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"A whirlwind will sweep them away, and their
sacrifices will bring them shame." - Hosea 4:19
Before
humans were warriors they were hunters,
but before they were
hunters they were gathers.
Caleb E. Finch
identified eight genes that evolved in human
beings to manage saturated fat, cholesterol
and other hazards of
flesh eating. One of the genes
is called apoE. A particular form,
known as apoE3, evolved in humans
some time after the divergence of
humans. ApoE3 is known to help protect human
beings against
heart disease. The seven other genes help
protect humans against infectious agents carried in meat and against overdose of iron and
other metals that are relatively
abundant in flesh compared with
plants.
In a civilized
society the taking of flesh is understood to be a necessary
evil.
In
my youth, being overly empathetic, the
violence of
man against
man overwhelmed me. I
had naturally assumed that
human life was
inviolable. I was shocked into the
reality that men with power,
using the excuse of expediency, used
human life and
threw human life
away as if it had no intrinsic value.
Purposeful destruction of human life was
inconceivable until I understood that men
justify their actions of murder, robbery,
rape, war,
genocide and
waste because the ‘other' is only a
thing. Categorizing
conscious entities, in this case humans,
as objects is the way in which
animals are commonly thought to
perceive
reality.
"War is only possible by
reducing the 'other' to bumper sticker
slogans that rob them of their humanity. War becomes impossible once you
understand that the 'other' has humanity
and feels sorrow, joy and fear." - Jeff Warner
Domination by human
predators occurs in response to the false need to "pacify" those
branded as
evil doers.
Moral self-congratulation is an
addiction of American aristocracy which pats
itself on the back in narcissistic
satisfaction over it's lean mean manner of
doing business - the marketing of the
image of the perfect '
American hero' battling evil doers to
protect the 'American Way of Life'.
In
American fantasies the perfect
American hero always succeeds in
conquering the 'evil
opposition'.
This
warped evil
tribal fantasy, based on the law of the tribal warrior far removed from
civilized people's manner of
living, is
branded onto the
minds of Americans in an attempt to militarize
them.
The propaganda machine conditions the
American people to recognize the
other as deviant - as an
evil doer - as a menace to the status quo.
This ideology may have been necessary for
primitive tribes in the past to ensure the
survival of the
tribe but is antithetical to a
civilized culture.
The attitude of
ideological superiority proscribes a
social law in which
it is acceptable for individual members of the social group to commit violent
acts in the name of and for the benefit of the social group.
Glorification of violence,
especially frequently used institutionalized
violence, is not what
citizens of a ‘free', ‘just'
and compassionate society would expect to be common traits of the
culture's institutional establishments.
The
myth that institutionalized violence to 'shock and awe' the evil doer into submission, when
expedient, is causing the
American psyche to become ever more
predatory.
"Our responsibility to
history is already
clear: to answer these attacks and
rid the Earth of evil." George
W. Bush, from The National Security Strategy of the United States of
America 2002George W.
Bush sees the branding of
fraternity pledges with a red hot coat hanger
as 'character building' - a desirable 'cute' ritual.
Weapons of mass
destruction under the hall table? Four teenage fraternity pledges are
paddled so hard in a hazing at Cal State LA that they had to hospitalized due
to internal injuries including kidney failure.
With the recent new addition to American
entertainment of the
bloody sport of ‘ultimate fighting',
'extreme fighting' or 'cage fighting', propagandized as mixed martial arts, the
spectacle of savagery continues to gain
adherents.
We can thank the Ashkanzi Robert Meyrowitz for bringing
extreme fighting to America with the Ultimate Fighting Championship in
1993. Robert Meyrowitz first sold extreme fighting to pay-per-view providers
through his company Semaphore Entertainment Group. Robert Meyrowitz also
brought Ozzy Osbourne into America's living room.
"American kids want to relate to something.
American kids want something edgy.
American kids are looking for identity,
something that makes them feel tough." -
Jeff Clark, president North County Fight Club 01/07
Violence on broadcast
television is approaching "epidemic
proportions," surging 75% over the last six years. The 2005-06 season was the
most violent since tracking
began in 1998."The debate is over? For the last three decades, the
one predominant finding in research on the mass media is that exposure to media
portrayals of violence increases aggressive behavior in children." - American
Psychiatric Association
"Media violence may cause aggressive and
antisocial behavior, desensitize viewers to future violence and increase
perceptions that they are living in a mean and dangerous world. Children
younger than 8 cannot uniformly discriminate between real life and
fantasy/entertainment. They quickly learn that violence is an acceptable
solution to resolving even complex problems, particularly if the aggressor is
the hero." - American Academy of Pediatrics
"Violence is like the
nicotine in cigarettes. The reason why the media has to pump ever more violence
into us is because we've built up a tolerance. In order to get the same high,
we need ever-higher levels. The television industry has gained its market share
through an addictive and toxic ingredient." - Lt. Col. David
Grossman
"The cumulative impact of violence-laden imagery can lead to a
"mean-world" perspective, in which viewers have an unrealistically dark view of
life." - The Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 1996
"People are
concerned about this race to the bottom. They wonder if there even is a bottom.
I do, too." - Federal Communications Commission, Michael J. Copps 01/07
Americans
generally do not regard themselves as arrogant, abusive,
violent, mean, petty and ignoble. As a matter of empirical,
verifiable fact, however, the best
social
scientific evidence suggests
otherwise. Stanford psychology
professor Philip G. Zimbardo initiated an
experiment in which participating
Stanford students were designated either as
prisoners or guards, with guards told to maintain order. After only a few
days, the project had to be terminated
prematurely because the guards were, with no
apparent motivation
other than fulfilling their roles,
becoming uncomfortably abusive toward the prisoners.
