.. totally without scruple or shame
subtitle "Some of my best friends are ..." [1,2]
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I just read a real shocker: David Bromwich/Euphemism and American Violence (thanks for the link; g'day).
Below are some quotes, with my spontaneous comments [3,4,5].
My earnest recommendation is to read it all, now.
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Part of the article discusses US torture of 'suspects,' ordered from 'on high,' including all the way 'up' to GWBush.
The reason 'they' - here meaning the forces of darkness masquerading as 'US security operators,' be they so-called secret agencies like the CIA, the US military, or some amorphous, becoming ever more ubiquitous 'contractors' or whatever-the-hell - just why 'they' may be getting away with torture (only so far is the hope), could lie in TV programs like the 'fictional' "24" and/or outright (lying!) propaganda - plus the above two qualifiers, i.e. vacuous and heinous, as applied to the obvious callous disregard for anyone but themselves displayed by both the US 'ruling élite' and the US sheople®, followed closely by all other such so-called élites and sheople everywhere, where not just US torture actions but more generally, US' naked and mass-murderingly criminal aggression goes effectively unopposed. And while we are mentioning US torture and murdering war crimes, we must also here include Israel, since as M-W have shown, the utterly malevolent influences 'in control' of both the US and Israel are melded into one (utterly disgusting!) entity, referred to by me as USrael. Phew!
(I'd apologise for the preceding convoluted construction, but I'm too distraught to untangle it.)
Five+ years now 'down the track,' in the cold, hard light of reality, where the illegal invasion of Iraq has now morphed into a brutal occupation, each more murdering than the other, the only possible reasons which may still be considered to have motivated B, B & H plus a few other psychophantic odds'n sods, all collectively 'the coalition of the killing' to embark on "Shockin' Whore" against Iraq are:
1. The US M/I/C-plex (with the illegal sprog's I/J/Z-plex) needs an enemy, more helpfully a war, to justify their continued funding, even very existence.
2. The US M/I/C-plex 'wants' to control Iraqi oil.
3. The I/J/Z-plex 'wants' a "Greater Israel."
4. With an 'outside' chance, the Anglo/Judaic 'ruling élite' 'wants' to crusade against, if not annihilate Islam.
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I call the "Shockin' Whore" invasion illegal because that's what it is, even Annan eventually admitted it. The fact that the UN failed to prevent it indicates the end of any UN pretensions. The law is often called an ass; it is in fact an arbitrary construct. Whatever, that aggressive, invasive murdering war is wrong can hardly be contentious. The question then becomes:
a) How dare they, and
b) how can they expect to get away with it?
I have found a possible explanation; here's another quote from Bromwich:
«"If a Power coerces once," wrote H.N. Brailsford in his great study of imperialism, The War of Steel and Gold, "it may dictate for years afterwards without requiring to repeat the lesson." This was the design of the American "shock and awe" in Iraq. Looking back on the invasion, one is impressed that so clear-cut a strategy could have evaded challenge under the casual drapery of "democracy."»
As far as I'm concerned, the 1st coercion was the A-bombing. It's been all downhill since then.
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PS One'a the bits they throw at us is: "We don't bargain with terrorists!"
Q: But who, exactly, are world's most feared terrorists?
Epilogue: Most of the so-called 'free' world appears to be in the thrall of the US, whose main idea of 'fun' seems to be utterly immoral murdering theft. As long as the craven cowardice exhibited by the rest of the so-called 'free' world continues, this murdering theft is most likely not just to continue, but get worse.
Then, of course, there's the excess CO2-caused greedastrophe®, 'coming down the pike.' (Detested Ameri-speak; spit!)
Ref(s):
[1] vacuous adj. 1 expressionless. 2 showing absence of thought or intelligence, inane. vacuity n. vacuously adv. [Latin vacuus empty] [POD]
[2] heinous adj. utterly odious or wicked. [French haïr hate] [ibid.]
[3] Oh, how fiendishly 'clever:'
«It would be hard to find a precedent for the sophistical juggle of these explanations. The secret in plain view was not a judgment about present or future policy, but an imposed acceptance of something past. President Bush, in 2002 and later, sought and obtained legal justifications for ordering the torture of terrorism suspects, and it is known that American interrogators used methods on some suspects that constitute torture under international law. If these acts had been admitted by the attorney general to meet the definition of torture, those who conducted the interrogations and those who ordered them, including the President, would be liable to prosecution for war crimes. Because the legacy of the Nuremberg Trials remains vivid today, the very idea of a war crime has been treated as a thing worth steering clear of, no matter what the cost in overstretched ingenuity. Thought of a war crime does not lend itself to euphemistic reduction.»
[4] How did they do it?
«Indeed, the single greatest propaganda victory of the Bush administration may be the belief shared by most Americans that the rise of radical Islam - so-called Islamofascism - has nothing to do with any previous actions by the United States.»
GWBush: "They hate us for our freedoms!"
[5] So much for our so-called democracies:
«But say a thing often enough, so as to subdue the anxiety of a people and flatter their pride, and, unless they have come to know better with their own eyes and their own hands, they will accept the illusion.»
All together: "Murder for oil!"
