President Obama as bringer of Hope or Magician or Messiah maybe?
The American Taliban Christian Right of course accuses artist of blasphemy would they if the president were white? Just asking! And they have the audacity to make fun of Muslims who get upset about similar uses of their religious icons and personalities and teachings ie cartoons of The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)or tossing copies of the Holy Qur'an in toilets or burning them as an act of hate speech against all of Islam. So if we take these Christians seriously in their attacks on what they consider Muslim over-reactions then Christians shouldn't be bother by similar acts such as "piss-Christ " or the Life Size Chocolate Jesus . Piss -Christ maybe bad art and bad taste and offensive but is it "Hate Speech".
Tell them to get a sense of humor and go watch Monty Python's /Terry Jones film "The Life of Brian"
The Truth by Michael D'Antuono
...The fact that national security whistleblowers have become the exception to the Obama administration's meme of 'looking forward, not back' at Bush-era crimes sets a dangerous precedent: if you torture a prisoner, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on torture, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act."Quote from : Obama Indicts Sixth Whistleblower Under the Espionage Act by OpEdNews.com,April 05, 2012
" Military ties with Israel have fueled relentless acts of aggression. Israel continues to entrench its subjugation of Palestinians while provoking or initiating armed conflict with its neighbors in the region. [...]
We therefore support the call from Palestinian civil society for an urgent and comprehensive military embargo on Israel as an effective, non-violent measure to stop Israel's wars and repression and to bring about Israel's compliance with its obligations under international law. This is now a moral and legal imperative to achieve a just and comprehensive peace... Quote from article at Common Dreams .org
53 authors 'horrified at the latest round of Israeli aggression' - Common Dreams staff, Nov. 28, 2012
Above image of Israel's most recent massive bombing of Gaza - Netanyahu calls these surgical strategical and targeted limited strikes while in fact they are anything but.
As Obama said :What nation would stand idly by and not retaliate when being bombed - so if Israel or the USA has that right don't all nations even the Nation of Gaza or Palestine or are only the lives of Israeli and American civilians and troops to be considered valuable and sacred.
So in this case claiming to be in favor of justice and fairness he refuses to accept the legitimate cause and grievances of the people of Gaza while helping Israel to bully the people of Gaza and maintain its inhumane blockade . But Israel and the Obama administration are now guilty of doing the same to Iran as they did to the Iraqis til Iraq was a basket case and seemed like easy picking for the Americans and British. Now they are hoping to decimate the Iranian population so they do will become easy pickings for the vulture capitalists to rob Iran of its resources and turn the country into mostly rubble like Iraq and Gaza and Libya and Syria and so on.
Obama's two Faced policies or his Jekyll and Hyde disorder -Good Obama versus Bad Obama
While still detaining and continuing the abuse of Whistleblower Private Bradley Manning and in April detaining a sixth Whistleblower Obama has the " audacity" to sign into law legislation ironically defending the rights of Whistle Blowers.
Strangely various human rights organizations praised Obama for signing this law ignore Obama's actual record and pay little attention to the fact that given the concentration of power by the President and the executive branch which have the right to contravene any law they wish to by asserting a claim of national security. Bush, Cheney,Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Karl Rove et al believed that the world could be reshaped by their thoughts and actions as they tried to do for example in the disastrous Iraqi invasion and 9 year Occupation.
Iraqis having some commonsense as opposed to Americans took a stand and kicked most of the Americans out of their country. The Iraqis proclaimed they had enough after the deaths of over a million of their citizens most of whom were innocent of any crime including those who were fighting the uninvited foreign invaders and occupiers of their country that is the Americans and British . As Obama recently said what nation would not fight back against another nation raining rockets, bombs, drones, White Phosphorus down upon their cities . For some strange reason or is it delusion Americans are unable to see that at times they are the ones in the wrong and are the real terrorists as their troops roam up and down the streets of a foreign nation taking potshots at anything that moves.
