The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Japan's wartime brothels were wrong, says 91-year-old veteran
- Man linked to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI in Florida
- U.S. military lawyers put more pressure on Guantanamo
| Japan's wartime brothels were wrong, says 91-year-old veteran Posted: 22 May 2013 08:54 PM PDT [unable to retrieve full-text content]SAGAMIHARA, Japan (Reuters) - When Masayoshi Matsumoto joined the Japanese army in 1943 and was sent to occupied China as a medic, he thought he was taking part in a righteous war to free Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism. | ||
| Man linked to Boston bombing suspect killed by FBI in Florida Posted: 22 May 2013 08:17 PM PDT ORLANDO, Fla./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Chechen immigrant who was being questioned about his possible links to one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was shot and killed by a federal agent in Florida on Wednesday after he suddenly turned violent, the FBI said.
A friend of the dead man identified him to Reuters as 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev, who had lived in Boston and knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers suspected of planting two bombs at the marathon on April 15, killing three people and injuring 264. NBC News reported that Todashev confessed to his involvement in an unsolved 2011 triple homicide in a Boston suburb that investigators believe was drug related, citing law enforcement officials. CBS News, citing law enforcement sources, said Todashev implicated himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the triple murder during the questioning by agents on Tuesday night. Reuters could not immediately confirm those details. Authorities were investigating possible connections between Tsarnaev, who died in a shootout with police, and the 2011 incident. Three men, including a close friend of Tsarnaev, were found stabbed in the neck in an apartment on September 12, 2011, in Waltham, Massachusetts. News reports said marijuana was strewn over their bodies. Wednesday's incident took place at an apartment complex near the Universal Studios theme park, where the FBI and members of other law enforcement agencies were interviewing the man about the marathon bombing. "A violent confrontation was initiated by the individual," the FBI said. A special agent, it said, "acting on the imminent threat posed by the individual, responded with deadly force. The individual was killed and the special agent was transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries." The possibility that Tsarnaev was connected to the Waltham murders is "being looked at seriously," said Republican Representative Peter King, who serves on the House Homeland Security Committee. Other U.S. officials confirmed the investigation involved Tsarnaev's possible role. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar are suspected of setting off two pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon finish line. Dzhokhar is being held at a prison hospital west of Boston awaiting trial on charges that carry the possibility of the death penalty. 'NOTHING TO HIDE' Todashev knew Tsarnaev because both were mixed martial-arts fighters in Boston but had no connection to the bombing, a friend of Todashev, Khusen Taramov, told Reuters in an interview. Todashev was tailed by law enforcement agents since the day the Tsarnaev brothers were identified as suspects in the Boston bombing and called in for questioning repeatedly, he said. "They called him a lot. They would just call and question him," Taramov said, adding he and his friend had met with FBI agents on several occasions. Asked about the 2011 triple homicide, he said it never came up in the meetings with the FBI that he personally attended. He said Todashev never mentioned the murders either. "He had nothing to hide. Everything he knew, he told them," Taramov said. Taramov said he met FBI agents on Tuesday night outside the apartment complex where his friend was killed but was told by the FBI to leave shortly before the shooting happened around midnight. He added that Todashev, who was in the United States as a legal permanent resident, had been planning a trip back to Russia where his parents live. Law enforcement officials have also interviewed another person of Chechen origin, ex-rebel Musa Khadzhimuratov, at his home in New Hampshire, the New York Times reported last week. Khadzhimuratov, who had served as a bodyguard to a top Chechen separatist leader during the region's civil war with Russia more than a decade ago, also had contact with Tsarnaev. Todashev was arrested on May 4 and charged with aggravated battery after getting into a fight with another man over a parking space at an Orlando shopping mall, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Office in Orlando. The man, who suffered a split upper lip and had several teeth knocked out of place, did not to press charges against Todashev, who was released from jail on a $3,500 bond, a sheriff's spokeswoman said. Before the Boston bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been listed on multiple U.S. government databases, including a master list of potential terrorism suspects. U.S. authorities also were asked twice by Russia to investigate Tsarnaev for possible involvement with Islamic militants, U.S. officials have said. On Wednesday afternoon, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was scheduled to meet in Washington with Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Russia's interior minister. The meeting's agenda was unclear, but U.S. investigators are anxious to learn what Russian authorities knew about the Tsarnaevs and about what Tamerlan Tsarnaev did during a trip to Russia last year. (Additional reporting by Jane Sutton and Kevin Gray; Editing by David Adams, Tom Brown, David Gregorio, Lisa Shumaker and Stacey Joyce) Copyright © 2013 Reuters | ||
| U.S. military lawyers put more pressure on Guantanamo Posted: 22 May 2013 07:30 PM PDT MIAMI (Reuters) - Military and civilian lawyers for prisoners at the Guantanamo naval base urged U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to improve conditions for detainees, putting more pressure on the Obama administration to make good its promise to close the camp.
