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"A whirlwind will sweep them away,
and their
sacrifices will bring them shame." - Hosea
4:19
"From the weeding of a strawberry bed to the
coercion of a child to the elimination of enemies in the name of national
security, the cultivation and control of the world inherently requires
violence.
Violence is a built-in feature of our world-view; it is
implicit in our conception of ourselves as separate beings in a universe of
discrete others competing for survival; moreover the objectification of other
beings, species, people, and the earth itself enables and legitimizes violence
toward them.
It is when we get lost in the manmade realm of abstractions
- statistics, names of countries, figures in accounting ledgers - and believe
them to be real that we end up perpetrating violence.
The increasing
ubiquity of depictions of graphic violence and diabolical cruelty in the
entertainment media have inured
us to violent or tragic images even when they are
not fictitious.
The endemic exposure to violence in our
culture desensitizes us.
The
suffering of others takes on an unreality,
without which we could never continue to perpetrate it. Violence seems not to
be violence when it is only a weed, only an animal, only a savage, only an
enemy, only a thing." - adapted from
Charles
Eisenstein
"Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent
narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are
those who have access to weapons and a penchant for
force." - Christopher Lynn Hedges
Before
humans were warriors they were hunters,
but before they were
hunters they were gathers.
Anthropologists believe ancient
humans probably began eating flesh
2.5 million years ago.
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.
At some point in
history humans began to eat the
flesh of animals.
"Our results strongly suggest
that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex on a long-term basis." - Cristina
Gomes
Violence is
our common human heritage simply by the
fact that we
have genes to digest flesh.
In a civilized
social culture the taking of
flesh is understood to be a necessary
evil which is only done for sustenance.
If
a social culture
believes itself to be a
civil then, by reason of Natural
Law, it would not glorify the unnecessary taking of life.
Is this true of
American social
culture?
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'. It is "business as usual."
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. (War
movies, heinous crimes on the nightly news, Afghans who legalize rape, Iraq
tyrants that gas Kurds with American provided weapons of mass destruction, ad
infinitum.)
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 - especially a world wide
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. (mercenaries, soldiers, terrorists,
insurgents)
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 will '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 2002
George W.
Bush sees the branding of
fraternity pledges with a red hot coat hanger
as 'character building' - a desirable 'cute' ritual.
"My belief that George
Bush and his administration are evil is not based on any single incident, but
rather on a pervasive pattern. This is a
man who blew up frogs when he was younger. As Governor of Texas he mocked a
woman (Carla Faye Tucker) who pleaded for her life with him, mimicking her
desperate pleas in discussions with other people." - Bruce McDonald
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.)
Violent acts are perpetually
pummeled into the American people's
conscious and
subconscious through
television,
movies and now in the 'cage'.
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 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 Major
General 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
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 911 attacks put the level of support
for torture at 32%.
"Rahm Emanuel* has indicated to me that the
President is committed to not ever letting these photos (of torture) see the
light of day." - Senator Lindsey Graham, June 17, 2009
"Let every one turn from his
evil way and from the violence that is in his
hands." - Jonah 3:8
In America
state 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
A study by the Justice Department's
Bureau of Justice Statistics out in January 2010 surveyed more than
9,000 young people in custody and found that 12 percent reported being sexually
abused one or more times, mainly by staff members. The study found several
juvenile facilities with rates of victimization as high as 30 percent in
Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas. (
How many refused to talk out of fear of reprisal?)
"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
"It is organized violence on top which creates
individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against
organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the
political offender to act." - Emma Goldman
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 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.
Ryan Weemer, Jermaine Nelson and Jose Nazario captured four
prisoners during the American invasion of Fallouja. They radioed to ask
commanders what to do with the prisoners. They were repeatedly asked if the
prisoners were dead yet. So they did as commanded and executed the Iraqi
prisoners. It is yet to be seen how many years they will have to spend in
prison for following orders!
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.
{On
March 2, 2009 it was revealed that at least 92 "interrogations" had been
videotaped. No one will ever know what was on those videotapes unless a
patriot whistleblower
steps forward as at least 92 videotapes were destroyed by a
traitor.}
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', first used in the
Spanish Inquistion, 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.
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." - United States 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.
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 imagined "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 United
States invasion found no direct connection
between Saddam
Hussein'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
"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 use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was first publicly
acknowledged by then-CIA director Michael Hayden during a Senate intelligence
hearing on Feb. 5, 2008. Michael Hayden said waterboarding was used in 2002 and
2003.
"It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was used on Abu
Zubaydah. And it was used on (Abd al-Rahim al-) Nashiri." - Michael Hayden
In April, the Justice Department released 2005 legal memos that
detailed the use of waterboarding in 2002 and 2003. Waterboarding was used on
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times and on Zubaydah at least 83 times. Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed claims he gave false information to the CIA even after
undergoing punishing bouts of interrogation.
"I make up
stories." - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
"To call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated
professionals who have saved American lives.
It is recklessness cloaked in
righteousness." - Dick
Cheney
"I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big
supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques. I signed off on it; others
did, as well." - Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney personally authorized the
torture of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of
three.
On March 8, 2008, President Bush vetoed congressional
legislation that called for a specific ban on waterboarding and other abusive
interrogation techniques, including stripping prisoners naked, subjecting them
to extreme cold and staging mock executions.
