Tag Archives: Torturers

Libertad! Mexico wants freedom from US paid asesinos

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Imagine if today the federal government had taken over the Colorado Springs Police Department, the Denver PD, and the Boulder PD? Imagine if that followed the federal government having taken over even more and bigger US cities’ PDs?

The US Drug War’s spillover into Mexico is just like that and yesterday the Mexican federal government took over the narco infiltrated police forces in Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo, and Reynosa. Just before, it was in Tijuana and some neighboring cities south of California that the police HQs got taken over by the army.

That does not mean that the Mexican military are the good guys Down South. They most certainly are not. They are the American government’s puppet henchmen directed by America’s puppet Mexican dictatorship. In all, they are a bunch of asesinos (assassins) and tortureros (torturers). The government there has a lot in common with Dick and Dubya’s.

The Mexican state of Oaxaca is where resistance to the US puppets remains strongest at this time despite last year’s repression. You can watch an 8 minute film of one of the latest marches for freedom there.
Youth March for the Liberation Of Political Prisoners

And how nice to see young people that are not passive and demobilized.
Libertad! Libertad!

Torturing the universities, future feminine possibilities for Colorado College

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Pity the universities these days. They have become wildlife havens for America’s torturers. Southern Methodist University in Dallas is to house the papers of the head torturer advocate of them all, George W. Bush, in his ‘presidential library’. Stanford gets Donald Rumsfield. And now the University of Florida took it upon itself to take up the media rehabilitation program of Alberto Gonzalez. Whoopee, Students!

Here at home the local rag, The Gazette, today continued in its campaign to pretend that Global Warming is nothing to be concerned about, health care for all is too expensive to be implemented in the US, and YES, that water boarding is ‘uncomfortable, not torture’. So what, since at least local students have the ‘liberal’ Colorado College to find refuge in, right?

No, this local institution has graduated Dick Cheney’s wife and both his daughters, too (Lynn, Elizabeth, and Mary). And the college’s board of directors has Suzanne Woolsey , wife of super neo con advocate of fighting a continual, decades long ‘world war’ against the Muslim World, exCIA Head James Woolsey, sitting in as Vice Chair of the Colorado College Board of Trustees, emphasis on VICE.

These women folk ‘belonging to’ such noted torturers and torture advocates, Dick Cheney and James Woolsey, make it just right, that Colorado College and its Department of Political Science should house a proposed ‘Library of Women That Love Torturers’. There, we could see the love letters between these prominent ladies and their torturer husbands, dads, and lovers!

It would be a credit for the local military community’s institutions, too! Visit the Air Force Academy, then step over to Colorado College to see the more feminine side of US militarism, and women who love the torturers behind it. Other cities have their water parks, but Colorado Springs could have their waterboarding park!

Maybe our mayor, Lionel Rivera, and the entire city council will get behind this idea? We can only propose… but Colorado College should not let itself fall behind in the academic love affair with noted American torturers! Now can it? Maybe it could open up by next Halloween?

The sick American public on Iraq and Iran

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Recent polls show that over 60% of Americans now are opposed to continuing the Iraq War. That’s the good news, but now the bad. Zogby poll Some 52% of Americans support a new war, that being one with Iran.

And now the even sicker news. Some 1/3 of the American public thinks it perfectly OK to use nuclear weapons on Iran, too. This is what the US public has arrived at thinking, after helping kill way over 1,000,000 Iraqis in the last decade and a half. Is this sick or what?

How did American society reach such a level of sick criminality? It shouldn’t be believed that it is fear at all. The stated fear of being under the possible threat from foreign WOMD is sheer excuse for supporting a criminality from one’s own government, similar to how Germans once stated a societal fear of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Acting illogical like this is based on a desire to be world thugs, same as it was with Hitler’s ascendancy

Despite the honks of support we get when we do vigils and demonstrations against the Iraq War, we should be cognizant that the American public continues to be overwhelmingly totally supportive of US militarism. They ‘support the troops’. We live in a totally sick national culture of support for cruelty and criminality. We should not forget that for even one second, so what can be done?