Yale
psychology professor Stanley Milgram told
subjects to give electric shocks to a victim
in a learning experiment. As the
victim - an actor in
another room who was not actually
being shocked - gave incorrect
answers, the participants were asked to turn
the voltage up, even to where the dial read "," a
point at which the victim could be
heard screaming.
Although often reluctant, two-thirds of the subjects continued to follow orders
to administer shocks.
"The jail environment is so corrosive that it is
liable to turn any young guard, inexperienced
man or woman, into a cynical authoritarian ready to harass, intimidate, bully
and physically punish any person who does not immediately follow orders.
Dehumanized inmates and dehumanized
jailers are a threat to everyone when they
walk the streets." - Steve Schlein
"You ever hear of emotional
release? I'm talking about people having a good
time."- Rush Limbaugh commenting on the Abu Ghraib
prison torture scandal
The Abu
Ghraib prison
torture scandal sheds light on the common
reality of American incarceration.
Abu Ghraib mirrors the
American prison system - underfunded,
inadequately supervised, lacking
civilian oversight, unaccountable and tolerant of inmate abuse.
"The
commander in chief and those under
him authorized a systematic regime of torture. A government policy was
promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of
Military Justice were disregarded. There is no longer any doubt as to whether
the current administration has committed war crimes." - Retired Army Maj. Gen.
Antonio Taguba, commissioned by the Pentagon to investigate the abuses at
Abu Ghraib
"I'm not willing to purchase my "security" at the cost of condoning the
abduction and torture of innocent people."
- Deborah Millias From 1996 to 2001, the Parents Television Council estimates,
there were 102 torture scenes on TV. From
2002 to 2005, there were 624, and the torturers were increasingly
heroes rather than villains. The hit Fox action
drama "24" featured 67 torture scenes in
it's first 5 seasons and most of those depicted torture being used by
"heroic" American counter-terrorist
agents.
"Intentionally or not - and for better
and for worse - fiction can
play a real role in the construction of
political reality. Amid the global
war on terror, those
in Hollywood and those in Washington would do well to take heed of this fact
about fiction." - Kelly M.
Greenhill
Using a television propaganda to get
Americans to approve of
torture is wrong!!! On May 15, 2007 Republican presidential debate canidates for
president were presented with a hypothetical terrorism scenario:
"I am
looking for Jack Bauer at this point." - Tom Tancredo
Rudolph W. Giuliani said interrogators should use "any method they can
think of" on suspects to find out about an
impending attack. His statement was met with thunderous applause.
In a
recent survey of college students nearly
44% of them supported the use of torture,
and 62% backed the employment of "soft" torture methods, including
"water-boarding."
A Christian Science Monitor survey done shortly after
the 9/11 attacks put the level of support for torture at 32%.
"Let every one turn from his evil way and from the
violence that is in his hands." - Jonah 3:8
In Americastate and federal legislatures, with the
complicity of federal courts,
have
continually trimmed avenues of legal redress for
inmates subject to abuse.
The American public has been fed a
myth that prisoners were coddled, and accepted on
faith that
inmates were treated fairly. The
public myth has only been interrupted when graphic
images materialized or by
guards unable to cope with the
violence who spoke out.
In
2004 images of California
Youth Authority wards were
locked up in cages for as much as 23 hours a
day were broadcast.
"A
staff member allows four wards into a locked cell to beat a youth she
mistakenly assumed stole her cellphone (which she found later under her car),
then left the youth without medical care and suborned false statements to cover the misconduct, and all that
happens is that she is fired? Where are the criminal charges which should include conspiracy,
aggravated assault, child abuse
and perjury?" - Jay Bradshaw
"How do you rehabilitate a
young
kid in trouble? Not with beatings!
Not with sexual assault! Not with
solitary confinement for months at a
time! That
category of treatment just
perpetuates the cycle of
abuse. Nine out of 10
kids get in trouble again after their
release from the California Youth
Authority. The only thing that's going
to change the lives of young offenders is closing California
Youth Authority
prisons down and replacing them with
real rehabilitation. California
Youth Authority
prisons are a dismal
failure and it is time to shut them down."- Deborah Carlos,
leader of
Books
Not Bars.
In
the Eddie Dillard case a paper trail was revealed in regard to one prolific
cell rapist
responsible for more than
30 reported incidents of attempted or completed sexual
assaults at six different California prisons. Unruly
prisoners were assigned to a cell with
this sexual predator as guard mandated
punishment for unruliness with
guards full knowledge they would be
raped.
In the summer of 2002 Ramon
Gavira, 43, arrested for drunk driving, beat himself nearly to death
before hanging himself according to Los Angeles sheriff's deputies. According
to deputies Ramon Gavira broke six of his own ribs, his collarbone, and beat
himself causing bruises on the torso, arms, legs, feet and internal
bleeding. Ramon Gavira also had a broken hyoid, broken thyroid cartilage, and
bleeding in his eyes meaning that he manually strangled himself before
hanging himself. If there is one thing that Los Angeles sheriff's deputies,
particularly Anel Manriquez, will not tolerate it is a grown man crying and
saying he just wants to go home! In May 2007 the Los Angeles Board of
Supervisors agreed to pay $750,000 to Ramon Gavira's family because he
strangled himself.
"I was appalled to read about the
torture and death of Ramon Gavira in Los Angeles County
Jail. As outrage mounts around the Earth over
torture at
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and
secret Central Intelligence Agency
prisons, now we
know that right here we have deadly, home
grown torture." -
Stephen F. Rohde
"Prisons are built to house people that are a
threat to society, not to be houses of
torture." - Ann LoganIn
November of 2005 Chadwick Shane Cochran, a mentally ill
individual, was beaten to
death when Los Angeles County Deputies
knowingly placed him with Level 9 threats held on charges of
murder, kidnaping and
carjacking.
Chadwick Shane Cochran
expected to be beat. Michael Cochran, his father
and a Baptist minister, said his son Shane was unruly and chaffed under his
authority so he punished him, "I paddled his butt, yes I did, and it was black
and blue."
