inform families of where their loved ones are and release those held arbitrarily.”
Despite denial of allegations by the United States military and government of the United Arab Emirates, the report from the Associated Press most likely will be remembered as the beginning of yet another torture scandal embroiling perpetually-ethicless entities during a complex and violent conflict — one, again, involving the U.S., which fights for freedom and against terror by, apparently, eviscerating freedom and waging terror.
While the double standards the United States sets for its close ally, Saudi Arabia, have been criticized by members of the public, it is not often that politicians call out the hypocrisy—and then there’s Rand Paul—the man, who on Wednesday, was dodging .556 rounds fired at him by an anti-Trump lunatic.
The Republican senator from Kentucky went off on an aggressive Twitter rant, before taking to the Senate floor on Tuesday to speak out against the proposed $350 billion arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which was praised by President Trump during his first official trip abroad.
“Saudi Arabia is causing a humanitarian crisis with a war in Yemen,” Paul wrote on Twitter. “It funds extremism worldwide. Abuses human rights. Stop arming them now.”
The vote will be close. It is time we stop the counterproductive and harmful practice of arming a country that promotes extremism
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 13, 2017
Today we will discuss issues of war & peace, which we rarely do. We have been in conflict over 15 years.
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 13, 2017
During his speech, Paul noted that by arming Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is directly supporting the Saudis’ horrific war in Yemen, which has resulted in the deaths of over 10,000, and has left millions of civilians malnourished, and in desperate need of food assistance.
“Should the United States be actively involved with refueling Saudi planes, with picking targets, with having advisors on the ground? Should we be at war in Yemen?” Paul said on the Senate floor. “If you remember your Constitution, it says no president has that authority. Only to repel imminent attack, but no president alone has the unilateral authority to take us to war. And yet, here we are on the verge of war.”
Paul also said that while it won’t solve every problem the Yemeni people are currently facing, he believes halting the arms sale will have an impact on helping to stop some of the suffering.
READ MORE: Anonymous Calls on IOC to Ban Saudi Arabia from 2016 Olympics Over Human Rights Violations
“One group said that the impending famine in Yemen may reach biblical proportions — think about that,” He said. “It is astounding what is being done, and it is not being done with your weapons, but with your — we will force this vote for these children in Yemen because we have a chance today to stop the carnage. We have a chance to tell Saudi Arabia we’ve had enough.”
17 million live in edge of starvation. Crisis may well be worse than Syria. And our country is going to further arm one side of this war
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 13, 2017
And we are going to give them weapons? I say no.
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 13, 2017
Paul then went on to bring up the fact that less than one year ago, Congress supported giving the families of 9/11 victims the right to sue Saudi Arabia for the attacks. When President Obama vetoed the bill in September 2016, it became the first veto of his presidency that Congress overturned.
A year ago the Senate voted to let 9/11 victims sue Saudi Arabia. Now we are going to sell them weapons? What are we thinking?
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 13, 2017
In a segment of the speech posted on his Facebook page, Paul quoted former President Dwight Eisenhower, who said he was worried the U.S. would start to make decisions in the name of the military industrial complex, rather than national defense.
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“I am embarrassed that people would bring up trying to feather the nests of corporations in order to sell these weapons,” Paul said. “This should be made pure and simple on our national defense. Saudi Arabia is not a reliable ally. Saudi Arabia should not get these weapons. For every supposed good thing they do, they do five things that are bad for America.”
Senator Paul Speaking in Opposition to the Saudi Arms Deal
I am embarrassed that people would bring up trying to feather the nests of corporations in order to sell these weapons. This should be made pure and simple on our national defense. Saudi Arabia is not a reliable ally. Saudi Arabia should not get these weapons. For every supposed good thing they do, they do five things that are bad for America. They are the biggest purveyor of hatred of christianity and judaism. I request a no vote.
Posted by Senator Rand Paul on Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Paul was joined by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) on Tuesday. The senators sought to invoke the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, in order to force a vote on blocking the portion of the arms sale that would be used to deepen the conflict in Yemen. As a result, 47 senators voted the halt the sale, and 53 senators voted to provide the weapons to Saudi Arabia.
