The US has used torture for decades...new is the openness...(Guardian)

(What I think is really so sad about this, is that so few (U.S.) Americans know about any of this, none of this was taught in the Indiana schools. Most of this I am reading for the first time, yet when (or if) we meet Europeans and start talking politics, they know all this stuff. All the stuff our government never told us.)

The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness about it

By ignoring past abuses, opponents of torture are in danger of pushing it back into the shadows instead of abolishing it

Naomi Klein
Saturday December 10, 2005
The Guardian

It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.

It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture". It is here in Panama, and later at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found.

According to declassified training manuals, SOA students - military and police officers from across the hemisphere - were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation", humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions - and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment".

Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1664174,00.html?gusrc=rss>
(more at link above)

A version of this article appears in the Nation <http://www.thenation.com/>

... correct.

Let's remember what we generally learned in school--the US is honest and pure and our intentions are for the best. The underbelly of the United States, its participation in violation of law over decades, is not well-known by the public, in part because the press is disinclined to shatter illusions.

From the advent of the national security state, we've not been told the truth. The truth, after so many decades of evading it, hurts like hell.

Sacred Terror: The Global Death Squad of George W. Bush

Friday, 09 December 2005

The much-belated, poll-prompted outcry of a few American elected officials against the widespread use of torture by the Bush Administration – following years of silent acquiescence in the face of incontrovertible evidence of deliberate atrocity – is a welcome development, of course. But it has left an even more sinister aspect of Bushist policy untouched, one that likewise has been hidden in plain sight for years.

On September 17, 2001, George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of "lethal measures" against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an "enemy combatant." This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate "enemies" on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.

The existence of this universal death squad – and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents – has not provoked so much as a crumb, an atom, a quantum particle of controversy in the American Establishment, although it's no secret. The executive order was first bruited in the Washington Post in October 2001. I first wrote of it in my Moscow Times column in November 2001. The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the dread edict also applied to American citizens, as the Associated Press reported.

The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred in Pakistan this month, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.

But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by the New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to…enter countries surreptitiously."

The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on "extrajudicial killings" noted in December 2004: " Empowering governments to identify and kill 'known terrorists' places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists… While it is portrayed as a limited 'exception' to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others."

It's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is what the great and good in America have done. Like the boyars of old, they not only countenance but celebrate their enslavement to the ruler.

SNIP

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=331&Itemid=1

...Prize acceptance speech? Well we didn't. This report (below) on Friday from NPR (National Public Radio) was the FIRST broadcast News report of even the existence of this speech from Dec. 7, 2005, that has broadcast nation wide.

So, now at least, 5% of the U.S. might eventually hear this speech (surveys say that only 5% of Americans listen to NPR). I guess that's why the shills in the Corporate Media call us "the intellectual elite."

Note: There are also links to the full text of the speech, and a link to the video at the link below.

Nobel Laureate Pinter Lashes Out at U.S. Policy

Listen to this story...(at the link below)

All Things Considered, December 9, 2005 · In his Nobel Prize speech Wednesday, British playwright Harold Pinter delivered a scathing critique of U.S. and British foreign policy. Some reviews of his speech praised it for its dramatic force, while others derided it as childish and uninformed. We hear two excerpts from that speech.

<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5047057>

And will offer it as a download (which the Nobel.org site does not do)

Check www.chris-floyd.com/pinter in a few hours.

This has taken me two days... but I have finally done it.

It's up now... the Pinter Video in both Macromedia Flash 8 (SWF-FLV) and wmv here


http://www.chris-floyd.com/pinter/

I'm in the process of retraining myself as a Digital Video Editor (when I was in Film school, the Commodore 64 had just hit the stores), so I'm having to re-learn how to do every thin on computer.

For anyone reading this who doesn't know what a Commodore 64 is, here's a link:

<http://oldcomputers.net/c64.html>

I downloaded the RAM stream using Flashget which ends up in an RM format.

From Realmedia I used EO video 1.36 All in One (it's VERY hard to find conversion programs for Real Media!) www.eo-video.com 15 day trial.

Make sure you really check your settings. I converted to Mpeg as the AVI was getting to big and out of control size wise.

Then I used Blaze Media Pro 6.1 to convert the video to WMV and I used Macromedia Flash 8's Video encoder to do the FLV file and created the Flash video in Macromedia Flash 8.

Cheers

DD

Recommended!

Right after 9/11 a lot of people were saying "we have lost our innocence."

The only "innocence" we had was ignorance of what our country had been doing to people around the world for decades. And that hasn't changed.

:kick:

about the openness of it all. Not that it's any good being a secret (mostly) - but it's awful having major newspapers (and relatives) defend it - having a vice-president openly ask for exemptions for the CIA - having "torture memos" where a lawyer who becomes the Attorney General argues for the legality of it. But it is awful - regardless.


"Past administrations tactfully kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were practiced in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush Administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws....

For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them."

As I have been saying for a couple years, it's just a matter of covert vs. overt. It almost makes me nostalgic for the Reagan days, when it all had to be covert, and people in the US could pretend to be righteous.

Which is what is really making me afraid for the US, since it is now the ugly hidden side proudly and openly to the world. The self-image of people will go from "We are good, sometimes we make mistakes but we stand against tyrants and for civil rights" to "We do what we have to do, whether its kill innocents, torture, wreck the Constitution, we do what we have to do."

:kick: