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TechnoratiGen McChrystal, America's New Army Chief in Afghanistan, Under Fire Over Rough Tactics and 'Prisoner Abuse'
The general chosen by Barack Obama to run the war in Afghanistan permitted abusive treatment and interrogation of detainees in Iraq, according to human rights investigators.
Soldiers have described beatings, psychological torture and other physical mistreatment at a camp near Baghdad where General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of US Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, was frequently seen.
![[U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal answers a reporter's question on the overnight developments of coalition forces in Baghdad during a Pentagon news conference in Washington, in this April 8, 2003 file photo. (REUTERS/DoD photo by Helene C. Stikkel/Released/Handout)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/mcchrystal.jpg "mcchrystal.jpg")
A tall Irish-American with a deceptively gentle manner, Gen McChrystal was named last week as the next head of Afghan operations. He is currently operations director for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The investigation into human rights abuses was led by Marc Garlasco, himself a former Pentagon intelligence officer who helped lead the hunt for former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Now a weapons expert at Human Rights Watch, his report, No Blood No Foul, covered the period 2003-2004 when Gen McChrystal operated in the shadows and hunted insurgents across Iraq.
Gen McChrystal is likely to be questioned over the findings of the report, compiled in 2006, during Senate hearings which are needed to confirm his appointment to his new post.
His special operations unit used Camp Nama, an acronym for "Nasty Ass Military Area", which had a fearsome reputation.
According to Mr Garlasco's report, which was based on soldiers' evidence, inmates at the camp were regularly stripped naked, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, placed in painful stress positions, and beaten. Gen McChrystal is lionised in the US as a warrior-scholar. Last week the media has carried admiring reports on how he eats just one meal a day and operates on a few hours' sleep. He led Task Force 121, the Special Operations units in Iraq which caught Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
His appointment signals a dramatic shift in US tactics, from reaching out to the Taliban in favour of a more aggressive military approach. But critics warn that Gen McChrystal's robust methods may generate more hostility among Afghan civilians to US and other Nato forces. Roger Carstens of the Center for a New American Security, himself a former special forces officer, said: "Has he ever worked in the counterinsurgency environment? Not really."
One senior official who asked for the identity of the respected international organisation for which he works to be withheld said: "Expect to see secret, dead of night raids in Afghanistan, with more civilians getting hurt and no one being held accountable. It's a big tactical shift. Because of his history in Iraq we were very alarmed when we heard he was going to be in charge in Afghanistan."
Mr Garlasco said that, as the top commander, Gen McChrystal "can allow the special forces to operate with impunity, or he can rein them in and use counterinsurgency tactics like (General David) Petraeus."
Mr Garlasco interviewed a special forces soldier named Jeff who accused Gen McChrystal of banning the Red Cross and other investigators from entering Camp Nama, a decision which was viewed as a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
"Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel," reported the soldier. "'Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?' And he said, 'Absolutely not.' He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in. 'They won't have access and they never will.'"
"This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even to Army investigators."
A spokesman for Gen McChrystal said last night it would be "inappropriate" to comment on the details of the Human Rights Watch report or a subsequent investigation by Esquire magazine. The Pentagon also refused to discuss the operations run by Gen McChrystal at the time, saying it "might lead to unravelling of state secrets that have been so beneficial in Iraq."
In another brush with controversy, General McChrystal was blamed for helping to fabricate false information in the drama surrounding the death in 2004 of Pat Tillman, a professional football player who volunteered for the army only to be killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan.
Gen McChrystal approved paperwork recommending Tillman for a silver star which stated that he died from "devastating enemy fire", and backtracked only when he learned that President George W Bush was about to quote from the citation in a speech. The US Army overruled a Pentagon recommendation that he be held accountable for his actions.
Last week the Tillman family attacked Gen McChrystal's new appointment. The dead soldier's mother, Mary Tillman, said, "It is imperative that Lt Gen McChrystal be scrutinised carefully during the Senate hearings."
34 Comments so far
Show AllBe quiet and let the empire trip stumble and fall. It's going to be a thud instead of a splash now that O'Bamba beat McKane.
