eots
no fly list
No real American can tolerate or condone torture. It is forbidden by the Constitution, and only those who secretly wish for our nation to abandon its principles and Constitutional protections could ever support it.
Torture does not assist in the solving of crimes. Tortured people will say anything. Indeed it hardly need be pointed out that the millions of executions carried out by religious fanatics for the crime of witchcraft were primarily based on confessions extracted under torture.
Torture exists for one reason only, to terrorize a population that opposes a dictatorship, and before we welcome such things into our midst I think we should read a few words from those who have experienced torture first hand.
"Tortures range from simple but brutal blows from a truncheon to electric shocks. Often the torture is more refined: the end of a reed is placed in the anus of a naked man hanging suspended downwards on the pau de arara [parrot's perch] and a piece of cotton soaked in petrol is lit at the other end of the reed. Pregnant women have been forced to watch their husbands being tortured. Other wives have been hung naked beside their husbands and given electric shocks on the sexual parts of their body, while subjected to the worst kind of obscenities. Children have been tortured before their parents and vice versa. The length of sessions depends upon the resistance capacity of the victims and have sometimes continued for days at a time."
-- Amnesty International, describing the torture suffered by Brazilians at the hands of the military and the US-run Office of Public Safety (OPS) in the 1960s
"For four months I was heavily tortured by the Army in Rio de Janeiro, and then in the Naval Information Center.... Near death, I was taken to the hospital for the sixth time. The beatings had been so severe that my body was one big bruise. The blood clotted under my skin and all the hair on my body fell out. They pulled out all my fingernails. They poked needles through my sexual organs and used a rope to drag me across the floor by my testicles. Right afterwards they hung me upside down. They hung me handcuffed from a grating, removed my artificial leg, and tied my penis so l could not urinate. They forced me to stand on my one leg for three days without food or drink. They gave me so many drugs that my eardrums burst and I am impotent. They nailed my penis to a table for 24 hours. They tied me up like a pig and threw me into a pool so that I nearly drowned. They put me in a completely dark cell where I remained for 30 days urinating and defecating in the same place where I had to sleep. They fed me only bread soaked in water. They put me in a rubber box and turned on a siren. For three days I neither ate nor slept and I nearly went mad...."
-- Manuel de Conceicao, peasant leader in Brazil He was arrested in 1972 and brought before Brazilian security police who had been schooled at US army bases in the latest methods of counterinsurgency and interrogation. He was tortured by Brazilian army units - trained and equipped by US military-aid programs.
" [U.S. aid] has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens..."
-- Lars Schoultz, leading academic specialist on human rights in Latin America
A young Salvadoran deserted the Salvadoran army and fled to Mexico. His story was published in The Other Side magazine, 1982 Part of his training by eight American Green Berets consisted of "teaching how to torture." He witnessed a boy of about fifteen, suspected of supporting the guerrillas, being subjected to a demonstration torture by the Green Berets They tore out the youth's fingernails, broke his elbows, gouged out his eyes, and then burned him alive. The author reports that the torture sessions continued into the next day and included a thirteen year-old girl. Another victim had various parts of his body burned and was then taken up in a helicopter while still alive and thrown out at 14,000 feet. The defector noted that "often the army goes and throws people out over the sea." (The editors of The Other Side withheld the Salvadoran informant's name "for obvious reasons" but claimed that "the basic outline of his story has been corroborated by independent sources which we believe to be reliable.")
Victims and survivors of the fascist coup in Chile in 1973
They tell how the Chilean military trained and financed by the United States tortured people with electric shock, particularly on the genitals; forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives (including children); raped women in the presence of other family members; burned sex organs with acid or scalding water; placed rats in women's vaginas and into the mouths of other prisoners; mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injected air into women's breasts and into veins (causing slow, painful death); shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death."
'My name is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. l am a representative of the "Vincente Menchu" [her father] Revolutionary Christians ... On 9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President] Lucas Garcia's army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be paraded in a line. Then he started to insult and threaten the inhabitants of the village who were forced to come out of their houses to witness the event. I was with my mother, and we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners. When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the other prisoners were swollen bloody, unrecognizable. lt. was monstrous, but they were still alive. They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline. The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants of Chajul to watch. This was his objective-that they should be terrified and witness the punishment given to the "guerrillas".
-- Rigoberta Menchu Tum, awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
-- Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvadore Allende in 1973
"Four men came in, bearing a cot with a sheet-covered figure. "Sit down," one ordered. "You're going to see a performance by a bad actor, an actor who has forgotten his part. Help him remember it." They uncovered a body entirely purple, missing a foot. "Come closer," another ordered. "Look at him. You'll know him." And she did. It was 27-year-old "El Gordo" Toledo, with whom she had been 20 days before. He could hardly speak, or scream, any more. When Elba maintained that she did not know him, they said, "Let's see"-they pulled out his nails, cut off his remaining ear, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and killed him slowly as she watched, thinking, "He could be my son." Then they brought another "actor," 26-year-old Eduard Munoz. It took them five hours to kill him, under her eyes. It was worse than any pain they could have inflicted on her, she said. Later she was forced to watch while her cellmates-aged 16, 17, and 40, nude and drugged, were directed to perform an erotic dance before they were raped. Another girl, back from a dreaded torture center, and pregnant, was so crazy that each time she awoke she screamed that her only desire was for her child to be born so she could kill it."
