12.20.04
Posted in Rants at 11:21 pm by Thomas
After the disclosure of photos from Abu Ghraib early in 2004 it was only a matter of time for the other shoe to drop. It has been clear for the whole time that the orders authorizing torture had to come from high up in the Department of Defense or the White House.
Well. The FBI thinks so, too.
Today the ACLU released redacted copies of internal emails from the FBI that point directly back at the Deputy Secretary of Defence, the Secretary of Defence and the President himself.
FBI officials had been concerned about the cases of clear torture they were witnessing in Guantanamo Bay and with the fradulent use of FBI identities by DOD employees during interrogations. A flurry of emails over these subjects with clear descriptions of torture witnessed by trained FBI agents is now publicly available.
If you are living in the United States, this is being done in our name:
“Here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO. On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand a foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. . . .”
And this:
“REDACTED stated that he had been beaten unconscious approximately three or four weeks ago when he was still at Camp X-Ray. According to REDACTED, an unknown number of guards entered his cell, unprovoked, and started spitting and curing at him. . . . REDACTED rolled onto his stomach to protect himself, REDACTED state a soldier named REDACTED jumped on his back and started beating him in the face REDACTED then choked him until he passed out. REDACTED stated that REDACTED was beating him because REDACTED was a Muslim . . . .”
Oh – so who signed the order to allow these interogation tactics? The FBI Site Commander in Baghdad quotes an executive order signed by none other than the Time’s Person of the Year, the President of the United States.
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12.11.04
Posted in Rants at 1:03 am by Thomas
Mosques all over Iraq have been destroyed in fights between local insurgents and US soldiers. Bombed out, ruined, burnt down, shot through. Symbols for a war where both sides don’t care what happens to the country they are fighting in.
The Pentagon regularily uses the insurgent’s tactics as an excuse of why they had to blow up another religious site. What kind of argument is that? If there is a bankrobbery, can the police just blow up the bank to stop the crime? Of course not. There is no excuse for the behaviour of the US soldiers in Iraq. None.
The US government likes to call the guerillas the “bad guys”. Well, if that’s the case, why do the Americans not behave like the good guys? The Geneva Conventions have been called “quaint” by this government, but they are still Federal Law.
This policy and the failure by the Bush regime to even once apologize for such an act has destroyed any hope for friendship, understanding and cooperation with all the countries in this world that have a high percentage of muslims among their population. Even most of Europe and the Canadians have been busy moving as far away as they can from being seen as allies of the US.
America is becoming a pariah.
This kind of behaviour against another culture and the frequent reports of torture in US-run prison camps all over the world will not be forgotten for a long time. It took the Germans fifty years of spotless behavior to overcome the blemish of the Second World War and to finally make peace with the survivors of the Holocaust.
It will take the US another fifty years to regain their status as a beacon of freedom. For now, the image of a progressive superpower and a defender of democracy has been utterly destroyed, ruined like the mosques of Iraq.
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12.02.04
Posted in Good Stuff at 1:21 am by Thomas
If you are spending more than a hundred dollars this year on Christmas presents and if you have an Amazon account, I have a suggestion for you:
Go to the Amazon Wish List, locate the Wish List Search box on the right and enter “school” as name and your homestate as location. Now Search.
All of these schools need books for their students to read. Go to any of these school wish lists and buy a few books for them. There’s books for elementary school levels for less than four dollars! Buy two, or three, or as many as your budget allows.
And even better – you can choose what to buy. Think about it – with a ten dollar investment, you can make a memorable impression in the life of these young children.
You think kids today do not learn enough about history? Get them a fun history book! Not enough music? Get them song books! Biology? Math? Geography? Amazon has it all, and many of the wish lists run over several dozen items, some go even into the hundreds.
You decide – They read.
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