A new movie, ‘The Mauritanian’, has put the controversial prison back in the spotlight by highlighting the inhumane and unlawful treatment meted out to the inmates of Gitmo. Will it spur Joe Biden to finally do the right thing?

After a while, some things that at first seemed shocking and disturbing somehow become normalised and melt into the background. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp is a prime example.

Apart from military geeks, hardly anyone has paid attention recently to the controversial prison at the US Naval Base in Cuba, itself a bizarre hangover dating back to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Even after the 1959 revolution that saw the communist Fidel Castro seize power, and a deeply hostile America cut diplomatic relations and sought to overthrow him, Washington has still been shelling out a yearly lease of around $4,000 for the indefinite use of 45 square miles of Cuban territory.

Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly urged US President Joe Biden to maintain his predecessor’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court, arguing that even if he disagrees with them, the US and Israel must stick together.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu personally called up Biden last week to request he keep the Trump administration’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in place, lest the court launch its long-threatened war crimes investigation into Tel Aviv’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, Axios reported on Wednesday.

The officer was found dead in the Russell complex in Canberra just a month after the biggest scandal in the history of the Australian military. According to police reports, his death was not suspicious, as he had apparently committed suicide.

An Australian intelligence officer, who was found dead in the car park of army headquarters in December 2020, allegedly had an encrypted hard drive with him, as he was reportedly planning to release classified information on the misconduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan, according to The Sunday Telegraph.

"It is understood the intelligence officer was going to make the information public because the Brereton Report is an erroneous one-sided witchhunt against the SAS to try to appease the Afghanis", the source told the newspaper.

Well, as usual, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has finally received authorization to proceed with the investigation of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel-Palestine, to include both the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and also Hamas in Gaza.

On February 5th ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that her office is now studying the decision made to confirm ICC’s jurisdiction and would be “guided strictly by its independent and impartial mandate” to investigate and prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC has already ruled in December 2019 that “war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip” but was waiting for confirmation that it had jurisdiction to proceed. Both the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and armed groups including Hamas were named as possible perpetrators.

Cameroon has detained eight soldiers after a video emerged over the weekend showing them in uniform torturing a victim with a machete until he fell unconscious, the Central African nation’s defence ministry said on Monday.

The incident, which occurred on Feb. 11 in the North West Region, one of the country’s English-speaking regions where separatist insurgents have been battling government forces since 2017, is the latest in a series of atrocities and suspected rights abuse in the drawn-out conflict.

What began as peaceful protests over marginalisation in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions by the majority French-speaking government in 2016 has degenerated into a violent insurgency pitting separatist groups against Cameroon’s army.

In 2009, a German Colonel in Kunduz ordered the bombing of two hijacked fuel tankers in Afghanistan, killing over 100 people, mostly civilians. The father of two pre-teen children killed by the airstrike challenged the failure of German authorities to properly investigate the incident at the European Court of Human Rights.

European Court of Human Right's Grand Chamber has dismissed a claim launched by an Afghan man, Abdul Hanan, who challenged the investigation into a NATO airstrike which killed his two sons, along with scores of others.

The International Criminal Court has announced that it has jurisdiction in the Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. This decision will allow the ICC to investigate potential war crimes carried out by Israel for the first time.

On February, 5 2021, the International Criminal Court, or ICC, headquartered in The Hague, published a ruling, establishing its jurisdiction in Palestine. This jurisdictional ruling from the ICC's pre Trial Chamber one establishes that Palestiness West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, which Israel has been illegally occupying since 1967, are indeed in the scope of the ICC's territorial jurisdiction, and therefore it can proceed with investigating potential war crimes committed by Israel.

An Ethiopian schoolgirl has told the BBC how she lost her right hand defending herself from a soldier who tried to rape her - and who had also tried to force her grandfather to have sex with her.

The 18-year-old, who we are not naming, has been in hospital in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region for more than two months recovering from her ordeal.

The conflict in Tigray, which erupted in early November 2020 when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched an offensive to oust the region's ruling TPLF party after its fighters captured federal military bases, has destroyed her dreams, and those of many of her classmates.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who has been probing war crimes committed by Israel, the US and their allies, is set to hand over office soon, amid reports of the Tel Aviv regime’s intense international lobbying for pressure on her over a recent jurisdiction-related ruling.

On Friday, the ICC’s member states are set to elect a new chief prosecutor to take over from Fatou Bensouda, who has been investigating the Israeli military and officials and those of the United States and other countries for possible war crimes in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied territories, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Bensouda, born in Gambia, is slated to leave office in June after nine years in one of the most challenging jobs in the international justice system.

The White House has announced that President Joe Biden intends to shut down the notorious US military prison at Guantanamo Bay by the time he leaves office, a tall task that the Obama administration failed to achieve nearly a decade ago.

Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday that it was the “intention” of the Biden administration to shutter the offshore prison, which was set up in January 2002 to hold people suspected of ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Psaki gave no timeline for the planned closure, telling reporters that officials from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and other agencies would conduct a “robust” review of the facility.

The Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, also known as “Gitmo,” became synonymous with prisoner abuse by the United States in the early years of the so-called war on terror, because of harsh “interrogation methods” that human rights advocates say amounted to torture.

