Ted Rall has it right, do we listen?

[Savannah Progressive]

Ted Rall clearly demonstrates the out of control Sadists and Fascists that make up the Military. These brainwashed kids are starting to wake up, and again it brings up good questions. First, shouldn't we as Democrats consider putting the idea forward of downsizing our Military to just the National Guard? By doing that, we have a sizable defense force, without the day to day brainwashing and sadisim that makes up our active duty military? Do we need bases in Germany to defend New Mexico? Do we need bases in the Middle east to defend Florida?

By eliminating the Active Military, we could better contain and control the abuse prone elements in our society and prevent them from being able to harm another.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20050930/cm_ucru/whodidyoutortureduringthewardaddy&printer=1;_ylt=AtuyI5Qxd.KpX6LZ29CtgvBkWRIF;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

WHO DID YOU TORTURE DURING THE WAR, DADDY? By Ted Rall

Thu Sep 29, 8:06 PM ET



Or, We Are All Torturers Now

NEW YORK--Never miss the Saturday paper. Because it's the skimpiest and least-circulated edition of the week, it's the venue of choice for lowballing the stories the government can't completely cover up. September 24's New York Times, for example, contained the bombshell revelation that the U.S. government continues to torture innocent men, women and children in Iraq.

An army captain and two sergeants from the elite 82nd Airborne Division confirm previous reports that Bagram and other concentration camps in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan are a kind of Torture University where American troops are taught how to abuse prisoners who have neither been charged with nor found guilty of any crime. "The soldiers told Human Rights Watch that while they were serving in Afghanistan," reports The Times, "they learned the stress techniques from watching Central Intelligence Agency operatives interrogating prisoners." Veterans who served as prison guards in Afghanistan went on to apply their newfound knowledge at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in U.S.-occupied Iraq.

One of the sergeants, his name withheld to protect him from Pentagon reprisals, confirms that torture continued even after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. "We still did it, but we were careful," he told HRW.

The latest sordid revelations concern Tiger Base on the border with Syria, and Camp Mercury, near Fallujah, the Iraqi city leveled by U.S. bombs in a campaign that officials claimed would finish off the insurgent movement. After the army told him to shut up over the course of 17 months--tacit proof that the top brass condones torture--a frustrated Captain Ian Fishback wrote to two conservative Republican senators to tell them about the "death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment" carried out against Afghans and Iraqis unlucky enough to fall into American hands.

"We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them," one sergeant said. "This happened every day...We did it for amusement." Another soldier says detainees were beaten with a broken chemical light stick: "That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny, but it burned their eyes, and their skin was irritated real bad." An off-duty cook told an Iraqi prisoner "to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a...metal bat." The sergeant continues: "I know that now. It was wrong. There are a set of standards. But you gotta understand, this was the norm."

Torture, condemned by civilized nations and their citizens since the Renaissance, has continued to be carried out in prisons and internment camps in every nation. But save for a few exceptions, such as France's overt torture of Algerian independence fighters during the late 1950s, it has been hidden away, lied about and condemned when exposed. Torture is shameful. It is never official policy.

That changed in the United States after 9/11. Current attorney general Alberto Gonzales authored a convoluted legal memo to George W. Bush justifying torture. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld joked about forcing prisoners to stand all day and officially sanctioned keeping them naked and threatening them with vicious dogs. Ultimately Bush declared that U.S. forces in Afghanistan would ignore the Geneva Conventions. By 2004 a third of Americans told pollsters that they didn't have a problem with torture.

Torture has been normalized.

By Monday, September 26, the story of torture at Camps Tiger and Mercury to which New York Times editors had granted page one treatment two days earlier had vanished entirely. Only a few papers, such as the Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times, ran follow-ups.

In his 2000 book "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture" John Conroy presciently describes the surprising means by which democracies are actually more susceptible to becoming "torture societies" than dictatorships: Where "notorious regimes have fallen, there has been a public acknowledgement that people were tortured. In democracies of long standing in which torture has taken place, however, denial takes hold and official acknowledgement is extremely slow in coming, if it appears at all." Conroy goes on to describe the "fairly predictable" stages of governmental response:

First, writes Conroy, comes "absolute and complete denial." Rumsfeld told Congress in 2004 that the U.S. had followed Geneva "to the letter" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The second stage," he says, is "to minimize the abuse." Republican mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh compared the murder and mayhem at Abu Ghraib to fraternity hazing rituals.

Next is "to disparage the victims." Bush Administration officials and right-wing pundits call the victims of torture in U.S. custody "terrorists," implying that detainees--who are not charged because there is no evidence against them--deserve whatever they get. Dick Cheney called victims of torture at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (who, under U.S. law, are presumed innocent) "the worst of a very bad lot." Rumsfeld called them "the worst of the worst."

Other government tactics include charging "that those who take up the cause of those tortured are aiding the enemies of the state" (Right-wing bloggers have smeared me as a "terrorist sympathizer" because I argue against torture); denying that torture is still occurring (numerous Bush Administration officials claimed that Abu Ghraib marked the end of the practice); placing "the blame on a few bad apples" (the classic Fox News-Bush trope); and pointing out that "someone else does or has done much worse things" (the beheadings of Western hostages by Iraqi jihadi organizations was used to justify torturing Iraqis who didn't belong to those groups).