"I wonder how many of those enrapitured
devotees of James C. Dobson,
founder of Focus on the Family, realize that he was directly responsible
for the inhumane beatings they received as children. In his 1970s books,
"Dare to Discipline" and "The Strong-Willed Child,"
James C. Dobson argues that it
is a biblical obligation to "break the will" of children by beating them into
submission. We now see the
results of his "psychological"
ministry: hoards of human
sheep with broken wills, who cannot
think, who follow
leaders unquestioningly and who pass the
trauma to their own children and our nation. One need only read
Philip
Greven's book, "Spare the Child," or
Justin
A. Frank's "Bush on the Couch" to see how the
religious roots of physical
punishment, advocated by the
likes of James C. Dobson have
shaped our leaders and threaten to
destroy our country." - Alitta Kullman
The mentally ill Chadwick Shane Cochran
offended two violent Latino gang members who promptly beat him to death.
Imagine the 'astonishment' of the deputies
when they returned and found that Chadwick Shane Cochran, charged with unlawful
possession of a firearm (a firearm that
had been given to him by his landlady), had been beaten to
death!
Chadwick Shane Cochran was
handed a death sentence by the deputies
involved!
"It's never easy looking forward
through the rain
Traveling backwards with my friend called
pain.
Torn and tattered from this
road called life
Scarred by
memories that cut like a knife."
- Chadwick
Shane Cochran
Daniel Lindini, Ralph Contreras
and Roxanne Fowler punched, kicked and struck California state
prisoner James Monroe, shackled with leg
irons, to death. James Monroe had refused to
comply with deputies so Daniel Lindini, Ralph Contreras and Roxanne Fowler
helped him comply.
James Monroe died of blunt
force trauma. A coroner's autopsy ruled James
Monroe's death a homicide.
Kim
Valasquez was awaiting arraignment on charges of burglary in a Monterey County
jail when he was viciously attacked in May
of 2006. Kim Valasquez had to be airlifted to San Jose Medical Center in
critical condition. Bail of $60 thousand was waived and Kim Valasquez was
released on his own recognizance so that Monterey County would not be
responsible for his medical expenses. Medical expenses that were directly
related to his incarceration.
John Derek Chamberlain possessed child
pornography. For this reprehensible act John Derek Chamberlain was given the
death sentence by his Orange County Deputy Sheriff jailers. Inmates stripped
and beat John Derek Chamberlain displacing 43 ribs. Inmates repeatedly
sodomized John Derek Chamberlain between beatings, urinating and spitting on
him. The guard in charge watched "Cops" on television and played video games
while John Derek Chamberlain was being tortured and murdered.
"Inmates
do run the jail system." - Phillip Le, Orange County Deputy Sheriff
"As long as
inmates are warehoused like canned goods,
without any positive outlets, hopelessness and
despair will continue to feed the
vicious
cycle of violence and
mistrust that threatens the safety of
correctional staff and inmates alike." -
Sandra Herwerth
Chris Penley, 15 years old, held a pellet gun to his
neck saying he was either going to kill someone or
die. So Mike Weippert, a lieutenant sheriff's deputy, obliged by shooting Chris
Penley dead.
Martin Anderson, 14, was
just trying to have some fun so he went joyriding in his
grandmother's car. In the spring of 2006
the state of Florida sent Martin Anderson to "boot camp" were he suffocated at
the hands of "instructors". State mandated
"behavioral modification" caused the death of
Martin Anderson, sentenced to death for
joyriding in his grandma's car.
"My program for
educating youth is hard.
Weakness must be hammered
away." - Adolf Hitler
American laws reward
violent
law enforcers! Jeremy Morse, a Inglewood
police officer, was awarded $1.6
million after he was reprimanded
for lifting Donovan Jackson, a teenager, off the ground, slamming him onto a car hood and punching
him in the face.
"Of the 215 people exonerated by DNA evidence more than
one-third were between the ages of 14 and 22 when they were arrested." - the
Innocence project
"In the 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a
small number of rogue states that, while different in important ways, share a
number of attributes. These states: brutalize their own people and squander
their national resources for the personal gain of the
rulers."
- The National Security Strategy of the United
States of America 2002
Americans skewed
vision of reality is rooted in the
idea of American 'exceptionalism,
of
our unique mission to inspire and
transform the Earth.
This fantasy has been forwarded by:
Abraham Lincoln, who spoke of the
America as the "last best
hope of Earth"; John F.
Kennedy urged us to "pay any price, bear any
burden, meet any hardship"; Ronald
Reagan cast America as a "shining city on a hill, "
illuminating the
Earth.
The fighting in
Fallouja, Iraq is a good example of
that skewed vision of
reality. Four American mercenaries were
killed and their bodies mutilated. In retaliation
the American military pounded
Fallouja, Iraq with
warplanes, gun ships
firing 'depleted' uranium amunition and white phosphorous. Hundreds of
Iraqis died, many of them civilian.
Americans shrug those casualties off as the
justifiable execution of
terrorists and
terrorist supporters just as
Americans did of the
Vietnamese, supposed
Viet Gong sympathizers like Kim Phuc, 12, who was hit
with napalm, that died in the jungles of
Vietnam.
George W. Bush
signed an executive order on September
17, 2001, on the advice of Alberto
Gonzales, that authorized the use of ‘enhanced
interrogation technics' in
Orwellian terms or
torture in
common
language.
One of the
‘enhanced interrogation
techniques' is the ‘Palestine hanging' were the
victim is hung from the wall or ceiling by
his wrists which are hand cuffed behind
his back. This results are nearly the same as crucifixion, Jesus' fate.
Another ‘enhanced
interrogation technique' is
‘water boarding' were the
victim is repeatedly dunked under
water and his/her lungs are filled to the
point of drowning.
