(The Obamas Party, While the CIA Tortures Men, Women and Children) 
 

Good looks may not be everything, but they can give one a head start in life. But, paraphrasing Mark Twain, "God must love plain looking (ugly) people as he made so many of us." And, I'd rather be loved by God than look like Rock Hudson used to look, or how Tom Cruise looks, today. 

Still, next life time, I'd like to have a six foot, four inch tall body, with muscular, well-shaped limbs, a fabulous throwing arm, jet-black hair (that later turns to a steel gray), piercing blue eyes, weighing in at a slim 235 pounds, all top off with a kill-her smile. I'm talkin' tall, dark, and devastating. No more Willie Nelson looks for me, unless I can sing and write music like he can. 

If God will give me such looks, I promise to try to win his love, in spite of my gorgeousness. Which reminds me of another good-looking chap, who needs to work over-time to win God's love: Barack Hussein Obama, once known as Barry Soetero. 

Why the name change Mr. Obama? Anybody know? 

Not long ago Obama, a relatively unknown Afro-American, was being sheep-dipped (gaining an identity, to build creditability) as a Constitutional Law professor (when he - by rights - should have been studying our Constitution) at the highly regarded University of Chicago School of Law, while he doubled as an Illinois state legislator. 

And even though flextime Professor Obama had produced no original scholarship papers on Constitutional Law, he was offered a tenured position at the lofty Chicago School of Law. But oddly enough, hard working Professor Obama refused tenure, as he must have known he was on a much faster greased track to something much bigger ... if ... he could only improve his poor teleprompter reading skills of what others wrote for him. 

And, Mr. Soetero ... er... Mr. Obama applied himself to his trade, which was not statesmanship, but neuro-linquistics. And in time, Obama's teleprompter reading coaches perfected with their student a slow rhythmic flow of spoken words, broken up with many "uhs," with the same measured cadence as the words appeared on his teleprompter screens. 

Then strangely, in an unprecedented move, the Democratic Party kingmakers gave lowly state Senator Obama a national stage, when allowing him to display his reading cadence at their presidential nominating convention of 2004. 

And even more amazingly, the following year, Barack became a United States senator. Then unbelievably, three years later, Mr. Obama became president and commander-in-chief of the most militarily equipped nation on Earth, without ever serving a day in any military. And, unless one is extremely naive, they know that some powerful interests, made Mr. Obama into Mr. President.  

The only power, we are conversant with, that has that much muscle is the private and foreign International Monetary/Banking Cartel. And true enough, it was those oligarchs that gave Obama about six times the presidential campaign funds as they did that other republican guy ... what's his name ... the one who wants to torture detainees indefinitely. 

This rise for President Obama "From Obscurity to Savior: In Three Years" has to be some kind of a record in American politics, and would make an excellent title for an expose. 

Obama, only in the US Senate for half a term, before he became president, was and is a blank slate upon which Barack's fans have projected their individual wishes, hopes, fantasies, broken souls, and anything else that fans fancy. But remember, the word "fan" is short for fanatic: one possessed by an excessive or irrational zeal, especially for an entertainment, religious or political personality ... or perhaps for a petty demagogue. 

What happens when Obama, with rock-star status, doesn't deliver on the "free lunch" some of his fan have been fanaticizing about? 

What if President Obama takes us into expanded wars, or a new war, and further destroys our dollar in the process? 

What if Obama's socialism is only for the super-rich? What if his policies bring on the greatest economic depression in our history? Will Obama's fans turn against him and his policies? Not likely. 

What if Obama doesn't deliver on all the promises he made while running for the presidency, like, "I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." 

Instead, Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan, and is waging a new one in Pakistan, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize. Can someone please explain that to me? Is it because he has brought "peace"to so many dead people? 

Obama also promised no tax increases for families netting less than $250,000 a year, then vigorously pushed congress to pass his Healthcare Reform Bill, which promises us the largest tax increases in American history. 

"Lobbyists won't find a job in my White House," said candidate Obama; but within a month of taking office, President Obama had hired 12 lobbyists. By the same time a year later, Obama had hired 40 lobbyists, for senior positions, including three Cabinet secretaries, and the CIA director. 

"Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones for my presidency," promised candidate Obama. He even said government negotiations on the health care bill would be televised on C-SPAN. But instead, President Obama allowed no cameras during the secret negotiations he conducted at the White House reconciling the House and Senate versions of the health care bill, even turning down a request by the C-SPAN CEO to televise those negotiations. 

According to the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner PolitiFact, President Obama has broken over 500 of his campaign promises. Was the man merely ignorant of what a president can actually accomplish, or is Obama simply a congenital liar?  

In any case, has any president, in our history, broken more promises in such a short period? 

The rudest awakening to the real Obama may be his continuance and advancement of the heinous torture policies of his demonic predecessor, George Bush - The Lesser. 

Obama's most egregious broken promise for open government was his exercise of Executive Privilege, with his refusal to investigate the torture crimes of the Bush administration, or to release a series of photographs depicting outrageous US tortures, by dismissing the most shameful chapter in American history with his, "We've moving on." 

Moving on where, Mr. Obama? 

Dick Cheney and Bush, Jr. have both since played out their allotted roles in deceiving the American people  - as ordered to do - by pretending to complain about Obama's "softness" about US torture of detainees, a softness they both knew has never existed. This is the way propaganda in an Orwellian state works: Since Cheney and Bush attack Obama for not torturing US prisoners enough, you're supposed to think Obama is more humane about torturing American prisoners than they were, an utter piece of disinformation. 

We've also heard that torture can be humane. What's next, we have to torture to be humane? Yes, this piece of "double-think" is already at work with the presidential proclamations of, "We torture to save American lives." 

But the undeniable truth is since we torture prisoners, other nations, or groups, will now torture our nationals, who are held as prisoners, a barbaric quid pro quo. America is now spreading - with Obama's help - torture of human life, world-wide. 

It's obvious our military and intelligence officers need better interrogators, not more fiendish torturous psychopaths. 

When campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised us that if elected, he'd move America away from fascism, by ending the Bush policies of torture and fanatic militarism in two important ways: First, he'd terminate the practice of sending the so-called "enemy non-combatants" to over 170 foreign military bases for torture, and end the notorious military tribunals that deny detainees basic rights. It was change most of us believed in, but has never come. 

The Obama promises to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and that he would respect the restrictions of the Geneva Convention, while he reviewed the American torture techniques have all come to nothing, other than more broken promises. 

Amy Goodman, on her "Democracy Now" internet show interviewed political investigator Jeremy Scahill, who reported that, "Obama is still continuing to use a notorious military police unit at Guatanmo, that regularly brutalizes prisoners, including gang-beating them, breaking their bones, gouging their eyes, and dousing them with chemicals." 

This out-law gang of thugs, officially known as the "Immediate Reaction Force," not only breaks bones, but urinates and smears feces of other detainees on the faces of prisoners, often guilty of nothing more than technically breaking petty rules, like perhaps having two Styroform cups in their cells instead of one. 

Information like what Mr. Scahill reports is very difficult to come by, as US torture of prisoners is kept tightly hidden from the American public. It was through an on-going Spanish investigation of the Bush torture camps that much of what Mr. Scahill's reports has come to light. 

Enough data, however, has leaked to the American press to prove the existence of US torture, in spite of its lock-down by the corporate media. In a little publicized report in the LA Times, we told of some of the tortures of the thousands of Iraqis that have been stuffed into the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Eye witnesses told of not only seeing such things as strangulation, but brutal beating, and the cramming of lit cigarettes into the ear openings of prisoners. 

Even Harper's magazine writer Scott Horton states he has obtained specific corroboration from a highly credible military officer with first hand knowledge of Iraqi men, women and children being raped and sodomized by US soldiers in Abu Gharaib. 

Keep in mind that the above tortures took place in front of witnesses; but, there seems to be a number of secret prisons where special torture techniques are carried out by the CIA, without any witnesses allowed, as reported in the Washington Post. 

And by Special Order of President Bush, and not repealed by President Obama, the CIA does not have to reveal to anyone who these prisoners are, or what happens to them behind the the impenetrable walls of about 170 US prisons around the world. Not satisfied with torturing detainees, US officials seem to also want to leave relatives and friends of the detainees in a constant state of worry and misery, wondering what happened to their loved ones. 

