This administration has gone to great lengths to illuminate religious beliefs (Christianity) and nationalism (Patriotism) as the headlights shining forth from their vehicle of agenda. With God and Country as their justification, they seem to possess the fervor of the nation. Why is it that millions of good Christian citizens would rather accept the mere suggestion of piety and righteousness, than actually defend their beliefs?
For as the Bush administration uses the words of the faithful as a shield to advance a global dominion strategy and relgious belief as their richeous sword, they seem be able to break the very tenents that serve to define faith itself. Lets us examine one of the foundational teachings of Christianity to see how the neo-conservative strategy of corporate colonialism has hyjacked our morality and ethical foundation.
In Dante's Inferno, part one of the 11th century Florentine poet's The Divine Comedy, considered the greatest literary statement of middle ages Europe, he detailed the structure of the seven deadly sins. They represented the fixation on one's self over others—in order of severity, culminating in pride, the worst of all sins.
Lust - uncontrolled or illicit sexual desire or appetite, an overmastering desire or craving.
Gluttony - wasting of food and drink through overindulgence, hoarding, or as punishment
Greed - desire to possess more than one needs, or has need or use for.
Sloth - laziness, complacency or wastefulness - causing others to have to work harder
Wrath - inappropriate feelings of rage, revenge, denial or punitive desire that falls outside the justice system
Envy - jealousy - coveting - resentment of others for their possessions
Pride/Vanity - desire to hold ones self out of proper position toward God or others. Or desire for self importance or attractiveness in relation to others or to self. Or as Danté himself referred, "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor"
Each sin is a particular way of failing to love the creator with all one's resources or to love others as much as self. Take a few moments to look into each deadly sin and ask yourself: How has my government, as an entity, respected or rejected these vices? How have most (not all) corporate citizens respected or rejected these vices? (enron, halliburton, general electric, exxon, oscar mayer, monsanto, conagra, bridgestone, sears, or walmart) Now the important one... just between you and whatever creator you respect. How have you respected or rejected these vices?
Lust- How is it that we condone our nation and its corporation's use of sex and coveting? How is it that our military regularly preys upon the religious fortitude of its detainees by using women interrogators who act suggestively, touch inappropriately and fake the smearing of menstrual blood on the faces and Korans of their captives? And why do we choose to defend these actions as free speech and our rights, rather than creating a climate where this behavior is not encouraged? Do we really need a law to tell us what is moral and immoral? Do we really need to better define Article Three of the Geneva Conventions?
Gluttony- How can there be no moral concern when as a nation we consume 80% of the planets resources yet constitute less than 8% of its population? How is it that we, the wealthest and most technologically adavanced nation on the Earth, allow gluttonous exploitation of our nation's underprivileged as well as those in developing nations round the world? Why is it that we turn our heads when it comes to holding our government or the corporations accountable for creating impoverished conditions throughout the world? Are our stock dividends worth our immortal souls?
We look away as our leaders force lesser nation's to turn on their own peoples rights, in order to finance debts incurred through intentional WTO lendings that served to help first-world corporations better extract their resources. Is it that we don't want our stock portfolios to suffer at the hands of true justice being served?
And how easily their agenda translates to the third deadly sin, Greed. Our insane quest for materialism and consumption is unparalleled in human history— Never before in the history of mankind have so many been marginalized to profit so few. Few of us are capable of distinguishing our roles as consumers from that of us trying to lead a good life. Our nation's willingness to break down trade barriers to enrich the corporations who's interest profits the shareholders rather than stakeholders, serves to disenfranchise the working and middle class in favor of the ultra-wealthy who benefit most by their stock holdings. But by giving the everyone a chance to benefit in shareholding, they make it increasingly hard for us to descern right from wrong.
We are victims of our own corporate creations-and we alone have the power to reign in the monster. But we feel powerless in the face of huge corporate interests. And how has our greed been further exacerbated by our society elevating material possessions and wealth generation to god-like levels-look at how our culture treats Donald Trump or Bill Gates, or Snoop Dog and Paris Hilton... look at your neighbors and their need to show wealth, perhaps even look in the mirror.
The very nature a corporation is to externalize costs and maximize profits.... and along the way make a product or service. Because publicly held corporations are beholden to shareholders first... their greed, their need for ROI is insatiable. If companies do not continually show profit, then heads roll. Job security is directly linked to the bottom line and the only goal is keeping it ever increasing. Greed set in motion by a political agenda that removes any oversight or governance to the corporations is the pandoras box of out times.
Sloth means taking the easy way out. Got a remote? Got a microwave? instant coffee, tv dinner? While it may seem these items help us stay "on-the-go", they rob us from the ability to take refuge in the simple pleasures of the mundane. While we're busy flip-pin channels and pop-pin pizza rolls in the micro for the kids. We're actually getting less pleasure from each event in and of itself. We no longer enjoy the pleasure of making a meal, of grinding the coffee or brewing it up... we can cram seven actions into any given moment... when we should really be assessing why our society demands so much of us every day? Sloth can be read two ways, just being lazy, but also being fixated on gadgets that are a means not and end.
Wrath- is like shoot-in fish in a barrel... oops ... how wrathful of me! Road Rage, gang violence, hostile take-overs, hostile workplaces, domestic violence, all shown on prime time television with our babies staring wide-eyed into the set... studies show a child born in 1990 will have seen more the 18,000 acts of violence And then there's our DOD and government. Yes we elect new politicians periodically... but we don't elect our military leaders do we? We may choose to listen to them or not, but they are doing their jobs every day... and they have a vested interest as does anyone working- to insure viability and fruitfulness for their chosen career- don't they? hmmm.... should make you wonder.
And what about us, we don't like terrorists, or russians, or hmong or liberals or republicans we don't take direct action for our hatred, but we do tend to look away or marginalize an incident or action taken against one of those demographics.... they deserved it, serves em right... gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet...
Look at this administration and its press to allow for torture by our forces. Even one act of torture is heinous, that's why it is illegal by the Geneva Convention and countless UN sanctions—but not the US— we're the 800lb gorilla yet we need to commit torture to keep our freedom? Careful how you answer that one.
Envy... gee, who's oil is it anyways? for that matter who's everything is it anyways? Our nation assassinates leaders it doesn't do not like, it kills thousands of civilians who don't think its right to allow our corporations to descend on their lands exploit them of everything down to the water they drink and the air they breathe... and somehow we're considered the ones being hurt by policy? We train hundreds of soldiers out of Ft Benning in the School of the Americas to become government sponsored terrorists... enforcing martial law over anyone trying to organize the peoples to resist our corporate domination.... no coveting here, right?
How bout at home, we are being conditioned to covet and envy? Every prime time show pits people against each-other to outdo the other and win something. We envy the winners, we envy the apprentices and fantasize how we'd do much better if in their shoes... Soap operas teach us all about hypocrisy and envy. Erika Kane has won how many daytime emmys for being the ultimate bitch... or was that Joan Collins an Dallas????