"Through acquaintance with cruelty, finally
accommodating themselves to it or even administering it, the citizenry, the
media and the politicians have become insensible to
horror. Years of conditioning to abuse and
war have had a numbing effect. So
George W. Bush's advocacy of an
"alternate set of procedures" for detainees gets a pass. The Democrats'
official response, a pass. The McCain compromise, a pass masquerading as
courageous dissent. Public reaction to legislating indefinite detention, the
admissibility of hearsay, prosecutions based on torture, a pass. As at
Abu Ghraib, up is down, day is
night." - JoAnn Wypijewski
Captain Ian Fishback, of the Army's 82nd Airborne
Division, witnessed detainees in Fallouja being tortured. A sergeant, in the same
command, reported to
Human Rights Watch that
"we would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, pull them down
and kick dirt on them." Another
sergeant witnessed a
soldier tell a
prisoner "to grab a pole and to bend over"
and then he "broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger (a metal
baseball bat)." As well all three witnessed kicks to
prisoner's faces, chests and abdomens as
well as chemical compounds poured onto
eyes and skin.
Captain Ian Fishback stated that
torture was being meted out at the behest
of military intelligence to soften
prisoners up for interrogation
while Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling the
Congressional Armed Services Committee that the
military was obeying the
rules of the Geneva Convention.
"I was immediately concerned that the
army was taking part in a
lie to the Congress, which would have been a
clear violation of the Constitution.
Interrogation techniques that
violated the Geneva Convention found their way into
army systems. The problem was
systemic, and it was
widespread." - ,"
Captain Ian Fishback
Alberto Gonzales as attorney general publicly
promoted the use of torture.
"I will be closely watching the testimony of
Alberto Gonzales before the Senate
Judiciary Committee for two main reasons: to
hear him finally tell the
truth and to hear and see why it has taken weeks of cramming to
prepare the highest justice
official in America to tell the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth." - Dorian De
Wind
"In life, very few things are truly
black and white. Torture happens to be one.
The administration of George W. Bush has shamed this
country with their policies of
torture,
secret
prisons and proposed "tribunals" that fall
far short of anything any American would
recognize as justice."- Gary E. Kaminski
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali's, born in the
America, confessed of making plans to
assassinate the president, hijack aircraft and
providing material support of al-Qa`ida(a splinter group of
the syndicate of the soulless) when
tortured by Saudi interrogators. A doctor
and a psychiatrist both testified that Ahmed Omar Abu Ali's account was
consistent with having been tortured.
"It serves as a clear to all that
terrorists can and will be brought to
justice." - U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi
was alleged to be a high-ranking
al-Qa`ida
official who was captured in late 2001
in Pakistan.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was holding out so
George Tenet director of the Central Intelligence Agency
took over Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi interrogation.
Central Intelligence Agency .
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi disappeared. Ibn al-Shaykh
al-Libi was 'water-boarded' then forced to
remain standing overnight in a cold
cell, where he was repeatedly soaked with icy water. Then interrogators threatened to
kill his family.
Under torture, Ibn al-Shaykh
al-Libi, 29 , finally broke. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi claimed to be a "senior
terrorist operative" who was offered
chemical/biological weapons training for
al-Qa`ida associates in
Iraq. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was
desperate to stop the water-boarding torture so he made up information. A
Defense Intelligence Agency memo warned that Ibn
al-Shaykh al-Libi 's information was "misleading as he may be describing
scenarios that he knows will retain
interrogators interests."
In March 2008, a Pentagon sponsored study
entitled Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi
Documents, based on the review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents
captured after the 2003 US invasion found no direct connection between Saddam's
regime and al-Qa`ida.
"It is
impossible to reconcile how George W.
Bush can even remotely claim to be Christian and, with the same mouth,
suggest that waterboarding is legal. Talk about the ultimate double-speak.
Never mind the reality that international treaties, ones America is
a signatory to, state that such techniques constitute
torture and consequently make it illegal.
What's truly astounding are the number of so-called Christians who line up
behind this mockery, in their lame attempts to justify behavior that is not
on1y illegal but clearly immoral. Spare us the "ticking bomb" justification.
This is brutality, plain and simple." - Elizabeth Broyles
"Waterboarding as been referred to as "simulated drowning." Since the
technique involves filling a person's lungs with water, it is plainly no
simulation but is in fact drowning. This particular form of
torture sometimes results in death, and the
cause of death is drowning, not simulated drowning. Victims do not simulate
death. They die, pure and simple." - James Caufield
"I am amazed by how
George W. Bush continues to suggest that
waterboarding is not torture. You just need
to look at the fact that the American organized the tribunals that convicted
Japanese soldiers for waterboarding Allied military personnel and civilians
during World War II. How could it be torture then but not now?" - Mary Shaw
"Consistent with previous historical prosecution of
torture as a war crime, any member of the
George W. Bush administration who has
either participated in or facilitated waterboarding should be prosecuted to the
full extent of the law." - Stephen Burns
"The next time the American government boasts about "confessions"
made by detainees held at Guantanamo Bay for several years,
remember the "confessions" made by
British sailors after only a few days of custody in Iran." - Stephen
Rohde"Arguing for permission to use "enhanced" interrogation
techniques, otherwise known as torture, Central Intelligence Agency
Chief Michael V. Hayden warns congress, "If you create a box, we will play inside the box without
exception," which in his view would "increase
the to
America." The box he rails against is the
rule of law as set down by
international treaty and Congress.
Allowing the Central
Intelligence Agency to act outside that box poses a greater and more
concrete to our founding
principles than the hypothetical threats he and the administration hope to
thwart. Finally, why aren't the people who commit these crimes prosecuted?" -
John De Simio 02/08
Lawrence
Wilkerson, a top aide to former secretary of state
Colin L. Powell, claimed
Dick Cheney's office,
Donald H. Rumsfeld aides and
others argued
"George W. Bush does not get to
pick and choose which laws he wants to follow.
