HISTORY REPEATING: U.S. Justice & The CIA - American Angels Of Death...

"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." Dr. Josef Mengele (1945 ).

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that physicians with the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) played an even greater role in facilitating the torture of detainees than was previously recognized.

As described in the study, "In 2003, partially in response to a CIA Inspector General investigation that questioned the use of enhanced interrogation methods and criticized the agency’s failure to consult with OMS about the risks to detainees of waterboarding, OMS physicians assumed another role, providing opinions to the agency and lawyers whether the techniques used would be expected to cause severe pain or suffering and thus constitute torture."

This advisory function came in addition to the physicians' previous involvement in the torture of detainees through performing medical evaluations before and after interrogation, monitoring waterboarding sessions, and collecting information on the effectiveness and risks of various techniques.

The study, titled "Roles of CIA Physicians in Enhanced Interrogation and Torture of Detainees," was authored by Leonard S. Rubinstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, and Brig. Gen. (ret.) Stephen N. Xenakis, a former Army psychiatrist who is now with the Center for Public Health and Human Rights. It is based on a previously secret document from 2004, laying out OMS guidelines for detainee interrogation, which was released by the Obama administration.

In an article for Harper's, human rights lawyer Scott Horton notes that the JAMA study makes it apparent that the OMS physicians did not merely offer a medical opinion as to what constituted torture:

"gave their bosses exactly what was expected of them: a green light to torture."

The study emphasizes that even though OMS approved the use of enhanced interrogation methods subject to "medical limitations," those limitations took no account of actual pain and suffering and were merely calculated to minimize the chances of doing permanent physical damage.

They "included durational limits for exposure to a specified temperature, either up to the time hypothermia would be expected to develop or on evidence of hypothermia; body weight loss of 10% or evidence of significant malnutrition as a result of dietary restrictions; and exposure to noise just under the decibel levels associated with permanent hearing loss. Stress positions were permitted for up to 48 hours provided the detainee’s hands were no higher than the head, weight was borne by lower extremities, and preexisting injuries were not aggravated. ... The OMS guidelines also advised that emergency resuscitation equipment be available when waterboarding was used."

Although the guidelines specify they: "the detainee's physical condition must be such that these interventions will not have lasting effect," they IGNORE professional literature on the potential health risks of the techniques, citing instead such sources as "'Wilderness Medicine' 4th Ed., Ch 6 -- Accidental Hypothermia."
"The duplicity in this affair is amazingly circular.," Horton writes. "The Justice Department’s torture lawyers relied on the CIA’s torture doctors for the conclusion that specific techniques did not produce 'severe pain' that ran afoul of the criminal law prohibition on torture; the CIA doctors relied on the Justice Department lawyers for the same conclusion. It looks like a compact, and an alert prosecutor would no doubt call it... A JOINT CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE. It’s hard to see at this point whose behavior was the more ethically odious, though evidence suggests that both engaged in professional misconduct so egregious as to warrant formal disciplinary proceedings."

"The torture doctors expect to have their identities protected, and thus to ESCAPE the natural consequences of their gross professional misconduct," Horton concludes: "This helps us understand why senior figures in the intelligence community are today ferociously pressuring the Justice Department to criminalize anyone who attempts to discover the identities of those involved. They assert that those identified would be terrorist targets. In fact, those who are unmasked face likely professional ethics proceedings, as well as the long-term risk of criminal prosecution, particularly if they ever venture beyond the borders of the United States."

-Muriel Kane (Study: CIA doctors ‘gave green light to torture’,RawStory.com, 8.5.2010. Image: Dr. Josef Mengele in his laboratory, 1945 ).

Torture 2003: "Sadistic Acts Perpetrated Against The Innocent." -GWB

"In 2003, President Bush said torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere, and the United States is committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law. In a statement issued on United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture June 26, the president called on all governments to join in prohibiting, investigating and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. Following is the official text of Bush's statement:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
June 26, 2003

STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT

United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

“Today, on the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the United States declares its strong solidarity with torture victims across the world. Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. We are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. Beating, burning, rape, and electric shock are some of the grisly tools such regimes use to terrorize their own citizens. These despicable crimes cannot be tolerated by a world committed to justice.

