Nervy…
Tag: war crimes
Shocking Videos Allegedly Show Ukrainians Shooting And Torturing Russian POWs
Videos that surfaced late last night purportedly show members of the Ukrainian military shooting Russian POWs in the knees and beating them senseless.
Several correspondents from around the world have called on the International Criminal Court, which Ukraine has invited into their country, to investigate and verify these potential war crimes.
Videos allegedly showing Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian prisoners of war in the knees have hit the internet alongside a series of clips from the Ukrainian army calling the families and loved ones of deceased Russian soldiers in order to mock their deaths. The footage embedded below is graphic and viewer discretion is advised.
While The Gateway Pundit is unable to independently verify the content of these videos, a foreign correspondent from the BBC has indicated that she reviewed the clips. “Seeing (not sharing) graphic videos from Ukraine. In accepting ICC jurisdiction, Ukraine has enabled ICC prosecutors to investigate allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity on both sides,” she tweeted. “Rhetoric from some politicians suggests focus on Russians alone.” Reporters from Sweden’s SVT and Bellingcat’s Elliot Higgins have also acknowledged the release of the videos.
International Law Is A Meaningless Concept When It Only Applies To US Enemies
Australian whistleblower David McBride just made the following statement on Twitter:
“I’ve been asked if I think the invasion of Ukraine is illegal.
My answer is: If we don’t hold our own leaders to account, we can’t hold other leaders to account.
If the law is not applied consistently, it is not the law.
It is simply an excuse we use to target our enemies.
We will pay a heavy price for our hubris of 2003 in the future.
We didn’t just fail to punish Bush and Blair: we rewarded them. We re-elected them. We knighted them.
If you want to see Putin in his true light imagine him landing a jet and then saying ‘Mission Accomplished’.”
As far as I can tell this point is logically unassailable. International law is a meaningless concept when it only applies to people the US power alliance doesn’t like. This point is driven home by the life of McBride himself, whose own government responded to his publicizing suppressed information about war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan by charging him as a criminal.
Neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair are in prison cells at The Hague where international law says they ought to be. Bush is still painting away from the comfort of his home, issuing proclamations comparing Putin to Hitler and platforming arguments for more interventionism in Ukraine. Blair is still merily warmongering his charred little heart out, saying NATO should not rule out directly attacking Russian forces in what amounts to a call for a thermonuclear world war.
They are free as birds, singing their same old demonic songs from the rooftops.
CIA ‘used 9/11 suspect as living prop to teach trainee interrogators torture techniques’ – including ‘bouncing his head off a plywood wall and leaving him with brain damage’
US officials at a notorious CIA detention site in Afghanistan used a detainee as a living prop to teach interrogators torture techniques, newly declassified documents reveal, bouncing the man’s head off a wall until he was left with permanent brain damage.
The shocking report, which dates back to 2008 but was unsealed Thursday, details the repeated torture of Ammar al-Baluchi, a current Guantanamo Bay captive and suspect in the 9/11 attacks, at the former CIA ‘black site’ Cobalt, north of Kabul.
Interrogators at the site, known both as Cobalt and ‘the Salt Pit,’ went beyond the CIA’s guidelines in torturing Baluchi, the documents reveal, testing techniques and their effectiveness without the agency’s approval.
Baluchi is one of five set to face military tribunal for his alleged part in the 9/11 plot, a case that’s been stuck in pre-trial proceedings for more than a decade due to a legal dispute over legal admissibility of testimony gathered from the defendants after they were tortured.
The redacted report from the CIA inspector’s general details some of the torture wreaked on Baluchi, 44, who, according to the documents, was taken out of Pakistani custody to the site in 2003 ‘extra-legally,’ due to his being under Pakistani jurisdiction at the time and not an immediate terrorist threat.
Baluchi, a Kuwaiti citizen, was then brought to ‘Cobalt’ – a secret torture den referred to by detainees as ‘the dark prison’ or ‘the darkness, a previous 2012 CIA report revealed.
Reports of the site, where prisoners would routinely become so broken that they would voluntarily climb onto waterboards and complaints over hypothermia concerns were rampant, unsealed documents have revealed, first surfaced in 2005.
The recently unsealed report, declassified as part of a court filing by Baluchi’s lawyers to get him an independent medical examination, described how for years interrogators at the site used Baluchi’s body as a living doll for unapproved torture techniques that left the still imprisoned man brain-damaged.