4 comments:
G'day Phil, sorry, but I'm going to add to the pain. Here is an article titled Sexual Terrorism; the sadistic side of Bush's war on terror. Here is an extract:
The best single source for details on abuses at Abu Ghraib is the study conducted by Major General Antonio Taguba. In the report’s executive summary, the following "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” are identified as having been used at the prison:
*
videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
*
forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
*
forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
*
forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
*
forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
*
arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
*
positioning a naked detainee on a MRE [meals ready to eat] Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
*
placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture;
* sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
In a description of a meeting about the report with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other high-ranking Defense Department officials, Taguba told Hersh: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.” Images of these practices, like similar images of cruelty from the Vietnam and other wars, have become enshrined in the nation’s memory.
"They hate us for our values." Cough, splutter.
On influences and pressures - Obama targeted by the Lobby.
Glad you found the Bromwich article useful, and yes, it should be required reading.
The language will be employed copiously if this should come to pass.
They are criminal enough, delusional enough ... and crazy enough.
G'day Bob,
I think that on the current illegal/immoral scale of thinking of the US sheople®, torture rates 'way down there.' (Detested Ameri-speak; spit!)
Although the blogosphere, and lots'a that from the US, is *loaded* with criticism (to put it politely) of the filthy, criminal acts of the US in Afghanistan & Iraq - these being only the most modern examples of US adventurism; recall, say the "El Salvador option"[1,2,3,4], anyone tortured (since 9/11, say, and only according to the supposed current thinking of the US sheople) should a) consider themselves lucky to be *allowed* to be still alive and b) probably deserved it.
Torture pales into insignificance, compared to mass-slaughter, aka 'pink-misting' a large proportion of the mostly innocent, hapless 'collateral' Iraqi citizens being killed as a direct result of US actions. Although the US sheople did, by a razor-thin majority, vote the Dummocrats into a Congressional majority in '06, nothing effective has been done to stop the slaughter, which now amounts to genocide.
Sooo (moral relativism:) which is worse, torture or genocide? And based on the 'murder for oil' scenario (absolutely likely - as in, gunna happen; anyone disagreeing is invited to *disprove* it), since the US sheople are mostly quiet about the whole ghastly lot, one assumes acquiescence - in massive, brutal crime.
Long story short (looping): torture just doesn't 'rate.'
-=*end*=-
Ref(s):
[1] Thursday, 27 January, 2005, 11:31 GMT
'Salvador Option' mooted for Iraq
By Tom Gibb
BBC, South America
bbc
[2] Death-squad style massacres
For Iraq, "The Salvador Option" Becomes Reality
by Max Fuller
2 june 2005
globalresearch
[3] Mar 2nd, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Roots of Iraq Civil War May Be in ‘Salvador Option’
thinkprogress
[4] The Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq
The American public is being prepared. If the attack on Iran does come, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no truth.
By John Pilger
06/05/04 (yy/mm/dd)
ICH/New Statesman
Oh, the Salvador option, Phil (G'day). Here is Chris Floyd on US meddling in the ME. Old "friends" turn up:
Can we not discern a pattern here, a clear intention? The "War on Terror" produces terror; it's part of the "creative destruction" that the militarists used to boast about, when they dreamed that their crimes of aggression, torture and murder would lead future generations to "sing songs about us," in the immortal words of Michael Ledeen.
This quote is often attributed to Richard Perle, but it comes from Ledeen's call for "total war" in a speech at American Enterprise Institute on October 29, 2001. Ledeen followed this up with a piece on National Review Online in August 2002, when he mocked Brent Scowcroft's concern that an invasion of Iraq could turn the Middle East into a cauldron. Ledeen's response:
One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.
Spoiler - the last part:
So Bush will soon have yet another proxy war playground to while away his time before retiring to stick his snout in the same corporate trough that has so enriched his fellow war crminal, Tony Blair -- who has already made almost $20 million in corporate pork in less than a year after leaving office.
Who says crime -- especially war crime -- doesn't pay?
*Note. Some might think that Bush is touring the region to build support for an attack on Iran. But that kind of head-knocking and arm-twisting is left to Dick Cheney (who took an ominious swing through the cauldron not long ago). Junior is too witless for any hard-core dealing -- although no doubt he will bluster and bellow to his hosts about Iranian perfidy and "doin' God's will" and whatever else vomits up from his murder-rotted brain.
Elsewhere that respected commentator Tom Friedman stars - this from Glenn Greenwald.
Today's a very exciting day in America. Our nation's most Serious foreign policy expert, the brilliant Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, has today declared our latest new war:
The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president -- but this cold war is with Iran.
So congratulations to us. After years of desperately searching, we've finally found our New Soviet Union. Nay-saying opponents of the New War (those who Tom Friedman, in March of 2003, dismissed as "knee-jerk liberals and pacifists") may try to point out that it's a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and could not possibly threaten us, but those are just small details. Iran is our new implacable foe in Tom Friedman's glorious, transcendent struggle -- which, in 2003, on NPR, he called "the beginning of World War III . . . the third great totalitarian challenge in the last, you know, 60 years," and which he today defines this way (featuring an amazingly disingenuous use of parenthesis):
That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today -- the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, "In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the U.S."
Friedman laments that "Team America" -- that's really what he calls it -- "is losing on just about every front."
And they have enlisted Hillary. There is material in the article about some truly dangerous people.
And one more on torture, this from Robert Scheer.
Some frighteningly crazy people with power and influence. But some think we should not mention such things. We should, and try to do something about it before it is too late.
G'day Phil, a story that was not told widely ... the MSM in the US again fails the test as US claims shot down. Not only should the media be seeking the truth but one would think they would want to help prevent another war (or military actions) based on lies.
Tom has a progress report ...
They could not have made a bigger stuff up if they had tried.
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