Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Cheney Admits To Torture & Obama is MIA & Chris Hedges Says Obama Too Weak & Kow Tows To The Corporate Elites

UPDATE: 12:48 PM,& 3:09 PM Feb. 17
Glenn Beck & Dick Cheney prefer torture & summary Executions
Cheney & Beck & the gang see nothing wrong with torture

Cheney , Bush, Beck Most of the United States Media see nothing wrong with Torture
Stress positions slapping someone over & over threatening to kill their children, putting a gun to their head etc. they claim is not torture-America has lost any sense of human decency- & Obama is becoming complicit in these crimes by not prosecuting.Meanwhile Cheney & others argue semantics & phony legalese or just focus on "Waterboarding" Unfortunately Obama also is ignoring the Geneva Conventions .(see endnotes for more on torture)

CIA Torture Techniques: Stress Position & Water Boarding (Amnesty International )



*Dick Cheney Loves Torture & Is quite Brazen about it
Why is the Obama Administration Kow-Towing to Dick Cheney & his buddies many of whom are still in Washington involved with the Obama administration or are paid employees of Fox News and right wing Think Tanks (an Oxymoron)

*Chris Hedges calls Obama weak & unwilling to take on the Corporate Elite or the Military -

*Obama running secret prisons in Afghanistan and still disappearing people and torturing them

*Afghanistan policy misguided
Or is the Afghanistan policy just about securing the area for American Corporate interests & the flow of oil

*Preparing for war with India???

War Criminal Dick Cheney still being Protected By President Obama's Administration
So does Obama prefer the status quo over truth and justice ???
"I Was a Big Supporter of Waterboarding" -- Dick Cheney, February 14, 2010



Cheney outed himself long ago as the Architect for Torture
Dick Cheney Admits To Use Of Torture-The Young Turks Dec. 2008



This is the Bush Cheney legacy -a wall of noise
The issue of torture is not just about "Waterboarding" but any technique which is considered to be inhumane, humiliating treatment and various techniques.
Note Torture supporter Duncan Hunter focuses again & again on waterboarding ignoring all other techniques-meanwhile he still claims that the Gonzales Bybee memos made the use of these techniques legal-when they were instructed to make a legal case-
The discussion turns into just shouting match because Obama did not & will not confront these issues & by doing so he is becoming complicit in these crimes.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Waterboarding, Torture and Dick Cheney
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and fmr Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) debate former Vice President Dick Cheney's remarks attacking the Obama White House for investigating the abuse of prisoners.




What Obama's Progressive and leftists supporters don't want to hear-Obama is the new Brand or Face of Rabid Rapacious Capitalism and he does not represent or his party average Americans working class the poor or even much of the middle class.



"Fighting Corporate Rape of US" By Chris Hedges RT via Information Clearing House Feb. 16,2010

American journalist and Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges told RT the United States has developed a new form of corporate totalitarianism.Video By Russia Today -



"Obama's Secret Prisons in Afghanistan Endanger Us All:He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he's dragging us further in" by Johann HariThe Independent /UK,Feb. 13, 2010 via CommonDreams

Yet a string of recent exposes has shown that Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people are held without charge indefinitely - and he is even expanding them.

...Where are all these men vanishing to? Obama ordered the closing of the CIA's secret prisons, but not those run by Joint Special Operations. They maintain a Bermuda Triangle of jails with the notorious Bagram Air Base at its centre. One of the few outsiders has been into this ex-Soviet air-hangar is the military prosecutor Stuart Couch. He says: "In my view, having visited Guantanamo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantanamo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear to be able to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo."

...The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit some of them, but in highly restricted circumstances, and their reports remain confidential. In this darkness, abuse becomes far more likely.

The Obama administration is appealing against US court rulings insisting the detainees have the right to make a legal case against their arbitrary imprisonment. And the White House is insisting they can forcibly snatch anyone they suspect from anywhere in the world - with no legal process - and take them there. Yes: Obama is fighting for the principles behind Guantanamo Bay. The frenzied debate about whether the actual camp in Cuba is closed is a distraction, since he is proposing to simply relocate it to less sunny climes.

...Today, Bagram is being given a $60m expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as Guantanamo Bay currently does. Gopal reports that the abuse is leaking out to other, more secretive sites across Afghanistan. They are so underground they are known only by the names given to them by released inmates - the Salt Pit, the Prison of Darkness. Obama also asserts his right to hand over the prisoners to countries that commit torture, provided they give a written "assurance" they won't be "abused" - assurances that have proved worthless in the past. The British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith estimates there are 18,000 people trapped in these "legal black holes" by the US.


Afghan strategy criticized

Afghanistan Politician Joya Condemns 'Ridiculous' Military Strategy By Glyn Strong February 16, 2010 "The Independent" via Information Clearing House

- -Afghanistan's "most famous woman" has voiced deep scepticism about Operation Moshtarak's aims and its impact on Afghan civilians.

"It is ridiculous," said Malalai Joya, an elected member of the Afghan parliament. "On the one hand they call on Mullah Omar to join the puppet regime. On another hand they launch this attack in which defenceless and poor people will be the prime victims. Like before, they will be killed in the Nato bombings and used as human shields by the Taliban. Helmand's people have suffered for years and thousands of innocent people have been killed so far." Her fears were confirmed when Nato reported yesterday that a rocket that missed its target had killed 12 civilians at a house in Marjah.

