Anti Torture, Anti Military Commissions Act Action

The guillotine was a device neither invented nor intended for government use, well, not to be used BY government, I mean.

With all the outrage and rightful protests going on, it might be a worthwhile effort to set up mock guillotines around the nation in conspicuous places, like in front of capitol buildings, and court houses, just to remind our political leaders of this fact.

It's probably even a good idea to make sure that the "mock" part of those guillotines can be easily amended.

Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
Limestone, Maine

An Illustrated Philosophy Primer for Young Readers
http://www.geocities.com/donaldwrobertson/index.html

Now that the Democrats won, it is time to straighten up some things, such as the gov't rountinely violating our Constitutional rights (Via Patriot Act, MCA and more).
They violate the 1st Amendment by caging demonstrators and banning books like "America Deceived" from Amazon.
They violate the 2nd Amendment by confiscating guns during Katrina.
They violate the 4th Amendment by conducting warrant-less wiretaps.
They violate the 5th and 6th Amendment by suspending habeas corpus.
They violate the 8th Amendment by torturing.
They violate the entire Constitution by starting 2 illegal wars based on lies and on behalf of a foriegn gov't.
Fix up that and while you are at it, investigate 9/11 a bit more thoroughly.
Support indy media.
Last link (unless Google Books caves to the gov't and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)

The Military Commission Act was passed by the criminally complicit Congress to protect their corporate donors as well as the bush crime family (BCF).

The BCF and their sponsors, the oil companies and war contractors such as Halliburton, Bechtel, CACI, Blackwater, etc. have committed crimes against humanity such as incarceration, rape, torture and purposeful murder of civilians. The MCA legalizes these acts to protect these criminals from incarceration and perhaps capital punishment.

I wonder how many see that all these things are related:
The "Patriot" Act
"Homeland" Security
TSA and-
the new "Bankruptcy" laws.
Isn't it plain what the government has in mind for dissent when the economic SHTF and the greedy corporations, the super-rich and the makers of our odious foreign policy are seen by the public as the ones responsible for the mess the US is in?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Courtesy of http://ministryoflove.wordpress.com/

Ministry of Love Continues Doubleplusgood Book Collection Activity

In October, the Ministry of Love announced its fourth-quarter plan to gather 315
separate copies of George Orwell's landmark novel 1984, from proles
and party comrades alike, all across our brave homeland.

Once collected, all 315 copies are to be mailed separately to each
Member of Congress who voted for the Military Commissions Act
on September 28th and 29th, in the sixth year of our glorious leader's regime.

Today we are pleased to say we have attained 21% of our goal! This is a wonderful victory for Miniluv!

In case you've forgotten, our glorious leader's regime has gifted us
with the following remarkably Orwellian achievements:
* spying on ordinary citizens without their knowledge
* paid propaganda masquerading as news reports
* removal by Thought Police of ungoodthinkers (protesters) from all
Party rallies and celebrations featuring our glorious leader
* community members encouraged to report "suspicious activities" of
neighbors and co-workers
* the promise of an endless war

Now, through the farsightedness of these distinguished 315 Inner Party
Members, House and Senate, we have added sanctioned torture and
indefinite detainment of suspects to that noteworthy list.

To recognize those who have brought us one step closer to the utopian
world envisioned by Orwell, Miniluv will enclose a handwritten note
with each copy of 1984, thanking each 315 Inner Party Member
individually for their achievement.

Send new and used copies of 1984 to the following address:
Ministry of Love
Box 655
Guilford, CT 06437

If ordering online, have books shipped directly to Miniluv
If you would like your donation earmarked for a particular Inner Party
Member, please note that with your shipment.
Goodthinkers always use media mail rates for shipping books.
Donations for postage to the Inner Party Members are doubleplushelpful.

Finally, remember:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


--
war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength

Oh, this is tripleplusgood! Thank you for the suggestion, Miniluv! I will search for my Bible ("1984") to send to you doubleplusfast with a special earmark to Nancy Pelosi for being such a "good" Democrat for the ministry. Oh, and, are you sure there are not 322 members of the inner circle?

Oh, and for you reading, take the pledge.

By Gary Brecher, eXile issue #193

http://www.exile.ru/2004-June-24/war_nerd.html

"I've stayed off the torture debate because to talk honestly about torture, you have to rip open so many layers of bullshit, it's like trying to get eighty years of bad wallpaper off a bedroom wall. Ever help a "friend" get a dozen layers of old wallpaper off? You don't need to fear Hell if you've done that.

But readers keep wanting my take on the whole Abu Ghraib mess, so put on your Beijing surgical masks and stand back while I start stripping the lies. The first and biggest lie is that you can do counterinsurgency (CI) warfare without torture. Bullshit. No army ever fought a CI campaign without resorting to torture. Goes with the territory. At most, it's like holding by your offensive line: you don't want them doing it where the ref can see it, but if you had an OG or tight end who refused to do it, you'd fire his ass.

Because you can't win without it.

