| Author | Message | | Lautaro | | Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 11:21 pm Post subject: John Pilger:TORTURE IS NEWS BUT IT'S NOT NEW |
| http://pilger.carlton.com/print
TORTURE IS NEWS BUT IT'S NOT NEW
When I first went to report the American war against Vietnam, in the 1960s, I visited the Saigon offices of the great American newspapers and TV companies, and the international news agencies.
I was struck by the similarity of displays on many of their office pinboards. "That's where we hang our conscience," said an agency photographer.
There were photographs of dismembered bodies, of soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles and of the actual moments of torture. There were men and women being beaten to death, and drowned, and humiliated in stomach-turning ways. On one photograph was a stick-on balloon above the torturer's head, which said: "That'll teach you to talk to the press."
The question came up whenever visitors caught sight of these pictures: why had they not been published? A standard response was that newspapers would not publish them, because their readers would not accept them. And to publish them, without an explanation of the wider circumstances of the war, was to "sensationalise".
At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this; atrocities and torture by "us" were surely aberrations by definition. My education thereafter was rapid; for this rationale did not explain the growing evidence of civilians killed, maimed, made homeless and sent mad by "anti-personnel" bombs dropped on villages, schools and hospitals.
Nor did it explain the children burned to a bubbling pulp by something called napalm, or farmers hunted in helicopter "turkey shoots", or a "suspect" tortured to death with a rope around his neck, dragged behind a jeep filled with doped and laughing American soldiers.
Nor did it explain why so many soldiers kept human parts in their wallets and special forces officers who kept human skulls in their huts, inscribed with the words: "One down, a million to go."
Philip Jones Griffiths, the great Welsh freelance photographer with whom I worked in Vietnam, tried to stop an American officer blowing to bits a huddled group of women and children.
"They're civilians," he yelled.
"What civilians?" came the reply.
Jones Griffiths and others tried to interest the news agencies in pictures that told the truth about that atrocious war. The response often was: "So what's new?"
The difference today is that the truth of the equally atrocious Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is news. Moreover, leaked Pentagon documents make clear that torture is widespread in Iraq. Amnesty International says it is "systematic".
And yet, we have only begun to identify the unspeakable element that unites the invasion of Vietnam with the invasion of Iraq. This element draws together most colonial occupations, no matter where or when. It is the essence of imperialism, a word only now being restored to our dictionaries. It is racism.
In Kenya in the 1950s, the British slaughtered an estimated 10,000 Kenyans and ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote the imperial historian V.G. Kiernan, "were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments."
None of this was news at the time. The "Mau Mau terror" was reported and perceived one way: as "demonic" black against white. The racist message was clear, but "our" racism was never mentioned.
In Kenya, as in the failed American attempt to colonise Vietnam, as in Iraq, racism fuelled the indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and the torture. When they arrived in Vietnam, the Americans regarded the Vietnamese as human lice. They called them "gooks" and "dinks" and "slopes" and they killed them in industrial quantities, just as they had slaughtered the Native Americans; indeed, Vietnam was known as "Indian country".
In Iraq, nothing has changed.
In boasting openly about killing "rats in their nest," US marine snipers, who in Falluja shot dead women, children and the elderly, just as German snipers shot dead Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, were reflecting the racism of their leaders.
Paul W Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary who is said to be the architect of the invasion of Iraq, has spoken of "snakes" and "draining the swamps" in the "uncivilised parts of the world".
Much of this modern imperial racism was invented in Britain. Listen to its subtle expressions, as British spokesmen find their weasel words in refusing to acknowledge the numbers of Iraqis killed or maimed by their cluster bombs, whose actual effects are no different from the effects of suicide bombers; they are weapons of terrorism. Listen to Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, drone on in parliament, refusing to say how many innocent people are the victims of his government.
In Vietnam, the shooting of women and their babies in the village of My Lai was called an "American Tragedy" by Newsweek magazine. Be prepared for more of the "our tragedy" line that invites sympathy for the invaders.
The Americans left three million dead in Vietnam and a once bountiful land devastated and poisoned with the effects of the chemical weapons they used. While American politicians and Hollywood wrung their hands over GIs missing-in-action, who gave a damn for the Vietnamese?
In Iraq, nothing has changed.
By the most conservative estimates, the Americans and the British have left 11,000 civilians dead. Include Iraqi conscripts, and the figure quadruples.