“Today, a bipartisan group of senators took a stand against the escalating war Saudi Arabia is waging with Yemen,” Paul said in a press release. “This is just the beginning, and we will continue to take a stance against waging an undeclared war and fueling an arms race in the Middle East. I applaud those who voted with me to block this proposed arms sale, and I hope this sends a clear message to Saudi Arabia that the United States will not just stand by as they massacre their unarmed neighbors.”
Earlier this month, multiple reports surfaced of US-led coalition forces in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria, using the incendiary chemical weapon, white phosphorus, on civilians. For over a week, the US government and the coalition at large have remained silent on the issue — until now.
In an error that will likely get him much backlash, in an interview with NPR, New Zealand Brig. Gen. Hugh McAslan, and member of the US-coalition has admitted — for the first time — to using white phosphorus during operations in the Iraqi city of Mosul.
“We have utilized white phosphorous to screen areas within West Mosul to get civilians out safely,” McAslan told NPR on Tuesday.
Instead of questioning the horrid nature of the chemical weapons use on civilians, NPR echoed the general’s sentiment and noted that 28,000 civilians have managed to escape. While that may be true, countless others were injured or suffered horrifying deaths.
This is the longer version of Amaq video of White phosphorous used yesterday in Zanjili neighborhood of west Mosul #Iraq pic.twitter.com/9QTQhAlDSw
— Fazel Hawramy (@FazelHawramy) June 4, 2017
White phosphorus is described as an “incendiary and toxic chemical substance used as a filler in a number of different munitions that can be employed for a variety of military purposes.”
The chemical was banned internationally after the 1980 Protocol on Incendiary Weapons restricted the “use of incendiary weapons as a means or method of warfare during armed conflict.”
The use of chemical weapons is clearly prohibited in international armed conflicts. The International Committee of the Red Cross noted that “employing asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and all analogous liquids, materials or devices is listed in the Statute of the International Criminal Court as a war crime.”
While deploying incendiary weapons against residential areas is banned under Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), the two other uses — smoke screens and signals — are not, which allows the hypocritical US, to keep such munitions in their arsenal and use them. It is through this loophole that the US claims the right to deploy these deadly weapons on towns.
READ MORE: Worse than ISIS -- Using US Arms, Saudi Arabia Just Bombed a Busy Market Killing Dozens of Children
On November 30, 2005, General Peter Pace stated that white phosphorus munitions were a “legitimate tool of the military” used to illuminate targets and create smokescreens, saying “It is not a chemical weapon. It is an incendiary.” However, the general is wrong. As soon as white phosphorus is deployed against people, it becomes a chemical weapon.
A chemical weapon can be “any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm.”
White phosphorus remains very dangerous even when not deliberately used to start fires or attack humans. Submunitions can ignite days after deployment and remain a hazard for a city. Injuries caused by the chemical can burn to the bone and are prone to reigniting if a piece of the phosphorus remaining in the wound is exposed to air when a dressing is changed.
“No matter how white phosphorus is used, it poses a high risk of horrific and long-lasting harm in crowded cities like Raqqa and Mosul and any other areas with concentrations of civilians,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch.
The US claims of using white phosphorus as a smoke screen or signal ring hollow when assessing the damage reported on the ground in Syria and Iraq.
Just as the rights groups warned, civilian casualties were, in fact, a reality from the coalition’s deployment of white phosphorus.
Xinhua News, China’s state press agency, reported last week that “Tens of civilians were killed on Thursday when the U.S.-led airstrikes targeted Syria’s northern city of Raqqa with white phosphorus,” citing a report from Syria’s Sham FM radio.
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Russia’s Riafan.ru reported that “Coalition forces led by the United States of America shell Raqqa and suburbs of white phosphorus munitions,” citing reports on Twitter, which said the U.S.-backed coalition conducted 20 air raids.
45 civilians killed in #Raqqa #Syria due to #US-led coalition airstrikes that used White Phosphorus! #UNSC and MSM must be busy for that! pic.twitter.com/mEo0C9fZBM
— maytham (@maytham956) June 8, 2017
Although the total number of civilian deaths has not been entirely confirmed, early reports suggest that nearly 50 people were killed.
