Posts tagged torture
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![Why Is a Report on Bush’s Torture Program Being Kept Classified by Obama? A massive report on torture reveals it’s far less effective than reported. But the CIA refuses to declassify it.
1) Because any diminution of the effectiveness of violence or the application of dehumanization as the means to achieve a military goal has a direct negative relationship on a thuggish administrations ability to justify murder for profit?
2) Obama is the same kind of drunken dipshit as George Bush?
Much of what you’ve been told (or seen in movies) about George W. Bush’s supposedly effective torture program is false and overhyped. At least, that’s one of the conclusions of the 6,000-page review of the program the Senate Intelligence Committee completed last year.
Yet, right now, President Obama is preventing you from learning any of this, by keeping the report classified.
Before the end of the Bush Administration, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)—then the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—started investigating the torture program. When Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) took over as Chair of the Committee in 2009, she intensified the investigation and negotiated with the CIA to get access to its files. After almost four more years of work and reviewing 6 million pages of documents, the Committee voted out the report in December on a mostly party line vote.
As you may recall from the debate around the film “Zero Dark Thirty debate,” Senators Feinstein, Carl Levin (D-MI), and John McCain (R-AZ) have said the report shows that torture didn’t produce the intelligence that led us to finding Osama bin Laden. According to reports, it shows that torture didn’t produce much useful information. While discussing the report, Jay Rockefeller described the torture program this way:
[T]he people who ran it were ignorant of the topic, [it was] executed by personnel without relevant experience, managed incompetently by senior officials who did not pay attention to crucial details, and corrupted by personnel and pecuniary conflicts of interest. It was sold to the policymakers and lawyers of the White House, the Department of Justice, and Congress, with grossly-inflated claims of professionalism and effectiveness, so-called lives saved.
In short, the report rebuts claims that torture worked—and specifically the claim made by torture boosters from Dick Cheney to former Counterterrorism Center head Jose Rodriguez that it helped to find Osama bin Laden.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/1ede4840e7fb34120f36bdbd55c8e1ba/tumblr_mmeckotkBo1qjrap6o1_400.jpg)
Why Is a Report on Bush’s Torture Program Being Kept Classified by Obama? A massive report on torture reveals it’s far less effective than reported. But the CIA refuses to declassify it.
![Politics Combined Together with Religious Fundamentalists, Like Republican Senator James Inhofe or Osama Bin Laden Equals Death
The Irish government has admitted that it was in collusion with laundries operated by religious congregations which kept generations of women enslaved.
Prime Minister Enda Kenny failed to issue a formal apology. Just hearing about the Magdalene laundries, which operated from 1922 until as late as 1996, suggests that Kenny and the Irish government have yet to grasp the suffering of so many innocent women and of their families. Once taken to the workhouses — 60-year-old survivor Maureen Sullivan recalls that she was taken to one directly from school in a laundry van — all the women were given different names by the god damn, god fearing souless nuns, on the pretext that such would protect their privacy.
As Sullivan tells the Guardian, she was physically and verbally abused for “infractions” of nothing more than not walking fast enough around the laundry:
“There was physical abuse where they would dig you in the side with a sacred torture stick, aka, a thick cross of the rosary beads, where you got a thump on the side of the head and where there would be constant putting you down, shouting, verbal abuse. You got the cross in the side of the ribs if you slowed down on your way around the laundry.
“[The nuns, aka, god fearing sexually dysfunctional state supported celibate sadists] ate very well while we were on dripping, tea, bread. I remember another torture – one when we were all hungry – we could smell the likes of roast beef and cooked chicken wafting from where the nuns were eating. That was like another insult.
Hell is on Earth, and most of hell is created by the pious religious piss suckers for those that are vulnerable. Religion is the disease that defines the human race.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/2d2ab31813711b06897de28825f70d49/tumblr_mhzjmy6XAo1qjrap6o1_500.jpg)
Politics Combined Together with Religious Fundamentalists, Like Republican Senator James Inhofe or Osama Bin Laden Equals Death
The Irish government has admitted that it was in collusion with laundries operated by religious congregations which kept generations of women enslaved.