"Yeah, we waterboarded
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." - George W. Bush
"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
Japanese soldiers were prosecuted for the war crime of waterboarding
American soldiers during World War II.
"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
above the lawA overlooked presidential
power has come to light. All a president has to do to commit a crime is assign
the criminal act to an underling and if the underling gets caught, as
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's did, then the
president can simply pardon him.
"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. 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
"What they did was wrong and harmful to national
security ... it is clear to me that Scooter Libby was guilty of perjury and
obstruction of justice." - Scott McClellan
"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
United States 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.
Erik Prince
inherited control of Edgar D. Prince's, his father, automotive parts supply
business to manufactures, Prince Corporation, in 1995. Edgar Prince was an
engineer-developer-industrialist, who became very wealthy in an industry not
known for its high degree of profitability. Edgar's father was Peter Prince,
owner of a produce company, which supplied stores in the western Michigan area,
including Holland and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Dutch Reformed immigrant
family arrived in the middle of the 19th century in Holland, Michigan.
Around the time of Edgar's death, the Prince family sold part of the
automotive business for $1.35 billion.
Erik's sister, Betsy, is married to
Amway billionaire Dick DeVos. Erik Prince's subscribes to the religious
philosophy is Dominionism.
"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 aircraft including helicopter
gunships surveillance blimps and private airstrips and 20,000
soldiers at the ready.
Blackwater's
seven-thousand-acre facility in Moyock, N.C., has now become the most
sophisticated private military center on the planet, while the company
possesses one of the world's larget privately held stockpiles of heavy-duty
weaponry. It is a major training center for federal and local security and
military forces in the United States, as well as foreign forces and private
individuals. Company officials say they have been training about 35,000 "law
enforcement" and military personnel a year.
A former Blackwater employee
and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have
made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3
2009 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner,
Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who
were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former
employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked
with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that
Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." -
Jeremy Scahill
{Blackwater became Blackwater Worldwide which became "Xe
Services LLC" (pronounced "Zee"). }
"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 United States 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 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
victims 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 United
States 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 United States 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 United States 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 United States 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.
"Violence is a symptom of
a wounded spirit." - Charles
Eisenstein
"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 victims. 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 (former World Bank and Ford Inc. president) 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 Division
"The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct:
Kill everybody, kill everybody. And you do. Then they just think you can just
come home and turn it off." - Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist serving
10 years for accessory to murder
Americans 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!
"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 did not ask to be treated by the
Veterens Administration, and I
did not plan in junior high to be living on
disability as I approach the end of my
life, but that is what happens when you send
naive, small town boys off to an immoral and worthless
war." -Tim C. (Sally Satel is a member of
the American Enterprise
Institute.)
"Our mythology
surrounding warfare in general needs to move
beyond the facile imagery of pure
goodness confronting pure evil in a pure contest with a pure outcome. Such
rectitude exists only on
movie screens, not in the
real world where we
all live our daily lives." - Micheal
Bess, professor Vanderbilt University
the truth of war
"Soldiers were
taking steroids, Valium, hooked on painkillers, drinking and popping multiple
Benzhexol pills (a strong
hallucinogenic when abused).
They'd go on raids and patrols totally stoned. We're killing the wrong people all the time, and mostly by accident.
One guy in my squadron ran over a family with
his tank. There's a lot of guys who steal from the
Iraqis.
Money, family heirlooms, and then they brag about it. Guys
would crap into MRE bags and throw them to old men begging for food." - Cliff
Hicks, American soldier recently
stationed in
Iraq.Maybe excessive drug use
and a total lack of respect for
living breathing
human beings helps explain the four
American soldiers of the 4th Infrantry
Division that raped an 15 year old
Iraqi girl named Abeer in Mahmoudiya
and slaughtered most of her
family,
Mohammad and Ahmad her young
brothers were away at school. They then
crushed her skull and burned her corpse and the
corpses of her sister,
mother and father
. The incident was reported as neutralizing
insurgents.
"During a visit to
the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center I met with female veterans and their
doctors. My jaw dropped when doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen
in the clinic say they were victims of sexual
assault while in the military, and 29%
report being raped during their
military service." - Represenative Jane
Harman, chair of House Homeland Security intelligence subcommittee
03/08
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.
On March 7, 2007, Army
Spc. Trevor Hogue was inside his barracks in Baghdad, describing his morning on
the battlefield.
"I saw things today that I think will mess me up for
life," Hogue typed to his mother, Donna.
That day Trevor Hogue saw his
sergeant blown to pieces. Trevor Hogue saw the bodies of half of the men in his
platoon torn apart. Heads were cut off and limbs severed.
Trevor Hogue
never really recovered. In June 2009 Trevor Hogue committed suicide by hanging
himself in the backyard of his childhood home. Trevor Hogue was 24 years old.