Notorious human rights abusers, including, among others, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Zimbabwe, have long sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors. Until recently, Saddam Hussein used similar means to hide the crimes of his regime. With Iraq's liberation, the world is only now learning the enormity of the dictator's three decades of victimization of the Iraqi people. Across the country, evidence of Baathist atrocities is mounting, including scores of mass graves containing the remains of thousands of men, women, and children and torture chambers hidden inside palaces and ministries. The most compelling evidence of all lies in the stories told by torture survivors, who are recounting a vast array of sadistic acts perpetrated against the innocent. Their testimony reminds us of their great courage in outlasting one of history's most brutal regimes, and it reminds us that similar cruelties are taking place behind the closed doors of other prison states.

The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy. I further urge governments to join America and others in supporting torture victims' treatment centers, contributing to the UN Fund for the Victims of Torture, and supporting the efforts of non-governmental organizations to end torture and assist its victims.

No people, no matter where they reside, should have to live in fear of their own government. Nowhere should the midnight knock foreshadow a nightmare of state-commissioned crime. The suffering of torture victims must end, and the United States calls on all governments to assume this great mission."

- Office of the White House Press Secretary (U.S Diplomatic Mission to Italy U.S. Department of State, 6.26.2003. Image: - Joseph Rodriguez, "Levi's Prison Guard-Advertisement", 2008).

Colonialist Conversions: Torture, Religion, Democracy & God...

"The special forces guys - they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom."

It's worse than you think.

Torture, religion, democracy, God. They're all part of the mixed-up, horrific business that George W. Bush unleashed in the Middle East and Central Asia, and that Barack Obama is struggling to control and rationalize. As the words above demonstrate, the 12th century is striving mightily to join hands with the 20th in the U.S. military: Unbridled religious arrogance is forging a link with high-tech weaponry and an unlimited defense budget.

COLONIALIST CONVERSIONS:

The speaker, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan was videotaped last year delivering a sermon at Bagram Air Base. Since Al Jazeera first broadcast the footage at the beginning of the week, it has spread widely on the Internet. (Video)

Like so much else that the Bush administration has bequeathed us, and the world - pre-emptive war and torture, for instance - this is nothing new, but suddenly it's overt. A U.S. military spokesman has denied that American soldiers are allowed to try to convert Afghans to Christianity - it violates Central Command's General Order No. 1 - and said that Hensley was quoted out of context. U.S. military spokesmen, of course, also routinely deny that U.S. bombing raids kill civilians.

And indeed, U.S. air strikes this week in a densely populated area in western Afghanistan's Farah Province, during a battle between Afghan soldiers and the Taliban, may have killed as many as 100 civilians, according to the New York Times. The Red Cross, the United Nations and the Afghan government are all expressing shock at the death toll, but our government will only acknowledge that it is "investigating the reports of civilian deaths," which is the standard, meaningless comment that reporters work into such stories, seemingly with no obligation to follow up. Forget about it and move on.

The possibility that we are - not officially but in the minds of many American soldiers and officers - waging a religious war that parallels the secular one, an Ann Coulter war ("We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," Coulter wrote on Sept. 12, 2001), is both deeply disturbing and utterly appropriate. The arrogance required for both efforts is so similar. The line blurs for many of the participants.

What is the difference between believing one can bomb a country into democracy and any sort of armed, uniformed proselytizing?

Putting a religious spin on the war on terror may be an official no-no, but when I read about Bargram's "hounds of heaven" and other recent reports of the growing evangelical Christian influence in the U.S. military (such as Jeff Sharlet's stunning investigative piece in the May issue of Harper's, titled "Jesus Killed Mohammed"), I think first of the extraordinary Winter Soldier testimony I attended a year ago in Washington, D.C.vvThis testimony, sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War, and vastly underreported in the media, featured vet after vet giving agonized, conscience-wracked testimony on his or her training and service in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. If one word could describe the overarching theme of the four-day event, it might be "Dehumanization."

"In our boot camp," said former Marine Matthew Childers, "we sang cadences about killing people."

Occupation means implicit disrespect. The testimony went on and on, describing detainee abuse, humiliation and starvation; the terrorizing of families during house raids; the casual brutalities and killings at checkpoints; vandalism and joy-riding around the ruins of Babylon; the shooting of pets to relieve boredom. And this is the context in which we now hear about earnest American Christians harvesting the souls of Muslims. Let us bow our heads in prayer, America. The worst of who we are is STALKING THE WORLD with religious fervor.

