Author Topic: Support the "Good Guys" US War propaganda  (Read 1798 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline kaydeejaded

  • Posts: 719
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
Support the "Good Guys" US War propaganda
« on: March 31, 2004, 03:06:00 PM »
It's one of the basic tenets of U.S. war propaganda that "we" are the good guys. It's always U.S. vs. Them: the evildoers...and no matter what our boys do to take on such monsters, we at home must always support the troops.

The next time you hear the "support the troops" bullshit, I suggest you remember that it usually means two things: 1. Support the policy that put the troops there in the first place 2. Ignore what those troops might be doing

The home of the brave claims it does not approve of torture as policy. For example, the State Department criticizes the Burmese military because it has "routinely subjected detainees to harsh interrogation techniques designed to intimidate and disorient." Cambodia has received condemnation due to "torture, beatings, and other forms of physical mistreatment of persons held in police or military custody continued to be a serious problem throughout the country." In China, "police and other elements of the security apparatus employed torture and degrading treatment in dealing with some detainees and prisoners." Out of Egypt comes "numerous, credible reports that security forces tortured and mistreated citizens." In Greece, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka...well, you get the idea. Across the globe, human rights are nothing more than a convenient issue to be bandied about by amoral leaders when a pretext for sanctions or war is needed.

What about the land of the free? According to a brand new report from Human Rights Watch (http://www.hrw.org), the US in Afghanistan is "maintaining a system of arrests and detention as part of its ongoing military and intelligence operations that violates international human rights law and international humanitarian law." This system, says the report, calls into question U.S. "commitment to upholding basic rights."

Stop me if you've heard it all before...

As Operation Enduring Freedom (sic) endures, the troops we're supposed to be supporting, no matter what, are doing things like this to detainees who've been denied POW status:

"Bright lights were set up outside their cells, shining in, and U.S. military personnel took shifts, keeping the detainees awake by banging on the metal walls of their cells with batons. The detainees said they were terrified and disoriented by sleep deprivation, which they said lasted for several weeks. During interrogations, they said, they were made to stand upright for lengthy periods of time with a bright spotlight shining directly into their eyes. They were told that they would not be questioned until they remained motionless for one hour, and that they were not entitled even to turn their heads. If they did move, the interrogators said the 'clock was reset.' U.S. personnel, through interpreters, yelled at the detainees from behind the light, asking questions."

As they say, if these are the good guys, I wouldn't wanna...you know the rest. Here are the conclusions reached by Human Rights Watch in the report:

U.S. forces regularly use military means and methods during arrest operations in residential areas where law enforcement techniques would be more appropriate. Members of the U.S. armed forces have arrested numerous civilians not directly participating in the hostilities and numerous persons whom U.S. authorities have no legal basis for taking into custody. Persons detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan are held without regard to the requirements of international humanitarian law or human rights law. The general lack of due process within the U.S. detention system violates both international humanitarian law and basic standards of human rights law. There are serious concerns regarding the treatment of detainees at Bagram airbase, particularly in light of the failure of the United States to investigate and publicly report on several unexplained deaths in detention. There is credible evidence of beatings and other physical assaults of detainees, as well as evidence that the United States has used prolonged shackling, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation amounting to torture or other mistreatment in violation of international law.

This is hardly news. On December 26, 2002, Dana Priest and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post wrote of detainees "sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles" or "held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights."

Human Rights Watch says the U.S. detention policy in Afghanistan serves as "a poor example for other nations around the world," but don't hold your breath waiting for a full-fledged denial...because declaring war on a tactic (i.e. terror) means never having to say you're sorry.

Last year, Roger King, a U.S. military spokesman at Bagram, explained: "We do force people to stand for an extended period of time. . . . Disruption of sleep has been reported as an effective way of reducing people's inhibition about talking or their resistance to questioning. . . . They are not allowed to speak to each other. If they do, they can plan together or rely on the comfort of one another. If they're caught speaking out of turn, they can be forced to do things, like stand for a period of time-as payment for speaking out."

As another official told the Washington Post in December 2002: "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job."

If you wanna sleep better tonight, try repeating this until catatonia sets in: "They hate us because we're free. They hate us because we're free. They hate us because we're free."

Mickey Z. is the author of two upcoming books: "A Gigantic Mistake: Articles and Essays for Your Intellectual Self-Defense" (Prime Books) and "Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda" (Common Courage Press). He can be reached at mzx2@earthlink.net.


Tough Love: Abuse of a type particularly enjoyable to the abuser, in that it combines the pleasures of sadism with those of self-righteousness. Commonly employed and widely admired in 12-step groups.
--Chaz Bufe

« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
or those who understand, no explanation is necessary; for those who don\'t, none will do

Offline Deborah

  • Posts: 5383
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
Support the "Good Guys" US War propaganda
« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2004, 09:08:00 PM »
NO HONEST AMERICANS
U.S. citizens cheer their criminal nation savaging the whole world
By John Kaminski - http://www.rense.com/general45/bll.htm ).
Before she ever got to the really bad part of how the poisonous nuclear waste product called
fluoride was put in America's drinking water (can you imagine such a bonehead, suicidal stunt?), she described an episode from the 1980s in which a panel of health experts was commissioned to devise a food chart that would enable Americans to have healthier diets. After they finished
their studies and concluded that a healthy diet should be based on plenty of fruits and vegetables, the government bureaucrats shifted all
the data and published a document that said healthy diets should be based on heavy consumption of cereals and starches.

The medical results of this prostituted campaign, 20 years later, has resulted in a variety of epidemics: thyroid problems, dental disasters,
obesity, and many other maladies that have all reaped trillions in profits for the pharmaceutical industry, which of course is the
incestuous first cousin to the petroleum  industry. To top it all off, after a long run where gastrointestinal medicine was the leading
moneymaker for the establishment drug pushers, a new product has leaped to the top - antidepressants. And it's all traceable back to that cynical decision by the government to change America's eating habits by changing the data that had been produced by health experts.

That's the kind of integrity we get from Washington. Forget about depleted uranium, funky vaccinations, and needless wars that take our
sons and daughters from us for no good reason. The government has been poisoning us with its basic medical information for years, so I guess
bombing another country for illegitimate reasons should not exactly come as a surprise to us at this late date, I mean, after all the decades of
lies that have been told to us about everything.

I mean, if we accept the poisoning of ourselves without much complaint, how could I be getting upset that we're killing people all over the
world for reasons that are proven lies? As I said before in a previous essay, we are much farther down the road to hell than I thought.

And I wonder why I write these words, since there is not a single person, either in the Congress or on television, who is currently pointing out that America is doing anything wrong in any area. Only that one rich person is not being very patriotic by criticizing the way another rich person has chosen to kill tens of thousands of people, and
that that first rich person would have done the same thing, but he would have done it differently.

Many people get upset when I talk about these things. Yet in the public sphere, I see no one talking honestly. Not a single American public
figure talking honestly. About anything.

--
John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy Report," a collection of his Internet essays posted on hundreds of websites around the world.
More recently he has written a booklet titled  "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001."
More information about both of these books can be found at
http://www.johnkaminski.com/
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
gt;>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Hidden Lake Academy, after operating 12 years unlicensed will now be monitored by the state. Access information on the Federal Class Action lawsuit against HLA here: http://www.fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?t=17700