-- Elba Vergara, secretary to President Allende (himself murdered by the US-backed Chilean generals),
"His forces executed or "disappeared" 3,197 people. Tens of thousands were tortured, hundreds of thousands were forced into exile. Pinochet destroyed the constitution, the parliament, the political parties, the trade unions, and the free universities. "
-- Saul Landau, author, about US-backed Augusto Pinochet's impact on Chile, The Progressive, May 2000, p24
"Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit."
-- A survivor of a raid by US-backed Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s
"People had been mercilessly tortured simply for being in possession of a leaflet criticizing the regime. Brutality and cruelty on one side, frustration and helplessness on the other. They were being tortured and there was nothing to be done. It was like listening to a friend who has cancer. What comfort, what wise reflection can someone who is comfortable give. Torture might last a short time, but the person will never be the same."
-- James Becket, American attorney, in Greece for Amnesty International, describing the torture suffered by Greeks under US-supported dictator Papdopoulos in the 1960s
" I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves ... The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''
-- Head of the US Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Uruguay in 1981, teaching classes in the art of torture
"The torturers from the start had said that the United States supported them and that was what counted."
-- Amnesty International report on Greece in the 1960s under US-supported dictator George Papadoupolus
" Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame."
-- Amnesty International, in its annual report on U.S. military aid and human rights
So, as you read the posts on these threads, ask yourselves what kind of a person would want such things to happen here in the United States, and why would you want to listen to them. Hitler supported state-sponsored torture. So did Stalin. Anyone who supports state-sponsored torture in the United States has to be the same class of human being. Why would a free people even give such monsters the time of day, let alone support the monsters and their wars-for-oil with their tax money or their children's lives?
Who are the terrorists? The media tells us it is Osama Bin Laden, but Osama bin Laden was trained and funded by the CIA. Osama's brother was George W. Bush's business partner in Texas.
The CIA is a terrorist organization. In 1985, authorized by William Casey, the CIA planted a car bomb near a mosque in Beirut to kill Sheik Mohammed Hossein Fadlallah, a muslim cleric. The bomb missed the Sheik but killed 80 people, including children. Now, if a car bomb that kills innocent people is a terrorist act, then the CIA is a terrorist organization. We can stop terrorism right here at home by disbanding the CIA.
What is the justification to use torture on men who may in fact have no connection to the crimes they are accused of?
FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27 that the FBI has no legal proof to prove the true identities of the hijackers, who were using phony IDs with stolen identities. Nobody really knows who they were or who they worked for, only who they wanted us to think they worked for.
We do know is that in 1998, oil company executives told the US Congress that they would not build an oil pipeline into the Caspian Sea oil field unless the government of Afghanistan was replaced with one more acceptable to the oil companies.
In March 2001, Jane's Defense reported that the United States was planning an invasion of Afghanistan. The Times of India reported the same thing in June! Even the BBC reported that the United States had intended to invade Afghanistan before the events on 9/11.
Most rational humans know that the timing of the attacks on the World Trade Towers fit into the pre-existing timetable for a war in Afghanistan just a little too cozily, happening right when the US Government most needed such an event to manufacture public support for an invasion to remove the Taliban and clear the way for the pipeline proposed in 1998.
Doubts exist over whether the American people are being told the truth of what is going on, or if, as was the case with the Pearl Harbor swindle a war is being manufactured for us out of lies and deceptions, without our knowledgable consent.
Despite assurances that proof exists that shows who the hijackers really were, with a solid evidentiary chain leading back to a good reason to bomb women and children of Afghanistan, the proof is kept hidden for reasons of "National Security" we are told. Except that this proof is being sent to the heads of other nations around the world; the only people it is secret from is the American citizen whose taxes and children are needed to fight this war. What little evidence has been shown on the media is at best circumstantial, and would not stand up in a court of law to prove that Osama had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks (he is still denying any role) or that if Osama did in fact take part in the attacks, that he was not still in the employ of the CIA at the time.
This demand for torture is a panic move by the government. They don't have a strong case connecting the 9/11 attacks to the people living along that oil pipeline route. But if torture is allowed to be used, there is no end to the crimes those who are tortured will confess to, from blowing up the World Trade Towers to shooting J.R. Ewing!
But the best reason to oppose this nonsense is that if torture is allowed in the United States then we will cease to be the United States. In throwing out our own Constitutional protections we will have done far more damage to the nation than any terrorist could ever dream of. What those who planned the WTC attacks could not knock down, the pro-torture war mongers will have thrown down in their eagerness for blood and their lust for vengeance, even against targets who may in fact be innocent of any wrong doing.
It is also quite possible, indeed likely, that the United States is being spoofed by a third party to trigger a war. It has happened before. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a defector from Israel's secret service, Mossad, Israel decided to mount a false flag operation designed to further discredit Libya, and provoke the US to attack an Arab nation. A transmitter loaded with pre-recorded messages was planted in Tripoli, Libya, by a Mossad team.
The `Trojan Horse' beamed out fake messages about Libyan-authorized bombings and planned attacks that were immediately intercepted by US electronic monitoring. Convinced by this disinformation that Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco in which a US soldier died, President Ronald Reagan ordered massive air attacks on Libya, including an obvious- and illegal (under US law) attempt to assassinate Qadaffi himself. Some 100 Libyan civilians were killed, including Qadaffi's young daughter.
Before we get out the thumb screws and heat up the branding irons, we need to take a close look at the manner in which US supported torture has been used in other nations, not as a tools for law enforcement but as a tool of drastic political oppression, used against, not criminals, but simply those who disagreed with the government in power.
Do we dare allow such things within this very nation? Only at our direst peril.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/torture.html
