I hope the world sees that this inhuman sickness is STRICTLY REPUBLICAN and NOT American.

Apologies to the world for these spawn of satan. Please be assured that they ABSOLUTELY DO NOT REPRESENT AMERICAN VALUES. They are NOT Americans.

Love the fetus, hate the child...

xoxoxo

Randi's right - I have only seen such sickness in historical documentation of Nazi German atrocities.

I cannot wait for the war crimes trials, so we can get all this psychosis known to the world and prevent its recurrence.

What a bunch of dickheads, they should be tried in the next administration, or better yet at the Hague. In front of the whole world....

I agree, NOT Americans - not even human.

We must separate them from us.

OMG are you listening to that caller? he just mentioned KAKI

The MSM needs to broadcast the testimony during prime time tonight.
These crimes should be seen in the light of day.
I would bet that impeachment proceedings would begin on Monday.

I hope you are listening to the current caller - the MI at Abu Ghraib.

These are war crimes.

IMO, EVERY Republican must be tried on 1.1 million counts of accessory to murder in the first degree, with special circumstances of war crimes and crimes against humanity. IMO, the Republican party must be made as illegal worldwide as the German Nazi party - same thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8HYaDqqsS0

Wait to go, John!!!

Wow, that call from John was electric. Hope he stays safe.

Yeah, torturing children is a war crime.

CACI - "We commercialize Pure Evil"


http://www.caci.com/hls.shtml

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/ne...t_id=1001218842

I think it was the late great George Carlin who said this.....Republicans want live fetuses so they can grow up to be dead soldiers.

A list of tortures used:

http://mindprod.com/politics/iraqtortures.html#TORTURES

Maybe Randi's right - it's some twisted sexual gratification thing like in the movie Silence of the Lambs. Whatever it is, it's more psychotic than a dozen Charles Mansons.

Propaganda!! Brought to you by Republican Campain Committee!!

Child Torture in Iraq
Kole | 02/23/2005 - 11:15» Media Coverage of Torture, Sumoud Newsfeed

Torturing Children
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 20 July 2004

(snip)

The biggest story of the Iraq war has not enjoyed any coverage in America, though it has been exploding across the international news media for several weeks now. (snip)


The biggest story of the Iraq war is about the torture of Iraqi children.

A German TV magazine called 'Report Mainz' recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross, to the effect that over 100 children are imprisoned in U.S.- controlled detention centers, including Abu Ghraib. "Between January and May of this year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations," said Red Cross representative Florian Westphal in the report.

The report also outlined eyewitness testimony of the abuse of these children. Staff Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, said that interrogating officers had gotten their hands on a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police only stopped the interrogation when the girl was half undressed. A separate incident described a 16 year old being soaked with water, driven through the cold, smeared with mud, and then presented before his weeping father, who was also a prisoner.

Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your government at war."

(snip)

Reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American prisons have been public knowledge since the release of the Taguba Report. Recently, however, some 106 annexes to the report, previously classified, have also been released. U.S. News and World Report detailed the sum of what is contained in these annexes in an article titled 'Hell on Earth.'

In it, U.S. News says, "The abuses took place, the files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment made even more so by the constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees. Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General Taguba's report, that pretty much sums up life at Abu Ghraib." According to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report from last May, between 70% to 90% of Iraqi detainees held in these prisons were arrested "by mistake." That means they were innocent.

(snip)

Mr. Hersh will revisit this issue within the next several weeks. In the meantime, the American news media has an obligation to report on this situation. Photographic and videotape evidence of this torture is currently in the hands of the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the U.S. Congress and the White House. It must be released.

(snip)

We took thousands of innocent civilians off the streets in Iraq and threw them into hellhole prisons, where they were beaten, raped, and killed. This story has faded from public view because no new pictures of the abuses have come out in the last several weeks. Those pictures are out there, and they show the rape and torture of children. The international media is reporting on it. Coalition ally Norway may be preparing to flee Iraq because of the allegations regarding these children.

Where is the American news media? Where are the pictures? Who is responsible for this abomination? Torturing children in the name of freedom? Is this what we have become?

(snip)

http://sumoud.tao.ca/?q=node/view/183

(snip)
Yes, children should be at the heart of America's concern for human rights. But that concern should start with the children detained in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Under international law, the line between childhood and maturity is 18. In communications with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon has lowered the cutoff to 16. For this reason among others, we don't know exactly how many Iraqi children are in American custody.

