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we really must create a special medal for these military lawyers who have spoken up, and taken action, against the Bushites' vilest of crimes-- torture, suspension of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, rendition, and other violations of the Geneva Conventions and the UCMJ.
The lawyers in this case managed to get the word out before they were gagged. What heroes they are! All of the military lawyers who have stood up to the Bushites have had a lot to lose--including losing their entire careers, hope of advancement, favorable assignments, pensions, and friends, and suffering other kinds of retaliation. Anyone who tries to defend the humanity and rights of these poor prisoners is at great risk. Capt. James Yee, for instance, a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo, was mercilessly harassed with false charges and driven out of the Air Force.
And it does make you wonder WHY. Most of the men being tortured and held for years without charge (--after nightmare flights around the world, wherein they are hooded and tied up, and no doubt beaten and abused) are innocent, in many cases mere bystanders or boy soldiers in general roundups that make little sense. Same at Abu Ghraib--mostly innocents. And then there are the renditions, the secret CIA flights, and the torture dungeons in eastern Europe. So what is all this horror FOR? Is it merely a reflection of the sadism and sickness that is so evident in Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? Or is it cover for something? I tend to see the Bushites as having two motives: a) greed, and attendant lust for power primarily connected to greed ; and b) covering up the heinous crimes they have committed in service to their greed and their attendant lust for power. So...I think the whole torture/imprisonment scene is cover for snuffing witnesses to Bushite crimes, and for finding out who knows what, in order to send death squads out to cover their tracks (--the Bushite money trail to Al Qaeda, Bushite connections to 9/11, Cheney arms dealings, especially nuclear and bio-weapons proliferation, Bushite connections to Saddam, their foiled effort to plant WMDs in Iraq, and whatever they may be doing now, or have done, to manufacture war with Iran, etc.)
The torture and imprisonment make little sense otherwise. Nothing they've done has more alienated the world, and turned them into pariahs in every sphere. They have literally made themselves "radioactive" in the diplomatic world by this unnecessary brutality. Military and intelligence professionals universally DISCOUNT information gained by torture, and believe torture to be highly counter-productive. So WHY have they done it, and on such a large scale, and with such blatant disregard of the law and their own standing in the world? I'd be willing to believe sadism--pleasure at the pain of others--of this gang of psychos. And it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that they view their torture and snuff videos from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and points east for entertainment. These are men who have slaughtered over half a million people, according to the latest count, without a thought, and with not even the slightest justification. And who don't care. Who laugh it off. I saw the photo posted here yesterday of Bush and Rumsfeld sharing a joke and laughing their heads off at Arlington National Cemetery. There is something vile at work there. But I tend to think that especially Cheney and Rumsfeld are more calculating, and are driven by insatiable greed and desire for the power to steal on a massive scale, and get away with it--and that their widespread use of torture and detention is connected to these other crimes.
That's the thing that makes the most sense to me, about the torture and detention. I DON'T think it's racism. They hang out with Prince Bandar and their other good buds in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The racism of it (torturing Arabs and Muslims in some sort of vengeance for 9/11) is attempted manipulation of the peons (us citizens) and the cannon fodder. And I've heard this racism from both stupid citizens and cannon fodder (a couple of instances; I don't think it's widespread). And it was evident in the Abu Ghraib torture photos. Fascists ALWAYS try to stir up these kinds of hatreds. It's their modus operandi. But--with the exception of Hitler--the targeted group has more to do with convenient scapegoats, or money, than it does with any racial vendetta of the powermongers. And that is particularly true of the Bushites. It was Saudis who bailed out Bush Jr.'s failed oil company. It was the Bush Cartel that funded Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Bushites might hate Persians, though, because of the Bush Saudi connections. (The Persians--Iranians--are not fond of Arabs, and vice versa.) (I was just reading a thing the other day in which a Persian linguist was still pissed off that Parsi--the name of the Persian language--had been Arabized into Farsi. That happened about a thousand years ago, I think--and they're still nettled by it!) This Arab-Iranian tension, however, did not stop the Bushites (back when they were Reaganites) from selling arms to Iran to fund the death squads in Nicaragua. As I said, MONEY rules. Money and the power to get lots of it.
That leaves cover up. Snuffing witnesses. And torturing for information on their own criminal exposure. And they throw in a bunch of innocents to cover THAT up--who their real targets are, and what they are detaining them, and torturing and killing them, FOR. And it is why they have been so obdurate about it. They CAN'T let it be investigated. They CAN'T let the Red Cross have access to certain prisoners. They CAN'T have real trials. It's all too dirty.
And I don't think even young children would believe their line that they're torturing people "to keep us safe." Something else is going on. Something so bad that they had to bludgeon their Bushite Congress into legalizing it retroactively, at great political risk to the Republican Party.
I think a lot about those innocents, and even the not-so-innocent. Hogtied and whipped. Beaten. Waterboarded. Lonely, disoriented, gone mad. Screaming in pain. Lost in hopeless depression. Dead, in anonymous graves.
There was a song in the '60s that comes back to me, because I associate it with a dear friend whom I lost, who died by violence. "Guantanamara." A sweet little song. A lovely tune. It seems that all our hopes and dreams for our country--for peace, for justice, for fairness--are wrapped up in that song. And whenever I hear it now, I can only think of Guantanmo Bay and the horrors that have occurred there in our name. It tears at my soul.
I am deeply grateful to the military lawyers who have fought against this horror, and this degradation of our country, and I hope that we will one day be able to honor them, formally, for their amazing moral courage.
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