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The Media Is Focusing On the WRONG Senate Torture Report
The Big Story Torture Everyone Is Missing
While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is very important, it doesn’t address the big scoop regarding torture.
Instead, it is the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S. torture program.
Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committee’s report on torture in 2009, explained:
The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting FALSE confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures [and] waterboarding.
McClatchy filled in important details:
Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.” Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
The Washington Post reported the same year:
Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.
Colin Powell's former chief of staff (Colonel Larry Wilkerson) wrote in 2009 that the Bush administration's "principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda."
Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
As Truthout reported:
[Torture architect] Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
***
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is EXPLOITATION, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”
In a subsequent report, Truthout notes:
Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD’s most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA’s teaching academy, said …. “This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence” …. “If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using.”
Interrogators also forced detainees to take drugs … which further impaired their ability to tell the truth.
And one of the two main architects of the torture program admitted this week on camera:
You can get people to say anything to stop harsh interrogations if you apply them in a way that does that.
And false confessions were, in fact, extracted.
For example:
- A humanitarian aid worker said: torture only stopped when I pretended I was in Al Qaeda
- Under torture, Libyan Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi falsely claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD
- President Bush mentioned Abu Zubaydah as a success story, where torture saved lives. Zubaydah was suspected of being a high-ranking al-Qaida leader. Bush administration officials claimed Zubaydah told them that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein. He also claimed there was a plot to attack Washington with a “dirty bomb”. Both claims are now recognized to be false, even by the CIA, which also admits he was never a member of al-Qaida.
- One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
- The so-called 9/11 mastermind said: “During … my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear” (the self-confessed 9/11 “mastermind” falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit)
And the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees. And the government went to great lengths to obstruct justice and hide unflattering facts from the Commission.
According to NBC News:
- Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
- At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”
- The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves
Details here.
Today, Raymond McGovern – a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials – provides details about one torture victim (Al-Libi) at former Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry's website:
But if it’s bad intelligence you’re after, torture works like a charm. If, for example, you wish to “prove,” post 9/11, that “evil dictator” Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and might arm the terrorists with WMD, bring on the torturers.
It is a highly cynical and extremely sad story, but many Bush administration policymakers wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11 and thus were determined to connect Saddam Hussein to those attacks. The PR push began in September 2002 – or as Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card put it, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
By March 2003 – after months of relentless “marketing” – almost 70 percent of Americans had been persuaded that Saddam Hussein was involved in some way with the attacks of 9/11.
The case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a low-level al-Qaeda operative, is illustrative of how this process worked. Born in Libya in 1963, al-Libi ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought he would know of any Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.
The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI’s Dan Coleman, who “lost” al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, “Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
CIA interrogators elicited some “cooperation” from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.
By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had “provided” unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi’s treatment improved as he expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq “to learn about nuclear weapons.”
Al-Libi’s claim was well received at the White House even though the Defense Intelligence Agency was suspicious.
“He lacks specific details” about the supposed training, the DIA observed. “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”
Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, told the Senate, “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
***
President Bush relied on al-Libi’s false Iraq allegation for a major speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”
And Colin Powell relied on it for his famous speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, declaring: “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”
Al-Libi’s “evidence” helped Powell as he sought support for what he ended up calling a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, in the general effort to justify invading Iraq.
For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.
You see, despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from early 2004 when al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda’s connections with Iraq, a subject “about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”
According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and “placed him in a small box” for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to “tell the truth.” When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he “was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back” and then was “punched for 15 minutes.”
After Al-Libi recanted, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. By then, however, the Bush administration had gotten its way regarding the invasion of Iraq and the disastrous U.S. occupation was well underway.
***
Intensive investigations into these allegations – after the U.S. military had conquered Iraq – failed to turn up any credible evidence to corroborate these allegations. What we do know is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bitter enemies, with al-Qaeda considering the secular Hussein an apostate to Islam.
