The Ruthless Truth blog

Nice Work Creating New Terrorists, You Morons

American civilian and military leaders have been creating new terrorists through their:

(1) Use of torture

and

(2) Killing of innocent civilians- especially children – in Arabic countries.

Torture

A high-level American Special Ops interrogator says that information obtained from torture is unreliable, and that torture just creates more terrorists. Indeed, he says that torture of innocent Iraqis by Americans is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place.

A former FBI interrogator — who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects — says categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence. On the other hand he says that torture actually turns people into terrorists.

A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:

"This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.”

Former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke says that America’s indefinite detention without trial and abuse of prisoners is a leading Al Qaeda recruiting tool.
A former U.S. interrogator and counterintelligence agent, and Afghanistan veteran said,

Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It’s used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo.

The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found:

"The administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies … strengthened the hand of our enemies."

Two professors of political science have demonstrated that torture increases, rather than decreases, terrorism.
Killing of Innocent Civilians
The former number 2 counter-terrorism expert at the State Department says that military attacks in Iraq increase terrorism.
Indeed, Al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq until the U.S. invaded that country.
After the U.S. military handcuffed and then killed a bunch of Afghan kids, thousands of Afghans are protesting the brutal killings, chanting ‘Death to America!’
Nice work creating new terrorists, you morons

Nice Work Creating New Terrorists, You Morons ~ Washington’s Blog

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

When Reporting on Islamist Organizations, Media Ignores Damning Facts in Quest for ‘Balance’

It’s Begun!! Unprescented INTERPOL Immunity in US

Reid Bill: Coercive and Unconstitutional

Senate Marxist Reid to Make It Almost Impossible to Repeal ObamaCare

There’s Two “T’s” in Ottumwa (The Day the Dollar Died IX)

Mike Whitney: Bernanke Tightens the Noose

Copenhagen Climate Deal Shows New World Order May Be Led by U.S., China

Czech President Klaus: Global Warming Not Science, But a ‘New Religion’

No Human Based Global Warming

Hunger for False Flag In U.S. by Luciferian Illuminati Inside U.S. Govt. / Military / Intel Agencies/ Money Center Banks – Still Strong?

"We Can Make Him Disappear": Immigration Officials Are Hold

Why Haven’t These State Legislators Been Indicted?

The Birth of Christ and the Birth of America Are Linked

Ashfall Brings New Fears Near Philippine Volcano

Czech President Klaus: Global Warming Not Science, But a ‘New Religion’

Special Ops Robots Now Do Psychological Warfare

Traitors, Every One

Gun Room Fire Damage, Repairs Could Reach $1 Million

Franklin Graham: ‘True Islam Cannot Be Practiced in This Country’

Fixing Drone Data: A Not-So-Modest Proposal

While You Were Sleeping… The Economy Collapsed

Jim Sinclair Interview

Credit Card Debt up to 15% of Annual Household Income. Average Credit Card Debt in 1980 was $670 and Today it is up to $7,800. The Slimy World of Credit Card Lending.

Small-Business Bankruptcies Rise 81% in California

Breaking Point: Top Trends 2010–Gerald Celente

The Ponzi Decade: A Lost Decade in Stocks, Industrial Production, U.S. Dollar, and Housing. How we Managed to Inflate and Destroy the Biggest Financial Bubble of our Generation.

Strategic Implications of American Millennialism

There’ll Be Nowhere to Run from the New World Government

Bunker Report 12/21/09 It’s Just a Little Training…Right? – video

‘Powerful Booms’ Signal Mayon Eruption Threat, Say Scientists

Over the Arctic, Auroras Collide

Military Science: Hack Stormy Skies to Lord over Lightning

The Equality Bill: Will A New Law Essentially Outlaw Evangelical Christianity And Roman Catholicism in the U.K.?

Influential Author Joins ASU to Direct New Law Project

DOJ Issues Gag Order in Black Panther Probe

Israel: First Jesus-Era House Found in Nazareth

States Get More Time to Comply with Real ID

Napolitano Responds to Surge of Homegrown Terrorism Cases

‘Muslim Mafia’ Lawsuit Response: Legally, CAIR Doesn’t Even Exist

Firearms and Explosives Denial to Terrorists

Steve Quayle’s World: It’s a Blast!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

YEARS OF DECEIT: US OPENLY ACCEPTS BIN LADEN LONG DEAD

05
Dec, 2009
Gordon Duff

BIN LADEN NEVER MENTIONED IN McCHRYSTAL REPORT OR OBAMA SPEECH

“HUNT FOR BIN LADEN” A NATIONAL SHAME

Conservative commentator, former Marine Colonel Bob Pappas has been saying for years that bin Laden died at Tora Bora and that Senator Kerry’s claim that bin Laden escaped with Bush help was a lie.  Now we know that Pappas was correct.  The embarrassment of having Secretary of State Clinton talk about bin Laden in Pakistan was horrific.  He has been dead since December 13, 2001 and now, finally, everyone, Obama, McChrystal, Cheney, everyone who isn’t nuts is finally saying what they have known for years.

