Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Categories

Raw Story » Leaked torture photos published in 2006 went largely unseen

By Raw Story

Published: May 15, 2009
Updated 1 day ago
A little over three years ago, SBS Dateline, an Australian television program, released leaked photographs from the U.S. prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib.
It is believed that the pictures being held back by the Obama administration may include some of these shots that most of the US [...]

 We Tortured To Justify War                      : Information Clearing House - ICH

We Tortured To Justify War
Dick Cheney keeps saying “enhanced interrogation” was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.
By Joe Conason
May 15, 2009 “Salon.com” — The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked — at least not by [...]

Stan Goff: McChrystal & Pelosi

One can’t be sure where to start in unpacking what people need to know about this guy — Stanley McChrystal, the military-culture that is refracted in his personhood, and the peculiar institutional ecology of that military.
I don’t know Stanley McChrystal. I came in the Army a couple of years before him. We are both named [...]

David Miliband presses for gag on CIA memo | Politics | The Guardian

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, tonight made a fresh attempt to stop high court judges from disclosing information about what Britain’s security and intelligence agencies knew of the ill-treatment and alleged torture of a UK resident.
In his third demand for a gagging order, he argued that “real harm to the national security and international relations [...]

BBC NEWS | Americas | Anger at Obama Guantanamo ruling

Civil liberties groups have reacted angrily to US President Barack Obama’s decision to revive military trials for some Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Mr Obama has previously denounced the Bush-era judicial system, but in a statement said new safeguards would ensure suspects got a fairer hearing.
New rules include rejecting statements obtained from harsh interrogations and limitations on using [...]

The NYT sums up Obama’s civil liberties record in one paragraph - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald

Saturday May 16, 2009 07:26 EDT
The NYT sums up Obama’s civil liberties record in one paragraph

(updated below - Update II)
Among progressives, Democrats, liberals, Obama supporters and the like, there seems to be some debate about the extent to which Obama deserves criticisms for what he has done thus far in the realm of civil [...]

U.N. rights chief urges Obama to prosecute torturers | Reuters

By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA, May 14 (Reuters) - The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on Thursday welcomed the election of the United States to the top United Nations rights forum and urged it to prosecute those accused of torture and other abuses.
Navi Pillay said Washington should investigate all U.S. renditions of terrorism suspects and ensure [...]

Yonkers Tribune : Gerald Celente Trends Alert - The “Bailout Bubble” - The Bubble to End All Bubbles

Kingston, NY — The biggest financial bubble in history is being inflated in plain sight, said Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute. “This is the Mother of All Bubbles, and when it explodes,” Celente warns, “it will signal the end to the boom/bust cycle that has characterized economic activity throughout the developed [...]

Raw Story » Report: much of 9/11 Commission’s findings cite intelligence garnered by torture

Much of the material cited in the 9/11 Commission’s findings was derived from terror war detainees during brutal CIA interrogations authorized by the Bush administration, according to a Wednesday report.
“More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques,” writes former [...]

OpEdNews » Becoming What We Seek to Destroy

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Becoming-What-We-Seek-to-D-by-Chris-Hedges-090513-670.html
May 13, 2009
Becoming What We Seek to Destroy
By Chris Hedges
Posted on May 10, 2009
The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates [...]