Rape. Torture. Murder. And now death squads. Anything we've forgotten?

[LynnTheDem]

Anything we've blamed Saddam Hussein for as one of many revolving "causes" for America's invasion & occupation of Iraq that we aren't yet doing in Iraq ourselves?

We're raping...murdering...torturing...kidnapping. We've killed 40,000 to 100,000+ Iraqi civilians and in less than 2 years.

And now we have the Pentagon considering the hiring of death squads. Ask Negroponte for advice on that, boys. He has vast experience.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/

STATE-SANCTIONED TERRORISM. With love from bush's America.

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[lachattefolle]

2. Yeah, you're forgetting it's all Clinton's fault!

[Cerridwen]

3. Biological warfare, salting the land, I imagine they'll think of a couple

more.

[DoYouEverWonder]

22. We've already done the modern version of salting

It's called depleted uranium.

[aquart]

4. Negroponte!

I couldn't remember his name.

Well, have we tried slave labor camps?

So far, we're not getting any use out of these prisoners at all.

Oh, wait. We don't have work for Americans, where will we find jobs for these guys. Of course, they're free...

[AG78]

16. Thinking about it

"Well, have we tried slave labor camps?"

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/12/05/returning_fallujans_will_face_clampdown/

"One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons."

Technically, not slaves.

I wonder how this story turned out? It's been over a month since it was reported.

[brokensymmetry]

5. Death camps.

We have a mini-concentration camp, but it's more a beta version.

Only problem is, what happens when the world turns on us?

[OutsourceBush]

6. We're raping...murdering...torturing...kidnapping

But we do our raping...murdering...torturing...kidnapping with Christian love. That makes us different. Praise Jesus!

[Mr_Spock]

7. Fun having a lying mass-murdering war criminal as "President" huh?

Hopefully he'll be executed for his crimes against humanity :eyes:

[CoffeeCat]

8. I'm afraid to ask...

...what's a "death squad"?

Pardon my ignorance.

[OutsourceBush]

10. info here about Bush's new 'death squads'

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2925510&mesg_id=2925510

[oblivious]

9. Let's not forget poisoning the land with depleted uranium.

[enough]

11. Why not? After all, it worked before.

snip>

Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

snip>

They consider it "to have been a success."


Nuns pray over the bodies of four American sisters killed by the military in El Salvador in 1980 (photo at the link above)

[buddysmellgood]

12. Can't we blow up a chemical plant or something?

[oblivious]

13. Bombing water and waste treatment plants might be a good idea.

Doh! Done that.

[OutsourceBush]

14. we could gas the Kurds again

hmmm... naa, let's keep using the depleted uranium, same difference.

[bobthedrummer]

15. Mind control and the "non-lethal" arsenal.

Nobody wants to talk about those facts either.

[oblivious]

17. Let's see. Other war crimes.

napalm - done it
cluster bombs on cities - done that
shrapnel bombs on cities - check
phosphorous bombs in cities - yup
wanton destruction of cities and villages - check
depriving a city of electricity and drinking water

Will the horror ever end?

[OutsourceBush]

19. Will the horror ever end?

probably not for 4 more years I am guessing

[leftchick]

25. The Devastation Of Iraq.....

Here is an analysis laying all of the war crimes out...


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0107-34.htm

~snip~

I've been in liberated Baghdad and environs on and off for 12 months, including being inside Fallujah during the April siege and having warning shots fired over my head more than once by soldiers. I've traveled in the south, north, and extensively around central Iraq. What I saw in the first months of 2004, however, when it was easier for a foreign reporter to travel the country, offered a powerful -- even predictive -- taste of the horrors to come in the rest of the year (and undoubtedly in 2005 as well). It's worth returning to the now forgotten first half of last year and remembering just how terrible things were for Iraqis even relatively early in our occupation of their country.

Then, as now, for Iraqis, our invasion and occupation was a case of liberation from -- from human rights (think: the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib which are still occurring daily there and elsewhere); liberation from functioning infrastructure (think: the malfunctioning electric system, the many-mile long gas lines, the raw sewage in the streets); liberation from an entire city to live in (think: Fallujah, most of which has by now been flattened by aerial bombardment and other means).

Iraqis were then already bitter, confused, and existing amid a desolation that came from myriads of Bush administration broken promises. Quite literally every liberated Iraqi I've gotten to know from my earliest days in the country has either had a family member or a friend killed by U.S. soldiers or from the effects of the war/occupation. These include such everyday facts of life as not having enough money for food or fuel due to massive unemployment and soaring energy prices, or any of the countless other horrors caused by the aforementioned. The broken promises, broken infrastructure, and broken cities of Iraq were plainly visible in those early months of 2004 -- and the sad thing is that the devastation I saw then has only grown worse since. The life Iraqis were living a year ago, horrendous as it was, was but a prelude to what was to come under the U.S. occupation. The warning signs were clear from a shattered infrastructure, to all the torturing, to a burgeoning, violent resistance.

[oblivious]

32. Another war crime to add to the list - targeting hospitals and ambulances

That's quite an article, from a real reporter, indicating that all is lost as far as the US and UK are concerned.

More snips:
Dr. Rashid...said, "Not less than sixty percent of the dead were women and children. You can go see the graves for yourself."..."I saw the cluster bombs with my own eyes. We don't need any evidence. Most of these bombs fell on those we then treated."

