Monday, April 13, 2009
Making the video - Sirenia 'The Path To Decay'
'Sirenia** started recording the new album in July. It was recorded in Sound Suite Studios, France and Stargoth Studios, Norway. The mixing and mastering took place in Antfarm Studios, Denmark with Tue Madsen. The new album, called "The 13th Floor", was completed on September [was released on] the 23rd of January 2009. The album features guest appearances by Jan Kenneth Barkved. The first single, "The Path To Decay", was released on December 26th 2008 as a digital download.'
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** 'Sirenia is an order of fully aquatic, herbivorous mammals that inhabit rivers, estuaries, coastal marine waters, swamps, and marine wetlands. The order evolved during the Eocene epoch, more than 50 million years ago...'
Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s torturers
Andy Worthington reports in the The Future of Freedom Foundation :
As I explained in an article at the time, Cheney’s claim that he was merely responding to pressure from the CIA was patently untrue, as it was clear from at least November 2001 that the crucial decisions to hold prisoners without any rights whatsoever — which led inexorably to decisions that they could be interrogated illegally, and then to decisions that they could be tortured with impunity — originated in the vice president’s office. However, even without a clear admission by Cheney that he was responsible for establishing the program, his confession that he was intimately involved in approving plans to waterboard a prisoner in U.S. custody establishes, beyond any doubt, that he was involved in approving the use of torture.
Nor are these the only occasions when senior officials have admitted that the Bush administration was involved in torture. In January, just a week before Barack Obama took office, retired judge Susan Crawford, the “convening authority” for the military commission trial system at Guantánamo (another brain-child of Cheney and his legal counsel, David Addington), admitted, in a Washington Post interview with Bob Woodward, that Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi prisoner in Guantánamo, regarded as the potential 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, had been tortured. “We tortured Qahtani,” Crawford, a protégée of Cheney and a close friend of Addington, admitted. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”
What was remarkable about this confession — beyond it being the first instance of a senior Bush administration official admitting that anyone had been tortured — was that al-Qahtani had not been subjected to waterboarding, but had, instead, been subjected, over a two-month period in late 2002 and early 2003, to a combination of other techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. For Crawford, however, it was the combined effect of these techniques — which included extreme sleep deprivation and sustained acts of humiliation — that led to her decision not to put al-Qahtani forward for a trial by military commission.
“The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent,” she said. “You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge,” and to conclude that it was torture.
Further evidence that senior officials were intimately involved with the use of torture by U.S. forces came last week, in a detailed analysis by Mark Danner, in the New York Review of Books, of a leaked secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” — including KSM, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri — who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. Danner’s article did not cite confessions by senior officials that they had authorized the use of torture — although it did include the Red Cross’s own unprecedented conclusion that, “in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture” — but what it did establish, with a chilling clarity, is that every slight amendment to the horrors of the torture program had to be approved further up the chain of command.
“It wasn't up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I'm gonna slap him. Or I'm going to shake him. Or I'm gonna make him stay up for 48 hours,’” CIA interrogator John Kiriakou explained. “Each one of these steps ... had to have the approval of the Deputy Director for Operations,” he continued. “So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He's uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’ And that permission would come.” And as Danner noted, soon after the first “high-value detainee,” Abu Zubaydah, was captured in March 2002, CIA officers “briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council's Principals Committee,” including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who “then signed off on the [interrogation] plan.”
As a result of America’s commitment to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which was presented to the U.S. Senate by Ronald Reagan on May 20, 1988, we should, therefore, be applauding an announcement by the Obama administration that those responsible for authorizing the use of torture will imminently be facing prosecution. As the convention makes clear, “Each state party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law,” and shall, when alleged acts of torture are discovered, “submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.” And under Article VI of the US Constitution, “all treaties made … under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land.”
Instead of prosecution, however, we have Sen. Leahy’s proposed “Nonpartisan Commission Of Inquiry,” and those calling for President Obama to appoint an Independent prosecutor kept firmly outside the corridors of power.
So how did this happen, and what does it mean? Well, to be blunt, a “Nonpartisan Commission Of Inquiry” is politically useful because it implicitly acknowledges that, although senior officials in the Bush administration committed war crimes, they only did so because they believed that another major terrorist attack was imminent, and because they thought that only torture would enable them to “break” those who possessed vital knowledge that they would not disclose by any other means.
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Time for the U.S. to take a second look at the International Criminal Court
William H. Taft IV,Patricia M. Wald
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The time has come for the United States to engage officially with the International Criminal Court. Established in 2002, the court exists to prosecute persons accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and the United States should cooperate with all responsible efforts to combat such abhorrent acts. We should act now to develop a more formal relationship with the leading institution for prosecuting such violators.
The United States has been wary of the ICC and so far declined to join the 108 nations that are members. Objections began with the Clinton administration and were magnified after 9/11. Out of fear that the court would issue frivolous arrest warrants for American soldiers and otherwise overstep its bounds, the Bush administration in 2002 announced that the United States would have nothing to do with the court.
Those fears have not been realized. The ICC prosecutor has declined to investigate politically motivated charges in Iraq and elsewhere, and instead has focused on the gravest human rights cases of our time: in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Darfur. The courthas compiled a commendable record in cases of considerable interest to the United States. Recognizing this, the Bush administration in 2005 began softening its opposition to the court and even supported some of its efforts, particularly in Darfur, where the court issued an arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir.
The American Society of International Law convened an independent, nonpartisan task force of American legal experts, which we chaired, to examine the U.S. relationship with the court. The task force concluded unanimously that the Obama administration should take the next step and announce an explicit policy of positive engagement with the ICC. If that policy proves successful, we should then give serious consideration to joining the court.
There are several ways in which the United States can and should be helpful to the court right now. First, the administration can designate a senior official as the U.S. liaison to the court. Second, President Obama should direct U.S. negotiators to attend upcoming meetings of court members. Of particular U.S. concern will be whether the member states decide to add the "crime of aggression" to the court's jurisdiction. This decision could affect U.S. military operations around the world. Staying away can only hurt our interests.
Third, the president should order an assessment of how the United States could offer concrete support to the court. That could include sharing evidence and information and assisting in the arrest and extradition of fugitive defendants.
Fourth, Congress should revisit the American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002. Congress passed the law principally to protect members of our armed forces from International Criminal Court prosecution. In practice, without a specific waiver, the act prohibits cooperation of any kind by U.S. agencies with the court, unnecessarily tying our hands. Congress should consider amending or repealing this law.
The International Criminal Court is well situated to enforce international laws against the most heinous crimes. The movement since 2005 toward increased engagement with the court has been beneficial - both to the court and to U.S. interests. The time has come to advance our common interests and help shape the court into an effective, accountable body. We could then consider whether to join it.
William H. Taft IV is former deputy secretary of Defense; Patricia M. Wald is a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
This article appeared on page A - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