Disney has taken political stances against Donald Trump, the state of Georgia, and Republican members of Congress. But when it comes to China and its human rights atrocities, the Magic Kingdom sides with the Middle Kingdom every time.

In the latest example of corporate complicity through silence, the Walt Disney Co. has refused to comment on a recent report that China is overseeing the systematic rape of ethnic minority women in the western Xinjiang region. The BBC News reported earlier this month that women in China’s concentration camps for Uyghurs have been repeatedly raped, sexually abused, and tortured.

One witness told the BBC News that women were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. On Thursday, China retaliated against the BBC News by suspending the network from its airwaves, claiming that the British broadcaster has harmed China’s national interests and ethnic unity.

On 25 September 2019, a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli soldiers and transferred to the Russian Compound detention facility in Jerusalem for interrogation by Israel’s internal intelligence agency, the Shin Bet.

Samer Arbeed’s arrest marked the beginning of a wave of arrests in the ensuing months throughout the occupied West Bank. Later, media publications would describe this operation as a crackdown on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was allegedly linked to the murder of Rina Schnerb, a young Israeli woman killed in a bombing attack earlier that year.

The Foreign Ministries of Germany and Hungary on Tuesday denounced the International Criminal Court’s ruling last week that the court has jurisdiction to open an investigation into alleged war crimes by Israel and the Hamas terror group.

Israel has denounced the Friday ruling and the US objected to it, while the Palestinians supported the move. Israel and the US are not members of the ICC; the Palestinian Authority joined the court in 2015.

Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, said “the court has no jurisdiction because of the absence of the element of Palestinian statehood required by international law.”

On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of Apartheid in the Palestinian territories.

Israeli politician Abba Eban once quipped that Palestinians never lost the opportunity to lose an opportunity. But Palestinians have carefully, methodically created this opportunity to be heard in an international tribunal. It is the ruling Israeli right wing about which one can now quip about missing opportunities.

Israel has egregiously violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of people in Occupied territories by flooding its own citizens into the Palestinian Territories, by stealing Palestinian land from its owners and building squatter settlements on it, and by using disproportional force against Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border.

The court will also look into war crimes by Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip.

The last hurdle in the way of an international investigation into war crimes committed in occupied Palestine has been removed, as the International Criminal Court in the Hague has finally approved the Prosecutor’s request to open legal proceedings regarding war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza.

In December 2019, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had concluded that the Court’s initial findings are a sufficient basis for an investigation into war crimes committed by Israeli officials and Palestinian groups in the occupied territories and that the Court does have jurisdiction to look into the matter.

The decision, then, has angered Israel and its Western allies, who insisted that the ICC has no jurisdiction since Palestine, they alleged, is not an independent state. Consequently, Bensouda referred the matter to the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber, requesting a “ruling on the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the Situation in the State of Palestine”.

Many Palestinians see a ruling by the International Criminal Court that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories as a belated chance of justice for victims of Israeli attacks.

But for many Israelis, Friday’s ruling is worrying because they say they are the “good guys” defending themselves against Palestinian violence.

The ruling, delivered by a pre-trial chamber of three ICC judges, could lead to criminal investigations of Israel and Palestinian militant groups including Hamas. No probe was expected in the near future, however.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said she would now examine the decision and pointed to the 2014 Gaza war between Israel and militant groups in Hamas-controlled Gaza, the 2018 Gaza border protests and Israeli settlements in occupied territory.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Saturday sent a letter to the IDF calling the International Criminal Court’s ruling claiming it has jurisdiction to open a war crimes investigation against Israel “grave” and “unauthorized.” Gantz asserted the decision is intended to serve as a tool for Israel’s enemies, and promised to shield troops from any repercussions.

“The defense establishment, together with the other state bodies, will act resolutely to prevent harm to IDF commanders and soldiers, and to members of the entire defense establishment,” he said.

“The decision of the judges at The Hague is grave and has no basis in international law. The proceeding…is conducted without authority and is unfounded,” Gantz wrote in the letter, addressed to the IDF Chief of Staff, IDF soldiers and commanders, the director-general of the Defense Ministry, and the upper echelon of Israel’s security establishment.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday assailed the International Criminal Court for ruling it has jurisdiction to open a war crimes investigation against Israel, calling such a probe “pure anti-Semitism” and vowing to fight it.

“When the ICC investigates Israel for fake war crimes, this is pure anti-Semitism,” Netanyahu said in a forceful English-language video sent out by his office.

In a major decision Friday, a pretrial chamber of the ICC determined that The Hague has jurisdiction to open a criminal investigation against Israel and the Palestinians for war crimes alleged to have taken place in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

President Biden is someone who has suffered his own personal tragedies: first losing his wife and daughter in 1972 to an accident, and then his son Beau from a brain tumor. He has felt so much pain; I hope that means he will understand mine. The last two decades of my life have been a nightmare without end — and the worst of it is that my family are also trapped inside it.

I sit here writing this in Guantánamo Bay, and I can only hope the president finds some empathy for my situation, and that of the other detainees who languish here in this terrible prison.

Five Palestinian minors said they were severely beaten and tortured by Israeli soldiers and interrogators during detention, today said the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs.