Abu Gharaid sections off men from their wives and children, and children from their mothers, except when children are being tortured in front of their parents. 

According to a Human Rights Watch report, the US Army, since March of 2003, has imprisoned about 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten years old. Many of these children have been imprisoned for more than a year, without charges or trials, in violation of the Coalition Provisional Authority memorandum on criminal procedures. 

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and all other oversight agencies have been denied permission to see these children, or where they are imprisoned in Iraq. What is being done to these children, that you have to hide them, Mr. Obama? Give us some answers, Mr. Obama. Insist that your teleprompter writers print in large letter for you to read the answers to us. 

In an article entitled US and Allies Torture Children in Iraqi Prisons, Sherwood Ross writes, "Iraqi lawyer SaharYasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps, and that 95 percent of the 10,000  women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, [and] starvation," and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random arrests not based on any legal text." 

And now that we torture foreign prisoners, we'll soon be torturing our domestic prisoners, and then even torturing innocent American citizens, who are merely stopped for simple traffic infractions. Already almost 400 people have been tasered to death with 50,000 volts of electricity that painfully disrupt a person's electromuscular system with repeat shocks in rapid succession. 

The International Monetary/Banking Cartel, that controls our government, practices incrementalism, wherein each tyrannical step builds on the last, each step logical to those unable to think beyond what they've been told by authority and the Cartel's corporate media. 

In the English Isles live some of the most docile and pliable people on Earth, with most of them civilized to the point of being almost as domesticated as house pets. England is a perfect testing ground for the Cartel's incremental and draconian policies. If a new piece of tyranny won't fly in the UK, it certainly will not work anywhere else on Earth, except maybe in Canada. 

And as predicted, England's Scotland Yard has been accused of water-boarding English citizens, who are only suspected of criminality, but with no proof. But thus far, English citizens can only be tortured for 28 days. How long will it be before American citizens are incarcerated and then tortured indefinitely? 

Indefinitely? Tortured? America? 

Yes, Obama's new Prolonged Detention policy has gone well beyond the Cartel's incrementalism, which usually starts out in the UK, with his "no limits" on how long those suspected of committing future crimes can be imprisoned and tortured. Under Obama's latest un-Constitutional doctrines, the US will be officially imprisoning people, not for any crimes they have committed, but for "crimes" they may commit in the future. 

Huh? Yes, that's right. Obama announced we'll now be officially (not under-cover like Bush did) imprisoning and torturing people who cannot be found guilty of any crimes ... yet ... but who may commit a crime in the future. This is George Orwell's concept of Thought police taken to unfathomable heights, and only Obama could openly get away with it. 

The US corporate media is keeping this piece of Obama tyranny under wraps, so as to not overly shock Obamanoids, who have long been struck dumb with paralytic political naivete. But you may still be able to see and hear Obama, himself, "ah-uh-ing" all about it on YouTube (Search - Rachel Maddow: Indefinite detention? Shame on you, Mr. President). 

One civil liberties advocate told the New York Times,"We've known this [Prolonged Detention] was on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning." 

Yes, "stunning" to those who have yet come to grips with a basic reality: The same dark forces who controlled George Bush, control BarackObama. 

Caroline Fredickson, director of the Washington, DC Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties union said, "Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme." 

After condemning Bush for his illegal ad hoc legal strategy of making up rules as he went, and then trying to make them seem legal, MrObama had the gall to say he'd do the very same thing: "We'll develop an appropriate legal regime (outside the court system to make illegal detention legal) so our efforts are consistent with our values and Constitution." 

Consistent with our Constitution? Did you really teach Constitution Law, Mr. President? In any case, you certainly need better teleprompter writers, Mr. Ex-law professor turned Teleprompter-Reader-In-Chief. One doesn't have to teach, or even study, Constitutional Law to understand that you as a sitting president cannot legally make-up laws, whether they are consistent with the Constitution or defy it, as does your ad hoc Prolonged Detention scheme proposes. 

And how long is "Prolonged, "Mr. Obama? A 28 day imprisonment is the longest period of preventive detainment allowed, under law, in any civilized country in the world. How long is your preventive detention, Mr. President? 

Obama spoke of 10 years, but didn't limit his preventive detention to a mere decade. But does our president realize that 10 years of detention is over 130 times longer than that of other nation? 

