Dick Cheney Still Lying -Cenk Uygur The Young Turks -May 21,2009
Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com
Cheney claims the use of torture was legal & prevented attcks. But there is no evidence that torture prevented any attacks. But if you keep repeating Cheney's Talking Points that torture prevented was legal & prevented attacks & the American conservatives & their Media Echo-chamber will repeat it til many Americans take it as a fact.
Cheney naming names as he goes after The New York Times for reporting on the abuse & torture of detainees & on illegal wiretapping . So the reason the War on Terror has not been going as well as it should have is that the UnAmerican Liberal Media helped to sabotage the Bush/Cheney policies & actions . So according to Cheney and the conservative Echo-chamber there is a fifth column in the US which is working against the US military & the US government. So it has all been a conspiracy to tarnish the reputations of Cheney ,Bush et al.
President Obama by refusing to go ahead with investigations & indictments this seems to give tacit approval of Cheney's position & policies when he was Vice President.Cheney in one sense in creating this narrative is just appealing to the real American Patriots who believe that whatever the US or its military or the C.I.A. does is for America's benefit that is to keep America secure by any & all means necessary. Based upon the belief in American Exceptionalism & that who ever is President & Vice President is not merely a matter of votes but is rather an issue of Divine Providence therefore whatever America does this is part of Divine Providenc. The more secular belief is that America is superior to all other nations and its system of government is the best in the world & again superior to all other nations therefore America can do no wrong.
Anyway Nancy Pelosi accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about the interrogation techniques they were using on Gitmo detainees. The C.I.A. of course claims they didn't lie. The Republicans & the conservative echo-chamber is attacking Pelosi for making such allegations against the C.I.A. which they believe can do no wrong & is always working hard to do what's best for America & to keep America safe. So it has become this sort of nonsense about he said & she said tabloid style journalism.
There are several issues here which include the fact that Obama has not come to Pelosi's defense because he himself has shown himself to be a "true Believer " in the C.I.A. & the " National Security Bureaucracy " as well as a defender of the "Military Industrial complex" . Obama told the C.I.A. that in the matter of abuse & torture of detainees that he would ensure that C.I.A. agents who took part in abuse & torture of detainees would not be indicted or brought to trial nor would he permit anyone to file civil suits against them for damages in an attempt to get some form of compensation.
Another issue is that Obama is going to continue the policies of abuse & torture of so called " detainees" but not in Gitmo but in other prisons in Iraq & Afghanistan and allow the various secret prisons run by the US military or the C.I.A. or private contractors to continue to operate. He is also allowing for the use of torture by proxy in which "detainees" are sent to countries which engage in torture.Obama has refuse to grant these prisoners their basic protections under the Geneva Conventions & the Special Convention on the Prohibition on Torture .
Obama refuses to release the photos of abuse by US personnel claiming National Security and protecting the troops in the field which is just a lot of nonsense . Obama has also said he will continue with the sham trials of detainees by the Military tribunals which have been describes by many as Kangaroo Courts in which everything is set up in order to make sure that the "detainees " are found guilty whether they are guilty or not is irrelevant. The problem with properly reviewing the detainees cases or having fair trials is that if a number of these "detainees " are not found guilty this would be an embarrassment for the US military & the C.I.A. & would lead to more people insisting that the Bush /Cheney Regime's policies should be investigated & Obama claims he wants to go forward & not open up old wounds.
The problem is that those wounds have not yet healed & will not until justice is done and is seen to be done. These issues are not partisan but rather have to do with the American core values of Justice, democracy, human rights & human dignity. The other problem is Obama himself since it appears that he is more concerned with protecting the guilty in the US government at various levels including members of Congress, members of the Judiciary,the medical professionals & others who took part in this policy of systematic abuse and torture of detainees & an investigations may also discover that many of these abuses have been going during Obama's presidency.
Anyway part of what I have been discussing for your consideration is the rather shady history of the C.I.A. Given their notorious history it is not surprising that they agreed to abuse & torture prisoners for Cheney & Bush or that they were willing to force false confessions out of tortured detainees.
The C.I.A. over the last fifty years has been involved in various criminal activities such as overthrowing democratically elected governments . They have used various means to accomplish their goals from using assassinations to death squads & backing military Coups which have led to the deaths of thousands as in Chile , Iran, Iraq etc.
So here's a clip from Costas Gavras ' powerful and difficult to find film "Missing"- some Americans and even some Canadians didn't like this more accurate & realistic portrayal of America & its military & the C.I.A & their dirty tricks & brutality. I guess many people are like Peggy Noonan they don't want to see the atrocities of which they cold- heartedly approve. In this scene the formerly true believer patriotic American Mr. Horman (Jack Lemmon)finally realizes that the US Ambassador in Chile and other US officials have been lying to him all along and that the US military & C.I.A. etc. were deeply involved in the coup in Chile & approved the Kill order issued against his son because they feared he knew too much.
also see my discussion of films by Costas Gavras at my website gordscafe
Missing (part 12)- the rest is available at YouTube
Gen. Stanley McChrystal who is fond of assassinations , deaths squads & torture & Abuse another winner picked by Obama guarantees more of the same or much worse. Besides leading assassination squads he ran a prison in Iraq notorious for its abuse & torture of detainees.
Tomgram: The Pressure of an Expanding War Tomsdispatch May 21,2009
Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it)So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy."
General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.")
...All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new approaches" -- to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words -- that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.
And now we are getting more info on Rumsfeld's own personally run special ops group of Assassins operating like your typical C.I.A. Death Squads.One of the commanders was Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal who was appointed recently to run US operations in Afghanistan & Pakistan. Again one is at a loss trying to explain why Obama would allow such an appointment except that Obama is now taking his orders from the Pentagon & the National Security Bureaucracy etc.