The Commission said it got affidavits from the five minors, who gave details of the beating and torture they were subjected to at the hands of Israeli soldiers and security agents during arrest and interrogation.

Mustafa Salameh, 17, was detained at his family home in Azzoun town, east of the northern West Bank city of Qalqilya. He was beaten with the butt of guns, smacked and kicked around, then shoved into an army jeep where he was thrown on the floor as soldiers kept trampling on him with their army boots, and kicking him while cursing him.

In his 2008 memoir, Promises to Keep, then Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden touted his leadership on the Balkan conflict as one of his two proudest moments in public life. He pushed a reluctant Clinton administration to arm Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s and to use air power to suppress conflict in Serbia and Kosovo.[1]

Biden reiterated the same theme in a January 2020 interview with NBC, telling Lester Holt: “Look, I’m the guy that started the effort to make sure we took down the guy who was engaged in genocide in the Balkans: Slobodan Miloševi?.”[2]

But was there really a genocide in the Balkans led by Miloševi? and was Biden’s involvement in the conflict really something to be proud about?

As Joe Biden settles into his presidency, in addition to facing a pandemic and economic crisis, he will hear demands for accountability. If President Biden is going to help restore a robust commitment to the rule of law, he will need to reach further back than Donald Trump and the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. He will also need to address the abuses that followed the 9/11 attacks — specifically, the CIA-run torture program.

When President Obama took office, he immediately acted to end the torture program and close the secret CIA detention facilities. But he pledged to “look forward, as opposed to looking backward,” a folksy remark that signaled a widespread policy. Not only has almost no one been held to account for detainee abuse, the torture program itself remains classified.

Joe Biden presents himself as an empathetic guy who is willing to go the extra mile to help people overcome their personal tragedies.

However, Biden has throughout his career endorsed policies that caused countless personal tragedies for millions of people.

The best example is his support for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It led to the deaths and wounding of thousands of U.S. soldiers, killing of an estimated one million Iraqis, and destabilization of a wide swath of the Middle East.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spent his final days in office committing political terrorism, planting foreign policy landmines to hinder incoming President Joe Biden. One of his cruelest actions was to charge the Yemeni Houthis with being a terrorist organization.

He cited missile attacks on civilian targets in Saudi Arabia. That is a war crime, not terrorism. Remember American and British terror bombing of Germany and Japan?

Western media are reporting headline claims that “new evidence supports claims about Syrian state detention deaths”, saying that “a leading rights group has released new evidence that up to 7,000 Syrians who died in state detention centres were tortured, mistreated, or executed”, noting that this information is a moral wakeup call and demanding that officials being held to account should be “central to peace efforts.”

However, as is usually so, not everything is quite as it seems. So let’s take a look at the facts.

First the timing.

As has been commonplace the timing of the reports like these have almost always coincided with important diplomatic meetings or just after important UN resolutions are passed.

A retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and two former board members of the International Code of Conduct Association (ICoCA) have expressed outrage over US President Donald Trump’s issuance of pardons for four Blackwater contractors convicted of killing at least 14 Iraqi civilians in a 2007 Baghdad massacre.

John M. Patarini, a retired FBI agent, wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times that he led the investigation into Baghdad’s Nisour Square massacre, noting that he initially thought the shooting was some form of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire between the guards and militants at the time.

After only one week, Patarini, however, discovered that the incident was not as what Blackwater, now renamed Academi, personnel and State Department officials had described, but it was actually a carnage similar to the My Lai massacre where between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians were killed by US Army soldiers during the Vietnam War.

Officials on a United Nations working group specializing in monitoring the role of mercenaries in conflicts on Wednesday blasted President Trump's pardons last week of four Blackwater contractors convicted of murdering unarmed Iraqi civilians as "an affront to justice".

"Pardoning the Blackwater contractors is an affront to justice and to the victims of the Nisour Square massacre and their families," said Jelena Aparac, who chairs a UN working group on the use of mercenaries. "These pardons violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level."

The first time I saw Blackwater contractors in action was one morning in 2005 on al-Mansour street in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In the middle of the bridge, heavily armed contractors emerged from a vehicle driving north, blocked the traffic by pointing their machine guns in all directions, including mine, and moved what seemed to be a VIP they were presumably protecting.

They then jumped into another vehicle with tinted windows heading south, in the opposite direction. In the time between the contractors’ emergence from the first vehicle and their entry into the second, everybody on the street froze, anticipating that bullets could start flying at any moment given the gunmen’s aggressivity and menacing behavior — to the point where my driver ducked and forgot to push on the brakes, allowing his car to roll forward and hit the one ahead.

President Donald Trump apparently plans on going out with a bang.

On Tuesday, the White House announced a list of pardons and clemencies granted by Trump, a standard occurrence in the twilight days of a presidency before a new administration takes office. Included in the list of pardons, however, were some standouts: the president had authorized pardons for four former U.S. service members who were convicted of killing civilians in Iraq while working there as contractors for the notorious defense giant Blackwater in 2007. The so-called Nisour Squad massacre left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, including two children; outside of similar incidents like the 2005 Haditha massacre, the massacre left “lasting stains” on the U.S. military occupation of the country, as the New York Times put it.

