|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by willravel
Why aren't more people disgusted that we have to argue over what is or isn't torture? This is insane.
|
There is an answer at the top of the page I linked to in the main article in my last post, and this is a reaction <h5>BY the news organization leading the investigation</h5> of white house approval of torture...consider the "coverage" of the less committed news media, if this is how the "best" is behaving?
Quote:
<img src="http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c219/talk2action/abc_snapshot.jpg">
image above: implicit message, from ABC News website, Monday April 14, 2008: Story on body of dog 'taken out with the trash', and other info-trivia & human interest/tragedy tales trump story of how a sitting US President signed off on a torture program that violated US and international laws concerning war crimes.
Here's a list of some of the top stories according to ABC -
"Polygamy Custody Battle Set For 416 Kids"
"Two Illinois Babies Switched at Birth"
"Butter Knife in Boy's Head"
"35,000 For An Allergy Free Cat ?"
"Dead Dog Taken Out With Trash"
"Granny Fights Off Armed Robber"
"Can Mint Lead To Alcoholism?"
"Barton's Beach Pix Likely a Publicity Ploy"
"Lively 'Doogie' and Their Doggies"
<h5>Turn off your TV. Cancel your cable contract.</h5>
There are other reasons for doing this, sure. TV watching is one of the top risk factors for Alzheimers. Television may, quite literally, shrivel your brain.
But if the American mainstream media's concerted effort to bury the Bush/White House creation of a torture program...
......... that led to abuses including, according to Senator Lindsey Graham, rape and murder and, according to Seymour Hersh, also the rape of Iraqi children isn't good enough reason for trimming your expenses, starting with whatever paid television service that pads your monthly budget I don't know what is.
Does torture matter ? Why should you care ?
Sure, it's true that US government human rights violations have been going on a long time, especially abroad. Following the "good war" of WW2 the United States proceeded to fight a lot of "dirty" wars and the effort, which was supposed to be about fighting communism, devolved into wars against nationalism and resulted in attempted counter-insurgency tactics, in Vietnam, including mass internment of Vietnamese civilians in concentration camps and "counter-insurgency" via napalm and carpet bombing. Not to mention a huge Vietnam-era torture and assassination operation called the <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/4/13/141846/121/378/494911">"Phoenix Program".</a>
<h5> "Torture and abuse also took many other forms, all of them criminal. Federal government documents obtained by the ACLU through our Freedom of Information Act litigation and reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross documented torture or abuse against U.S.-held detainees, including acts such as: soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and setting it on fire, administering electric shocks, subjecting prisoners to repeated sexual abuse and assault, including sodomy with a bottle, raping a juvenile prisoner, kicking and beating prisoners in the head and groin, putting lit cigarettes inside a prisoner’s ear, force-feeding a baseball to a prisoner, chaining a prisoner hands-to-feet in a fetal position for 24 hours without food or water or access to a toilet, and breaking a prisoner’s shoulders.
But unpunished crimes go even further, to include possible homicides..." [from ACLU Letter calling for an independent prosecutor, linked at bottom of post]</h5>
So, isn't this business as usual ?
Well, even if you're morally comfortable with a government that behaves like a mafia you should consider your own personal safety well being:
In the Bush Administration's heady days of working to roll back American civil rights, to about the 13th Century [by trying to bury Habeus Corpus] the sorts of memos flowing from John Yoo's lawyerly pen included claims that a US President, George W. Bush at the time, could order that the testicles of US citizens be crushed, their eyes gouged out, their limbs lopped off or their skin burnt off with acid. As long as those methods were "non-lethal".
So much government secrecy has arisen during the Presidency of George W. Bush that it's very hard to determine, regardless of administration disavowals, whether such patently sadistic, pre-13th Century brutality has been repudiated or not.
What can we do ?
Well, this has been said before but ultimately one of the most direct forms of power we still possess is the power we wield as consumers.
Are you concerned about government claims, on being able to pluck you off the street and torture you with acid, blind you or hack off parts of your body as if that could be some rational approach to fighting terrorism rather than terrorism itself ?
Turn off your TV. Cancel the contract.
[image, right: "boy survives butter knife in head, girl survives screwdriver to head" beats 4-5 million Iraqis internally displaced, 4-5 million made into orphans, God knows how many wounded and killed, tens of thousands of US troops killed, wounded and suffering PTSD with some now unable now to get proper medical care... plus news that George W. Bush signed off on war crimes ?]
Much of what can be seen on TV is junk, but some of what is good can be watched now for free. South Park is free, the best bits of Olberman and Bill Maher tend to pop up soon enough on YouTube and, let's face it :
If you're watching TV while your government is torturing around the world in wretched prisons and secret detention centers, while government lawyers are writing memos on how they want to bring such a debasement of basic human rights to the US and institute a torture regime, in America, that sounds about on par with the torture abuses of Saddam Hussein's Iraq the the Bush Administration used as a pretext for invading Iraq...
If you're watching TV, letting your brain slowly shrivel (because the activity is so passive) while your government tries to fashion legal excuses for the psycho-sexual sadistic impulses of its top executives who apparently get sexually turned on by torture, given their obsession with the practice, then you've got a terminal reality gap.
Last Wednesday, ABC News broke the story of how top members of the Bush White House discussed, in graphic detail, proposed torture methods.
On Friday, ABC broke the news that, in an interview, George W. Bush had admitted he knew of an "approved" of the torture discussions.
Since that convenient emptying of the garbage on a Friday at the end of the weekly news cycle, ABC and all the other major networks have worked overtime to bury the story, the fact that President George W. Bush almost certainly signed off on torture (probably sexual torture too).
So, here's a picture of what we've come to:
[image, right: ABC says "Lively doogie and their doggies" beats presidentially authorized torture.]
It's been openly admitted that a sitting US President committed war crimes. Lawyers in the president's administration have written legal justifications claiming the president can gouge out US citizen's eyes, chop off their limbs, crush their testicles and douse them with acid.
<h3>The media finds this unremarkable. Especially the war crimes part.</h3>.....
|
Does that "clear up" your question? We live in a "fucked" country, will:
"Regular" "good Americans"...they elected a president who they consider a "regular guy", someone who they could sit down and drink a beer with, and then torture whoever he told them to torture.....
Quote:
http://www.stern.de/politik/ausland/....html?nv=ct_cb
<img src="http://img2.stern.de/_content/61/43/614356/england250_250.jpg">
...... How do you get by? What do you live on?
We just got our taxes back. Thank God. Otherwise, I don't know. I live in a trailer with my parents. My Dad works for the railway and he tries to help out with bills and my Mom helps me with what she gets.
You live in Ashby, a small town with a population of 1300. How do people treat you now?
They don't treat me any different. I haven't met a person yet that's been negative to me. Not since I got home. Most of them back me up one hundred percent. They say, "What happened to you was wrong." And some even say they would have done the same thing.
What do they mean by "They would have done the same thing"?
That they would have followed orders, just as I did in Abu Ghraib......
|
|