The PPJ Gazette

Marti Oakley

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Regardless of who released the report on the CIA, the fact is, this is a tragic and shameful moment for America. What was done under the false pretense of “keeping us safe” is nothing less than the stuff of nightmares. That any one of us thinks or believes that the sadistic, torturous, murderous actions of the CIA was somehow acceptable because of 9/11 is in itself a tragedy.  The billions spent building hidden prisons, designing facilities to exact horrific pain and death, is exceeded in its sickest moments in knowing that truly sick and malignant individuals actually took the time to design these facilities for effect.

Consider the fact that all of this torture has done nothing other than to inflame the hatred of the United States by people around the world.  Is this not counter productive?

Are you really so naïve as to think they have not done this here at home to some of our fellow countrymen, or would not do the same to you if they decided to? These people have no boundaries. You and I,  along with billions of others around the globe mean nothing to them. What they have happily done to others is just a moment away from happening to you. Or, were you thinking they thought you were far too special to practice their torture on?

Were you thinking that all of this money was spent, all of these people were trained in the fine art of torturing other human beings so that you could be saved from some contrived enemy that may or may not even exist?

That torture is not an effective tool is evidenced by the facts.  This is not a “war on terror”.  It is a “war of terror” and eventually it will come to a neighborhood near you.

Mr. Hayden: There is a bug on your dress

Michael Hayden, one of Bush’s henchmen, screamed like a little girl with a big green bug on his dress over the revelations in the report. While claiming on one hand that what they did was legal and necessary, on the other, he claims that to have to own up to the horrendous activities that were perpetrated on his watch, is somehow not right. Why not Mr Hayden? Aren’t you proud of the terrible things you approved of? Of course, you didn’t actually do any of the torturing yourself; that required people far sicker mentally than even you are.

While we express our outrage and disgust over the beheadings of westerners at the hands of ISIS, while we sit in feigned superior judgement over some foreign leader who allegedly “gassed his own people”, I have to wonder where our outrage and disgust is over the torture techniques not only used, but also taught by the CIA and the military to US citizens and those sent here to the US from all over the world. The School of the Americas has been in business since 1946 and teaches and has taught some of the most treacherous, sadistic, malignant characters ever known. And what they teach is equally sadistic.

In 2000 Congress renamed the school The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Formerly known as the US Army School of the Americas, United States Department of Defense Institute located at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, provides military training to government personnel of Latin American. Ft Huachuca claims it does not teach torture and yet…….

From Common Dreams: 

The investigation also revealed that Huachuca was the source of infamous “torture manuals” distributed to hundreds of Latin American graduates of the US Army School of Americas at Fort Benning, GA., and those from countries with right-wing governments.

As with all of the most egregious agency constructs engaged in by the US government, the School of the America’s was simply renamed; this rather than closing these schools for torture and ending this sordid episode in our history.

In 2005 a bill to abolish the institute, with 134 cosponsors, was introduced to the House Armed Services Committee. In June 2007, the McGovern/Lewis Amendment to shut off funding for the Institute failed by six votes. This effort to close the Institute was endorsed by the nonpartisan Council on Hemispheric Affairs, which described the Institute as a “black eye” for America.

Remember: “When we do it we call it noble…..when they do it we call it terrorism”.

The usual cadre of political parrots on MSM squawked all day long expressing their outrage over the release of the CIA investigative report. Even the former head of the CIA, Michael Hayden, spoke of how lives could be endangered as a result of the US exposing publicly what was privately known; people could be identified! Like him maybe? And what about the lives he personally put in danger through the activities of the CIA? The lives that were destroyed for no other reason than the individual was kidnapped off the streets of his own country and delivered to agents working for the CIA with no real evidence of wrong-doing then or now? Since they don’t work for the CIA they don’t count?

Hayden stated that “the report would hurt CIA employees and embolden our enemies”. Really Mr. Hayden? Maybe what hurt your CIA employees and emboldened your enemies was the operation of black ops prisons where individuals kidnapped off the streets of their own countries were taken and tortured, many times to death. Maybe it was the 17 floating prisons that were (still are?)operating at sea, where people who have been charged with no crimes are subjected to unspeakable things. Maybe the crimes committed under the rubric of “keeping us safe”, were really not about that at all.