George W. Bush is a
president, not a king." -
Senator Russell D. Feingold
above the
lawThe whole
truth came out in July of 2007. The
egomaniac
George W. Bush is indeed
above the law. All
George W. Bush has to do is
assign a criminal task to an
underling, say for example I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, have the underling commit the
crime and then pardon or commute that
underling's sentence if convicted of the crime.
"George W. Bush's commutation of
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence is
particularly insidious because I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby's crime was committed on behalf of the administration.
What's to stop George W.
Bush, or any future president, from assigning staff to commit crimes with
the understanding that the staffer will get off?" - Ryan Snyder
"Scott
McClellan admits that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Andrew H. Card Jr. as well
as Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby's all lied about their involvement in the outing of a covert Central Intelligence Agency
agent, Valerie Plame. How is this not an impeachable offense? Not only covering
up their involvement in the leak, but the actual act of deliberately disclosing
the identity of covert agent? Former president George H.W. Bush, who signed
into law severe sanctions for the outing of agents, called this kind of
disclosure "high treason." - Eric Burns
Scott McClellan wrote in his
book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of
Deception that"what they did was wrong and harmful to national security"
and said that it was "clear to me that Scooter Libby was guilty of perjury and
obstruction of justice.
"McClellan is a hero. Why is the
media so so blind and shortsighted? Please
connect the dots." - Raquel Brac
"That certain political
actors would expect McClellan to value tribal affiliation over honesty is
reprehensible. When we come to value loyalty over
truth we have truly lost our
way." - Matthew Bilinsky
"The
brilliant minds in the George W. Bush administration have
created a
private Gestapo of rogue
agents, mercenaries and hit men whose allegiance is not to
Americans but to the
U.S. dollar. This is far worse than just
another failed
Republican
experiment in
privatization; it is a
treasonous abrogation and dereliction of
duty." - Steve Weller
Colonel Ted Westhunsing, a
military ethicist, complained that a
private security company, the
civilian contractor (politically correct name
for mercenary) USIS, in
Iraq was committing
murder. The official
story is that
Colonel Ted Westhunsing could not
handle the fact that USIS was making a
profit off the war so he committed
suicide in June 2005.
Strange how Colonel Ted
Westhunsing, the highest ranking officer to die in Iraq, died at the USIS camp with a single bullet to his
head without ever mentioning to family or
friends that the corruption in
Iraq he had found sullied the
militaries
honor so much that he was
forced to kill
himself. Strange how fear took over
Colonel Ted Westhunsing's
life once he had made allegations of
corruption.
In 2006
there were about 100,000 private 'contractors' in
Iraq, of which 48,000
worked as mercenaries.
Mercenaries, an undeclared expansion of
the scope of the Iraqi occupation, operate with almost no oversight or
effective legal constraints and make up to $1,000 a day.
Mercenary deaths go uncounted in official
death roles.
"Blackwater, one of the suppliers
of mercenaries, began in 1996 with a
private
military training camp "to fulfill the
anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Blackwater contacts run
from deep inside the military and
intelligence agencies to the upper
echelons of the White House.
Blackwater has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global
war on terror, with
the largest private
military base on Earth , a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000
soldiers at the ready." - Jeremy
Scahill
"Privatizing
security has lined the pockets of
war profiteers and further
undermined our power as
American
citizens, to hold our government
accountable. Democratic states, not profit seeking
corporations, should
control the use of force." -
Ben Cohen
"How many
private contractors did we have in World War II, the Korean War or in
Vietnam? This war in
Iraq was never intended to be fully
manned by our armed forces; rather it was to be a cash cow for
private business. There are more
than 160,000 contractors in
Iraq, many making in excess of
$100,000 a year."- Leonard A. Zivitz
Guantanamo"I
am writing from the darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo in the
hope that I can make our voices heard. In
January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled,
drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we
got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray
and locked us in cages with two buckets - one empty and one filled with water.
We were to urinate in one and wash in the other.
At Guantanamo,
soldiers have
assaulted me, placed me in
solitary confinement, threatened to kill me,
threatened to kill my
daughter and told me I will stay in
Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived
me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense
lights in my
face; placed me in cold rooms
for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for
prayers; wrapped me in the
Israeli flag and told me there is a
holy war
between the Cross and the
star of David on one hand and
the Crescent on the other; and beaten me
unconscious.
Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot
chocolate and cookies. What I write here is not what my
imagination fancies or my insanity
dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees,
representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators." - Jumah
al-Dossari
During the course of the war on terror at least 775 prisoners
have been incarcerated at Guantanamo. 470 of those have been released as of
November 2007. At this time only David Hicks, an Australian, had plead guilty
to providing material support to the terrorists which he did in exchange for
being released to Australian authorities. No other prisoners have been
successfully tried.
renditions
"I helped run the CIA's rendition program. Simply
and callously put, covert forces cannot
kill the number of
enemies that require
killing. Although the covert
services can successfully eliminate the enemy
leaders, its foot soldiers and civilian
supporters are not being wiped out." - Michael F. Scheuer
"ISRAEL is
NOT WORTH A SINGLE AMERICAN LIFE OR DOLLAR"
Bill Maher interviews
Michael F. Scheuer
Six days after the 911 attacks
George W. Bush authorized an
unprecedented range of covert action, including renditions, assassinations,
disinformation
campaigns and cyber
attacks against those identified as
al-Qa`ida.
The
Central Intelligence
Agency's Counter Terrorist Center,
relies on its Rendition Group to kidnap people:
dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the
clothes off captives, administer an enema
and sleeping drugs; they transport their
victim to a detention facility
operated by cooperative "allies", including
Afghanistan, or one of the Central Intelligence Agency's
own covert prisons, a "black site."
