It looks like he’s just one atrocity away from hitting the trifecta.
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March 19, 2006
WB: Torture Rooms
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I think the third leg of the trifecta is right here at home. The following does not bode well, nor does it help my paranoia.
The “Continuity Act” ?
The “Continuity Act” now provides for the reformation of the entire US House and Senate structure, even after it is ‘incapacitated’, yet curiously (in effect) suspends them for 50 days…
3/2005- “The bill passed by the House last week requires states to hold special elections within 49 days if 100 members or more are killed or incapacitated. The 49-day period is both too short and too long: too short because the vast majority of states would not be able to meet that deadline in normal times, never mind the trying period after an attack,
… and too long because 49 days without a Congress means no check on the president. Remember that the president after a big attack might be an obscure Cabinet member, not the elected president.
This bill is meant to accompany a very disturbing rules change made quietly at the beginning of the 109th Congress that condones the House’s operating with just a handful of members…”
As Japanese Admiral Yamamoto once said, “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There will be a rifle behind every blade of grass”, however, it can be taken from within…
Read up on Edward Bernays or the1951 Psychological Strategy Board.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 19 2006 20:02 utc | 1
From Billmon’s post:
GWB:.there won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.
Billmon: It looks like he’s just one atrocity away from hitting the trifecta.Text
If the count is 1, mass graves, 2, torture rooms and 3, rape rooms, than the trifecta has been hit a long time ago. Billmon’s last two posts were about mass graves and torture rooms, but after looking at the images on http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm you know that rape is also on the US forces menu in Iraq. Ergo sum, some US Troops and their Commander in the WH are about as sordid as SH and his henchmen. And the Democrats in Washington are asleep at the wheel, a disgrace. As Billmon demonstrates, it is so easy to dismantle the crap statements Bush delivers, to expose their inherent hypocrisy. But where is this last great American whale, the one which causes the huge tidal wave that washes away the thugs in office? (I must have been listening to Lou Reed’s “New York” album to often lately… actually, I am gonna put it on right now)
Posted by: Feelgood | Mar 19 2006 21:04 utc | 2
Iraq is more free every day. The lives of the citizens are improving every day. And one thing is for certain; there won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.
George W. Bush
Remarks to Reporters
January 12, 2004
Why does the president need to say these things then? Most strong supporters of the war 57% think prisoner abuse (torture) is acceptable. Why would the president mock his own support(ers), and at the same time create a “credibility gap” for his critics? Why can’t the “plain talking” president level with the american people as to his true intentions, torture being a necessary ingredient, like destroy the village to save it — of those intentions? Why does the president need to portray his agenda as being a LIBERAL one?
Posted by: anna missed | Mar 19 2006 21:24 utc | 3
anna,
for the same reason that he could not have come out and said that the war was being fought to promote a neocon agenda of US monopolar domination of world politics, and that a permanent military presence in Iraq was one of the initial steps: none but the most rabid nationalists would’ve supported it.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 19 2006 21:53 utc | 4
Why does the president need to portray his agenda as being a LIBERAL one?
Well, at least one politician should portray his agaenda as liberal. If the Dems don´t do so, and they don´t, Bush will.
I have no love for Brzezinski, but he said something right here:
What troubles me the most is not that which that I have criticized, but that which hasn’t happened. That is to say: a serious and comprehensive Democratic challenge on this subject. Democratic leaders have been silent or evasive. They have not offered an alternative to the war in Iraq. It’s easy to criticize – that was the first part of my speech. That is easy to do, although some of us did it sooner than others.
But they haven’t offered an alternative. Also they have not seriously challenged the view of the world that is being propagated from the top. At a time of a deepening and widening crisis in Iraq, and a widening gap between America and the world, that to me is a form of political desertion.
Speaking of ol’ Brezy:
Brzezinski
” We are acting as though the Iraqis are our colonial wards,” he said. “We are teaching them about democracy by arresting them, bombing them, by humiliating them and also helping them. It is an ambivalent course in democracy. ”
Now why do you suppose he is recanting at this point?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 19 2006 22:03 utc | 6
ralphieboy said;
…. and that a permanent military presence in Iraq was one of the initial steps: none but the most rabid nationalists would’ve supported it.
…..
