Judge Approves Navy Spraying Banned Chemicals in Eyes of Recruits

United States Navy Training - 2009 Style

Pepper spray is banned for use in war by Article I.5 of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The "spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents," the North Carolina Medical journal wrote in a study. "Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death."

But that doesn't stop our Navy from spraying it in the eyes of recruits for "training purposes" and it didn't stop Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia from deciding that he wasn't in a position to overrule the Navy's decision to continue the practice. He ruled on Friday that the Navy can spray recruits in the eyes with pepper spray, even though it has been linked to death and is banned during warfare by international law.

“The use of direct-impact [pepper] spray indisputably risks injury, but the agency decided that this risk was offset by the benefits of training,” Leon wrote. “Plaintiffs allegation that the action was ‘clearly not the product of reasoned thought,’ is little more than a legal conclusion and provides insufficient support for its claim that the agency decision was arbitrary and capricious.”

The decision, revealed by the blog of Legal Times, is in response to a case brought by naval officers, who argued that the practice of "subjecting trainees to a direct shot of pepper spray was dangerous and deprived them of their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. They said the Navy could rely on less intense training methods, such as smearing a small amount of the spray on the skin beneath the eyes, or forcing trainees to walk through a room that had previously been sprayed."

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there have been 27 deaths among people sprayed in California alone since 1993, although the deaths were not directly linked to the chemical. In particular, it can be fatal for individuals with asthma. 

America was once a great country.  I now feel ashamed.

source:  RAW STORY

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John Dean Says Cheney is Guilty of Murder

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s bombshell earlier this week that Vice President Dick Cheney controlled an “executive assassination ring” continues to reverberate throughout Washington, with Nixon aide John Dean going so far as to accuse the former VP of murder if the charges are true.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann visited the issue on his show Countdown Thursday night where he discussed the legal implications of Hersh's allegations with Dean, who was White House legal counsel under President Richard Nixon.

“It’s potentially a war crime,” Dean said of the reported assassination ring. “It’s potentially just outright murder and it’s clearly in violation of the Ford Executive Order.”

Hersh told the students at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday that the assassination squad was “a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. In the Bush-Cheney Days, they reported directly to the Cheney, Cheney office. They do not report to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. Gates, the secretary of defense. They report directly to him. Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring, essentially.”

“If this is true you have to prosecute this. There is no way around this,” said Olbermann, noting the 1976 executive order of President Gerald Ford which explicitly outlawed the engagement of political employees in political assassination. Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff at the time the order was issued.

“By the time Cheney was back in the West Wing it appears that Cheney had forgotten his own boss’s executive order, or worse, he had decided to ignore it,” Olbermann said.


This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Mar. 12, 2009.







SOURCE: Raw Story
Filed by David Edwards and Rachel Oswald


















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Bush Must be Prosecuted for War Crimes

A Detainee at Guantanamo

In a press conference on October 5, 2007, President Bush states: "This government does not torture people. We stick to international law".



President Bush later talks with Larry King about the aftermath of 9/11 and criticisms of his administration. When confronted with the issue of torture, Bush again states: "WE DON'T TORTURE".




It is obvious from his statements, that Bush was very aware of international law and that torture is against the Geneva Convention and that he was lying. He must also have been aware that violating the Geneva Convention exposes our troops to similar treatment when and if they are captured.  In other words, Bush's "Macho Man" routine not only endangered our troops, but cast a dark shadow on the integrity and reputation of the United States abroad.  

Now we have evidence that we not only tortured captives, but in some cases they were tortured to death. Three major human rights organizations have declared the Department of Defense was running secret prisons at Bagram and in Iraq, actively sought ways around the terms of the Geneva conventions and cooperated with the CIA's "ghost detention" program which saw prisoners hidden from Red Cross oversight.

The arrival of the documents comes on the same day the ACLU published two unredacted pages of a government report which reveals detainees in US custody were tortured to death. In a Raw Story article, the following was revealed:

"These newly released documents confirm our suspicion that the tentacles of the CIA’s abusive program reached across agency lines," said Margaret Satterthwaite, Director of the NYU International Human Rights Clinic, in a Thursday advisory. "In fact, it is increasingly obvious that defense officials engaged in legal gymnastics to find ways to cooperate with the CIA’s activities. A full accounting of all agencies must now take place to ensure that future abuses don’t continue under a different guise."

The papers, part of a volley of responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, were released by Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. The entire package, which encompasses hundreds of pages, was boiled down to several key points by the CCR in a report by Mother Jones writer Steve Aquino.

"One heavily redacted page mentions (page 34) an 'undisclosed detention facility' at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan," he noted.

"Another, dated May 2004, highlights (page 17) how the Geneva Conventions can be interpreted to allow the CIA and the DoD to ghost detainees' identities so they can be denied a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"This was done, according to a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to 'maximize intelligence collection efforts.' In other words, give them more time to interrogate inmates." And perhaps most outrageous, a Feb. 2006 e-mail disclosed by the groups highlights an effort to limit bad press by delaying the release of a detainee "for 45 days or so until things cool down."

"It is astonishing that the government may have delayed releasing men from Guantбnamo in order to avoid bad press," said CCR attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez, who represents many of the men held in Guantбnamo, in an Amnesty International release. "Proposing to hold men for a month and a half after they were deemed releasable is inexcusable. The Obama Administration should avoid repeating this injustice and release the innocent individuals with all due haste."

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President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, have expressed a hesitancy to look back at the Bush administration and a desire to look toward the future.  That future will always have a dark cloud hanging over it unless we hold President Bush and his cohorts accountable for their illegal and murderous conduct.  As we used to say in the 60's,

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING

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