"You think that they are safe when they get back home. They're not. The
reality of the things that they experienced continues to haunt them." - Donna
Hogue
"According to the Army, soldiers are killing themselves at the
highest rate in nearly three decades, surpassing the civilian suicide rate for
the first time since the Vietnam War. At least 128 U.S. soldiers killed
themselves in 2008, a number that has risen four years in a row. The death toll
could be even higher this year. Through April, 2009 91 soldiers had committed
suicide." - Cynthia Hubert
"As an
American with more than 25 years of
commissioned military
service, I am absolutely astounded
at the dearth of leadership shown by the
military throughout its
chain of command. The inability of these
enlisted personnel and officers to follow long-established guidelines and the
service's own code of conduct is
an insult to every person who has ever worn the American uniform. To the officers especially I
say, "Whatever happened to the simple notion of just doing the right thing?" As
citizens we must not allow this
type of misconduct to continue." - Carl Schellenberg
"Let's stop acting
shocked at such
horrors. War has always produced these atrocities. We
consider the killing of innocents exceptional when
in fact it is inherent in war. We train our
young soldiers to kill but want them to keep their
honor and sanity. What nonsense! Honorable warfare is a
lie we tell ourselves to defend the tragedy of
slaughter. War itself represents "a total breakdown in
morality and leadership, with
tragic results." - Paul Astin
"I was
a psychopathic
murderer because I was trained to
kill. I was not born with that
mentality. The Marines trained me to be a
gangster in the interest of United States
corporations - a criminal. We
expected to see explosions every time we riddle
the cars with bullets; but we never heard or saw an explosion. When we opened
the car all we found was people killed or wounded, not a single
weapon, not
al-Qa`ida
propaganda, nothing. Our first mission in
Iraq was not aimed at offering
humanitarian assistance, as the media said, but to
secure oil fields in
Basra."- Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey USMC"War is a drug
because when soldiers are in the Infantry, like me, they get used to
everything, and fast. I got used to killing and after a while it became
something I really had to do. Killing becomes a drug, and it is really
addictive.
I had a really hard time with this problem when I returned
to the United States, because turning this addiction off was impossible. It is
not like I have a switch I can just turn off. To this day, I still feel the
addictions running through my blood and throughout my body, but now I know how
to keep myself composed and keep order in myself, my mind. War does things to
me that are so hard to explain to someone that does not go through everything
that I went through. That’s part of the reason why I want to go back to
war so badly, because of this addiction.
Over in Iraq and Afghanistan
killing becomes a habit, a way of life, a drug to me and to other soldiers like
me who need to feel like we can survive off of it. It is something that I do
not just want, but something I really need so I can feel like myself.
Killing is a drug to me and has been ever since the first time I have
killed someone. At first, it was weird and felt wrong, but by the time of the
third and fourth killing it feels so natural. It feels like I could do this for
the rest of my life and it makes me happy.
This is what I was trained
to do and now I cannot get rid of it; it will be with me for the rest of my
life and hurts me that I cannot go back to war and kill again, because I would
love too. When I stick my blade through his stomach or his ribs or slice his
throat it’s a feeling that I cannot explain, but feels so good to me, and
I become addicted to seeing and acting out this act of hate, and violence
against the rag heads that hurt our country. Terrorists will have nowhere to
hide because there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers like me who feel like
me and want their revenge as well." - C.J. Whittington, (C.J. Whittington
served as an Infantry Squad Leader in Iraq from Oct2005 to June2007)
"Boys with a
normal viewpoint were taken out of the
fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There
they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to regard
murder as the order of the day. They were
put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology,
they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them
to think nothing at all of
killing or of being
killed." - Major General
Smedley Darlington Butler USMC
(twice awarded the Medal of Honor, awarded one of only three
Marine Corps Brevet Medal - nicknamed "The Fighting
Quaker")
"One innocent is one too
many. We all have their blood on
our hands. When will we stop justifying murder in the
name of peace." - Murray
RubinsteinWitnesses to the slaying of
Iraqi civilians by
American Marines in the town of Haditha say the
American Marines shot men, women and
children at close range in retaliation for the
death of a Marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.
Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident watched and listened as American Marines went from
house to
house killing members of three families.
Aws Fahmi heard Younis Salim
Khafif plead in English for his life and the lives
of his family members.
"I heard Younis
speaking to the American
Marines, saying: 'I am friend. I am
good,' they killed
him, his wife and daughters."- Aws Fahmi
The girls
killed inside Younis Salim Khafif's
house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1.
Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali, 76; Khamisa Tuma Ali, 66 (wife); Iman, 8; Abdul
Rahman, 5; Abdullah, 4; were killed in the
house next door.
Khafif,
43; Aeda Yasin Ahmed, 41; a son, 8 and five young daughters and an infant were
killed in the third
house.
Only 13-year-old
Safa Younis lived - saved by her mother's
blood spilling onto her making her
look dead.
One marine claimed that in a pistol fire fight while unloading
his pistol he shot three Iraqs in the head. (Trained by Clint
Eastwood!)
"Democracy assassinated
the family that was here" - graffiti seen later
on one of the houses
Warplanes conducted airstrikes,
dropping 500-pound bombs on more than one
house to cover up the
massacre.