The few of us willing to take a public stance of opposing the main stream must be as bold as possible, and continue to show our stance of being against this new war that Hillary Cheney and Dick Clinton are trying to push off on the world. We cannot get sidelined into other issues and activities that seem more comfortable to do. We must be as public as possible about opposing the new set of lies that have been let fly.

No War with Iran! And throw these torturers and assassins that head up our government in jail where they now belong. Supporting their new plans for international terrorism needs to be stopped.

Shame on the majority of our citizens for playing stupid so long. It certainly won’t get you to heaven either here or when you die.

Bush’s token roundup of ‘legal immigrants’

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It didn’t make The Gazette, but Bush’s announced token roundup of 3 ‘legal’ immigrants yesterday is noteworthy for what it says about the great immigration ‘debate’ the Far Right wants us all to engage in. Their script goes that legal immigration is OK with them, but they just want us all to stop the undocumented from flooding our country with their ‘alien hordes’.

But just who are many of these ‘legal’ immigrants that the US government gives visas to? Do you really want them next door to you, instead of some nice foreign farmworker, janitor, or construction worker and their family, that the US likes to use then discard? If we knew the full details, I think that most of us would be more likely to support supposedly illegal immigration long before we would want to support US government sanctioned legal immigration.

The 3 immigrants arrested and jailed by the government are all 3 ex military in their respective South American countries, who were issued US visas based on they’re having been seen as being CIA assets at one time. Now, since they are giving the US bad press in Latin America, the US government is betraying these murderers, torturers, and war criminals they previously had welcomed with open arms to become your next door neighbors and mine.

But don’t for a minute be fooled. There are tens of thousands more of this type of ‘immigrant’ still living amongst us. I bet a good portion of the Vietnamese restaurants in this country have owners that came from such shady backgrounds as the 3 above did, for example.

So don’t be so quick to jump on the gun about the dangers of the supposed ‘illegal’ immigrant, as compared to the ‘legals’. Thank of who is doing the evaluation of who is to be made legal, and to who is then judging whom are to be made out to be criminals? A criminal government like the one running the US these days is likely to welcome their worst foreign criminal buddies into our country, while hunting down good people who would be true assets to America like they were mere wild animals we have to protect ourselves from.

Treat all the immigrants amongst us with dignity, whether they have paperwork are not. And let’s protest an immigration policy that routinely admits some of the world’s worst criminals to live amongst us, all with legal paperwork totally in order all the while mistreating immigrant families and often tearing them apart, like how was done to the slaves of old.

Torturers not Liable, says judge

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The judge called it lamentable, but said he had no authority to oversee military actions oversees, not quite in those words.

He said allowing foreign nationals to sue American military personnel, (although Rumsfeld was appointed to a quasi-military rank, Sec. of Defense) would undermine their ability to make decisions and take actions considered necessary, and pointed out that under such a precedent, Osama Bin Hidin’ could sue because two US presidents had threatened to have him killed.

Imperialism strikes again.

Remember when Jessica Lynch was captured? How dare those Iraqis capture an American who is LIBERATING them!! Bush and Rumsfeld both ORDERED the Iraqis to abide by the Geneva Convention, while constantly stating that US personnel didn’t have to abide by any such laws.

And that US military were above prosecution for war crimes.

Apparently the criminals are above being punished in United States courts as well.

The price of militarism on the militarists

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What is the price of militarism on the militarists themselves? In the case of Pat Tillman it was death instead of wealth, yet others live and still pay a price. In ‘Torturers Toll‘, another Tony other than myself tells the story of how his torturing of innocent people in Iraq, has essentially destroyed his entire self respect for the duration of his life. How can he ever forgive himself for the cruelty he dealt others, all dictated by picking a ‘career’ inside the US military? He can’t, and many other Americans are also in his shoes, too.

