The Crimes of Bushbama… Ongoing September 11, 2011

Matthew Rothschild has a long piece at The Progressive site on President Obama’s continuation and intensification of American policies that threaten citizens of the United States, of any country the President deems a problem, and that threaten to bring down United States democracy itself. His lead…

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, let’s face facts: The United States is a more repressive place to live in, and it conducts itself in a more lawless manner overseas. The edifice of repression that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney erected after 9/11, far from being dismantled by Barack Obama, has actually been buttressed. And he’s even added a couple of new floors. We are not the same nation we were ten yeas ago. We are less free. We are more bellicose. And our leaders have put in place mechanisms that future Presidents may use to utterly destroy our democracy.

And then the ugliness begins.

Worth reading.

(You don’t really believe the United States stopped torturing its prisoners just because the President said so, do you?)

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Marketing Wisdom: Woolite Says Torture Sells Soap!! Yowsah!! August 4, 2011

 

This is a new Woolite commercial, directed by Rob Zombie:

You can find the video and the comments here. The comments appear to be pretty much ‘Oh Wow!!’, perhaps indicative of the mindless state of childish American intellect today.

The advertising industry has trivialized just about everything they’ve touched, so why should torture be an exception.

Woolite and its ad agency believe torture sells soap. They couldn’t stop at the concept of zombies, generally affectionately regarded by horror movie fans, selling soap. It is one thing to watch zombie horror in a horror movie, or even faux torture in shallow television shows and movies. You expect what you get. But to use torture as their metaphor to sell soap, to sell anything, in a television commercial?

I doubt that any of the untold numbers of people Americans have tortured would be inclined to buy Woolite after seeing this. We might keep in mind that any number of them have been turned into zombies by torture: their lives destroyed, their minds broken, their hopes and beliefs shattered.

Given everything that’s been learned about torture, not only in human history, but in the last ten years, what kind of mind, what kind of culture is so debased that it thinks using torture to sell soap is cute?

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Technorati Tags: Woolite, Zombies, Rob Zombie, Torture, Corruption, Politics, Education

Oh Yeah! Bring On The Rack And The Waterboard! July 12, 2011

Maybe, finally there might be some accountability for the United States government’s policy of torture and brutality and trashing of international law.

Maybe there’s a chance that some of the American sociopaths will have to stand before legitimate justice and answer for their diseased beliefs.

One can hope, even though the current government has done and will do everything in its power to avoid bringing any American to justice. Obama has made that perfectly clear, and in that has become legally culpable of complicity.

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Technorati Tags: Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld, Torture Investigation, Torture, Politics, Iraq, Afghanistan, CIA, Human Rights Watch, Obama

Torture, Maim, Murder, Slaughter – The Wingnut Way To American Greatness August 31, 2009

A letter in today’s Globe demonstrates once again the failure of wingnut ‘thinking’. This one’s about torture and holding torturers accountable.

MEMBERS OF Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other assorted groups crying for American blood must be thrilled with the news that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is sending out the posse (“Inquiry ordered into CIA methods,’’ Page A1, Aug. 25).

By naming a veteran prosecutor to investigate “alleged’’ harsh interrogation techniques, we ignore the atrocities committed by terrorists and focus on the few tools we still have available to us.

I am unconcerned with the comfort of our enemies. My concern is Americans, civilians and military alike, and our allies. This ridiculous announcement only encourages and emboldens enemies who will view this position as weak.

We had better be ready to fight hard, because these people seek our annihilation or capitulation, nothing less.

That’s the whole letter, minus the signature.

The Lion would wager that al-Qaeda and friends don’t really care about Mr. Holder’s investigation. It is, as currently constructed, petty and fairly useless, more of a sop to the progressive Democrats than a real investigation dedicated to holding accountable the entire chain of command that encouraged and enabled torture, from the White House to the CIA field agents and the contractors.

But if AQ did give a damn, they would more likely be unhappy than ‘thrilled’, as the letter writer said. AQ could not have been happier than when the United States began to torture and murder detainees. When the U.S. began torturing captives, it lost its moral authority to claim a just war and to claim that it was a better system of government, that it held the high ground morally and ethically. AQ at that point had effectively knocked the U.S. down into the gutter. AQ at that point had won a great victory over America.

Torturing people is a sign of weakness and fear. When the United States began torturing, it said to the world, “We have no faith in our values and our institutions of freedom and democracy. We are so afraid of this handful of criminal terrorists that we are throwing away those things that make us strong and resorting to the most base and evil actions mankind can commit against itself.”