"In addition to the
American Marines' individual actions, "jets dropped
500- pound bombs". The buck for the "total breakdown in
morality and leadership" doesn't stop with a single unit of
stressed out, third tour of duty
American Marines. It stops at the very top, with
George W. Bush." - Jess Winfield
"Haditha holds a mirror up not just to
American troops in the field but to our
whole society. Not just to the liars in
government but to those that
believe them too easily. It is past
time for Americans to summon the
civil courage to face what is being
done in their name and refuse to be accomplices." - Daniel Ellsberg
"Soon Haditha in Iraq will be as infamous as My Lai, a location in
that other
American
enterprise:
Vietnam. There is the
point of view that an unprovoked
invasion of
Iraq was a
war crime itself. Because those responsible
make our laws, control our military and own our courts, there is little
chance that they will ever be "brought
to justice," to use one of their own favorite
phrases." - Jack Wright
My Lai The
soldiers found no
insurgents in the village of My Lai on
the morning of March 16, 1968. One
platoon led by
Lt. William Calley,
killed hundreds of civilians - primarily old men,
women, children, and babies. Some were tortured or raped. Dozens were herded into a ditch and
executed with automatic firearms.
In the spring of 1972, the
survivors of the My Lai
massacre, were "accidently"
slaughtered by "friendly"
airstrikes and artillery bombardment.(Dead men tell no tales!)
No Gun RiIn the chaotic early days of
the Korean War, groups of refugees fleeing a North Korean advance attempted to
cross American lines despite warning shots. Up to 400 refuges, mostly women and
children, were shot in one incident because American soldiers suspected the
group contained Communist gunmen. A document found in the National
Archives in April 2007 noted that the army had a policy of shooting
approaching civilians. A memo, dated July 25, 1950, from the United States
Fifth Air Force regarding "Policy on Strafing Civilian Targets", written by
USAF Colonel Turner C. Rogers recalls that, "the army has requested that we
strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions,"
and that, "to date, we have complied with the army request in this
regard."
In 1999 the New York Times reported that 30 South Korean
survivors and relatives of
victims had filed a lawsuit in 1997
that "described a three-day period of killing, saying that American planes had
strafed hundreds of refugees who were fleeing from North Korean troops, leaving
about 100 people dead. The survivors
fled under the bridge, where they said they were pinned by American troops who
shot and killed almost all the refugees." The suit was rejected on a
technicality.(The technicality is might makes
right!)
Haditha, My Lai and No Gun Ri
massacres raise serious questions about
how often incidents like this occur and are successfully covered up by
airstrikes. The archives of
the Vietnam War Crimes Working
Group, made up of staff members assigned to General William C.
Westmoreland, filed at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland
substantiated 300 atrocities which included: seven
massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which
at least 137 civilians died; seventy-eight
other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57
were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted; One hundred forty-one
instances in which American
soldiers tortured civilian
detainees or
prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats,
water or electric shock.
Members of a
reconnaissance platoon swept through the Que Son Valley,
burning homes,
slaughtering animals and clearing civilians. Members of the platoon
killed: an unarmed boy standing outside a cluster of huts; three women
and three children in a hut; executed an elderly
woman and a baby; raped a woman and a young girl and then executed
civilian detainees. The unit reported the
victims as
enemy killed in
action.
On the same day as the massacre at My Lai,
American soldiers from the same division
killed an undetermined number of women and
children in neighboring My Khe.
American soldiers tossed grenades into shelters and
shot women, and children as they ran for cover
or tried to flee. Over the next three days, members of the unit
burned three sub-hamlets to the ground and
tortured detainees with electric shocks. The unit
reported 39 enemy combatants
killed but recovered no
weapons and suffered no casualties.
An American helicopter "hunter-killer" team attacked a village in Cambodia with rockets and
machine gun fire, killing eight civilians, including two
children, and wounding 15. After the
attack, an American captain landed with a platoon of South
Vietnamese troops. No
enemy weapons or
other war materiel were found. The troops provided no
medical treatment to the wounded and made off
with "large quantities of civilian property, including
tobacco, poultry, and
radios, and the
American captain returned to the aircraft with
a motorcycle."
The documents, archives of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group
have now been reclassified "secret"
and removed from the public domain.
"Convictions can be hard to obtain because the
units involved tend to cover up the facts." - Max Boot"It is
almost impossible for a Marine warrior to
take on the mantle of benevolent overseer. When American soldiers are sent out to
kill the enemy,
and then become the force of an occupying
power where there is no force
monopoly, atrocities are inevitable.
It happened in Vietnam War; it is
happening in Iraq. The problem is
exacerbated by being in an alien culture with overextended tours of
duty. The tension of being constantly on
guard against ambush and
death, of not being able to respond with a
trained warrior's need to act with decisive
force, develops enormous pressures. It does not take a
psychiatrist to deduce that among 150,000
men and women, something or someone has got to give to release that pressure. I
do not believe we can bully people into our
form of democracy; we can only
corrupt our own." - Robert Silver
"Truly reducing
violence involves changing
hearts and minds. Black power
activist H. Rap Brown said that "violence is as
American as cherry pie." Indeed, it's
everywhere, from our popular
culture to our geopolitics. Challenging our culture's
obsession with
death and
destruction takes
swords-into-plowshares leadership, and if you
haven't noticed, Isaiahs are in short supply." - Diane Winston
war is a racket
War is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
It is the only one international in
scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the
losses in lives.
A racket is best
described, I believe, as
something that is not what it seems to the
majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group
knows what it is about. It is conducted for
the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
Out of war a few people make huge
fortunes.
In the World
War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000
new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the
World War. That many admitted their
huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires
falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them
dug a trench? How many of them knew what it
meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless,
frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How
many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or
killed in battle?
Three steps must be taken to smash the
war racket: We must
take the profit out of war;
We must
permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there
should be war;
We must limit our
military forces to home defense purposes.