If such tortured detainees do "confess" to crimes they have not committed, what then? Ten more years of detention until they confess to more crimes they are not guilty of committing? What's the ultimate solution? More detention? More torture? More what? Have you even thought that far ahead, Mr. President? 

Rachel Maddow said, "[Obama's prolonged detention] are one of the most radical proposals for defying the Constitution that we have ever heard made to the American people." 

Vincent Warren, the Black Executive Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights said, " I was really stunned when I heard those words [preventive detention] come out of his mouth. This has never been done before. It is completely outside the realm of what is constitutionally permissible. It is deeply shocking that he'd even go there, when George Bush didn't even go there. This is really something that was beyond the pale." 

Author Yvonne Ridley wrote, "This president [Obama] has gone from charming to harming and few have noticed." 

George Hunsinger, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, in his book "Torture is a Moral Issue," tells us of the danger torture poses to the human soul, to civil liberty, and to the morale and safety of our soldiers, and marks a milestone in the disintegration of American democracy." 

Is there any wonder that in some months more US soldiers commit suicide than are killed in combat; and, many of those suicides have occurred with soldiers who have rotated out of the theaters of war. Apparently to some, death is preferred to living with the atrocities to which we are all guilty, which began with incrementalism.  

This incrementalism of US torture began as flat denials, during the Bush administration, that the US tortured anyone. But even former president, Jimmy Carter has confirmed that we have long tortured prisoners. 

"I don't think it, I know it," snapped Carter to CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights, continued Carter. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib Prison, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they have been accused." 

We have been told that the people we’ve interned are the worse terrorists of the worst, a lie on it’s face, when one considers that we, also, imprison innocent children. 

In reality, the US military and intelligence agents callously gather up stray non-combatants, wandering around their US destroyed little farms, that border on battlefields, or we pay local warlords to provide us with women, children and men to torture. 

Why do we torture homeless people, even children, who have no intelligence data to give, when the infliction of severe pain is logically used as a means of punishment or coercion? Are we trying to punish Iraqi and Afghani peasants, because we hate their national leaders?  

Does not the torture of such poor tillers of the soil engender hate for America, and invite terrorist attacks on our homeland from Arabs around the world? So, what is the real reason for all this rush to torture human beings? 

The official reason, given by government authorities for our deplorable treatment of largely uneducated small farmers, is if we torture them long enough, they’ll give us valuable information about the enemy; but, the CIA finances that enemy to keep our wars going, while blaming Iran for the financing and supplying of war materials. 

The CIA/Mossad nexus has more intelligence on al Qaeda than all the Arabs in the world combined. So, if we’re not torturing Arab individuals and families for intelligence data, why are we torturing them? 

The US practice of torture has to come from the highest command source that we know of: the International Monetary/Banking Cartel. 

Why does the Cartel want to torture human beings? That’s a question best left to metaphysicians; but perhaps it will suffice to say that President Obama, our titular commander-in-chief, is so far down the command structure he has little to say about our torturing of human beings other than, I don’t want to offend the intelligence community. You see the International Monetary/Banking Cartel controls our government through the intelligence establishment, with blackmail, the threat of death, and actual assassinations. 

Is Mr. Obama ignorant of the Immediate Reaction Force, or of the wide spread US torture of human beings? No, but he is keeping our shameful, but open secret a secret from the world as best he can, and all reporters know better than to ask him about it. 

The Obama administration has gone so far as threatening to cut off intelligence sharing programs with Great Britain, if their High Court releases information to the press regarding US torture methods. 

And, Obama, with the help of the corporate media, has proven to be even more dangerous than Bush, with  Barack's ability to portray himself as someone who is "reasonable" about torturing human beings, as if such an attitude were even possible or defensible, as anything short of an outright denunciation of torture is psychopathic. 

Torture was a crucial issue while Bush was president, but is now not something much discussed in polite company, lest one be called a racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for criticizing a black president. So, we close off our minds to the thousands of constant screams of agony from around the world, as if we didn't know they existed, or take refuge in such nebulous terms as Enhanced Interrogations, Harsh Interrogations, Rough Interrogations, or an Alternate Set of Procedures. 