(snip)

The figures from Afghanistan are still more alarming: the journalist Seymour Hersh wrote last month in the British newspaper The Guardian that a memo addressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after the 2001 invasion reported "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody."

Juvenile detainees in American facilities like Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base have been subject to the same mistreatment as adults. The International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon itself have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, bolstered by accounts from soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse.

According to Amnesty International, Muhammad Ismail Agha, 13, was arrested in Afghanistan in late 2002 and detained without charge or trial for over a year, first at Bagram and then at Guantánamo. He was held in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation.

(snip)
A Canadian, Omar Khadr, was 15 in 2002 when he was captured in Afghanistan and interned at Guantánamo. For two and a half years, he was allowed no contact with a lawyer or with his family.

Akhtar Muhammad, 17, told Amnesty that he was kept in solitary confinement in a shipping container for eight days in Afghanistan in January 2002.

A Pentagon investigation last year by Major General George Fay reported that in January 2004, a leashed but unmuzzled guard dog was allowed into a cell holding two children. The intention was for the dog to "'go nuts on the kids,' barking and scaring them."

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Fay about visiting a weeping 11-year-old in the prison's notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed prisoners designated high risk. "He told me he was almost 12," Karpinski recalled, and that "he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother."

Children like this have been denied the right to see their parents, a lawyer or anyone else. They were not told why they were detained, let alone for how long. A Pentagon spokesman told Hersh that juveniles received some special care, but added, "Age is not a determining factor in detention."


(snip)
Many innocent children are swept up with their parents in chaotic nighttime dragnets based on tips from unreliable informants.

(snip)

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/29/opinion/edchild.php

Unfortunately this will ensure that the "War on Terror" will last longer, since torturing children will be sure to make more terrorists.
What ever happened to "Winning the Hearts and Minds"?

Problem is, many of them don't understand the difference.

It's like that video of the former GITMO prisoner that's up at the McClatchy website. When they went in, not only weren't they working for Al Qaeda or the Taliban, one of them was a minister in Karzai's gov't, for chrissake!

But when they got put into the tank with all the REAL Al Qaeda guys, and were abused by us on top of it, the Al Qaeda guys saw an opportunity to indoctrinate them in their worldview. And seriously, when you're an innocent dude being tortured by someone, and the guy sitting next to you is saying, "See, I told you they were assholes," who you gonna believe?

You're not going to make fine distinctions between Republicans and Democrats, you're going to lump. So whereas GITMO was supposed to be a place where we put terrorists AWAY, it ended up simply creating a bunch of people who now sympathize with those jerks!

THAT's one of the MANY reasons why this torture policy is shear CRAP!

Exactly....

I think the Republicans wanted the hearts and minds, so they could EAT them....

I was wondering what the "why" of this is, besides the thing about psychotic monsters being a factor here.

I just forgot my own conclusions - yes, this is to scare the world. Headline: America tells the world that we are tough on terrorists - better beware.

But it's more than that. To torture children? That wasn't necessary. Michael Reagan saying blow up the babies. This is all more than anything I can fathom.

I think there's a bigger why. Is it a grand global masterplan of greed. These people knowing full well oil would run out sometime, and they were not going to end up on the bottom of the pile. They have, or are attempting to take it all, and have spared nothing in their path to getting that. And we are at that precipise when they get their Iran War and 400/barrel oil. This is why you see them smirking and Bush still making care-free idiotic incoherent statements.

Randi's right there's something brewing and someone must stop them.

I can not read any more of this. We've become monsters. Our own SS has ground into the dirt everything we said, did, and stood for in Tokyo and Nuremberg and we are all responsible for letting them do it. We've gone from shining beacon to stinking cesspool in less than a decade.

Right! They're everywhere.

Just when the republicians have sunk as low as I think they can go they come up with a way to sink even lower. These people should be arrested and put in prison for life and I don't mean a "Club Fed" prison or even the Hague...NO NO they need to be put in a real prison with guys that will make them girls!!!!!! I can not believe that they really think it is OK to torture children for any reason.

I think the torture was absolutely part of the plan so the world would know that these evil bastards are willing to do inhumane things to human beings. They have no scruples and no conscience. Yes, we all should fear them, for whenever you come face-to-face with true evil, it should sent shivers up your spine. It should open your eyes. We all should know what we are dealing with. Yes, it sends a chilling message to those who would oppose their fascist actions, toward those who are perceived as "enemies" and toward all those who love freedom and human rights.