Let’s be honest…
Some people have a lot of nerve…
Ukraine’s Special Operations Command Announces They’re Going to Start Committing War Crimes
Ukraine’s Special Operations Command announced Thursday on Facebook that Russian soldiers who try to surrender henceforth will be “slaughtered like pigs” while they’re begging for mercy.
Ukraine’s special operations command wrote on Facebook:
The SSO Brotherhood of Ukraine sends its greetings to the Russian artillery! We congratulate you: after you bombarded our peaceful cities, our relatives, children, loved ones – you, worms, became our number one target. We explain to you, Vanki: you seem to be far away and shoot at targets you can’t see. You don’t see little children, old people, homes, kindergartens, schools and hospitals – all these are just goals for you. Pressed, flew, got hit – f*cked, right guys? Now look, worms: you don’t see your goals and you seem to be relieved. But believe me: it will never be easier for you scum. We already have the information about you. And if it is not for someone else, then it is a matter of minutes. From now on, there will be no more captured Russian artillery. No mercy, no “please don’t kill, I surrender” will be getting away. Every calculation, no matter: commander, driver, guide, charger – will be slaughtered like pigs. Tie your pants up, we’ve already come for you. Call your mom one last time. Say you gonna die soon jackal. We are not death, we are worse!
The post is still live [UPDATE: They stealth edited the post, see below].
The US Bombed A Vital Dam In Syria, Lied About It, & Called Anyone Who Reported The Truth “Crazy”
Many years too late, it appears The New York Times has suddenly discovered that the United States has been committing war crimes in Syria, coming long after it was clear Washington was pursuing regime change in Damascus. With Assad still in control of most of the country, US efforts have turned to far-reach sanctions of late, which have greatly increased the sufferings of common Syrians. Like with Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq before, the Times was the foremost cheerleader for that war, laundering Pentagon and admin propaganda, and only many years later admitting the truth that it was all based on lies… so now it seems to be going with Syria.
In its latest reporting, the NY Times has “uncovered” that an elite US military unit intentionally targeted and destroyed a large dam which was vital to the daily life and survival of tens of thousands of people near a vital Euphrates River reservoir. When the 2017 bombing of the Tabqa Dam (or al-Thawra Dam as it’s also called) was first reported, a top American general labeled those accusing the US of being behind it as “crazy”. Like much mainstream media reporting on Syria, those who had it right in real time – many from independent and alternative media – were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” and loons, but now this…
The fresh NY Times reporting begins, “Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived.”
The US had quickly dismissed those accusing the US of being behind the attack. And since Russia was among them, it was easy for the Pentagon to bat it down as but the “propaganda” of America’s enemies in the region…
The Islamic State, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. military’s “no-strike list” of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of U.S. involvement were based on “crazy reporting.”
“The Tabqa Dam is not a coalition target,” he declared emphatically two days after the blasts.
Multiple Syrians had been killed and wounded in the attack, including dam workers and engineers who had rushed to the scene to save it.
US Hid True Toll of Air Wars; Thousands of Dead Civilians, Many of Them Children
Thousands of previously hidden Pentagon documents show that the US air wars in the Middle East have been marked by “deeply flawed intelligence” and have killed thousands of civilians, many of them children, according to a shocking new report in the New York Times Saturday afternoon.
The 5-year Times investigation received more than 1,300 reports examining airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from September 2014 to January 2018, more than 5,400 pages in all. None of these records show any findings of wrongdoing on the actions of the US military.
The Times reporting confirms many of the previous reports by whistleblowers Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and others. On July 27, 2021, whistleblower Hale was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison for exposing the true civilian toll of the US drone program. “I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life,” Hale said at his sentencing.
From the Times report:
The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
The Assange Case Explained Simply
One of the most common reasons I hear from people on their reluctance to wade into the Assange debate is that they don’t understand it. It looks like a complicated issue to them, so they leave it to the experts.
In reality, the complexity of this case is a complete illusion. It’s very, very simple. It only looks complicated because many years of media distortion have made it appear so.
The US government is trying to extradite a journalist and prosecute him under the Espionage Act for exposing its war crimes, with the long-term goal of normalizing this practice.
That’s it. That’s the whole entire thing. So simple you can sum it up in a single sentence. In a single breath. The most powerful government on earth setting a legal precedent which would allow it to extradite any journalist anywhere in the world for exposing its malfeasance would unquestionably have a massive chilling effect on journalism everywhere in precisely the area where press scrutiny is most sorely needed. It’s not any more complex or nuanced than that.
The Assange issue is simple. What makes it seem complicated is the lies people have been fed by the media class whose job is to manipulate the public into consenting to the agendas of the US power alliance and its war machine.
Hellbound and Down 
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