-Robert C. Koehler ("The Hounds of Heaven", CommonDreams.org, 5.7.2009. Image -J. Keppler, "Consistency," Library of Congress, 1891).

The Conscience Of Humanity: And Justice For All....

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice." -Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970).

Image: -Mr. Fish ("Doing Nothing," Truthdig.com, 4.19.2009).

The Torture Party: A Loaded Weapon Ready For Resurrection...

There were no professional interrogators involved in the creation of the CIA’s torture program.

It's bad enough that we have war criminals running amok. Having one of them (Jay Bybee )sitting on one of the highest courts in the land (United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ) is simply psychotic.

"The evidence is now undeniable. President Barack Obama is flouting his unflagging constitutional obligation enshrined in Article II, Section 3 to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He is also reneging on his signature campaign promise to restore the rule of law, transparency, and accountability to the White House. He is displaying the psychology of an arrogant Empire as opposed to a modest Republic in continuing and escalating the Bush-Cheney duumvirate’s global and perpetual war against international terrorism heedless of foreign sovereignties or the lives of civilians.

Even more disappointing, Obama has proven a political coward dangerous to the Republic. Before April 16, he had decided against any criminal investigation of the Bush-Cheney duumvirate or their inner circles for their boasted complicity in torture, i.e., waterboarding, which Attorney General Eric Holder has declared is torture. He has similarly declined investigations of extraordinary renditions that have occasioned, among other things, the indictments and in absentia trials of 26 CIA operatives in Milan, Italy, for the kidnapping and torture of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar.

Obama asserted: “Enlisting our values [like the rule of law or transparency] in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure. A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals [like the rule of law or government in the sunshine]… I believe strongly in transparency and accountability… The United States is a nation of laws.”

Obama has set a precedent whitewashing White House lawlessness in the name of national security that will lie around like a loaded weapon ready for resurrection by any Commander-in-Chief eager to appear “tough on terrorism” and to exploit popular fear."

- Bruce Fein, (Excerpt: "How Obama Excused Torture," The Daily Beast, 4-17-09. Image: -James Akin, Implements Of Torture, Used in Pennsylvania, Library of Congress, 1835).

Donald Rumsfeld: The Executioner...With Near-Perfect Clarity...

"Clarity! I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.
And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known."

-Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld (Comments at a Department of Defense Briefing, 3.28.03).

"Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into The Treatment Of Detainees In U.S.Custody"

Excerpts:

"(U) Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces that distorted view, increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies. In fact, the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States” cited “pervasive anti U.S. sentiment among most Muslims” as an underlying factor fueling the spread of the global jihadist movement. Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

(U) The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the Committee’s inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about

A. Conclusions on GTMO’s Request for Aggressive Techniques:

Conclusion 13: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there. Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Mr. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, water boarding in Afghanistan and Iraq.

B. Conclusions on Interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Conclusion 15: Special Mission Unit (SMU) Task Force (TF) interrogation policies were influenced by the Secretary of Defense’s December 2, 2002 approval of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at GTMO. SMU TF interrogation policies in Iraq included the use of aggressive interrogation techniques such as military working dogs and stress positions. SMU TF policies were a direct cause of detainee abuse and influenced interrogation policies at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.

Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely."

-Report Released by Senators. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) & John McCain (R-Ariz.) 12.12.2008. Image: Illustration - "Prison Life in America Showing the "Trapeze", Torture Of Hanging By The Thumbs". Life Magazine, 1871).

The Metamorphosis: Scandal, Ignorance & A Bottomless Pit of Self-Justification...

"Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit.

Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream.

1. Revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration.

2. Investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept.

3. Expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.

It is a myth, of course, but a lovely one. It relies on images of power, the press, and the people that fit our collective longing—for justice, for heroism, and for ultimate goodness residing in a people who, once alerted to wrongdoing, insist on its rectification. The obstacle to this natural self-cleansing of our political life can only be the people's ignorance. For if they know, and the corruption and scandals persist—well, how can the people be good? No, what must be missing then—so the myth implies—is clarity, revelation. What is missing is the gatekeepers of our ignorance whose duty it is to draw the curtain back from scandal and show the people everything, thereby starting the polity on the road to inexorable justice.

Information is all. Information, together with the people's natural sense of the good and the right, leads to expiation and society's inevitable cleansing.