As for the letter writer’s last point, that AQ and friends want to annihilate us, or force us to surrender, perhaps the last time she looked out her window she noticed the vast armies and navies of AQ storming ashore.

Sorry, lady, but AQ isn’t going to bring America down. We have politicians and corporate leaders and religious fanatics and the Republican Party that continue to do a fine job of destroying the United States. It’s people like yourself, who can see neither forest nor trees, whose reasoning processes have failed on a fundamental level, who will do a truly amazing job of annihilating America.

Technorati Tags: Boston Globe, Al Qaeda, Attorney Genral Holder, Torture, Torture Investigation, United States, Values, Morals, Ethics, Politics, Wingnuts, Republicans, Religion, Religious Fanatics

Republicans Wave Penises, Proclaim Manhood, Blame Democrats For Torture May 13, 2009

Are the Republicans smart or what? (The real answer is ‘what’, but bear with The Lion for a bit.)

Various leaders of Senate and House Intelligence (oxymoron alert!) committees were briefed to some extent or other on the techniques the CIA was using a while ago to extract information from people who may or may not have been involved in so-called terrorist activities.

Under secrecy rules those leaders, including the special target of Republican penis-waving, Nancy Pelosi, were forbidden from revealing the content of those briefings, even though the leaders were involved in oversight of intelligence activities.

The current Republican leadership, if it can be called that, now claims that the Democrats should have done something to stop the activities. They’re making a huge deal of it, in essence blaming the Democrats for torture.

There’s a few problems with this.

First off, President Obama, by refusing to pursue investigations and prosecutions of war crimes, to wit, torture, has opened the door to this sort of Republican revision of history. While he’s ‘looking forward’ Republicans are covering up and muddying the waters and burning out shredder motors.

How about this, Obama? I’m gonna head down to D.C. this afternoon, rob a couple of banks, shoot a few people, maybe shove a law book up Mitch McConnell’s butt, and hide out until tomorrow. Then, since you have made ‘looking forward’ an integral part of American law, rather than looking backward at actual crimes and prosecuting them, I’ll come back home and all will be forgiven.

The Republicans want the people to forget that it was Republicans, according to former Vice President and current Senior Penis Waver Dick Cheney, it was Republicans who ran the torture program. Cheney admits he and Bush authorized torture. He’s running around to every television news program that will have him and proclaiming his guilt and dragging former President and Chief Dick Waver George W. Bush down with him. (In some circles it is thought that Cheney is merely trying to solidify an insanity defense – why else publicly admit criminal behavior before any legal action? The Lion believes it more likely that Cheney actually believes he’s a good guy and that waterboarding someone 183 times in a month is good policy, real Americanism, and proves what a man he is. Dick doesn’t see it as having his dick caught in a slamming door.)

The Republican strategy is obvious. Blame the Democrats for not stopping the use of torture, and pretty soon everyone will think the Democrats created and authorized the use of torture.

In one small way they have a point, but it’s one that comes around and bites them in their collective fat ass.

The point they have is that the secretly informed Democratic leaders did nothing to stop the use of torture. The Democrats claim the shield of classified secrecy forced them to keep quiet.

Bogus!

They were informed that war crimes, crimes under American and international law, were being committed by the government of the United States. Secrecy or no, they were obligated, under law and under any normal conception of moral behavior, to inform appropriate authorities. Obviously there were no authorities in the United States government they could inform. The Executive Branch was up to its eyeballs in torture, and the Justice Department under Alfredo Gonzales and Michael Mukasey was nothing more than a willing lackey in a conspiracy to legalize torture.

But they could have brought the information to the United Nations. They could have brought it to the International Criminal Court. They could have gone public. They could have simply leaked the information. The point is there were steps they could have taken. They stayed silent, and thus they are complicit in the crime, and they should have to take their lumps for that. And so should the Republicans who were briefed on the crimes.

But the Democrats did not initiate the crime. Republicans did that. Dick Cheney and George Bush and their sycophants throughout government did that.  If the Republican leadership wants to put the torture beast to rest they should shut up. What they are doing now keeps the beast alive and well-fed, and it is a beast that wears a blood-red Republican coat.

Torture is a crime. Period. There’s no gray area. Aided and abetted by President Obama’s denials of reality and denials of law, complicit officials throughout government are doing the best they can to create caves of fog in which they can hide. That whirring sound all around Washington is the sound of shredders overheating.

The people who authorized torture and the people who committed it and the people who justified it in legal mumbo-jumbo and the people who were complicit by their silence should be investigated and prosecuted, be they Republican or Democrat. Until that is done the stench of war crimes, of crimes against humanity, will foul the corridors of government for generations.