These dehumanized participants in mayhem and abuse of their fellow humans reside throughout our super militarized society now. Take the most interesting case of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former cohort of our peanut farmer pastor President, Jimmy Carter. For years now, Brzenzinski used to brag about how he brought down the Soviet Union by starting the Muslim insurgency in Afghanistan that bogged the Soviet Union into ‘their own Vietnam’. The US threw $2 billion PLUS dollars into a covert war waged by puppet troops of the US led by people like Osama bin Laden. Today, Brzenzinski is singing a different tune though, and he is inow nto warning us about militarism, instead of bragging about promoting it.

The Washington Post carries his thoughts in a commentary titled, Terrorized by the ‘War on Terror’. How bizarre to see a terrorist like Jimmy’s former buddy now taking a stance against the likes of Bush and Cheney. Poor Zbigniew! Tears drop from my eyes even, in sympathy for this Donald Rumsfield of an earlier more..uh….innocent time. The man feels terrorized now by the thought that Bush’s gangsterism is undermining the economic system and imperialism that he did so much to prop up. Yes, there is a price to militarism that the militarists themselves will have to pay. Zbigniew worries about that.

For the overwhelming majority of us though, it will be the economic collapse that we will soon most suffer from. And for Brzezinski and his friends, the price to be paid will come from our anger at what unbidled capitalist corruption does to us all. Ultimately, the rich will become isolated as criminals that must be removed from the power they currently hold over us. The total price we will all pay for Iraq will be in many forms and will be seen differently by all of us American citizens. The returning troops are a first Tsunami wave that is hitting our society today. What will society look like afterwards though? Time will tell the now hidden price for turning away from solving our real problems by creating yet worse ones? The price is enormous.

The tiers of torture inside American prisons

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It’s been ages since I saw an article in Time Magazine worth reading, but ‘Are Prisons Driving Prisoners Mad?‘ does ask the right question It even goes so far as to answer the question honestly, and then to conclude that driving prisoners insane is in nobody’s real interests. There is though another question which is, ‘Are the Prisons Deliberately Driving Prisoners Insane?’ I believe that the answer is YES, which in turn leads to yet another question. ‘Why?’

The short article in Time hints that YES, the prisons are deliberately doing what they are doing, and says that it is out of society’s relatively normal urge, which they call ’emotional sense’ to make life harsh for those who have committed brutal acts. They conclude though, that ’emotional sense’ does not make practical sense. That’s because some of these now insane prisoners get eventually released back out into society and there they are even more likely to do harm than before.

What was interesting about this relatively honest Time Magazine commentary, is that nowhere did it ever call what was going on TORTURE. It did say that examining how SuperMax prisons and isolation function to permanently injure people did open up the need for courts to examine these practices and to maybe stop them. That somehow a line had been crossed?

So what amount of torture crosses the line for Time/Life/ AOL and folks like them? Apparently they have some second thoughts about turning people into vegetables and raving psychotics through sensory deprivation? But that is just one tier of torture within America’s Gulags. You get to that tier because other tiers of torture also are in place. SuperMaxes and isolation chambers begin in stages to torture prisoners. Are the earlier stage of solitary confinement deemed normal and appropriate by Time Magazine?

Take for example, the routine separation of prisoners in America from their children and spouses? Is that not a form of torture and prisoner abuse, too. Is that not the first tier towards driving human beings insane by torture? After all, what is a norm in prisoner abuse in American jails is not the norm in many other countries. In other systems of detention, prisoners are not forced into homosexuality, nor separated from the calming effects of holding their babies and hugging their older children. Is it not a form of torture to not allow normal human contact of this type for prisoners that will, in their majority, some day return to society?

