Saturday 11th of May 2024

hopeless .....

hopeless .....

These are the photos the American Government doesn't want you to see.....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11944.htm

Recall that immediately after 9/11, U.S. officials put out the official version of what had motivated the terrorists. "They hate America for its freedom and values," they cried. The anger and hatred that had motivated the attackers had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy, U.S. officials claimed.

Yet, today we have President Obama, on the extreme urging of the Pentagon, reneging not only on his campaign promise of "transparency" but also on the commitment U.S. officials made to release the latest batch of torture photos that the Pentagon has kept hidden for some five years.

What are Obama and the Pentagon using as an excuse to keep these photographs secret? They're saying that foreigners will get angry if they see photographic evidence of bad things that U.S. officials have been doing to foreigners as part of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11.

Isn't that an implicit admission that foreigners do get angry over the bad things that the U.S. government does as part of its foreign policy? Wouldn't the same principle apply to the bad things that the U.S. government was doing to people in the Middle East as part of U.S. foreign policy before 9/11?

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22626.htm

The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. As he tours television studios, radio stations and conservative think tanks, the former vice-president hopes to persuade America that only waterboarding kept us safe for seven years.

Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney's direction, "enhanced interrogation" was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of terror or collect actionable intelligence -- the aims that he constantly emphasizes -- but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.

In one report after another, from journalists, former administration officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge: Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida's operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship (which contradicted everything that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between Saddam's Baath Party and Osama bin Laden's jihadists). Indeed, the futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA's black sites in Thailand and elsewhere.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/05/14/cheney/print.html

At the entrance to the White House Correspondents Dinner, Donald Rumsfeld remained by Codepink "You're A War Criminal"

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22622.htm

Speaking on a Supplemental Appropriations bill that would continue to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

"America went to war against Iraq based on a lie. We were told back in 2002 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The previous administration even pursued torture to try to extract false confessions in order to justify the war. It is time to tell the truth. The truth is we should not have prosecuted a war against the Iraqi people. The truth is the Democratic Senate could have stopped the Iraq war in 2002. The truth is we Democrats were given control of Congress in 2006 to end the war. The truth is this bill continues a disastrous war, which has cost the lives of thousands of our soldiers. The truth is the occupation has fueled the insurgency. The truth is the Iraq war will cost the American and the Iraqi people trillions of dollars and as many as a million innocent Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of this war.

"Don't tell the American people that you are ending the war by continuing to fund the war. Don't tell the American people that the war will end when their plans leave 50, 000 troops in Iraq. Don't tell the American people that the way out of Afghanistan is to escalate our presence.

"Get out of Iraq. Get out Afghanistan. Come home America."

plain murder .....

We get reaction to the Senate hearing on torture from private investigator and attorney John Sifton, executive director of One World Research, which carries out research for law firms and human rights groups. Sifton has conducted extensive investigations into the CIA interrogation and detention program.

He says any investigation of Bush administration torture and rendition should include an estimated 100 homicides of prisoners in US custody.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/human_rights_investigator_attorney_john_sifton