Prime Minister Enda Kenny failed to issue a formal apology. Just hearing about the Magdalene laundries, which operated from 1922 until as late as 1996, suggests that Kenny and the Irish government have yet to grasp the suffering of so many innocent women and of their families. Once taken to the workhouses — 60-year-old survivor Maureen Sullivan recalls that she was taken to one directly from school in a laundry van — all the women were given different names by the god damn, god fearing souless nuns, on the pretext that such would protect their privacy.
As Sullivan tells the Guardian, she was physically and verbally abused for “infractions” of nothing more than not walking fast enough around the laundry:
“There was physical abuse where they would dig you in the side with a sacred torture stick, aka, a thick cross of the rosary beads, where you got a thump on the side of the head and where there would be constant putting you down, shouting, verbal abuse. You got the cross in the side of the ribs if you slowed down on your way around the laundry.
“[The nuns, aka, god fearing sexually dysfunctional state supported celibate sadists] ate very well while we were on dripping, tea, bread. I remember another torture – one when we were all hungry – we could smell the likes of roast beef and cooked chicken wafting from where the nuns were eating. That was like another insult.
Hell is on Earth, and most of hell is created by the pious religious piss suckers for those that are vulnerable. Religion is the disease that defines the human race.
America’s Drone Terrorism
In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the U.S. safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.
This narrative is false.
Those are the understated opening words of a disturbing, though unsurprising, nine-month study of the Obama administration’s official, yet unacknowledged, remote-controlled bombing campaign in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, near Afghanistan. The report, “Living Under Drones,” is a joint effort by the New York University School of Law’s Global Justice Clinic and Stanford Law School’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic.
The NYU/Stanford report goes beyond reporting estimates of the civilian casualties inflicted by the deadly and illegal U.S. campaign. It also documents the hell the Pakistanis endure under President Barack Obama’s policy, which includes a “kill list” from which he personally selects targets. That hell shouldn’t be hard to imagine. Picture yourself living in an area routinely visited from the air by pilotless aircraft carrying Hellfire missiles. This policy is hardly calculated to win friends for the United States.
10,000 Americans Thank Italy for Convicting CIA Agents.
Almost 10,000 Americans have sent messages to the Italian Embassy in Washington thanking Italy’s high court for upholding the conviction of 23 Americans (22 CIA officers and one military official) for the offense of kidnapping a man off the street in Milan on February 17, 2003, and shipping him to Egypt to be brutally tortured.
“La Legge E’ Uguale Per Tutti,” were the words on the wall behind the judges. Would that it were so. Those 10,000 messages, sent through the website of an organization I work for, RootsAction.org, also asked Italy to request the extradition of the 23 convicts, who are living free and immune from serious consequences in the United States.
If the law were the same for all, Italy would request extradition. If the law were the same for all, Italy would be able to kidnap the 23 and justify the act to the U.S. government by calling it “rendition.” If the law were the same for all, the United States would prosecute our own criminals and not have to rely on Italy to do so. If the law were the same for all, prosecutions of mid- to low-level operatives would be followed by prosecutions of the ultimate decision makers at the top, including U.S. presidents. If the law were the same for all, the U.S. government would be more interested in shipping 23 convicts to Italy to serve their sentences than in shipping WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden or the United States, in neither of which nations he has been convicted of or even charged with a crime.
Abu Omar was walking near his home in Milano when he was stopped and questioned by a policeman. When the two men had been engaged in conversation for some minutes, the side door of a van parked behind Omar crashed open with a thunderous sound, two extremely large and strong men grabbed their victim and hauled him inside, and the door slammed shut three seconds after it had opened, as the van accelerated and the two men hit and kicked their victim repeatedly in the dark of the van’s interior, pounding his head, chest, stomach, and legs.
They stopped. They stuffed a gag in his mouth and put a hood over his head, as they cinched cords tight around his wrists and ankles. Hours later they threw him into another vehicle. An hour later they took him out, stood him up, cut his clothes off, shoved something hard up his anus, stuck a diaper and pajamas on him, wrapped his head almost entirely with duct tape, and tossed him in an airplane.
