An Open Letter to Europe on Condoleeza's Propaganda and Bullying Tour

An Open Letter to Europe on Condoleeza's Propaganda and Bullying Tour in Support of Torture

The American Secretary of State is on tour to bully you and propagandize you into abandoning your civilized principles and accepting torture. You must not let her succeed.

You must understand that the America you have to deal with today is not the America you used to know. It is not the America of Eisenhower and the Marshall Plan, not the America that helped establish the UN and treated German POWs humanely during World War II, and not the America that once was a beacon of democracy to the world. It is a new America, and the future depends on you to recognize that fact.

Forty-some years ago during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Charles de Gaulle famously said (I paraphrase), "I don't need to see the pictures. If the President of the United States says it, that's good enough for me." Today, we Americans have a saying: If George Bush's lips are moving, he's lying.

Sixty years ago, America was instrumental in establishing the UN. Today our president has appointed a wrecking ball as our "ambassador" to the UN.

During World War II, when the future of both Europe and America really were at stake, Americans treated German POWs humanely because we were a civilized people living under the rule of law. Today America considers torture routine and necessary, the cabal of neocons who rule America consider torture to be a desirable patriotic virtue, and talk radio hosts and callers alike revel in their own bloodthirstiness.

America was once a beacon of democracy to the world. Today democracy is completely broken in America. It is like a football game where one team's coaches and family are also the game's referees, and they don't even make a pretense of impartiality (Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Florida; Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio). And the score is kept secretly by the same team's agents to be revealed only at the end of the game, with no way to verify the score (paperless, untraceable voting on computers programmed by Republican felon hackers). Last year the world responded together and forced new elections in Ukraine when it was obvious that the election was fraudulent, largely on the basis of exit polls. Yet the American election's exit polls differed from the official results by more than Ukraine's difference. Even till today, most Americans don't know that because our mass media, all owned and controlled by neocon corporations, refuse to inform us. We have to go to European or Canadian or Asian or other worldwide news sources to find out what is really happening in the world, because American "news" has become a neocon propaganda tool, almost as bad as the old Soviet Pravda. There seems to be little hope of Americans saving America or sparing the rest of the world the consequences of neocon aggression, perfidy, and villainy.

America once showed "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," as our founders said in our Declaration of Independence. Today America's neocon rulers show complete contempt for the opinions of decent people anywhere in the world.

So Condoleeza is in Europe now to con you into accepting torture, and if conning you doesn't work, to bully you. She's saying things like, "Everything we do is legal." You must understand what this cabal means when they say "legal." The current American regime claims legal authority to capture any person of any nationality anywhere in the world, to take them and detain them secretly anywhere in the world, to subject them to any kind of treatment whatsoever, including torture until death, to keep them from any contact with anyone, including lawyers and the Red Cross. And they further claim that no law, no constitution, no court, and no judge have any legal standing to constrain them in any way. When she says that we don't do anything illegal, you must know the context, that in their view of the meaning of "legal" it is logically impossible for them to do anything illegal to detainees. Her statement is completely meaningless.

The neocon cabal that rules America today have completely hijacked democracy, law, our constitution, and our nation, and they aim to do the same to the whole world. They lied about WMDs, they lied about Saddam's imminent threat, they lied about Saddam's connection to 9/11, they lied about why we invaded Iraq, they lied about what the UN resolutions on Iraq said, and they continue shifting, slippery, ever-changing lies about why we went into Iraq and why we stay. And they lie about torture, saying we don't torture, we have the right to torture, and when we do torture, it isn't torture and it isn't illegal. You must not let yourselves be deceived or confused or browbeaten.

The neocon cabal that rules America today is driven by voracious and insatiable greed that requires perpetual war to feed their war profiteering. They are driven by voracious and insatiable lust for power that demands complete world domination and subjugation (refer to the Project for a New American Century). Sooner or later, you will have to stand up to the neocons and stand up for civilized principles; and the sooner, the better.

It is a very real possibility that Iraq is this generation's Sudetenland, and that torture presents Europe with this generation's Neville Chamberlain moment. Please do what is right.

www.bushcommission.org


Peace.

:applause:

nominated

Wish I had written after listening to the bile spilling from her mouth yesterday, but I wouldn't have done as good a job. Very well thought out.

She so played with language, with the word "legal," with present tense. "We do not..." she said. Not "We have not.." Such a horrible person, she is.