There is a very slightly redacted release of Stanley's Camp Bucca torture complex at the Baghdad Airport here which details an investigation of one poor student who was captured by his unit and tortured on 4 January 2004. In it are details of the no-names, no uniforms, methodology which he instituted to avoid future investigation into his activities and the protection of the torturers under his command. It was set up like a terrorist cell.
In the investigation carried out by Special Agents of Military Intelligence they recommend prosecution of the perps but the last page reveals how they stopped it from going up the chain of command. It is worth reading the 79 pages in that it reveals much about these scumbags operate and even gives physical descriptions of the torturers by the man who was tortured.
go to this site:
http://sites.google.com/site/grandcommitteeofpublicsafety/files
open this file:
6-26CampBuccaMcChrystal.pdf
michael jordan
http://sites.google.com/site/apolloguide
I think this nomination is in line with Obama's other foreign policy decisions; carry out the PNAC doctrine and carry on with Cheney and Rumsfelds's pointless cruelty.
His refusal to prosecute torture has nothing to do with "moving the country forward". It has everything to do with protecting his own behind.
Abuse continues apace at Guantanamo as do rendition flights.
Bagram, when torture began, is open for business.
Secrecy is equal to or exceeds Bush's so we cannot know what else is being done in our name.
He is not only continuing Bush's illegal wars (a far worse war crime than torture), he is expanding them.
We didn't have an election, we had a theatrical event.
MAYBE THE FACT HE HAS ONLY ONE MEAL A DAY AND SO LITTLE SLEEP IS WHAT MAKES HIM SO CRAZY!OBAMA TOOLAMA THIS GUY IS INCAPABLE OF SEEING THE TRUTH. HE NEEDS
TO FIRE HIS ENTIRE CABINET AND START HIRING INTELLIGENT PEOPLE FROM OUTSIDE THE
BELTWAY ! SOME SANITY AND TRUYH THEN MIGHT SEEP IN.
America still doesn't torture, and never has. They water board, suffocate, electrocute and batter prisoners to death. They pull out finger nails, mash gonads, shoot the children of foreign war suspects, and bomb wedding ceremonies . They assassinate and overthrow democratically elected leaders, and fund puppet dictators to slaughter union protesters. They blow up buildings and entire city blocks that are thought to harbor truth-seeking journalists. They rape the ecological environment for all its resources, pillage the social environment for their amusement, and plunder labor environments worldwide for their pleasure. The rest of the world sees them as the most arrogant, and blindly self-serving empire that ever strode the earth, but Americans can ignore all potential consequences because they love Jesus. This is also why he gave them the right to re-defined the word "torture" to have only one new meaning - "something America doesn't do." So be warned, non-America, God the Father has damned every lying son-of-a-bitch who even thinks about accusing God-blessed America of torture. That person's days are numbered, but America will live for ever!
Bring America Back !!!!............A US Military General willing to lie about how a US Troop died !!!
****The Congress should fully explore McChrystals motives for lying about Tillman's demise !! Has he lied about the deaths of other Troops ???
Most of these military - minded Jackboots are not fit, nor qualified to lead Girlscouts to the Cookie Bakery !!!!
TK:
McChrystal is responsible for a lot more and I've got five on it that he staged the beheading of Nick Berg because Nick was working near Abu Ghraib in high towers and could see the bodies being rolled out of there and dumped in the river. Palestinian journalist/photographer Mazen Dana also was killed while filming outside the torture chamber. There were the journalists killed at the hotel, in fact a couple hundred journalists were killed by American guns during the war. There was the bombing of Al Jazeerah offices. They were doing anything to keep a lid on the truth getting out.
His group was in Afghanistan and took part in the the torture of John Walker Lindh. It is a small step to assume he ordered the assassination of Pat Tillman. He was there under Cheney/Rumsfeld to stop the truth and manufacture phony confessions. He worked both sides of the street in the service of the butchers.
He was Rumsfeld/Cheney's fixer and his TF 6-26 Unit(under its various pseudonyms) and false identities was completely free to kill anyone Don/Dick ordered him to. From what I understand Tillman was kinda dumb to think that just because he was a millionaire that he was immune to abuse. Tillman forgot he was just a corporal who was threatening to go to Chomsky when he returned to the states and that was all they needed to craft their publicity killing. Tillman was shot between the eyes according to one account I read and the body was destroyed.