The plea from 18 lawyers representing "high-value" prisoners came before a speech by President Barack Obama on Thursday when he will address counterterrorism measures such as drone strikes and closing Guantanamo. Obama is struggling to emerge from a series of domestic scandals that critics say show his administration is secretive and bullies the media and political opponents. Thursday's speech at the National Defense University in Washington is meant as an effort to show he is eager to protect civil liberties. Calls on Obama to close the Guantanamo Bay camp have risen as a hunger strike at the U.S. naval base in Cuba lingers. Prisoners are in their fourth month of the strike to protest the failure to resolve their fate after 11 years of detention. More than 100 people have joined the protest and 31 have lost so much weight that they are being force-fed liquid nutrients through tubes inserted into their noses and down to their stomachs to keep them alive. It is the largest hunger strike at the camp in several years. "While the hunger strike continues to increase in scope and severity, there is much you can do, right now, to improve the quality of life for all the prisoners," the lawyers said in their letter to Hagel, which was dated earlier this week and seen by Reuters on Wednesday. They said that detention practices at Guantanamo violated the Geneva Conventions, the international treaties that govern the treatment of captives during armed conflict. Camp officials spy on lawyers' supposedly private meetings with their clients, seize confidential legal documents and harass prisoners with daily cell shakedowns and degrading bodily searches, the lawyers said. Obama has promised repeatedly to close Guantanamo, but opposition in Congress, which controls funding for transferring detainees out of the camp, has stopped him. He will call again for Guantanamo to be emptied when he speaks on Thursday and will announce a number of specific steps to advance that goal, a White House official said. As part of its push for transparency, the administration acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that it had killed four Americans, including militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. One effort that Obama might make on Guantanamo is to name an official to head the transfer of detainees. Of the 86 prisoners cleared for transfer or release, 56 are Yemenis. "Keeping (Guantanamo) open is not efficient. It's not effective. And it's not in the interests of our national security. And I think senior members of the military have testified to that fact," White House spokesman Jay Carney told a briefing. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Obama administration was set to restart transfers of detainees from Guantanamo in the coming weeks, starting the process of closing the camp down. 'HIGH-VALUE' PRISONERS The lawyers who wrote to Hagel represent the captives previously held in secret CIA prisons, some of whom are facing death penalty trials by military commission for allegedly plotting the September 11 hijacked plane attacks and the deadly 2000 bombing of a U.S. warship, the USS Cole, off Yemen. Army Captain Jason Wright, a lawyer for alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said that unlike other prisoners, the former CIA captives were held in isolation tantamount to solitary confinement and prevented from contacting their families. The U.S. government maintains it has the right to hold them forever even if they are acquitted at trial and to keep holding other captives whom it does not intend to try. "So now these men are facing the indefinite prospect of detention for the remainder of their lives," Wright said. He said Mohammed "has been observing a religious fast for quite some time," but apparently was not among those being force-fed. Nearly 800 men were rounded up after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and held at Guantanamo on suspicion of involvement with al Qaeda and the Taliban. More than half of the 166 remaining prisoners have been cleared for transfer or release, but efforts to repatriate them have stalled. Shutting Guantanamo is fraught with difficult legal and political questions. An aide to House Armed Services Chairman Republican Howard McKeon said that if Obama was trying to close Guantanamo, he needed to give "concrete answers on what the president intends to do with those terrorists who are too dangerous to be released but cannot be tried; how he would ensure that transferred detainees can't rejoin the fight; and what he will do to detain and interrogate new terrorist captures or those very dangerous terrorists still held in Afghanistan." Camp officials say 103 detainees were taking part in the hunger strike. One detainee was in the hospital but did not have life-threatening conditions, a Guantanamo spokesman, Army Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House said on Wednesday. "The biggest difference between this hunger strike and the ones previous is the ones earlier were for living conditions and other tangibles, whereas this one focuses on indefinite detention," House said. An investigation ordered by the Obama administration in 2009 found that the Guantanamo prison complied with the humane treatment standards required by the Geneva Conventions. But the lawyers said conditions had worsened during the past year and accused the current detention camp commanders of waging a campaign to dehumanize the prisoners through isolation, force-feedings and collective punishment of hunger strikers. House said camp officials do not comment on detainee allegations made through their attorneys but provide safe, humane, legal and transparent care of those detained there. (Additional reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Alistair Bell and Lisa Shumaker) Copyright © 2013 Reuters |
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