So why did everybody from Bush on down act surprised? Well, the key word is "act." And the answer is: they were lying. After all, lying's a big, legitimate part of warfare. It's the President's job to go on TV and act shocked when pictures like the ones from Abu Ghraib come out. Nobody with a grain of sense believes he's actually lying awake at night worrying that we might have violated the Geneva convention by dunking some Jihadi's head in a bucket to give him time to rethink his whole position re: drowning for Allah vs. telling us where his friends are hiding out. Maybe Jimmy "the Parson" Carter would've been really, truly upset, but the less said about that pansy-ass mama's boy, the better.

The only thing Bush did wrong was mess up the lie. He was supposed to do the interview with those two Arab TV networks and say, "I'm just so sorry we brutalized those poor Iraqis." Only he messed that up like he messes everything up. He didn't manage to say he was sorry, so that was the headline all over the world: "Bush refuses to apologize."

As for all this stuff about how America was shocked -- well, as far as I could tell that's another lie. I listened to a lot of conversations at the office about those pictures, and most people said they were totally OK with us torturing Iraqis, but they were upset by the whole gay sex thing with those pictures of naked Iraqi guys piled up in mounds. That bothered them more than Janet Jackson's saggy Superbowl tit. "My children read that paper," that was what one lady said.

To understand why torture is so fundamental to CI warfare, you have to remember that in guerrilla wars there are no battles, there are just ambushes. And an ambush is totally different from a battle. Let's say your squad is patrolling through a village just like it's done for the past two weeks, right? Everything's hunky-dory: the little old lady who sells veggies waves and smiles when you go past, the kids ask for gum, and you start to feel like a liberator. You're just turning a corner when there's a big boom and two of your buddies are on the ground screaming, two others are dead. You look around -- where's the old lady? Where are all the smiling kiddies? A blast that big should've killed a dozen locals, but somehow the only casualties are your buddies.

Somehow the smiling locals magically disappeared two seconds before the IED went off. So either they all have some pretty effective ESP...or they knew it was going to go off. In fact, they were part of the set-up. The smiling kids, the friendly grandma -- all a set-up to relax you, make you walk into the kill zone.

That's how torture starts. You know they know. They're weaker than you. But they won't tell you anything. You start hating them more and more. Sooner or later the idea of grabbing some of them and making them talk is going to occur to you, or somebody higher up.

If you've got good NCOs, they'll try to keep you under control, because you're likely to pick the wrong people to start whacking around. That's the nastiest part of the whole CI picture: the villagers may not be involved by choice. They may not want to mess with you at all. Most people, even crazy tribes like Chechens, just want to get by. But they have to deal with the insurgents, who are putting as much pressure on them in the nighttime as you are during the day. Maybe the little old lady's grandson is being held with a knife at his throat to make sure she goes to her usual veggie stand and looks cheerful, just to make the set-up more convincing. You can't know.

You'll never really know what's happening to the locals. Finally you get a decent tip -- somebody snitches on an old enemy from the neighborhood, you go to his house and dig up a fully-functional RPG with a dozen rounds. Just think of the pure hate you feel for this guy: he and his little friends have been bushwhacking you for weeks without the guts to show themselves. Well, now you've got him. Not even your NCO can stop you now -- even if he wanted to.

Besides, it makes good military sense to torture him. Like I've said a dozen times, the key weapon in CI warfare is info. You want names and addresses, fast -- before another patrol gets blown up.

That's how most improvised, low-level torture starts: working out on somebody you think tried to kill you. Every CI force in history has done that kind of torture, and so do we. Duh!

But....and, like Oprah, this is a pretty big but...that's not what we saw in those weird snapshots from Abu Ghraib. Those people didn't look like angry soldiers to me. In fact they didn't look like soldiers at all -- they looked like the janitor staff at CostCo having a little fun on break. If there's a practical lesson from Abu Ghraib, it's that we can't afford to leave interrogation to losers like this. Not when every schmo's got a digital camera, and every other schmo wants to get his picture on CNN. The army's going to have to face the fact that prisoner guarding detail is a top-priority job that should be done by people who have a lot to lose if the dirty secrets of the job come out. New tech, new rules. From now on, it should be career officers with something to lose doing the torturing, not those West Virginia Hessians.

And the things they were doing weren't what angry frontline soldiers do to their prisoners. I'm talking about putting a prisoner on a box, a hood over his head, wires taped to his balls, and telling him if he falls off he'll get electrocuted. Or having a naked male prisoner on a leash with a girl soldier laughing at him. Or making somebody squat in an impossible position all day.

This stuff came out of a book: the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, published by the CIA in the early '80s. It was a torture manual, but not the House of Bondage stuff you'd expect. The CIA said basically that the point of torture was to make the victim shrink back into a terrified little kid, and the best way to do that was to humiliate, confuse and just plain wear out the victim, not pull his fingernails out. So they stressed sleep deprivation, messing with his sense of time, and forcing him into weird postures, so when he fell he'd blame himself, not the torturer. It was one of the most interesting books I ever read. For instance, they said that threatening to kill people was totally useless, because people who think they're going to be killed just turn into zombies. What you want is to make the subject into a blubbering baby, because then he'll talk. After five days with no sleep, women laughing at you naked, weird noises and non-stop screaming, you can't wait for the nice-cop interrogator to say, "They made you do it, didn't they? You didn't want to hurt anyone, did you? Tell us all about it."

