CBS News Reports:
"The Devil is in The [American] House"

 
  Hugo Chavez

Torture, Then And Now
By Rev. Fred Morris

I continue to be involved in Latin America. From 2002 to 2004 I was the Director for Latin American and Caribbean Relations of the National Council of Churches of Christ of the USA. Today I am the President of Faith Partners of the Americas, a non-profit organization dedicated to deepening relations of solidarity between churches in the US and faith communities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. As I travel in the region there is no place in the hemisphere where the US is not feared and hated because of our war policies and actions and for our blatant use of torture and kidnapping to carry out our policies. The peoples of the region suffered the same for years from the military dictators that ruled them. But throughout that dark period the US was, for them, a beacon of hope because of our public and international defense of human rights. No more. We are clearly seen as the enemy. And they are painfully puzzled that the American people don’t do something to stop this.

It is past time for the American people to stand up and say “no more. These policies do not represent us—this is totally un-American and we will have no more of it in our name.”
 

Priests Jailed for Protesting Fort Huachuca Torture Training
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Report
 

The priests were arrested while kneeling in prayer halfway up the driveway to Fort Huachuca in November 2006. Both priests were charged with trespassing on a military base and resisting orders of an officer to stop.

    
In a pre-trial hearing, the priests attempted to introduce evidence of torture, murder and gross violations of human rights in Afghanistan, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo. The priests offered investigative reports from the FBI, the US Army, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Social Responsibility documenting hundreds of incidents of human rights violations. Despite increasing evidence of the use of torture by US forces sanctioned by President Bush and others, the federal court in Tucson refused to allow any evidence of torture, the legality of the invasion of Iraq, or international law to be a part of the trial.
 

Pete, Nancy, George and WWIII

By Cindy Sheehan 

BushCo has over 14 more months to sew their demented seeds of destruction all over the planet. We must all join Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Oh) in his call to remove them from office not only for their past, but for their future, illegal wars of aggression, possibly even doing the unthinkable: using a nuclear weapon.
 

Iraq: Child prisoners abused and tortured, say activists

Iraqi NGOs have raised concerns about the condition of children in local prisons, saying they are abused and tortured during interrogation.


“The Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran” Another Casualty of Bush's War
By Mark Clinton and Tony Udell

Things really began to fall apart on Christmas Eve. While drunk, Lucey took two handmade Iraqi dog tags from around his neck, threw them at his younger sister, and told her that he felt like a murderer.

He never did tell his family the whole story of his experience in Iraq, only bits and pieces. It was horrific enough. He spoke of elderly people killed as they tried to run from Marines rolling into Nasariya.

He spoke of a small Iraqi boy, bloody and prone in the dusty street, shot in the head and the chest and still holding a small, bloodstained American flag in his hands. He spoke of his horror as an American tank lumbered down the street, how he had bolted from his own vehicle and, as gunfire rippled the sand around him, moved the tiny corpse to the sad sanctuary of a nearby alley.

He spoke of how he had been ordered to shoot two Iraqi prisoners. He remembered how he had looked into their eyes and hesitated, watching as they shook in terror, and thinking of their families. He remembered that an officer had shouted, "Pull the fucking trigger, Lucey!" He remembered shooting the soldiers and watching them die. He told his father that there were "other things" he did not want the family to know about.

There is something wrong with this so-called "Global War on Terror"

At Least 430 Iraq, Afghanistan Veterans Have Committed Suicide

120 US War Veteran Suicides a Week

Iraq Holocaust Surpasses Nazi Holocaust; US Uses Nuclear Weapons;
Over 1 Million US Troops Disabled, 73,000 Dead 

Iraq Truth

The U.S. Military and the Pharmaceutical Drug Companies – Drugging Troops to Desensitize Them to Committing War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19065.htm

What sort of world is this?

Hall of Shame

The Catholic Left

The Camden 28

Here's a faith-based initiative that's not on the Bush Administration's funding wish list:  antiwar protest.  In this stirring documentry, filmmaker Anthony Giacchino turns back the clock to 1971, when some of the most effective resistance to the Vietnam War came from the Catholic left.  Using archival footage, inerviews, and a rich collection of photographs and audio recordings, the documentary traces the actions o the Camden 28, a group of mostly Catholic war resistersas they plotted and destroyed draft records at a Camden, New Jersey, post office, and the trial that followed.  The film takes surprising twists and turns and ultimately offers a call for vigorous dissent in the face of war.  "We saw children on fire," says one activist, the Reverend Michael Doyle.  "What do you do when a child is on fire in a war that was a mistake?...Write a letter?" –Anthony Kaufman
 

A Lone Hero

Aglow for the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was supposed to be a call to the nation, a symbol of his rage and discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq.

"Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country," he wrote in his suicide note. "... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/27/national/main2209348.shtml

Behind the Facade of Incompetence

By Charles Sullivan
 

It is clear that the US media moguls would have us believe that the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq was a sincere effort to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East, gone awry. But we must remember that everything associated with capitalism is about marketing: making the people believe that things and events are the opposite of what they really are, and creating artificial wants that neither benefit the individual nor society, while simultaneously embellishing corporate profits.
 

This understanding would have been equally evident in the mainstream media’s buildup to the war had we a less propagandized, better read, and more informed citizenry. Even the politically naïve should have known that Saddam Hussein’s threat to the US, so vividly hyped in the media, was pure marketing propaganda.

But the majority of the people bought it, and now we have no choice but to live with our purchase. Short of a major social upheaval, we are going to be in Iraq for a very long time, and the death toll will continue to rise, especially for the Iraqis—the unwilling recipients of our corporate benevolence delivered through carpet bombs, terror, and torture. For these are the undeniable legacy of our foreign policies, and the illegal, amoral, acquisition of property by blunt force trauma.
 