Scandals, the more complicated and richer the plotlines the better, have above all to endure. Scandals provide the fodder for on-air confrontation, the verbal slash and parry—which is what television, a terrible medium for conveying information of any complexity, does best, and does most cheaply. Scandals provide subplots and minor characters and spin-offs. They offer, to the post-Watergate, high-profile, well-coiffed, colleague-of-the-powerful journalist hero of today—could anything be further from the deeply irreverent working stiff cracking wise in Howard Hawks's "His Girl Friday" - the true venue for the highest practice of his art, the television studio.

That art relies on, or anyway thrives on, scandal. Scandal denotes success. Scandal shows he is doing his job. Scandal means pay dirt. And scandal represents that media-age dream, the perpetual story. Scandal can be rehashed, debated, photographed, from initial leak, to perp walk, to hearing, to trial, to appeal.

Scandal offers an endless stream of what the business is after all supposed to be about: news. As in: what is new.

Scandal brings the heart-pumping, breath-gulping surge of stop-the-presses excitement, letting us know that into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene. Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped "breaking news," beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis.

Everything changes and nothing does.

It is not information, it is politics. If we have learned anything this past decade it is that "the people," that vaunted repository of public good—"the people always find out"—the people are willing and able to live with quite a lot. They read, watch television, grunt a pox on all their houses, and turn back to their dinners. Thanks to the efficiency of our age of scandal we now know as never before what the public is willing to live with. "Now you have shown independence, commendable independence," Barack Obama said to John McCain in the third debate, "on some key issues—torture, for example." Torture has metamorphosed, these past few years, from an execrable war crime to a "key issue." From something forbidden by international treaty and condemned by domestic law to...something to be debated. Something one can stand on either side of.

Something we can live with.

What notes on scandal could be complete without mention of the presiding master-scandal of our age, The War. One uses capitals to denote not a set of discrete events—a set of particular people being cut down or blown apart by particular violent actions at particular times—but a state of mind. Threat becomes not only a political shield but what is in the end much more dangerous: a source of bottomless self-justification. What is dangerous is not only that our leaders have endlessly maintained that they are right but that they believe they are. George Bush, as he declared to the world in a proudly emphatic phrase, had been reborn as a "war president."

George Orwell has long since surveyed this ground, most famously in 1984, in his perpetual war between Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania, a never-ending, shape-shifting struggle that, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless.... It helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.

How will history choose to explain a war launched in the cause of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist? It is a tantalizing question. Will the Iraq War take its place as a historical curiosity, alongside the Guano War of the nineteenth century or the Soccer War of the twentieth? And how interested will our descendants be in the response of our democratic polity: the investigations that, like dinosaurs slowly rousing themselves from the mudhole, ever so slowly got under way and then, after years of lumbering effort—hundreds of hours of testimony, thousands of documents examined—finally discovered...What...?

In the end, there was, alas, no "smoking gun."

-Mark Danner (Excerpt: "Frozen Scandal,"NY Review Of Books, Volume 55, Number 19 · 12.4.2008. Image: Poster for "The Pit And The Pendulum," directed by Roger Corman, 1961).

Indefensible, Unjustifiable & Immoral...

The Empire is falling. Bush is basically an amalgam of Augustus Caesar and Nero. He, his administration and his party have neutralized our Republic and turned our government into a crony-serving money-machine for the likes of Cheney's KBR. In eight short years the Repugs, with the weak-kneed acquiescence and therefore tacit approval of the Democrats, have dismantled our republic and accelerated into full-fledged imperial overreach.

Nearly thirty years of supply-side, Reaganomics is coming home to roost. The real economy, the one the vast majority of Americans live in, has seen wages stagnate and fail to keep up with productivity since 1973. The parasitic economy, the one you see bubble heads on TV talking about is largely illusory. Full of "naked short sales", "spiders" and other speculative devices designed to steal money from the rest of us.

The unmitigated greed of the lords of this other economy, about 1% of the population, have harnessed the labor of the other 99% while at the same time infiltrating our government and slashing any and all regulation in order to make it even easier to steal. They've created trade deals in opposition to over two-hundred years of trade policy that have decimated our real economy. The economy of factories and steel mills. Our manufacturing base, the strength of our whole country is just gone in the name of Globalization. Just a little understanding of history reveals that this "globalization" isn't new. Something very similar was touted during the height of the British Empire; even down to the same justifications.