However, since we lost a couple of hundred of our top special operations forces hunting for bin Laden after we knew he was dead, is someone going to answer for this with some jail time?  Since we spent 200 million dollars on “special ops” looking for someone we knew was dead, who is going to jail for that?  Since Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney continually talked about a man they knew was dead, now known to be for reasons of POLITICAL nature, who is going to jail for that?  Why were tapes brought out, now known to be forged, as legitimate intelligence to sway the disputed 2004 election in the US?  This is a criminal act if there ever was one.

In 66 pages, General Stanley McChrystal never mentions Osama bin Laden.  Everything is “Mullah Omar” now.  In his talk at West Point, President Obama never mentioned Osama bin Laden.  Col. Pappas makes it clear, Vice President Cheney let it “out of the bag” long ago.  Bin Laden was killed by American troops many many years ago.

America knew Osama bin Laden died December 13, 2001.  After that, his use was hardly one to unite America but rather one to divide, scam and play games.  With bin Laden gone, we could have started legitimate nation building in Afghanistan instead of the eternal insurgency that we invented ourselves.

Without our ill informed policies, we could have had a brought diplomatic solution in 2002 in Afghanistan, the one we are ignoring now, and spent money rebuilding the country, 5 cents on the dollar compared to what we are spending fighting a war against an enemy we ourselves recruited thru ignorance.

The bin Laden scam is one of the most shameful acts ever perpetrated against the American people.  We don’t even know if he really was an enemy, certainly he was never the person that Bush and Cheney said.  In fact, the Bush and bin Laden families were always close friends and had been for many years.

What kind of man was Osama bin Laden?  This one time American ally against Russia, son of a wealthy Saudi family, went to Afghanistan to help them fight for their freedom.  America saw him as a great hero then.  Transcripts of the real bin Laden show him to be much more moderate than we claim, angry at Israel and the US government but showing no anger toward Americans and never making the kind of theats claimed.  All of this is public record for any with the will to learn.

How much of America’s tragedy is tied with these two children of the rich, children of families long joined thru money and friendship, the Bush and bin Laden clans.

One son died in remote mountains, another lives in a Dallas suburb hoping nobody is sent after him.  One is a combat veteran, one never took a strong stand unless done from safety and comfort.  Islam once saw bin Laden as a great leader.  Now he is mostly forgotten.

What has America decided about Bush? 

We know this:  Bin Laden always denied any ties to 9/11 and, in fact, has never been charged in relation to 9/11.  He not only denied involvement, but had done so, while alive, 4 times and had vigorously condemned those who were involved in the attack.

This is on the public record, public in every free country except ours.  We, instead, showed films made by paid actors, made up to look somewhat similar to bin Laden, actors who contradicted bin Ladens very public statements, actors pretending to be bin Laden long after bin Laden’s death.

These were done to help justify spending, repressive laws, torture and simple thievery.

For years, we attacked the government of Pakistan for not hunting down someone everyone knew was dead.  Bin Laden’s death hit the newspapers in Pakistan on December 15, 2001.  How do you think our ally felt when they were continually berated for failing to hunt down and turn over someone who didn’t exist?

What do you think this did for American credibility in Pakistan and thru the Islamic world?  Were we seen as criminals, liars or simply fools?  Which one is best? 

This is also treason.

I don’t always agree with Col. Pappas on things.  I believe his politics overrule his judgement at times.  However, we totally agree on bin Laden, simply disagree with what it means.  To me lying and sending men to their deaths based on lies is treason.

Falsifying military intelligence and spending billions on unnecessary military operations for political reasons is an abomination.  Consider this, giving billions in contracts to GOP friends who fill campaign coffers, and doing so based on falsified intelligence is insane.  This was done for years.

We spent 8 years chasing a dead man, spending billions, sending FBI agents, the CIA, Navy Seals, Marine Force Recon, Special Forces, many to their deaths, as part of a political campaign to justify running American into debt, enriching a pack of political cronies and war profiteers and to puff up a pack of Pentagon peacocks and their Whitehouse draft dodging bosses.

How many laws were pushed thru because of a dead man?

How many hundreds were tortured to find a dead man?

How many hundreds died looking for a dead man?

How many billions were spent looking for a dead man?