And President Obama should refute his policy of looking forward and ignoring the crimes of torture. He should encourage investigations and let the chips fall where they may. Otherwise the Republican crimes will stain his administration forever, which is assuredly what the Republicans have in mind. We can feel confident that in 2012 and likely 2016 the Republicans will claim that Obama did nothing about war crimes and thus was complicit and lacks decency and morality. The American electorate’s memory and intellect are woefully weak, and by the next couple of elections they can be led to believe Republican revisionism. Obama should slam the door on the Republican penis wavers, he should slam it now, and he should slam it hard.

Technorati Tags: Penis Wavers, Republicans, Torture, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, CIA, International Criminal Court, Department of Justice, Alfredo Gonzales, Michael Mukasey, Mitch McConnell

Why The U.S. Military Sucks And Why It Will Lose In Afghanistan And Pakistan May 5, 2009

Over at Common Dreams there’s a piece by Jeremy Scahill documenting the U.S. military’s activities in proselytizing  Afghanis, or as the the head chaplain put it, soldiers are to ‘hunt people for Christ’.

Almost as a sidelight is this mention of torture preferences among the U.S. population:

The broadcast of this video comes just days after a new poll of White Americans found that, in the US, church going Christians are more likely to support the use of torture than other segments of the population. The Pew Research Center poll found: "White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified – more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."

Yup. Christians go big for torture and for shoving their delusional religion down people’s throats. And the military is right in the middle of both efforts. (The Lion recalls the scandal at the United States Air Force Academy, which was, and likely still is, officially bent on turning out killers for Christ.)

Most Christians should never be allowed near guns or politics, just as anyone living and practicing delusional thinking should not be allowed near guns or politics.

For those who cleverly point out that President Obama is a Christian and snicker at The Lion’s comment, The Lion would point out that thus far Obama has pretty much kept his religion out of policy decisions, as opposed to that Christian hero, George W. Bush, who stuck his psychotic god into everything and pretty much screwed up everything he touched – the economy, the nation’s security, Iraq, the military, Afghanistan and so on. It is also worth noting that the Republicans seem to consider themselves the Party of God, and have succeeded only in making themselves look like fools and idiots while they destroy themselves politically.

Technorati Tags: Religion, Afghanistan, Boykin, Scahill, Christianity, Republicans, Bush, Air Force Academy

Kellogg’s Sweet Lies And Why America Tortures April 21, 2009

“How sweet it is!” was the cry of Jackie Gleason as his stage personas wended their way through the trials of life.

Kellogg Company, the cereal sweeties, tried the same thing and got spanked by the Federal Trade Commission for false advertising.

Some tidbits from the story from Bloomberg in today’s Globe:

The Federal Trade Commission said the settlement bars Kellogg, based in Battle Creek, Mich., from making unsubstantiated health claims about Frosted-Mini Wheats or other products.

The company agreed not to misrepresent the results of scientific tests, the FTC said.

The FTC said that in ads and on packaging Kellogg asserted the attentiveness of children who ate Frosted Mini-Wheats at breakfast increased by almost 20 percent. The FTC said the clinical study Kellogg cited in the ads found that only half the children who ate the cereal showed any improvement in their attentiveness.

"It’s especially important that America’s leading companies are more attentive to the truthfulness of their ads and don’t exaggerate the results of tests or research," FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement.

"We stand behind the validity of our clinical study, yet have adjusted our communication to incorporate FTC’s guidance," Kellogg said in a statement.

Summing up, Kellogg lied in the commercials they put before the public. They lied to increase their sales and profits. They obviously did not care what harm might have been done.

And they got caught.

But look at what the FTC said in the next-to-last paragraph. Go ahead, read it.

Talk about mealy mouth spankings. Talk about going all around the forest to avoid calling a tree a tree. Wassamatta, Leibowitz, afraid you might cost some politician some corporate donations?

And Kellogg’s reply? Beneath the corporatese, it sounds like this:

“We lied and got caught, but we will never admit it. We still claim the study we lied about was legitimate in the way we said it was, despite the proven evidence that it was not what we said it was. So we’re not gonna say we did anything wrong, but we’ll change our misleading ads because those psychos at the FTC caught us lying and cheating.”

Rest assured, America, Kellogg Company will find another way to lie to you about its products, and your faithful government watchdog will find another way to let them off the hook and to let them lie about that. That’s what corporations do, and that’s what the government lets them do, especially governments run by Republicans and Conservatives.