After the 911 attacks, the staff of the
Counter Terrorist Center, directed by J. Cofer
Black, went from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight. J. Cofer Black embraced a "Hollywood model" of operations which
played well with George W. Bush, where
the president was keeping a scorecard of captured or killed terrorists.
Mamdouh Habib, an
Egyptian-born Australian citizen
kidnapped in Pakistan in October 2001 was sent to Egypt for
interrogation where he was
burned by cigarettes, given electric shocks and
beaten.
Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, a Mauritanian and former Canada
resident, turned himself in to the Mauritanian police 18 days after the 911
attacks because Mohamedou Oulad Slahi heard the Americans were looking for him. Mohamedou Oulad
Slahi was spirited to Jordan, where he spent eight months undergoing
interrogation.
Muhammad
Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian imprisoned
by Indonesia authorities
in January 2002, was flown to Egypt for
interrogation. Muhammad Saad
Iqbal Madni was then tortured for 13 months in
Afghanistan.
Khaled el-Masri, a German
citizen, stated, "I saw seven or
eight men with black clothing and wearing masks. They beat me from all sides,
from everywhere, with hands and feet.
With knives or scissors they took away my clothes. In
silence. The beating was just to
humiliate me, to hurt me, to make me
afraid, to make me silent. They stripped
me naked. I was terrified. They tried to
take off my pants. I tried to stop them so they beat me again. I was
humiliated. And when I was naked I
heard a camera."
The first
night Khaled el-Masri was kicked and beaten
and warned by an interrogator: "You are here in a country where no one
knows about you, in a country where there is
no law. If you die,
we will bury you, and no one will know."
Khaled el-Masri's passport analysis
by Office of Technical Services concluded
the passport was genuine.
The Central Intelligence Agency
had imprisoned the wrong man. A reverse
rendition was suggested. Return Khaled el-Masri to Macedonia and release him.
There would be no trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would
believe him.
On the day of his release,
the prison's director, who Khaled el-Masri
believed was an American, told him that he had been held because
he "had a suspicious name."
A Macedonia bus driver has confirmed that
Khaled el-Masri was taken away by border guards on the date he gave investigators. A
forensic analysis of Khaled el-Masri's hair
showed he was malnourished during the period he says he was in the
prison. Flight logs show a plane
registered to a Central
Intelligence Agency front company flew out of Macedonia on the day
Khaled el-Masri says he was flown to Afghanistan. A Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen
Dataplan Inc., provided flight planning and logistical support with the full
knowledge it was profiting from what one senior company official openly
described as "torture flights."
Khaled el-Masri's lawsuit against the
federal government was first thrown out of
court in May 2006 and finally by the Supreme Court in October 2007. The first
judge and the Supreme Court justices honored the
request of the George W. Bush
administration to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds that trying the case would
reveal secret classified information
about American actions in the ‘war on terror' and thus
provide material support to the
terrorists.
"The
more I heard about the imprisonment of
Khaled el-Masri, abducted, tortured and imprisoned for over five months by the Central Intelligence Agency,
the more sick to my stomach I became. What ever happened to
justice, honor and decency? If you wonder why
people hate us, this is it. The
George W. Bush administration is
refusing to allow justice to take place by
hiding behind "state secrets." It
makes me embarrassed to call myself an American." - Cpl. Robert A. Pratt, Marine
Corp
"It is incredible that Khaled el-Masri was kidnaped by U.S.
government agents, abused and transported to Afghanistan for torture in a
secret
prison, then dumped on an Albanian
hillside five months later when agents realized he was not the right person.
This sounds more like the behavior of
Nazi Germany or
Augusto Pinochet's Chile.
The U.S. has become a rogue nation, one that believes it alone has the right to disregard legal
norms and the rights of other nations. The
state secrets defense, born solely
out of the military's
desire to cover up its lies and
ineptitude in the U.S. vs. Reynolds
case, has been allowed by courts to become an easy way for the government to
avoid accountability." - Alex Murray
"El-Masri's ordeal received
front-page media coverage throughout the
world and has been the subject of criminal and
intergovernmental investigations in Europe. His allegations are supported by
eyewitness testimony and physical evidence. Nonetheless, when we brought suit
against former CIA Director George
Tenet and others seeking compensation for the brutal treatment of El-Masri, the
George W. Bush administration
insisted the case be dismissed because any litigation of the claims would
reveal state secrets. The
government's argument prevailed, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene.
As the law stands, the U.S. can engage in torture,
declare it a state secret and, by
virtue of that designation alone, avoid any
accountability for conduct that violates the
Constitution and universal human
rights guarantees. A broad range of
executive misconduct has been
shielded from judicial review under this doctrine." - Ben Wizner
"Extraordinary renditions are utterly inconsistent with our broader
foreign policy goals of promoting
democracy and the rule of law, the very foundations of
civil society. These practices have brought
America universal condemnation and have frustrated our efforts to
work in a concerted way with our allies in
fighting terrorism.
They also
yield no good intelligence.
Up until November 2007 over a hundred
people had experienced "extraordinary"
renditions and not a single one has been convicted of a crime.
These
renditions have undermined our very commitment to
fundamental American values.
These fundamental
American values
are what define us a people, as a nation. When we allow our government to
undermine them, we undermine everything we stand for, everything we are.
Look at the case of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent man kidnapped and
brought to Afghanistan by the Central Intelligence Agency
where he was brutally interrogated and then dumped off in the Albanian
countryside.
How can these kinds of operations help us?
How can
we justify such actions by our intelligence
services?
Nations across the globe
envy our commitment to freedom and the
rule of law. But they are appalled at our
hypocrisy when we betray those
values." - Congressman William
Delahunt
"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive
practices."- Lt. Gen. John F. Kimmons, the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for
Intelligence
George Tenet, told the United
States 911 Commission that even before 911 the United States had abducted more than 70 foreigners
it considered terrorists - a process
George W. Bush administration has
declared legal under the label "extraordinary rendition".