The last and worst of all deadly sins, pride. It is pride that emboldens a nation to become wrathful,jealous, greedy or vane. And I know from my studies in spirituality, regardless of the flavor, every religion asks you to let go of your ego to embrace the universal truth... or something like that. What does the military do to condition recruits in boot-camp? Break their spirit and they become like putty. Then you reshape them into your ideal. Same with prisoners, break their pride and they become like sheep. How have we been flaunting our pride? How is it that we have to be important, have to be noticed, have to attract attention?
Take a moment to reflect on these teachings, how is it we can allow such violations to mankink, both at home, and abroad?
Listen to Dante's description of our fate
THIE INFERNO
The Inferno begins on Holy Thursday of the year 1300, a significant holiday, "In the middle of our life's journey". Dante is thirty-five years old, half of the biblically alloted age of 70, lost in a dark wood (allegorically, contemplating suicide), assailed by beasts (sins) he cannot evade, and unable to find the "straight way" to salvation. Conscious that he is ruining himself, that he is falling into a "deep place" where the sun is silent, Dante is at last rescued by Virgil after his love Beatrice intercedes on his behalf, and he and Virgil begin their journey to the underworld.
Dante and Virgil enter the Gate of Hell, on which is inscribed the famous phrase "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" Virgil guides Dante through the nine circles of Hell. The circles are concentric, each new one representing further and further evil, culminating in the center of the earth, where Satan is held, bound. Each circle's sin is punished in an appropriately revengeful way to fit the crime. The nine circles are:
Circle 1. Limbo-the unbaptized and virtuous pagans, who did not accept Christ. They are unable to reach Heaven and denied God's presence for eternity.
Circle 2. Lust, depicted by the lovers in an embrace, never to touch each other again.
Circle 3. Gluttons, face-down in the mud and gnawed apart by a monster.
Circle 4. The greedy and indulgent, forced to push giant rocks in opposite directions.
Circle 5. The wrathful, fighting each other in the swamp-like water of the river Styx, and the slothful, trapped beneath the water.
The lower parts of hell are contained within the walls a city surrounded by the river Styx. These are the active (rather than passive) sins; first are the sins of violence:
Circle 6. Heretics, trapped in flaming tombs.
Circle 7. The violent. These are divided into three rings:
Outer ring: The violent against people and property, in a river of boiling blood.
Middle ring: The violent against themselves—suicides —turned into thorny black trees [Uniquely among the dead, they will not be bodily reincarnated after the final judgment. Where others will continue to occupy Hell (and Heaven) in corporeal (rather than merely spiritual) form, suicides—because they alienated themselves from their own bodies—spend eternity in the body of a tree, their own corpses hanging from the limbs.] Also punished in this circle are profligates, chased perpetually through the trees by ferocious dogs. They are held here with the suicides because, during Dante's time, one's property is seen as an extension of one's physical body. Hence, doing violence to one's property is kin to suicide.
Inner ring: The violent against God, art, and nature—blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers—in a desert of flaming sand where fire rains from the sky (Cantos 14 through 17).
The last two circles of Hell punish sins of malice, or sins of the intellect; that is, sins involving conscious fraud or treachery, and can only be reached by descending a vast cliff into the "pit" of Hell:
Circle 8 The fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge. This is divided into ten ditches:
Ditch 1: Panderers and seducers, running forever in opposite directions, whipped by demons.
Ditch 2: Flatterers, steeped in human excrement.
Ditch 3: Faith Preachers, placed head-first in holes, flames burning on the soles of their feet.
Ditch 4: False prophets, their heads on backwards so they can only see what is behind them.
Ditch 5: Corrupt politicians, trapped in a lake of burning pitch.
Ditch 6: Hypocrites, made to wear brightly painted lead cloaks.
Ditch 7: Thieves, chased by venomous snakes, who after being bitten, turn into snakes themselves.
Ditch 8: Fraudulent advisors, trapped in flames.
Ditch 9: Sowers of discord, whose bodies are ripped apart, then heal, only to be attacked again.
Ditch 10: Falsifiers, counterfeiters, perjurers, and impersonators. Each group is punished by being afflicted with a different type of disease.
The passage to the ninth circle contains classical and Biblical giants.
Circle 9. Traitors, distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent, in that their acts involve knowingly and deliberately betraying others, are frozen in a lake of ice. Each group of traitors is encased in ice to a different height, ranging from only the waist down to complete immersion.
This is divided into four concentric zones:
zone 1 (Caïna): Traitors to their kindred. Named for Cain.
Zone 2 (Antenora): Traitors to political entities, such as party, city, or country
Zone 3 (Ptolomæa): Traitors to their guests. Named for Ptolemy, captain of Jericho, who invited Simon the High Priest and his sons to a banquet and there killed them.
zone 4 (Judecca): Traitors to their lords and benefactors. This is the harshest section of Hell, containing Satan, who is eternally consuming the bodies of Brutus and Cassius for assassinating Julius Caesar, and the head of Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus, after whom this zone is named.This is where Satan is trapped in the frozen central zone.I wonder where Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz will end up?
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Rambo Coast Guards!
News broke of a story today that the Coast Guard has been quietly preparing for creating 34 live-weapon shooting zones along the coastlines of the Great Lakes without public participation!
Seems they plan to replace life rafts with 50cal machine guns on our Coast Guard cutters and helicopters as their mission under the Bush administration (and the post-9/11 era) has transformed from one of search and rescue to hunt and kill. After all, we all know Canadian terrorists, like AlQaeda, hate our freedom and wish to harm our boaters and beachgoers.
This negates a 200 year old treaty with Canada raising tension with our neighbor to the north and puts boaters and citizens in harms way. Is this the "New American Century" you voted for in 2000 and 2004?
Here the red areas denote where live-fire exercizes are to be held throughout the year. Citizens are somehow going to be notified to avoid these areas while or brave lifeguards learn how to use eco-friendly hot lead to "save" victims.
Now our Coast Guard most often thought of as lifeguards with serious toys.... David Hasselhofs with a flying "Kits" are being trained to be executioners from the skies! The NeoCon global war on terror has come home and lets hope they never have orders to shoot civilians.... but how far away are we from that???
Particularly if you pay attention to the immigration strategy the Bush Administration is executing... Do you know who is and who is not an American? These days the definition is under debate. During Rumsfeld's 2005 BRAC Plan (Base Re Alignment and Closure) hundreds of military bases are being disarmed and/or closed... oddly too, they seem to be the ones concentrated closer to urban centers -typically in Blue States. While this may not seem important, think of the job loss and economic trouble closings of this magnitude bring... and oddly, all the Bases being fortified are in Red States bringing jobs and further partisan afiliation by constituants.
Now understand too, many of these closed bases have plans to convert them to prisons and detention centers.... by Halliburton subsidiary KBR(Kellogg Brown and Root) who won no-bid contracts from Homeland Security worth millions. So gigantic prisons are being built outside urban population centers whos lower income citizens will suffer most by the loss of jobs related to the military.. not many rich kids are in the army... But when poor people don't have jobs, they usually get into trouble don't they?