"We count every screw driver, but we don't count dead Iraqis," said an American officer during the 1991 slaughter. Adam Ingram may not be as literate, but the dishonouring of human life is the same.
Yes, the atrocities and torture are news now. But how are they news? asks the writer Ahdaf Soueif. A BBC news presenter describes the torture pictures as "merely mementoes". Yes, of course: just like the human parts kept in wallets in Vietnam.
BBC commentators - always the best measure of the British establishment thinking on its feet - remind us that the torturing, humiliating of soldiers "does not compare with Saddam Hussein's systematic tortures and executions". Saddam, noted Ahdaf Soueif, "is now the moral compass of the West".
We cannot give back Iraqi lives extinguished or ruined by those acting in our name. At the very least, we must demand that those responsible for this epic crime get out of Iraq now and that we have an opportunity to prosecute and judge them, and to make amends to the Iraqi people. Anything less disqualifies "us" as civilised.
First published in the Daily Mirror - www.mirror.co.uk | |  | | Cowboy | | | | Nobody | | Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 3:07 am Post subject: |
| Whining and distraction will never cover up the fact of the lies that were made to invade Iraq-The WMD's. Just where the hell are they? Don't tell me! SHOCK HORROR! SYRIA!
Fanx for the excellent Pilger article Lautaro  | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 3:38 am Post subject: |
| The curious lack of curiosity about WMD
Larry Elder
May 6, 2004
"Week after week after week after week," said Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., about President Bush's rationale for going to war with Iraq, "we were told lie after lie after lie after lie." Were we?
Jordan recently seized 20 tons of chemicals trucked in by confessed al Qaeda members who brought the stuff in from Syria. The chemicals included VX, Sarin and 70 others. But the media seems curiously incurious about whether one could reasonably trace this stuff back to Iraq. Had the terrorists released a "toxic cloud," Jordanian officials say 80,000 would have died!
So, I interviewed terrorism expert John Loftus, who once held some of the highest security clearances in the world. Loftus, a former Army officer, served as a Justice Department prosecutor. He investigated CIA cases of Nazi war criminals for the U.S. attorney general. Author of several books, Loftus once received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
John Loftus: There's a lot of reason to think (the source of the chemicals) might be Iraq. We captured Iraqi members of al Qaeda, who've been trained in Iraq, planned for the mission in Iraq, and now they're in Jordan with nerve gas. That's not the kind of thing you buy in a grocery store. You have to have obtained it from someplace.
Larry Elder: They couldn't have obtained it from Syria?
Loftus: Syria does have the ability to produce certain kinds of nerve gasses, but in small quantities. The large stockpiles were known to be in Iraq. The best U.S. and allied intelligence say that in the 10 weeks before the Iraq war, Saddam's Russian adviser told him to get rid of all the nerve gas. It would be useless against U.S. troops; the rubber suits were immune to it. So they shipped it across the border to Syria and Lebanon and buried it. Now, in the last few weeks, there's a controversy that Syria has been trying to get rid of this stuff.
They're selling it to al Qaeda is one supposition. We know the Sudanese government demanded that the Syrian government empty its warehouse in Khartoum where they've been hiding illegal missiles along with components of weapons of mass destruction. But there's no doubt these guys confessed on Jordanian television that they received the training for this mission in Iraq. . . . And from the description it appears this is the form of nerve gas known as VX. It's very rare, and very tough to manufacture . . . one of the most destructive chemical mass-production weapons that you can use. . . . They wanted to build three clouds, a mile across, of toxic gas. A whole witch's brew of nasty chemicals that were going to go into this poison cloud, and this would have gone over shopping malls, hospitals . . .
Elder: You said that the Russians told Saddam, "There is going to be an invasion. Get rid of your chemical and biological weapons."
Loftus: Sure. It would only bring the United Nations down on their heads if they were shown to really have weapons of mass destruction. It's not generally known, but the CIA has found 41 different material breaches where Saddam did have a weapons of mass destruction program of various types. It was completely illegal. But no one could find the stockpiles. And the liberal press seems to be focusing on that.
Elder: It seems to me that this is a huge, huge story.
Loftus: It's embarrassing to the (press). They've staked their reputations that this stuff wasn't there. And now all of a sudden we have al Qaeda agents from Iraq showing up with weapons of mass destruction.