"The Central Intelligence
Agency was conceived at the end of World War II as the way
America could fight as dirty as any
other nation. So we needed in a bad
world something as evil
as the Soviet KGB. This has done more to destroy the goodwill formerly enjoyed by
America across the face of the
Earth than anything we've done.
In
addition, even in the intelligence arena, the Central Intelligence Agency has failed
us on many important issues in the last 20 years. Let's start over with
something in keeping with our core values." - T.
Willard Hunter
In July 2008 Sweden agreed to pay a $502,000 in
compensation to Muhammed Alzery. Sweden handed over Muhammed Alzery to CIA
agents who transported him to Egypt where he was tortured at the CIA's
behest.
"One of the most
noble things you can do is
kill the
enemy." - Major Douglas Zembiec,
killed May 10, 2007 while
conducting a raid in BaghdadThe
vanquished see through
the empty jingoism of those who use
the abstract
words of glory,
honor, and
patriotism to mask the cries of the
wounded, the senseless killing, war
profiteering and chest-pounding
grief.
The
vanquished
know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge,
the lies covered up in stately
war memorials and mythic war
narratives, filled with
words of courage and a false brotherhood called comradeship.
The
vanquished
know the lies that permeate the thick,
self-worshiping memoirs by amoral
statesmen who create war but do
not know war.
The vanquished
know that war
is necrophilia, blood
lust and know
the essence of war – death.
The
vanquished
know how war
fosters alienation, inevitably to nihilism and that
war is a state of almost pure
sin with its goals of
hatred and
destruction.
Narratives about
war fall prey to the allure and seductiveness
of violence, as well as the
attraction of the
godlike power that
comes with the license to
kill with impunity.
The words of the
vanquished come later,
sometimes long after the war, when grown men
and women unpack the suffering they
endured as
children, what it was like to
see their mother
or father killed or
taken away to never be seen again. What it was like to
see their homes, their community, their
innocence destroyed. What it is like to be
discarded as human refuse.
The truth about war comes
out, but usually too late.Americans, assured by those that
create war that
truth has no bearing on the
gloriously
violent
enterprise of
war,see the
war in Iraq only through the distorted lens of
conquers.
Embedded 'reporters', dependent on
the military for food, transportation and
security, have a
natural and understandable tendency, one
I have myself felt, to protect those who are
protecting them. They are not allowed to
report outside of the unit and are, in effect, captives.
Embedded 'reporters' have no
relationships with the
occupied, essential to all balanced reporting of
conflicts, but only with the
American Marines and soldiers who drive through desolate mud-walled
towns and pump grenades and machine gun
bullets into houses, leaving scores
of nameless dead and
wounded in their wake.
Embedded 'reporters' admire and
laud these fighters for their physical
courage and feel
protected by the jet
fighters, the heavy artillery and throaty
rattle of machine guns - but rarely
experience the reality of slaughter. Nearly every
embedded
war correspondent sees his or her mission as
sustaining civilian and
army morale.
The myth of war, the
myth of glory, the
myth of honor sells
newspapers and boosts
television ratings, real
war reporting creates peace marches.
In
war time, as Senator Hiram Johnson reminded us
in 1917, "truth is the first casualty."
All our knowledge of the war in Iraq has to be viewed as lacking the
sweep and depth that will come one day when a small
Iraqi
boy reaches adulthood and
unfolds for us the sad and tragic
story of the
invasion and bloody occupation of
Iraq.
I have spent most of my adult
life in war. My
life has been deformed by the organized industrial
violence that
year after year was an intimate part of my
existence. I have
watched young men bleed to death on
lonely
Central American dirt roads
and cobblestone squares in Sarajevo. I have looked into
the eyes of mothers, kneeing over the lifeless
and mutilated bodies of their children.
I have stood in warehouses with rows of corpses, including
children, and breathed
death into my lungs.
I carry within me the ghosts of those I
worked with, my comrades in war, now long gone,
dead and buried.
The young
soldiers, trained well enough to be
disciplined but encouraged to maintain their naive adolescent
belief in invulnerability, have in
war time more power at their fingertips than they will ever have
again. They catapult from being minimum wage employees at places like Burger
King, facing a life of dead end jobs with little
hope of health
insurance and adequate benefits, to
being part of, in the words of the
American Marine's, "the greatest
fighting force on the face of the
Earth."
The disparity between what they
were and what they have become is breathtaking and intoxicating. This
intoxication is only heightened in war time
when all taboos are broken.
Murder goes unpunished and often rewarded. The thrill of
destruction fills their days with
wild adrenaline highs, strange
grotesque landscapes that are hallucinogenic, all accompanied by a
sense of purpose and comradeship,
overpowers the alienation many left behind.
Men become accustomed to
killing, carrying out acts of slaughter with no
more forethought than they take to relieve themselves. Abuses committed against
the helpless prisoners in
Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo are
not aberrations but the real face of
war.
In war time all human beings become
objects,
objects either to gratify or
destroy or both. No one is immune. The
contagion of the crowd sees to that.
"Force," Simone Weil wrote, "is as pitiless to
the man who possess it, or thinks he does, as
it is to his victim. The second it crushes;
the first it intoxicates."
This
myth, the lie of human beings as objects, about
Americans as perfect heroes, is
imploding American democracy.
Americans shun
introspection and self-criticism.
Americans ignore truth, to embrace the strange, disquieting
certitude and hubris offered by the radical imperialist Christian right about a war
between good and evil.
Ken Ham speaks before crowds of children teaching "creation science" with warrior
myths in and attempt to refute science as
misguided lies.
"We're going to arm you with
Christian Patriot missiles." -
Ken Ham
These radical imperialist
'Christians' relish the aesthetic of
violence and necrophilia.
