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POPSA Little Welcome Home from the Torture Masters "As they ridiculed me, they took delight most in mocking letters I had received from readers in England. I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum . The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror."
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POPSUSA: Drowning in Pretend Patriotism? Any doubts as to this later governing impulse of our imperial ambitions were shattered with the recent news that U.S. advisers to our puppet government in the Green Zone of occupied Iraq have worked out agreements for American oil companies to gain control of Iraqi oil fields. But, then again, what did we expect when we elected a Texas oil hustler, and a failed one at that , to be our president? ... AlterNet
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POPSBreathtakingly Offensive Speech ...can be be hilariously inappropriate. Talk about your "unintentional ironies." And no, sadly, this is not satire. He really think that the fact John McCain succumbed to torture proves the concept. But if McCain is a hero... what does that make the people at Gitmo?
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POPSThe U.S. Is Drowning in Pretend Patriotism Washington's "Farewell Address" to the new nation was a warning about the threat of American imperial ambitions and a declaration of his high expectations for a republic of free men: "In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism. ..."
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POPSThe Guatemala Genicide Case Among the witnesses was Jesus Tecú Osorio, survivor of the Río Negro massacre and winner of the Reebok Human Rights Award. Tecú was a child when the military began attacking the communities of Rabinal with increasing intensity during 1981 and into 1982. He was ten years old when he watched the Army and civil patrols (PAC) enter his village of Río Negro on March 13, 1982, and carry out the massacre that left 70 woman and 107 children dead, including his own mother and infant brother.
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POPS"My Guantanamo Diary" All About Naive
And this is how Mahvish Rukhsana Kahn,assesses every one of her clients. She accepts without question detainee stories of widespread torture, brutal interrogation, commonplace Quran desecration and illegal confinement. But she never bothers to reference al Qaeda's "Manchester Manual," that instructs its members to allege torture and abuse as part of their defense against Western legal systems. Besides her sympathies for the "innocent" Afghans, Kahn grew openly contemptuous of the American military men and women serving there. She describes mocking a posted "Soldier's Creed" to a guard and how she had to learn "the military's sneaky speak" - her description of terms commonly used in the detention process. She refers to one female guard repeatedly as "Rodent Face," and repeats one detainee's story about how he found the guards "androgynous" and that "we can find no sign of manhood in this army." If she was bothered by these attitudes, she doesn't mention it.
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POPSMexico Police Video Shows Alleged Torture Practice Notice in the article the man with the American instructor. That's what the United States of America has become the world leader in torture and inhumanity. Land of the free and home of the brave. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. ... and the whole world knows it.
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POPSBarack is a survivalist
A few months ago, when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright first came to national attention, Obama was nearly demure when he said: “I can no more disown (Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother.” He may not have disowned his white grandmother, but Obama didn’t exactly paint a sympathetic — or loving — portrait of her either. He essentially threw her under the bus, saying that she had made racist remarks while he was growing up, a statement that served only to highlight Obama’s own remarkable transcendence. After several weeks of balancing his professed love for Wright with the controversial statements of his chosen father figure and spiritual mentor, Obama eventually left his church of 20 years. But why then, after all those years, did Obama finally find the door? What changed was the degree of his self-interest. As long as Wright was helping Obama burnish his bona fides within the African-American community, it didn’t matter that the minister’s rhetorical flights of fancy border
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POPSYoo Roast Watch John Yoo squirm. Great fun. What is your question? I was wondering if the President could order a suspect to watch reruns of Roseanne?
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POPSChina Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo Swell, just swell, borrowing techniques from communist dictatorships. Well done! Plus: "In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." Brilliant!
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POPSMoral Depravity in the Highest Places
After 7 1/2 years of George W. Bush, much of the media and political establishment — which have never shown much interest in holding Bush to account — now appear anxious to simply move on. They seem determined to leave unexamined the full cruelty and mendacity of the Bush administration, with its unlawful wars and blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions. Moving on is a great idea - once there’s been some accountability, with a full public recognition of wrongdoing, and a commitment to bring about change. Otherwise, nothing will have been learned. The comments of Yoo, who authored top-level internal memos justifying torture and virtually unlimited presidential power, suggest a moral depravity in very high places. That depravity led to the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and “black sites” around the world. The dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, Lawrence Velvel, argues that Bush and top administration offi
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POPSAverting our gaze from U.S. cruelty This article examines the depravity with which the Bush adminsitration has conducted itself since 9/11. It asks some very important questions. But the biggest question to me is why the hell is Bush and his henchmen not being tried for war crimes?
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POPSJohn "Songbird" McCain According to a fellow POW, John McCain sustained some injures after ejecting over North Vietnam, but was never tortured or…
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POPStorture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is the rule, not the exception Shame? Israeli Jews & and their supporters with an ounce of shame? They don't even know the definition of the word. The contradictions are obvious. These are the people stuffing sympathy down our throats around the clock about the brutal Nazis. These creatures are EXACTLY the same and even worse. My question is why should anyone feel sympathy for the profiteering alleged victims who, in the present hour, systematically perform the same torture rituals, justifying such barbaric acts with the same lame excuses?
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POPSThe Club Gitmo Experience Thirty-one flavors of crazy down in Washington today. The lengths people will go to to enable those who'd gladly slit their throats.