The chief aim of any power of
disarmament conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent
war but rather to get more armament.
Professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be
without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. They are not for
disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the
background but all-powerful, just the same, are the
sinister agents of those who profit by
war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit
armaments.
Yes, ships will continue
to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will
be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers
must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for
the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
There is only one way
to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get
together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war
plane. " - Major General Smedley
Darlington Butler USMC - medals for heroism, the Marine Corps Brevet Medal
and the Medal of Honor (2)
"The social forms and institutions of nonaggressive
cultures positively reinforce acts that benefit the group as a whole while
negatively reinforcing acts (and eliminating goals) that harm some members of
the group. The social forms of aggressive cultures, on the other hand, reward
actions that emphasize individual gain, even or especially when that gain harms
others in the community." - Ruth Benedict"Pleasure and
violence have a reciprocal
relationship, the
presence of one inhibits the
other. When the brain's pleasure
circuits are 'on,' the violence
circuits are 'off,' and vice versa. A pleasure-prone personality rarely
displays violence or aggressive
behaviors, and a
violent personality has
little ability to tolerate, experience, or
enjoy sensuously pleasing activities.
The reciprocal relationship of pleasure
and violence is highly significant
because certain sensory
experiences during the formative periods of
development will
create a neuropsychological predisposition for
either violence seeking or
pleasure seeking behavior
later in life. Abnormal social and emotional
behaviors result from
'somatosensory' deprivation, a lack of
tender and loving care.
Derived from the Greek word for 'body,' the term 'somatosensory' refers to
the sensations of touch and body movement which differ from the
senses of seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting. The
deprivation of body
touch and contact are the basic causes of a
number of emotional disturbances include
depressive
behaviors,
sexual aberration,
drug abuse,
violence, and aggression. Not
surprisingly, when high self-needs are combined
with the deprivation of physical
affection, the result is
self-interest and high rates of
narcissism.
The deprivation of
body pleasure throughout life - but particularly
during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence - are very
closely related to the amount of warfare and interpersonal
violence a
culture experiences - high self-needs coupled with high rates of
self-interest and
narcissism.
Another way of looking at the reciprocal
relationship between
violence and pleasure is to
examine a society's choice of
drugs as a society will support
behaviors that are consistent
with its values and social mores.
American society
is a competitive,
aggressive, and
violent
society. Consequently, it supports
drugs that facilitate
competitive,
aggressive, and
violent
behaviors and
oppose drugs that counteract such
behaviors. Alcohol is well
known to facilitate the
expression of
violent
behaviors, and, although
addicting and very harmful to chronic users, is acceptable to
American society. Methamphetamine and
engineered tobacco also belong to a
competitive,
aggressive, and
violent
society.
Marijuana, on the
other
hand, is an active pleasure inducing
drug which enhances the pleasure of
touch and actively inhibits
violent
aggressive
behaviors. It is for this
reason that marijuana is rejected in
American culture.
In Western
philosophical
dualistic thought man
is not a unitary being but is
divided into two parts,
body and soul.
The Greek philosophical
conception of the relationship between body and soul was
quite different than the Judeo-Christian concept which posited a state of
war between the body and soul.
Within Judeo-Christian thought the
purpose of
human life
was to save the soul, and the body,
flesh, was seen as an impediment to achieving
this objective. Consequently, the flesh must be
punished and deprived.
When high self-needs
are combined with the deprivation of
physical affection, the result is
self-interest and high rates of
narcissism.
Cultures which are
repressive of
human sexuality tend to have rich pornographic
art forms such as exhibitionistic
dancing and pornography - a substitute
for normal sexual
expression.
-James W. Prescott, a
neuropsychologist and health scientist administrator at the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda,
Maryland.
biochemical marker of neglectStartling
differences in hormone levels which
leave a biochemical mark linked to social
bonding was found in children who spent their
first two years in Romanian or Russian orphanages by Seth Pollak.
The
hormone,
oxytocin, the peptide of
love, works on brain centers linked to reward and
emotion. The oxytocin levels of children being reared by
their biological parents increased when they played a game with their
mothers but didn't increase when they
played the game with the stranger. 83% of the adopted children showed no rise
in oxytocin levels - whether playing the
game with their adoptive mother or the
stranger.
Jane Healy's
research in 1990 indicated that
brain size could decrease 20-30% if a child is not talked to, touched, or
played with.
Our everyday experiences can
affect whether countless tiny genetic ‘switches' in our DNA are turned on
or off, and by extension, whether we develop or successfully avoid all kinds of
hereditarily influenced health woes.
Negative experiences in
childhood alter not only an adult's psychology but also physical health into
middle age and beyond. A team led by Duke University researchers has found
sustained health risks that apparently stem from childhood abuse, neglect,
social isolation, or economic hardship. Adults who had been maltreated as
children were twice as likely to suffer major depression and chronic
inflammation. Children who grew up poor or socially isolated were twice as
likely to show metabolic risk markers at age 32.