Blood lust pervades their warped
theology. These radical imperialist
Christians, although claiming to worship Jesus, secretly worship in their hearts
Thanatos, the god of death, and
Mars the god of
war.
As the
war grinds forward, unthinking
Americans sink into a morass of
mass media's embrace of the god of war,
Mars. Mars
and Thanatos intertwined with
intolerance and
force have crippled
Americans.
War deforms American spirtual essence, especially a war fought for and by the cult of
materialism.
Americans give up
individual
conscience to show support for
the federal government in
moments of feigned extremity.
The few
true Christians who find war evil, are
branded as
heretics who refuse to
worship the cult of
materialistic consumerism's
bloody false
idols of Thanatos and Mars.
The attacks on the World Trade
Center, the dramatic explosions, the
fireballs, the victims plummeting to their
deaths, the collapse of the towers in
Manhattan, were straight out of Hollywood.
Americans have always left the same calling
cards in the past. Americans delivered
incendiary messages in Dresden,
Hiroshima,
Vietnam, Serbia,
Afghanistan and
Iraq.
"It would be difficult
to exaggerate the terror and chaos
caused in German towns and cities by Allied bombing, especially in the last two
years of the war." - Jill Stephenson
McGeorge
Bundy, ghostwriter for Secretary of War Henry
L. Stimson, claimed the bombing of Hiroshima was a meaningful message
sent to Japan which saved
American lives.
Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara in the summer of 1965 defined the bombing raids that would
kill hundreds of thousands of civilians north of
Saigon as a means of 'communication' to
the Communist regime in Hanoi.
The most powerful
anti war testaments: limbs torn off, piles of
corpses, young girls with their flesh sloughing
off from burns, bodies strewn across the
battlefield and the
survivers standing in
shock and
disbelief, pulling their hair out and
pounding their chests praying for tears to relieve their unbearable
anguish are not seen by
Americans. Americans never see the
wounds that leave faces horribly disfigured by
burns and never watch the agony of the
dying.
It is the suffering of the veteran whose
body and mind are changed forever because he
or she served a nation that sacrificed
them, the suffering of their families and children caught up in the unforgiving
maw of war, which begin to tell the
story of war.
War is made palatable, sanitized and glorified, by
mass media for American plutocracy.
Americans are allowed to
taste war's
perverse thrill, but spared from seeing
war's consequences. Mass
media willingly hides the effects of bullets, roadside
bombs and rocket-propelled
grenades on humans.
Mass
media, sat at the feet of the neo cons
who lied to make this war possible and
dutifully reported these lies and called
it journalism. War, based on lies of betrayal, betrayal of young
men and women by entrenched industrial
interests, the betrayal of reality by cynics who claim
war is necessary and finally the betrayal by
corrupt politicians elected to represent the people.
The victims, maimed forever by
war, are crumpled up and thrown away as their
destruction is too painful for Americans to
see, too painful for
Americans to hear. American denial of
empathy is hollow.
Indifference and
apathy are used as a shield.
The
victims are doomed, like wandering
spirits, to float around the edges of the
American consciousness, ignored, even reviled for
they bring conscious consideration of the
reality of individual
hopes and dreams destroyed.
Americans wallow in the myth of war, the
myth of glory, the
myth of honor, the
myth of patriotism and the
myth of heroism, words that in the terror and brutality of
combat are empty, meaningless and obscene.
Thucydides wrote of Athens' expanding empire and how this
empire led it to become a
tyrant abroad and then a
tyrant at home. The
tyranny Athens imposed on
others, Athens finally imposed on
itself and then Athens died.
If
Americans do not confront the
lies and hubris told to
justify the killing and mask the
destruction carried out in the name of
the American people in
Iraq, if
Americans do not grasp the
moral corrosiveness of
empire and occupation, if Americans continue to allow
force and
violence to be our primary form of
communication, if
Americans do not remove from
power our flag waving,
cross bearing,
falsely patriotic
versions of the Taliban,
Americans will not so much
defeat dictators such as
Saddam Hussein as become them.
-adapted from Chris Hedges,
journalist
"Actually, it's quite fun to
fight them. You know, it's a
hell of a hoot ... I like
brawling. You go into
Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women
around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that
ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell
of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the First
Marine DivisionAmericans must
recognize that those smirking grins and
sadistic leers are simply
expressions of America's evil side,
they are the faces of men and
women trained to be brutal, the faces of Americans involved in a never ending
war against the evil doers.
Once a
soldier always a
soldier. Robert Ferro a retired Army Special Forces
officer just loves guns. When
police raided his home in Upland, California
in April 2006 they found over 1,571 weapons
including assault
weapons, machine guns, automatic rifles and explosive
devices. Robert Ferro claimed that the
weapons were provided by the federal
government so he could launch an
invasion to free Cuba from Fidel
Castro. Once a Special Forces officer always a Special Forces
officer!
Recent studies note that although veterans are half as likely
to be incarcerated as the general population those that are incarcerated are
more than 2.5 times more likely to be sex offenders. As well veterans are
almost twice as likely to commit suicide than the general populace. These
findings suggest two things - being dominated by military hierarchy gives some
individuals the desire to dominate and murdering human beings is hard to
live with.
"Slaughtering
human beings with high tech,
flesh shredding machinery should not make anyone
insane. It was those massively extravagant disability
payments that led to all the homeless vets. Those guys were led to
expect that they might have problems so, voila
they developed problems. We do not want
this same thing happening to our new
crop of 'temporarily' stressed out
warriors. They should just suck it up and
forget all those memories of
blood and
terror."
- Eric P.
"I am a
Vietnam War veteran with
post traumatic stress
disorder. The problem with the treatment of
post traumatic stress
disorder is that the people treating us have never been to
war. People like
Sally Satel aren't there to help
veterans but to protect the
system. Sally Satel's
idea about veterans being rehabilitated makes
it sound like we are convicts.
I didn't ask to go to war,
and I< | | |