Elder: David Kay said, in an interim report, that there was a possibility that WMD components were shipped to Syria.
Loftus: A possibility? We had a Syrian journalist who defected to Paris in January. The guy is dying of cancer, and he said, "Look, my friends in Syrian intelligence told me exactly where the stuff is buried." He named three sites in Syria, and the Israelis have confirmed the three sites. They know where the stuff is, but the problem is that the United States can't just go around invading Arab countries. . . . We know from Israeli and defectors' intelligence that the son of the Syrian defense minister was paid 50 million bucks to bring the stuff across the border and bury it.
Elder: Why would al Qaeda attack Jordan?
Loftus: Jordan is an ally of the United States. It's at peace with Israel. And Jordan has a long history of trying to prosecute terrorists. . . . There are a lot of reasons. . . . They want to make an example of them. They want to terrorize as many of the Arab states as possible. This is sort of a political dream for the president. The worst nightmare is al Qaeda gets weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. And it looks like it's coming true.
A Syria/Iraq/al Qaeda/WMD connection? Why, this calls for a congressional investigation. | | | | Nobody | | Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 4:29 am Post subject: Re: John Pilger:TORTURE IS NEWS BUT IT'S NOT NEW |
| | Lautaro wrote: | http://pilger.carlton.com/print
TORTURE IS NEWS BUT IT'S NOT NEW
When I first went to report the American war against Vietnam, in the 1960s, I visited the Saigon offices of the great American newspapers and TV companies, and the international news agencies.
I was struck by the similarity of displays on many of their office pinboards. "That's where we hang our conscience," said an agency photographer.
There were photographs of dismembered bodies, of soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles and of the actual moments of torture. There were men and women being beaten to death, and drowned, and humiliated in stomach-turning ways. On one photograph was a stick-on balloon above the torturer's head, which said: "That'll teach you to talk to the press."
The question came up whenever visitors caught sight of these pictures: why had they not been published? A standard response was that newspapers would not publish them, because their readers would not accept them. And to publish them, without an explanation of the wider circumstances of the war, was to "sensationalise".
At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this; atrocities and torture by "us" were surely aberrations by definition. My education thereafter was rapid; for this rationale did not explain the growing evidence of civilians killed, maimed, made homeless and sent mad by "anti-personnel" bombs dropped on villages, schools and hospitals.
Nor did it explain the children burned to a bubbling pulp by something called napalm, or farmers hunted in helicopter "turkey shoots", or a "suspect" tortured to death with a rope around his neck, dragged behind a jeep filled with doped and laughing American soldiers.
Nor did it explain why so many soldiers kept human parts in their wallets and special forces officers who kept human skulls in their huts, inscribed with the words: "One down, a million to go."
Philip Jones Griffiths, the great Welsh freelance photographer with whom I worked in Vietnam, tried to stop an American officer blowing to bits a huddled group of women and children.
"They're civilians," he yelled.
"What civilians?" came the reply.
Jones Griffiths and others tried to interest the news agencies in pictures that told the truth about that atrocious war. The response often was: "So what's new?"
The difference today is that the truth of the equally atrocious Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is news. Moreover, leaked Pentagon documents make clear that torture is widespread in Iraq. Amnesty International says it is "systematic".
And yet, we have only begun to identify the unspeakable element that unites the invasion of Vietnam with the invasion of Iraq. This element draws together most colonial occupations, no matter where or when. It is the essence of imperialism, a word only now being restored to our dictionaries. It is racism.
In Kenya in the 1950s, the British slaughtered an estimated 10,000 Kenyans and ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote the imperial historian V.G. Kiernan, "were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments."
None of this was news at the time. The "Mau Mau terror" was reported and perceived one way: as "demonic" black against white. The racist message was clear, but "our" racism was never mentioned.
In Kenya, as in the failed American attempt to colonise Vietnam, as in Iraq, racism fuelled the indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and the torture. When they arrived in Vietnam, the Americans regarded the Vietnamese as human lice. They called them "gooks" and "dinks" and "slopes" and they killed them in industrial quantities, just as they had slaughtered the Native Americans; indeed, Vietnam was known as "Indian country".
In Iraq, nothing has changed.
In boasting openly about killing "rats in their nest," US marine snipers, who in Falluja shot dead women, children and the elderly, just as German snipers shot dead Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, were reflecting the racism of their leaders.