Every time Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld stood before troops and talked about hunting down the dead bin Laden, it was a dishonor.  Lying to men and women who put their lives on the line is not a joke.

Who is going to answer to the families of those who died for the politics and profit tied to the Hunt for Bin Laden?

Opinion Maker

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:15 UTC

© Unknown

We’ve just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here’s how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders, didn’t inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn’t keep that body’s “Gang of Eight” informed. A House investigation is now underway.
We’re told that the CIA — being the president’s private army and part of the executive branch of our government — has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even “be illegal,” according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)
This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA’s own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations — sometimes wiping out innocent civilians — from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never — we’re told — off the ground.
If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there’s much that we don’t know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration’s deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.
After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA destruction of interrogation-video tapes flap, the what did Congress/Nancy Pelosi really know about torture methods flap, the Bush administration officials (like Condi Rice) signed off on torture methods in 2002 even before the Justice Department justified them flap, the National Security Agency (it was far more widespread than anyone imagined) electronic surveillance flap, should the NSA’s telecom spies be investigated and prosecuted for engaging in illegal warrantless wiretapping flap, the should CIA torturers be investigated and prosecuted for using enhanced interrogation techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib photos (round-two) suppression flap, or various versions of the can they close Guantanamo, will they keep detainees in prison forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we’re told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to “look forward, not backward.”
Of course, he’s not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but — just for a moment — let’s not.
Admittedly, we’re a people who don’t really believe in history — so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing, of which each of these flaps has been but a tiny example. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each one of them is, soon enough, lessened by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?
The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we — not just the Obama administration — have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn’t been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.
As a start, remind me: What didn’t we do? Let’s review for a moment.
In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques — known to the previous administration and most of the media as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at “black sites” offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its global war on terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the “cleansing” of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our Special Forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out — and still carry out — assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world, on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined “torture” out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).
And don’t think that that’s anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It’s only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what’s missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category or, as with the latest CIA assassination story, a known curiosity whose full shape and depths remain to be grasped. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It’s a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.
Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place, rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately, is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared “war,” made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power in the world, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.
Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don’t believe it. History matters.
Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don’t face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson — the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson — of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam — and Laos and Cambodia — because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H.W. Bush, “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” It still haunts us.
However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country — and they remain monstrously large — we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of… well, of us and our “safety.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.
Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/189792-Don-t-Turn-the-Page-on-History-We-Must-Face-the-World-We-Created

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

by Ralph Lopez.

Global Research, July 20, 2009

dailykos.com

While congress says it is gearing up to investigate what is old news, that CIA and Special Ops forces are killing Al Qaeda leaders, a decision of far different gravity is being contemplated by Attorney General Eric Holder. The new insistence of Congress on its oversight role, conspicuously absent throughout 8 years of Bush, is suddenly rearing its head in the form of questioning a policy which has been in place with no controversy for years. The U.S. has been hunting and killing Al Qaeda leaders outside of official war zones since 2004, when the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had signed an order authorizing Special Forces to kill Al Qaeda where they found them.

As recently as September 2008 CBS reported that Special Forces struck Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

The decision faced by Holder, whether or not to appoint a Special Prosecutor on torture, is of a different gravity altogether. A weight of evidence keeps building which indicates torture was employed on innocent men, that it didn’t work, and that it didn’t prevent any attacks. And it gets worse. Bush’s own FBI Director Robert Mueller recently confirmed to the New York Times what he told Vanity Fair a year ago, that "to [his] knowledge" torture didn’t prevent a single attack. Former Legendary CIA Director William Colby has said that torture is "ineffective."

Harper’s Magazine’s Scott Horton nows suggests there are two Eric Holders at war with each other: Holder the good soldier who knows well the preference of his boss for prosecutions to not take place, and Holder the servant of the law who is aware that what he does now may determine what is likely to happen again.

It is becoming clear that such an investigation, if it happens, will not stop with a few low-ranking scapegoats. Horton notes:

"President Obama’s assurance to CIA officials who relied on the opinions of government lawyers in implementing these programs, an assurance that Holder himself repeated, would have to be worked in. That suggests that the focus would likely be on the lawyers and policymakers who authorized use of the new techniques."

And CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern writes this week:

the buck stops – actually, in this case, it began – with President Bush. Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Carl Levin and John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008, released the executive summary of a report, approved by the full committee without dissent, concluding that Bush’s Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum "opened the door to considering aggressive techniques."

What changed with Holder? Horton writes in "The Torture Prosecution Turnaround?":

Holder began his review mindful of the clear preference of President Obama’s two key political advisers—David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel—that there be no investigation. Axelrod and Emanuel are described as uninterested in either the legal or policy merits of the issue of a criminal investigation. Their concerns turn entirely on their political analysis…Holder initially appeared prepared to satisfy their wishes.