Nobel Peace Laureates Call For Military Boycott Of Israel of course Obama also a Nobel Peace Prize winner was conspicuously absent from this group since he is on Israel's side and especially on the side of the US armaments manufacturers and being an ideological Neo-Liberal on the side of Wall St. the Super Rich and his erroneous deluded belief in "American Exceptionalism" and "Manifest Destiny" and all that super-hyper patriotic nonsense. Even Obama feels the need to feed the arrogant American Myths of Exceptionalism and being the chosen of God and that any who criticize America or its ally Israel are on the side of the "terrorists" the Minions of Satan etc. There is no folly like hubris as Icarus informs us.
So Obama's road to peace is through continual bombing and Drone Attacks and invasion and occupation if necessary of sovereign state which were no existential threat to the USA or its allies including Israel.
Nobel Peace Laureates Call For Military Boycott Of Israel
53 authors 'horrified at the latest round of Israeli aggression'
- Common Dreams staff
Fifty-two Nobel peace prize-winners, activists and others today called for an international military boycott of Israel after its latest deadly assault against Palestine earlier this month.
Issued on the eve of the International Day of Solidarity with the People of Palestine, according to the Middle East Monitor, the statement is signed by US academic Noam Chomsky; Nobel peace laureates Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel; former French diplomat and Holocaust survivor Stéphane Hessel; and film directors, authors and musicians, among others. It denounces the US, European Union and several developing countries for complicity through weapons sales and other military support in the attacks that killed 160 Palestinians, including civilians and 35 children, The Guardian reports.
It calls for "urgent ... and international action towards a mandatory, comprehensive military embargo against Israel," the Middle East Monitor reports.
The Middle East Monitor continues:
Though directly motivated by Israel's latest war of aggression against the 1.6 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, the statement is also a reaction to Israel's decades-old military occupation and persistent denial of the UN-sanctioned rights of the Palestinian people. Expressing horror at Israel's latest bloodbath in Gaza which claimed 160 Palestinian lives, including 34 children, the statement argues that this recurring brutality has been allowed to continue due to the impunity Israel enjoys.
The statement, published in full in the Middle East Monitor, charges, in part:
Horrified at the latest round of Israeli aggression against the 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip and conscious of the impunity that has enabled this new chapter in Israel's decades-old violations of international law and Palestinian rights, we believe there is an urgent need for international action towards a mandatory, comprehensive military embargo against Israel.
Such a measure has been subject to several UN resolutions and is similar to the arms embargo imposed against apartheid South Africa in the past.
The authors charge that the US has supplied billions of dollars of "advanced military hardware every year" to Israel, and the EU has provided subsidies through its research programs.
The authors of the statement also include John Dugard, a South African jurist and former UN special rapporteur in the occupied territories; Luisa Morgantini, former president of the European parliament; Cynthia McKinney, a former member of the US Congress; Ronnie Kasrils, a South African former cabinet minister; and the dramatist Caryl Churchill.
"Similarly, the growing military ties between Israel and the emerging economies of Brazil, India and South Korea are unconscionable given their nominal support for Palestinian freedom," the statement notes.
It continues:
Military ties with Israel have fueled relentless acts of aggression. Israel continues to entrench its subjugation of Palestinians while provoking or initiating armed conflict with its neighbors in the region. [...]
We therefore support the call from Palestinian civil society for an urgent and comprehensive military embargo on Israel as an effective, non-violent measure to stop Israel's wars and repression and to bring about Israel's compliance with its obligations under international law. This is now a moral and legal imperative to achieve a just and comprehensive peace.
Meanwhile in the Obama bizaro world the president appears to reveal two different personas the Good and Just Obama who is in favor of real substantive change and the Bad or Evil Obama who is in favor of the status quo on a number of issues including treatment of Whistleblowers .