Paul W Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary who is said to be the architect of the invasion of Iraq, has spoken of "snakes" and "draining the swamps" in the "uncivilised parts of the world".
Much of this modern imperial racism was invented in Britain. Listen to its subtle expressions, as British spokesmen find their weasel words in refusing to acknowledge the numbers of Iraqis killed or maimed by their cluster bombs, whose actual effects are no different from the effects of suicide bombers; they are weapons of terrorism. Listen to Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, drone on in parliament, refusing to say how many innocent people are the victims of his government.
In Vietnam, the shooting of women and their babies in the village of My Lai was called an "American Tragedy" by Newsweek magazine. Be prepared for more of the "our tragedy" line that invites sympathy for the invaders.
The Americans left three million dead in Vietnam and a once bountiful land devastated and poisoned with the effects of the chemical weapons they used. While American politicians and Hollywood wrung their hands over GIs missing-in-action, who gave a damn for the Vietnamese?
In Iraq, nothing has changed.
By the most conservative estimates, the Americans and the British have left 11,000 civilians dead. Include Iraqi conscripts, and the figure quadruples.
"We count every screw driver, but we don't count dead Iraqis," said an American officer during the 1991 slaughter. Adam Ingram may not be as literate, but the dishonouring of human life is the same.
Yes, the atrocities and torture are news now. But how are they news? asks the writer Ahdaf Soueif. A BBC news presenter describes the torture pictures as "merely mementoes". Yes, of course: just like the human parts kept in wallets in Vietnam.
BBC commentators - always the best measure of the British establishment thinking on its feet - remind us that the torturing, humiliating of soldiers "does not compare with Saddam Hussein's systematic tortures and executions". Saddam, noted Ahdaf Soueif, "is now the moral compass of the West".
We cannot give back Iraqi lives extinguished or ruined by those acting in our name. At the very least, we must demand that those responsible for this epic crime get out of Iraq now and that we have an opportunity to prosecute and judge them, and to make amends to the Iraqi people. Anything less disqualifies "us" as civilised.
First published in the Daily Mirror - www.mirror.co.uk |
Another Mylai photo. From the source:
"With bodies and burning huts all around them [American] troops had accosted the young 13-year-old girl seen here trying to button her top. Another woman tries to hold back the girl's distraught mother. When the troops noticed Haeberle, the photographer, they stopped and turned away as if everything was normal.
"Then a soldier asked, 'Well, what'll we do with 'em?'"
"Kill 'em," another answered."
"I heard an M60 go off," says Roberts, "a light machine gun, and when we turned back around, all of them and the kids with them were dead."
With all the latest pictures coming out and so,e posted around here, this is the sort of thing which the Neoc****/Zionists want you to turn a blind eye to and invade another ME country. Those people above could be any nationality and are an instance of what goes down during the occupation of another country.... You think bravely dropping payloads from a plane doesn't count? Sure..... | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 4:38 am Post subject: |
| | | | | | Nobody | | Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 4:54 am Post subject: |
| | Yeah, I somehow suspected that there'd be no sympathy for civilians from the likes of a pro-war mongering, armchair general, such as yourself.... Just a bunch of 'gooks' or presently 'ragheads', right? | | | | Lautaro | | Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 3:00 pm Post subject: to Boy-Cow |
| And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.
– John 8:32
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Cow-Boy,
Your BLACK-PROPAGANDA doesn't work
with the educated people of the world. Sorry...
Just the ignorant and the Greedy like you
want to bring humanity to THE DARK AGES again.
You have been brainwashed since early age
with HOLLYWOOD-HISTORY,
to used you as CANNON-FODDER
in any imperialist war.
Since you are so macho-macho,
why are you wasting our time
in this boring propaganda of yours,
a propaganda of the MEGA-MEDIA to enslaved you?
Please go to Iraq
and fight for your Emperor with no Clothes,
and replace those soldiers
who want to come back home
to live a decent life as HOMO-SAPIENS.
Anybody with a soul knows:
That Saddam and Osama been-Forgotten
are CIA agents.
You didn't know that one Mr. Boy-Scow?
When you belong to any Mafia,
you can't just quit and still keep your empty life.
Don't you know that your Agency was formed with the remaining of the SS?
Don't you know how they love
to use the mentally sick like you, Saddam, Osama or The Chimp
to guide the working class to war in time of ecomomic crisis?