Al-Libi, who ended up in prison in Libya, reportedly committed suicide shortly after he was discovered there by a human rights organization. Thus, the world never got to hear his own account of the torture that he experienced and the story that he presented and then recanted.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime at the time of al-Libi’s death, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.”
Paul Krugman [whatever you think of his economics, he got this one right] eloquently summarized the truth about the torture used:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Torture Program Was Part of a Con Job
As discussed above, in order to “justify” the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create a false linkage between between Al Qaida and Iraq. And see this and this.
But this effort started earlier …
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam”.
He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush’s March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
Suskind also revealed that “Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official ‘that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.’ ”
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 on many occasions.
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September 2003 – a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC’s Tim Russert asked him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:
It’s not surprising that people make that connection.
And even after the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection, Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime , that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this.
Even then-CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office.
And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.” And see this.
The administration’s false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11 was at least as important in many people’s mind as a reason to invade Iraq.
So the torture program was really all about “justifying” the ultimate war crime: launching an unnecessary war of aggression based upon false pretenses.
Postscript: It is beyond any real dispute that torture does not work to produce any useful, truthful intelligence. Today, the following question made it to the front page of Reddit:
Why would the CIA torture if torture “doesn’t work”? Wouldn’t they want the most effective tool to gather intelligence?
The Senate Armed Services Committee report gave the answer.
»
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Moscow show trials - for you younger folks - look it up.
Same thing here. The script has to be followed in order to create the warped logic society.
Yes. We all know this. But it´s a strange round-about - way of doing things. Why not just tell detainees from the start what interregators want to hear...or else - so that they can cooperate straigth away.
Why not just cut out the middle-man (the media) and just announce what the PTB wanna do. You could possibly use that emergency broadcast system and SMS everyone - we are going to war with ...XYZ.
If I ever was detained for "interrogation" I would simply start by asking - what´s your angle - what do you wanna hear...?
"If I ever was detained for "interrogation" I would simply start by asking - what´s your angle - what do you wanna hear..."
Torture itself is not even necessary...you can just announce "prisoner 'x' just confessed to 'y' and have done with it...
No, the point of torture IS torture itself...the sheer, exhilarating, demonic, cruelty of it all...We are ruled by such the like...
I say the techniques outlined in the first paragraph are very humane compared with: burning with red hot irons, tying your hands behind your back, attach a rope and hoist you up in that position (used by the N Vietnamese at Hanoi Hilton
beatings with clubs, etc.
"I say the techniques outlined in the first paragraph are very humane compared with: burning with red hot irons, tying your hands behind your back, attach a rope and hoist you up in that position (used by the N Vietnamese at Hanoi Hilton
beatings with clubs, etc."
The truth is that there is no humane method of torture, including the techniques outlined in the first paragraph.
Yes - that´s a very good standard to compare yourself with...a hard-core Communist dictatorship.
For all previous place name .....substitute the with the place ..Ukraine....coming soon!
As long as the checks roll in for any reason behaviors are justified, even though it means the money-worshipper has lost his or her humanity.
Torture by any name- droning, splitting apart struggling families, sending children to school in a cloud of benzene, pedophilia, making water or the ecosystem forever poison to any living creature, creating technologies that spew radiation over all, these are all things that have been reported.
It makes people wonder what the ghouls left hand is doing.
all you need to know is is the crap is about to hit the fan.
