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The Nine Circles of Hell! – all the news that gives you fits in print – for Monday, July 26, includes six bonus stories on the Wikileak scandal. Click on ‘more’ below to see them all. Here’s today’s Nine:

In Wikileaks release, “there does appear to be evidence of war crimes”

Taxpayers paid off ‘Big Bank’ debts to Goldman Sachs

US secretly backed release of Lockerbie bomber

NATO rockets kill 52 Afghan civilians

Tea Party wants war with Iran

US media double-standard revealed in American’s Gaza flotilla death

Israeli security agency’s ties to illegal settlers revealed in murder arrest

India chooses resources over human rights in relations with Burma

Detained Thai protesters “were beaten during their arrest”

In Wikileaks release, “there does appear to be evidence of war crimes”
Press Association
(7/26/10)

Wikileaks files ‘may reveal thousands of war crimes’

The Afghanistan files released by WikiLeaks could contain details of “thousands” of potential war crimes, the founder of the whistleblowers’ website said today.

Julian Assange told reporters at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London: “It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime.

“That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material.”

According to Mr Assange, the documents provided the “raw ingredients” that lead to statistics about matters such as civilian deaths in war.

He said he hoped information in the files would be investigated and exposed as a deterrent to future “human rights abuses” and to create an “incentive” for policy change.

“We would like to see the revelations that this material gives to be taken seriously, investigated by governments and new policies put in place as a result, if not prosecutions of those people who have committed abuses,” Mr Assange said.

“It’s important to understand this material does not just reveal abuses.

“This material describes the past six years of the war.”

Here’s the This is Hell! one-stop shop for all the news on the Wikileaks story.

• You gotta read this interview with the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It’s got the great quote, ‘I Enjoy Crushing Bastards’ for a headline.
• Der Spiegel, the Guardian and The New York Times were the first three papers to release the Wikileaks story. Dert Speigel’s story was headlined, “Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It.”
• The New York Times version is headlined, Pakistan Spy Service Aids Insurgents, Reports Assert.”
• The Guardian’s version is entitled, “Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation.”
• The Guardian also offers a great database in, “Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet.”
• The Guardian also had this eye-popping story, “Afghanistan war logs: How US marines sanitised record of bloodbath.”

Taxpayers paid off ‘Big Bank’ debts to Goldman Sachs
USA Today
(7/26/10)

Goldman reveals where bailout cash went

Goldman Sachs sent $4.3 billion in federal tax money to 32 entities, including many overseas banks, hedge funds and pensions, according to information made public Friday night.

Goldman Sachs disclosed the list of companies to the Senate Finance Committee after a threat of subpoena from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.

Asked the significance of the list, Grassley said, “I hope it’s as simple as taxpayers deserve to know what happened to their money.”

He added, “We thought originally we were bailing out AIG. Then later on … we learned that the money flowed through AIG to a few big banks, and now we know that the money went from these few big banks to dozens of financial institutions all around the world.”

Grassley said he was reserving judgment on the appropriateness of U.S. taxpayer money ending up overseas until he learns more about the 32 entities …

Goldman Sachs (GS)  received $5.55 billion from the government in fall of 2008 as payment for then-worthless securities it held in AIG. Goldman had already hedged its risk that the securities would go bad. It had entered into agreements to spread the risk with the 32 entities named in Friday’s report.

Overall, Goldman Sachs received a $12.9 billion payout from the government’s bailout of AIG, which was at one time the world’s largest insurance company.

Goldman Sachs also revealed to the Senate Finance Committee that it would have received $2.3 billion if AIG had gone under. Other large financial institutions, such as Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, sold Goldman Sachs protection in the case of AIG’s collapse. Those institutions did not have to pay Goldman Sachs after the government stepped in with tax money.

Shouldn’t Goldman Sachs be expected to collect from those institutions “before they collect the taxpayers’ dollars?” Grassley asked. “It’s a little bit like a farmer, if you got crop insurance, you shouldn’t be getting disaster aid.”