The torture he received when he got where he was going left him nearly dead, prematurely aged, and barely able to walk. The torture was U.S.-sponsored and Egyptian administered.
The kidnapping was the work of dozens of CIA agents who had long been living it up in Italy’s most luxurious hotels. They carelessly used identifiable cell phones and frequent flyer accounts, as well as disguising themselves with pseudonyms very similar to their real names. They believed they were above the law. The Italian courts are to be congratulated for showing them they might not be.
No other nation has done the same. The United States believes it can operate under different rules from the rest of the world. George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney left office to go on book tours rather than on trial. They tentatively established new U.S. practices, still considered somewhat illicit and scandalous. President Obama publicly instructed the U.S. Justice Department not to prosecute the CIA for torture. On the question of permitting the prosecution of his predecessor, President Obama said he preferred to “look forward.” Sadly, we’re looking forward to a world without legal limitations on presidents.
(Source: act.rootsaction.org)
Civil Liberties Under Obama or the Expansion of the Police Security State.
When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ great hope. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, pledged to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and run a transparent and open government. But he has become a civil libertarian’s nightmare: a supposedly liberal president who instead has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies, lending bipartisan support for a more intrusive and authoritarian federal government.
It started with the 9/11 attacks. Within a week, Congress, including many liberals, gave the White House blanket authority to wage a war on the terrorists. A month after that, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, authorizing many anti-terrorism measure including expanded surveillance. By mid-November, the White House ordered creation of military tribunals to try terrorists who were not U.S. citizens.
Bush quickly expanded covert operations, creating a shadow arrest, interrogation and detention system based at Guantanamo that violated international law and evaded domestic oversight. While the Supreme Court eventually ruled that detainees have some rights, the precedent that the Constitution does not restrict how a president conducts an endless war against a stateless enemy was firmly planted. In response, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union proposed reforms the newly elected president could make. What few anticipated was how he would embrace, expand and institutionalize many of Bush’s war on terror excesses.
President Obama now has power that Bush never had. Foremost is he can (and has) ordered the killing of U.S. citizens abroad who are deemed terrorists. Like Bush, he has asked the Justice Department to draft secret memos authorizing his actions without going before a federal court or disclosing them. Obama has continued indefinite detentions at Gitmo, but also brought the policy ashore by signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which authorizes the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of assisting terrorists, even citizens. That policy, codifying how the Bush administration treated Jose Padilla, a citizen who was arrested in a bomb plot after landing at a Chicago airport in 2002 and was transferred from civil to military custody, upends the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878’s ban on domestic military deployment.
Obama, “The Paranoid”, Will Not Win in 2012; Romney Will Lose by Default.
Two Republicans Arrested in UK On Charges of Female Genital Mutilation
FGM can cause long-term severe physical, psychological and sexual problems for girls and women subjected to it and is a violation of their human rights. As Care2 blogger Judy Molland has written, FGM also “reflects deep-rooted inequality between the sexes, and constitutes an extreme form of discrimination against women. It is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children.”
Iowa is the Most Backward Terrorist Criminally Run State in the Union: Torture OK’d by Iowa Governor.
Despite a fierce campaign to stop the measure, Iowa became the first state Friday to officially make it a crime to enter a farming operation with the intent to secretly videotape animal abuse. Undercover footage filmed by animal rights groups during the past several years have been instrumental in exposing cases of cruelty to farm animals.
Republican Governor Terry Branstad signed the law in a private ceremony. Iowa is the country’s leading producer of pork and eggs and the governor is known to have “strong ties to the state’s agricultural industry.”
In other news - Terry Branstad, Iowa Governor, Slapped With $1 Million Sexual Discrimination Lawsuit By State Commissioner.