And those are the folks still left supporting the war, and most of them (the ones who would be fine with ” glassing over the whole ME”) could care less about bringing about liberal reform. Perhaps, neo-liberalism is really nothing more than right wing “triangulation”. A manner of taking liberal ideas hostage in order to preform foreign policy bank robbery — which if you take Brzezinski at is word, is what he is saying about the lack of Democratic alternative, in lue of Republican LIBERAL ACTIVITISM. So, to answer my own question, the president portrays his policy as liberal — in order to shut down liberal criticism.
Posted by: anna missed | Mar 19 2006 22:58 utc | 7
I have a question: In Feelgood’s link the soldiers aren’t wearing desert camo. Does anyone know why not? Are they American or someone else?
Posted by: beq | Mar 19 2006 23:05 utc | 8
beq
it is my understanding that that link is a hoax – tho no doubt such violtions of humanity occur – these are not photographs of them
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 20 2006 0:35 utc | 9
Thanks, r’giap. My thought as well. Speaking of well, I wish you the same. 🙂
Posted by: beq | Mar 20 2006 1:26 utc | 10
Well, no since in the US not holding it’s own inquisition (oh I forgot, we had the Salem witch trials while still colonies). Joking aside, this WH is really something. What it is, I have no idea because they’re not on the same wave link as the majority of Americans.
Posted by: jdp | Mar 20 2006 1:42 utc | 11
Feelgood’s link features photographs taken from a porn site, not from Iraq. Using discredited fakes is not recommended as the fact that the actual provenance of those photographs is widely known means that credibility is lost the instant such bogus material is used as ‘evidence’.
By now Feelgood’s source actually functions better as an anti-anti-war site, which may be the actual purpose behind duping people into citing easily dismissed fake photographs that can be branded as lying propaganda.
Posted by: H.S. | Mar 20 2006 8:47 utc | 12
These photgraphs are fake and were widely distributed two years ago. Although this right wing news source should always be viewed with a grain of salt, (as it is one of Sun Myung Moon’s media propaganda whore outlets) there is enough verification provided to do additional research and determine that this is the case.. Here is the link:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38352
Posted by: diogenes | Mar 20 2006 11:46 utc | 13
Knight Ridder:
Iraqi police report details civilians’ deaths at hands of U.S. troops
Iraqi police have accused American troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid last Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers’ animals and blew up the house, the document said.
…
The report, which also contained brief descriptions of other events in the area, was compiled by the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit, a regional security center set up with United States military assistance. An Iraqi police colonel signed the report, which was based on communications from local police.
Brig. Gen. Issa al-Juboori, who heads the center, said that his office assembled the report on Thursday and that it accurately reflects the direction of the current police investigation into the incident.
He also said he knows the officer heading the investigation. “He’s a dedicated policeman, and a good cop,” he said when reached by phone in Tikrit from Baghdad. “I trust him.”
…
“The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men,” the report said. “Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.”
The report identified the dead by name, giving their ages. The two men killed were 22 and 28. Of the women, two were 22 years old, one was 30 and one was 75. Two of the children were 5 years old, two were 3, and the fifth was 6 months old, the document said.
The report was signed by Col. Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, who was described in the document as the assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center.
Timehas also a piece on a similar incident:
One Morning in Haditha
he details of what happened that morning in Haditha are more disturbing, disputed and horrific than the military initially reported. According to eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks, the civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children. Human-rights activists say that if the accusations are true, the incident ranks as the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war began.
In January, after Time presented military officials in Baghdad with the Iraqis’ accounts of the Marines’ actions, the U.S. opened its own investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the families of the victims and local doctors. According to military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military’s initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (ncis), which will conduct a criminal investigation to determine whether the troops broke the laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians. Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement of the ncis does not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who “placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves.”
Sure that’s why the marines lied about it…
These incidents smell like (small) MyLai’s. Wonder how many of them happen…
We only hear about the GI’s killed or wounded in Iraq, we get no overall reports on how many times they come under fire every day. Their nerves and their sense of judgement must be completely shot.
This does not excuse their behavior, but neither does it excuse us from the necessity of ensuring that our soldiers are able to respond to stress situations and perform their duty in a humane and sane manner. If we cannot do so, we are harming our own image and our own national interests.