The CIA engineered the whole Bush Torture Regime as a marketing tool
to generate media buzz and attract attention to their partisan zealotry
for Internationalist purposes. Once the World knew that Bush would torture his own mother for political support the investigative journalists
knew they had to remain silent throughout the whole campaign. Slowly but surely the Bush administration starting blacklisting newscasters and jounalists as being unpatriotic if they did not adhere to Bush doctrine
on the Iraq War. Threats were levied left and right and many professionals lost their jobs for attempting to speak out. In brief, the Bush administration used to fact that they were putting prisoners of war in stress positions as a tacit admission that they were indeed torturing prisoners and no American citizens dared to speak out about it until Bush was out of office entirely. Dan Rather was fired from 60 Minutes and a couple of talk show hosts were terrorized and let go by their networks. The word was put out by the Bush administration in a covert manner whilst David Addington was busy changing the legislation as White House Council. Abu Garreb Prison
released photos of prisoners in the shape of a pyramid on prime time televison so that everyone across the World could witness the depravity of the CIA and Bush administration in the White House at the time of their governance. The whole 'torture' thing was theater
and a show trial not unlike Stalin's show trials. The White House did not care one bit if the American people did not accept their totalitarian dictatorship because they were too busy directing the show trials in the media every morning on the White House briefings
and the Pentagon briefings. Rumy was on cloud nine everyday around 10am. The 'anthrax' show was being broadcast every night
at 11:00pm and the war machine MIC was doling out the contracts
through the Pentagon while all this was going on. Frankly, the White House knew all of this bullshit would have to be scraped off their shoes sometime in the future, but they planned to be out-of-office by that juncture in time so the Bullshit Show kept being aired on the same Bat channel at the same Bat time every night to classically condition the Pavlovian Americans into submission to the Commander and Chief Sociopath George W. Bush Jr. Nothing substantive came out of the Bush regime because it was all just an act and a show for the dumbed down American masses whether they wanted it or not. Americans should face facts and admit that they were played for the SUCKERS they really are by some second rate character actors that came out of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Oil industry.
Great Work George... a well documented reminder of recent history... hope it sticks somewhere in the consciousness of the Great Unwashed.
Face The Nation-Colin Powell responds to Dick Cheney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCvVdK2ZqG4
.
John Cale - Ship Of Fools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4PiWf5spdM
.
Steve Winwood // Traffic - John Barleycorn (Must Die)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8878chOvfI
.
I say we hang em high. Tie em up boys!
I find GW articles fit the definition of torture. Arg! I give up. I'll tell you anything.......... just STOP!
troll alert
AIPAC...or worse
Folks, what we glibly take as SOP is beyond shocking. We must engage in cognitive dissonance daily or we couldn't breathe beneath the weight of the implications of all this.
I am not scolding. I just notice posts with a tone like, "eh, nothing new here" and I really do get what you mean, but we have become innured to way too much.
The idealist in me wants to fix this.
It can't be fixed.
I still want to have hope.
It can't be fixed and this is just how it is.
Until it fails under the weight of their own over-reach, it is a steam roller out of control.
G.W. You do your namesake honor. Good material.
And still, somehow, we must hold our heads up and live another day. I know when I contemplate it, really, really, contemplate it, I go somewhere far, far, north of rage. I can't live there if I can't do anything about it though.
Said differently, this shit sure sucks.
“We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” - former CIA Director William Colby
That quote belongs to Bill Casey. Colby tried to unhorse the CIA and was fired by Ford for his efforts. Later he was murdered to keep him from talking about something that's very important to the PTB....
Sometimes I get confused. I'm not sure if I'm outside the matrix or if I'm inside the twilight zone.
Why is it either or?
Perhaps it's neither and I'm just inside a Dali painting. After all, nothing is what it seems; up is down, down is up, black is white, left is right, male is female, good is bad, bad is good, invisible men and melting faces, contorted truths and distorted meanings.
Balance in opposition? No. It's an illusion.
All the world's a stage.
If I understand Dali correctly you would not be looking at an 'illusion', but more aptly you would be characterized as a 'Dandyism' inside the
observers mind if the observer is Dali and you are in one of his paintings. And as far as I know he only put Gala in his paintings
because she was his muse. Moreover, if Dali ever encountered a matrix
he would have deconstructed it into something other than a matrix just for effect and fun. Dali was anything but a dry mathematical matrix
IMHO. Dali was real life and the real deal.The Matrix was just a shitty
B rated movie with bad actors and bad writers. Dali was a true artist.