Here's the deal, Bush alienates and impoverish's Blue State urban centers, imprisons blue voters as they become further economically strapped, enriches and alligns red state support and moves weapons away from citizens, concentrating them in privatized bunkers in only a few locations in the country. Gee, if the citizens ever felt a need to rise up against a tyrannical leader, they'd have no means to do it now wouldn't they? And now the Coast Guard would be waiting at the shoreline to gundown these citizen terrorists... hmm go George!
Seems they plan to replace life rafts with 50cal machine guns on our Coast Guard cutters and helicopters as their mission under the Bush administration (and the post-9/11 era) has transformed from one of search and rescue to hunt and kill. After all, we all know Canadian terrorists, like AlQaeda, hate our freedom and wish to harm our boaters and beachgoers.This negates a 200 year old treaty with Canada raising tension with our neighbor to the north and puts boaters and citizens in harms way. Is this the "New American Century" you voted for in 2000 and 2004?
Here the red areas denote where live-fire exercizes are to be held throughout the year. Citizens are somehow going to be notified to avoid these areas while or brave lifeguards learn how to use eco-friendly hot lead to "save" victims.
Now our Coast Guard most often thought of as lifeguards with serious toys.... David Hasselhofs with a flying "Kits" are being trained to be executioners from the skies! The NeoCon global war on terror has come home and lets hope they never have orders to shoot civilians.... but how far away are we from that???
Particularly if you pay attention to the immigration strategy the Bush Administration is executing... Do you know who is and who is not an American? These days the definition is under debate. During Rumsfeld's 2005 BRAC Plan (Base Re Alignment and Closure) hundreds of military bases are being disarmed and/or closed... oddly too, they seem to be the ones concentrated closer to urban centers -typically in Blue States. While this may not seem important, think of the job loss and economic trouble closings of this magnitude bring... and oddly, all the Bases being fortified are in Red States bringing jobs and further partisan afiliation by constituants.
Now understand too, many of these closed bases have plans to convert them to prisons and detention centers.... by Halliburton subsidiary KBR(Kellogg Brown and Root) who won no-bid contracts from Homeland Security worth millions. So gigantic prisons are being built outside urban population centers whos lower income citizens will suffer most by the loss of jobs related to the military.. not many rich kids are in the army... But when poor people don't have jobs, they usually get into trouble don't they?
Here's the deal, Bush alienates and impoverish's Blue State urban centers, imprisons blue voters as they become further economically strapped, enriches and alligns red state support and moves weapons away from citizens, concentrating them in privatized bunkers in only a few locations in the country. Gee, if the citizens ever felt a need to rise up against a tyrannical leader, they'd have no means to do it now wouldn't they? And now the Coast Guard would be waiting at the shoreline to gundown these citizen terrorists... hmm go George!
Saturday, August 26, 2006
eVote Machines are Hacked!
This unedited testimony under oath deserves to be seen in its entirety. Right till the end it only gets more outrageous. Will somebody please explain why this is not on every news show and why no one has been indicted. The election is only weeks away. Voters who see this might want to order an absentee ballot and "cross their fingers?"
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Retroactive Immunity
Here at least some newscasters in mainstream media are able to pierce the bubble of silence that surrounds the insane GOP takeover of our government.Bush, flanked by his partners in crime, Senate leader Bill Frist and House head Haskert, ramrod a bill through Congress that renders them immune from any prosecution for war crimes back-dated to 9/11/2001!
Sounds like their lawyers informed them that the recent judgement by the Supreme Court upholding the Geneva Convention Rules puts them squarely at risk of being tried as the War Criminals they are!
At least Nixon had the decency to have President Ford do his dirty work!
Though it popped up this once the big screen it is hardly making a wave in the rest of the news media.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Americo® The Bounty's Full
America the Beautiful. School teacher, Katharine Lee Bates, wrote this historic anthem in 1893. She wrote a second version in 1904 and her final version in 1913. It remained in tact until in 2004 when a majority of American voters were again exploited for their beliefs. A corrupt administration had devisively used religious, moral and free speech issues–once held sacred from partisanism by our forefathers–to swing an election and keep them in power. With a “majority” mandate, they engaged their directives and began systematically dismantlng America’s Bounty.
A disillusioned American Patriot rewrote the verse to instill the thirst– To regain the nation’s life, liberty and pursuit of true free-market Democracy–from the devisive forces intent on conquest and imbalance under the guise of freedom and democracy. The following is the rewritten version from Charlie Koenen and then final draft of Katherine Lee Bates Anthem.
For since 2000, and substantially more since the 2004 election, laws and constitutional ammendments are being rewritten like this anthem, to tell a different story. Regain you thirst for Liberty and Justice for All the world.
Our precious flag should fly overturned, above our country in disarray.
–to symbolize the battlecry - let TRUE Liberty Justice and Freedom Reign.
AmeriCo® the Bounty’s-Full 2004
O beautiful for acid skies,
For bioengineered waves of grain,
For purple mountaintop strip mines
Whose wastestreams foul our plains!
America! America!
God’s mandate’s charged to thee
And crown the Hoods to destroy the good
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for corporate greed
Whose motives hide from us
A thoroughfare for capital
To pave the wilderness!
American! American’t!
God rewrite every law,
Confirm thy goal is no self-control,
Class separation for all!
O beautiful more nations to free from strife.
Who’s resources we herd without a word
Their existence not considered life!
AmeriCo®! Halliburtono!
May God permit our course
Till all the death is nobleness
Net profits gain divine!
O beautiful the Patriot Act
That sees inside our souls
With reams of Rights to vanquish whole
Unstopped by human fears!
Amerikan! Amerikan’t!
God’s righteousness unweilds
And jail our Just, conceal the trust
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for righteous cries,
For pockets lined with gold,
While interest groups jump through the hoops
Above the law –free reign!
Americo! WeOwnTheOil!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls we tax for earth and air
No music-without a fee!
O beautiful for pilgrims feet,
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America ! America !
God shed his grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through
Wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!
O beautiful for glory-tale
Of liberating strife
When once and twice,
for man's avail
Men lavished precious life !
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!
–Katharine Lee Bates 1913
O beautiful for workers feet,
Who’s production hours we increase
A thoroughfare for profit beat
Less benefits let them reap!
Amarikar ! AmeriCo® !
Thy love of God makes blind your free
Confused by Hoods
Vote against what’s good
And in the end you’ll see!
Once beautiful our glory assailed
Terror resides in us
With twisted vice,
From down on high
Our leaders have their way
Amerigas! Monsanto!
God forgive us for our deeds
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
O beautiful recaptured dream
Reclaim our solemn States
We’ll rid the scene
Of these foul machines
With a renewed refocused faith!
America! America!
God may we one day smile again
When nobler men keep once again
Truth, Justice and Liberty!
–Charlie Koenen 2004
No greater a call for patriotism has been made in generations.
Our enemy is within us- our ignorance and alienation of one another.