It was painful enough to live through the U.S invasion of Iraq that caused untold devastation and human misery for no justifiable reason.

Now we are again reminded of the grim Bush legacy with President-elect Biden’s nomination of Avril Haines for Director of National Intelligence. Haines, who has an inside-the-beltway reputation for being nice and soft spoken, was a little too nice to CIA agents who hacked the computers of Senate Intelligence Committee investigators looking into the CIA use of torture – waterboarding, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, rectal feeding, whippings, sexual humiliation – at prisons in Guantanamo and Afghanistan during the Bush War on Terror.

A prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday pushed for a full investigation into a "broad range" of war crimes committed in Ukraine since 2014.

A six-year preliminary probe looked into allegations of war crimes during the pro-European Union protests in 2013-14, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

"My office has concluded that there is a reasonable basis at this time to believe that a broad range of conduct constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the court have been committed in the context of the situation in Ukraine," said chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in a statement.

Ukraine is not a member of the ICC, but has accepted the court's jurisdiction into the conflicts of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court recently reported that there was “reasonable basis to believe” that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq. She declared that there was evidence of crimes including unlawful killing, rape, torture and inhumane treatment of detainees.

Ben Wallace, the UK’s Defence Secretary, responded to this report by saying that it “vindicates our efforts to pursue justice”.

Several headlines about this report have focused on the ICC’s decision not to open a full-scale investigation into British war crimes. But the ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, made clear that this is not due to a lack of evidence. It is based on a procedural technicality.

The ICC is not supposed to investigate crimes unless there is evidence that they are not being investigated properly by the country concerned. They concluded that there was insufficient evidence that authorities in the UK were deliberately shielding armed forces from investigation.

A young Palestinian woman has shared the horrific story of how she endured excruciating physical and psychological torture in an Israeli jail, saying that there are many Palestinian women with a similar condition behind bars.

In a two-minute video posted on Twitter by a human rights advocacy group, 22-year-old Mays Abu Ghosh, a university student, said after being 15 months behind bars that the prison authorities had told her, upon detention, that she would not be the same when she left the jail.

‘You’ll either leave while paralyzed, or you’ll end up at a psychiatric hospital.’

oe Biden announced last week that he will nominate Avril Haines to the position of Director of National Intelligence. Haines provided legal cover for CIA agents and worked closely with Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan on Obama’s tenfold expansion of drone killings.

If confirmed by Congress, Haines will be the first woman to head up the coalition of 17 intelligence agencies ranging from the National Security Agency to the FBI and the State Department, all under the umbrella of the DNI.

“If she gets word of a threat coming to our shores, like another pandemic or foreign interference in our elections, she will not stop raising alarms until the right people take action. People will be able to take her word because she always calls it as she sees it,” said Joe Biden when announcing Haines’ nomination.

On Monday, Charlie Kirk interviewed former Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline of the Amistad Project, on his Got Freedom show. The interview starts at the 41:00 minute mark, but a bombshell is dropped by Kline at the 43:15 mark, where he reveals how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s contributed $400 million to a leftist group that was used to give Democrat-stronghold areas, especially in critical swing states, an advantage in the November election.

In the video, Kline reveals how the Democrats stole ballots from Americans. He explained how “third parties,” specifically Rock the Vote, were given “front end access” to voter rolls by Democrat Secretary of States where they actually had the ability to add names to the voter rolls.

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.” (Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize speech 2005)(1)

Last month, the Australian Army fired 13 servicemen in connection with a redacted version of the Brereton Report – a comprehensive, four-year investigation into alleged war crimes perpetrated by Australian troops in Afghanistan.

The Guardian Australia has revealed a photo of an alleged Australian special forces soldier drinking beer out of the prosthetic leg of a dead Taliban soldier in a bar in Afghanistan.

The soldier purportedly depicted in the photo is still in the military, according to The Guardian. The scene is taking place at the bar Fat Lady’s Arms - an unofficial pub set up inside Australia’s special forces base in Tarin Kowt in 2009.

The death toll in a suspected Boko Haram attack on farmers in northeastern Nigeria on Saturday has reached at least 110, a UN humanitarian coordinator in the country said, urging the perpetrators to be brought to justice.

“At least 110 civilians were ruthlessly killed and many others wounded in this attack,” Edward Kallon, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria, said in a statement.

The incident was the “most violent direct attack against innocent civilians” in the country in 2020, Kallon pointed out. The perpetrators of this “heinous and senseless” act must be brought to justice, he added.

A group of armed men on motorcycles ambushed the farmers as they went into the rice fields to gather the harvest on Saturday. The bodies of 43 farmers have been recovered after the massacre, with around 30 of them being beheaded. The security forces have been searching the area for those missing.

Canberra failed to deal with atrocities laid bare in a report which found that elite special forces’ murder of prisoners and innocent civilians in Afghanistan was “disgraceful.” Sadly, the guilty will probably get away with it.

The Australian government’s handling of the Afghanistan war crimes scandal has been an utter shambles and, as a result, those responsible are likely to escape punishment entirely.

The Brereton report, handed down last week in redacted form, found that some unnamed 25 soldiers in the elite Australian special forces had committed 39 murders while on duty in Afghanistan. Brereton correctly described this as “a disgraceful and profound betrayal.”