Osiris,
I agree he was the real deal and there is no comparison with the matrix, and it wasn't a direct comparison. I disagree that I would be charactorized as a Dandyism and therefore disagree that you understand him correctly. He was real life because he dealt with the art of illusion, the illuminated pleasures if you will. There are deep esoteric meanings and symbols in his paintings that are not available to the profane, and dandyism is not a part of it. It is in this way that he is the observer, representative of the illuminated, and we are the muse.
Hey, what do I know, I'm just a fool!
HA HA HA HA
Why are you addressing me as 'Osiris', The Joker? Please articulate
the reasoning behind the label?
Why are you addressing me as 'Osiris', The Joker? Please articulate
the reasoning behind the label?
it could be and is just a stage,
but,
it sometimes feels/seems like a spherical lava lamp
magnet stuck in various and fundamental fields of influence,
terminally waiting for things to cool up.
You're stoned.
HA HA HA HA
moar ...
Guns and Butter
"The Other Side of Climate Change" with Ben Davidson
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/108171
.
http://www.suspicious0bservers.org/
the sun.
December 12, 2014
no way, really?
what makes you say such a thing?
.
the hunter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCTivc4PtVY&list=UULwXLS-KHDAABP02xEzpls...
Why not both?
Outside the MatrixTM is The Twilight ZoneTM.
There was one point towards the end of the second Matrix movie where Neo is fighting the machines outside of the matrix, and just before the movie ends, reality flickers in and out, even though they thought Zion was underground outside of the matrix--Twilight Zone.
Twilight is liminal space. Twilight is in the margins, not clearly defined. Neither day nor night, but in transition. Both and neither.
That explains it. Transition...to a new era, a new sign, a new world, a new order, a new religion, a new currency, a new reality. That's why it seems to be twilight. Innocence was lost long ago but the dream remained and now I am awake and the high noon of my life is nothing but a whistful memory. Now I have been forced into slow transition over the last decade as the decadence on this planet has sucked me towards the grim night. I no longer live in the present. All I see is what is to come, and the painful transition it entails. Perhaps in the end their religion will be good for the planet but it will be bad for humanity, and the transition will be a house of horrors. Alot of people are going to suffer. Alot of people are going to die, if I dare say. No point in sugar-coating it.
100100010111010010100010100010010001000001111010101010010101010100100001010!
http://www.inspirationgreen.com/index.php?q=planned-opolis.html
Great points you made above, The Joker & MsCreant!
It can't be fixed.
Correct. We need to forsake this eveil beast and start building a better world apart from it.
Truly, an "awesome" article regarding the degree to which it demonstrated the facts that "the torture program was really all about “justifying” the ultimate war crime: launching an unnecessary war of aggression based upon false pretenses."
However, the premise continues to be the mistaken view that "war crimes" may exist in some isolated ideal space, separate from the paradox of enforcement, namely that the best organized criminals, who are able to best back up their deceits with destruction, thereby win the wars, and therefore, all of their "crimes" are justified by the facts that they won those wars.
In that context, I point out the comments I already made upon this previous article:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-09/torture-executive-summary
Torture: An Executive Summary
The War on Terror was deliberately designed to become a self-fulfilling prophesy! The basic system is debt slavery backed by wars based on deceits. There is a cascade of organized crime down from the highest levels to lower levels. It is a false fundamental dichotomy to believe that there are any human activities whatsoever that are not basically organized lies operating robberies. The only things which exist are the dynamic equilibria between different systems of organized lies operating robberies.
There is NO idealized "rule of law" that can operate outside of the fact that the ONLY connection between human laws and natural laws is ability to back up lies with violence. Those who promote idealized notions regarding "war crimes" are actually assisting those war crimes to continue, because they are not actually contributing to the dynamic equilibria of what actually exists, which are systems of organized lies operating robberies.
While I agreed with the article above, and most of the comments posted previously, I continue to regard the standard attitudes towards the human murder systems operating death controls as being as backwards as they could possibly be, which includes the controlled opposition attitudes towards those just as much as the established systems' attitudes.