That torturous bit of legerdemain by the FTC and Kellogg is the tip of the iceberg for the reason why the United States tortured people these last several years and why the torturers, their enablers in the medical and psychological and legal professions, and the bosses, including the President of the United States, are getting away with it.

How many times have you read in the papers, or heard on the news that Corporation X lost a legal action, and then proudly proclaimed that although they paid a fine they admitted no wrongdoing? Time and time again the corporations get away with screwing the public, indeed killing any number of people in some cases (tires, cigarettes, what have you), get caught, and get to shout that they did nothing wrong.

Cozy little deals get worked out between the judges and the opposing lawyers, and the deals are sealed, and the public gets reamed.

The torture debate sounds a lot like that in Washington these days.

Let’s not get confused. Torture is a crime under American law and international law. There is no question of that. And there is no question that agents of the United States government, acting on orders of the people running that government, tortured people. Lots of people. Killed a bunch of them in custody, too.

The people involved in the American torture program are depraved. They had a moral choice to make, they were free to make that choice, and they chose to torture.

There is no question that the acts they performed were torture. There can be no question that they knew they were torturing, unless they were, each and every one, incredibly stupid and virulently mentally defective. By their own admission, the torturers waterboarded one man 183 times in a month. That’s six times a day for a month. To paraphrase Rachel Maddow on the claimed effectiveness of this particular torture, it apparently didn’t work the first 182 times.

And the depravity extended, indeed could be said to have begun and been generated from the President and Vice-President of the United States, and was covered up by an ethically and morally corrupt, and depraved, Department of Justice. It extended down through the bureaucracy of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military.

All of these people should be prosecuted. All should stand public trial. And every one found guilty should be locked away from the public until they are too feeble to bother anyone except the nurses who would clean up their drool in cheap nursing homes.

But now our latest President and his henchmen have decided to apply the Kellogg treatment. Despite the clarity of the law, despite the clarity of the obligation to prosecute, Obama will not countenance it. He will not even consider it. Not for the bloody-handed agents, not for the bloody-minded officials. Obama would allow them to walk away and claim that they did nothing wrong, that they acted on orders (tell it to the Nazis the Americans hung for making the same claim to cover their evils), that they did it for God and Country.

Those who carried out the most depraved and morally reprehensible acts that any government or institution can command will get to keep their jobs, their salaries, their pensions, their government perks. They get to walk around free in your neighborhood and talk to your children.

The American hypocrisy continues, under the banner of hope and change.

No country should, in any matter, trust the United States or the word of its top officers until the American house has been cleansed of the foul stench of torture, and purged of the people who sanctioned torture and the people who committed the acts of torture.

Until that cleaning is done the United States must be considered a nation that tortures people, no matter what its officials claim. Without an official accounting, without prosecutions and unbiased justice being meted out, the United States must be considered a rogue nation, a pariah, a mecca, if you will, of government sanctioned evil.

Technorati Tags: Torture, Obama, United States, CIA, Pentagon, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Waterboarding, Kellogg, Kellogg Cereal, Frosted Mini Wheats, Federal Trade Commission, FTC, Department of Justice, DOJ

Stunning Admissions From Bush And Cheney Draw Major Yawns From Media And Citizenry December 17, 2008

Within the past two days the Republican Administration of the United States has publicly admitted two stunning facts.

Yesterday George W. Bush, the proponent, promoter, and snake-oil salesmen of unregulated free markets told CNN “I have abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”

Which is to say that free-market principles don’t work. Not big news, but to have the little slug admit it? That’s big. But it rates hardly a blip on the news.

And the other stunner occurred when the Vice-President of the United States admitted on ABC News that he approved the use of torture and that he believes torture should be used.

He admits to a war crime, publicly, on national television, and he hasn’t been arrested? And hardly anyone acts as if it’s important?

These two men have dragged the United States to depths of illegality and immorality that in an earlier day would have been unimaginable.

But given the last couple of decades of Republican dominance, what else could we expect. It’s the Republican way.

Technorati Tags: Torture, Cheney, Bush, Republicans, Politics, Economy, Free Markets, CNN, ABC

Christmas Quickies… December 16, 2008

Madoff victims cry… foul?

All the rich people who lost money to the fraud of Bernard Madoff are crying ‘I’m a victim’ and bemoaning their fate. Imagine that.

After all these years of benefiting from the fraud of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, which amount to massive theft from the middle and lower classes for the next couple of generations, rich people got screwed by one of their own.

Couldn’t happen to a crappier class of people.

Of course they’ll soon be begging at the government’s door for a bailout, won’t they? Take more money from the taxpayers to make up for the wealthy classes’ greed, stupidity, and ignorance?