The Chief of the Army has revealed 13 members of the Australian Defence Force face the prospect of being sacked following the Afghanistan war crimes inquiry.

It comes after the ABC yesterday revealed the Defence Force had sent "show cause" notices to members of the elite SAS.

Lieutenant General Rick Burr said the 13 soldiers had 14 days to respond to "administrative action notices" proposing to terminate their service.

"At this point in time no individuals have been separated from the Australian Defence Force," he said.

Throughout its aggressive wars against Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has deliberately and intentionally targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. This policy has been a declared Zionist plan and it was applied in Lebanon during the 2006 war. According to the Israeli Chief of Staff, in 2008, Major General Gadi Eizenkot,

… trying to hit rocket launchers is “complete nonsense”, because “when there are thousands of launchers on the other side, it is impossible to hunt them down.” Israel, instead, should focus on deterrence: Every village from which they fire on Israel, we will deploy disproportional force, and cause massive damage and destruction. As far as we are concerned, these are military bases. Eizenkot emphasized that “this is not a recommendation; this is the plan and it has been approved.”[1]

Australian special forces allegedly executed dozens of non-combatants while stationed in Afghanistan, an explosive war crimes probe found, prompting a rare mea culpa from the military for “grave” and “deeply disturbing” conduct.

General Angus Campbell, Chief of the Australian Defence Force, announced the findings of the 465-page ‘Brereton report' on Thursday, saying “credible information” indicates that 39 Afghan civilians were killed unlawfully by elite special forces troops between 2007 and 2014 in 23 separate incidents.

“To the people of Afghanistan on behalf of the Australian Defence Forces, I sincerely and unreservedly apologize for any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers,” Campbell said at a press briefing, calling its findings “damaging to our moral authority as a military force.”

Saudi human rights activists told British MPs on Tuesday that political prisoners in Saudi Arabia face dire conditons in detention, including rape, torture and murder.

Speaking at a fact-finding panel investigating the detention conditions of two senior Saudi princes - former Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz - the activists detailed a litany of abuses carried out against detainees, with little oversight or transparency.

One panelist said they had received reports of detainees being "sodomised to death" in prisons.

Alia al-Hathloul, sister of imprisoned women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, said she and her family have had no updates on her sister's health condition since she began a hunger strike on 28 October.

The disclosures from the special forces soldiers came slowly at first. Some spoke of killing as a "sport". Others of shame suffered in silence.

As word spread among the secretive community of soldiers and spies who had served for Australia in Afghanistan, information arrived with more urgency. Some men spoke matter-of-factly; others broke down. One thread bound many of them. It was their belief that small cliques of their fellow special forces soldiers had turned bad with impunity.

he woman who interviewed hardened special forces soldiers to uncover horrifying 'war crimes' by Australian troops in Afghanistan has broken her silence.

Dr Samantha Crompvoets is the author of a secret 2016 report commissioned by military chief General Angus Campbell.

Four years after her harrowing investigation, which led to a report due out this week that could result in charges against 10 soldiers, she said it appeared Australian special forces soldiers were 'killing as a sport'.

Fighting between Ethiopian government forces and rebellious northern leaders could spiral out of control and war crimes may have been committed, the United Nations said on Friday, as repercussions spread around the volatile Horn of Africa.

The 10-day conflict in Tigray region has killed hundreds, sent refugees flooding into Sudan, and raised fears it may draw in Eritrea or force Ethiopia to divert troops from an African force opposing al-Qaeda-linked fighters in Somalia.

Nixon’s secretary of state and the arch realist of Washington has given his blessing to the former vice president. Let the bombs fall where they may...

No matter what happens in the Supreme Court, Joe Biden will always have Henry Kissinger.

The oldest-living war criminal – Kissinger, not Biden – has made clear his preference for the oldest living senator (Biden claimed during the campaign he'd been in the Senate for 180 years) and perhaps come January the oldest ever president to take the oath.

A disturbing new report blows the lid on the shameful conduct of Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan, accusing them of waging a campaign of torture and murder across the war-torn country, and hiding the evidence.
When Australia’s elite SAS soldiers would raid villages in Afghanistan, they brought terror and death with them, a report seen by Melbourne newspaper The Age alleges. The special forces “would take the men and boys to these guest houses and interrogate them, meaning tie them up and torture them,” the report states.

By the time the SAS units left, “the men and boys would be found dead, shot in the head, sometimes blindfolded and throats slit. These are corroborated accounts,” it continues, comparing the alleged war crimes to the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War, and to the US’ mistreatment of detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth – especially uncomfortable truth – and to publish it for the benefit of society. In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal – and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out.

Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential.

Ten years ago last week, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization published an exposé of US government wrongdoing on par with the above Hersh bombshell stories.

In his report to the General Assembly of the UN on October 15, Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer delivered an incisive and damning indictment of the human propensity for self-deception and denial, citing these attributes as contributing to the prevalence of torture. He discussed how these innate propensities paved the way for denial that torture was taking place and for compartmentalization of one’s own participation in hurting other people. While applauding the normative structure of society and law in terms of “official” prohibitions against torture, Melzer unequivocally stated that these structures were not sufficient in stopping torture, given the human tendency towards self-interest and self-protection, and discussed how this tendency rears up in fear-based societies.