Hope you don't mind. It will be under Hissyspit's diaries, if you want to check out the response there.

this should go out as a LTTE here. This is the kind of stuff out Congressional people need to understand is how we see our current situation.

Again, bravo!

Rice says US does not condone torture, wins German support

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1970033&mesg_id=1970033

... at the same time, fresh off the Guardian's press....

Seized, held, tortured: six tell same tale

Ian Cobain
Tuesday December 6, 2005
The Guardian

Mamdouh Habib, 49, an Australian citizen, was caught up in the rendition system after being arrested near the Pakistani-Afghan border shortly after the 9/11 attacks. His lawyers say he was bundled aboard a small jet by men speaking English with American accents and flown to Egypt, the country where he was born. For the next six months, they say, he was held in a Cairo jail, where he was hung from hooks, beaten, given shocks from an electric cattle prod, and told he was to be raped by dogs.

Habib also says that he was shackled and forced into three torture chambers: one filled with water up to his chin, requiring him to stand on tiptoe for hours, a second with a low ceiling and two feet of water, forcing him into a painful stoop, and a third with a few inches of water, and within sight of an electric generator which his captors said would be used to electrocute him. He made statements - which he has since withdrawn - declaring that he had helped train the 9/11 attackers in martial arts. Habib was moved to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo. Last January he was released without charge and allowed to return to his wife and three children in Sydney.

Maher Arar, 34, a Canadian citizen, was seized in September 2002 while travelling through JFK airport in New York, on his way home after a holiday in Tunisia. After being questioned for 13 days about a terrorism suspect - the brother of a work colleague - he was handcuffed, placed in leg irons, and put aboard an executive jet. Hearing the crew describe themselves as members of the "special removals unit", and discovering he was bound for Syria, the country where he was born, he begged them to return to the US. The crew, he says, ignored his pleas and suggested he watch a spy film that was being shown on board. After landing in Jordan, Arar says he was driven to Syria, where he was held in a small underground cell which he likened to a grave. His hands were repeatedly whipped with cables, he says. He added that he would eventually confess to anything put to him. Arar was released a year later after the Canadian government took up his case. The Syrian ambassador in Washington announced that no terrorist links had been found. Arar is suing the US government.

Amnesty International has highlighted the plight of two Yemeni friends, Salah Nasser Salim 'Ali, 27, and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah, 37, arrested separately in August 2003. Salah was detained in Indonesia, then flown to Jordan, where Muhammad was already under arrest. They say they were hung upside down and beaten for several days, before being flown to an unknown country about four hours' flying distance.

Neither man knew that the other was under arrest, but both described being detained in solitary confinement in an old underground prison, staffed by masked American guards, where western music was played in their cells 24 hours a day. Both men say they were moved after eight months, spending around three hours in a small aircraft, and then a helicopter, before being taken to another underground prison, this time modern, with air conditioning and surveillance cameras in the cells. This too was run by Americans, they say. The two men were returned to Yemen last May, but remain in custody. Amnesty says Yemeni officials have said they are being held at the request of US authorities. "What we have heard from these two men is just one small part of the much broader picture of US secret detentions around the world," said Sharon Critoph, the Amnesty researcher who interviewed them in Yemen.

Ahmed Agiza, 43, a doctor, and Muhammad Zery, 36, were abducted in Stockholm in December 2001, with the connivance of the Swedish government. Both were seeking asylum in Sweden, and had been convicted in absentia of membership of a banned Islamist group in their native Egypt. Agiza admits knowing Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, but says he severed all links many years ago and insists he has renounced violence.

According to evidence to a Swedish parliamentary inquiry last year, they were taken to Bromma airport, Stockholm, by uniformed Swedish police and Americans wearing suits. They were stripped, searched, sedated and dressed in boiler suits and hoods. They were shackled and bundled on to a Gulfstream 5 executive jet, before being flown to Cairo. This aircraft has flown in and out of the UK at least 60 times since December 2001, most recently with a new tail number. Senior Swedish police officers told the parliamentary inquiry the aircraft was operated by the CIA.

Both men later told relatives and Swedish diplomats that they were subjected to electric shock torture in Egypt. Zery was released from prison almost two years later. Agiza was jailed for 25 years, reduced to 15 on appeal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1658934,00.html

:)