BAD APPLES...Rotting America to it's very core.

[Hubert Flottz]

McCain, Warner, Graham, Frist and anyone else, who thinks that torture is the way America should move foreword. The congressional record will forever show, who they ALL are.

Do you remember when the GOP/DoD's defense for those shocking pictures taken at Abu Ghraib, of unarmed prisoners being tortured and mistreated, were all blamed on a "FEW BAD APPLES"? The real Bad Apples, are the people who could stop this terror NOW, but who refuse to do so.

What if FDR had taken this same shameful path during WW II, that the GOP now wants to take? What if we had become as cruel and evil as the Nazis we were fighting then and stooped to their horrid level of depravity?

I have tried and tried to get those pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib out of my mind, but it does no good. This sad truth remains burned into my mind, that my tax dollars, even though I totally disagree with all my being, are making these horrid things go on and on and on. I'm saddened, sickened and ashamed. I blame the very people in Washington, who refuse to stop this evil thing and I will forever.

[acmejack]

1. This is not America.

I am sorry, but is contrary to everything I was taught. it is against everything I went through life believing in. Now I am adrift, hating everything about this farce that is supposed to be the United States of America. It appears that rendition may have been used before the Bush regime a turd in the punch bowl that no one is willing to mention since it occurred during the beloved "Big Dawg's" watch, who can obviously have done no wrong. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6 We are just an evil nation of sick fuckers, either obliviously tacitly supportive or complicit. Or opposed, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground. All of the past leaders are OK with this policy, so are you? Take your choice.

[Hubert Flottz]

3. The cat is out of the bag now...

This issue, in the end, is going to shine a light on the darkest side of our government and it's long overdue!

Lesson number one...getting along with others 101...DON'T START ANY SHIT AND THERE WON'T BE ANY SHIT!(Golden Rule)

[Hubert Flottz]

2. Beacon of Human Rights, Freedom and Liberty?

Of human bondage

The kinds of torture used at Abu Ghraib stem from techniques common to colonial imperialists, Stalin's secret police and the Gestapo.

By Darius Rejali

Page 1June 18, 2004 | Three of the torture techniques used at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are choking with water, exposure to extremes of heat or cold, and forced standing and other "stress positions." Use of these techniques by the United States in the past two years was approved by military commanders such as Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez at the instigation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and possibly other administration officials. Memos from the Department of Justice and the Pentagon reveal that legal counsel sought justification for breaking the Geneva Conventions that forbid use of such methods, a process that appears to have been driven by the White House. Whatever investigations ultimately reveal about who authorized the use of torture, the history of torture techniques is easy to trace.

Choking with water: For centuries, interrogators used water to cause pain in two ways, "pumping" and "choking." Pumping involves forcibly filling the stomach and intestines with water. A garden hose in the mouth is sufficient. This technique (the "Tormento de Toca" in Spanish) was one of the most fearful tortures of the Inquisition. Choking pushes pumping one step further by preventing breathing.

Americans were the first to use pumping for interrogation in the 20th century. In 1902, during the Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers put funnels in the mouths of Filipinos to force water into their organs. In pumping, victims' organs stretch and convulse, causing the most intense pain that visceral tissue can experience. William Howard Taft, governor of the Philippines, carelessly conceded to the Senate that pumping was the policy in some cases.

Because water torture left few marks, it was easy to dismiss. President Theodore Roosevelt privately called pumping a mild torture, observing that no one had been seriously damaged. Italian dictator Mussolini's police adopted pumping in the 1920s, as did the Japanese military police (Kempeitai) in the 1930s. In 1939, British police used pumping in Mandatory Palestine.

http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2004/06/18/torture_methods/index.html

[Hubert Flottz]

4. History...repeats

The Trial of German Major War Criminals

Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany

21st January to 1st February, 1946

Forty-Third Day: Friday, 25rd January, 1946

snip...

It is an extract from the Danish Memorandum of October, 1945, concerning the German Major War Criminals appearing before the International Military Tribunal. Page 5, under the title "Torture" we read, in a brief resume, everything that concerns the question with regard to Denmark:

"In numerous cases German police and their assistants used torture in order to force the prisoners to confess or to give information. This fact is supported by irrefutable evidence. In most cases the torture consisted in lashing or beating with sticks or with a rubber bludgeon.

But much more serious forms of torture were used, including some which will have lasting effects. Bovensiepen had stated that the order to use torture came, in certain cases, from the higher authorities, perhaps even from Goering as Chief of the Gestapo, but, in any event, from Heydrich. The instructions were to the effect that torture might be used in order to force the victims to give information that might serve to give away subversive organisations working against the German Reich, and not only to force the victim to confess his own acts."

A little further on: "The methods prescribed were, among other things, a specified number of blows with a stick. Bovensiepen does not remember whether the maximum was ten or twenty blows. An officer from the criminal police was there, and also, when circumstances so required, there was a medical officer present." MORE...

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-05/tgmwc-05-43-04.shtml

[Hubert Flottz]

5. Torture is terrorism.

The Gestapo is Born

snip...

Anyone foolish enough to say something risky or tell an anti-Nazi joke in mixed company might get a knock on the door in the middle of the night or a tap on the shoulder while walking along the street. Letters were also sent out demanding an appearance at No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, to answer a few questions. The Gestapo prison center in Berlin (the Columbia-Haus) became notorious as a place where pedestrians strolling outside the building could hear screaming coming from inside.

Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a prisoner in a bathtub filled with ice-cold water; electric shocks by attaching wires to hands, feet, ears and genitalia; crushing a man's testicles in a special vice; securing a prisoner's wrists behind his back then hanging him by the arms causing shoulder dislocation; beatings with rubber nightsticks and cow-hide whips; and burning flesh with matches or a soldering iron.

snip...

From the very beginning of Hitler's regime, the ever-present threat of arrest and indefinite confinement in a concentration camp robbed the German people of their personal freedom and left them as inhibited, dutifully obedient subjects.

But even this was not enough. The Nazis wanted to change people's thinking. And so, just as they had purged their hated political enemies, they began a campaign to purge hated "unGerman" ideas. That effort started in May 1933 with the worst of all crimes against human thought and culture - the burning of books. MORE...

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-gestapo.htm

"You're either with us or against us"...How long, given more leeway, before the same things going on in Iraq now, start to happen to anyone, anywhere, who stands up to the PNAC and The Unitary Ruler?

"Anyone foolish enough to say something risky or tell an anti-Nazi joke in mixed company might get a knock on the door in the middle of the night or a tap on the shoulder while walking along the street."