“Horrific civilian harm from previous use of white phosphorus has generated public outrage and this latest use of white phosphorus underscores the urgent need for states to strengthen international law relating to incendiary weapons,” HRW’s Goose said.
Although NPR happened to have the general admit to them US forces are using white phosphorus, no other mainstream outlet in America has picked up this bombshell story.
Their silence shows their complicit nature in covering up the alleged war crimes of the West.
“US-led forces should take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm when using white phosphorus in Iraq and Syria,” Goose said of the situation. However, from the reports on the ground, that appears not to be the case.
US-led coalition use of white phosphorus in Syria & Iraq raises serious questions about the protection of civilians https://t.co/QqgHnCbZyI pic.twitter.com/v33z0jPSwG
— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) June 14, 2017
In the video below, the US-led coalition is dropping white phosphorus bombs on Western Mosul. Watch for yourself and decide whether or not it was being used as a ‘tool’ to allow civilians to escape.
US led coalition dropping white phosphorus bombs on Western Mosul last week. pic.twitter.com/qdXkL2n5Gv
— CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) June 5, 2017
Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst who was charged with leaking the largest trove of government secrets in U.S. history, spoke out for the first time this week after spending seven years in prison.
“I accept the responsibility,” Manning said. “No one told me to do this. No one directed me to do this. This is me, it’s on me.”
Manning said she was inspired to turn over the collection of over 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, after watching American soldiers commit atrocities against innocent civilians in the Middle East.
“All of this information—it’s just death, destruction, mayhem, and eventually you just stop—I stopped seeing just statistics and information,” Manning said. “I started seeing people. Counterinsurgents and warfare is not a simple thing. It’s not as simple as ‘good guys vs. bad guys.’ It was a mess.”
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As a result, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison—the longest sentence given to any whistleblower in U.S. history. President Obama waited until the end of his presidency to commute the remainder of Manning’s sentence.
One of the videos included in the trove, which Manning said inspired her to turn to WikiLeaks, showed American solders carrying out an aerial attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
Amnesty International Americas Director Erika Guevara-Rosas noted that while Manning was originally given an extremely long sentence, none of the solders exposed in any of the videos faced justice.
“Instead of punishing the messenger, the U.S. government can send a strong signal to the world that it is serious about investigating the human rights violations exposed by the leaks and bringing all those suspected of criminal responsible to justice in fair trials,” Guevara-Rosas said.
READ MORE: Obama says his is ‘most transparent administration" ever
As The Free Thought Project has reported, while Manning is out of prison now, she remains on an active duty soldier in the U.S. Army, and has been “placed on voluntary excess leave, rather than discharged—and, as such, could be swiftly and relentlessly punished for the slightest violation, despite technically being considered free.”
While the mainstream media devoted an agonizing amount of coverage to an HBO host’s use of a racial slur, it ignored the Trump Administration’s efforts to further bury war crimes committed by the United States—even though the latter is arguably more alarming and offensive.
Those war crimes were detailed in the 2014 CIA torture report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report gave insight into the gruesome, cruel methods used by CIA agents in their attempts to extract information from suspected Al-Qaeda members after 9/11.
The full 6,700-page report has never been released to the public, and there is a good chance it won’t make any progress under President Trump. He has reportedly begun returning all copies of the classified report to Congress, following requests from Sen. Richard Burr, the intelligence committee’s current Republican chairman.
“I have directed my staff to retrieve copies of the Congressional study that remain with the Executive Branch agencies, and as the Committee does with all classified and compartmented information, will enact the necessary measures to protect the sensitive sources and methods contained within the report,” Burr said in a statement to Reuters.
This move is notable because while government documents are supposed to be made public under the Freedom of Information Act, documents held by Congress are exempt. If all of the copies of the CIA torture report end up in the hands of members of Congress who want to keep them from the public, they could be buried for good.
The latest developments impacting the future of the report have drawn criticism from some Democrats in the Senate.