Goldman had not disclosed the names of the counterparties it paid in late 2008 until Friday, despite repeated requests from Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.

“I think we didn’t get the information because they consider it very embarrassing,” Grassley said, “and they ought to consider it very embarrassing.”

US secretly backed release of Lockerbie bomber
The Australian
(7/26/10)

White House backed release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi

The US government secretly advised Scottish ministers it would be “far preferable” to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Libya.

Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison.

The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, a week before Megrahi was freed in August last year on grounds that he had terminal cancer.

The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama’s claim last week that all Americans were “surprised, disappointed and angry” to learn of Megrahi’s release.

Scottish ministers viewed the level of US resistance to compassionate release as “half-hearted” and a sign it would be accepted.

The US has tried to keep the letter secret, refusing to give permission to the Scottish authorities to publish it on the grounds it would prevent future “frank and open communications” with other governments.

In the letter, sent on August 12 last year to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond and justice officials, Mr LeBaron wrote that the US wanted Megrahi to remain imprisoned in view of the nature of the crime.

The note added: “Nevertheless, if Scottish authorities come to the conclusion that Megrahi must be released from Scottish custody, the US position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be a far preferable alternative to prisoner transfer, which we strongly oppose.”

NATO rockets kill 52 Afghan civilians
Al Jazeera
(7/26/10)

‘Scores die’ in Afghan village raid

A Nato rocket attack on a village in Afghanistan last week killed 52 civilians, including women and children, the office of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said in a statement.

Based on reports from the Afghan National Directorate of Security, a house in Regey village in Sangin district of the southern Helmand province was hit with a rocket launched by Nato troops on Friday.

Karzai has offered his condolences via telephone to the mourning families and called on Nato troops to “put into practice every possible measure to avoid harming civilians during military operations”.

The Afghan president has ordered the National Security Council to investigate the incident, Sediq Sediqqi, head of media relations at the presidency, said earlier …

Civilian casualties are an incendiary topic in Afghanistan, though surveys have shown that most are caused by Taliban attacks.

Colonel Wayne Shanks, an Isaf spokesman, said the location of the reported deaths was “several kilometres away from where we had engaged enemy fighters”.

Isaf forces had fought a battle with the Taliban, Shanks said, but an investigation team dispatched after the casualty reports emerged “had accounted for all the rounds that were shot at the enemy”.

“We found no evidence of civilian casualties,” he said.

Leaked documents carried by Wikileaks, a whistleblower website, on Sunday pointed to under-reporting of civilian casualties, which Omar said were a cause of concern for the Afghan government.

The Pentagon files and field reports, spanning the period from January 2004 to December 2009, detail hundreds of unreported civilian deaths caused by Nato and Taliban attacks.

“We have continuously stated that the Afghan government and Afghan people were upset about civilian casualties,” Omar told reporters, adding that Karzai had found nothing new in the leaked documents.

Tea Party wants war with Iran
Foreign Policy
(7/26/10)

Tea Party Caucus members endorse Israeli attack on Iran

Now that the congressional supporters of the Tea Party movement have formed their own caucus, their policy positions are becoming easier to track. Expanding their foray into foreign policy, 21 members of the new caucus have now come out explicitly endorsing Israel’s right to strike Iran’s nuclear program.

Almost two dozen Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers cosponsored a new resolution late last week that expresses their support for Israel “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.”

The lead sponsor of the resolution was Texas Republican Louie Gohmert, one of four congressmen to announce the formation of the 44-member Tea Party caucus at a press conference on July 21. The other three Tea Party Caucus leaders, Michele Bachmann, R-MN, Steve King, R-IA, and John Culberson, R-TX, are also sponsors of the resolution. In total, 21 Tea Party Caucus members have signed on, according to the latest list of caucus members put out by Bachmann’s office.

The resolution cites threats by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to “annihilate” the state of Israel, endorses other means to persuade Iran to stop pursuing nuclear weapons, and states the lawmakers’ support for an Israeli military strike “if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time.”