We are rushing faster and faster towards the contradictions of progress in understanding all other energy systems, EXCEPT human energy systems, since the core of those concerns are the ways that human artificial selection systems were developed to be operated through the maximum possible deceits (which became the foundations for economic systems based on the maximum possible frauds.)
The supreme paradoxes continue to be found in the oldest book on the Art of War, that starts by saying "success in war is based on deceits," and ends by saying "spies are the most important soldiers." Thousands of years of human history has been based on the social successes of deceits and treacheries, in which context the recent American led examples were spectacular symbols of more of the same.
However, the deeper problems are that natural selection pressure always exist, as long as any life exists. Therefore, the death controls were always the central feature of the control of the overall systems. At present, the civilization we are inside is able to back up bigger lies, with more violence, without almost anyone within those systems being able to face those facts, since thousands of years of human history was built on the history of successful warfare based on deceits and treacheries.
It is bullshit controlled opposition, stuck inside of the frame of reference of the biggest bullies, to promote idealized versions of what are "war crimes" outside of the view that there must necessarily be some death controls, in which the human murder systems will be first and foremost. We are utterly failing to develop better dynamic equilibria between the different systems of organized lies operating robberies because we discuss all of those problems in ridiculous ways, based on false fundamental dichotomies, which refuse to face the facts that governments must be the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals.
Human beings have ended up understanding general energy systems better and better, through science and technology, which have been applied through militarism to become much, much better at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence. However, that has become runaway criminal insanities due to the degree that human beings continue to deliberately understand themselves as energy systems in the most backwards ways possible.
Operating our death controls through the maximum possible deceits was selected to become the most successful methods throughout previous human history, up until recently, with the development of weapons of mass destruction becoming trillions of times more powerful. It remains to be seen whether or not the human species is going to be able to survive having done that. So far, there tends to be nothing but covert death controls, done through the maximum possible deceits, apparently opposed by those who promote various versions of impossible ideals that there should be no death controls, or at least none that human beings are conscious of participating in.
I do not think it can be exaggerated the degree to which the controlled opposition groups, promoting the same old-fashioned false fundamental dichotomies, and related impossible ideals, regarding notions such as "war crimes," or the "rule of law," tend to actually make things worse, rather than better, because they do not provide better militarism, enabling that to do better death controls. Rather, articles like the one above, as well as most of the comments above, continue to be relatively correct, regarding their analysis of the social facts, but then collapse back to bullshit "solutions," due to either promoting no better militarism, to operate better death controls, or else promoting some facile old-fashioned forms of death controls, as their superficial sets of "solutions" to the problems that the established death controls have become based on such extreme deceits and treacheries, as to have become criminal insanities.
Warfare is the oldest and best developed form of social science and social engineering, which needs to go through more profound paradigm shifts than has any other science previously gone through!
Articles like the one above are merely outlining more of the apparent anomalies in the old paradigms regarding how people perceived the world, which are getting more difficult to ignore. However, so far, there is barely any deeper, publicly promoted, better understanding of how and why warfare developed in the ways that it did, because the established deceitful death controls continue to mostly be opposed by controlled opposition groups who do not offer better death controls, but rather, continue to promote the same impossible ideals, which actually make the opposite happen in the real world.
You bring a very rational approach to a thing which is at it's core personal-- killing and dying are personal, utterly personal. GW takes the moral judgement on himself to assign aspects of good and evil. On the other hand you sir propose a symantical blamelessness to the horror. I suggest it is not a socially acclimating (in search of perfection) "death control" but a glimpse of hell that lives within mens minds.
Indeed, g speed, I regard "entropy" as the scientific formulation of the concept of evil. Furthermore, I regard the currently dominate conception of "entropy" to be backwards, as indicated by how an arbitrary minus sign was inserted into the entropy equations of thermodynamics and information theory.
