Aside from bondage fantasies what intel did Dick Cheney receive from this? How did the sexual assault of these Iraqi suspects in Abu-Ghraib make us safer? It didn’t, no matter what Dick Cheney or his larvae in the media tell you. How many American lives did this save?
None. In fact, it cost American lives as it only served to polarize hitherto neutral parties to engage in the fight against an occupying army that was torturing prisoners while condemning Saddam Hussein for doing the same. It wasn’t the photos and videos that were to blame for the deaths. Alyssa Peterson, one of the first female soldiers to die in Iraq, was a direct casualty of this policy. It was torture itself, without which there would be no photos. Nor was it a secret to the enemy in the first place.
How bad was the torture? It was bad enough that army psychologist Alyssa Peterson committed suicide rather than participate in it, that’s how bad. During this time a concerted effort was made by the corporate media to condition Americans into ignoring the fact that torture is a violation of the Geneva Convention; to believe torture is wrong when other countries do it but not when we do it. To this end we had television and radio personalities infest the airwaves in a pro-torture black psy-op campaign [the promulgated falsification being that torture is not a war crime].
On FOX you could always count on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to promote the use of torture by calling it an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Henry Rollins aptly noted of the latter as “over-fed, Baby Huey, coward-bitch motherfuckers… suck-up coward-weakling apologists like Sean Hannity.” He further added “To question authority is to be somehow unpatriotic? un-American? and in league with terrorists world-wide? Fuck you!”
But it wasn’t just FOX News by any means. You had these propagandists on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, you name it. They always had plenty of airtime. For example, this scat-muncher and his ilk from a Disney owned station in San Francisco at KSFO suggested we could violate the Geneva Conventions in the good old days but not anymore…
“I would say first we cut off your finger, next we go for your penis. What do you want? Okay? I’ll tell ya what. The guy says nothing? We cut off the tip of the finger first. Just the tip of the finger, that’s all. I got news for ya he’s gonna start talking quickly. We can’t do any of that now…”
Of course we can’t do that now, you sadistic racist fuck. It’s a war crime! We never could. This is America. What is wrong with you?
Well, doesn’t matter now, Lee Rogers is dead. But this was one sick motherfucker. It’s also interesting that for a homophobe his first thought was to fantasize about handling another man’s penis.
Regardless, the rest of the world eventually called the Bush Administration on its embrace of wantonly violating the Geneva Conventions and engaging in war crimes, and we had this national embarrassment happen…
One Way to Extract a False Confession
CIA says it made, destroyed interrogation tapes Dec. 6, 2007: The CIA acknowledged making videotapes to document interrogations of terrorism suspects that used techniques critics have denounced as torture,and said on Thursday it had destroyed the recordings. Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden told employees in a letter that the videotapes were made in 2002 as part of a secret detention and interrogation program that began with the arrest of suspected al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah…. Continued
Water Boarding Featured in Medieval Torture Museum
“In order to best carry out this form of torture, the accused was placed on a kind of ‘rack’ that consisted, in one of its forms, of a large table with a raised center. After tying the hands and feet of the victim to the edges of this table, the torturer proceeded with his work in one of several ways. One of these methods involved forcing the victim to swallow large amounts of water with the help of a funnel, then striking his swollen and arched abdomen repeatedly with heavy blows. Another form of water torture involved inserting a cloth tube into the mouth of victim, forcing it as deep as possible into this throat. The tube was then filled slowly with water, swelling up and choking the victim. If that weren’t enough, the tube would then pulled violently from the victim’s throat, causing internal abrasions.”Tortures Devices (St. Petersburg museum, Russia)
“In 1947, a Japanese soldier who used water boarding against a U.S. citizen during World War II was sentenced to 15 years in U.S. prison for committing a war crime.”
What is Water boarding?– Howstuffworks
All of the G20 world leaders refused to shake an American President’s hand. Think about that. He was and is recognized as an international war criminal or justifiably treated as one, just like Henry Kissinger. That’s just sad. The war-mongering shit bubbles that dribbled out of Nixon’s asshole, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, really did a number on this country.
John W. Dean, a former counsel to the president, writes: Dean Koh minced no words when he stated, “in my professional opinion as a law professor and a law dean, the Bybee memorandum [assistant attorney general to the Bush administration’s legal justification for torture] is perhaps the most clearly legally erroneous opinion I have ever read.” And he proceeded to spell out no less than “five obvious failures” within the memo. According to Dean Koh, the memo’s blatant flaws include its ignoring the existing “zero tolerance policy” on torture, and its defining torture so loosely that it would tolerate “the things that Saddam Hussein’s forces did” such as “beating, pulling out a fingernail, burning with hot irons, suspension from ceiling fans” to name a few. Also, Koh noted, the memo so “grossly overreads the president’s constitutional power” that, under its logic, the president could “order genocide or other kinds of acts” and neither Congress nor the courts could stop him.
Additionally, the memo’s advice that “executive officials can escape prosecution if they are carrying out the president’s orders as commander in chief” is, Koh noted, the same I-was-following-orders “defense which was rejected in Nuremberg and is at the very basis of our international criminal law.” Finally, Koh noted, Bybee’s memo tolerates “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” which is contrary to the existing law. Other international law, and law of war, experts tell me that Bybee’s memo (not to mention a few others) is damning evidence suggesting a common plan on the part of the Administration to violate the laws of war. Strikingly, such a “common plan,” or conspiracy, is itself a war crime.
An important thing to remember is that love of country does not mean you must love an elected official. Love of country and love of elected officials are not interchangeable terms. Elected officials change but the country, and your countrymen remain. You often heard that if you did not love Bush or his foreign and domestic policies, you did not love your country, and that’s bullshit. Don’t ever swallow this fascist propaganda and don’t ever trust anyone who implies as much. No wonder Elvis shot his television set.
Latest:
- The A-Team Killings
- Report: Medical Professionals Participated in Torture of Terror Suspects
- U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Calls for Release of Info on Bush-Era Kidnappings, Torture
More…
- Philip Zimbardo: Why ordinary people do evil … or do good
- The Asch Experiment: How People Believe Obvious Lies
- We Have Met the Enemy and it is Us
- Memo to Real Christians: Jesus Was Tortured to Death
- “Involuntary Brain-Wave Cessation” Memo
- “Say Allah is a whore!”
- War Criminal a Grandpa
Fuck Yoo very much…
John Yoo, that is. He was a chief architect of Bush’s torture policy. In the video above he is teaching a class of Berkeley law students, apparently, the fine points of detainee torture.
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