From Amy Goodman
“At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were “disappeared” to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.”

In 2003 the CIA paid the polish government $15 million to build a black ops prison for the CIA and later gave the Moroccans $20 million for another in their country.

The intended purpose was that the CIA wanted them kept outside of the U.S. legal system where they wouldn’t have a right to an attorney or habeas provisions. These are the same reasons we maintain the prison at Quantanamo.  By stashing them in these black sites in Europe and other willing countries, they could detain them for years and do whatever they liked with them. And they did. And they did it in our name.

From Reprieve:
According to Reprieve’s legal director, Clive Stafford Smith, the U.S. admits to holding 26,000 people without trial in various secret prisons, and Smith believes “up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001.”

Again, I ask: If what you were doing was legal, moral, and the right thing to do….why all the subterfuge? If these people really were a threat to us, why not bring them here and present your evidence in a court of law? Maybe because there was no such evidence, and more likely because even after the psychopaths and sociopaths that work for the CIA and in certain places in the military got done with them, they came up empty-handed. Even so, the torturing continued, didn’t it Mr. Hayden?

I think the basic question we all need to be asking those who set this in motion is; where did you find that many sick, twisted, evil people, willing to voluntarily commit such horrors on other human beings and to do it to such an extent? And, are they still walking around free?

Mr. Hayden, just like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, claim they are not ashamed of what they allowed, what they ordered and condoned, but apparently are quite afraid for us to find out just exactly what they did do. All three of these men were far too spineless, far too cowardly to do the deeds themselves, but these and several others took great pleasure in knowing that it was being done at their request.

In the end

As a country, we have been shamed to such a degree that I doubt we can recover from it any time soon. Our credibility in the world was already strained after the numerous wars of aggression that were claimed to be waged in retaliation for crimes never committed, to bring a system of freedom to countries that weren’t interested in it—(a system we no longer possess), to supposedly end human rights suffering and to depose what we called dictators and tyrants.

People do not hate us for our freedoms, because we have little of those left. They hate us because we have attacked them relentlessly most times using made up stories about their leaders, or, in the case of 9/11, false flag attacks that got blamed on a country like Iraq, a country that had no part in 9/11 but which had huge oil reserves the global cartels wanted to access.

As it turns out, thanks to the likes of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Pinetta, and a long list of other politically notable people who appear to have no conscience and even less integrity, we have become the thing we claimed to despise. We have become the human rights aggressors, the dictators, the tyrants, the world villains. We have become the destroyers of other people’s and country’s.

Once we were a beacon of hope, of freedom around the world. We were the standard by which everyone else was measured. Now, we have been reduced to the level of some hated barbaric country and are viewed as a terrorist threat around the globe.

The release of the CIA report should be a wake up call to all of us. What was done in our name, what we allowed to happen when we failed to control or end these secretive agencies that adhere to no laws, domestic or international, moral or ethical or even under the flimsy banner of religion, is what we condoned either by our silence or because we thought it was ok as long as it wasn’t done to us. We should be demanding an end to these activities, to these agencies and the perp walks should be long and slow. They should end in one of these same chambers of horrors so they can experience first hand what they did to so many others. `

Something we all might want to consider is that those who were involved in all of this seem far more angered at being exposed for what they have done, rather than being ashamed that they sunk so low as a human being and took us down with them.

That they still want to hide what they have been doing speaks to the fact that even they know how evil and horrendous all of this is.

Maybe things are somewhat better today. Today, we kill people right where they live with drones. Nothing personal. We just got a tip that so & so might be a bad guy so we blew him, his family and several of his neighbors off the planet.

Should we feel better that they weren’t tortured first?

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http://www.americantorture.com/labels/Amy%20Goodman.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Hemispheric_Affairs

hhtp://www.cbsnews.com/ news/ former-cia-chief-michael-hayden-raises-alarm-about-forthcoming-senate -torture-report/

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/10/17/priests-protesting-torture-fort-huachuca-jailed-justice

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world-jan-june14-prisons-01-23/

Book: A Question of Torture