Washington haalt valse Befehl ist Befehl cliché van stal voor nieuwe CIA directeur 'Bloody Gina.....'

Tijdens de Neurenberg processen werd het excuus 'Befehl ist Befehl' onderuit gehaald als onzin, immers je hebt je ten allen tijde aan de (internationale) rechtsorde te houden en als dat niet kan valt het toch echt onder jouw eigen verantwoording als je je schuldig maakt aan (oorlogs-) misdaden..... Ondanks deze juridische geschiedenis, gebruikt Washington dit valse 'Befehl ist Befehl' excuus voor de nieuwe directeur van de CIA, Gina Haspel.......  

Gina Haspel, een psychopaat die niet alleen toezag op martelingen, maar ook voor de lol zelf mensen martelde in een geheime CIA gevangenis in Thailand, is dus door Trump benoemd tot de nieuwe directeur van de CIA....... Dit nadat Mike Pompeo, tot nu directeur van de CIA, een al even grote psychopaat en voorstander van het disfunctionerende martelen, tot minister van buitenlandse zaken werd benoemd....... 

Pompeo heeft meermaals gezegd dat martelen wel effectief is (wetenschappelijk bewezen onjuist) en dat alles volgens de (VS) wet is toegestaan...... (dat is niet zo, maar slimme juristen vinden wel een zwak punt in de wet, waarmee bij wijze van spreken alles gerechtvaardigd kan worden, ook als het bijvoorbeeld gaat om martelen.....)

Lees de volgende stap van de VS in het proces richting het Vierde Rijk (dat al net zo fascistisch zal zijn als het Derde Rijk, dat blijkt ten overvloede weer uit het volgende artikel van The Intercept):

WASHINGTON BREAKS OUT THE “JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS” NAZI DEFENSE FOR CIA DIRECTOR-DESIGNATE GINA HASPEL

Written by Jon Schwarz

Mar. 15

DURING THE NUREMBERG TRIALS after World War II, several Nazis, including top German generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, claimed they were not guilty of the tribunal’s charges because they had been acting at the directive of their superiors.

Ever since, this justification has been popularly known as the “Nuremberg defense,” in which the accused states they were “only following orders.”

The Nuremberg judges rejected the Nuremberg defense, and both Jodl and Keitel were hanged. The United Nations International Law Commission later codified the underlying principle from Nuremberg as “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

This is likely the most famous declaration in the history of international law and is as settled as anything possibly can be.

However, many members of the Washington, D.C. elite are now stating that it, in fact, is a legitimate defense for American officials who violate international law to claim they were just following orders.

View of some of the Nazi leaders accused of war crimes during World War II during the war crimes trial at Nuremberg International Military Tribunal court, held between Nov. 20, 1945 and Oct. 1, 1946. Photo: Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Specifically, they say Gina Haspel, a top CIA officer whom President Donald Trump has designated to be the agency’s next director, bears no responsibility for the torture she supervised during George W. Bush’s administration.

Haspel oversaw a secret “black site” in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel later participated in the destruction of the CIA’s videotapes of some of its torture sessions. There is informed speculation that part of the CIA’s motivation for destroying these records may have been that they showed operatives employing torture to generate false “intelligence” used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who helped capture many Al Qaeda prisoners, recently said that Haspel was known to some at the agency as “Bloody Gina” and that “Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.” (In 2012, in a convoluted case, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer to the press and spent a year in prison.)

Some of Haspel’s champions have used the exact language of the popular version of the Nuremberg defense, while others have paraphrased it.

One who paraphrased it is Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency. In a Wednesday op-ed, Hayden endorsed Haspel as head of the CIA, writing that “Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well.”

Hayden later said on Twitter that Haspel’s actions were “consistent with U.S. law as interpreted by the department of justice.” This is true: In 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department declared in a series of notorious memosthat it was legal for the U.S. to engage in “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were obviously torture. Of course, the actions of the Nuremberg defendants had also been “legal” under German law.

John Brennan, who ran the CIA under President Barack Obama, made similar remarks on Tuesday when asked about Haspel. The Bush administration had decided that its torture program was legal, said Brennan, and Haspel “tried to carry out her duties at CIA to the best of her ability, even when the CIA was asked to do some very difficult things.”

Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd used the precise language of the Nuremberg defense during a Tuesday appearance on CNN when Wolf Blitzer asked him to respond to a statement from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: “The Senate must do its job in scrutinizing the record and involvement of Gina Haspel in this disgraceful program.”

Hurd, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA operative as well, told Blitzer that “this wasn’t Gina’s idea. She was following orders. … She implemented orders and was doing her job.”

Hurd also told Blitzer, “You have to remember where we were at that moment, thinking that another attack was going to happen.”