The speculative/parasitic economy is run on television for television by vast weapons manufacturers that also happen to own television. Cheap hucksters and just plain lying pricks like the guys from Enron who famously joked:

"Yeah, grandma Millie, man" "Yeah, now she wants her f-----g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a-- for f-----g $250 a megawatt hour" (gales of frat-boy laughter).

Voters have a clear choice.

• If you care about the economy you can choose between a guy who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard law school, who eschewed big money jobs on Wall St. to go work with the people on the south side of Chicago. Or you can choose a guy who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the Annapolis Naval Academy who nevertheless was given a much coveted spot for training as a naval pilot, who during the last huge collapse in the financial sector in the late 80's, was a member of the Keating 5.

• If you care about foreign policy, you can choose a guy who voted to allow Bush to unilaterally invade Iraq in 2003. A guy who has voted with Bush nearly every chance he's gotten and who thinks the foreign policy we are currently engaged in is just great. Or they can choose a guy who was interviewed on November 11, 2002 where he said he would not have voted to authorize the Iraq war and who further went on to say that if the headlong rush to war was pressed; the issue would then become how to stabilize the region and how to get back out. Something he's been thinking about since Bush, McCain, et al. invaded in March 2003.

There's more, oh so much more, but we all know the arguments. The bottom line is, a vote for McCain in this election is indefensible, unjustifiable, and immoral.

- Sean Keenan, ("A Clear Choice," The Ojai Post, 9.16.08. Image: Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Rome, Bronze, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD, Julio-Claudian Period, ca. A.D. 50).

Gore Vidal: On Bush...The Courage To Sack Him....

It will take the United States a century to recover from the damage wreaked by President George. W Bush, writer Gore Vidal said in an interview published on Saturday.

"The president behaved like a virtual criminal but we didn't have the courage to sack him for fear of violating the American constitution," Vidal told the El Mundo newspaper.

The author, a trenchant critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq, said it would take the United States "100 years to repair the damage caused by Bush. We live in a dictatorship. We have a fascist government...which controls the media," Vidal also said presidential aspirant Barack Obama was "intelligent" adding that it would be a "novelty" to have an "intelligent" person in the White House. -Gore Vidal (El Mundo News, Spain 6.14.08)

Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment...High Crimes & Misdemeanors...

On June 9, 2008, a counterrevolution began on the floor of the House of Representatives against the gas and oil crooks who had seized control of the federal government. This counterrevolution began in the exact place which had slumbered during the all-out assault on our liberties and the Constitution itself.

I wish to draw the attention of the blog world to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment presented to the House in order that two faithless public servants be removed from office for crimes against the American people. As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment — he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials — we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

Although this is the most important motion made in Congress in the 21st century, it was also the most significant plea for a restoration of the republic, which had been swept to one side by the mad antics of a president bent on great crime. And as I listened with awe to Kucinich, I realized that no newspaper in the U.S., no broadcast or cable network, would pay much notice to the fact that a highly respected member of Congress was asking for the president and vice president to be tried for crimes which were carefully listed by Kucinich in his articles requesting impeachment.

But then I have known for a long time that the media of the U.S. and too many of its elected officials give not a flying fuck for the welfare of this republic, and so I turned, as I often do, to the foreign press for a clear report of what has been going on in Congress. We all know how the self-described “war hero,” Mr. John McCain, likes to snigger at France, while the notion that he is a hero of any kind is what we should be sniggering at. It is Le Monde, a French newspaper, that told a story the next day hardly touched by The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or, in fact, any other major American media outlet.

As for TV? Well, there wasn’t much — you see, we dare not be divisive because it upsets our masters who know that this is a perfect country, and the fact that so many in it don’t like it means that they have been terribly spoiled by the greatest health service on Earth, the greatest justice system, the greatest number of occupied prisons — two and a half million Americans are prisoners — what a great tribute to our penal passions!

Naturally, I do not want to sound hard, but let me point out that even a banana Republican would be distressed to discover how much of our nation’s treasury has been siphoned off by our vice president in the interest of his Cosa Nostra company, Halliburton, the lawless gang of mercenaries set loose by his administration in the Middle East.