UNITED WE STAND–DIVIDED WE FALL
America the Beautiful - 1913
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife.
Who more than self the country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!
A disillusioned American Patriot rewrote the verse to instill the thirst– To regain the nation’s life, liberty and pursuit of true free-market Democracy–from the devisive forces intent on conquest and imbalance under the guise of freedom and democracy. The following is the rewritten version from Charlie Koenen and then final draft of Katherine Lee Bates Anthem.
For since 2000, and substantially more since the 2004 election, laws and constitutional ammendments are being rewritten like this anthem, to tell a different story. Regain you thirst for Liberty and Justice for All the world.
Our precious flag should fly overturned, above our country in disarray.
–to symbolize the battlecry - let TRUE Liberty Justice and Freedom Reign.
AmeriCo® the Bounty’s-Full 2004
O beautiful for acid skies,
For bioengineered waves of grain,
For purple mountaintop strip mines
Whose wastestreams foul our plains!
America! America!
God’s mandate’s charged to thee
And crown the Hoods to destroy the good
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for corporate greed
Whose motives hide from us
A thoroughfare for capital
To pave the wilderness!
American! American’t!
God rewrite every law,
Confirm thy goal is no self-control,
Class separation for all!
O beautiful more nations to free from strife.
Who’s resources we herd without a word
Their existence not considered life!
AmeriCo®! Halliburtono!
May God permit our course
Till all the death is nobleness
Net profits gain divine!
O beautiful the Patriot Act
That sees inside our souls
With reams of Rights to vanquish whole
Unstopped by human fears!
Amerikan! Amerikan’t!
God’s righteousness unweilds
And jail our Just, conceal the trust
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for righteous cries,
For pockets lined with gold,
While interest groups jump through the hoops
Above the law –free reign!
Americo! WeOwnTheOil!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls we tax for earth and air
No music-without a fee!
O beautiful for pilgrims feet,
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America ! America !
God shed his grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through
Wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!
O beautiful for glory-tale
Of liberating strife
When once and twice,
for man's avail
Men lavished precious life !
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!
–Katharine Lee Bates 1913
O beautiful for workers feet,
Who’s production hours we increase
A thoroughfare for profit beat
Less benefits let them reap!
Amarikar ! AmeriCo® !
Thy love of God makes blind your free
Confused by Hoods
Vote against what’s good
And in the end you’ll see!
Once beautiful our glory assailed
Terror resides in us
With twisted vice,
From down on high
Our leaders have their way
Amerigas! Monsanto!
God forgive us for our deeds
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
O beautiful recaptured dream
Reclaim our solemn States
We’ll rid the scene
Of these foul machines
With a renewed refocused faith!
America! America!
God may we one day smile again
When nobler men keep once again
Truth, Justice and Liberty!
–Charlie Koenen 2004
No greater a call for patriotism has been made in generations.
Our enemy is within us- our ignorance and alienation of one another.
UNITED WE STAND–DIVIDED WE FALL
America the Beautiful - 1913
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife.
Who more than self the country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Colbert-Truth to Power!
This year's White House Correspondent's Dinner had the greatest roast of a standing administration in history. Steven Colbert stood a mere meter from pResident Bush as he spoke truth to power in a way only Colbert could do. Faces in the crowd, the most influental newsmakers on earth, sat with their mouths agasp, blank stares as they witnessed a defiancy never before seen to standing power.
Several of Bush's aides and supporters walked out during Colbert's speech, and one former aide said that the President had "that look that he's ready to blow."
Prior to Colbert, Bush mocked himself with the help of a celebrity impersonator, Steve Bridges. Many bloggers would criticize the fact that most news sources focused on Bush and his impersonator, and devoted little space to Colbert, sometimes not even mentioning him at all.
Truly the greatest day for America's true patriots.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Helen's Question
Helen Thomas, the "First Lady" of the press corps who's covered every President since JFK has been silent in the Bush Administration.... until now. pResident Bush decided to field one question from her and she didn't waste the moment.
A beleagered Bush fumbled for his correct soundbite, and clearly messed up.
But what is really interesting beyond the fact that pResident Bush has no concept of what his Administration has him doing, is the way he will fight like a caged animal to defend whatever it was they told him he was doing. Listen to his intensity as he defends his righteousness.
Now that should scare even the most ideologically challenged of his constituants...shouldn't it?
A beleagered Bush fumbled for his correct soundbite, and clearly messed up.
But what is really interesting beyond the fact that pResident Bush has no concept of what his Administration has him doing, is the way he will fight like a caged animal to defend whatever it was they told him he was doing. Listen to his intensity as he defends his righteousness.
Now that should scare even the most ideologically challenged of his constituants...shouldn't it?
Friday, March 10, 2006
Habeas Schmabeas
Today, Arlen Spector did a 180, now supporting Unitary Executive Privilege! Now he says FISA laws are antiquated...who's been over to pay him a visit? Bush speaks about Iraq... says the tv lies... don't believe your eyes... believe my lies! This must be what it was like to be a Jew in 1932 Germany.... difference being that Hitler WAS elected.
Please listen to this broadcast of This American Life with Ira Glass....search for Episode #310 Habeas Schmabeas 3/10/06 in the 2006 archive.
Tune to the audio story that discusses Habeaus Corpus. It is very interesting. The right of habeas corpus has been a part of this country's legal tradition longer than we've actually been a country. It means the government has to explain why it's holding a person in custody. But now, the war on terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that the prisoners should not be covered by habeas – or even by the Geneva Conventions – because they're the most fearsome terrorist enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?
Who are the terrorists now?
PS. When Seton Hall Professor Baher Azmy discusses the classified file of his client, Murat Kurnaz, in ActOne, he is referring to information that had previously been made public and published in the Washington Post. That material has subsequently been reclassified.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Happy Mothers Day
Julia Ward Howe, founder of Mother's Day, author of the Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870 following the Civil War, called for peace and disarmament.
An excerpt follows:
From the voice of a devastated Earth
a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel
with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Today we celebrate her courage and efforts... by screening the film The Promise of America.
An excerpt follows:
From the voice of a devastated Earth
a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel
with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Today we celebrate her courage and efforts... by screening the film The Promise of America.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Bush erasing access to history
The Bush Administration has been secretly reclassifying thousands of documents in a clandestine Review Process away from scrutiny. This administration is covering its tracks and erasing history. Can you spell Fascism?
read it
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years. Because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy - governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved - it continued virtually without outside notice until December 2005.
Now if a history professor, a writer, or a citizen is in possession of information formerly declassified but now considered secret—they can be arrested and convicted.
The most secret administration in US history... with most of its advisors having served for Nixon and during the Iran-Contra scandals.... now they are covering up history.
got an opinion, share it. its a free country
................ for now!
Monday, February 20, 2006
Torture Followup
In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the United States found it had no intelligence assets; it had no way to contain the insurgency, and they -- the U.S. military was in a state of panic. And at that moment, they began sweeping across Iraq, rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib
prison. At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. He brought his techniques with him, the manual of his techniques. He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.