"What we're learning
is that poor adult health is, in part, manufactured in childhood. The human
stress response is implicated not only in psychological conditions but in other
health conditions as well. The more difficult the childhood, the more adult
age-related disease risk factors we see. It's multiple and cumulative childhood
experience that predisposes adults to poor health." - Avshalom
Caspi
"New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity:
children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a
rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And
the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe
conditions than their middle-class counterparts. Children with diagnoses of
mental or emotional problems in low-income families are also more likely to be
given drugs than receive family counseling or psychotherapy. Antipsychotics are
the single biggest drug expenditure for Medicaid, costing the program $7.9
billion in 2006. Studies have found that children in low-income families have a
higher rate of mental health problems compared with children in better-off
families." - Duff Wilson, December 11, 2009
300,000 American children
under age 18 have been prescribed antipsychotics.
“A lot of these
kids are not getting other mental health services.” - Dr. Mark
Olfson
“Medicaid kids are subject to a lot of stresses that lead to
behavior issues which can be hard to distinguish from more serious psychiatric
conditions. It’s very hard to pin down.” - Stephen
Crystal
All is not
well in the suburbs.
In the Chicago suburb of Country Club Hills
5 murders occurred in 11 days in the winter of 2009: Leon Taylor, 77, and
Minnie Taylor, 75, were found shot to death; George Britton, 18, was stabbed
multiple times; Jarrett Jones, 27, strangled his mother Sheryl, 59; and a boy,
14, stabbed his stepfather, John Weatherspoon, to death. Country Club Hills is
situated on the junctions of interstate highways 57, 80 and 294 south of Oak
Forest, north of Park Forest and east of Tinley Park.
"My own interest in studying
murder began when I
witnessed a close friend, a highly accomplished academic, fly into a
murderous rage and come frighteningly close to
killing his wife.
Previous
theories about why
humans kill
typically invoke single factors: the murderer is pathological; the
murderer is the
violent
product of poverty; the murderer is warped by neglect and child abuse; the murderer was created by evil
parents; the murderer was
created by exposure to mass
media violence. Every one of
these theories is wrong.
Killing has proved to be a
effective solution to an array of adaptive
problems in the evolutionary game of
survival and
reproductive
competition: preventing injury,
rape or death; protecting one's children; eliminating a
crucial antagonist; acquiring a rival's resources; securing
sexual access to a
competitor's mate; preventing an
interloper from appropriating one's own mate; and many
others.
The
logic of evolutionary struggle is all about
reproductive
competition, strategies that lead
to greater reproductive
success selected over eons of evolution
which characterize our species. Mating is
inextricably intertwined with murder.
Over the long sweep of deep time,
killing has conferred such powerful advantages in
the ruthless game of reproductive
competition that natural selection has
designed the survivor's minds to have the ability to commit
murder."
- David
M. Buss, professor of psychology University of
Texas at Austin
murder is directly related to
the concept of agency.
Charles
Martin, 66, was consumed by the need to be his own agent. Charles Martin
meticulously kept his lawn in
perfect condition. Charles Martin did not want
anyone to walk on his lawn. Larry
Mugrage, a fifteen year old next door neighbor, walked across Charles Martin
lawn one too many times. Charles
Martin shot Larry Mugrage dead with a shotgun blast to the chest at a short
distance.
mass murder"Five
factors exist in virtually all cases of mass
murder:
Mass murders have a long history of
frustration,
failure and a diminished ability to cope with
life's disappointments.
Mass murders
externalize blame, frequently complaining that others didn't give them a
chance. Rejection often causes
anti-social behavior which feeds a
vicious cycle of anti-social
behavior/rejection. Marc Lepine killed 14 female engineering
students at the Ecole Polytechnique of
the University of Montreal apparently because he felt that women were
taking too many teaching positions.
Mass murders generally lack
emotional support from friends or
family. You've read the "he always seemed to be
something of a loner" quote? This truth is
grounded in the reality of the spurned and shunned.
Mass murders
generally suffer a precipitating event viewed as
catastrophic, often a major disappointment - the loss of a job or the breakup of a
relationship. In
massacres at colleges and universities,
it's often about getting a grade the shooter feels he didn't deserve. In 1991,
a graduate student at the University of
Iowa killed five people because he thought his
physics dissertation should have won a prestigious $1,000 award.
Mass
murders need access to a weapon
powerful enough to satisfy their need for
revenge.
America has become much more
competitive in recent years. We
admire those who achieve at any
cost, and it seems that we have less compassion for those who fail. (Just look at how eager we are to vote people
off the island, to reject them in a singing
competition or to have the
bachelor send them on their way.)" - adapted from James Alan
Fox
"My heart broke to hear about the murders at
Virginia Tech. Even though I was only 10 when the Columbine shootings occurred,
I feel the same emotions now as I did then. I cannot help but wonder: When will
we all learn? Seung-hui Cho was mad at the world; why couldn't someone have
reached out and befriended him? So many people are hurting and just need
someone to show them that life and love are valuable and worth pursuing." -
Sarah Roberts
"As shocking as Seung-hui Cho's DVD was, NBC's decision
to air it was even more shocking. This heartless decision only adds to the
immeasurable pain and
suffering of the families affected by this
horrible tragedy and gives the killer what he wanted most: immortality. It's
one thing for a video to appear on YouTube, but when the major news
organizations embrace it and air it over and over, the killer achieves exactly
the immortality he was looking for." - James Maddox
"I
wish the media would refrain from showing
excerpts from the shooter's video. Media exposure like this is why many killers
decide to act out. I also heard an expert on school shootings say that
constant media emphasis on the "record" nature of killings (i.e., the worst
school shooting in United States history) encourages other unbalanced
individuals to want to break the record." - Frances Rouse
death penalty
"We are the only Western democracy that has the
death penalty. It is time to join the rest of the civilized world and end the
death penalty." - Nancy Oliveira
"State-sanctioned killing is barbaric, cruel and
should be highly unusual. We should join the civilized countries of the world
in eliminating it." - Joy Buckley
"A study commissioned by the American Law Institute
said that decades of experience have proved that the system cannot reconcile
the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and
systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment is plagued by racial
disparities; is enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers are underpaid
and some are incompetent; risks executing innocent people; and is undermined by
the politics that come with judicial elections." - Adam Liptak 01/04/09
The American Law Institute was the only organization that built an
intellectual framework supporting the death penalty.