The Kafkaesque terror of the endless enhanced interrogations, practiced by US intelligence agents on defenseless human beings, cannot easily be imaged by most Americans, so many feel that savage and inhuman US torture practices do not exist. 

But please, declare your abhorrence of the US torture of human life, so as to not inherit the negative karma surely to befall those who authorize torture, commit it, or condone it, either explicitly or implicitly.  

The great 17th century philosopher John Locke, whose work was later reflected in our own Declaration of Independence, wrote, "As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil which they set out to destroy." 

In keeping with Locke's axiom, a nation guilty of the war crime of torture - even water-boarding - is, itself, a terrorist state. Our government hanged the Japanese military leaders who water-boarded our GIs during World War II.

President Obama has proclaimed our inconsistency with that standard with his curt dismissal of Bush's war crimes with, "We're moving on;" which obviously means that since George Bush's crimes were not really crimes,  Mr. Obama is free to continue the crimes our government denies are crimes.

If some of our fat cat authorities were being tortured by our Immediate Reaction Force, perhaps they'd see torture in a different, more honest light; but, soulless men have no empathy for others, especially many ruthless psychologists.

With a membership of about 150,000, the American Psychological Association (APA) condones the evil practice of psychologists tutoring CIA operatives with torture methods, that are used in secret sites around the world. 

APA  president, Gerald Koocher is an enabler of torture insisting, “psychologists play a valuable and ethical role with the interrogation [torture] of US prisoners.”

Psychologists have long functioned as the CIA’s torture teachers, as proven by articles in both magazines of Vanity Fair and Salon.com.

The brilliant gad-fly and TV personality Max Kaiser reminds us that Hannibal Lecter was a psychologist, and anyone who’d take advice from a common garden variety psychologist might as well have a private dinner-date with Hannibal Lecter, at his home.

State licensing boards that have the power to revoke or suspend a psychologist’s license, should do so when psychologists become enablers of torture, if not instituting criminal proceedings against them for their crimes against humanity.

But neither, at the state and federal levels, have any bureaucrats or politicians taken any effective actions to end our disgraceful and shameful official policy of torturing human life, least of all from our president.

Being a Cartel puppet may prevent you from being able to end US torture practices, Mr. Obama; but outrageous indulgences do not become you or our nation. In good taste, you should probably reduce giving so many dinner parties, laden with Wagyu steaks (at $100.00 per serving), with the best wines and aperitifs, all on the heels of America’s most expensive inaugural celebration in history.

Sir, you have nothing decent to celebrate. In a time of unprecedented debt (you helped to create), a time when Americans continue to lose their homes, cars, jobs, and savings, you should be thinking about some food fasts, to clean your body and soul.

And as the face of our nation, I would appreciate a few less smiles from your handsome countenance. Until, we discontinue killing and torturing human life, our entire nation should be in mourning.

Little boy Bush effectively assaulted our moral and ethical values under right-wing cover; and now, Mr.Obama is doing the same thing, but with left-wing pretenses; and that is essentially the change PresidentObama has thus far brought to the White House.
     

Shackled in total blackness in the CIA's 'dark prison' in Kabul, he was forced to listen to ear-splitting music 24 hours a day for a month.

In Morocco he was hung from walls and ceilings and repeatedly beaten, His penis and chest were sliced with a scalpel and hot, stinging liquid poured into the open wounds.

"They cut all over my private parts", he wrote in his diary. "One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists" ...

... In July 2002, Mohamed was flown - trussed, gagged, blindfolded and wearing a giant nappy - from Islamabad to Rabat in Morocco.

For the next 18 months he suffered torture including the genital mutilation. He says it was here that questions from MI5 were channelled by his Moroccan interrogators."  It was obvious the British were feeding them questions about people in London."

Mohamed says that under torture he told his interrogators that [alleged] 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had given him the false British passport and that he had met Osama Bin Laden 30 times. "None of it was true."'


Continued here

 

"While military officials repeatedly told his family that he would be released, four days later his corpse was dumped on their doorstep, bearing cigarette burns and with nails hammered into his flesh. “There was no place on his body not tortured,” his family said in a petition seeking justice."

"American officials have praised the Pakistani military for its campaign in the Swat Valley, with US Ambassador Anne Patterson visiting Mingora, Swat’s largest town, last week to congratulate the army." [Sick Woman]