Posts in category War Crimes
Written by Festering anger, Nazi war crimes and the £60bn the Greeks believe the Germans owe them
The SS indulged their bloodlust on men, women and children alike. While homes and shops blazed around them like some hellish inferno, women were violated and those who were pregnant were stabbed in the guts. Small babies were bayoneted in their cribs. The village priest was beheaded.
By the time Hitler’s men had left the Greek village of Distomo near the ancient town of Delphi on that bloody day in June 1944, 218 people were dead.
The Waffen-SS was pleased with its work: the local partisans who had dared to attack a German unit had been taught a bitter lesson in revenge.
The slaughter at Distomo was such an outrage that, in 2003, even a German Federal Court judge described it as ‘one of the most despicable crimes of World War II’.
But he refused to grant the families of the victims any compensation for their suffering, and not a single German soldier was ever punished for what he and his comrades had done.
The Distomo massacre is just one example of the terrible suffering endured by the people of Greece during World War II and, some would say, of the German government’s reluctance to pay for the crimes committed against the Greeks in their nation’s name.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2056400/Greece-debt-crisis-Greeks-believe-Germans-owe-60bn.html#ixzz1cYMa3hnh
George W. Bush war crime prosecution blocked in B.C.
B.C.’s Criminal Justice Branch has blocked an attempt by a human rights group to prosecute former U.S. president George W. Bush.
The Canadian Centre for International Justice filed the private prosecution last Thursday, the same day Bush was in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey for a speaking engagement along with former U.S. president Bill Clinton.
The group submitted the case on behalf of three former and one current Guantanamo Bay detainees, who accuse the former commander-in-chief and his administration of orders that led to their torture.
Neil MacKenzie, spokesman for the Justice Branch, which makes decisions on criminal charges, says the proceedings were stayed because there was “no realistic prospect” the federal attorney general would grant consent.
The higher-level permission is required in cases involving people who are not Canadian citizens.
Hundreds in Vancouver Protest and Demand Arrest of Dick Cheney !! : Parental Advisory
A lavish book promotion event by self confessed torturer and war criminal Dick Cheney drives hundreds of peace activists into a frenzy demanding Vancouver Police uphold Canadian Law and arrest him.
Some of Vancouver’s “Elite” are verbally smacked down on The Walk of Shame for supporting a war criminal and paying him a $500.00 blood money fee.
The language is foul at times.
Parental Advisory.
Ex-Powell aide: Dick Cheney fears prosecution for war crimes
Dick Cheney was “president for all practical purposes” during George W. Bush’s first term in office and “fears being tried as a war criminal,” according to Colin Powell’s chief of staff during his time as secretary of state.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who has known Cheney for decades, told ABC News that Cheney was a “very vindictive person.”
“I simply don’t recognize Mr. Cheney anymore,” he added.
In his memoir, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which was released Tuesday, Cheney claimed Powell had undermined Bush, by criticizing policy to people outside the administration. Cheney told NBC News that the book would see “heads exploding all over Washington.”
In the ABC interview, Wilkerson suggested Cheney was adopting a tough stance in an attempt to forestall criticism or even prosecution.
“What really sort of got my attention was this way in which he characterized it (the memoir): it’s going to ’cause heads to explode,’” Powell said. “That’s quite a visual. And in fact, it’s the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist, or the kind of headline you might see one of the supermarket tabloids write. It’s not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from a former vice president of the United States of America.
“I think he’s just trying to, one, assert himself so he’s not in some subsequent time period tried for war crimes and, second, so that he somehow vindicates himself because he feels like he needs vindication. That in itself tells you something about him,” Wilkerson added.
“He’s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as ‘exploding heads all over Washington’ because that’s the way someone who’s decided he’s not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let’s get out in front of everybody, let’s act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him,” Wilkerson added.
Barack Obama accused of crime against humanity for killing Bin Laden
Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president who ordered the Seal Team Six to kill Osama bin Laden, is now being accused of committing a crime against humanity for the act that sent countless people to the streets to celebrate.
Daniel Fiol, a Spanish lawyer, submitted a written complaint to the International Criminal Court accusing Obama of violating the Geneva Convention, according to the Telegraph UK.
Fiol wrote that the terrorist leader should have been “pursued, arrested, tried and convicted” as opposed to being assassinated in his hideout in Abbotabad, Pakistan.
Later Fiol joked that he was “not being paid by Al Qaeda.”
D.C. Circuit Reinstates Blackwater Manslaughter Case
A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated the prosecution of a group of Blackwater security guards charged in Washington with manslaughter and weapons violations for their alleged roles in a shooting in Baghdad that killed more than a dozen civilians.
In December 2009, Judge Ricardo Urbina of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the Justice Department prosecution of five guards, saying the prosecution was tainted through the improper use of compelled statements the defendants made to investigators following the shooting in September 2007. DOJ appealed the ruling.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously reversed Urbina’s decision, sending the case back to the trial court for further hearings. The appeals court’s 17-page redacted opinion is here. (The court simultaneously filed a confidential opinion under seal. The court heard oral argument in a closed session in February.)
WikiLeaks: ‘Secret’ assessment says Khadr ‘high risk’
Omar Khadr, Canada’s lone detainee in the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was considered a high risk and kept in custody for his “high intelligence value,” according to a document released Monday in the latest document dump by whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
The Department of Defense document is marked secret and dated Jan, 24 2004. Khadr was detained after a firefight in July 2002 during which he admitted to throwing the grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces soldier.
After being held at the maximum security prison base at Guantanamo Bay since Oct. 2002, Khadr pleaded guilty in October 2010 to a series of war crimes, including killing the soldier in the July 2002 firefight. Khadr was sentenced to 40 years, but a plea bargain capped his sentence to eight years. The deal also allows Khadr to return to Canada this fall with support of the U.S. government after serving one year of his sentence at Guantanamo Bay.
Iraqi Says He Made Up Tale of Biological Weapons Before War
WASHINGTON — The Iraqi defector whose claims that Saddam Hussein’s government had biological weapons became part of the Bush administration’s justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq has admitted that he fabricated his story.
The defector, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who was code-named “Curveball” by the Central Intelligence Agency and German intelligence officials, told the British newspaper The Guardian on Tuesday that he had concocted his tale that Iraq was hiding mobile bioweapons laboratories. He did so, he said, in hopes that his lies would lead to the eventual overthrow of the Iraqi ruler.
“I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,” Mr. Janabi told the newspaper. “I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”
Mr. Janabi, who lives in Germany, has given several interviews in the past, but until now has always denied that he had lied to his intelligence handlers before the war in Iraq, even though his information had long been discredited.