In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452. He orders in essence, a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions, sensory disorientation, cultural attacks and the use of BISCUIT teams with psychologists.
And it was Rumsfeld in the margins of a memo he wrote, "I stand at my desk eight hours a day." he has a specially made podium desk,"How come we're limiting these stress techniques to four hours?"An with that... our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld opened the door to the hideous torture images we again see today.
Of course he is not liable and as his ministers of propaganda all say "The bad apples have been brought to justice.... America should not be subjected to seeing these aggredious images... they only serve to stir discontent." But in April 2004 when the photos first went public CBS news and the Times wrote this was the work of creeps, just abuse by a few people on the night shift. “Recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” In other words, we could blame these bad apples. But these photos clearly show all the textbook trademarked and newly revised C.I.A. psychological interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain, sensory disorientation,and cultural psyche attacks.
You might be interested to know only seven low-ranking soldiers have been charged and found guilty of these acts. Lindy Englund and Charles Grainer will serve less than ten years in prison for their roles in this scandal. The latest release of photos show thousands of examples of abuse and torture.... not just a few bad apples.
And just last week, while American peace activist Teresa Grady and four others, known as the St. Patricks Four, were sentenced to four months in prison each for spilling their own human blood at a military recruiting station in upstate New York to protest
the Iraq war, a military jury in Colorado decided not to jail an Army interrogator even though he was found guilty of negligent homicide in the torturing and killing of an Iraqi detainee.
Today's news reported that a judge has thrown out the case against Maher Arar, the Canadian-Syrian who was arrested while on lay-over at JFK airport. Who became our first case of known "extraordinary rendition" a man who was secretly flown to Syria, kept in an under-ground “grave-like” cell, subject to sensory disorientation for almost a year. Clearly,this administration is laying the groundwork for a system that operates above the law and without regulation. From torture to invasion of privacy. Now that the highest court in the land has been seeded with justices that have proven records against civil rights in favor or corporate or government rule, we can expect to see many more such abuses to human rights.
"Torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. There's an absolute ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control."—Alfred McCoy
When the Bush administration gave those orders for, basically, techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on terror, one could only hope it was their intention that these be limited to top al-Qaeda suspects. But within months, we were torturing hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in 2003, through these techniques, we were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis. And you can see in those photos, beyond the details of the techniques that have been described, you can see how once it starts, it becomes this Dantesque Hell, this kind of play-palace of the darkest recesses of human consciousness.
That’s why it’s necessary to maintain a no-torture policy. There is no such thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical torture, that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country came up with, that's impossible. That cannot operate. It will inevitably spread.
But, one of the problems of talking about this topic in the US, is that we've been conditioned to regard all of this as “torture light,”— not really torture. And we're the only country in the world that does that. The U.N. Anti-Torture Convention defines torture as the infliction of severe psychological or physical pain. The U.N. convention in 1994 banning torture gave equal weight to psychological and physical techniques. But we alone, as a society, somehow exempt all of the psychological techniques.
The reasons date back to the way we ratified the U.N. convention in the first place, and who did the drafting.Back in the early 1990s, when the US was emerging from the Cold War, we began a process of disarming ourselves and getting beyond all of these cold war techniques, trying to sort of bring ourselves in line with rest of the international community. When President Clinton sent the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention to the U.S. Congress for ratification in 1994, he included four detailed paragraphs of reservations that had, in fact, been drafted by the Reagan administration, and when he adopted them without so much as changing a semicolon. He basically outlawed only physical torture. The reservations were carefully written by then Department of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, to avoid one word —in the 26 printed pages. The word, "mental" was exempted allowing psychological torture.
Now, another problem for the United States, as well, was when the U.S. Army, again under the watchful eyes of Dick Cheney, re-wrote the Army Field Manual in 1992, with the intention of strictly observing the letter and the spirit of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention and other similar treaties.
So what happened is that when the Defense Department gave orders for extreme techniques, when General Sanchez gave orders for his techniques beyond the Army Field Manual, what that meant is when the soldiers like Grainer, were actually investigated, they had committed crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They were prosecuted, and sent to jail. No ties up the ladder... except to Cheney?
Most Americans think that it's over, that in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the McCain Torture Ban (Detainee Treatment Act), barring all inhumane or cruel treatment. Written, at least the first draft, by Sen John McCain who endured torture while a POW in Korea. Most people think that’s it, that it’s over, right?
In reality, the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Dick Cheney went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain refused. The National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, went to McCain and asked for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. Again, he refused. So they started amending it introducing loopholes.
The Bush ordered torture right at the start of the War On Terror... President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation saying, “I don't care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.” Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles.
One, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. —The Unitary Executive Theory.
Two, plausible defenses for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture. There were two, first they played around with the word "severe," that torture is the infliction of severe pain. That's when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, “’severe’ means equivalent to organ failure,” in other words, right up to the point of death. The other, was that they came up with the idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty.
The third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts.
Now, in the process of passing the McCain torture prohibition, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said “I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do
to defend America.”
The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that's a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A. torturers.
The third principle was – is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory,
and last month -- the Bush administration has gone to federal courts and said, “Drop all of your habeas corpus suits from Guantanamo.” There are 160 of them. They've gone to the Supreme Court and said, “Drop your Guantanamo case.”
They have, in fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their actions.Just like that shown by Canadian Citizen, Maher Arar, wrongfully imprisoned for a year in a secret Syrian torture prison, subjected to textbook C.I.A. counterintelligence techniques, and now, powerless to do anything about it.
Welcome to the new United States of America.
prison. At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. He brought his techniques with him, the manual of his techniques. He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.
In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452. He orders in essence, a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions, sensory disorientation, cultural attacks and the use of BISCUIT teams with psychologists.And it was Rumsfeld in the margins of a memo he wrote, "I stand at my desk eight hours a day." he has a specially made podium desk,"How come we're limiting these stress techniques to four hours?"An with that... our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld opened the door to the hideous torture images we again see today.
Of course he is not liable and as his ministers of propaganda all say "The bad apples have been brought to justice.... America should not be subjected to seeing these aggredious images... they only serve to stir discontent." But in April 2004 when the photos first went public CBS news and the Times wrote this was the work of creeps, just abuse by a few people on the night shift. “Recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” In other words, we could blame these bad apples. But these photos clearly show all the textbook trademarked and newly revised C.I.A. psychological interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain, sensory disorientation,and cultural psyche attacks.
You might be interested to know only seven low-ranking soldiers have been charged and found guilty of these acts. Lindy Englund and Charles Grainer will serve less than ten years in prison for their roles in this scandal. The latest release of photos show thousands of examples of abuse and torture.... not just a few bad apples.
And just last week, while American peace activist Teresa Grady and four others, known as the St. Patricks Four, were sentenced to four months in prison each for spilling their own human blood at a military recruiting station in upstate New York to protest
the Iraq war, a military jury in Colorado decided not to jail an Army interrogator even though he was found guilty of negligent homicide in the torturing and killing of an Iraqi detainee.