Dismissing Allied claims that Nato forces won't abandon Afghan civilians after the surge, she said: "They have launched such offensives a number of times in the past, but each time after clearing the area, they leave it and [the] Taliban retake it. This is just a military manoeuvre and removal of Taliban is not the prime objective."

Ms Joya believes that corruption is endemic, citing uranium deposits and opium as incentives for Nato and Afghan officials to retain a presence in Helmand. Operation Moshtarak is described as an inclusive offensive, depending for its longer-term success on involvement of Afghan forces. But Ms Joya said: "The Afghan police force is the most corrupt institution in Afghanistan. Bribery is common and if you have money, by bribing police from top to bottom you can do almost anything. In many parts of Afghanistan, people hate the police more than the Taliban. In Helmand, for instance, people are afraid of police who commit violence against people and make trouble..


and check out messy Afghanistan war as American as Apple Pie from the War Against the Indians to The Philippines to Vietnam and American little wars in Central America to Iraq & Afghanistan. America bought the Philippines but the Filopinos did not know they and their land were for sale. As usual America is all for freedom, democracy and sovereignty until it runs up against America's interests corporate or otherwise.

"The Philippine War is Not So Different from Afghanistan:American history has been dominated by war; so, too, may the American future be." By David Silbey Free-Lance Star February 09, 2010
-- The war in Afghanistan feels foreign to Americans: a far distant land, a confusing and alien culture, and combat against a shadowy enemy. That feeling is mistaken. America has spent much of its history fighting wars like the one in Afghanistan. So much so, in fact, that Afghanistan would be familiar to an American in 1900, and conventional wars such as World War II would seem strange.

In fact, in many ways the United States was defined by wars like Afghanistan. America created itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in a series of small wars, waged by and against irregular forces in unconventional ways that pushed America's boundaries westward. These were mostly against Indian tribes, but were also against European powers like Spain and France and Britain. Some of the big wars we remember--the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War--were less important to shaping the America we know than the small wars that we have forgotten.

Andrew Jackson might be most famous for his victory at New Orleans in 1815, but at least as important (though much more controversial) was his success in the First Seminole War later that decade, which won Florida for the U.S. and ended the Spanish presence on the eastern seaboard. The American Civil War, of course, was the most important war in American history, but it was the Indian Wars of the last part of the 19th century that created the western half of the United States and formed the nation we recognize today.

..PEACE, AND WAR

Yet while that struggle is remembered, it was a war that occurred as a result that had longer-lasting repercussions. As part of the peace treaty with Spain, America bought the Philippine Islands in the Pacific for $20 million. We found ourselves embroiled in a war there against the Filipinos themselves, who resented being bought and sold.

That war would be familiar to veterans of Afghanistan. The Filipino revolutionaries, after a brief and unsuccessful conventional phase, resorted to the kind of insurgent tactics that the Taliban now uses. As in Afghanistan, the fractured and ferocious geography and climate in the Philippines were often as much of a challenge as was the combat. Mountains and jungles coexisted in equal profusion and were used by the insurgents for cover and refuge.

While the American forces in the Philippines did not have the helicopters and air support of the modern military, an American brown-water naval force offered much of the same mobility and firepower in the intricate maze of Philippine islands. It was, as is Afghanistan, a war of small units operating at long distances from each other. John J. Pershing, later commander of American forces in World War I, accompanied an Army unit that, for two weeks, chased an insurgent band through the jungles and over mountains, and they spent as much time interacting with the local Filipinos as they did fighting their enemy. Such a patrol was in no way unusual.


End Notes:

*Maddow V. Glenn Beck: Beck says snowstorm proves Global Warming a scam & then denies having said that

BECK V. MADDOW
Beck lies and then claims he didn't




On Torture see previous posts:

April 27, 2009
Bush, Cheney & the Pro-Torture Lobby Redefining America's Core Values

April 29, 2009
Olbermann Waterboarding Sean Hannity & Torturing Suspected Witches or Detainees To Get False Confessions

April 30, 2009
America's War Crimes and its Crimes Against Humanity Are A Global Issue and Not As Obama Thinks A Private Affair

May 01, 2009
Obama Afraid to Use the Word " TORTURE" Calls it "Techniques" & The " Imperial Presidency " or " Presidential Infallibility


May 02, 2009
Obama Joins Bush & Cheney in Declaring Human Rights Meaningless As he Refuses to Prosecute U.S. War Crimes "

May 06, 2009
NYT Attempts A Whitewash By Focusing On Debates in Bush Regime Over Torture

May 08, 2009
U.S. Not Winning Hearts & Minds By Indiscriminate Killings, Torture and Proselytizing

May 13, 2009
Should Hannity & Limbaugh & Cheney et al Be Investigated For Sedition & Treason?

May 16, 2009
Obama Invokes " National Security & Troops Safety " As Defense For Witholding Detainee Abuse Photos

May 26, 2009
America Mourns Its Dead But Not Those They Abused, tortured , Bombed & Murdered

and so it goes,
GORD

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