After human beings are able to build mental models of themselves, within their mental models of the world, then they become self-conscious of how they appear to be born, live and die, as well as how they could be caused to die, or cause others to die. Any perceptions that are based on identification of the self within those facts of life is necessarily "a glimpse of hell, that lives in men's minds."
As the Buddhists have been attempting to cope with for thousands of years, after one recognizes one's own life, as well as the lives of others, then one gets the package deal of impermanence, with the most extreme forms of impermanence manifested as warfare, where the appearance of death flies around so fast it could barely be seen coming and going!
You are quite correct, g speed, that I attempt to apply a kind of "a symantical (sic) blamelessness to the horror."
( I presume you mean semantical?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/semantical )
One of my favourite dead religions is Mithraism, which was adopted by many Roman soldiers for a while. I would also refer to the Bhagavad Gita as an ancient poem that attempted to address the issue of the perception of warfare. It seems to me that nobody is more driven towards some kind of emergency philosophical debate with themselves than warriors, who are within the situation where they must kill or be killed. Depending upon their culture, they must have some sort of notions of god or country, or honour, or comradeship, which drives them to go into battles. I am doing similar things, but with more emphasis about doing that after the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Most of what I do is an attempt to provide a creative synthesis between ancient mysticism, and post-modernizing science, in which context the most pressing questions arise with respect to the death controls, and especially in their most extreme manifestations as murder systems. Clearly, being tortured to death is as bad as it gets! However, even there, I still attempt to perceive that with some consolidations from philosophy, or with my own kind of self-made religion.
I am attempting to take the principle of the conservation of energy more seriously, which includes radical paradigm shifts in the law of increasing entropy, related to the errors that took place in the philosophy of science, which reversed the meaning of the concept of entropy. The concepts of the conservation of energy, and increasing entropy, are the scientific equivalents of the concepts of good and evil, or god and the devil, and therefore, those are most acutely relevant in the murder systems, whereby some human beings have occasion to torture to death other human beings.
The ways in which I propose a "a semantical blamelessness to the horror" are mostly my own ways, using more of the language of science, (although radically transformed, by even more paradigm shifting in the basic philosophy of science) to focus upon the same issues that various religions have been focused upon for a long, long time, such as morality with respect to mortality, with the most extreme form of that being murder. I am transforming the ways that old-fashioned religions would provide warriors with some mental means to operate, that I attempt to make more consistent with the languages of post-modernizing sciences, so that those can be better reconciled with ancient mysticism. Therefore, while I certainly agree that the ability to have a mental model of one's self, along with a mental model of others, within an overall mental model of the world, results in becoming aware of the phenomena of death, and murder, which is "a glimpse of hell that lives within men's minds," I deliberately do my best to develop better mental models of that, which tends towards "a semantical blamelessness to the horror."
I though you meant the war on terror & torture at first when you said:
It is a false fundamental dichotomy
But turns out there are many false dichotomies. Good point here though...
Yes, TeethVillage88s, there are an apparently infinite variety of different dualities, which different people can employ to attempt to perceive their world and themselves. On a mathematically more abstract level, I assert that the fundamental process is SUBTRACTION. The only number which cannot be proven to exist is minus 1. However, the subtraction process generates all other numbers, which relatively exist.
In keeping with my attempts to radically transform the philosophy of science, I attempt to radically transform the basic ways that we presume we understand subtraction. It appears that we are all endlessly chasing our tails because we understand the processes of subtraction backwards, which was expressed by the ways that our currently established philosophy of science inserted an arbitrary minus sign into the basic entropy equations, so that power and information would end up being measured in relative positive numbers, instead of relative negative numbers.
The profound paradox, which nobody using any language is able to escape from, is the nature of relative dichotomization, or perceiving the world through dualities, (such as us versus them.) In my view, the biggest bullies' bullshit world view does everything it can to prevent people from understanding the elementary principles of philosophy or from enjoying more genuine spirituality.