Today's news reported that a judge has thrown out the case against Maher Arar, the Canadian-Syrian who was arrested while on lay-over at JFK airport. Who became our first case of known "extraordinary rendition" a man who was secretly flown to Syria, kept in an under-ground “grave-like” cell, subject to sensory disorientation for almost a year. Clearly,this administration is laying the groundwork for a system that operates above the law and without regulation. From torture to invasion of privacy. Now that the highest court in the land has been seeded with justices that have proven records against civil rights in favor or corporate or government rule, we can expect to see many more such abuses to human rights.
"Torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. There's an absolute ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control."—Alfred McCoy
When the Bush administration gave those orders for, basically, techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on terror, one could only hope it was their intention that these be limited to top al-Qaeda suspects. But within months, we were torturing hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in 2003, through these techniques, we were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis. And you can see in those photos, beyond the details of the techniques that have been described, you can see how once it starts, it becomes this Dantesque Hell, this kind of play-palace of the darkest recesses of human consciousness.
That’s why it’s necessary to maintain a no-torture policy. There is no such thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical torture, that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country came up with, that's impossible. That cannot operate. It will inevitably spread.
But, one of the problems of talking about this topic in the US, is that we've been conditioned to regard all of this as “torture light,”— not really torture. And we're the only country in the world that does that. The U.N. Anti-Torture Convention defines torture as the infliction of severe psychological or physical pain. The U.N. convention in 1994 banning torture gave equal weight to psychological and physical techniques. But we alone, as a society, somehow exempt all of the psychological techniques.
The reasons date back to the way we ratified the U.N. convention in the first place, and who did the drafting.Back in the early 1990s, when the US was emerging from the Cold War, we began a process of disarming ourselves and getting beyond all of these cold war techniques, trying to sort of bring ourselves in line with rest of the international community. When President Clinton sent the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention to the U.S. Congress for ratification in 1994, he included four detailed paragraphs of reservations that had, in fact, been drafted by the Reagan administration, and when he adopted them without so much as changing a semicolon. He basically outlawed only physical torture. The reservations were carefully written by then Department of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, to avoid one word —in the 26 printed pages. The word, "mental" was exempted allowing psychological torture.
Now, another problem for the United States, as well, was when the U.S. Army, again under the watchful eyes of Dick Cheney, re-wrote the Army Field Manual in 1992, with the intention of strictly observing the letter and the spirit of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention and other similar treaties.
So what happened is that when the Defense Department gave orders for extreme techniques, when General Sanchez gave orders for his techniques beyond the Army Field Manual, what that meant is when the soldiers like Grainer, were actually investigated, they had committed crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They were prosecuted, and sent to jail. No ties up the ladder... except to Cheney?
Most Americans think that it's over, that in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the McCain Torture Ban (Detainee Treatment Act), barring all inhumane or cruel treatment. Written, at least the first draft, by Sen John McCain who endured torture while a POW in Korea. Most people think that’s it, that it’s over, right?
In reality, the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Dick Cheney went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain refused. The National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, went to McCain and asked for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. Again, he refused. So they started amending it introducing loopholes.
The Bush ordered torture right at the start of the War On Terror... President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation saying, “I don't care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.” Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles.
One, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. —The Unitary Executive Theory.
Two, plausible defenses for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture. There were two, first they played around with the word "severe," that torture is the infliction of severe pain. That's when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, “’severe’ means equivalent to organ failure,” in other words, right up to the point of death. The other, was that they came up with the idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty.
The third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts.
Now, in the process of passing the McCain torture prohibition, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said “I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do
to defend America.”
The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that's a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A. torturers.
The third principle was – is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory,
and last month -- the Bush administration has gone to federal courts and said, “Drop all of your habeas corpus suits from Guantanamo.” There are 160 of them. They've gone to the Supreme Court and said, “Drop your Guantanamo case.”
They have, in fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their actions.Just like that shown by Canadian Citizen, Maher Arar, wrongfully imprisoned for a year in a secret Syrian torture prison, subjected to textbook C.I.A. counterintelligence techniques, and now, powerless to do anything about it.
Welcome to the new United States of America.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
CIA Torture Techniques
What lies behind the shocking images of torture at Abu Ghraib? Lets look at the history of the CIA and torture techniques. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the recently released images of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib show a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The U.S. made a pledge against torture when Congress ratified the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 - but it was ratified with reservations that exempted the CIA’s psychological torture method.
A new expose gives an account of the CIA’s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture spanning fifty years. It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods, distributing them across the world from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book, written by UW-Madison history professor, Alfred McCoy is titled "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror." He also authored “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.”
If you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain.
And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost. From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, resulting in the creation of the 1963 C.I.A. Counterintelligence Manual called Kubark. Spending over $1 billion a year they tried to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass-persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered -- they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked.
What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill. The first breakthrough came at McGill. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain.
All he did was have student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately a breakdown. And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their heads. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.
The second major C.I.A. breakthrough came in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, “You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.” And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, and the kidneys shut down.
The C.I.A. incorporated this at the Technical Services Division. Most of the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD experiments that we heard about for years, but ultimately those gave a negative result. All the drugs didn’t work. They caused disorientation and hallucinations, the information gleened through interrogation couldn't be trusted. But, what did work was this: Sensory Disorientation and Self-Inflicted Pain.
And in 1963, the C.I.A. codified these results in the so-called KUBARK Counterintelligence Manual. If you just type the word “KUBARK” into Google, you will get the manual, an actual copy of it, on your computer screen, and you can read the techniques. Read the report. But also read the footnotes, because that's where the behavioral research is. These findings produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture, and it's the one that's with us today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm. Let’s make one thing clear. Americans refer to this often times in common parlance as “torture light.” Psychological Torture, people who are involved in treatment tell us it’s far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture. As Senator McCain said, himself, last year when he was debating his torture prohibition, faced with a choice between being beaten and psychologically tortured, I'd rather be beaten. Okay? It does far more lasting damage. It is far crueler than physical torture. This is something that we don't realize in this country. Now, another thing we see is those photographs is the psychological techniques, but the initial research basically developed techniques for attacking universal human sensory receptors: sight, sound, heat, cold, sense of time. That's why all of the detainees describe being put in dark rooms, being subjected to strobe lights, loud music, okay? That’s sensory deprivation or sensory assault. Okay, that was sort of the phase one of the C.I.A. research. But the paradigm has proved to be quite adaptable.
One of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, was to appoint General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo because the previous commanders were too soft on the detainees. General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.
And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called “Biscuit” teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.
Now armed with these techniques, andthe Bush "Unitary Exuective Theory" the administration will be able to renegotiate the interpretation the Geneva Convention. Showing they will not physically harm prisoners... but will attain their objectives through much crueler methods, PsyOps.
A new expose gives an account of the CIA’s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture spanning fifty years. It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods, distributing them across the world from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book, written by UW-Madison history professor, Alfred McCoy is titled "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror." He also authored “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.”