Your Masters,
The Nazis won the war:
The Devil in the Details: The CIA and Saddam Hussein
http://www.representativepress.org/CIASaddam.html
______________________________________________________________________________
How the CIA found and groomed Saddam Hussein
http://www.sianews.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=856
_____________________________________________________________________________
Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein:
The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
______________________________________________________________________________
Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28INTE-GOOD.html
April 28, 2001
Prewar File Told of Hitler's Mental State
By DAVID JOHNSTON
ASHINGTON, April 27 — A C.I.A. file on Hitler made public today included a prewar description of the Nazi leader as a "border case between genius and insanity" and the prediction that he could become the "craziest criminal the world ever knew."
The declassified files were released with those of 19 others, including Josef Mengele, the doctor at Auschwitz; Adolf Eichmann, architect of the effort to exterminate Jews, and Heinrich Müller, Gestapo chief.
Over all, according to historians who have studied the records, the 10,000 pages of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency files are highly unlikely to alter in a fundamental way what is known about the Nazis. Still, the documents do shed light on United States dealings with Nazi officials and on when and how much American intelligence knew about the Nazi era.
Several million pages of United States intelligence documents on Germany have previously been released through the National Archives. Many of those documents were in C.I.A. custody, but related to the Office of Special Services, the wartime predecessor of the intelligence agency, which was established in 1947.
The files released today were the first of the agency's own files disclosed under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. The law, written by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of Manhattan, requires agencies like the C.I.A. to initiate searches for records that contain information about the Holocaust. The declassification was supervised by the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which has retained well-known historians who have had full access to the records, some of which were edited before release.
At a news conference today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, historians said the files might be most significant, because they illuminate the early days of the cold war by showing that in the aftermath of World War II the United States government, primarily military intelligence, knowingly recruited Nazis accused of war crimes for espionage against the Soviet Union.
Several lesser-known Nazi officials became associated with what is known as the Gehlen Organization, a postwar intelligence operation run by Reinhard Gehlen, one of Hitler's generals. The unit was partly financed by the United States and used to conduct espionage against the Soviet Union.
At the time, the historians said, Americans defended the practice on utilitarian grounds, because of the perceived seriousness of the Soviet threat to the West. European governments also used Nazis in the cold war, and some German intelligence officials sought to use their wartime knowledge of the Soviet Union to ingratiate themselves with the Western powers.
The comments about Hitler's mental state were attributed to his personal physician and surgeon at the University of Berlin, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, in a memorandum written on Dec. 7, 1944, by Ronald Carroll, an O.S.S. officer.
The report is based on an interview with an informer, Hans Bie, who said he discussed Hitler's growing megalomania with Dr. Sauerbruch at a party in 1937. According to the memorandum, Dr. Sauerbruch was reported to have said that "from close observation of Hitler for many years, he had formed the opinion that the Nazi leader was a border case between genius and insanity and that in his opinion the decision would take place in the near future whether Hitler's mind would swing toward the latter."
Historians at the news conference said the files helped to clarify the record of figures like Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian leader and former United Nations secretary general who was found to have concealed his wartime activities as a German officer in Yugoslavia.
For years, researchers have raised questions about whether the United States concealed its knowledge of Mr. Waldheim's role by refusing to disclose its files when he served at the United Nations from 1972 to 1982. But the historians found little evidence in the files to support a cover-up by the United States.
In a report today, Richard Breitman, a history professor at American University who headed the working group's research on the central intelligence files, said, "The thrust of these documents suggests that the C.I.A. itself did not have a great deal of information or knowledge about Waldheim's Nazi past."
The files, Professor Breitman added, did not suggest that Mr. Waldheim was a C.I.A. agent or informer, nor did they show that the Soviet Union was aware of his past and used the information to blackmail him while he was secretary general.
The historians said the files showed that the agency investigated the fate of Müller in 1970 and 1971. Some researchers have said they believe he was killed late in the war or might have survived to collaborate with the Soviet Union. Others thought that he might have been recruited by American intelligence.
The files indicate that the C.I.A. reached no conclusion about him. The historians said it was quite unlikely that the agency would have conducted an investigation if Müller had been working for American intelligence. | | | | Lautaro | | Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 3:13 pm Post subject: to Nobody |
| Please bring more of this pictures,
we had not seen enough of them.
Myself
I don't know how to post pictures,
thanks. | | | | Cowboy | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