We are on the Dark side now baby because Obama has turned and flipped us off. This don't look good at all my friend.
michael jordan
http://sites.google.com/site/apolloguide/
Wow. Powerful post MJ.
Kinda looks like these oil companies are fronts for organized crime. The Bush/Cheney Crime Families. Can't get the UnoCal pipeline through to Pak and India? Stage a beheading. Call in air strikes at Tora-Bora. That oughta soften up those pesky rag-heads who are just trying to make it through the year without dying of DU lead poisoning....
I couldn't help but notice in the "terrorists" beheading pictures on the net the "terrorists" were wearing big bulky western watches and the victim was wearing the same prison issue orange jumpsuit as Abu Grave. Even the wall paint was identical in color and blistering.... I thought I also saw dog tags (the chain) on one. Do terrorists wear dog tags?
Creeeeeepy, Creeeeepy people, these soldiers-of-fortune are.
You're so right. We are on the dark side now..... how do we ever get back this far into the abyss?
TJ
"for once you cross over to the dark side, forever will it dominate your destiny." - Yoda
I saw the same things in the Nick Berg video and wrote at length about in at the time and was able to learn that he too was writing emails and phoning to his father in New Jersey about what he was seeing. The McChrystal unit captured him in the north in the Mosul area when he went native and tried to learn more of what was taking place. They held him for a period of a few weeks on the presumption that his Jewishness and his Arabic language ability and his previous Israeli work made him suspect. His father even went so far as to try to get him released. They were threatening him as a spy. Then they released him and then he showed up in the video beheading a few days later. That would allow them plausible deniability to say that he was captured by the enemy. This is a common prosecutorial tactic where a person gets acquitted and then is immediately re-arrested and re-charged. They just stepped it up one order of magnitude. I was intrigued by the uniforms, the white chairs and the paint on the wall; --the Rolexes, --common with these cowboys which are of the Air America brand of CIA.
During that time they were monitoring all communications, email and cellphones etc., and his father related that Nick was beginning to rethink his pro Republican stance on the war in a manner identical to that of Tillman a year later. They were both lone wolves without any support in a foreign land.
They both met a similar fate in McChrystals' little half acre of hell. I am hoping that Janis Karpinski comes forward regarding McChrystal because she surely has some pieces to the puzzle, but I don't think that she was involved but must have heard some scuttlebutt which could be the seeds of a serious investigation.
michael jordan
http://sites.google.com/site/apolloguide/
This is just the beginning my friend. We are in the midst of a Stalinist reorganization of our country. How do we ever get back? Consider what a veteran of this wrote in 1970:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during times of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door, and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur --what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would have quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and notwithstanding all of Stalins's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If...if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more --we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! (Arthur Ransome describes a workers' meeting in Yaroslavl in 1921. Delegates were sent to the workers from the Central Committee in Moscow to confer on the substance of the argument about trade unions. The representative of the opposition, Y. Larin, explained to the workers that their trade union must be their defense against the administration, that they possessed rights which they had won and upon which no one else had any right to infringe. The workers, however, were completely indifferent, simply not comprehending whom they still needed to be defended against and why they still needed any rights. When the spokesman for the Party line rebuked them for their laziness and for getting out of hand, and demanded sacrifices from them --overtime work without pay, reductions in food, military discipline in the factory administration --this arouse great elation and applause.) We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
footnote 5, page 13, Chapter 1, Arrest, 'The Gulag Archipelago', Alesandr I. Solzhenitsyn Harper & Row, 1973
michael jordan
http://sites.google.com/site/apolloguide/
McChrystal reminds me more of he role of Reinhard Heydrich. Czechoslovakia proved Heydrich's undoing.
Could hope, I suppose.
reference at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich
Was it General McKiernan, the guy the Assassin is replacing, that said publicly drones were counter-productive about a week ago? Career error.
Back todDiplomacy through a sniper's scope.
I third that! Is that accepted parliamentary procedure?
No matter.
We will get to see which state's senators are in favor of sadistic torture with this creature's confirmation.
Alright people. Let's get this torture business straight, shall we? Almost any general would have let the torture go on because it's all part of the system. Obama chose him and I believe the Senate will most likely confirm him. It's all politics as usual.
In other news an article in an Indian paper quoting Seymour Hersh claims.