Notably absent from the resolution — and indeed, from the Tea Party Caucus — is Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and 2008 presidential candidate. Paul, who leads the libertarian wing of the Tea Party movement, was one of only 11 members of the House to vote against the recent Iran sanctions bill, which he called “very, very dangerous and not well thought out”; in 2007 he expressed his concern that “a contrived Gulf of Tonkin-type incident may occur to gain popular support for an attack on Iran.”

There’s little chance the resolution, which has 46 co-sponsors in total, will see a vote on the House floor any time soon. But the resolution signals increasing interests by the Tea Party and its congressional supporters in foreign policy.

Last week, a Tea Party-affiliated grassroots organization launched a nationwide campaign to build popular opposition to the administration’s nuclear reductions treaty with Russia, called New START. The group is led by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginny and it dovetails with similar efforts by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

US media double-standard revealed in American’s Gaza flotilla death
The New York Times
(7/26/10)

The Forgotten American

• The Dogans were a quiet family little noticed by their neighbors here in upstate New York. Ahmet Dogan had come to the area from Turkey to study accounting at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
  He was a serious student; the Dogans did little entertaining. But when their younger son, Furkan, was born in 1991, the family threw a party and a neighbor recalled a toast “to the first U.S. citizen in the family.”
  Furkan Dogan would live just two years in Troy, returning to Turkey with his family in 1993. But he was proud of his American passport and dreamt of coming back after completing medical school. Five Israeli bullets — at least two of them to the head — ended that dream on May 31. Dogan was 19
  The young American, who had just completed high school with excellent grades in the central Turkish town of Kayseri, had seen an online advertisement for volunteers to deliver aid to Gaza. The ad, from a Turkish charity called the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, or I.H.H, said the goal of the trip was to show that Israel’s “embargo/blockade can be legally broken.”
  Little interested in politics, but with an aspiring doctor’s concern for Palestinian suffering, Dogan won a lottery to go.
  How he was killed is disputed — as is just about everything concerning the Israeli naval takeover of the six-boat Gaza-bound flotilla — but his father suspects a video camera carried by his son may have provoked Israeli commandos.

O.K., enough said, that’s the start of the story you haven’t read about the short life of Furkan Dogan, an American killed by Israeli forces in international waters on the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara.

In truth I have not been to Troy but I do find the effacement of Dogan since his death almost two months ago at once offensive and instructive.

I have little doubt that if the American killed on those ships had been Hedy Epstein, a St. Louis-based Holocaust survivor, or Edward Peck, a former U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, we would have heard a lot more. We would have read the kind of tick-tock reconstructions that the deaths of Americans abroad in violent and disputed circumstances tend to provoke. (Epstein had planned to be aboard the flotilla and Peck was.)

I also have little doubt that if the incident had been different — say a 19-year-old American student called Michael Sandler killed by a Palestinian gunman in the West Bank when caught in a cross-fire between Palestinians and Israelis — we would have been deluged in stories about him.

But a chill descends when you have the combination of Israeli commandos doing the firing, an American with a foreign-sounding Muslim name, and the frenzied pre-emptive arguments of Israel and those among its U.S. supporters who will brook no criticism of the Jewish state.

This chill is a bad thing. Let’s do whatever it takes to find out how Dogan died — and the eight other victims. The Middle East requires more open debate and the dropping of taboos. It needs the leading institutions of American Jewry to encourage broad discussion rather than, as Peter Beinart put it in an important recent essay in The New York Review of Books, checking “their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”

Let’s face it, without the flotilla outcry that allowed the Obama administration to question Israel’s self-defeating suffocation of Gaza, Israel would still be imposing the blockade that handed Hamas control of whatever was left of the Gaza economy. Now that blockade has been eased.

Israeli security agency’s ties to illegal settlers revealed in murder arrest
The National
(7/24/10)

Suspect in murder of four Palestinians was Shin Bet agent

Past This is Hell! guest Jonathan Cook writes …

The arrest by the Israeli internal security service, the Shin Bet, of an Israeli Jew accused of killing at least four Palestinians has thrown a rare light on the secret police, including claims that it tried to enlist the accused to assassinate a Palestinian spiritual leader.