Melzer’s report stated:

Video footage obtained by ABC Investigations shows members of an SAS patrol in Afghanistan talking about the apparent execution of a "totally compliant" prisoner by one of their comrades.

The patrol commander describes the incident as "f***ing bullshit".

"I'm not happy with it," he says in the footage.

The metadata of the footage, taken from the helmet camera of one of the SAS soldiers, reveals the conversation took place a day after an operation in the village of Shina in Uruzgan Province in mid-May 2012.

During that raid, by members of 3 Squadron SAS, three Afghans were killed.

Australian special forces have been accused of killing an unarmed, bound prisoner in cold blood, as a four-year probe into alleged war crimes committed by Aussie troops in Afghanistan nears its end.

A US Marine helicopter crew chief told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that a group of Australian soldiers shot and killed an Afghan prisoner as they were preparing to be airlifted after a raid.

According to the marine, identified only as Josh, the Aussie commandos radioed his helicopter to tell them they needed transportation for seven prisoners captured during the operation.

“And you just heard this silence, and then we heard a pop. And then they said, ‘OK, we have six prisoners’,” Josh told the Australian outlet.

The US marine said it was the first time he had seen something he couldn’t “morally justify,” as the prisoner had already been detained and posed no threat to the Aussie forces.

On October 22, 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War Logs, a colossal compendium of nearly 400,000 classified U.S. Army field reports revealing what founder Julian Assange called “intimate details” of the war—including war crimes and other serious human rights abuses perpetrated by American and coalition troops, private contractors, and Iraqi government and paramilitary forces.

It was the largest leak in U.S. military history and a stunned world demanded justice. However, in the decade since then, only the whistleblowers who revealed the crimes detailed in the logs were ever seriously punished, while the architects and the perpetrators of the atrocities continue to enjoy impunity.

Washington’s decision to impose financial sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is overshadowing the search for her successor, with countries deadlocked over a post that has new visibility as the target of American anger.

The court’s 123 member countries are due to meet in New York on Dec. 7, when they are meant to pick a successor for Fatou Bensouda, the court’s Gambian chief prosecutor whose term expires in June. A shortlist of four candidates has been drawn up for the nine-year term, narrowed down from a list of 14 by a panel of diplomats and experts.

But in a letter, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, the court’s oversight body wrote to inform members that none of the four nominees had enough support. It proposed widening the search to include all 14 of the original candidates.

Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about 6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million, the Canadians about 300,000, the French around 200,000. Uncounted millions of Japanese entered American captivity in 1945, plus about 640,000 entering Soviet captivity.

The Azerbaijani Armed Forces have been developing their advance on Armenian positions in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region. As in the previous several days, the main clashes are taking place in the southern part of Karabakh.

As of October 16, Azerbaijani forces finally took full control of the town of Hadrat and started an operation to push the remaining Armenian units out of the town’s surroundings. Despite this, Armenian forces still conduct regular counter-attacks attempting to force the Azerbaijani military to retreat from their recently captured positions.

Azerbaijani troops also seized the villages of Arish in the Fuzuli district, Doshulu in the Jabrayil district and the villages of Edishe, Dudukchi, Edilli and Chiraguz in the Khojavend district. Earlier this week, Azerbaijan captured Garadaghli, Melikjanli, Garakollu, Bulutan, Tagaser, Khatunbulag, Kemertuk and Teke. Thus, Armenian forces lost at least 15 towns and settlements during this week of clashes.

Weekends, we usually take day trips outside of Pyongyang. Today’s Saturday, so we’ll take a drive out to neighboring South Hwanghae Province, which occupies the southwestern corner of the country. Our first stop: rural Sinchon county. Home of the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities.

I’ve been wanting to visit the museum for years, but it is rarely put on group itineraries. It’s considered one of the more “sensitive” sites, a polite way of saying that its contents are actually rather incendiary. The Sinchon Museum is intended more for domestic rather than international propaganda purposes; virtually every North Korean visits the museum at least once, on mandatory educational pilgrimages.

After the three-hour ride along the potholed highway through depressed bucolica, our van pulls into the empty parking lot.

In recent days, and in the wake of multiple resounding defeats at the hands of Artsakh defenders, Azerbaijan has resorted to firing 300mm rockets, armed with banned cluster submunitions, against residential areas of multiple Armenian cities and towns, primarily the capital of the Republic of Artsakh, Stepanakert.

In order to justify its campaign of terror, Azeri authorities conducted a series of rather amateurish false flags, with images and videos allegedly showing Armenian missiles striking civilian areas inside Azerbaijan. However, at a glance, what might look like valid footage, failed to convince anyone in any way familiar with how rockets work.

A Sky News investigation has discovered evidence of a recent potential war crime in northern Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition, which is backed by the US and Britain.

There's already growing controversy over why Britain is still supporting a campaign which has led to the country being declared the world's biggest humanitarian disaster.

A group of journalists have looked for evidence of war crime at the scene of a recent massacre of civilians, including children, during a Saudi Arabia-led strike that targeted a civilian home near Yemen’s border with the kingdom.