List of
countries that executed people in 2007: Iran (265), Saudi Arabia (156), USA
(42), Pakistan (29), Iraq (29), Afghanistan (15), China (13), Japan (9), North
Korea (8), Yemen (7), Bangladesh (6), Syria (5), Somalia (3), Singapore (2),
Sudan (2), Belarus (1), Botswana (1), Ethiopia (1), Indonesia (1), Kuwait
(1).
List of countries that have no death penalty:
ANDORRA, ANGOLA, ARMENIA, AUSTRALIA, AUSTRIA, AZERBAIJAN, BELGIUM,
BHUTAN, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, BULGARIA, CAMBODIA, CANADA, CAPE VERDE, COLOMBIA,
COSTA RICA, COTE D'IVOIRE, CROATIA, CYPRUS, CZECH REPUBLIC, DENMARK, DJIBOUTI,
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, ECUADOR, ESTONIA, FINLAND, FRANCE, GEORGIA, GERMANY,
GREECE, GUINEA-BISSAU, HAITI, HONDURAS, HUNGARY, ICELAND, IRELAND, ITALY,
KIRIBATI, LIBERIA, LIECHTENSTEIN, LITHUANIA, LUXEMBOURG, MACEDONIA, MALTA,
MARSHALL ISLANDS, MAURITIUS, MEXICO, MICRONESIA, MOLDOVA, MONACO, MONTENEGRO,
MOZAMBIQUE, NAMIBIA, NEPAL, NETHERLANDS, NEW ZEALAND, NICARAGUA, NIUE, NORWAY,
PALAU, PANAMA, PARAGUAY, PHILIPPINES, POLAND, PORTUGAL, ROMANIA, SAMOA, SAN
MARINO, SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE, SENEGAL, SERBIA SEYCHELLES, SLOVAK REPUBLIC,
SLOVENIA, SOLOMON ISLANDS, SOUTH AFRICA, SPAIN, SWEDEN, SWITZERLAND,
TIMOR-LESTE, TURKEY, TURKMENISTAN, TUVALU, UKRAINE, UNITED KINGDOM, URUGUAY,
VANUATU, VATICAN CITY STATE, VENEZUELA
List of countries that
have no death penalty except in times of war or under martial law:
ALBANIA, ARGENTINA, BOLIVIA, BRAZIL, CHILE, COOK ISLANDS, EL SALVADOR,
FIJI, ISRAEL, LATVIA, PERU
List of countries that have the death
penalty but have not executed anyone during the past 10 years:
ALGERIA, BENIN, BRUNEI DARUSSALAM, BURKINA FASO, CENTRAL AFRICAN
REPUBLIC, CONGO, GABON, GAMBIA, GHANA, GRENADA, KENYA, KYRGYZSTAN, MADAGASCAR,
MALAWI, MALDIVES, MALI, MAURITANIA, MOROCCO, MYANMAR, NAURU, NIGER, PAPUA NEW
GUINEA, RUSSIAN FEDERATION, SRI LANKA, SURINAME, SWAZILAND, TOGO, TONGA,
TUNISIA
"Exonerations from death row from 1973 to
2003 stands at 111." - Death Penalty Information Center
Lawyer
Johnson, 10 years Massachusetts' death row; Randall Dale Adams, 12 years Texas'
death row; Clarence Brandley, 9 years Texas'death row; Kirk Bloodsworth, 9
years Maryland's death row; Shareef Cousin, 3 years Nicholas James Yarris, 21
years Pennsylvania's death row; Joseph Amrine, 17 years Missouri's death row;
Timothy Howard and Gary Lamar James, 25 years on Ohio's death row; Juan Roberto
Melendez-Colon, 17 years on Florida's death row ; Ray Krone, 10 years Arizona's
death row (the 101th death row inmate in the United States to be exonerated and
released from prison since 1973);
"Wrongful convictions based on the
misapplication of forensic science are all
too common. Nationwide, in about two-thirds of the exonerations proved through
post-conviction DNA testing, sloppy or
fraudulent forensic evidence played a role." - Peter Neufeld, Barry
Scheck
{"DNA profiles are stored electronically and searched for
possible matches."- Department of Justice/Federal Bureau of Investigation
website
"DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual
crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes. Over time more and
more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database."- Harry
Levine sociologist
"Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding
their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested
or detained but not yet convicted. Sixteen states now take DNA from some who
have been found guilty of misdemeanors." - Solomon Moore 03/18/09
"According to population geneticists, it is indeed possible to have the
six loci match in perhaps many dozens of individuals whose DNA is contained in
a databank of 700,000." - Andre A. Moenssens October 2000
"State crime
lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona's DNA database when she
stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles. The men
matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to
distinguish people. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing
those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of
the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other
white. In the years after her 2001 discovery, Kathryn Troyer found dozens of
similar matches - each seeming to defy impossible odds. The FBI laboratory
tried to stop distribution of Kathryn Troyer's results and began an aggressive
behind-the-scenes campaign to block similar searches elsewhere, even those
ordered by courts." - Jason Felch, Maura Dolan 07/19/08}
"In fact the
most glaring weakness is that no matter how efficient and fair the
death penalty may seem in
theory, in actual practice it is primarily
inflicted upon the weak, the poor, the
ignorant and against racial
minorities. " - California Governor Pat Brown
"To take a
life when a life has
been lost is revenge, it is not
justice. Justice allows for
mercy, clemency and
compassion. These virtues are not weakness." - Reverend Desmond
Tutu
"The illusion of gentleness of lethal
injections has made executions far less of a taboo
experience for the public. But as Albert
Camus wrote in 1957 in "Reflections on the Guillotine," those who
actually witness an execution know it for the
horror it is." - David DeKok
American crime laboratories are grossly underfunded,
lack a scientific foundation and are compromised by critical delays in
analyzing physical evidence, according to a broad study of forensic techniques
published February 18, 2009 by the National Academy of Sciences.