So the Good and Just Obama signed into law legislation giving better protection to Whistle Blowers while still ill-treating the heroic whistle Blower Bradley Manning for doing what he believed to be the right thing to expose the government's lies and crimes . By doing so Bradley Manning was releasing information so the American public information they had a right to in order to have an informed opinion of what the US government was in fact covering up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it seems on this issue Obama is not in favor of Bradley Manning who had nothing to gain personally for taking this action and a great deal to lose his motivation was not for personal gain or profit. President Obama as the authoritarian or tyrannical Obama has by his actions as opposed to the Nicer good Obama is against anyone leaking information to the public and labeling them as traitors who are giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Advocates Laud President Obama's Signing of Federal Whistleblower Reforms OpedNews, Nov. 28,2012
After a Campaign Waged Over More Than a Decade, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act Becomes Law.
President Obama signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA, S. 743) into law today, marking the finale of a more than decade-long campaign by the Make It Safe Coalition to restore and modernize federal whistleblower protections. The President's unwavering support of the WPEA, paired with Congress' sweeping endorsement by unanimous consent, demonstrates the strong mandate for a new day of accountability in the federal government. These reforms expand protections for federal employees who disclose wrongdoing and protect the public trust.
Whistleblower advocates from organizations with diverse interests and ideologies who together waged a historic campaign for this landmark government accountability reform are enthusiastic about this victory for whistleblowers and taxpayers:
Beth Moten, Legislative Director for American Federation of Government Employees, commented: "AFGE applauds the bipartisan, collaborative work of members of Congress, a diverse coalition of worker advocates and good government groups, and the Obama Administration resulting in the bill signed into law today.
The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act provides many of the changes in law necessary to protect federal workers when they come forward to report fraud, waste, and wrongdoing in the workplace and to hold managers accountable when they retaliate. AFGE is especially pleased that the law applies to Transportation Security Officers, the federal workers dedicated to the safety of the flying public, and provides them with the same whistleblower protections as other federal workers."
But then we are reminded that the authoritarian Tyrannical Obama vs Hope and Change Obama has gone after Whistleblowers than all other previous presidents. So which side is Obama on the Status Quo of The military and Intelligence Industrial Comlpex as first defined by President Eisenhower or on the side of truth and justice and the rule of law -does it just depend on the mood he is in or who were the latest lobbyist who visited him in the Oval Office.
As we see in the actions of Obama are quite different and even contradict what he says publicly so those who supported him once again have the duty to get Obama moving in the right /actually more to the left direction and not keep moving to the ideological so called center which is now really the right and is the domain of the Neoconservatives and Neo-Liberals and the status quo. He should be pestered til he takes up more progressive policies domestically and in foreign policy and start dismantling the American Empire before the wild fires the Americans started engulf the all of the nations of the Earth.
Obama Indicts Sixth Whistleblower Under the Espionage Act by OpEdNews.com,April 05, 2012
GAP's Government Accountability Project Director Jesselyn Radack: "CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou blew the whistle on 'waterboarding' and refused to engage in torture, but is the only person to be criminally prosecuted in connection with the Bush-era torture program"...The Obama administration's unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to target whistleblowers sends a chilling message to any national security worker considering blowing the whistle on corruption and wrongdoing. The Espionage Act is an archaic World War I-era law intended to go after spies, not whistleblowers."
On April 3, 2012, the Obama administration indicted intelligence whistleblower John Kiriakou. Kiriakou is the sixth whistleblower that the Obama administration has charged under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information – more than all past administrations combined. In a rare move, the indictment was sealed until today.
Kiriakou is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) veteran who headed counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, organized the team operation that captured suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, and refused to be trained in torture interrogation tactics. In December 2007, Kiriakou gave an on-camera interview to ABC News in which he disclosed that Zubaydah was "waterboarded" and that "waterboarding" was torture. Kiriakou was one of the first CIA officers to label waterboarding as torture, and his interview helped expose the CIA's torture program as policy, rather than the actions of a few rogue agents. Kiriakou further exposed the CIA's torture program and the CIA's deception about torture even to its own employees in his 2009 book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror.