The Sky News team that identified itself as the first journalists to independently investigate the attack, “discovered evidence of a recent potential war crime in northern Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition, which is backed by the US and Britain,” the network reported on its website on Monday.

The attack saw a jet reaching the remote village of Washah before striking the home where only women and children were present at the time, while refusing to even “touch” any other nearby structure.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia recently announced that it was providing $204 million in aid for the impoverished and war-ravaged country of Yemen. That sounds generous, but it’s the Saudi royals themselves who are responsible for most of the death, destruction, starvation, and disease in Yemen, in which 80 percent of the population, some 24 million, need outside assistance.

Riyadh has spent more than five years conducting a brutal air campaign intended to restore a pliant regime to power. The claim that the Kingdom is generously helping the needy is a bit like a man murdering his parents only to throw himself on the court’s mercy since he is an orphan. If Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wanted to help the Yemeni people, he would simply end the war.

A controversial bill is passing through the House of Commons which will make it virtually impossible to prosecute soldiers but, at the same time, will strip away their own legal rights and health benefits.

It’s avoided a great deal of attention, mainly due to the EU face-off and, of course, the resumption of Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. Ministers must be praising their luck as the bill is an unthinkable betrayal of what Britain stands for.

The first part insulates soldiers from alleged offences while on duty. It does this via a ‘triple lock’ of a five-year statute of limitations, a presumption against prosecution, and the requirement of explicit consent from the attorney general.

No legal knowledge is required to grasp how much freedom this offers.

The longstanding involvement of the United States in the conflict in Yemen is facing renewed scrutiny. On September 16, State Department officials testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about whether the State Department misled Congress – and the American people – by circumventing controls designed to limit arms sales and ensure congressional oversight.

The crimes occurring in Yemen are serious – and the responsible parties demonstrably unwilling or unable to address them. The most recent report by the United Nations Group of Eminent and International Regional Experts on Yemen described “an acute accountability gap” and recommended that the UN Security Council refer the situation in Yemen to the International Criminal Court.

Trump Administration officials have been saying this for weeks, but on Friday reiterated their intentions to try to enforce a UN Security Council resolution that includes broad sanctions against Iran. Officials say they expect every nation to comply.

The glaring problem with this is that the resolution doesn’t exist, at least not as an active resolution the US wants. The P5+1 nuclear deal gave the US the authority to reimpose sanctions on Iran, but the US had withdrawn from that pact years ago. Though the Trump Administration argued that didn’t matter, the UN has virtually unanimously rejected their interpretation, and rejected the UN Security Council resolution. The US believes the resolution becomes active Sunday, but the reality is it just doesn’t exist legally.

A new survey conducted by EKOS Research Associates shows that an overwhelming majority of Canadians would support International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation of Israel.

The poll, which was co-sponsored by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), and the United Network for Justice and Peace in Palestine-Israel (UNJPPI), found that 84% of Canadians think the ICC should investigate alleged war crimes committed by Israeli officials. 86% of Canadians do not believe that the human rights record of Israel should be overlooked because the country is an ally of Canada. 82% want Canada’s current policy toward Jerusalem to be maintained, with the city being shared rather than it being recognized as Israel’s capital exclusively.

Amid growing controversy over a possible International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Israel, newly published results from a survey conducted by EKOS Research Associates show that Canadians do not want Israel to be treated differently than other countries when it comes to consequences for alleged war crimes or human rights violations. The survey found that Canadians support an ICC investigation of any country accused of war crimes, including Israel, and they do not want Canada to overlook Israel’s human rights violations. The survey further found that Canadians do not support recognizing Jerusalem as exclusively Israel’s capital.

State Department has come under fire for facilitating arms sales to the Saudis and suppressing evidence of legal issues raised by Yemen war.

A report from The New York Times revealed that some US officials are concerned that their role in facilitating arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, while ignoring the harm to civilians each country has caused in Yemen, could lead to their arrest overseas for war crimes. A Congressional hearing over these arms sales is set to take place on Wednesday.

The report said that officials from both the Obama administration and the Trump administration have considered hiring lawyers to discuss the possibility of being arrested while vacationing overseas.

The Times report reads: “No episode in recent American history compares to Yemen, legal scholars say, where the United States has provided material support over five years for actions that have caused the continuous killing of civilians.”

The Russian Union of Journalists (UJR) has awarded its Solidarity Prize to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently fighting extradition to the United States at a British court.

The head of the UJR, Vladimir Soloviev, announced the award on the International Day of Solidarity of Journalists on Tuesday, describing Assange as “a true fighter for the freedom of speech.”

“We had no doubts about who should receive this prize. We decided that it should go to Julian Assange,” he said.

Soloviev expressed concern about Assange’s possible extradition to the US, which he said “might be equal to life imprisonment or death penalty.”

Assange, who had already been informed about the award, donated the monetary part of the prize to “the families of Russian journalists who died [on duty],” according to Secretary of UJR Timur Shafir, who accepted the prize on Assange’s behalf.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team spent the second morning of a major extradition hearing focusing a magistrate court judge’s attention on United States torture and war crimes that Assange helped to expose.