And be sure they won’t forget to blame the SEC and other regulatory agencies, the ones gutted by the Bush and Republican ideology of deregulation.

It would be good for the country to get a bunch of rich people living homeless on the street, trying to whine to the local winos about their terrible misfortune. There’s real democracy for you. There’s the free market at work, for real.

Condi Rice puts shoe in mouth again…

Condoleezza Rice, rumored to be the current Secretary of State, commenting on the shoe tossing incident involving her boss:

The shoe incident Sunday in Baghdad “is a kind of sign of the freedom that people feel in Iraq,” Rice said.

If Iraq were free, why is there a foreign army occupying it? Why did the Americans destroy the country? Why are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and more injured, and over four million living as refugees? Why are so many out of work? Why are Sunni and Shia, who used to live together, now separated by concrete barriers? Why is the country’s infrastructure in ruins?

Iraq’s not free. It exists under the heel of an invader, an invader propped up by corporations who feel it is their right to rape the country and take whatever they want from it.

That the architect of this disaster dares to visit and proclaim a victory is a slap in the face to Iraq, and to America itself. The ruin that is Iraq is little more than the display of George Bush’s adolescent ego.

There were not enough shoes flying that day in Baghdad.

Dick Cheney, unrepentedly stupid and arrogant to the end…

Little Dickie Cheney, whose mother should probably been waterboarded when it was discovered she was pregnant with him, went on ABC News yesterday to reaffirm his belief in torture and his belief that torturing people is the right thing to do.

That Cheney is no better than the thugs who ran the Catholic Inquisition’s dungeons, the Lubyanka in Moscow, and jolly old Adolf’s Gestapo, was confirmed by his statement that the stinking pit of inhumanity that is Guantanamo Bay prison should stay open until the war on terror is over.

Which is to say that American torture holes will never close, because the Americans insist on continuing the stupidity of making war on a stateless technique.

The best hope of mankind is that this pig, this banquet of brutality and arrogance and ignorance, ends his days in a pit, buried under tons of Iraqi shoes, preferably those of the thousands of women and children killed by Bush and Cheney’s war of aggression.

Technorati Tags: Condi Rice, Condoleezza Rice, Iraq, Sunni, Shia, George Bush, Shoe Throwing, al-Zaidi, Dick Cheney, Torture, Guantanamo, Lubyanka, Gestapo, Bernard Madoff, Ponzi, SEC, Fraud, Taxes

U.S. Captures Another Key Insurgent To Feed To George Bush November 16, 2008

The lead paragraph in an AP story in the Globe today reads:

Afghan and coalition forces captured an insurgent leader in eastern Afghanistan, and in a separate operation 10 militants were killed in a firefight, the US military said yesterday.

Translating this story into reality would produce:

The United States bombed another wedding party in Afghanistan yesterday, killing ten celebrants. Someplace else the United States caught a guy the military thinks it can get away with calling a ‘key insurgent leader’, thus making the military look like it’s accomplishing something.

Be that as it may, is anyone keeping track of all the so-called key insurgent leaders the United States has captured (and apparently tortured and brutalized and killed) since the country started its dumbass wars in the Islamic countries?

There have been a bunch, and it seems like these foreign devils conveniently manage to get themselves caught whenever George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s egos need propping up so they can suck more money out of the people for their wars or when they need to shut down another civil liberty or arrange for one of their buddies in the corporate world to make a killing off the wars.

In any event, despite the capture of all those key leaders, those evil Muslim fanatics just keep on coming, don’t they? They just keep fighting, and keep getting better at it.

They’ve learned how to kill Americans no matter what the situation, and they’ve learned how to play Americans for money and weapons.

The United States has been reduced to helping terrorists slaughter civilians, in effect saying “Well, harumph, we had to kill the entire wedding party with a couple of bombs because someone told us there were some insurgents in that area and the insurgents want us to get out of their country. Sorry about the dead women and children. We’ll send you some money.”

Perhaps someone could explain the difference between a terrorist car bomb and an American high-tech bomb to the relatives of the dead kids? Oh, wait, no time for that… the relatives are getting their guns and going hunting for American troops.

Imagine that. Or imagine that the people in Washington running these travesties had any imagination or intellect to imagine such things. Never mind. They don’t. If something or someone disagrees with their blinkered view of reality (which, according to the psychos in the White House, they create) they just bomb the crap out of it and call it a terrorist. Or a key insurgent leader. No matter that it was four years old and attending its uncle’s wedding.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, Muslims, Islam, George Bush, Politics, War, Terrorists, Weddings, Insurgents