When the blubbering baby spills the names, you go collect the people he fingered and do the same to them. It's all standard stuff. Which raises another question: how come it's not working? Let's face it, it's not. In fact I have to say that the Iraqi insurgents are so much more effective than I ever thought they'd be I can hardly believe it. Do any of you out there realize how damn hard it is to set off a bomb on a residential street and kill only the enemy, not a dozen of your own civilians? That's what they've been doing, every damn day.

There's only one way to pull off a string of successes like that, and O'Reilly nailed it in one of his shows a couple weeks ago: you have to have the backing of 100% of the local civilian population.

So here's the other big truth we have to deal with: we invaded Iraq. We didn't come to bring them democracy or Big Gulps or Get Smart reruns or whatever. We invaded their country and occupied their cities and put their old enemies in power, just because we were pissed off after 9/ll and it seemed like a good way to let off steam and corner the market on some cheap oil while we were at it. We weren't there to liberate anybody, and we shouldn't have expected the whole rose-petal parade treatment. So what it comes down to, as usual, is that nobody in the country wants to tell the truth. You whiny, snotty liberals don't want to face the fact that torture is a central part of CI warfare, and you dumbass, gullible neocons won't face the fact that we invaded Iraq, and invaders generate insurgencies. We faced that fact in Afghanistan, treated the locals like enemies, and won their respect. We went up to the Afghans with brass knuckles on one hand and a bouquet in the other -- and we wonder why they don't love us.

When you lie to other people, it can work. When you lie to yourself, you pay. We're going to be paying a long, long time."

Feel free to debate any of the material expressed above. I just read it and was interested in what people might think.

"You whiny, snotty liberals don't want to face the fact that torture is a central part of CI warfare, and you dumbass, gullible neocons won't face the fact that we invaded Iraq, and invaders generate insurgencies."

I am not sure I get what you mean, "somewhat, related but not mine." This guy isn't telling us anything we don't know. We've known that our government sanctions torture, and they have for some time. We snotty nosed liberals have already faced that fact. We also know that they lied to us not only about he war but about 9/11 as well, which is probably something this mercenary or delusional special ops guy thinks was done by Arabs. And, he will continue to see his buddies die for these lies and reject any notion that he's been lied to by the goverment and their masters, the neocons. And, the neocons want chaos... no matter what they say to the public. They can make the world of their sick little wetdreams by the chaos they sow.

Also, virtually all authorities who study torture say it doesn't work. People will say anything and accuse anyone to stop the torture, so you keep torturing people who accuse others (who are probably innocent) until everybody dies. Oh, that makes great *ucking sense.

We are a lot more sophisticated than this bloodthirsty mercenary bumkin.

We'll Joe a few quick things

1. Gary Brecher is not, nor ever has been a member of the military or an intelligence agency. Studying these topics is his hobby, not his proffession

2. Never the less, as an amatuer enthuisiast he's cynical yet honest. He doesn't like Bush and his people nor does he like liberals...He hates them both equally. He does not buy the rationale for invading Iraq.

example

"here's the other big truth we have to deal with: we invaded Iraq. We didn't come to bring them democracy or Big Gulps or Get Smart reruns or whatever. We invaded their country and occupied their cities and put their old enemies in power, just because we were pissed off after 9/ll and it seemed like a good way to let off steam and corner the market on some cheap oil while we were at it. We weren't there to liberate anybody, and we shouldn't have expected the whole rose-petal parade treatment."

From what I gather his only motivation is to make America "kick ass".


3. How does he recommend doing this? His point is that we should stop acting like we have a moral highground and start playing dirty. He believes that War is brutal and unrestrained and should not be treated as something that can be regulated. On that point its hard to disagree with him.

4. His article is relevaent in the sense that its dealing with torture. He would claim that ,historically speaking, torture has been common practice in uncovential warfare.

If you have any more questions, his email is available and he could certainly explain his thoughts better than I would able to.

Yes, I understand his point, but why should anybody want to play dirty for Halliburton, Bechtel and the bankers, who probably helped carry out 9/11? His priorities are all wrong and where are his loyalties? Are they to the American people? or to the globalist who want a wider, bloodier war?

And, what does this have to do with this article except for the torture aspect. The key problem with the MCA is Bush can arbitrally decide who is, or is not, an enemy combantant, he then can kidnap, torture and dissappear people if he chooses. How unconstitutional and dictatorial can you get? So, once again, I ask him, where are his loyalities and why would he fight, or advocate for others to fight, for a lie?

One again, you should ask him. I pasted the link to his article so you can get email address there.

Well, why just not tell him that this discussion is happening on this website. Personally, I don't want him to have my email address.

Thanks for taking this action! We need to sustain our opposition as a counter to apathy and ignorance about this law.

I was at Congress on the day when this infamous law was passed, and I've started a petition to call for the complete repeal of the Military Commissions Act. For that, and other actions you can take, please visit the Project to Repeal the Military Commissions Act at http://www.irregulartimes.com/repealmca.html