Our two options are to a) draft and train more of them or b) bring them home.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 20 2006 17:58 utc | 17
the options are very clear indeed – offer reparations – real & substantial reparations to the people of iraq & the occupying armies must leave, now
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 20 2006 18:03 utc | 18
Does this mean we’d have to supply a new dictator to replace the one we broke? I am not being facetious here. Iraq is not ready to embrace the kind of democracy we would lie them to be: secular, stable, peaceful and US-friendly.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 20 2006 18:38 utc | 19
‘coming’ under fire sounds like a defensive action. this story reeks of revenge. their buddy dies and they go bezerk.
what percentage of the soldiers on the ground, not the ones in the green zone, are healthy and sane? although awareness of PTSD is becoming more mainstream have there been studies done on percentages of active duty diagnosed?
‘post’ doesn’t mean it breaks out once a person is separated from the environment. what about plain ol’ tramatic stress disorder?
asking someone to perform inhumane acts in a ‘humane and sane manner’ is a tall order.
the intentional presence of death squads for example, who are the soldiers performing or training the people carrying out these atrocities?
yet, they are conditioned to accepting they have very little choice but to continue. that’s got to eat away at the fabric of a persons sanity. if there had not been a film crew to document the haditha massacre would we be hearing about it today? how brazen an attack. what confidence. that kind of blatant disregard of human life could not have happened as an isolated incident. no one should be surprised it has come to this.
Posted by: annie | Mar 20 2006 18:39 utc | 20
These incidents of soldiers freaking out and killing people at random illustrates in real time those recent polls that show the soldiers themselves have lost faith in the mission. The notion of “force protection” has been assumed by the troops themselves (without orders) to its logical ends — by an infection of malignant mob mentality. A paranoid panic response to a loosing proposition where the last ratchet click is internalized as the lowest common denominator of us against them — popularily known as “kill em all”. This is where war transcends all its codified nomenclatures of honor, courage, and even humanity — and leaps wholesale into the abyss of unfettered insanity — where the living are also the dead.
Posted by: anna missed | Mar 20 2006 19:57 utc | 21
anna,
one can express it also as the “squad ethos”, when under duress, a soldier’s duty is no longer to his country or his army, it is to his immediate comrades-in-arms, the people he serves with every day.
Our army is also failing to cope because it has been trained to fight an organized, recognizeable enemy. That opponent ceased to exist within the first few weeks of the Iraqi campaign.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 20 2006 20:38 utc | 22
Does this mean we’d have to supply a new dictator to replace the one we broke?
Why not for once let THEM choose instead of further carrying your “white mens burdon?”
I am not being facetious here. Iraq is not ready to embrace the kind of democracy we would lie them to be: secular, stable, peaceful and US-friendly.
How should they have ever any reason to be US friendly?
On the Origins of an Atrocity
If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.
George W. Bush, speech at West Point in 2002
That seems to be the logic use in defense of the atrocity at Haditha. I am ready to agree with that logic, but to disagree that this logic was actually being followed in Haditha or in Iraq in general. Nor has the government given us reason to expect that this logic is actually driving the so-called national policy of the United States.
In Haditha, Iraq – a Time report:
Dr. Wahid, director of the local hospital in Haditha, who asked that his family name be withheld because, he says, he fears reprisals by U.S. troops, says the Marines brought 24 bodies to his hospital around midnight on Nov. 19. Wahid says the Marines claimed the victims had been killed by shrapnel from the roadside bomb. “But it was obvious to us that there were no organs slashed by shrapnel,” Wahid says. “The bullet wounds were very apparent. Most of the victims were shot in the chest and the head–from close range.”
A day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with Time. The tape makes for grisly viewing. It shows that many of the victims, especially the women and children, were still in their nightclothes when they died. The scenes from inside the houses show that the walls and ceilings are pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet holes as well as the telltale spray of blood. But the video does not reveal the presence of any bullet holes on the outside of the houses, which may cast doubt on the Marines’ contention that after the ied exploded, the Marines and the insurgents engaged in a fierce gunfight.