Also, is it not torture to physically and emotionally allow some prisoners to torture others. The prison administrators like to charge that this is something that prisoners do to themselves and that they are doing all they can to stop it. Does anybody really believe this? Actually, just like in our foreign wars, the ‘deciders’ in control use one group against another, and afterwards blame them all for being responsible for the mayhem that is presided over. Inside the prison, homosexuals are often used against the others as informants, and heterosexuals are used against the homosexuals. Blacks vs Whites vs Hispanics. Short timers vs lifers, and lifers vs short timers. The prison administrative gang lords it over the prisoner gangs, and the prisoner gangs fight back, but usually against each other. The forms of torture administered within the American prisons are varied and often quite camouflaged. but they are there and constant. The greatest torture in the prisons is arbitrariness. It is used as a constant stick by the legal system.

All this mayhem encouraged amongst the tiers of torture inside American prisons only goes to reinforce the excuse for having so many locked up. ‘See? We got to do it! It’s not that we are cruel, oh hell no! It’s just that they are animals!’ But that’s all really a lie.

The truth is, that America’s tiers of torture inside the prison system were deliberately put into effect because the economically elite ruling class hates the poor, hates the weak, hates the people they rob and abuse, and want to torture them. It’s no mistake at all, and they encourage a mob to support them in their own hatred towards those they despise. The torture is there, because the rulers want to break others down into dysfunctional, mentally and physically destroyed human beings. This is the same nastiness and viciousness of those that burned witches at the stake, lynched innocent Blacks, beat and whipped slaves and prisoners of the past. It’s still going on, though the forms have evolved.

The tiers of torture within the US prison system are twin to the secret rendition centers and Guantanamo where our military abuses POWs held without any due process. So the answer to Time Magazine’s question is…. Yes, US prisons are driving prisoners insane. Thats’ what torture is meant to do, and torture works.

Should we honor the torturers and their work in America, Time? You do in most of your commentaries and ‘news’. We need to stop torturing all prisoners, and not just those held by the military.

Allgone

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Colonel Brian Allgood, West Point grad, army surgeon, Doctor Allgood, died last weekend in a helicopter crash, among a dozen unlucky American soldiers being transported across Baghdad. By all accounts he was an exemplary soldier.
 
Rest in peace. But why should he get peace, and not everybody?

Allgood worked for the Department of Defense whose chief function has been to kill people. As a doctor, Allgood’s particular role was to save people from dying, mainly of course those on our side. Allgood was a surgeon who healed battle injuries, reconditioning combat soldiers, as opposed to a doctor who ensured that subjects of interrogation did not succumb to their torturers before they fulfilled their intelligence potential. Without painting too dark a picture, we should be frank about the Hippocratic Oath in the military.

So let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Allgood’s proper name meant exactly what it said. Let’s say he wasn’t a sadist on a USDD Approved power trip, or a moral dimwit loosed on the sanctioned lawlessness of a battlefield, venting his anger with his sidearm, authorizing gunfire over video monitors, or ordering the destruction of communities for the sake of protecting US ambulance routes; say Allgood wasn’t a blind proponent of US imperialist superiority; say he wasn’t an Eichmann cog enabling the massive machinery of our military to grind its way through the bones of peoples and cultures; say he wasn’t an idealogue of convenience holding out for his honorable discharge, fearing a court-martial for disobeying orders, thinking about his family and his pension.

Say Mr. Allgood was an all-American do-gooder think-gooder. How much can that matter? Isn’t it time he would be the last?

Isn’t it time our soldier-citizens there in Iraq admit to themselves what they are seeing? Soldiers cannot blame a complicit media for keeping them from the darkness of their deeds. When can we expect these gun-ho idealists to figure out that shooting Iraqis is not the way to help them?

Allgood is dead -I wouldn’t be writing about him but for his name. Allgood was killed with a dozen maybe just as red-white-and-true soldiers. And this Blackhawk Down should take with it our national dellusion. Even America’s best are going to be pulled into the buzz-saw. Is this not the face of what will be America’s heavy price: Our innocence shattered, the same that we’ve done to the Iraqis as they look upon the senseless loss? The sacrifice of Allgoods of our own will join the sides of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents.

