PUBLISH, PROSECUTE,
AND BE DAMNED!
Of course, all the photos of torture should be published.
If that causes even more people to get angry, very good!
It is a very sick society that knows all about this,
but keeps making pathetic excuses why the law is not enforced.
It is also a very sick society if we need to actually see such horror photos,
when the horror descriptions should be more than enough for everyone.
However, we know it is a very sick society,
and sometimes pictures work when words unfortunately do not.
Remember, we all knew about the tortures, atrocities
and illegal war of aggression going on in Viet Nam too,
but many were in denial then (and many still are!).
However, the publishing of those official US Army photographs
of the My Lai Massacre shocked some people into finally believing,
in a way words apparently could not.
So, PUBLISH, PROSECUTE, AND BE DAMNED!
Bruce McPhie
Why The Photos Probably Do Show Detainees Sodomized and Raped
By Naomi Wolf
....Is systemic sex crime practiced by the US in a consequence of the lawlessness of `the war on terror' surprising to those of us who work on issues of sexual abuse and war? It is totally predictable:.....
But what is far scarier about these images Obama refuses to release and that the Pentagon is likely to be lying about now is that it is not the evidence of lower-level soldiers being corrupted by power - it is proof of the fact that the most senior leadership - Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, with Rice's collusion - were running a global sex crime trafficking ring with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Baghram as the holding sites....
Well, America? Do you want to live with this? Remember: history shows categorically that once the state can lock `them' up without a fair trial, torture, rape them or sodomize them - well; sooner or later it will be able to do the same to your children or mine; or to you and me. Continue
By Paul Craig Roberts
If the Obama regime does not hold the Bush regime accountable for violating US and international law, then the Obama regime is complicit in the Bush regime’s crimes. If the American people permit Obama to look the other way in order “to move on,” the American people are also complicit in the crimes. Continue
And I liked some of the comments that followed the above article:
By the way, it's not Al-Libi, it's ALIBI! Get it? Alibi!
"U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R,Tx) understands the danger to Americans of permitting government to violate the law. In “Torturing the Rule of Law” http:// informationclearinghouse....ticle22705.htm , he said that the US government’s use of torture to produce excuses for illegal actions is the most radicalizing force at work today. “The fact that our government engages in evil behavior under the auspices of the American people is what poses the greatest threat to the American people, and it must not be allowed to stand.” - [end quote]
This threat to the American people (why only americans?) as Ron Paul is quoted, has existed for a very long time.
In Vietnam torture by telephone was called 'the Bell's telephone hour'. To give an example, for those who don't know this yet:
"Former sergeant D.J. Lewis, who served with the Ninth MPs from February 1968 to January 1969, said field phone interrogations were "not uncommon." Lewis, who retired last year from his job as an engineer at a VA hospital in Wisconsin, spent part of his tour at firebase Tan An, where he was among the MPs present during the questioning of a group of Vietcong in a tent away from the base. "We were attached to this field unit out there, and they would take them in and they had a kind of large tent, and they would tie them up to the poles right in the center there, their hands behind them and their feet strapped to the pole.
And they would give them treatment, and it was not uncommon for them to rig up a field telephone and put one [wire] around a finger and the other around the scrotum and start cranking. And they would eventually tell you what you wanted to know . . .
"It was Military Intelligence that done it, them and the ARVNs [the Army of the Republic of Vietnam]. The ARVNs are the ones that hooked the wire up and did the cranking, but it was with the blessing of the MI."
Was it painful? "Oh, hell yes, it's painful. I mean, you can hold the two wires and barely crank it and get a jolt. The more you crank the higher the voltage, and it's DC voltage, so that's more intense shock."
Were the interrogators at all leery about MPs observing what went on?
"They didn't really seem to mind. They didn't want anybody else to see it, you know, but I guess since we were supposed to be, you know, we would keep our mouth shut, I guess, for lack of a better explanation. They wouldn't let anyone else in, though, and we actually escorted the prisoners in and out."
Wasn't MI taking a chance that an MP would file charges?
"It would have been my word against an officer's word, which the officer is always going to win. So what do you do? And at that time CID [Criminal Investigation Division] and Military Intelligence, they were held in the highest regard, they could walk on the clouds."
So if some MP got it in his head to report the incident, what would happen to him?
"It would probably be swept under the rug, and he would either be sent to another duty station or put on shit duty the rest of the time--KP, picking up cigarette butts--anything they can think of that can keep him quiet and keep him in a certain place. Usually what they did, they sent him to a different destination."
A Chicago cop practiced what he learned in Vietnam: "Allegedly, Burge used a handheld magneto to torture victims. Members of his unit in Vietnam remember this torture well. MPs describe field telephone torture. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/mov9q4
The rest, including 'Tiger Cages' etc. is described in the story "Torture and democracy"
Source: Chicago Reader - Tools of Torture - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/3fvbox
In Vietnam (I was there in 1971) it was the same discussion: how to make friends, and win the minds and hearts of the people which the US wanted to conquer.
As in all history, it was shown that it was impossible to make friends by invading, intimidating, shooting, bombing, jailing, torturing, killing, maiming, napalming or other deadly actions.
It showed every time that the only people the US and allies could call their friends were the dead: because they couldn't protest anymore." [end quote]
The rest is here, about 'Making dead friends' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5t9j7
Never thought it would only be a painful page in history...
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