Among
the problems: there is little if any scientific research to support the claim
that no two people share identical fingerprints; chemical analysis of the lead
in bullets has been determined to be flawed and unreliable; crazed glass, the
tiny, weblike lines that spread across glass that lead arson investigators to
determine a set fire was found to be caused by water dousing the fired;
bite-mark comparisons are subjective. These methods of forensic analysis helped
send innocent people to prison and Death Row.
"Crime laboratories
should be managed separately from police departments to ensure that their
findings are protected from bias. The potential for conflicts of interest
between the needs of law enforcement and the broader needs of forensic science
are too great." - National Academy of Sciences
"I am troubled by the
report's general finding that far too many forensic disciplines lack the
standards necessary to ensure their scientific reliability in court." - Senator
Patrick J. Leahy
"I stand before you to explain my
frustrations and deep concerns
about both the administration and the penalty of death.Today
America is not in league with most of our
major allies: Europe, Canada, Mexico, most of South and
Central America. These
countries rejected the death penalty.
We are partners in death with several
third world countries. Even Russia has called a moratorium.
The
death penalty has been abolished in 12
states. In none of these states has the homicide rate increased.
You
are 5 times more likely to get a death
sentence for first degree murder in the
rural area of Illinois than you are in Cook County.Half of the nearly 300
capital cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or resentencing. 33
of the death row inmates were represented at
trial by an attorney who had later been disbarred or at some point suspended
from practicing law. 46 inmates were convicted on
the basis of testimony from jailhouse
informants." -Governor George H. Ryan of Illinois
Governor George H.
Ryan of Illinois commuted all death sentences
in the state of Illinois to life in
prison.
Realizing that
moral integrity in public servants when it comes
to speaking up or actually doing something about the unnecessary, inhumane and
unjustifiably violent
treatment of social outcasts is a trend that
must by nipped in the bud, Alberto Gonzales has
succeeded in creating a finding, by jury trial, that George H.
Ryan is a corrupt politician.
If the federal
government chose to they could
imprison nearly every modern
politician that ever ran for office. George H.
Ryan was found guilty of accepting gifts and steering
government business to friends and
associates just like every politician ever
elected.
According to federal prosecutors George H. Ryan stands out as
an anomaly, one of only a handful of corrupt
politicians, for accepting gifts and steering
government business to friends and
associates. (Why did Halliburton get the
no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq?
Surely it had nothing to do with Dick
Cheney!)
Governor George H. Ryan of Illinois reward for stepping up
and saying 'it is wrong to execute people' is imprisonment for accepting gifts
and steering government business to friends
and associates - just like every other politician.
"That capital
punishment is
cruel and unusual is not the argument that
opponents need to make; rather, the argument is that as long as the
political state is permitted by its
citizens to
kill helpless, restrained
prisoners as a
solution to a problem, the door to
State sponsored
genocide, however remote an
idea it seems in America at the moment, remains open.
Capital
punishment is, and always will
be, a political power in search of a crime, whether it's
murder, treason, being a member of a
hated ethnic group or anything else that
inflames public
opinion. States, just like their
citizens, should only have the
legitimate power to kill in immediate
self-defense, and never in the
service of
punishment." - Lindsie
Carlsen
Imperial Christianity
Indian Wars
Iraq
Mara Salvaturcha
Vietnam War
Gulf War |
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This web site is not a commercial web site and
is presented for educational purposes only.
This website defines a new religious
ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification
of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern
propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an
international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt
version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any
group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due
to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion
aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason
which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no
church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to
develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of
reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the
human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in
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crime.”
This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary
the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the
international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The
international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking
system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military entertainment complex of
America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of
self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization
is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a
gun.
American social mores and values have declined precipitously over
the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more
power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general
through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed
into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The
results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social
structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a
perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the
bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the
corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which
further their purposes.
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