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Sen. Mark Warner, the current Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, took to Twitter to share his disappointment with the decision. “#TortureReport must be preserved so we can learn from past mistakes & ensure that abuses are never repeated,” Warner said.
Disappointed w/ this decision. #TortureReport must be preserved so we can learn from past mistakes & ensure that abuses are never repeated. https://t.co/VZPoEsldVu
— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) June 2, 2017
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was the committee’s chairman when the report was authored, called Burr’s request “alarming and concerning.”
“This creates a dangerous precedent,” Feinstein said. “No senator—chairman or not—has the authority to erase history. I believe that is the intent of the chairman.”
Following the report’s completion, Feinstein ordered copies to be sent to several government agencies, who would then have the opportunity to release it under a FOIA request.
As The Free Thought Project reported in May 2016, the CIA inspector general’s office admitted to “mistakenly” destroying their only copy of the CIA torture report. However, when the agency turned to CIA Director John Brennan, who has his own copy of the classified report, he refused to send a replacement to the internal watchdog’s office.
Although HBO late-night host Bill Maher’s use of the “N-word” during an interview has garnered much more attention from the mainstream media, the fate of the Senate’s CIA torture report is news that should warrant every American’s concern.
While a 500-page executive summary was released in December 2014, the full 6,700-page report has never been made public. Many politicians claimed the release of the entire report would be detrimental to U.S. foreign relations. But the question, with the heavily redacted summary already detailing kidnapping, torture, public deception, human rights abuses and war crimes—what is the CIA still trying to hide?
For the last eight years, Peace Prize recipient and ostensible savior of the free world, Barack Obama, rained down hell from the sky on brown people across the Middle East. Obama far exceeded his predecessor, George W. Bush, in the use of drone strikes, killing more civilians than ever before and aiding in the creation and growth of worldwide terror.
On top of this warlord president receiving the Peace Prize, in his final days in office, Barack Obama was ironically given the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service “as a token of appreciation for his service as commander in chief” at a farewell ceremony on January 4. The medal is the highest honorary award at the Department of Defense and is presented by the Secretary of Defense.
In his last year alone, Obama authorized the United States military to drop more than 26,000 bombs in 7 countries, according to an estimate by the Council on Foreign Relations. During the prior year, the numbers were similar.
An estimated 50,000 bombs in only 24 months fell onto houses, churches, schools, and hospitals — all authorized by the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize — his supporters, as well as the corporate mainstream media, remained silent.
Fast forward to last weekend.
Following in his predecessor’s footsteps, reports from Yemen indicate that as many as 10 women and children were killed in a raid authorized by Donald Trump. During this raid, the 8-year-old granddaughter of Nasser al-Awlaki, who was also the daughter of Anwar Awlaki was shot in the neck and died after suffering for two hours, according to Nasser al-Awlaki.
This is the 8-year-old girl killed in US raid in Yemen, Arabic media reports https://t.co/nPlWh6LqE3
US killed her teen American brother too pic.twitter.com/QP0TsgdIfq— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 29, 2017
What makes the tragedy of this 8-year-old girl killed by Trump stand out, however, is the fact that Obama killed her older brother and her father — who were both US citizens — who were extrajudicially murdered without trial.
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As the Free Thought Project reported last month, below are just a handful of the civilian slaughters that took place under Obama.
In July 2016, over 100 civilians were killed in multiple U.S. airstrikes in the town of Manbij, inlcuding 77 in one attack. One of the U.S. airstrikes hit a children’s hospital.
Dozens of civilians were killed by U.S. bombs in Daquq, Iraq while attending a funeral in an area where there was said to be no ISIS presence.
The U.S. bombed two hospitals in the same month, in the same city during operations in Mosul, Iraq. Both attacks caused an unknown number of civilian deaths.
U.S. officials revealed in November 2016 that the military investigated 257 allegations of civilian casualties and deemed only 31 of them credible, just over 10 percent of the total.
The aforementioned civilian deaths are only during the last 6 months of 2016, and are from Syria, only.