In Letter to Obama Dozens of European Parliamentarians Condemn Abusive Treatment of Bradley Manning
Obama is a catastrophic failure at honesty. Our President feigns ignorance condescendingly and disgustingly to the fact that he is a willing collaborator in a Police State that has about as much resemblance to a Democracy as the Third Reich. America has evaporated, and these bastards we the corporations put in office lie to the people as if the people have to listen to lies and believe the lies, as if it is unimportant to behave honestly towards the people and as if the only reason we the people exist is to be the recipient of a lie, as if that were our job, to be lied to. We the people are not these avaricious legislatwhores pathetic children to be condescended to and set aside as unimportant. This is our country, America belongs to the 99% and not to those greedy, wealthy, pompous asses that subjugate and prey upon the people. The 1% are thieves, well dressed, haughty and articulate thieves, but nonetheless thieves.
The United States Government revels so majestically (not really) in its grand superiority amongst the nations of the world. A cowardly, duplicitous, two faced plutocratic moron that scratches its ass with the same finger it picks its teeth might, one would hope, at least know that such gifted behavior would appear damn disgusting to others. Politicians in the White House and Department of Justices behavior towards Bradley Manning is barbaric in any century and insane in its level of slow, prolonged, distracted torture, medieval torture of a decent concerned human being. The people expect more respect from leaders for the rule of law: a fast and speedy trial is a constitutional right, not a fucking privilege to be obviated by any officious ass, including a presidential ass.
Both Eric Holder and Barrack Obama should be summarily executed as enemies of the United States Constitution and perpetrators of crimes against humanity. America is not naive enough to see this travesty as anything but failure of the United States at its highest level of government.
Welcome to Boston, Mr. Rumsfeld. You Are Under Arrest.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been stripped of legal immunity for acts of torture against US citizens authorized while he was in office. The 7th Circuit made the ruling in the case of two American contractors who were tortured by the US military in Iraq after uncovering a smuggling ring within an Iraqi security company. The company was under contract to the Department of Defense.
The company was assisting Iraqi insurgent groups in the “mass acquisition” of American weapons. The ruling comes as Rumsfeld begins his book tour with a visit to Boston on Wednesday, September 21, and as new, uncensored photos of Abu Ghraib spark fresh outrage across Internet. Awareness is growing that Bush-era crimes went far beyond mere water boarding.
Cheney, Rumsfield, Bush and the Republican Party in general are epitomized by the unrestrained illegal use of torture and parrallel the behavior of the Third Reich as fanatics come to power.
Vote Republican: Destroy America.
Jesus Loves Nukes
Some students in the Air Force’s Nuclear Ethics course called its theological justifications for nuclear strikes the ‘Jesus loves nukes’ part.
Brought to you by the same organization which maintained that the Earth was orbited by the Sun and if you dared disagree, you were put to death: Christians - murderous empty-headed fools - Christians.
How 2 American Whistleblowers Allegedly Tortured in Iraq May Force Donald Rumsfeld to Pay for His Crimes
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Monday refused to dismiss a lawsuit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for creating policies that caused American civilians to be tortured by the U.S. military in Iraq.
Republicans: still treating Americans like cattle for the slaughter.
Gay Concentration Camp Survivor Dies at 98.
The last known gay concentration camp survivor imprisoned because of his sexual orientation has died, according to Germany’s Lesbian and Gay Association.
Rudolf Brazda, who was held at the Buchenwald concentration camp for three years until U.S. forces liberated the camp in 1945, died Wednesday at the age of 98.
Torture prompts soul-searching among some Christians - CNN
A survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that white evangelical Christians are more likely to support torture than people who rarely or never attend religious services.
Christians also have poor sex lives, empty heads so what exactly is the attraction?
Bradley Manning was moved from Quantico to a better facility at Leavenworth according to his attorney David Coombs, due to his dual Welsh citizenry, and pressure from Welsh Parliamentarian in Britain - David House, Democracy Now.
Obama would not have done it for just a regular old fucking American; Obama likes to kiss Royal ass, though.
Time to go Obama. Alan Grayson Democrat, 2012.
Autopsy Study Provides New Theory On Shaken Baby Syndrome
Findings from a series of autopsies could alter the debate over the controversial diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.
A new study suggests that babies can die by violent shaking alone — but not in the way doctors have previously thought.
A team of researchers who conducted autopsies on 35 babies in Miami, Dallas and Calgary, Alberta, report that when children die after being violently shaken, they die of neck injuries and not from brain trauma. by Joseph Shapiro