Dick Cheney ordered the assassination of Benazir Bhutto because she revealed to the Al Jazeera press that Osama Bin Laden had been assassinated several years before. (She did in fact make this claim in a TV Interview shortly before her death)
The Article also claims that Dick Cheney ordered the assassination of President Hariri of Lebanon. This was later blamed on Syria. The Article claims this because Hariri was not defending US interests in Lebanon and would not allow a US Military prescence.
Now I must point out that I have found little in the way of articles to corroborate these claims however it would certainly fit a pattern by the Chief Executioner.
Now if true this would certainly be one reason Obama is terrified of a prosecution of Mr Cheney and would help explain how a McChrystal gets promoted.
McChrystal after all was the one who headed up the hit squad.
Peel back one layer and its gets dirtier and dirtier.
I always thoujght Cheney was behind Bhutto's assassination.
A few weeks before she was killed, Cheney made a trip to Pakistan and there wasn't one single report about the purpose of his trip. I remember thinking oh no, how many people are going to die now?
Could have been her Bin Laden statement. I think it was more than that.
She was becoming a popular force in Pakistan and that's not good for the US.
Her husband doesn't have long either, except he might get out alive. The US is doing every covert and overt op we can to overthrow this new gov't. Killing civilians and displacing millions to get at a few fanatics creates anger and hatred against the Pakistani government. With a liitle internal push the US has the excuse to put another puppet general in office.
Cheney, Obama, and the rest of the ruling psychos, they don't really want a democracy in Pakistan or anywhere else. A well greased cooperative dictator always serves American interests better than a democracy.
Terrified? Says who?! More likely than any other scenario, Obama was in agreement with the US Central Asian foreign fallacy plan for a very long time -but played his campaign audience for gullible saps.
DOn't forget, Obama endorsed Israel's attack on Lebanon (The July War, 2006) with a written memo to former US Ambassador to the UN Khalilzad.
Further, Khalilzad and Big Zbig Brzezinski were an instrumental team in the US 1980s covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Brzezinski started ramping up the "Soviet's Vietnam" game plan under "peace loving", Carter.
Big Zbig was an instrumental supporter of Barack Obama. Freedom House, Azerbaijan, Central Asia. The writing was on the wall, Obama would bring war to Central Asia.
I'm worry people still entertain the idea that Obama is a victim in all of this.... hence the idea he must be "terrified" ....
Oh I do not suggest he terrified for the sake of the peoples of the United States or for his own for that matter.
He is terrified for the sake of the power brokers that back him. They do not want this information out there.
The entire system would collapse were the truth revealed so the lie MUST be perpetuated.
Yes he is part and parcel of the system.
Very nice clarification! Thank you for taking the time to explain your point to me.
There is no end to the layers of this onion or the depth of this rabbit hole................even the truth of 9/11 gets deeper and deeper and the motives become legion.
http:/www.israelshamir.net/Contributors/Collateral
_Damage_911.pdf
Come on, now-- Admiral Dennis Blair sailed through confirmation as Director of National Intelligence despite the reports that he backed the perpetrators of church massacres in East Timor in 1999.
It's all about "moving forward", remember?
· Yr Obd't Servant
Ha! Exactly. After a few testy exchanges by the members of Murder, Inc., Congress will confirm him on the first go round. Expedience (spending as little time as possible) is always paramount these days.
Gotta' quickly get back to the criticial issues; raising cash.
One more test for Pelosi and Reid to pass or fail.
This guy does not have nightmares. This guy lives them. Remember that character Marlon Brando played in "Apocalypse Now"? This is that guy!
My thought exactly! Col. Kurtz was the character. The article states: "Last week the media has carried admiring reports on how he eats just one meal a day and operates on a few hours' sleep." This makes a man crazy, not effective.
Jeevee
The last statement is ABSOLUTELY TRUE!
Even a general answers to SOMEONE. Investigate and prosecute those "SOMEONES".......and the general too, of course, since he violated the UCMJ.
Obama is like a beard: unless someone clips him, he just gets Bushier and Bushier.
Hilarious.
Good one!
I nominate this quip from DrBrian for best comment of the day. ;)
I'll second that!
The motion is carried.
· Yr Obd't Servant