" Rumsfeld's Renegade Unit Blamed for Afghan Deaths " By Jerome Starkey in Kabul "The Independent May 17,2009 ( Information Clearing House)
Special Forces group implicated in three incidents that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians / MarSOC was set up by former defence secretary despite opposition from within the Marine Corps
" --- A single American Special Forces group was behind at least three of Afghanistan's worst civilian casualty incidents, The Independent has learnt, raising fundamental questions about their ongoing role in the conflict.
Troops from the US Marines Corps' Special Operations Command, or MarSOC, were responsible for calling in air strikes in Bala Boluk, in Farah, last week – believed to have killed more than 140 men, women and children – as well as two other incidents in 2007 and 2008. News of MarSOC's involvement in the three incidents comes just days after a Special Forces expert, Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal, was named to take over as the top commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. His surprise appointment has prompted speculation that commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.
MarSOC was created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary at the time, despite opposition from within the Marine Corps and the wider Special Forces community. An article in the Marine Corps Times described the MarSOC troops as "cowboys" who brought shame on the corps.
Americans keep asking why do these foreigners hate them and then they go into a sovereign nation and bomb entire villages or wedding parties in the hope of killing a couple of suspected "terrorists" or Taliban or "insurgents" and those who survive then take up guns and begin fighting the Americans and the US's unfortunate allies which includes troops from my country Canada- eventually the people who feel they are being unjustly targeted no longer see any difference between America & other Western Nations who are occupying their land.And so day by day this insane war is becoming Obama's war as Vietnam became Johnson's War and then Nixon's war which could not be won no matter how many bombs and no matter how much Napalm they dropped on Vietnamese civilians.That war ended with over 50,000 Americans dead & 2,000,000 (two Million )Vietnamese dead.
New York Times
Villagers in Afghanistan Describe Chaos of U.S. Strikes By CARLOTTA GALL and TAIMOOR SHAH, New York Times, May 15, 2009
FARAH, Afghanistan — The number of civilians killed by the American airstrikes in Farah Province last week may never be fully known. But villagers, including two girls recovering from burn wounds, described devastation that officials and human rights workers are calling the worst episode of civilian casualties in eight years of war in Afghanistan.
...The bombs were so powerful that people were ripped to shreds. Survivors said they collected only pieces of bodies. Several villagers said that they could not distinguish all of the dead and that they never found some of their relatives.
...It is bombings like this one that have turned many Afghans against the American-backed government and the foreign military presence. The events in Granai have raised sharp questions once again about the appropriateness and effectiveness of aerial bombardment in a guerrilla war in which the insurgents deliberately blend into the civilian population to fight and flee.
---
The journalists Gall & Sanger two years ago were warning that the war in Afghanistan was going badly for NATO:
Civilian Deaths Undermine Allies’ War on Taliban by Carlotta Gall & David E. Sanger at The New York Times May 13, 2007
What angers Afghans are not just the bombings, but also the raids of homes, the shootings of civilians in the streets and at checkpoints, and the failure to address those issues over the five years of war. Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn.
The civilian deaths are also exposing tensions between American commanders and commanders from other NATO countries, who have never fully agreed on the strategy to fight the war here, in a country where there are no clear battle lines between civilians and Taliban insurgents.
...But it is not only the Americans whose practices are being questioned. NATO soldiers have frequently fired on civilians on the roads, often because the Afghans drive too close to military convoys or checkpoints.
The public mood hardened against foreign forces in the southern city of Kandahar after British troops fired on civilians while driving through the streets after a suicide bombing last year, and Canadian soldiers have repeatedly killed and wounded civilians while on patrol in civilian areas.
Air Power and Popular Anger
The reliance on air power has led to a string of prominent episodes recently involving the deaths of large numbers of civilians, who often cannot escape, caught between NATO forces and the Taliban and its sympathizers.
Meanwhile things are worsening in Afghanistan & Pakistan as Obama approves of more massive bombings and killings as the solution to the problem of the Taliban, Al Qaeda & now like Iraq (or Vietnam decades ago )the rising numbers of Insurgents who once were the citizens who were cooperative but are no longer :
Republicans salute Obama's military tack:Moves anger liberal Democrats
...After the Special Forces units started raiding homes, the villagers were so angered, they said, they fought the Americans themselves. They insisted that no Taliban were here, an area that has been mostly calm.
“NATO was coming regularly, and the Afghan Army and police, and we were cooperating with them,” said Muhammad Alef, 35, a farmer who was tending to his wounded cousin in the provincial hospital in the city of Herat.
“But when the Americans came without permission, and they came more than once and disturbed the people,” he said. “They searched the houses, and the second time they arrested people, and the third time the people got angry and fought them.”
The American forces searched the tribal chief’s house and arrested two of his staff members, the villagers said. One, a watchman named only Bahadullah, 45, said he had been handcuffed, covered with a hood and taken to the nearby American base at Shindand.
He said he had been strung up by his feet for what seemed like an hour and a half as American soldiers swung him about. When he was let down the soldiers kicked and beat him, he said. In an interview this week, he said he was still passing blood and in pain from the beatings.
... But a villager, Abdul Waheed, said the Americans had searched his family compound and found no weapons and certainly must have seen the women and children. Two days later they bombed the compound, killing six children, he said.
“The Americans should leave Afghanistan because this is my own home,” he said. “I am sitting here and they come and just order a bomb to drop.”
and so it goes,
GORD.
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