This Guardian story, this Rolling Stone article, and a number of other major pieces from 2004 discuss the official memorandum which describes the crime. We are told that a translator working for the Army -- identified as Abu Hamid -- raped an Iraqi youngster in Amrican custody. An American female soldier (the divine Lynndie, perhaps?) ran the video camera.
Yeah, this is old news . But it is also new news, because we have a new administration -- an administration which has done nothing to investigate the crime and which still keeps the visual evidence under wraps.
Why won't this "reformer" president tell us what happened to Abu Hamid? If Team Obama is going to maintain the coverup, then they must accept partial ownership of this atrocity.
Ah, but the tale gets stranger. This report, which I consider quite credible, tells us that "Abu Hamid" is actually a fellow named Adel Nakhla-- and that his employer was none other than the Titan Corporation.
Long-time readers know that Titan keeps popping up in the damnedest places. For example, Titan played a key role in the notorious affair of the Skyway coke jet, found on the tarmac in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine on board.
Between 2003 and 2005 Titan Corp and a group of allied firms combined to issue a steady drumbeat of phony press releases, announcing multi-million contracts to purchase products which didn't exist, and major deals which never took place, as part of a concerted effort to "pump up" the price of stock in SkyWay Aircraft of St Petersburg, FL.(Those words were written by Daniel Hopsicker, not by me.) I've never understood why a massive defense contractor like Titan involved itself with a pump-and-dump fraud scheme.
The goal was to inflate SkyWay’s stock price--the pump--in advance of a massive sell-off--the dump-- by company insiders.
So: Titan, employer of a homosexual rapist in military fatigues, invested in a fake company implicated in coke importation. If the defense thing doesn't work out for Titan, they can always cater parties in West Hollywood.
Under Obama, as under Bush, Titan remains untouchable and unmentionable. Why?
7 comments:
One way or the other, the rape should be investigated by the DOJ or, the only place justice seems to have much meaning, the Spanish Judiciary.
Kovar, Cunningham, Chams. Turning over the Titan rock could raise too many questions on too many issues.
I do not recall that Obama's promised reforms included passing ex post facto laws (as the Constitution prohibits) that criminalize foreign nationals' acts on foreign soil.
I mention that because I doubt that there is any current law that applies to the situation he is said to be covering up and therefore now co-responsible for.
The proper jurisdiction should be the Iraqi government's, although that is likely also not available, per the Paul Bremer departure dictats that mandated absolute immunity for all coalition acts from Iraqi governmental prosecution.
XI
XI: You don't know that he is a foreign national. He has a foreign-sounding name, and he was in (or employed by) the American military. He was wearing the uniform. That's all you know.
If a boy in American custody is raped with the assent of the captors, and if American military personnel are gleefully filming the incident, then of course both Bush and Obama had and have a responsibility to bring the perps to justice.
Bring that homosexual terrorist to justice!
I am not certain that he is a foreign national, no. I infer that's the case because of his job. He was a translator.
We know that the worst abuse took place in cell blocks in Abu Ghraib given over to the command of private contractors. If working for the US meant he worked for the private contractors, he is immune from the UCMJ, foreign national or not. That is the only US law with effect in that theater.
Seymour Hersch said the screams of the boy were on tape, but I've not known him to say the scene had been captured on video. It may have been a miked fixed camera on tape, with the incident off lens. But there is no claim that anyone videotaped this.
XI
You probably haven't heard much about the Titan Corporation lately primarily because it was purchased by major defense and security grifter L-3 Communications in 2005 after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. L-3 paid "just under $2 billion" for Titan according to The Washington Post. It operates as the "Titan Group" of L-3.
The Project on Government Oversight's (POGO) Federal Contractor Misconduct Database lists Titan parent-company L-3 as number 7 on their list http://www.contractormisconduct.org/index.cfm/1,73,221,html?ContractorID=37&ranking=7 for the company's questionable practices. These include: False Claims (Iraq Reconstruction); Bribery (Baghdad, Iraq); Court Martial of a Civilian Contractor in Iraq for "corrupt practices"; and the "Al-Janabi v. Stefanowicz" case brought against Titan, now L-3, and CACI International for torture at Abu Ghraib prison by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Aside from Daniel Hopsicker (Mad Cow Morning News) and Bill Conroy's (Narco News Bulletin) reporting on the Cocaine Planes scandal, you'll find nothing in the so-called "mainstream media" linking these corporate grifters to the international drugs trade.
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