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Pedro Gonçalves

US contractor can sue Donald Rumsfeld for alleged Iraq torture, judge rules | World new... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...s-donald-rumsfeld-iraq-torture

Iraq War Rumsfeld

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • An American former military contractor who claims he was imprisoned and tortured by the US army in Iraq has been allowed by a judge to sue the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally for damages.
  • Mike Kanovitz, the Chicago lawyer representing the plaintiff, says it appears the military wanted to keep his client behind bars so he would be unable tell anyone about an important contact he made with a leading sheik while helping to collect intelligence in Iraq.The plaintiff says he was the first American to open direct talks with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, who became an important US ally and later led a revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida before being killed by a bomb."The US government wasn't ready for the rest of the world to know about it, so they basically put him on ice," Kanovitz said. "If you've got unchecked power over the citizens, why not use it?"
  • this is the second time a federal judge has allowed a US citizen to sue Rumsfeld personally.
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  • District judge Wayne Andersen in Illinois last year ruled that Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, Americans who worked in Iraq as contractors and were held at Camp Cropper, could pursue claims that they were tortured using Rumsfeld-approved methods after they suspected the security firm they worked for of engaging in illegal activities.
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Americas | Rumsfeld 'Bible texts' criticised - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8056207.stm

US Rumsfeld Bush Iraq War

shared by Argos Media on 19 May 09 - Cached
  • Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been accused of using quotes from the Bible in his briefings to George W Bush during the Iraq War.
  • The quotes were placed on the cover of the briefings alongside images of US soldiers, GQ magazine has reported.
  • The decision to put the biblical quotations on the cover pages was taken by Maj Gen Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both Mr Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to GQ.
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  • One cover page featured pictures of US soldiers at prayer and US tanks in Iraq, underneath a passage from the Book of Isaiah: "Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses' hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels are like a whirlwind."
  • Another briefing showed a picture of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein beneath a quotation from the First Epistle of Peter: "It is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men."
Pedro Gonçalves

granma.cu - Our defense is much stronger - 0 views

www.granma.cu/...defense.html

US Cuba Rumsfeld Bush Raul Castro

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 04 Jul 09 - Cached
  • the author relates in another book, Bush at War, that during a meeting of the U.S. National Security Council, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proposed, with the consent of Vice President Cheney, to mount a massive attack on Cuba. Woodward adds that Bush not only agreed with the proposal but also asked for a detailed plan to be presented as fast as possible. "It was one of the most dangerous moments our country has gone through since the 1962 missile crisis," Raúl affirmed.
  • That situation led to an extraordinary plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party on July 15, 2003, and to the decision to increase and speed up measures aimed at strengthening the country’s defense in every aspect, based on a renewed, rational and realistic approach. Three years later, on July 1, 2006, the Fifth Plenum confirmed the results obtained and ratified and improved the strategy charted.
Argos Media

Trackers Deem North Korea's Missile Flight a Failure - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...06korea.html

North Korea Missile Tests Taepodong-2

shared by Argos Media on 06 Apr 09 - Cached
  • North Korea failed in its highly vaunted effort to fire a satellite into orbit, military and private experts said Sunday after reviewing detailed tracking data that showed the missile and payload fell into the sea. Some said the failure undercut the North Korean campaign to come across as a fearsome adversary able to hurl deadly warheads halfway around the globe.
  • looking at the launching from a purely technical vantage point, space experts said the failure represented a blow that in all likelihood would seriously delay the missile’s debut.
  • Analysts dismissed the idea that the rocket firing could represent a furtive success, calling the failure consistent with past North Korean fumbles and suggesting it might reveal a significant quality control problem in one of the world’s most isolated nations.
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  • “It’s a setback,” Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks satellites and rocket launchings, said of the North Korean launching. He added that the North Koreans must now find and fix the problem. “The missile doesn’t represent any kind of near-term threat.”
  • The United States Northern Command, based in Colorado Springs, issued a statement on Sunday that portrayed the launching as a major failure. It based its information on a maze of federal radars, spy ships and satellites that monitor global missile firings.
  • The command emphasized that “no object entered orbit,” apparently a reference to both the rocket’s third stage as well as the supposed satellite.
  • North Korea’s public portrayal of the event as a complete success was similar in its celebratory tone to the happy note it struck in 1998 after having failed to loft a satellite into orbit.
  • A general rule of engineering is that failures reveal more than successes. If so, North Korea — which has now test-fired three long-range rockets, each time unsuccessfully — is learning a lot about limitations.
  • “It’s not unusual to have a series of failures at the beginning of a missile program,” Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a research group in Washington, said in an interview. “But they don’t test enough to develop confidence that they’re getting over the problems.”Dr. Lewis added that an influential 1998 report by Donald H. Rumsfeld, before he became secretary of defense in the Bush administration, argued that the North Korean rockets might be good enough to pose a threat to the United States, even without flight testing. “But given that both versions of the Taepodong-2 have failed now,” he said, “we have very little confidence in the reliability of the system.”
  • In August 1998, North Korea’s first attempt at launching a long-range rocket, the Taepodong-1, managed to scare Japan but failed to deliver a satellite to orbit. The troubles continued in July 2006 when its second test of a long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, ended in an explosion just seconds after liftoff.
Pedro Gonçalves

BBC News - Obama unveils new strategy for 'leaner' US military - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-us-canada-16430405

US Military

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 05 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • The future will see fewer counter-insurgency battles in distant lands. It will focus much more on the capacity of America's air and naval forces to balance a competitor like China or face down an antagonist like Iran. And it will scale back America's much-heralded ability to fight two wars at once.
  • The president said the new strategy would end "long-term, nation-building with large military footprints". The Pentagon would instead pursue a national security strategy based on "smaller conventional ground forces".
  • Mr Panetta said on Thursday the review would make the US military "more agile, more flexible, ready to deploy quickly".
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  • The Pentagon has long debated its doctrine on being able to wage two wars simultaneously. In 2001, former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that strategy was not working. And when the US was in fact fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the military suffered a shortage of manpower.
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