Bear in mind: Conroy wrote his book in 2000, before Bush seized power and more than a year before 9/11 was given as a pretext for legalizing torture.

Citing the case of widespread and proven torture of arrestees by Chicago cops, Conroy noted: "It wasn't a case of five people...doing nothing or acting slowly, it was a case of millions of people knowing of an emergency and doing nothing. People looked about, saw no great crusade forming, saw protests only from the usual agitators, and assumed there was no cause for alarm. Responsibility was diffused. Citizens offended by torture could easily retreat into the notion that they lived in a just world, that the experts would sort things out."

[Dogmudgeon]

1. A good one by Rall

One thing I would like to see explored in some depth is the damage torture does TO the torturers. Rather than trying to let them off the hook, I think making it clear that torturers also suffer (often in the extreme) would go a long way toward eliminating torture in our society.

Abuse under color of official business becomes "the norm", as one of the interviewees said. Lynndie England passively went along with the program at Abu Ghraib and inflicted horrifying humiliation on her captives -- under orders from her devoutly "Christian" illicit lover. Elimination of the conscience is a notoriously easy thing to accomplish.

Torturers often suffer from guilt and shame for the rest of their lives. That's all well and good, but the problem is that no one really knows it. For guilt to be effective as a deterrent to the society that roots it, it must be open. People must know that they can't escape collective responsibility by making a show of righteous anger at a "perp". If more abusers (of all kinds) came out and explained why they abdicated personal responsibility and/or inflicted torture on their own initiative -- and how much guilt and shame they now had to endure -- potential torturers would be deterred from their evil.

Forgiveness would be dependent on honest contrition. Nor should forgiveness be granted quickly or easily. At a minimum, the culpable should at least start to compensate the abused. I do not rule out imprisonment, either, but there is clearly a need for more thorough engagement of conscience. Nelson Mandela revolutionized South African society with this principle, and after the end of Apartheid, a civil war did not erupt. (Yes, I'm aware that there is still a lot of violence in South African society. But there is a lot less than there would be otherwise. The job Mandela began remains unfinished -- but at least it was started.)

Of course, sociopaths wouldn't respond to conscience-based approaches, and reconciliation is an absurdity to many of them. Still, getting the incidence of torture down as far as possible as fast as possible should be a primary goal of the martial professions (police work, soldiering, corrections).

Most torturers start out thinking that what they're doing is no big deal. Soon, most of them can't even close their eyes without seeing their victims, or hearing the screams of agony. A good "supply-side" solution would be to remove the block of numbness abusers have. And we have to remove the block of numbness society has, too.

Making sure that the world knows of the pains of conscience that follow torturers and abusers would swiftly end the acceptability of the practice. The point, as I said, isn't to exonerate the criminal, but to make sure appropriate guilt can be experienced by abusers and those who support them -- and that a whole generation learns that torture both abuses the victim and destroys the persecutor. Reconciliation is only possible when the wrongdoers fully face their wrongdoing -- and their society feels the weight of the consequences.

--p!

[Savannah Progressive]

2. Torture and Concience

The problem is we are assuming that the majority of Military people are like us, compassionate, considerate, and interested in what is best for the people. I think the record speaks for itself.

George Carlin once joked that all our wars have been against people of different colors. We wiped out the Red man, the Brown Man, and then the Yellow man. Our nations motto according to Carlin should be "show us a color and we'll wipe it out".

The torture and abuse is indicitive of the sense of superiority that too many military people have. They believe they are blessed because they are the white male. It's part racisim, part sadism. These are psychotic loons who join the military to get big guns and the chance to murder people. They think they're blessed by god. This is the NRA on Steroids with a dash of the KKK and Nazi's thrown in for good measure.

While some may turn away from that life, and finally see the error of their ways, the majority of these have children, and raise them to be good little jackbooted sadists as well. How many times have we seen pictures of children at KKK rallies? How many kids do you see running around in Army garb today? Any doubt what the little wanna be soldiers will be doing in 10 or 15 years? They will probably be torturing the French for information, possibly under the orders of Jeb Bush and the Fascist cabal that is the Repugnik party.

We must withdraw our military, disband them to a home guard, a defensive only force that is our National Guard. Smaller, because we don't need to be the worlds imperialist force. Why should we spend billions of taxpayer dollars on failed immoral crusades that benefit only Haliburton and Texico?

[teryang]

3. The premeditated torture policy came from the top down

It was a deliberate attempt to compromise and destroy the military, particularly the US Army, as a traditional institution dedicated to the preservation of the US Constitution and the rule of law. Those high ranking officers and Judge Advocates who have not gone along have been ignored, passed over and/or retired in the process of degrading the professionalism of the Army in particular.

The Pentagon is operated for profit of the defense contractors, the aerospace industry, and the oil industry. The well being of its personnel and the undermining of their dedication to the principles of the Constitution and the law of land warfare are a target of the fascists who run our regime. Privatization, tooth to tail, Armed Forces lite, and advocacy of torture and the repudiation of international law are all part of the corporate/fascist attack on our traditional military institutions.

[cassiepriam]

4. It is not just BushCo, it is the whole damn country. Sociopaths.

We are a people who have lost our way. Greedy, ignorant,
apathetic and racist. No moral compass. Bush represents us well.
He has only tapped into our dark and ugly side.