jj82277 said:
i agree that we should not be so blind to the truth because of our patiotism that we just agree with whatever our government says or us to do, but in this specific case i personally believe that the action taken was with all intent to inhance the level of security to this country. That in my oppinion is the only thing that you can ask of any official is to do everything in his power to protect the citizenry of its country. If the powers that be thught that my plans for political contributions and international travel plans brought about suspicion or warranted their attention i dont think that them taking a few hours to ask me a few questions would be all that out of the way in the grand scheme of national security. When they start locking up and torturing their owncitizens without any form of probable cause i will become a lot more skeptical, but untill then i really as i said before think that to this point you can do nothing but applaud the end result of the campaign against terror.
As for punk, This is one of the freest countries on the face of the planet, nearing the height of its reign as the last remaining superpower.
When Timothy McVeigh knocked down the oklahoma city building, from what i have heard of the man he was under a lot of influence from the usual rebel against the government types that wanted to abolish the current government for a variety of reasons. the ideology that government in of itself is evil, and infringing upon human rights, logically leads to the desire to destroy said government.
and just because a meeting apears to be peaceful, the fruit from said meeting may lead to the genesiss of ungodly evil. The question you should ask is does having all those meetings at libraries lead people to a state of mind that predisposes them to terrorist or radical behavior, and i think that history will show, as Goodieluver so eloquentally said, that anarchism is the icing on the cakes of many extreme groups with histories much less nobel than that of the united states.
first off there is no "campaign against terror". there is a campaign to expand the control of government influence on people domestically and economic resources and people abroad. that has nothing to do with terror, except that the government often uses terror. in fact those actions, such as in iraq, helped to vastly increase the amount of the terrorism you are familiar with.
the government has a long history of torturing people and helping to imprison them abroad and it also has a long history of countering dissent through intimidation and terrorism.*
This may be "one of the freest places on the planet" but that has nothing to do with its external behavior, and also this freedom you speak of is being stripped away as we speak. secondly this freedom has nothing to do with the government, if it were up to them they would be watching all of us to make sure we dont "have the wrong thoughts" that freedom came as a result of struggles by the people, including many anarchists.
to say that timothy mcviegh had any concern about human rights is beyond retarded, not only did he kill children, he was also involved in the neo nazi national alliance. the issue at hand is not wanting to do away with the government, which millions of people want to do, its what you will replace it with and why you want to do so. grouping all of those people together is not very bright.
no i dont think having teach ins at librarys about human rights leads to "ungodly evil" unless you view human rights as evil, which most governments do. and though you support government i doubt your a part of it, so id say you respect human rights. there is no doubt that government violations of rights will on ocassion result in evil, but the people who commit that evil dont need me to tell them that, its the israeli tank in their backyard that does it. if we are serious about limiting or doing away with evil we need to seriously limit the influence and power of the state and corporate power, because not only is that power evil in itself, it also inevitably leads to many evil reactions.
i dont know what you mean by anarchism being the "icing on the cakes" but if your talking about american history you cannot seperate anarchism from american history. anarchists played a massive role in forcing the government to respect workers rights, trade unions, the 8 hour day, the weekend, freedom of speach (many of whom were killed as a result of this noble battle) to the contrary of your point i would argue that the most noble history of the united states has been created by american anarchists.
*"your enemy" was your ally, ie saddam. and when he was committing his worst atrocities your aliances with him were strongest. of course what he did when you were supporting him was against the geneva conventions.
torture has nothing to do with saving lives and it never has. it has to do with totall totalitarian control. its how you beat an enemy when you loose the ideolgical battle. The US has a long history of torture and an evenlonger history of supporting the most vicious torturers the world has ever seen.
In January 1997, the Baltimore Sun exposed a 1983 CIA torture manual that was used to instruct five Latin American nations' security forces. The infamous disclaimer in the torture manual read: “While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them.” A 1996 U.S. government investigation into the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia resulted in the release of no less than seven training manuals used at the school “which taught murder, torture, and extortion” as a means of repressing so-called “subversives, ” according to a Congressional report. (
www.fas.org/irp/congress/1997_rpt/soaexec.htm) In addition to the seven training manuals, add the 1983 Honduran Interrogation Manual and the 1984 Contra Manual as evidence of the U.S. military industrial complex’s long-standing practice of torture.
