FRONTLINE: How George W. Bush and Dick Cheney brought torture to America

[kpete]

Tonight, Frontline will air a documentary called Secrets, Politics, and Torture, directed by Michael Kirk, about how President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney institutionalized torture in American politics and government.

............

The first was the crushing ideological pressure to torture that came from the top of the Bush administration. The most striking example of this came directly after 9/11, when al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured. Since the CIA had zero personnel with experience in interrogation, the FBI was initially brought in. Ali Soufan, a highly experienced interrogator and Muslim who speaks fluent Arabic, took charge of the questioning. He deployed the traditional police model, which focuses on building rapport and a criminal case. Almost immediately, Zubaydah gave up Khalid Sheik Mohammad as a member of al Qaeda.

.............

The second development occurred when the torture bill came due. The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was a colossal stain on Bush's legacy, and by late 2005 much of the administration had turned against the CIA program. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a push inside the administration to announce an official stop to the program. At a high-level meeting in the White House, everyone but Cheney agreed with Rice, and she seemed to have won. A speech was arranged.

But as happened so often in the Bush administration, Cheney went to Bush personally afterward, and convinced him that Rice was wrong. Rice went to the speech expecting Bush to disavow "enhanced interrogation," but instead he embraced it, and claimed it had produced valuable intelligence (it hadn't).

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Finally, unrepentant and unpunished CIA torturers, defensively looking to clear their names and reputations, inserted pro-torture agitprop into the Hollywood blockbuster Zero Dark Thirty. Acting on extensive CIA interviews, director Katherine Bigelow conveyed the strong impression that torture is what led to the killing of Osama bin Laden:

...........

As a result, it's very likely America will torture again.
http://theweek.com/articles/555720/how-george-w-bush-dick-cheney-brought-torture-america

[underpants]

1. Will tape it

[freshwest]

2. And here I thought things that happened in the Americas were torture.

Or the founding of many nations and religions globally. Some of us don't look at the prism of the Bush Reign of Terror as being the only standard. Torture, like slavery and other brutality is part of what makes Humanity suck as a whole.

Warning: GRAPHIC description:

Since ~ unlike animal predators, who flay their prey alive, teeth and claws ripping the flesh offf, crushing bones and organs or eviscerating them while they scream (only briefly because of shock) in agony, tearing limbs off by pulling them out of their sockets, throwing small bodies in the air (to tenderize the meat or stun them, you take you pick) and dropping them down again to gleefully pounce upon ~ Humans are presumed to have the sentience to recognize pain in another body just the same as they would feel, and choose to say NO, THIS IS EVIL, SO I WILL NOT DO THIS.

Instead, knowing full well in their own flesh, what the pain to be inflicted will feel like, still choose to be evil, and act like an animal predator but without their excuse, choose to gleefully do so with all the joy of the pride of an animal in its first kill.

People suck, have always sucked and will continue to do so. The only way is for them to be 'civilized,' allegedly, but even that didn't stop them from doing the same evil to those fellow travelers on Earth, as they still saw it as superiority, is to evolve somehow. I sure don't see it here.

So while in modern times, we find what BushCo did as a negation of Human Rights, they just followed true to form. And showed the worst example. And millions of Americans, including Evangelicals, declared it a good.

And untold thousands joined in the effort, to annihilate the masses of people in the Middle East, in a bloodbath. But we should not make any mistake, that there were any angels on either side, with the Taliban hacking off limbs in sports stadiums for alleged crimes, women and children being raped, sold and killed, and every other thing that is allowed.

Is our argument that we needed to become more brutal than Saddam, or Osama, or the rest of the RWNJs of the region? Or that we lost our minds? I go with the former and it's going to get us all killed. What you are, is what you will recieve.



Sorry, most likely off-topic. I didn't play the game that we are supposed to be playing here, but I'm sick of dancing around the edges of this issue.

[kpete]

3. your rant

some humans

"Choose to be evil"

as always......



all I can do these days,
is IMAGINE PEACE

kp

[napkinz]

4. ...

[napkinz]

5. war criminals