..."Even transferring patients in the city was impossible. You can see our ambulances outside. Their snipers also shot into the main doors of one of our centers." Several ambulances were indeed in the hospital's parking lot, two of them with bullet holes in their windshields.

...Dr. Rashid summed the situation up this way: "They send only bombs, not medicine."

...Abdulla, an older professor who is a friend of his. As we were eating, Abdulla expressed a sentiment now widely heard. "The mujahideen," he said, "are fighting for their country against the Americans. This resistance is acceptable to us."

[Lexingtonian]

18. Last guys don't finish nice.

Let's not forget that in the past lifetime Democratic Presidents win wars and win the peace. Republican Presidents win some of the wars, lose others, but none of them has won the aftermath of any of them. (I count the Bay of Pigs and Somalia as Republican legacies, run by Republican surrogates- isn't that what the CIA military arm is- and lost by them.)

So Republicans are basically losers at the game of war, whatever their viciousness and grandiosity and initial successes. They make bad picks to begin with, then can't admit to being stupid, and then prove their stupidity in actions while trying to disprove it. That explains why they get so ugly when things go bad on them- we only see the tip of the iceberg of their agonizing fight with the Goddess of Stupidity, whose bitch they are.

[DoYouEverWonder]

23. The CIA has done more damage to the USA

than any middle eastern terrorist sitting in a cave could ever dream.

Who needs enemies, when you have the CIA?

[0007]

20. The Nazis were good at stealing and the U.S. just like the Nazis

Robbed by force, especially the Museums, the oil fields. So you can add plundering a nation of its resources and artifacts to your list of raping...murdering...torturing...kidnapping and plundering.

[saltpoint]

21. I'm assuming the Bush administration is saving --

-- smallpox-infested blankets for when things REALLY get difficult in Iraq.

[LizW]

24. Displacement from homes. Humiliation and stigmatization.

Eventually starvation. Other known methods of genocide.

I think we've about covered it all.

[leftchick]

26. An Iraqi Woman tortured by the US still suffering....

<snip>

Last summer I interviewed a kind, 55 year-old woman who used to work as an English teacher. She had been detained for four months in as many prisons…in Samarra, Tikrit, Baghdad and, of course, at Abu Ghraib. She was never, she told me, allowed to sleep through a night. She was interrogated many times each day, not given enough food or water, or access to a lawyer or to her family. She was verbally and psychologically abused.

But that, she assured me, wasn't the worst part. Not by far. Her 70 year-old husband was also detained and he was beaten. After seven months of beatings and interrogations, he died in U.S. military custody in prison.

She was crying as she spoke of him. "I miss my husband," she sobbed and stood up, speaking not to us but to the room, "I miss him so much." She shook her hands as if to fling water off them…then she held her chest and cried some more.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0107-34.htm

"Why are they doing this to us?" she asked. She simply couldn't understand, she said, what was happening because two of her sons were also detained, and her family had been completely shattered. "We didn't do anything wrong," she whimpered.

[oc2002]

27. What is Negroponte role in this?

Was he the one in central america directing the death squads?

[AngryAmish]

28. Need Agent Orange or similar enviromental toxin

[txaslftist]

29. We're NOTHING like Saddam!

What you are forgetting is that he had RIGGED ELECTIONS to keep himself in power. We don't ...

Oh. Nevermind.

[Cocoa]

30. have we done mass graves yet?

bona fide mass graves, bona fide ethnic cleansing? I think we're headed that way.

[Ilsa]

33. Watch out Sunnis! And then,

when * doesn't like that the Shi'a theocrats in power have aligned with Iran, it'll be their turn!

[ArkDem]

31. Many of the members of the Arkansas 39th Infantry that is

currently deployed in Iraq are known for farting in public. I dread it when they come home.

[Octafish]

34. Amerika the Monstrous

"Fascism, which was not afraid to call itself reactionary... does not hesitate to call itself illiberal and anti-liberal." -- Benito Mussolini

What is Fascism?

by Chip Berlet

We have all heard of the Nazis_but our image is usually a caricature of a brutal goose-stepping soldier wearing a uniform emblazoned with a swastika. Most people in the U.S. are aware that the U.S. and its allies fought a war against the Nazis, but there is much more to know if one is to learn the important lessons of our recent history.

Technically, the word NAZI was the acronym for the National Socialist German Worker's Party. It was a fascist movement that had its roots in the European nationalist and socialist movements, and that developed a grotesque biologically-determinant view of so-called "Aryan" supremacy. (Here we use "national socialism" to refer to the early Nazi movement before Hitler came to power, sometimes termed the "Brownshirt" phase, and the term "Nazi" to refer to the movement after it had consolidated around ideological fascism.)

The seeds of fascism, however, were planted in Italy. "Fascism is reaction," said Mussolini, but reaction to what? The reactionary movement following World War I was based on a rejection of the social theories that formed the basis of the 1789 French Revolution, and whose early formulations in this country had a major influence on our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

It was Rousseau who is best known for crystallizing these modern social theories in . The progeny of these theories are sometimes called Modernism or Modernity because they challenged social theories generally accepted since the days of Machiavelli. The response to the French Revolution and Rousseau, by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and others, poured into an intellectual stew which served up Marxism, socialism, national socialism, fascism, modern liberalism, modern conservatism, communism, and a variety of forms of capitalist participatory democracy.

Fascists particularly loathed the social theories of the French Revolution and its slogan: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."

CONTINUED...

http://www.remember.org/hist.root.what.html

"Reaction" read "Right-Wing Nutjobs of Today."