Ukraine: Orange Revolution 2.0? CIA’s Global Shadow War: Hiring Private Mercenaries And Former Guantanamo Inmates! Guantanamo: Twelve Years of Torture, Illegality, and Shame !!

 

 

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, December 06, 2013

Ongoing Ukrainian protests bear its earmarks. Whether it succeeds remains to be seen.  >>  Ordinary Ukrainians are being manipulated. Internal street thugs are involved. They’re militants. They’ve been recruited to cause trouble. They’re mostly young. They’re Western oriented.  >>  Washington’s dirty hands are involved. Color revolutions are a US specialty. At issue is eliminating independent sovereign states.  >>  It’s co-opting former Soviet Republics. It’s drawing them into NATO. It’s increasing American dominance.

How the CIA Bungled the War on Terror

By Pratap Chatterjee

Global Research, December 06, 2013

TomDispatch 5 December 2013

Hollywood Without the Happy Ending  >> Call it the Jason Bourne strategy.  >>  Think of it as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) plunge into Hollywood — or into the absurd.  As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more real.  In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world’s most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an orange jumpsuit in the world’s most infamous jail.

The first group of undercover agents were recruited by private companies from the Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs and then repurposed to the CIA at handsome salaries averaging around $140,000 a year; the second crew was recruited from the prison cells at Guantanamo Bay and paid out of a secret multimillion dollar slush fund called “the Pledge.”

Last month, the Associated Press revealed that the CIA had selected a few dozen men from among the hundreds of terror suspects being held at Guantanamo and trained them to be double agents at a cluster of eight cottages in a program dubbed “Penny Lane.” (Yes, indeed, the name was taken from the Beatles song, as was “Strawberry Fields,” a Guantanamo program that involved torturing “high-value” detainees.) These men were then returned to what the Bush administration liked to call the “global battlefield,” where their mission was to befriend members of al-Qaeda and supply targeting information for the Agency’s drone assassination program.

A litany of physical injuries, psychological deterioration, and illnesses caused by the conditions of the last 12 years are fully documented and are an indictment of all those responsible at every level of US government and military…

Twelve years have passed since the US government of President George Bush made the dramatic decision to ignore half a century of international law, abrogate the Geneva Conventions and bring us to a place today where 164 men who have never been tried and 84 of whom have been cleared for release, are still in Guantanamo Bay prison.

The horror of the place cannot truly be conveyed in words. Fifteen men are being daily force fed, in contravention of medical ethics. The current hunger strike has lasted since February and at one time involved two thirds of the prisoners. Men became skin and bones, according to their lawyers, one of who has an on-going court case to get an independent doctor into the prison to assess his failing client.

Violence is a daily norm with invasive body searches and manhandling of prisoners in and out of cells by special teams of heavy soldiers in body armour. Solitary confinement for many has lasted months or years. A litany of physical injuries, psychological deterioration, and illnesses caused by the conditions of the last 12 years are fully documented and are an indictment of all those responsible at every level of US government and military.

Guantanamo is the symbol of the new normality imposed on our world since that reckless Bush-era phrase was coined – the war on terror. The notorious Abu Ghraib photographs of US abuse in Iraq in 2004 had their origins in the personnel and practices authorized by the Bush White House in Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo.  By Victoria Brittain Global Research, December 06, 2013 worldbulletin.net