If we are to survive as a republic, we must appreciate that capitalism and its cousin, global corporatism—not Saddam Hussein, not Communism or Socialism, nor Islamic terrorists, are the greatest threats to democracy. Zionism and Christian fundamentalism, which attempt to provide the flimsy moral basis for our Middle East policy, also pose significant obstacles to world peace by denying justice to others and promoting ethnic cleansing.

It is beguiling that we have yet to learn this fundamental lesson, that we know so little about our own history, and the role that mass ignorance plays in determining the future.
 

The narcotic of state sponsored propaganda has a powerful and hypnotic effect on our collective senses, and it is rending asunder the fabric of what is supposed to be a free and civil society. We believe what we are told and accept what we are given, without demanding truth, justice or accountability.
 

It is imperative for the purveyors of war to maintain a cloak of secrecy and a façade of public support where, if the truth were known, none would exist. It is necessary to keep the truth concealed in order to throw the public off the scent of the corruption that is the guiding principle of corporate governance and plutocracy, fomented by morally bankrupt men and women; a system that causes irreparable harm and suffering to its innocent victims and then profits from the misery and suffering it inflicts.
 

These days it is popular to describe the events occurring in Iraq as the result of incompetence, mismanagement, miscalculation, and benevolent bungling; to characterize them as a well intentioned mistake on the road to freedom and democracy, rather than the moral abomination they are. What we have in Iraq is not the result of any of these phenomena. It is the intended consequence of cold calculation to bomb Iraq into submission, to thoroughly disorient its people, and to apply economic shock therapy before they can recognize what is being done to them.

The intent is to invade sovereign nations either militarily, economically, or both; and to force unbridled capitalism on them. This means, of course, that we must first overthrow the existing governments—many of them democracies, and replace them with ruthless dictatorships willing to betray their own people, and amenable to opening up their countries to corporate exploitation and privatization.
 

So called free market capitalism requires corrupt leadership on the receiving end that is willing to accept bribes while becoming a puppet to the US. This is how some of the must brutal regimes in the world came into power. Corporate America is always beating the drums of war in search of profits and ever increasing shares of the world’s markets. Enough is never enough—they want it all.
 

Aside from overthrowing popularly elected governments, the unspoken objective of mature capitalism, guided by the doctrine of economic shock therapy, is to turn once sovereign nations into totally deregulated corporate states, answerable to no one.
 

This objective will be accomplished by privatizing the nationalized infrastructure, inviting in foreign investors, removing tariffs that protect local business and cooperatives from predatory multinational corporations, and downsizing the workforce; by eliminating social spending, and removing all forms of corporate controls. In short, by conducting a fire sale of each nation’s stolen assets and auctioning them off at bargain basement prices to wealthy multinational investors.
 

The intent is to create an unfettered corporate state in which the market, driven solely by profit, is the final arbiter of all things; an Orwellian world in which human rights, labor laws, environmental protections, and social justice do not even exist, much less enter into market equations.
 

Aided by the World Bank and the IMF, we are rapidly arriving at a state of global corporate fascism—the free market reform of manic capitalism, greed on steroids; a horrible economic monster unleashed upon unsuspecting people the world over, masquerading as democracy and free trade. And it is occurring in blatant contradiction to everything that is free, decent, and fair; a monstrosity utterly devoid of humanity and empathy for those struggling to survive.

But behind the marketing façade of a beneficent capitalism that is more oxymoronic than real, the skeleton of Reaganism, free marketry, and trickle down economics is exposed for all to see. We are witnessing naked greed unleashed upon the world like a swarm of locusts the size of North America. The fabulously wealthy are realizing obscene profits, while the majority of the world’s people are forced into economic servitude, many of them living in abject poverty, scratching out a bleak existence on sweatshop wages under horrendous conditions.
 

Economic slavery and burdensome debt, not freedom and democracy, is what we are imposing upon Iraq, aided by the most powerful military in history and, all too often, with the blessings of an oblivious and propagandized citizenry. Aside from the fierce resistance to the occupation, the US is achieving all of its major objectives in Iraq.

Like flies circling piles of stinking excrement, the lords of unfettered capitalism are buzzing around the bloated corpse of what is left of the world. And they have no intentions of stopping at Iraq. Iran and Syria are waiting in the wings: war that will not end in our lifetime.
 

If the world were as enamored with capitalism as its adherents proclaim, there would be no need to masquerade it as anything other than what it is—economic self interest for the privileged, driven by insatiable greed, funded by the public treasure. There would be no need to impose it on the world through high tech militarism and occupation, preceded by elaborate propagandistic media blitzes and tricks. All people would seek it out, as they seek water to slake their thirst and nourishment for their bodies.
 

So we must ask ourselves: When has it ever been in the pubic interest to over feed the rich and starve the poor? When has it ever been in the public interest to destroy the earth for the sake of profits? When has it ever been in the public interest to promote war and injustice over peace and shared prosperity?
 

Just people everywhere must resist evil or run the risk of being complicit in it. Neutrality, indifference and apathy, are untenable responses to what is being done in our name. Somehow, we must awaken from this media induced cultural stupor. We must do so under the prying eyes of government and private security contractors who are protecting corporate investors from democracy, and from people like us. Each of us is being diminished just as the Declaration of Independence states: “harass our people and eat out their substance.”
 

Every citizen is faced with a simple choice: organize or perish. The storm clouds of World War Three are looming on the horizon. These are extraordinary times that demand something from every one of us.


Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free-lance writer living in the hinterland of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com