‘IRF-ed’ — Biblically Speaking
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The terror/shame of America.
(Illustration found here).
Similar to peeling the layers off one rotten-assed onion, the horrors of the last presidential administration continues to strike nausea and shame into the very hearts of any US peoples who have any heart left to smell the shit — in the last few weeks bad odorous news has spewed forth from DC about just how corrupt and vile were the years 2001 to 2009.
If the current trend continues, George Jr. and Dick Cheney will be viewed as monsters.
Via antiwar.com on the inquiry by Spain into US “enhanced” techniques:
The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. Military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force.
Despite President Barack Obama’s publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture — and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces’ actions illegal — IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.
…
So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: “IRF-ing” prisoners or to be “IRF-ed.”
Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described “the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke.”
Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners’ “private areas” and Korans to “rile the detainees,” saying it “seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it.
“Those who did were always IRFed.”
The above-mentioned James Yee is the same guy who was harassed out of the military on all sorts of trumped-up bullshit because of his concern for the well-being of other human beings at Guantánamo.
All the charges were eventually dropped.
And while all these “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding… was going on, US defense chief at the time, the dastardedly Don Rumsfeld was dispatching daily the ultra-top secret Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update to George Jr. with Bibical quotes smeared on them.
See some of this creepy, weird and hypocritical shit here at GQ.
Rumsfeld might a backstabbing criminal, but he knew George Jr.
Some background on this craziness can be found at Think Progress.
This particular aspect of the Rumsfeld/Cheney era will be a hot topic right now — there seems to be no end to the uncovering of the workings of the most-corrupt adminstration in this nation’s history.
Frank Rich, once again in the New York Times this morning nails it.
President Obama has to open the can of worms to clean-up US history.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch.
If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
Amen, brother!
Tartuffery
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Why the US talks out the ass.
Churchgoing makes one a much-nicer person:
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified.
Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it.
People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.
Only four in 10 of them did.
(Illustration found here).
Who are these “white evangelical Protestants” you ask? — The GOP!
And George Jr. is right there.
In October 2005:
One of the delegates, Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said:
“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
Mr Bush went on: “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”
Mr Bush, who became a born-again Christian at 40, is one of the most overtly religious leaders to occupy the White House, a fact which brings him much support in middle America.
And I guess ‘God’ also told him that if he couldn’t get the right answers out of some people — just torture the shit out of them.
Date-Rape Agent
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This is bad.
From ABC tonight:
- The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
Just as President Obama told the Islamic world, “Americans are not your enemy,” some sex-crazed rapist puts the feud back into fuel for extremists.
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, Andrew Warren, the 41-year-old CIA station chief in Algiers, had made videos of the sexual encounters and were found in his official residence along with the drugs, Valium and Xanax, the perfect date-rape high-ball.
And apparently this episode wasn’t the first.
- The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.
This incident is not only a slap at Muslims, but a real-burn on the CIA.
- “This will be seen as the typical ugly American,” said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. “My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas,” Baer said.
“From a national security standpoint,” said Baer, the alleged rapes would be “not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that’s something the CIA should have picked up on,” said Baer. “This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency,” he said.
Welcome to the age of the real ugly American, Mr. Leon Panetta.
Obama with Cluster at the Little Big Horror
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One of the most indiscriminate and terrifying weapons in humanity’s vast arsenal, among a long, long list of terrifying instruments, are cluster bombs.
Situated within the category of dumb bombs, or those just dropped from aircraft without any specific target, gravity-fed, these little sonofabitches have an enormous killing zone — cats, dogs, children, women, old men, sick people, those in wheelchairs, kids on a playground, some asshole sitting on a toilet, mothers, daddies, a guy looking out the window, people in vehicles, walking around, or maybe scrambling for cover, and then maybe a few insurgents.
Weeks later, a small-boy survivor of the original bombing, upon discovering a metal, ball-shaped chunk in some rubble, picks it up and is blown nearly half-in-two.
This effectiveness as a killing tool is obtained by little bomblets scattered about by the dispenser before hitting earth — submuntions in military terms.
Although today about 100 nations will sign a binding document that would ban such weapons, the real shitheads won’t be putting any John Hancocks on the treaty.
- But the big military powers, most, or all, of which are also nuclear-capable — namely the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan — have declined to sign the cluster-bomb ban.
Hypocrisy of weaponry.
Seemingly, the more humanity civilized itself, the less humane its warfare.
India and Pakistan can obliterate a couple of continents and sub-continents, and of course, the US and Russian could reduce the entire planet to ash.
(Illustration found here).
How does President-Elect Obama react?
Last year as senator he backed an amendment to curb the Pentagon’s use of cluster bombs, but what will he do as commander-in-chief in inking the treaty?
Right now, he’s dancing around the subject with thick verbiage.
Reports the New York Times‘ The Lede blog:
- “President-elect Obama is deeply concerned about the well-being of civilians in situations of conflict, as reflected by his support of the legislation in 2006 that would have prohibited the use of cluster munitions near concentrations of civilians. As president, he will carefullly review the new treaty and work closely other countries to ensure that the United States is doing everything feasible to promote protection of civilians in conflict.”
– Brooke Anderson, Obama’s chief national security spokesperson
One would think with all this change we can believe in stuff, a concept of banning a horrible, and unnecessary, weapon would be a no brainer.
Politics is the US way.
The NYT bog also noted Decider George’s official stance, via the State Department:
- U.S. government officials have stated that “the United States relies on them [cluster munitions] as an important part of our own defense strategy,” and that Washington’s preferred alternative to a ban would be “to pursue technological fixes that will make sure that these weapons are no longer viable once the conflict is over.”
What conflict, asshole?
And a defense strategy — Cluster bomb the Canadians if they decider to invade the US in mass?
Or better yet, and also, use cluster bombs as an alarming deterrent tool for immigration control along the southwestern US?
Innocent victims the bottom line.
According to a Handicap International survey two years ago, casualties off cluster munitions could number a 100,000:
- The full extent of the damage caused by unexploded “bomblets” scattered by the weapons will probably never be known, it says.
Ninety-eight per cent of the casualties it found were civilian.
Of the 11,044 cases it discovered, 3,830 people were killed and the remainder injured.
Read the details here.
Get some backbone Barack!
F-k the Bird!
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Mark Twain hit the real bird squarely on the truth’s head:
- “Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians.
Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.“
(Illustration of Wounded Knee found here).
Americana as revisionist history.
Thanksgiving has got to be one of the most horribly-ironic holidays on record.
Stuff your faces you fat-ass somofabitches!
As football, full-blown feasts and fancy napping are the pure chance of a goodly-chunk of US peoples today, there should be some notice of shame.
Not!
Most people nowadays are shamed of their wallets.
Journalism professor Robert Jensen offered this up three years ago and the essay was re-posted this morning on AlterNet.
Some choice morsels:
- One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
…
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hardy Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims’ first winter.
Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough.
But it’s also true that by 1637, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders.
The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.
…
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians’ land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving “wild beasts” from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, “both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
Thomas Jefferson — president No. 3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the “merciless Indian Savages” — was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn’t stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, “[W]e shall destroy all of them.”
…
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who “settled” the country — and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable — such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States — suddenly the value of history drops precipitously, and one is asked, “Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?”
Read the whole essay, if you dare.
And to Mr. Obama I say, ‘Fuck the Bird,’ the false past is the false American Dream.