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Medical Professionals 'Led the Way' : The Psychologists of Torture
Frederick Clarkson
Licensed psychologist and Army Col. Larry James was the director of Guan-
tanamo's "Behavioral Science Consultation Team," which oversaw the use
of harsh interrogation techniques widely condemned as torture. Photo by
Army Spc. Shanita Simmons / from In These Times.
Medical professionals designed and helped to implement Bush administration interrogation practices.
One of the key, if underreported, findings in the recent bombshell Senate report on the Bush-era treatment of U.S. military detainees was the role of civilian and military psychologists in devising, directing and overseeing the torture of prisoners.
While the report highlights the role of senior Bush administration officials in approving "aggressive" interrogation techniques, it also exposes how medical professionals helped to transform the Pentagon's torture resistance program into tactics used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA "black" sites.
Understanding the role of these professionals should be a "specific focus" of an investigation into the use of these tactics, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has condemned the tactics as illegal and medically unethical.
When Will Obama See Afghanistan's Daughters As His Own?
Sherwood Ross
The war in Afghanistan today hangs like some cloud of poison gas over Washington that won’t blow away. It sickens everything as it spreads. It continues to suck precious tax dollars out of the Treasury, money this country cannot afford to squander, especially as millions of Americans are sinking into poverty and joblessness exceeds ten percent. Writing in USA Today last March 10th, Susan Page reported, “In one year, 24 million slide from ‘thriving’ to ‘struggling’ and “Some fear that the American dream may be in peril as well.” Worse, the U.S. is turning poverty-plagued Afghanistan, a long-suffering nation of 25 million souls into another Iraq, perhaps even another Viet Nam. Afghanistan has already been under U.S. assault for eight years and President Obama’s top military advisers are telling him it will take many more years to achieve “victory,” a term having utterly no meaning for skyrocketing numbers of dead and dismembered civilians.
U.S. troops dispatched to “build long-term stability” in Afghanistan (the phrase was uttered by Obama accomplice British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) went from 5,200 in 2002 to 62,000 currently while the cost has shot up from $21 billion to $60 billion a year in that period for a grand total of $228 billion---dollars that could have been far better spent in America, on Americans, for Americans. And dispatching more troops means dispatching more targets. “Deaths from bombings soaring,” the Miami Herald reported last August 12th. IED explosions soared to 828 in July, more than twice as many as in the previous July and the highest level since the war began. U.S. casualties are at record highs. This is the road to “victory”?
"It’s The Vaccines Stupid!"
F. William Engdahl
Autism was virtually unknown in the US until 1943 when it was
diagnosed and identified eleven months after Thimerosal, a
mercury-based vaccine “adjuvant” was first added to baby vaccines
Instances of autism in the US exploded as some 40 million children were injected during the 1990’s with Thimersol-based vaccines, giving them unprecedented accumulations of mercury poison.
Part I: Evidence Linking Autism Rise in Children to Vaccinations
The WHO and US Government CDC are escalating a public psychological conditioning to create hysteria and panic among an uninformed public about an alleged “virus” H1N1 Influenza A, aka Swine Flu, whose alleged effects to date appear comparable with a common cold. Before people line up in the streets demanding their vaccinations for their children and themselves, it would be wise to remember, to paraphrase a 1992 campaign statement of Bill Clinton to George H.W. Bush: “It’s the vaccination, Stupid!”
By countless scientific accounts, far more dangerous to human health than any reported incidences of Swine Flu are the dangers of severe health issues including paralysis, brain damage and even death arising from what is added to vaccines by virtually every major vaccine maker. Almost without exception, all commercial vaccines today contain various substances known as adjuvants designed to make the vaccine “work.” These adjuvants are the source of horrendous and sometimes deadly damage.
Palestinian embassy in London strangely silent as Israeli terror-strikes and land-grabs continue
Stuart Littlewood
As if they didn’t have enough problems, tormented Palestinians suffer the added misfortune of being represented here in London - the media capital of the western world - by the most invisible and silent embassy it is possible to imagine.
A year ago, campaigners urged the ambassador to get his act together or go home. He angrily retorted that he had "a plan of how to influence British Media to give us the Palestinians more exposure".
Whatever the plan was, it hasn’t worked. Press releases and briefings are non-existent. It is many months since I last heard the ambassador on radio or TV, while his Israeli opposite number pops up on the national airwaves with nauseating regularity. And the Palestinians' precious shop window - their embassy website – never functioned properly and has now been taken down.