Bush ‘renders’ US citizen to Israel

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Israel extradites a dissidentFawaz Damra, a US citizen was stripped of his citizenship, held in jail for months for no crime what-so-ever, and finally ‘rendered’ to Israel 2 weeks ago, possibly to be tortured?. His crime? He was born a Palestinian.

He was deported to Israeli military forces without being allowed contact with either his family or his lawyer beforehand. He has 3 teenage daughters and a wife, all who are also US citizens. I bet they are really glad to enjoy the benefits of American citizenship? What a grand civics lesson they are receiving.

It is apparent to more and more American Muslims now, that it is barely legal to be a Muslim here. Muslims do not now have to wear a Crescent like the Star of David that Jews once had to wear for Germans, but that’s more due to advances in surveillance technology. But you really are taking your life in your hands as an American Muslim, to enter your place of worship or to make a charitable donation to a church cause. I bet the family of Damra are really impressed by what religious freedom us Americans have? How protected they must feel in being citizens, too.

Fawaz, upon immigrating to the US, became a moderate imam and headed up the Cleveland mosque. Just the type of person that the US people as a whole need most amongst us, to counter the threats of future terrorism. I’m sure that stripping this man of his citizenship and then deporting him into the custody of Israeli military torturers, is certainly going to do wonders for our National Security, the Bush neo-con Klan are so fond of barfing on about so continuously! They are brilliant strategists for sure!

It shouldn’t surprise us at all, I guess? The US was very good under the Democrats of FDR at turning back Jews trying to escape from the Nazis. But the Zionist Jews of Israel are now our Aryan Empires allies, and so things are the same as back then, yet so very topsy turvy. It is now the Jews that run the show and Arabs that are in ghettos. Looking over all this, of course, is the great Christian Church of imperialism.

Let me mention here, that my last name is really Arabic, though I am really totally Aryan. I wonder how I fit into the computers of our new national security state observation deck? But just for the record let me state, that I am still for jailing the terrorists that run our country. Oh how anti-US I must be with my Arab last name! How suspect my politics.

And to you fascistic dittohead thugs out there? Well, I am ashamed of the US. If you weren’t such ignorant backward bastards, so would you be, too. I wonder just how far out nutty this government terrorism against us will go? Let’s just say, I don’t think I can just go down to the airport and hop on a plane nowadays. But why should I leave? This is my country, and the Right Wingers should get out of it and Go to Hell, not me. They are nothing but traitors to everything decent, they are, and are not the real patriots out there, not in the least. All their good Americanism is a big fat sham, same as the good Germans back 90 years ago were with their ‘patriotism’..

To follow more the history of this case somewhat, go to the Cleveland newspaper’s coverage page on Fawaz Damra

Closed door policy at Senator Allard’s

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Click for more pictures of the PPJPC petition march
This is building security manager Del Suhr blocking our way to Senator Wayne Allard’s office in the Plaza of the Rockies. He told us, in less civil words, what we didn’t understand about Iraq, that we were unpatriotic, that we were Taliban, and he refused to let us pass. In the end Mr. Suhr and his staff permitted two of us to ascend to the Senator’s office under escort.

I didn’t want to argue with the mis-educated man, so I suggested only that he might owe it to everyone, especially the dead, to look into the facts without an O’Reilly topspin. You’re rationalizing illegal war and immoral conduct Mr. Neuhauser and it won’t be enough to say later you didn’t know. Bush is going to hang, as surely as the rest of his cohorts, for the highest crimes against humanity, and you were following his orders, keeping the rails greased.

My friends and I were today trying to present a petition to our senator to urge him to reverse his endorsement of Bush’s torture policy. Torture is universally deplored, even our duplicitous leaders dare not admit they allow it, yet the Torture Bill exclusions and the mounting evidence show otherwise. And while victims continue to suffer at the hands of American torturers, you Mr. Suhr stand guard to hold off their hope of rescue.