This attitude seemed to change after Obama’s speech at the CIA, when Emanual and Axelrod moved out front to say there would be no prosecutions. According to Horton:

"In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated."

To make things worse for the Bush administration, evidence is emerging that they can no longer even rely on exhibit A and B of the Torture Works theory, Al Zabudaya and Kalid Shiek Mohammed, the latter of whom is still confessing to everything short of being the real Boston Strangler. I guess if I’d been waterboarded 82 times I’d be babbling too. The FBI Special Agent who interrogated Abu Zubayda, recently breaking a 7-year silence after reading the "torture memos," wrote in the New York Times:

"One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence…This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives."

Then there is the political risk to the Obama administration that Axelrod and Emanual have miscalculated, and that, in fact, the rest of the president’s agenda is hamstrung while a growing number of Americans call for existing laws to be enforced. What is haunting Americans could be, in Washington jargon, "sucking oxygen" out of the debate, and "moving forward" is a pipe dream until pending business is dealt with. Spontaneous and planned rallies calling for a Special Prosecutor are growing, not diminishing. In addition, the worse revelations may be yet to come in the horrifying saga of what happened when, as Major General Anthony Taguba says:

[a] permissive environment [was] created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"…

President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.

Journalist Seymour Hersh’s (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal) bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:

" Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out."

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said at the time:

"The American public needs to understand, we’re talking about rape and murder here. We’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We’re talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging. Today, even among Republicans, it is difficult to find those who will embrace Richard Nixon, though for a while he was every bit the perceived victim of "left-wing hate" that Bush and Cheney are now. Incredibly, to compare Nixon to Bush-Cheney is to do a deeply flawed man a disservice. Nixon inherited Vietnam. He did not orchestrate from whole cloth a campaign to link Saddam with 9/11, and strenuously push to war despite the objections of his countrymen and the world. Nixon spied on political enemies. He did not use a tragedy to illegally spy on millions, the true numbers of which we still do not know because congress has never investigated.

It’s almost possible to feel sorry for the shifty, friendless Nixon. It is less possible to feel so for the smirking Bush, who thought nothing of telling soldier’s families that war critics were saying that their loved ones "had died in vain."

A compilation in November 2008 of other evidence of alleged incidents involving children at the time recounts:

– Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."

– Former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod in a witness statement said, "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a U.S. soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."

– Iraqi TV reporter, Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, arrested while making a documentary and thrown into Abu Ghraib for 74 days, told Mackay he saw "hundreds" of children there. Al-Baz said he heard one 12-year-old girl crying, "They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." He said he heard her whimpering daily.

– Al-Baz also told of a 15-year-old boy "who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed." Amnesty International said ex-detainees reported boys as young as 10 are held at Abu Ghraib.

– German TV reporter Thomas Reutter of "Report Mainz" quoted U.S. Army Sgt. Samuel Provance that interrogation specialists "poured water" over one 16-year-old Iraqi boy, drove him throughout a cold night, "smeared him with mud" and then showed him to his father, who was also in custody. Apparently, one tactic employed by the Bush regime is to elicit confessions from adults by dragging their abused children in front of them.

– Jonathan Steele, wrote in the British "The Guardian" that "Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons…Sixteen-year-old Omar Ali told the "Guardian" he spent more than three years at Karkh juvenile prison sleeping with 75 boys to a cell that is just five by 10 meters, some of them on the floor. Omar told the paper guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them.

– Raad Jamal, age 17, was taken from his Doura home by U.S. troops and turned over to the Iraqi Army’s Second regiment where Jamal said he was hung from the ceiling by ropes and beaten with electric cables.

– Human Rights Watch (HRW) last June put the number of juveniles detained at 513. In all, HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten.

– IRIN, the humanitarian news service, last year quoted Khalid Rabia of the Iraqi NGO Prisoners’ Association for Justice(PAJ), stating that five boys between 13 and 17 accused of supporting insurgents and detained by the Iraqi army "showed signs of torture all over their bodies," such as "cigarette burns over their legs," she said.

– One boy of 13 arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep, according to the "Catholic Worker."

Attorney General Holder is a man of conscience who now serves both President Obama and the law. A Newsweek piece last week says he has no illusions that:

Such a decision [to appoint a Special Prosecutor] would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda," he says. "But that can’t be a part of my decision."

There can be redemption for a nation which faces its past. One that does not can only become more monstrous.

Global Research Articles by Ralph Lopez

Bookmark It

Hide Sites