But there it was on the first page of Le Monde. The House of Representatives, which was intended to be the democratic chamber, at last was alert to its function, and the bravest of its members set in motion the articles of impeachment of the most dangerous president in our history. Rep Kucinich listed some 30-odd articles describing impeachable offenses committed by the president and vice president, neither of whom had ever been the clear choice of our sleeping polity for any office.

Some months ago, Kucinich had made the case against Dick Cheney. Now he had the principal malefactor in his view under the title “Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush”! “Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.” The purpose of the resolve is that he be duly tried by the Senate, and if found guilty, be removed from office. At this point, Rep. Kucinich presented his 35 articles detailing various high crimes and misdemeanors for which removal from office was demanded by the framers of the Constitution.

Update: On Wednesday, the House voted by 251 to 166 to send Rep. Kucinich’s articles of impeachment to a committee which probably won’t get to the matter before Bush leaves office, a strategy that is “often used to kill legislation,” as the Associated Press noted later that day.

-Gore Vidal (TruthDig, 6.12.08)

Iraq: It's Impossible To Calculate The Messages On The Streets...

BAQUBA: The real number of the dead is far higher than even the highest declared in death tolls, many Iraqis say. A study by doctors from the Johns Hopkins School of Health in conjunction with Iraqi doctors from al-Mustanceriya University in Baghdad, published in the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006, estimated the number of excess deaths as a result of the occupation at above 655,000.

Just Foreign Policy, an independent organisation “dedicated to reforming U.S. foreign policy” offered an updated total of 1,213,716 at the time of this writing. On Sep. 14, 2007, Opinion Research Business (ORB), an independent polling agency located in London, produced a figure of 1,220,580 deaths as a result of the invasion. These estimates are above any official figures from Iraq, but they do consider the reported official figures.

Iraqis believe that the authorities are hiding these figures. “The U.S. military benefits from hiding the real totals,” said a political analyst who declined to give his name because of the atmosphere of fear within Iraq. “And the Iraqi government is a puppet of the Americans, so their figures are ridiculously low as well.”

The report published in The Lancet did not take into account many circumstances of death, say residents in Baquba, capital of Diyala province 40km north of capital Baghdad.

“All people know that a large number of bodies are dropped into the Diyala river.” said a local resident. “I was kidnapped and taken to a village called Huwaider, which is completely Shia and located on the Diyala River. Sunnis there are killed and dropped in the river by militiamen, but I was freed by the U.S Army. “People in all the villages on the river have gotten used to seeing bodies floating in the river."

“I lived in Gatoon district, the volatile stronghold of the militants in Baquba,” Yasir al-Azawi, a 37-year-old truck driver told IPS. “Everyday I saw vehicles dropping bodies in the river. Everyone in my district knows this truth; that the river contained an extraordinary number of bodies to the extent that living in that place became impossible. We left our home and moved to live in the north of Iraq.” An officer at the directorate-general of police for Diyala province said the number of dead is impossible to calculate exactly.

“When the new security plan began in Diyala, some of the arrested militants confessed that they were burying bodies. Some of them led us to the places where they buried the bodies. We found hundreds by digging in the areas that are a stronghold of the militants, and sometimes in the gardens of the houses they were living in, or in a place nearby.”

An eyewitness at the Baquba morgue spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity. “I was looking for my relative who was kidnapped and then killed, and I saw an ambulance moving the dead who were killed by militants, I asked the driver about these bodies. He said that the Iraqi army found them in houses and in holes dug within the houses. I also saw a skeleton among the bodies.”

Many believe that the number of the dead is higher than these studies reflect also because the lack of access to areas controlled by militias and other fighters prevents police and army personnel from finding and collecting bodies. A policeman, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS that “we were moving the bodies from the main streets of the city through patrols. A body that may have been dropped in the street is a message for people. They dropped it purposely. But these are only a few; the bodies of most we believe were killed, were never found.”

“The morgue continues to receive bodies brought by the police or the ambulance,” said an employee at the Baquba morgue. “We used to receive many daily. The capacity of the morgue was not enough, so they were buried after certain procedures like taking photos or waiting for the families to ask about them and to take them. Sometimes, at times of bombing and disastrous accidents, we were receiving hundreds of bodies.”

“Hundreds of families come to the provincial office everyday to ask about their loved ones who were kidnapped; they do not know whether they are dead or alive,” an employee at the governor’s office told IPS. “Often the Iraqi army finds records of the dead from the militants through their confessions. Every week there are new lists of names of those who were killed by the militants. People come to find out whether their loved ones are dead, in order to stop searching.” New burial grounds are found often, and the dead are usually not recorded. Many residents told IPS that farmers commonly find bones in their fields.