As Trump now takes the helm, the same media who covered for Obama’s slaughter in the Middle East, are now all of the sudden interested in exposing that same slaughter.
When Obama approved a CIA drone strike in Yemen that killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, mainstream corporate media was all but silent. The fact that the president ordered a strike on an American citizen with no due process and killed his teen son in the process — was but a blip on the news cycle — including FOX News.
Now, however, the same Praetorian guard who protected Obama and Hillary Clinton during the WikiLeaks fiasco is plastering headlines of Trump killing civilians all over the internet.
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Of course, this does not lessen the crimes of Trump. However, what it does do is highlight just how easily controlled people are by the media — on both sides.
Those of us who watched this madness unfold in 2009, were blown away by the once ‘antiwar left’ now approving of torture and extrajudicial killings — literally overnight — because their guy was in power.
When Obama killed children in the Middle East, the right was quick to denounce him while the left continued praising him. Now, the exact same scenario is playing out, again, right before our eyes.
While Trump ran on a platform of demilitarizing the Middle East and concentrating only on ISIS, he’s quickly showing his true intentions. Friday morning, the President’s first Tweet was a threat to Iran.
Iran is playing with fire – they don"t appreciate how "kind" President Obama was to them. Not me!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2017
And, just like Obama’s supporters did, Trump’s supporters are cheering him on — even the ones who chastised the left for failing to call out war crimes after Obama took office.
The fact of the matter is Iran has never caused harm to the United States. In fact, Iran hasn’t attacked another country in over 200 years! And somehow, the US considers them a threat?
No matter how good you thought Trump was or how bad you thought Obama was, they are merely seat fillers on a machine beholden to corrupt corporate interests with their tentacles so far into the government that you can’t tell where the state ends and the business begins. And, the media plays right along with it.
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Do not think for one minute that the mainstream media has all of the sudden found their conscience and began to question war. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The actions of Trump are now being used to stoke divide in the United States so people are too busy arguing to notice they are being fleeced to kill more brown people for profit.
These wars have been the plan since before 9/11 and will continue until they are defunded and the criminals behind them exposed — or until, they are finished. But don’t take our word for it, listen to 4-start general, and previous Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Wesley Clark.
It is worth noting that 6 out of these 7 countries (with the exception of Lebanon) identified by Clark in the video above “to be taken out” are now the object of President Trump’s ban on Muslims’ entry to the US: Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Iran and Yemen — with the US now aiming its sights on Iran.
Please share this article with your friends and family so that they may not fall victim to the two-party manipulation being used against them to foster more war and, in turn, more terrorism.
(MEE) British government analysis has indicated that British-made cluster bombs have been used by Saudi Arabia-led forces in the war in Yemen.
The defence secretary, Michael Fallon, is among ministers to have been made aware of the analysis, sources told The Guardian.
The Government said it takes the allegations “very seriously” and has raised them with the Saudi-led coalition.
The analysis comes after the prime minister of Yemen’s rebel Houthi government accused the UK of “war crimes” for supplying arms.
Because of their extraordinary risk to civilians, cluster bombs were banned in 2010 in an international treaty signed by Britain.
The UK’s signature on the Convention on Cluster Munitions also means it must be committed to preventing the banned weapon’s use by other nations.
Amnesty International has documented multiple examples of cluster bomb use in the war in Yemen, and blames the Saudi-led coalition for their deployment.
The Houthi Prime Minister, Abdel-Aziz bin Habtoor, said last week that the British government was profiting from the humanitarian crisis by selling munitions.
He told Sky News: “They have sold cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia.
“They know the Saudis are going to drop them on Yemen… in Saadah and in Sanaa and other provinces.
“I don’t think they are guilty of war crimes, I believe so. They are participating in the bombing of Yemen people.”
The British defence ministry declined to comment on the latest claims but a government spokesman said: “The government takes such allegations very seriously.
“We have analysed the case carefully using all available information, considering all possibilities, and raised the issue with the Saudi-led coalition.”
This article (UK Cluster Bombs Used by Saudi Arabia in Yemen) by MEE and agencies originally appeared on MiddleEastEye.net and was used with permission. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.