This is another defense that is explicitly illegitimate under international law. The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which was transmitted to the Senate by Ronald Reagan in 1988, statesthat “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Notably, Blitzer did not have any follow-up questions for Hurd about his jarring comments.

Samantha Winograd, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council and now is an analyst for CNN, likewise used Nuremberg defense language in an appearance on the network. Haspel, she said, “was implementing the lawful orders of the president. … You could argue she should have quit because the program was so abhorrent. But she was following orders.”

Last but not least there’s Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, who issued a ringing defense of Haspel in Politico, claiming she was merely acting “in response to what she was told were lawful orders.”

Remarkably, this perspective has even seeped into the viewpoint of regular journalists. At a recent press conference at which Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul criticized Haspel, a reporter asked him to respond to “the counterargument” that “these policies were signed off by the Bush administration. … They were considered lawful at the time.”

It fell to Paul to make the obvious observation that appears to have eluded almost everyone else in official Washington: “This has been historically a question we’ve asked in every war: Is there a point at which soldiers say ‘no’? … Horrendous things happened in World War II, and people said, well, the German soldiers were just obeying orders. … I think there’s a point at which, even suffering repercussions, that if someone asks you to torture someone that you should say no.”

(Thank you to @jeanbilly545 and Scott Horton for telling me about Hurd and Paul’s remarks, respectively.)

Top photo: Gina Haspel speaks at the 2017 William J. Donovan Award Dinner.

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Voor een begeleidende video, zie het origineel

Zie ook:
'Ondervragers van de VS zijn aanwezig bij martelingen in Jemenitische gevangenissen'

'Rapport maakt duidelijk dat VAE 23 gevangenen hebben vermoord in Jemenitische gevangenissen'

'Michael Hayden (ex-CIA en generaal b.d.): niets mis met martelingen door Gina Haspel.....'

NAVO uitbreiding in Oost-Europa is bewezen tegen gesloten overeenkomst met Rusland.......

Al jaren durven de NAVO, een groot deel van de westerse politici, gesteund door de westerse reguliere (massa-) media, de bevolking van de EU en de VS voor te liegen dat er nooit een overeenkomst is gesloten met Gorbatsjov in 1991, waarin men Rusland beloofde dat de NAVO zich niet uit zou breiden in Oost-Europa, richting Russische grens. 

Terwijl iedereen die zich enigszins heeft verdiept in deze zaak kon weten, dat dit wel degelijk het geval was. Sterker nog: dit was voor Gorbatsjov de voorwaarde om in te stemmen met de vereniging van West- en Oost-Duitsland. Uit meerdere documenten blijkt nu dat het westen Rusland in de jaren 1990/1991 heeft verzekerd dat die NAVO uitbreiding niet zou plaatsvinden in de toekomst........

Dit zet grote vraagtekens bij alle leugens over Russische agressie in Oost-Europa, zo bezien mogen de VS en de EU blij zijn dat Rusland zo verstandig is geweest nooit actie te ondernemen tegen deze VS en NAVO agressie*. Het is nu zelfs zo zot dat de VS dicht op de Russische grens, in Roemenië en Polen, beiden 'NAVO-landen' een raketschild heeft gestationeerd...... Een schild zogenaamd tegen Iraanse raketten, echter die antiraketten kunnen in een mum van tijd voorzien worden van kernkoppen (en dat zijn ze waarschijnlijk al), waarna ze als aanvalsraketten ingezet kunnen worden tegen Rusland en dat op redelijk korte afstand van bijvoorbeeld Moskou.......

Voorts worden er de laatste jaren voortdurend grote NAVO oefening, gehouden langs de Russische grens........ Tel daar nog eens de wil van de VS en Groot-Brittannie bij op, een eerste aanval met kernraketten niet langer uit te sluiten en WOIII ligt binnen schootsafstand.......**

Lees het volgende artikel van Darius Shahtahmasebi over deze zaak (en laat u nooit meer voorliegen door de anti-Russische propagandamachine van oorlogshitsers en dienaren van het vervloekte militair-industrieel complex):

Turns Out Russia Was Right: Declassified Docs Prove NATO Broke Its Promise

December 23, 2017 at 6:03 am

Written by Darius Shahtahmasebi

(ANTIMEDIA) — When the media talks about Russia’s activities in neighboring Europe, Russia is typically portrayed as the aggressor. Russia’s standard response is usually that it has been forced to protect its interests because the U.S. is actively trying to contain the country within a host of NATO allies, which would essentially put American troops and missiles alongside its border despite assurances at the end of the Cold War that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe.