-Ahmed Ali & Dahr Jamail (Excerpt: "Iraq Death Toll: Above Highest Estimate",Inter Press Service, 6.2.2008, Image: -Hendrick van Cleve (1525-1589) The Tower of Babel," 16th Century. Christian Symbolism: The Tower of Babel symbolizes human arrogance and disrespect towards God).

Iraq: One Winter Soldier's Tale...My Choking Hand...

In the spring of 2008, a conference was held on the outskirts of Washington, DC. Entitled Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, it harkened back to the Winter Soldier testimonies held three decades ago during the Vietnam War. Of the testimonies we filmed, this one, by Iraq War vet Jon Michael Turner, was the most compelling and intense:

Watch Video Here:

- Garland McLaurin ( "Iraq: One Winter Soldier's Tale" Spring, 2008).

Donald Rumsfeld: Memo To Self...The Dire Consequences Of Fear...

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda offshore."
- 43rd President George W. Bush (President Participates in Social Security Conversation in Greece Athena High School Athena Performing Arts Center, Greece, New York 5.24.2005).

Click On Document To ENLARGE:

-Donald Rumsfeld's Memo To Self, US Secretary of Defense (2001-2006). Forced Resignation on 12.18.2006, Eight months after the above memo was written. (The Archives of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff, Pentagon's Military Analyst Program, 4.18.2006) .

"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us."
- 41st President George H.W. Bush ( Reportedly to journalist Sarah McClendon, 12.1992).

Donald Rumsfeld: "The Psychological Patterns Are Wearing Off..."

"Shocking excerpts of confidential recordings recently released under the Freedom of Information Act feature former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking with top military analysts about how a flagging Neo-Con political agenda could be successfully restored with the aid of another terrorist attack on America. The tape also includes a conversation where Rumsfeld and the military analysts agree on the possible necessity of installing a brutal dictator in Iraq to oversee U.S. interests.

The tapes were released as part of the investigation into the Pentagon's "message force multipliers" program in which top military analysts were hired to propagandize for the Iraq war in the corporate media. In attendance at the valedictory luncheon Rumsfeld hosted on December 12, 2006 were David L. Grange, Donald W. Sheppard, James Marks, Rick Francona, Wayne Downing, and Robert H. Scales, Jr. among others.

The most extraordinary exchange takes place when Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans shrinking political support for Neo-Con war plans on Capitol Hill and suggests that sympathy for the Bush administration's agenda will only be achieved after a new terror attack. Rumsfeld agrees that the psychological impact of 9/11 is wearing off and the "behavior pattern" of citizens in both the U.S. and Europe suggests that they are unconcerned about the threat of terror:

DELONG: "Politically, what are the challenges because you're not going to have a lot of sympathetic ears up there until it [a terror attack] happens.

RUMSFELD: That's what I was just going to say. This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it's a shame we don't have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats...the lethality, the carnage, that can be imposed on our society is so real and so present and so serious that you'd think we'd be able to understand it, but as a society, the longer you get away from 9/11, the less...the less..."

VIOLETPLANET SAYS: Notice the reverse psychology in his choice of words and phrasing. He uses negative words for positive actions and positive words for negative actions. He's one slick, sick mad-hatter.

CLICK HERE For Audio Tape Recording

-Paul Joseph Watson ( Rumsfeld "On Tape: Terror Attack Could Restore Neo-Con Agenda: Former Defense Secretary's Conversation with Military Analysts on Political Problems - "The Correction For That...Is An Attack," Prison Planet, 5.16.08. Image: Donald Rumsfeld Riding His Unicycle, 1970s).

Harry S. Truman: Target Hiroshima...New Images Of U.S. Genocide In WWII

"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.

Anyway we "think" we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexico desert was startling - to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused the complete disintegration of a steel tower 60 feet high, created a crater 6 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower 1/2 mile away and knocked men down 10,000 yards away. The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more.

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.  He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful..."

- Harry S. Truman, ( Truman's Personal Diary quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman New York: Harper and Row, 1980) pp. 55-56, 7.25.1945).

- Image: Photographer Unknown (The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institute Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb).  