If you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain.
And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost. From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, resulting in the creation of the 1963 C.I.A. Counterintelligence Manual called Kubark. Spending over $1 billion a year they tried to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass-persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered -- they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked.
What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill. The first breakthrough came at McGill. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain.
All he did was have student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately a breakdown. And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their heads. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.
The second major C.I.A. breakthrough came in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, “You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.” And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, and the kidneys shut down.The C.I.A. incorporated this at the Technical Services Division. Most of the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD experiments that we heard about for years, but ultimately those gave a negative result. All the drugs didn’t work. They caused disorientation and hallucinations, the information gleened through interrogation couldn't be trusted. But, what did work was this: Sensory Disorientation and Self-Inflicted Pain.
And in 1963, the C.I.A. codified these results in the so-called KUBARK Counterintelligence Manual. If you just type the word “KUBARK” into Google, you will get the manual, an actual copy of it, on your computer screen, and you can read the techniques. Read the report. But also read the footnotes, because that's where the behavioral research is. These findings produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture, and it's the one that's with us today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm. Let’s make one thing clear. Americans refer to this often times in common parlance as “torture light.” Psychological Torture, people who are involved in treatment tell us it’s far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture. As Senator McCain said, himself, last year when he was debating his torture prohibition, faced with a choice between being beaten and psychologically tortured, I'd rather be beaten. Okay? It does far more lasting damage. It is far crueler than physical torture. This is something that we don't realize in this country. Now, another thing we see is those photographs is the psychological techniques, but the initial research basically developed techniques for attacking universal human sensory receptors: sight, sound, heat, cold, sense of time. That's why all of the detainees describe being put in dark rooms, being subjected to strobe lights, loud music, okay? That’s sensory deprivation or sensory assault. Okay, that was sort of the phase one of the C.I.A. research. But the paradigm has proved to be quite adaptable.
One of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, was to appoint General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo because the previous commanders were too soft on the detainees. General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called “Biscuit” teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.
Now armed with these techniques, andthe Bush "Unitary Exuective Theory" the administration will be able to renegotiate the interpretation the Geneva Convention. Showing they will not physically harm prisoners... but will attain their objectives through much crueler methods, PsyOps.
Black Friday!
U.S. Judge Dismisses Maher Arar Lawsuit
A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Canadian citizen against the U.S. government for detaining him and sending him to Syria where he was jailed and tortured. Maher Arar was the first person to mount a civil suit challenging the U.S. government policy known as extraordinary rendition. In October 2002, he was detained at JFK airport while on a stopover in New York. He was then jailed and secretly deported to Syria. He was held for almost a year without charge in an underground cell not much larger than a grave. Charges were never filed against him. The federal judge, David Trager, said he could not interfere in the case because it involves crucial national security and foreign relations issues. In Canada, Arar called the decision "very disappointing [and] emotionally very hard to digest." Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights said the law group would still try to proceed with the case. She said "How can this Administration argue before a Federal Court Judge that its practice of outsourcing for interrogation under torture constitutes a state secret? This is a dark day indeed."
Senate Republicans Block Investigation Into NSA Spying
This update on http://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifthe controversy over President Bush's warrant-less domestic spying program - on Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans have blocked a proposed investigation into the operation. On Thursday, Republican Senator Pat Roberts, chair of the Intelligence Committee said, his panel decided not to conduct an investigation. Roberts said he reached an agreement with the White House to consider legislation and provide more information to Congress on the eavesdropping program. The ranking Democrat on the committee -- Sen. John Rockefeller -- said "Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee once again abdicated its responsibility to oversee the intelligence activities of the United States."
Abu Ghraib abuse far more pervasive than ever revealed!
Lyndi England wasn't the only one torturing prisioners as she claimed. 546 pictures of dead prisoners, 660 pornographic photos, 93 videos of abuse and 1,325 images of torture...
Bush tries to sneak the sale of six major US seaportsto the Arabs!
NEW YORK, PHILADELPHIA, NEW JERSEY, NEW ORLEANS, MIAMI & BALTIMORE
UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.... the arabs! Sold to United Arab Emerites for a paultry $6.8 Billion?
I thought this land was our land.... did anyone get to vote on this sale???
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11404058/
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021706O.shtml
A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Canadian citizen against the U.S. government for detaining him and sending him to Syria where he was jailed and tortured. Maher Arar was the first person to mount a civil suit challenging the U.S. government policy known as extraordinary rendition. In October 2002, he was detained at JFK airport while on a stopover in New York. He was then jailed and secretly deported to Syria. He was held for almost a year without charge in an underground cell not much larger than a grave. Charges were never filed against him. The federal judge, David Trager, said he could not interfere in the case because it involves crucial national security and foreign relations issues. In Canada, Arar called the decision "very disappointing [and] emotionally very hard to digest." Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights said the law group would still try to proceed with the case. She said "How can this Administration argue before a Federal Court Judge that its practice of outsourcing for interrogation under torture constitutes a state secret? This is a dark day indeed."
Senate Republicans Block Investigation Into NSA Spying
This update on http://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifthe controversy over President Bush's warrant-less domestic spying program - on Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans have blocked a proposed investigation into the operation. On Thursday, Republican Senator Pat Roberts, chair of the Intelligence Committee said, his panel decided not to conduct an investigation. Roberts said he reached an agreement with the White House to consider legislation and provide more information to Congress on the eavesdropping program. The ranking Democrat on the committee -- Sen. John Rockefeller -- said "Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee once again abdicated its responsibility to oversee the intelligence activities of the United States."
Abu Ghraib abuse far more pervasive than ever revealed!
Lyndi England wasn't the only one torturing prisioners as she claimed. 546 pictures of dead prisoners, 660 pornographic photos, 93 videos of abuse and 1,325 images of torture...
Bush tries to sneak the sale of six major US seaportsto the Arabs!
NEW YORK, PHILADELPHIA, NEW JERSEY, NEW ORLEANS, MIAMI & BALTIMORE
UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.... the arabs! Sold to United Arab Emerites for a paultry $6.8 Billion?
I thought this land was our land.... did anyone get to vote on this sale???
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11404058/
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021706O.shtml
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Alito's Volkswagon
Samuel Alito’s interviews are nearly complete. He has shown us what nice person he is, and how intelligent he is. But so was serial-killer, Ted Bundy. Point being, we are nominating him to a lifetime position deciding the law of the land for the next several generations. While Ted Bundy was able to present himself as a friendly, intelligent person, enough to charm unsuspecting women into his Volkswagen Beetle, his views of right and wrong, were very different from those of the average citizen. So too, the next Supreme Court Justice must be more than just a nice person, they must have a clear and proven record of doing things favorable to the average citizen.