Yet, I am struck by how little coverage this story has received in the mainstream media. Since when is the fact that high officials in the U.S. government sat around, envisioning sadistic and brutal techniques of prisoner "interrogations", not a newsworthy story for the consumption of the American people?

And you ask me why I don't trust the corporate media? You ask me why I am increasingly turning toward alternative sources of news? I saw the Addington and Yoo performances on Cspan myself, but most people I know did not and they still don't know about it. That makes me crazy! How can we hope to choose a new leader wisely and reclaim our country, when so many of us don't even know what is going on?

Thanks to Randi for covering this story so well. Because of her, many people now know and have no excuse for turning a blind eye toward the commission of war crimes by our leaders. Shine a light.

unreal, isn't it? children in front of their parents? unfreakinbelievable!

It ain't so much a question of not knowing what to do.

I Cain't Say No

All week long, the newsplex is stirring the pot, planting wedges wherever they can, or reporting on issues that SHOULD be on the local news. They are not reporting, for instance, what happened to Barbara Boxer's bill, but Bill Moyers did on Friday night. Of course they are not covering the dodgy smirks of Yoo and Addington. I will send them my commentary on this subject, if I have to send it to them a thousand times. I want justice. We have had a bad week or two here. Are we still in shock that Hoyer struck a compromise in FISA that still gives telecoms immunity? And now this past week we have to look at these evil clowns sitting in front of Conyers, Adler, Wasserman, and Cohen insulting them??!!! and not even being able to deny that Bush has all the power in the world anytime he wants to bury anyone alive whenever he chooses in the false claim that this jerk is protecting the American people in this trumped up war on terror? Get the heck out of Iraq and solve the only problem you EVER had - and that's Afghanistan.

And all the media can give forth is that these two jackals - Yoo and Addington are rarely seen in public?

Damn right it's good that Randi is speaking up about this. Let's help her in all that we can do and think of how to move this issue forward.

Oh, and I want to hear Obama say more about this issue. All I hear everywhere is that he's lost his brand, he's flip-flopping, and he's moved to the right. I say something has happened. Obama is 15 points ahead, and the PTB do not like it. The power is not in the Republican party anymore, it's the media - the newsplex. THEY are the other candidate - the MIComplex.

Alternative sources are the only way to go. I laugh and roll my eyes so much at the cable news I get headaches.
But I still watch, just to get a feel as to how to counter them. Even Cspan's Journal is infiltrated with regular paid right wing callers. Just tune it out. We know better.

What ever happened to just raping the women as a tactic in war to break the enemy?

Torturing children is so far beyond the pale.

I have to wonder:

Is there a price on Bush's head and what it is. Is there a price on Cheney's head and what is it?
And whose offering the reward? If it's Iran, well then we know why the problem is Iran.

How can torturing Iraqi children endear the US to anyone other than AIPAC and Satanic cult leaders and followers?

I understand the genesis of the "torturing children" topic, and Yoo's opinion - I'm sorry: the memo's conclusions, a document Yoo participated in creating - that torturing the child of a suspect in order to compel the suspect to divulge information would be permitted. (From the testimony, it wasn't clear to me whether that would be permitted generally, or if a special Presidential order was required.)

Without downplaying the horror, heinousness, depravity and really inarguably immoral status of that opinion, has anyone read or heard of reliable reports that it has happened? Several times today Randi said, "They tortured children in front of their parents," and words to that effect. But on the NovaM site and here I have not found any stories posted relaying those accounts. Does anyone know of any?

I can't find any articles on the internetrs about it right now, but I do remember when the Abu Gharib story broke it was then that we learned that children were being tortured to get information out of the parent(s).

And then there's the effects of depleted Uranium on the developing fetus, but that's another story.

I can't BELIEVE I'd forget that significant of an aspect to the story. But that only means I'll be ashamed when I'm shown otherwise - not that there's any less likelihood that I HAVE forgotten it! (Which is to say, it wouldn't be the first time.)

If that was a documented aspect to Abu Gahraib, then I'd be livid that it was allowed to fade into the background, behind leashes and pyramids. No, I don't regard those as "college hijinks." But I just cannot believe people would reference those aspects of the story, and fall silent about the children of suspects being tortured.