When justice comes for those victims I’ll bet you will find playing stupid very humbling.

Baroness Thatcher is sad

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Lady Thatcher is sad today in England. A long time family friend, the Chilean torturer general , Augusto Pinochet, has died. Margaret did what she could to keep this man from ever being held accountable for his crimes against humanity, and she had the help of Tony Blair, too.

Jack Straw, former British Foreign Secretary for Blair and good friend of Condaleeza Rice, allowed the popular Chilean thug to rest in bed under ‘house arrest’. Current Foreign Secretary for Blair, Margaret Beckett, hails Pinochet today as being a model economic genius. Aw shucks, Marge, all he did was follow University of Chicago Professor, Milton Friedman’s advice. And torturerama! All that said, Our lovely Baroness Thatcher today laments that she has seen her last tea with Augusto.

Is it any wonder that our own US and British thugs and warmongers fell in love with the idea of freely and openly using torture themselves? They have been hobnobbing with the Faisals, Saddams, Pinochets, Shah of Irans, Ferninand and Imelda Marcoses of the world for the longest time now. It even almost looks like Margaret Thatcher was carrying on an extramarital affair with Augusto, to see how fiel she has been to the man! And to think that Soviet CPer, Mikhail Gorbachev, also fell in love with the Iron Maiden! Certainly that love affair harmed the Soviet Union’s many peoples even more than Pinochet has harmed Chile.

But what is it that makes the leaders of our Western ‘Democracies’ enamored of the Third World torturers so? It’s like they don’t have even a shred of democratic sensibilities in them, is it not? I guess that’s what being leaders of a corporate model does to them. There is no other explanation. Cut the rebels down; those serfs! Pinochet led the way for them, and now they are sad in London and D.C.

Look at it

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Suspended by feet pants offSomeone’s leaked video footage of an interrogation/torture session in Iraq. Information Clearinghouse has a short clip, thankfully not completely explicit. I’m of two minds about whether to look. Because the scene will haunt you, I advise not looking. On the other hand, what about the poor victims of torture? Are they given such a choice? Look at the outrage we are perpetrating. Be queasy. Live with it. So long as we permit torture, condone it, and subject others to it, the least we can do is have it haunt us.

A word about this clip. Is it real? Who are the torturers? Are those American shouts among the Arabic? Who filmed this session? Could these have been Saddam’s thugs at work previous to the US invasion?

I would submit that those details matter only to the voyeur getting off on the clip. I could care less. No matter what and who we are seeing, we know it depicts what we Americans are doing. We’ve approved torture for use by our military, and American contractors are conducting interrogation sessions beyond what even has been tacitly approved. We know this. We know that our Denfense Department’s definition of permitted duress is the infliction of pain which falls just short of causing organ failure. That’s a lot of pain. The guys in the clip are just getting started.

Spilling the beans about Donald Rumsfield

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Well it has come to this. Janis Karpinski, ex-US general in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison, is ready to spill the beans about her former commander in chief, Donald Rumsfield. See Rumsfield Okayed Abuses And she says she will do it in Germany, where Rumsfield and other top US governmental authorities are actually being tried for war crimes! If somebody had imagined such a scenario a year ago, they would have been deemed insane.

Let’s fact it, America. We’re being led by a group of bloody torturers, thieves, and asssassins. They all deserve to go to jail for their crimes, while we should save mere impeahment for the Democratic Party heavies who went along with the whole Republican scheme to tear Iraq asunder.

Jail Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, and the rest of the sorry group of thugs we currently have running our country, and get our troops entirely out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We should be ashamed of having allowed this level of total corruption to have passed in our supposedly ‘Land of the Free’. It’s more than past time to dump US corporate and governmental corruption out of our public life, simply to keep it from destroying not only us, but also the entire world.