However, western critics are still debating whether such a promise ever existed, as is NATO itself. As a result of this attempt to rewrite history, NATO has continued to expand as far into eastern Europe as possible, with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic all joining in 1999. The alliance has broadened its reach in the years since, ultimately to Russia’s detriment.

In an article for Foreign Affairs in December 2014, Mark Kramer, director of the Harvard Project on Cold War studies, stated he had “examined the declassified negotiating records and concluded that no such promise was ever offered.”

“Mary Elise Sarotte (“A Broken Promise?” September/October 2014) points to my article as an example of the history she intends to correct,” Kramer wrote, “but she provides nothing that would change my judgment about what happened. As I wrote, the question of NATO’s possible expansion eastward arose numerous times during negotiations Gorbachev conducted with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and U.S. President George H. W. Bush. Viewed in context, however, it is clear that they were speaking solely about expanding the alliance into East Germany.” [emphasis added]

Kramer’s assertion is that while it has been previously understood that then-Secretary of State James Baker had assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward” during a meeting that took place on February 9, 1990, the context was that of German reunification, not wider Europe.

However, as the National Interest recently learned, even Kramer’s assessment appears to be incorrect due to the release of some further declassified material.

“The [recently declassified] documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991,” George Washington University National Security Archives researchers Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton wrote in the National Security Archives. “That discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.”

According to the National Interest — and Russia continuously argues — Gorbachev only accepted the proposal for German reunification (which Gorbachev could have vetoed) due to these assurances that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. This sequence of events is similar to how Russia was duped out of using its veto power on a U.N. Security Council Resolution in Libya in 2011 after having received assurances that the NATO coalition would not pursue regime change.

“I believe that your thoughts about the role of NATO in the current situation are the result of misunderstanding,” Major told Gorbachev, according to British Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite’s diary entry of March 5, 1991. “We are not talking about strengthening of NATO. We are talking about the coordination of efforts that is already happening in Europe between NATO and the West European Union, which, as it is envisioned, would allow all members of the European Community to contribute to enhance [our] security.”

The documents also show that Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders received assurances against NATO expansion from Baker; President George H.W. Bush; West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher; West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl; former CIA Director Robert Gates; French leader Francois Mitterrand (who told Gorbachev he was in favor of “gradually dismantling the military blocs”; Margaret Thatcher; British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd; and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner.

Having perused the relevant documents, Savranskaya and Blanton concluded that “Gorbachev went to the end of the Soviet Union assured that the West was not threatening his security and was not expanding NATO.”

We would do well to bear this in mind the next time the U.S. saber-rattles Russia for wanting to protect its borders against NATO aggression. That being said, very few newspapers have paid any headline attention at all to this story or its implications even though it continues to be a major source of conflict between the two countries that hold the majority of the world’s nuclear weapons.

Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo

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*  Al zou je met gemak kunnen stellen dat directe Russische actie (destijds bijna onmogelijk onder de corrupte alcoholist Jeltsin) tegen deze NAVO uitbreiding van meet af aan, heel veel ellende had kunnen voorkomen, ellende waar we nu mee te maken hebben, waar de VS en de NAVO Rusland tarten langs haar grenzen......

** Dit feit kreeg amper aandacht in de reguliere westerse (massa-) media, echter toen Rusland als reactie op deze nieuwe inzet op kernwapens door de VS en GB, ook een eerste aanval met kernwapens niet uit te sluiten, stonden deze zelfde media op de kop en spraken daar schande van....... Je weet wel, dezelfde media die zich onafhankelijk durven te noemen en een grote bek hebben over 'fake news' in de alternatieve media, terwijl ze zelf het ene 'fake bericht' na het andere brengen (neem alleen al de illegale oorlogen van de VS tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië...)......

Zie ook: 'VS gaat wapens leveren aan Oekraïne, puur en alleen om Rusland te schofferen en verder voet aan de grond te krijgen....'

        en: 'Zuid-Koreaanse president Moon Jae-in buiten spel gezet inzake Noord-Korea.....'

        en: 'Rusland waarschuwt VS voor oorlog tegen Noord-Korea'

        en: 'VS bezig met de voorbereiding van een militaire aanval op Noord-Korea..........'

        en: 'Top VS generaal stelt dat er een grote oorlog met Rusland op komst is, ofwel: WOIII......'

        en:  'Zuid-Koreaanse president Moon Jae-in buiten spel gezet inzake Noord-Korea.....'

        en: 'Remco Breuker over 'het Noord-Koreaanse gevaar' en dwangarbeid in de EU.....'

        en: 'VS oorlog tegen China bijna onvermijdelijk..........'

        en: 'Bernhard Hammelburg veegt Nobelprijswinnaar Beatrice Fihn de mantel uit, zelfs voordat hij wist wat ze te berde bracht.......'