And that's not even taking into account young people, teens, who were put through the same shit because they were prisoners on their own. I want to know about any cases where kids were tortured while their parents watched in an effort to compel the parent(s) to talk.

Oh, they were won alright, just not in the way that we might have envisioned.

Remember that "to assume makes an ass of you and me"...

See, it's much better this way because then we'll always get to pay for more wars on 'terror' - there will be plenty of terror for us to battle. How nice of W and company to make sure there will always be demand.

There is a story in The Bible that King Herrod ordered the first-born male child in every household killed. Was King Herrod therefore a Republican?

Infanticide and torture has been around a long, long time. Some people must feel so low (or inculpable) that the only way they can show any dominance in this world is to pick on defenseless or deemed weak individuals in society.

Legislation will not eradicate the problem. It will only force it further underground. The Natural Law Party way of thinking might be just what we need: Find the root causes of what causes someone to behave this way and prevent those conditions from occurring with others. Do not mistake Natural Law's approach to solving the problem to condoning the behavior of the perpetrators.

That's not the same thing.

However I believe that if you took the ends strived for by today's neocon republicans and blue dogs, they would closely match the ends sought by history's most bloodthirsty and oppressive monarchs.

You know, I'm a J Street guy, so I'm not AIPAC's biggest fan.

But seeing crap like this pisses me off to high hell.

Putting AIPAC and "Satanism" in the same sentence, or implying that AIPAC members favor torturing of children.

You should call Randi Rhodes Show and reveal your experienced, natural journalistic suspicions and ask her yourself.

On the other board, there was a wealth of information, testimonies, pictures? (Perhaps this was before you became a member of RRMB.) I didn't look at all of them. I believe Salon did a lot of work on compiling this information. Anyway, some of our oldest members relayed this information to me.

Well as it was a subject of discussion here (check out the subject line), I asked those who were also discussing it. Thus far, no links though. It's early yet.

Oh, and running a search for "torture, children, Iraq" and then "torture, children" at Salon.com brought up the previously referenced story about teens captured, alleged to be terrorists and shipped off to Gitmo. But I found no stories about or references to the children of the accused being tortured to compel statements/information from the accused.

Well, it seems that you do have an issue with Randi, that's why I made the suggetion.

When we find the pictures, and/or testimonies, we'll post. But who knows, we may never find out - suppose all we have for now are Yoo and Addington's statments of not denying in the hearing it is true.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml...bughraib130.xml

I appreciate your feedback. I didn't use the term Satanism.

I'll stop adding "Satanic to the mix. Maybe Barbarous is more appropriate?

How would you refer to a Christan political PAC that was buying off every member of the Senate and Congress and the White House for the purpose of buying political favor in the form of waging pre-emptive world war against everybody else to steal all the resources? The fact that AIPAC has palled up with the Repubican and Democratic Christians doesn't make it any more morally right than if the Christians decided to do it all for themselves.

AIPAC is not a religious group. It does not lobby the Jewish POV on moral or social issues. It has members that are Christian, probably even members that are atheist. I can imagine there might even be atheists who believe in the value of a strong U.S.-Israel geopolitical relationship. Christopher Hitchens seems to be one. While many members are ethnically Jewish, religiously they may well be of any faith or none at all.

It is not like CUFI. It does not make religious arguments for why there should be a U.S.-Israel relationship, only secular and geopolitical ones.

It lobbies on one and only one thing -- its POV as to what the U.S.-Israel relationship should be and on U.S. foreign policy. As for the Iraq war itself, well, here's the truth, and I know, because yes, I do know people involved in AIPAC, and I even went to meetings in 2003. (I would not go back. I personally found the whole experience distasteful. One reason why I am now a J Streeter.) They did not all support the Iraq War, because the fact is this: AIPAC, and most of the Israeli establishment, always considered Iran the worse threat. Many were against it because they felt attacking Iraq would only strengthen Iran - and guess what, it did. However, after the Iraq War was underway, AIPAC shifted to a "cheerleader" role because they saw Bush as otherwise being "good" for Israel and decided to "go along". That's fact.

The neoconservatives and AIPAC were not on the same page. In fact, I would argue notable figures both in AIPAC and even Israel's Likud party didn't trust the neocons' belief that the Arab world could be "democratized" through an Iraq invasion. Maybe due to racism ("Arabs are not ready for democracy"), maybe due to pessimism, but for whatever reason, AIPAC and the neocons were not one big giant celestial choir working in concert. It didn't happen that way. Even Stephen Zunes recognizes this.