The Robert L. Capp Collection Hiroshima Photographs Here

Excalibur & The Unseen Hand: MindWar

"MindWar is defined as "the deliberate aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war."

 Propaganda the usual way:

"The terror of the Roman name will be such that the world shall know that, once a Roman army has laid siege to a city, nothing will move it - not the rigors of winter nor the weariness of the months and years - that it knows no end but victory and is ready, if a swift and sudden stroke will not serve, to preserve until that victory is achieved." - Titus Livius a.k.a Livy (59 BC–AD 17, The Early History of Rome Vol. 1-5).

MindWar:

"MindWar reverses this sequence. Psychological means for achieving victory-essentially through convincing the enemy that he really wants to bring his national policies into harmony with ours-are fashioned in support of basic political goals. The use of ordinary military force (bombs, bullets, etc.) is regarded as a last rsort in circumstances where MindWar by itself fails.

Essentially you overwhelm your enemy with argument. You seize control of all of the means by which his government and populace process information to make up their minds, and you adjust it so that those minds are made up as you desire.

The MindWar operative must know that he speaks the truth, and he must be personally committed to it. What he says is only a part of MindWar; the rest - and the test of its effectiveness - lies in the conviction he projects to his audience, in the rapport he establishes with it. In practice, however, the difference between MindWar and cynical or deceptive propaganda, from the perspective of the audience, is difficult if not impossible to perceive. The examples of Kennedy's ultimatum to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Hitler's stance at Munich might be cited. A MindWar message does not have to fit conditions of abstract credibility as do PSYOP there; its source makes it credible.

Strategic MindWar must begin  the moment war is considered inevitable.  It must seek out the attention of the enemy nation through every available medium, and it must strike at the nation's potential soldiers before they put on their uniforms.  It is in their homes and their communities that they are most vulnerable to MindWar.

Was the United States defeated in the jungles of Vietnam, or was it defeated in the streets of American cities?

Like the sword Exalibur, we have to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to enhance civilization with it.  If we do not accept Excalibur, the we relinquish our ability to "inspire" foreign cultures with our morality. If they then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level."

 MindWar states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States.

-General Paul E. Vallely  (From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory,  Headquarters, 7th Psychological Operations Group, United States Army Reserve, Presidio of San Francisco, CA, 1980).  The first President of the National Psychological Operations Association participant in the Pentagon military analyst program and a Fox News analyst.  In September 2003, he took part in a Pentagon-funded  tour of Iraq ... timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing." He later told the New York Times, "I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south." However, after returning he claimed on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" show: "You can’t believe the progress." 

Vallely is also the Military Committee Chairman for the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Iran Policy Committee. He is co-author, with Thomas McInerney, of "Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror." In April 2008 America learned he had been one of a dozen "military analysts" recruited by the Pentagon to spread favorable views of the failing Iraq War via the news. General Valley is also a supporter of the Jerusalem Summit organization and an advocate of the organization's proposal to transfer Palestine to surrounding Arab countries as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He advocates military-led regime change in Iran, Syria and North Korea."  Image: Brainstorming by: Franck44).

Evil Little Men!

Leo Tolstoy: The Art of War...Treachery, Trickery & Murder

"War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous … there is no profession held in higher esteem than the military. And what is war? What makes for success in warfare? What are the morals of the military world? The aim and end of war is...murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying, which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom—in other words, a rigorous discipline—enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And yet this is the highest caste in society, respected by all.

Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow creatures. Tens of thousands of men meet—as they will tomorrow—to massacre one another: to kill and maim, and then they will offer up thanksgiving services for having slain such vast numbers (they even exaggerate the number) and proclaim a victory, supposing that the more men they have slaughtered the more credit to them. Think of God looking down and listening to them!” cried Prince Andrei in a shrill, piercing voice."

-Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) War And Peace: "An example of Tolstoy's view that history proceeds inexorably to its own ends with mankind appearing as an incidental instrument of the historial process. Whilst so tendentious an approach to the philosophy of history is difficult to accept today, as one of the themes of Tolstoy's greatest novel, it adds depth and perspective to a narrative that intersperses historical, social and personal interaction." -The Reading Group. ( A New Translation: From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the best-selling, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, 2007 ).

Photo Of The Last 8 Years: Nothing A Little Water Boarding Wouldn't Cure.....

Genius!