The ruling classes are engaged in a war against the consciousness of those they rule over. There is every possible attempt made to reify the relative, in order to transform that into an assertion of absolute dichotomies, which I regard as false fundamental dichotomies. The basic social pyramid systems, that dominate the American establishment, promote those kinds of world views, because the social pyramid systems are basically human slavery systems, in which the slave masters attempt to keep the slaves ignorant and afraid, so that they can be controlled and exploited.
Torture employed in the context of deliberately starting wars based on deceits is an extreme manifestation of the war against consciousness, that the ruling classes in America have applied upon the American people that are ruled over, and indeed, those trends go all around the world, and deep into human history. DEBT SLAVERY BACKED BY WARS BASED ON DECEITS IS THE BASIC SYSTEM INTO WHICH TORTURE FIT AS ONE OF THE TOOLS EMPLOYED IN THAT CONTEXT.
good info gw, thanks,...
This is bad.
Worse is that the GOP no longer even cares what the people think. At least back then they felt the need to connect Al-quida to Iraq, now they would just say "we are are going to defend Americas' interests abroad" and the sheeple would switch channels to watch Kardashians.
Break 9/11 open and break the Neocons and their dream of a facsist, hegemonic police state.
Great interview with Prof. Niels Harrit: http://noliesradio.org/archives/92732
Torture is a crime against humanity and violates estsablished national and international law. The terrible irony is that CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou sits in jail while the torturers make book deals and are free.
2,316 architects and engineers: http://www.ae911truth.org/
Why even believe whatever the torturers say they learned? False confessions implicate others, as well as falsely reported confessions implicate others. Everything the government says is self-serving lies.
The flaw of mankind is trust in leaders, officials, judges, media reporters, torturers or their ilk. Official office or status ennobles no one. GW is a voice deep within a media wilderness crying out. Some will heed and doubt. Most will hear the numerous near voices and trust.
"Why even believe whatever the torturers say they learned? False confessions implicate others, as well as falsely reported confessions implicate others. Everything the government says is self-serving lies."
"You have the right to confront your accuser, but we have the right to pull out his fingernails before you do so."
An American, not US subject.
MSM media ALWAYS focus on the story that is wrong for most people.
It's their reason to be.
So true, and the owners of MSM predates the lawless CIA.
No bout a dout it...sumting wong in hong-kong alwighty-o, eh!
Not quite tikity-boo in la-la land, no?
Simon!
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/israelimplodes.php
Yousa don't think it is because of the wonderful way america treats the world, is it?
http://rt.com/shows/crosstalk/213639-us-cia-tortures-sic/
torture report, bank bailouts, REP/DEM dynamic (or static), war after war, Ferguson/Garner, Kardashians, drones, ZIRP, ZH board...this mirror help up to our faces is quite Ugly...and to think we're still so much better than so many other places....lets just re-read our Constitution (esp 8th amend) and force our gubbermint to stick to it.
the rest of us should follow the Great George Bush's advice and
go shopping
Here is what a thinking person thinks:
They lie and produce propaganda all the time. Some it, like 9/11, on an epic scale. That they used torture of real people to generate additional propaganda that they could have easily just fabricated, tells you all you need to know about these people, and the condition of the DC US governmnet.
An American, not US subject.
Another reason that I differentiate myself as an American citizen, and not in anyway connected to the US nation.
Interesting you say that. They could have fabricated it, so why would they torture? They know full well, 1) there was no connection, and 2) Al Q works for us. Reading of the torture methods reminds me of a little something called Project Monarch which uses the same techniques. Perhaps they weren't torturing them to coerce confessions, perhaps they are creating mind controlled terrorists. Kind of takes the concept of Al-CIAda to a whole new level.
http://vigilantcitizen.com/hidden-knowledge/origins-and-techniques-of-monarch-mind-control/
That they resort to torture when they have the ability, and proven history, of being able to fabricate propaganda on demand, goes to show you the level of depravity in these people.
An American, not US subject.
"Say he said it, or pull his fingernails out, and then say he said it.?"