Chaim Pearlman, who was arrested on July 13, has been charged with murdering four Palestinians in Jerusalem and injuring at least seven others in a series of knife attacks that began more than a decade ago. Police are still investigating whether he was involved in additional attacks.

Although Mr Pearlman had been denied access to a lawyer until Friday, since his arrest far-right groups have rapidly come to his aid, waging what the Shin Bet officials have described as “psychological warfare” by releasing damaging details about the case.

Ties between the Shin Bet and illegal settler organisations have come to light after Mr Pearlman’s arrest. The Shin Bet have been cornered into admitting that they recruited Mr Pearlman as an agent in 2000, in the midst of his alleged stabbing spree, despite the fact that he was a known member of Kach, an outlawed group calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from “Greater Israel”.

In addition, Mr Pearlman has also released tape recordings he secretly made of recent conversations with an undercover Shin Bet agent who tried to get Mr Pearlman to incriminate himself.

The agent, who befriended Mr Pearlman and was known as “Dada”, can be heard exhorting him both to go to an “Arab village” to “turn it into a fireworks display” and to execute Sheikh Raed Salah, a leader of the Islamic Movement and a recent participant in the aid flotilla to Gaza that was attacked by Israel.

In the 20 hours of recordings with Dada, some of which have been broadcast on Israeli television, the undercover agent can be heard repeatedly inciting Mr Pearlman to kill Sheikh Salah,

India chooses resources over human rights in relations with Burma
BBC News
(7/25/10)

Burma leader’s India visit draws rights criticism

Burmese military ruler General Than Shwe has arrived in India for a controversial five-day visit, which has been condemned by rights groups.

The junta leader is expected to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on a trip that marks India’s desire to strengthen trade links with its neighbour.

Rights groups have written to Mr Singh saying it was “unbecoming” of a democracy to welcome Gen Than Shwe.

Burma’s junta is accused of widespread human rights abuses.

Until the mid-1990s, Delhi was a supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s imprisoned pro-democracy leader.

But analysts say India’s desire to do business with Burma, reputed to have large reserves of natural gas and precious stones, has since outweighed concerns over human rights.

Detained Thai protesters “were beaten during their arrest”
Bangkok Post
(7/27/10)

Red shirts detained unfairly, say activists

Independent lawyers and rights activists working with red shirt counsel are accusing the authorities of detaining protesters on the flimsiest of evidence and forced confessions.

United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) lawyers and independent observers claim the emergency decree has made red shirt supporters vulnerable to abuse.

Since the military dispersed the red shirt protesters on May 19, police say they have detained 417 of them for violating the decree, illegal possession of weapons or setting fire to buildings.

UDD lawyer Karom Polthaklang said yesterday about half of those detained have been released.

But the group’s legal advisers have not yet worked out the exact number of those still held around the country …

The report cites interviews given by detainees to the volunteer lawyers and the National Human Rights Commission, and says many were detained and then arrested based on flimsy evidence such as blurred pictures which do not give clear identification.

Some were arrested while simply observing violent events when protesters set fire to provincial halls. Some were beaten or threatened by the police to confess.

A detainee said he was convinced by the police to confess in exchange for being charged with a petty misdemeanour only to find himself detained and facing serious criminal charges.

The majority of the detainees had no access to legal counsel and have not been informed of the status of their cases.

Many are detained in crowded prison compounds with those charged with more serious crimes. Access to medical care has been insufficient, the report notes.

Their families have also been affected, living in financial and mental anguish.

Among 144 people detained in these provinces, three have been given jail terms from six months to one year, while 18 have been formally charged by public prosecutors.

Mr Karom said some of those detained in Bangkok prisons were arrested in a similar fashion of forced confession and false charges.

“Some confessed involuntarily, some were beaten during their arrest,” Mr Karom said.