(Artwork: Mark Clifford)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama declared Monday he would try to block the court-ordered release of photos showing U.S. troops abusing prisoners, abruptly reversing his position out of concern the pictures would “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House had said last month it would not oppose an appeals court ruling that set a May 28 deadline for releasing dozens of photos from military investigations of alleged misconduct.
CIA Refuses to Turn Over Torture Tape Documents
Bush Advisor Says President Has Legal Power to Torture Children
I believe that the pictures will put our soldiers at risk.
If the situation is as Catherine describes, there would be mass protests. The concealment of the evidence is a guarantee that this abuse will continue. Most of us have seen images of the cross and there isn’t too much more barbaric than that unless children are involved. The truth is not going to hurt our soldiers. It is going to hurt those who deserve justice.
Some say that the volume of pictures show that this practice was not just a few bad apples. I had never even considered that children were the targets. That explains a lot.
Hummingbird:
What I am saying is that to take the positions that:
1. We don’t want significant change
2. We want financial security
3. Torture is not permitted and the people who use it would be prosecuted
are internally inconsistent,
Catherine
What do you mean by “immoral irresponsible morality? Sex Slavery! Torture! Blowing up the World Trade center in order to start a policy of terrorist suppression and totalitarian rule, the march toward the wars in Irac and Afghanistan under the umbrella of the War on Terror and last but not least the plan to implement total genocide not just in this country but across the world to stop the protest of an awakening global population. Finally most loathsome of all claiming to be moved by the hand of God while ultimately being a surrogate of the Devil himself?
This is my take on things: To hell with Treasury Bills CDs and Bonds they are worthless peices of paper!
Dangerous people are in the binds they made for themselves and because they plan to kill all of us sooner if not later I think it’s very important that their evil intentions be brought to light!
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Here is my guess:
1. Pictures exist of young boys being sodomized. Whether this was in front of mothers/female relatives as the allegations contend, I don’t know.
2. Such practices are much more common than widely understood — both in the US and areas that we target and occupy globally.
3. I would note that when we went into Iraq, we awarded a $500 billion sole source contract to a private company to run prisons and enforcement that had just settled two tracks of litigation relating to documented sex slave trafficking by their personnel in Eastern Europe.
4. Sex slavery is a integral part of maintaining the type of Empire we run. One of the business lines of occupations is culling the attractive children who do not have strong family protection and selling them into slavery or sex slavery.
5. Since we as a nation do not want to push the red button http://solari.com/blog/?p=1949, then the question for the military industrial complex is how do they keep the slow burn going particularly as the population ages, the dynamic growth shifts to the middle east and Asia and the economy globalizes. This all means you need lots of force, and the reality that implies an entire infrastructure of people and activities that are criminal in nature.
6. Slavery works. Crime works. The system depends on it. This is not what we are. This is what we have been for 500 plus years. If all sex slavery stopped tomorrow, the global financial system would melt down within one to three months. Without control files and sex benefits, the whole thing grinds to a halt.
7. Asking the CIA and DOJ et al. to keep the red button from being pushed but insisting that they can not use torture to do it is putting a group of people in a horrible double bind. Do you want your Treasury bills, bonds and CD’s to have value? Or do you want to the torture to stop? The notion that you can have both without significant spiritual, culture and political global transformation is irrational.
8. When you put dangerous people in unfair double binds they become disrespectful, frustrated and if you make it worse and insist on their investigation and prosecution, they do things like use bio warfare to have flu epidemics. While I don’t condone their tactics, I empathize with what it is like to be on the receiving end of immoral and irresponsible morality.
Way it is. That is my 2 cents,
Catherine
POLITICS OF POWER AND PLUNDER!
The torture of “anyone” in United States Custody is a despotic act calculated to terrorize the very citizens, it professes to make secure. If the U.S. government had meant to hide that it tortures, that fact would have remained hidden not only from Americans but from the rest of the world. A Congress and a justice system that thwarts prosecution of those deemed “too POWERFUL to ANSWER for their crimes”, is an unspeakable betrayal of duty, called TREASON. Failure to act in the face of such violations of international law and human rights, tars us all with the same brush of inhumanity, and makes scapegoats and targets of all Americans. The purposeful and wholesale assault on our National identity forces us to face the most heartbreaking of questions. “WHO ARE WE AS A PEOPLE AND A COUNTRY WHEN THOSE WHO WE TRUSTED TO ACT IN OUR NAME COULD BETRAY OUR VALUES AND OUR TRUST SO COMPLETELY”? That betrayal has made us prisoners within our own borders and pariahs if we dare to venture outside of them. This leads us to the next question. “WHO ARE THE REAL TARGETS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S WAR ON TERROR?” The chilling answer is there in black and white, in the Patriot Act, The Emergency State Health Powers Act, The Military Commissions Act, The Homegrown Terrorism Act HR 645 and the National Security Presidential Directive 59, to name a few. NSPD 59 creates a secret state police run by the FBI and created to spy on and terrorize U.S. citizens. As if the CIA, NSA, NORTHCOM, FEMA, and DHS weren’t enough! Furthermore those don’t include the civilian contractors financed from behind a 20 trillion dollar a year wall of secrecy who can only perpetuate their profits by creating a need for security infinitum. The list goes on and on. The reason may sound simplistic, however it’s consistent with what has always been the motivator of those addicted to power. Money, which buys, controls and shifts more power. The true irony is that the same power that runs the engines of progress is inextricably entwined with that other kind of power the megalomaniacs are so addicted to. That second kind of power involves corporate, gobal, imperalistic, interests that, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, visits the plagues of revelation upon every corner of the globe. Wherever there are resources to steal, people to exploit and pristine environments to destroy, Sovereignty, becomes meaningless, outside, and even inside our national borders. While Multinational Corporate treachery financed by a 20 trillion dollar a year shadow government plans the end of our future, “Our leaders” “continue” to steal the lives of our children and love ones under the False Flag of Militant Patriotism. The limits and ultimate end of the first kind of power, is coming toward us, at warp speed. And with it, ramifications of sustainability of human populations of less than a third than what now inhabit the earth. With that inside information, there is even further consolidation, in the evil few, of the second kind of power. They say power corrupts and with no exception comes the misguided idea that “they decide” who lives and who dies. How we as Americans understand and deal with the unthinkable, will ultimately decide whether we survive as a people, a country, or as a species on the fragile face of our beautiful and beloved planet. D
You pose an interesting point, certainly possible. I think a lot of things that happen are for the reasons you mention, so, if one is paying attention, it’s not hard to feel that it’s not only possible but true. Brandon Mayfield found out how possible it was. Leonard Peltier is in prison, most likely, just to serve as an example. However, if you read a book like “The Lucifer Complex”, it’s also a “natural” human progression to behave that way when people are separated into groups of ‘those with power’ and ‘those without power’. In his experiment, in a very short time, the ‘guards’ were pushing the limits of what they could do without being told and it had to be stopped. Some learned some things about themselves that they didn’t want to know. The experiment was for humane purposes but then it was “reverse engineered” for other purposes. I’m sure there are more photos and it’s been wide spread and not a “few bad apples” like they always try to make it seem.