3 Fort Carson snipers die, no reason to cry

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Probably one of the most disgusting lines of work the Pentagon arranges for ‘our troops’ to do, is the role of sniper. And three of these Fort Carson trained assassins just got blown up yesterday in Iraq, according to The Gazette headline today. The article had sort of a tearful quality to it, and this is part of the neo-con rehab for the reputation of snipers, torturers, and thugs of all stripes and varieities.
 
Cybersniper.com will give you even a musical rendition of this sniper rehab propaganda, and another sniper.com site had a collection going to help out US military snipers to get better equipment to shoot down Arabs with. Kind of a Toy for Tots thing, Bless their damned souls. But when most Americans think of snipers, they generally still think of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Charles Whitman, who shot down close to 50 people from the University Tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Let’s hope that people also remember that both got their training in the US Marine Corp, but they might not, I guess?

These three soldiers who just died in Iraq all trained as snipers at Fort Carson, but their dead bodies will head back to their hometowns, where no doubt the local press will talk about how proud their families are of them, how proud their local communities are of them, and how proud America is that they gave their lives in service to Bush and Cheney and the oil companies they represent. Hahaha, that last part is just untrue. The local press won’t mention that part of their ‘sevice’ for sure. My bad. They will be called hereoes, ‘sniper heroes’ even! Tears will wash ashore in remembrance of what fine men they were to choose this fine line of endeavour.

But the time to cry was when they joined the military and began to have the aspiration to train as long distance killers. They threw their lives away THEN, plain and simple. No reason to cry now. RIP, you three made the wrong turn in life. I’m crying for the orphan children of Iraq instead.

Justice delayed, denied, for now

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Not to worry, not to worry. The Bush and GOP plan to indemnify themselves from responsibility for their war crimes will be to scant avail. Let them pass whatever bill they want.

It’s true, justice delayed is justice denied. And it is depressingly ungratifying to see criminals legislate themselves legitimacy. But the representatives at the United Nations have settled for this delay before.

Not long ago our nation was at war with the people of Vietnam. Our imperialist interventions eventually turned toward the people of Cambodia and Laos in illegal acts of aggression. There was absolutely no other nation powerful enough to bring us to account, and because of our veto power on the Security Council, any number of Nations United could not condemn us or stop us.

The U.N. delegates settled for delayed justice. They said, in effect, we may not stop you now, but that doesn’t make what you are doing right or legal. They agreed that there would be no statute of limitations for breaches of international law, neither should any nation be able to exclude itself from the law’s jurisdiction.

In 1968 the U.N. General Assembly made explicit the universal jurisdiction of the war crimes conventions. The Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity ensured that nobody could consider themselves beyond the reach of international rule of law.

Article 1, part (b) defines the universal illegality of war crimes, “even if such acts do not constitute a violation of the domestic law of the country in which they were committed.”

Article 4 reads that no nation’s laws can redefine what are understood to be war crimes, that “statutory or other limitations shall not apply to the prosecution and punishment of the crimes referred to in articles 1 and 2 of this Convention and that, where they exist, such limitations shall be abolished.”

The torturers and warmongers can delay their appointment with the hangman, but the scurryng around to jerrymander the law is a good sign. Bush and co are showing the discomfort of knowing that justice awaits.

Black gloves

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Standard GI uniformCan somebody explain the psychology of our boys in their black gloves? Am I too distracted by the bad-guy movie image? Black gloves remind me of hired assassins, mafioso, bad cops, sadists, interrogators and torturers.
 
Did I miss any good guys who wear black gloves? Scuba divers? Al Jolsen?

The French para-military sent to put down the Algerian Islamic freedom fighters wore black gloves. They were notorious torturers. Did the gloves have to be black to hide the blood?

The Gestapo wore black gloves. And before them Hessian mercenaries. Americans had to fight black-clad Hessians during the Revolutionary War. Is that why black has such an ingrained stigma?

All the more reason why Americans would be sensitive to projecting themselves as heavies. Unless, like Hitler’s Death Head division, we want to create a fearful impression. How about a name? Brown Shirts. Jack-Boots. Black Gloves.