Questioning the Police State, Not Just the Tactics
By: Peter Chamberlin
The torture debate focuses on the wrong issues, serving only to obscure the bigger picture. The real life issue is not that our elected government has used police state tactics on prisoners, but that our elected leaders believe that the United States has some sort of moral authority to define its own set of standards, freeing American spies and soldiers to operate outside of the laws that bind the rest of the human race. The torture debate has merely exposed the terror that our government utilizes everyday, to have its way with the world.
The recent revelations contained in CIA releases is kid’s stuff in the real spy world, but it is revealing enough to give the public a whiff of the stench that rolls out of the agency’s secret prisons and nightmarish hell holes, where they show the world what American democracy really means—POWER, plain and simple.
US Hypocrisy Astonishes the World
Paul Craig Roberts
Americans have lost their ability for introspection, thereby revealing their astounding hypocrisy to the world.
U.S. War Secretary Robert Gates has condemned the Associated Press and a reporter, Julie Jacobson, embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for taking and releasing a photo of a U.S. Marine who was wounded in action and died from his injury.
The photographer was on patrol with the Marines when they came under fire. She found the courage and presence of mind to do her job. Her reward is to be condemned by the warmonger Gates as "insensitive." Gates says her employer, the Associated Press, lacks "judgment and common decency." The American Legion jumped in and denounced the Associated Press for a "stunning lack of compassion and common decency."
Is Zionism a sophisticated Hegelian Dialectic?
Zahir Ebrahim
Just like Brzezinski's “The Grand Chessboard” now appears to be a fantastic red herring to bankrupt the United States and create the right pretexts and ripe conditions to present a NAU to its public as the only panacea enroute to the international banksters' world government, is it possible that Zionism too was/is a phantasmic red herring to set the stage for Albert Pike's World War III in order to drive the final nail into the coffin of all nationalism and sovereign nation-states?
The fact that the harbingers of all wars and world government are also the prime supporters of Zionism means little, for just as they were once prime supporters-bankrollers of the USSR and Nazi Socialism before destroying them, the Hegelian Dialectics of conquest require credible enemies, or rather credible opposites to achieve the synthesis of the desired agenda - global communism to be centrally controlled by a hierarchy at whose apex sit the all-seeing eye!
Workers of the World Unite! A New Message for Labour Day 2009?
Leo Panitch
What is the significance of the way not only Keynes but even Marx has been brought back into fashion amidst the global economic crisis? This is a question well worth pondering on the day that is officially designated to celebrate the class that Marx saw as carrying the promise – and the responsibility – of creating a better world.
Twenty years ago, many cast Marx's ideas into the dustbin of history along with the statist Communist regimes that collapsed in 1989. Yet Marx, who more than any 19th century liberal economist or philosopher insisted that the state was an imposition on society, and looked forward to it 'withering away' after a proletarian revolution, would have been the severest critic of those regimes. As Schumpeter once said, there was as little in common between Marx and Stalinism as there was Jesus and the Inquisition.
Martial Law Alert Over Swine Flu
Stephen Lendman
Fact check:
■ no Swine Flu threat exists;
■ reported H1N1 infections and deaths are uncorroborated;
■ WHO predicting a global pandemic affecting "as many as two billion people....over the next two years" is falsified hype unless a diabolical depopulation scheme (by vaccines or other means) plans to create one;
■ vaccines don't protect against diseases they're designed to prevent and often cause them;
■ all vaccines contain harmful toxins, including mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, phenoxyethanol (antifreeze), and squalene adjuvants that weaken and can destroy the human immune system, making it vulnerable to many annoying to life-threatening illnesses; and
■ evidence suggests that the H1N1 strain was bioengineered in a US laboratory, and the vaccines being produced for it are extremely hazardous and potentially lethal.
Under no circumstances should anyone submit to them even if threatened with fines, quarantine, or incarceration.
Capitalizing Security: "Non-Lethal" Weapons and the Market
Antifascist
When the U.S. military planned to deploy Raytheon's Active Denial System (ADS) in Iraq, it set off a political firestorm. How couldn't it?
Known for its "goodbye effect," the so-called "pain ray" is a "non-lethal" directed energy weapon that repels "rioters" and other disreputable citizens by heating the outer surface of the skin to 130 degrees F. in short, directed bursts. With a range of some 550 yards, the microwave beam can penetrate clothing and its effects have been described by test subjects as nothing less than "excruciating."
The prospect that American "liberators" would soon be zapping "unruly mobs," that is, Iraqi citizens objecting to the destruction of their country and the looting of their resource-rich nation by Western (corporate) invaders proved to be a public relations nightmare for the Pentagon.
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