Unfortunately the tyrants, the self-promoting elites ,the wealthy and the well connected still rule and when necessary with an Iron Fist !!!
The Tyrants whether American or British or Saudis or Israelis or the self-declared royalty in the Middle East or elsewhere prop each other up to keep the rest of us in our place!!!
No it is not some well worked out conspiracy but rather a matter of historical inevitability so the Social Darwinists like to remind us day in and day out that those in power deserve to be in power under nature's laws of the survival of the fittest in nature steeped or drenched in blood .
When the people are duped into believing the lies and propaganda of these Tyrants and their Quislings the people become faceless slaves of these unfeeling Tyrants who prosper by the sweat, tear and blood of others.
The Tyrants will silence all who cry out for justice for equality for the dignity of all humankind.
These overlords and Tyrants hate talk of equality for then the poorest of the poor the feeble, the disabled, the unfortunate would be counted as their equals and this they cannot abide.
These Tyrants have convinced their subjects, their citizens, their People that they alone have the right to wield power and influence and to live as the ancient Emperors, Kings or Pharaohs while the rest barely get by.
These Tyrants tell us we have rights but when it suits them they ignore our rights.
As the French citizens attacked the Bastille in order to free the prisoners there who were being held under the King's Special warrants so the citizens of the US should storm Gitmo or the prison where Bradley Manning is being kept.
In the US tens of thousands of American citizens are being kept in prisons for what amount to petty crimes.
These crimes include drug related charges ie "simple possession" and the draconian "three strikes rule" which was condemned by the UN and Human Rights organizations as being an unjustified law.
Instead of reforming, rethinking or changing the laws so that fewer people would be sent to prison the American solution even under the Obama administration is to simply build more prisons.
As we have seen America has rejected the reforms made in the West over the last two centuries as America imprisons & has even executed children, the mentally disabled or mentally ill or those who maybe innocent due to new evidence or judicial injustice.
The US prisons also hold a disproportional number of visible minorities ie African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos even though these groups are no more apt to commit crimes than are the majority of White Americans.
Meanwhile the Obama administration is still trying to prove it is just as tough on prisoners as was the Bush Regime.
As Glenn Greenwald notes the UN torture official complains that he is not given permission to talk to alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning.
UN torture official accuses US of rule violations by Glenn Greenwald Salon.com, July 12, 2011
In response to the growing controversy over the inhumane detention conditions of Bradley Manning, the U.N.'s top official on torture, Juan Mendez, announced last December that his office would formally investigate whether those conditions amounted to torture. Since then, the Obama administration has steadfastly rejected Mendez's repeated requests to interview Manning in private: something even Bush officials allowed for "high-level" Guantanamo detainees accused of being top Al Qaeda operatives (see p. 3). Now, Mendez is publicly accusing the Obama administration of violating U.N. rules by refusing him private access to Manning:
The United Nations' torture investigator on Tuesday accused the United States of violating U.N. rules by refusing him unfettered access to the Army private accused of passing classified documents to WikiLeaks.
Juan Mendez, the U.N.'s special rapporteur for torture, said he can't do his job unless he has unmonitored access to detainees. He said the U.S. military's insistence on monitoring conversations with Bradley Manning "violates long-standing rules" the U.N. follows for visits to inmates. . .
Mendez said the U.S. government assured him Manning is better treated now than he was in Quantico, but the government must allow the U.N. investigator to check that for himself.
Mendez said he needs to assess whether the conditions Manning experienced amounted to "torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" while at Quantico.
"For that, it is imperative that I talk to Mr. Manning under conditions where I can be assured that he is being absolutely candid," Mendez said.
Tom Englehardtat Salon. com argues that the Bush administration maybe long gone but its legacy remains which is the black and white "Mindset" of all nations categorized as being " for us or against us " in the termed " Global War on Terrorism". So the Obama Regime has continued to buy into this rhetoric and propaganda rather than developing a more nuanced set of policies to fight extremists who use the tactics of "terrorism".
But the American leaders seem incapable of a more thoughtful reality based set of policies. These leaders assume that the American public is also unable to grasp such nuanced policy making and so revert to "Jingoistic Rhetoric " appealing to American notions of exceptionalism , pariotism, a united front and the over-hyped jingoistic "Clash of Civilizations".
Even Obama appears to believe that America has this great Democracy that guarntees basic rights and freedoms and that no other nation is as Enlightened as it is . The rest of the world sees this posturing of the U.S. as an insult to all other nations.
The Obama administration though it has changed some of the phrasing and rhetoric about the War on Terrorism is still dedicated to the same old policies in which a large proportion of the world is seen as "Enemy Territory'" which includes the Middle East Africa and central Asia . It includes overlapping categories such as the Islamic world and the Arab World.
The Obama administration also reduces every circumstance as being evaluated by Enemies versus friends .
So even those countries which did not jump on the anti-terrorism bandwagon were called enemies ie France.
While other nations viewed the world as more complex than the notion of "For us or Against us " and so argued that there were a lot of shades of grey in between these two poles the U.S. insisted there were only two choices each nation had to support the USA or to support the terrorists.
We're stuck in Bush's America" BY TOM ENGELHARDT Salon.com, July 12, 2011
Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.) Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you're being honest, you'll have to admit that one thing didn't happen: They didn't turn the page on us.
They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn't. It's not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word "homeland," both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever; or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie; or Guantánamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close; or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating; or the National Security Agency's surveillance and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing. No, it's scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over. Among them all, consider the Obama administration's updated version of that signature Bush invention, the global war on terror.
Yes, Obama's national security officials threw that term to the dogs back in 2009 and now pursue a no-name global strategy that's meant not to remind you of the Bush era. Recently, the White House released an unclassified summary of its 2011 "National Strategy for Counterterrorism," a 19-page document in prose only a giant bureaucracy with a desire to be impenetrable could produce. (Don't bother to read it. I read it for you.) If it makes a feeble attempt to put a little rhetorical space between Obama-style counterterrorism and what the Bush administration was doing, it still manages to send one overwhelming message: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding among us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes.
The global war on terror (or GWOT in acronym-crazed Washington) was the bastard spawn of the disorientation and soaring hubris of the days after the 9/11 attacks, which set afire the delusional geopolitical dreams of Bush, Cheney, their top national security officials and their neocon supporters. And here's the saddest thing: The Bush administration's most extreme ideas when it comes to GWOT are now the humdrum norm of Obama administration policies -- and hardly anyone thinks it's worth a comment.
... Bush's national security folks focused on an area that they termed "the arc of instability." It stretched from North Africa to the Chinese border, conveniently sweeping through the major oil lands of the planet. They would later dub it "the Greater Middle East." In that vast region, they were ready to declare hunting season open and they would be the ones to hand out the hunting licenses.
Within weeks of 9/11, top administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were speaking of this vast region as a global "swamp," an earthly miasma that they were going to "drain" of terrorists. As the U.S. military had declared whole areas of enemy-controlled rural Vietnam "free-fire zones" in the 1960s, so they were going to turn much of the planet into such a zone, a region where no national boundary, no claim of sovereignty would stop them from taking out whomever (or whatever government) they cared to.
Within days of 9/11, administration officials let it be known that, in their war, they were preparing to target terrorist groups in at least 60 countries. And if they were that blunt in public, in private they were exuberantly extreme. Top officials spoke with gusto about "taking off the gloves" or "the shackles" (the ones, as they saw it, that Congress had placed on the executive branch and the intelligence community in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair)...
and so it goes,
GORD.
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