Recall the comments of former CIA Station Chief and National Security Council Coordinator John Stockwell about the CIA Contra Manual and actions promoted by the U.S. military in Nicaragua: “They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children forced to watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off his face. They put a grenade in his mouth, and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch, they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes, for variety they make the parents watch while they do these things to the children.” (
www.serendipity.li/cia/stock1.html)
In his lecture, “The Secret Wars of the CIA, ” Stockwell outlined in detail the use of sexual humiliation from his own investigation. “She told about being tortured one day: She’s on this table, naked in a room full of six men and they’re doing these incredibly painful, degrading things to her body. There’s an interruption. The American is called to the telephone, and he’s in the next room, and the others take a smoke break. She’s lying on this table, and he’s saying: ‘Oh, hi Honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in another hour or so, and meet you and the kids at the Ambassador’s on the way home.’”
The recent Iraqi allegations of sexual humiliation, forcing simulated sex, forcing detainees to “publicly masturbate” and at least one charge of an interrogator raping a male prisoner, according to the Guardian U.K., simply are a continuation of condoned U.S. military/CIA practices. (
www.truthout.org/docs_04/050104A.shtml)
By now much of the world has seen images of a hooded Iraqi prisoner with electrical wires attached to his body. This is another long-standing practice of U.S. military and CIA interrogators. The Baltimore Sun also uncovered a 1963 manual called “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” containing references to the use of “electric shock.” (
www.thirdworldtraveler.com/SOA/SOA_TortureManuals.html) CIA spokesperson Mark Mansfield told the Sun in 1997 that the agency was now opposed to the use of such torture tactics. (
www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/049.html) The discovery of the KUBARK document did little to prompt a full-scale investigation into U.S. military/CIA techniques, and if they were promoted throughout the world.
Stockwell and others have tried to remind America of the use of electronic torture by Dan Mitrione, the notorious U.S. “policy advisor” killed in 1970 in Uruguay. Stockwell claims that Mitrone perfected the use of an ultra-thin highly conductive wire that could be hooked to hand-cranked field phones and inserted as a catheter (meaning jammed up your penis) to shock subversives. A.J. Langguth wrote about this in a July 11, 1979 New York Times article entitled “Torture’s Teachers.”
Langguth notes in his article that “… the C.I.A. sent an operative to teach interrogation methods to SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, [and] that the training included instructions in torture, and the techniques were copied from the Nazis.”
The only new trend in pattern and practice of U.S. military/CIA torture interrogation is the strong push to privatization, in line with President Bush’s ideology. The Guardian U.K. reports that both CACI International Inc. and Titan Corporations were names involved in the Abu Ghraib prison operation.
CACI’s website offers the following insight on the for-profit organization. Its goal is to “Help America’s intelligence community collect, analyze, and share global information in the war on terrorism.” The late CIA Director William Casey’s dream was the complete privatization of covert, and usually illegal, operations. In part, this privatization was used during the Iran-Contra affair through the likes of Richard Secord’s Enterprise. By privatizing, they seek to subvert the Geneva Conventions on war and other universal standards of human rights.
The torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners is merely another sad and well-documented chapter of a pompous nation using virtuous rhetoric while perpetuating obvious evils. The fact that the U.S. military, with for-profit contractors, is torturing Iraqis in Saddam’s former prisons while claiming to bring American, and Bush’s, values to the war devastated nation is an irony not lost on the world.
The Bush administration is committed to systematically destroying the Iraqis in order to liberate them. The United Nations must demand that the people of the United States form a Truth Commission to look deeply and honestly into the practices of its bloated military and security industrial complexes. The truth may yet set Americans free.
On a side note, they didnt just torture people for "having the wrong thought" in a study conducted by the catholic church, it is reporded that cia tortures "used to take beggers off the streets and torture them in classrooms" (the primary source document is called torture in brazil and is readily availble)
you do not torture people for "Freedom or to "fight terror"
and you dont destroy the geneva convention to "protect it"
