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

Obama on torture photos: cover-up and complicity :: www.uruknet.info :: informazione dall’Iraq occupato :: news from occupied Iraq :: - it

15 May 2009
President Obama’s repudiation of his promise to comply with a court order and release Pentagon torture photos marks a qualitative deepening of the cover-up of the crimes carried out under Bush as well as their continuation under the new administration in only slightly altered form.
The president’s decision amounts to the deliberate suppression of [...]

Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture - War Room - Salon.com

Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture

U.S. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, deputy commander of prison operations in Iraq, testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill about Iraqi prisoner abuse, May 19, 2004.

It’s one thing if, as former Vice President Dick Cheney keeps saying, the United States brutally interrogated people to [...]

 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 [...]

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 [...]

Lawrence Wilkerson Drops an Iraq-Torture Bombshell | Democrats.com

On April 21, McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay first suggested the Bush Administration used torture to intentionally extract false confessions linking Al Qaeda (and 9/11) to Iraq, to give Bush a false “casus belli” to invade Iraq.
Landay’s suggestion was shocking. I called it the “Iraq-Torture Scandal” because of its similarity to the Iran-Contra Scandal, where two seemingly [...]

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 [...]

Obama’s Latest Effort to Conceal Evidence of Bush Era Crimes | CommonDreams.org

Published on Thursday, May 14, 2009 by Salon.com
Obama’s Latest Effort to Conceal Evidence of Bush Era Crimes
by Glenn Greenwald

It’s difficult to react much to Obama’s complete reversal today of his own prior decision to release photographs depicting extreme detainee abuse by the United States.  He’s left no doubt that this is what he does:  ever [...]

Washington’s Blog

Warning, very graphic and tragic images:

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Here Are a Few of the Torture Photos Obama Doesn’t Want You To See
Obama has changed his mind, and is now trying to prevent the release of the torture photos.
Here are just a few of the photos he doesn’t want you to see (leaked to the Sydney [...]

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 » “Sadistic . . . Violent . . . Inhuman”

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/-Sadistic—-Violent–by-Mike-Malloy-090513-563.html
May 13, 2009
“Sadistic . . . Violent . . . Inhuman”
By Mike Malloy

They must be horrific. So violent, in fact, so obscene, so counter to even the basic tenets of human decency that President Barack Obama sought today to block the release of hundreds of photos showing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan being abused, [...]