The officers that allowed have no solid grounds for explaining to their troops that they have suffered for any good reason, nor that their deaths and soul-crimes have been in true service to the nation or the folks back home. These Marines have been damned by a military policy that is not national, not at the service of the U.S. as a people, or even as a country. Whether or not these Marines have gotten as far as Smedley Butler and figured out that they’re working for this era’s version of United Fruit and Standard Oil, it is a certainty that these troops have been damned to hell by the same ‘national’ policy makers when they also damned Iraqis to life in hell.
For democracy?! Tell that to these Marines. Or tell it to the Iraqis in this or any village.
One wonders, who do these ‘national’ policy makers consider the enemy? They seem to hate and fear most of all:
anyone serious about serving the nation – look at whom they smear and spy on
the Bill of Rights – look at how they seem to read it.
We are taking about treachery, or as a former Supreme Court Justice of the U.S. said upon the opening of certain earlier trials against men and women who betrayed their nation by leading it into hell:
Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling these grievances or for altering these conditions.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, opening the Nuremburg Trials
How does the current President of the United States recommend we defend ourselves were someone to threaten to betray and attack the nation:
We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.
Words to live by.
Posted by: citizen | Mar 20 2006 21:16 utc | 24
Iraq is not ready to embrace the kind of democracy we would lie them to be: secular, stable, peaceful and US-friendly.
seriously, i think many of these qualifications are irrelevant. if we had given any thought to stability we would have first and foremost followed the recommendations of the studies by the state department and guarenteed basics like clean water and electricity. we would have sent our best and brightest not a bunch of inexperienced kids of to operate the CPA.
how could we have occupied iraq long enough to build our bases and set up a permanent presence had things gone swimmingly? if US friendly means willing to privatize the resources in the country first come first serve (us being first of course) than that is really the only qualification for stability we require, secular or not, peaceful or not.
Posted by: annie | Mar 20 2006 22:35 utc | 25
If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.
that seems to be the logic use in defense of the atrocity at Haditha.
i think this is a real stretch. first of all i don’t know if they are defending themselves yet, and not sure it applies.
as i understand it their first defense was to lie about it. to try to justify this atrocity w/some pre emptive excuse seems absurd because it seems clear it was in retaliation to the explosion that killed their comrad.
it seems the evidence suggests there was not battle going on where the house was attached from outside. slaughtering women and children can hardly be used as a pretense for self defense.
i have serious doubts if pre emption even lends itself to concept of self defense. sounds to me more like an offense.
they say the best defense is a good offense. so which is it?
One wonders, who do these ‘national’ policy makers consider the enemy?
really? why, the left of course! they know they have no enemy in iraq!
Posted by: annie | Mar 20 2006 22:47 utc | 26
remembereringgiap:
it is my understanding that that link is a hoax – tho no doubt such violtions of humanity occur – these are not photographs of them
I am no expert in analysing rape photos, but how do you know that those pics are a hoax? Should I have linked a rightwing hoax site, my apologies, looked kinda real.
Posted by: Feelgood | Mar 20 2006 22:56 utc | 27
feelgood
i accuse you of nothing, friend – its just that these photographs were discussed here last year & were revealed as being from something staged
& i repeat – i am completely convinced that the empire is going through the whole repertoire of barbarity & so expect that it is really happening in ways even we have not imagined
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 20 2006 23:23 utc | 29
b,
“chosing” a dictator is a bit of a contradiction in terms. They tend to impose themselves.
I just thought we’d spare them a bit of turmoil by setting one up for them before we leave. We could even do them a Marshall Plan (we could call it a “Rumsfeld/Cheney Plan”) so the new dictator could have a slush fund at his disposal.
Plus we’d have to replace the army that we broke (the one they have now is little more than a glorified police force).
We are already funding the construction of new prisons, which ought to make any dictator happy. That plus a formal apology, and we would have a US-friendly (or at least non-US hostile) Iraq.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 21 2006 12:22 utc | 30
“chosing” a dictator is a bit of a contradiction in terms. They tend to impose themselves.
they tend to be installed by outside interests
augusto pinochet
reza pahlev
ferdinand marcos
‘papa doc’ duvalier
saddam hussein
joseph mobutu
off the top of my head
Posted by: b real | Mar 21 2006 16:00 utc | 31
b,
or they get constitutionally elected as presidents and just stick around in office as with Lukaschenka.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 21 2006 17:05 utc | 32