Defense attorney Mark Summers called Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights attorney who has represented prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, to the witness stand. He was asked about human rights cases he pursued, which were bolstered by revelations in documents WikiLeaks published.

For example, Stafford Smith told Judge Vanessa Baraitser that U.S. State Department cables helped those impacted by U.S. drone killings in Pakistan. It contributed to “court findings that US drone strikes are criminal offenses and that criminal proceedings should be initiated against senior U.S. officials involved in such strikes.”

Landmark decision means judges at Gitmo's war court are not obliged to consider rights of detainees or their cases through lens of US Constitution.

A federal appeals court in Washington DC recently ruled that Guantanamo Bay prisoners are not entitled to due process - a landmark decision that may have an overarching effect on the prison camp's war court trials, and one that defence lawyers may try to challenge.

A three-judge appeals panel for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously last week to uphold the indefinite detention of Abdulsalam al-Hela, a 52-year-old Yemeni citizen who was held at a CIA black site for more than a year-and-a-half before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2004, where he has been detained without charge or trial ever since.

It's not just so-called "rogue states" apparently, but no one is immune from coming under Washington's cross hairs and wrath in the form of economic sanctions and travel restrictions.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just announced sanctions on Fatou Bensouda, the head prosecutor of The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), after the ICC previously opened a formal probe into US soldiers committing war crimes in Afghanistan.

This is after already revoking visas and placing travel bans into the US of other ICC personnel and their families. "Today we take the next step, because the ICC continues to target Americans, sadly," Pompeo said Wednesday.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has defended Washington’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia after a watchdog report said the State Department failed to “fully assess” the risk of civilian deaths in war-torn Yemen.

Pompeo said on Wednesday that his department “did everything by the book” in regards to arms sales to Riyadh in May 2019.

“I am proud of the work that my team did. We got a really good outcome. We prevented the loss of lives,” he claimed.

News / Foreign Policy
US Secretary of State Pompeo defends Saudi arms sales after damning watchdog report on Yemen
Thursday, 13 August 2020 9:24 AM [ Last Update: Thursday, 13 August 2020 11:05 AM ]
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (L) talks with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a rally with fellow Democrats before voting on H.R. 1, or the People Act, on the East Steps of the US Capitol on March 08, 2019 in Washington, DC. (AFP photo)

By Tony Cox, a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.

The neoconservatives have a new party. It’s called Democratic, and it’s every bit as warmongering and interventionist as the Republicans were during the Reagan era or that of the Bushes.

We keep hearing how radical leftists have taken over the Democratic Party, but guess who stole the limelight at Tuesday’s Democratic National Convention: the disgraced former Secretary of State Colin Powell who endorsed their presidential candidate, Joe Biden.

In fact, Powell, who helped George W. Bush’s administration lie America into the ruinous Iraq War, was given a full extra minute to speak when compared to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the face of the woke left.

The joint trial of five men charged in the 9/11 attacks may be postponed because a new defence attorney in the case has requested a 30-month extension to prepare.

David Bruck, the new lead attorney for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the five men charged in the 9/11 case, estimated in a legal filing on Wednesday that he would need two-and-a-half years to get caught up on the proceedings.

"The following estimate of the work before me reflects, 'prevailing professional norms at the time of [this] trial', as required by well-established Supreme Court precedent," Bruck wrote, breaking down the reasons for the hours needed to properly prepare for the case.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has adjourned without issuing its ruling on whether Israeli officials will be tried for war crimes against the Palestinian people since 2014, when Gaza was destroyed during “Operation Protective Edge”. With an extended timeframe until the ruling is due, Israel now has additional time to prepare for any eventual action taken by The Hague. It has apparently already drawn up a list of officials who might be liable to be prosecuted for war crimes.

According to Haaretz, the list contains the names of 200-300 Israeli officials, most probably including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Benny Gantz. The list has been drawn up in utmost secrecy, not least because, as Haaretz points out, “The court is likely to view a list of names as an official Israeli admission of these officials’ involvement in the incidents under investigation.” The existence of the list alone is likely to be viewed as such.

Israel is preparing a secret list of hundreds of its officials who are liable to be tried in The Hague on war crimes charges, it has been revealed. The government is warning them not to travel in case they are arrested.

According to Haaretz, the list has the names of between 200 and 300 military and intelligence officials who could be arrested and put on trial for war crimes committed against civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The report comes amid news of the International Criminal Court (ICC) possibly opening an investigation into war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas, starting from the Israeli military offensive on Gaza in 2014, known as “Operation Protective Edge”. The request for the trial was made by ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

Awar crimes complaint has been filed against Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump adviser Jared Kushner in the International Criminal Court (ICC). It is now up to the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor to decide whether the complaint should be pursued. If the prosecutor launches a preliminary examination and finds reason to believe they committed war crimes, the court could then authorize a full investigation.

The complaint, filed by Middlesex University law professor William Schabas on June 30 on behalf of four Palestinians who live in the West Bank, states “there is credible evidence” that Trump, Netanyahu and Kushner “are complicit in acts that may amount to war crimes relating to the transfer of populations into occupied territory and the annexation of the sovereign territory of the State of Palestine.” Under article 15 of the ICC’s Rome Statute, any individual, group or organization can bring a complaint to the Office of the Prosecutor.