As for what AIPAC wants -- hey, criticize them for what they DO want, all you want to -- a strong, U.S.-Israel relationship, continued $3bil of funding every year, security guarantees, insistence that they not "pressure" Israel into a deal with the Palestinians, that the U.S. not send any military aid or assistance to any other Middle Eastern countries -- but sorry, it is just bullshit to say their goal is to take over the world's resources or annihilate everyone in the Middle East on behalf of Israel.

However, they do not lobby on U.S. interrogation policy, so if U.S. interrogation policy involved torture, point fingers at Yoo or Addington or whoever else, but not at AIPAC -- they do not deal with the issue. They do not lobby on what methods the U.S. government uses to fight terrorism. Period.

They might be willing to do things that both you and I disagree with to "protect" or "preserve" Israel's security, including but not limited to engaging in hostile action against its enemies. But let's not ascribe goals to them they don't have. Israel does not want to rule the world, let alone the Middle East, it is too much of a fucking hassle.

Saturday, June 12, 2004


Children of Detainees Were Abused & Tortured to Get Parents to Talk

There has been chatter over Seymour Hersh's disturbing revelations of children being abused and tortured in front of their parents as part of the parents' interrogations. These revelations were made in his graduation address at the University of Chicago on June 8th. Blogger Brad Delong broke the news based on Rick Pearlstein who attended the graduation and took notes. Here is a paragraph that has caused some attention:

He [Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

(snip)

Mike Dorning of the Chicago Times validates one of Hersh's comments in his article yesterday. The article is about Army Spec. Jeremy Sivits account of what he experienced at Abu Ghraib, including this horrific account. Consider Dorning's review of the account and details of the facts that have been discovered:

[A} military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father's resistance to interrogators.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

The new account of mistreatment came as Army Spec. Jeremy Sivits was sentenced in Iraq to a year in prison Wednesday and a bad-conduct discharge after pleading guilty in the first court-martial stemming from the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

.....Sgt. Samuel Provance, who maintained the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion's top-secret computer system at Abu Ghraib prison, gave the account of abuse of the teenager in a telephone interview from Germany, where he is now stationed. He said he also has described the incident to Army investigators.

Provance's account of mistreatment of a prisoner's son is consistent with concerns raised by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had received reports that interrogators were threatening reprisals against detainees' family members.


(snip)

http://blogs.salon.com/0002090/2004/06/12.html

Children in Iraqi prisons
Human rights groups demand immediate access to children held as criminals or 'security detainees.'

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The Sunday Herald of Scotland reported this week on its own investigation into allegations that more than 100 children, some as young as 10 years-old, are being detained by coalition forces in Iraq under suspicion of "alleged activities targeting the occupying forces." Many of the children are being held in a special wing at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The Herald's story includes allegations that some of the children were abused, tortured, or raped, by coalition and Iraqi soldiers.

An Iraqi TV reporter Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz saw the Abu Ghraib children's wing when he was arrested by Americans while making a documentary. He spent 74 days in Abu Ghraib. "I saw a camp for children there," he said. "Boys, under the age of puberty. There were certainly hundreds of children in this camp." Al-Baz said he heard a 12-year-old girl crying. Her brother was also held in the jail. One night guards came into her cell. "She was beaten," said al-Baz. "I heard her call out, 'They have undressed me. They have poured water over me.'"

A report run on the German TV program Report Mainz (video) in July on the same topic included an interview with US Sgt. Samuel Provance. Sgt. Provance was one of the original whistleblowers who said US troops were abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Provance has since been transferred to Germany. He says he was ordered by his superiors not to talk to the media any more. In May, Provance said he was told by Army officials that he may be prosecuted because his statements were " not in the national interest."

Provance, however, did talk to the German TV crew about the treatment of children at Abu Ghraib. He alleges that children were sometimes abused in order to force their parents to give information to coalition authorities.

(snip)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0804/dailyUpdate.html?s=ent

Actually, I tried calling on Monday about this, and last week about the "Bill said Kiss my ass" stuff. Sat on hold for an hour or so, and both times was then summarily disconnected at the end of the final commercial break before the last segment started. Perhaps I should consider claiming I'm calling about something more... um, supportive.

Also took a shot today through the Clark stuff today, but hung up myself after about 40 minutes.

I've gotten through before though.

I didn't hear that many supportive call-ins to Randi yesterday?