Samuel Alito's position on Corporate power and self-determination is his Bundy-like secret. In this age of unregulated corporate power and globalization, corporations like Enron and Tyco are permitted to grow without governance. Monopolies compete to own vast amounts of our nation's airwaves, information and resources. Corporate lobbyists like Jack Abermoff buy off politicians with little oversight. Corporations who make billions on war profits also own the major news media outlets that ordinary citizens watch to make their opinions about the war. We badly need a judicial branch that treats corporate entities with the same objectivity it treats a person.
But since most justices, and ordinary citizens, own stock in these "Corporation-people", it becomes harder to be objective, or trace a conflict of interest. Could a Justice preside over a case involving someone that owed him money? Would we tolerate a Justice deciding a precedent that while not directly affecting a friend or relative, a precedent that would enrich his friends and family? We are no longer talking about the fate of one person... In 1980, when General Electric and Dr Chakrabarty petitioned the Supreme Court to allow for the patenting of a synthesized life-form (bacteria) that was believed to eat oil, the 5 to 4 decision also opened the door to patenting life itself. These are the "incidental" repercussions that will occur more frequently with a corporate-leaning court.
Samuel Alito's record shows clearly his stance on cases favoring Corporate rights over that of the individual. If we accept Alito to replace the former moderate, swing-voting Sandra Day O'Connor, we will be authorizing a Supreme Court who's balance is decidedly in favor of Corporations. The facts prove it, the political ties re-enforce it, and in a time of great corruption of the highest branches of government, are we sure we want this choice, a court with a Bundy-like secret? The sooner we demand our majority leadership question his behavior, his record, and not his outward appearance, the sooner we may avoid giving our nation to a Supreme Court with a Corporate agenda.
What we need to fear is not whether Roe v Wade is overturned, but what rights will be given to the already omnipotent Corporations? Will this justice suddenly have an epiphany and decide giving corporations immunity from prosecution for their actions is not in the best interest of the average citizen? Or will we jump in the Volkswagen Beetle with him and go for what might be the ride of our life?
Samuel Alito's position on Corporate power and self-determination is his Bundy-like secret. In this age of unregulated corporate power and globalization, corporations like Enron and Tyco are permitted to grow without governance. Monopolies compete to own vast amounts of our nation's airwaves, information and resources. Corporate lobbyists like Jack Abermoff buy off politicians with little oversight. Corporations who make billions on war profits also own the major news media outlets that ordinary citizens watch to make their opinions about the war. We badly need a judicial branch that treats corporate entities with the same objectivity it treats a person.
But since most justices, and ordinary citizens, own stock in these "Corporation-people", it becomes harder to be objective, or trace a conflict of interest. Could a Justice preside over a case involving someone that owed him money? Would we tolerate a Justice deciding a precedent that while not directly affecting a friend or relative, a precedent that would enrich his friends and family? We are no longer talking about the fate of one person... In 1980, when General Electric and Dr Chakrabarty petitioned the Supreme Court to allow for the patenting of a synthesized life-form (bacteria) that was believed to eat oil, the 5 to 4 decision also opened the door to patenting life itself. These are the "incidental" repercussions that will occur more frequently with a corporate-leaning court.
Samuel Alito's record shows clearly his stance on cases favoring Corporate rights over that of the individual. If we accept Alito to replace the former moderate, swing-voting Sandra Day O'Connor, we will be authorizing a Supreme Court who's balance is decidedly in favor of Corporations. The facts prove it, the political ties re-enforce it, and in a time of great corruption of the highest branches of government, are we sure we want this choice, a court with a Bundy-like secret? The sooner we demand our majority leadership question his behavior, his record, and not his outward appearance, the sooner we may avoid giving our nation to a Supreme Court with a Corporate agenda.
What we need to fear is not whether Roe v Wade is overturned, but what rights will be given to the already omnipotent Corporations? Will this justice suddenly have an epiphany and decide giving corporations immunity from prosecution for their actions is not in the best interest of the average citizen? Or will we jump in the Volkswagen Beetle with him and go for what might be the ride of our life?
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
2000 Dead
PeaceAction-WI organized a candle light vigil to commemorate the 2000th soldier to die in Iraq. Hundreds of people lined Lincoln Memorial Drive holding candles and carrying signs. Cars beeped their horns in support, some voiced their disdain for the message. Police on horseback stood watch on the perimeter and a few television crews were on hand collecting file footage. Several leaders spoke at the event including myself. Here is the speech I gave at the rally in Milwaukee Wisconsin USA.
Thanks George welcome everyone,
I'm Charlie Koenen and I've prepared something for today,
Peace Action and United for Peace and Justice also prepared for this day... Cindy Sheehan prepared for this day.... People in cities across the nation have prepared for this day...
Unfortunately, another family of an American soldier has to make real the preparation for this day.
And now we gather to send out a message locally and to join people in cities nationally— to SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER- to say BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
We stand here today to tell the Bush Administration that a WAR BASED ON LIES will never succeed... That A WAR BASED ON LIES that sends our troops out to kill and destroy nations based on false fears and forced sense of duty... will not be tolerated.
We stand united with our soldiers in the knowledge that their duty and devotion to the founding principles of our great nation IS worth fighting and dying for!
But we also must stand together in our outrage against a system of corruption and manipulation that has misled our nation into acts of hideous aggression against people of other nations.
We must stand united in our sense of duty and patriotism to speak truth to power. To risk alienation, persecution and discrimination in order to end this unjust occupation.
We honor our soldiers and their role as defenders of freedom and liberty. We realize that their duty and honor is preserved by their strength and allegiance.
This strength and allegiance is also why so many families seem to object to our actions. For in battle they are trained to not ask why, but rather to do or die. Unfortunately for the families of the 2000 soldiers, this duty has become forever real.
But if their duty is to hold rank and follow command, then what is our role as citizens in this democracy? Are we not the conscience of our governing body? Do not we have the duty to question our leadership?
Our obligation to this great nation is not merely to march to the polls every two or four years to choose a leader--- to read a few talking points or sound bites and then pull a lever or pencil out a spot on a ballot card...
No our obligation is to put in office, leadership that we think will help advance our nation and be true to our sense of place in the world, AND to hold that leadership accountable for the trust and allegiance we granted them through our democratic election process.
It seems to clear that we as a nation have lax in our duty to hold leadership accountable. We are so busy trying to carve out a niche in this world for ourselves and our families... that we have slackened our duty to the Democratic process we so enjoy and defend.
But today we stand united, and today we are beginning to see once again that there is hope- That we the people will again hold our democratic process high and see that liberty and justice prevail over the abuse and greed, of the fear and contempt, that seems to have taken control while many of us were busy with our lives.
Today we mark a milestone, and today as further revelations unfold and incriminate the leadership of our great nation, we have the chance to take back our democracy,
to see that questioning authority, and speaking truth to power can bring about change.... can make right the wrongs, and can make us strong and sensible once again.
We are but one planet, with one people.... the sooner we realize this...the sooner we find the true way to end terror
through love and by peace.
thank you and keep growing the effort....
Patriotism is a duty not an elective.
Come out tonight- Bring forth your light -
Share in our plight - Keep real the fight....
to Make Peace our Right!
Bring them home now!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