...The fact that national security whistleblowers have become the exception to the Obama administration's meme of 'looking forward, not back' at Bush-era crimes sets a dangerous precedent: if you torture a prisoner, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on torture, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act."
And now more recent reports on the trial of the erroneously and unjustly accused Bradley Manning just for doing his duty . Obama himself claims whistleblowers do offer the public a needed service to open up government policies and its inner workings to make it more transparent. For instance the department of the environment must be concerned about the environment and how abuses of the environment by Big Business or government affect that environment and the impact of such abuses on the citizens not just in the short term but the long term as well. Instead since the 1980s the department of the Environment is more often than not directed to do the biding of lobbyists and Big Business and doing little to protect the nation's natural resources such as water and air quality or its people .
The Humiliation of Bradley Manning
By Ray McGovern ,OPEdNews, Nov. 28, 2012
It is a bitter irony that Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, whose conscience compelled him to leak evidence about the U.S. military brass ignoring evidence of torture in Iraq, was himself the victim of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment while other military officers privately took note but did nothing.
That was one of the revelations at Manning's pre-trial hearing at Ft. Meade, Maryland, on Tuesday, as Manning's defense counsel David Coombs used e-mail exchanges to show Marine officers grousing that the Marines had been left holding the bag on Manning's detention at their base in Quantico, Virginia, though he was an Army soldier.
According to the e-mail evidence, the controversy over the rough handling of Manning prompted Quantico commander, Marine Col. Daniel Choike, to complain bitterly that not one Army officer was in the chain of blame. Choike's lament prompted an e-mail reply from his commander, Lt. Gen. George Flynn, offering assurances that Choike and Quantico would not be left "holding the bag."
At Quantico, Manning, who is accused of giving hundreds of thousands of pages of classified material to WikiLeaks, was subjected to harsh treatment. He was locked in a 6-foot-by-8-foot cell for 23 hours a day and was kept naked for long periods. His incarceration led the UN Rapporteur for Torture to complain that Manning was being subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
However, concerns about possible repercussions from softening up Manning did little to ease the conditions that Manning faced. His Marine captors seemed eager to give him the business and make him an example to any other prospective whistleblowers. Only after a sustained public outcry was Manning transferred to the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Though his treatment was less harsh there, Manning still has faced 2-1/2 years of incarceration without trial and could face up to life imprisonment after a court martial into his act of conscience, i.e., releasing extensive evidence of wrongdoing by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan and questionable foreign policies carried out by the U.S. State Department.
And concerning the treatment received by Bradley Manning while being held for over a year basically being held in indefinite detention and stict form of isolation and physical and psychological abuse by the Obama administration also see:
WikiLeaks suspect Manning 'not suicide risk' by Camille Elhassani Al Jazeera ,Nov. 29, 2012
Psychiatrists treating US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, the alleged source of classified information leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010, say that long-term suicide watch or prevention-of-injury status is unnecessary.and so it goes,
Manning's defence lawyer is trying to prove he was mistreated while in pre-trial confinement in the military brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia to get the case against him dismissed. Manning was held at Quantico from July 2010 until April 2011.
Captain William Hocter, the main psychiatrist who treated Manning at Quantico, said he was a moderate to low danger to himself or others. And he repeatedly requested Manning be taken off prevention-of-injury status, which included checks every five minutes around the clock, long periods of isolation, and removing his clothing to prevent him from harming himself.
Hocter said it was extraordinary that his medical opinion was ignored by brig commanders. "It was clear to me they'd made up their mind on a course of action and my recommendations had no impact," he said.
However, Colonel Robert Oltman, the security battalion commander at Quantico, said that he did not have confidence in Hocter's abilities because of a suicide earlier in 2010 of a detainee under his care. "He didn’t have the strongest credibility with me," Oltman said.
GORD.
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