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After years of stonewalling and protecting his predecessor Bush-Cheney regime, and blockading the release of a Congressional report on CIA kidnapping and torture, Obama has officially admitted the obvious. Namely, that the CIA "tortured some folks."
"We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values," said Obama at a White House “news conference.” (“Values” meaning the usual mendacious rhetoric and political propaganda that is diametrically the opposite of their actual actions, motives, interests and goals. You know, all that guff about human rights, freedom and democracy, the blah blah blah as they overthrow governments, support military dictatorships, aid and abet and directly commit mass murder, and spy on everyone on the planet for good measure.[1])
But Obama still made a point of defending the torturers:
"It's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had," he said. "A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots." Yeah, what kind of sanctimonious, self-righteous person would criticize a torturer? They have a tough job to do.
And according to Obama, all in all, the repression, wars, assassinations, and destruction of civil liberties and human rights for Americans and others has been a good thing:
"We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values."
Even though the President of the United States himself has finally dropped the euphemisms and used the “T” word officially, propagandists such as those at the British Reuters still couldn’t bring themselves to say it, even while quoting Obama in their stories. Reuters called it “harsh questioning techniques of militant detainees,” compounding their sin by pretending that all the torture victims were indeed militants. This is belied by the fact that almost everyone imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, for example, have been released.
Obama has done his utmost in the five and a half years of his reign to protect the CIA. He imprisoned former CIA officer John Kiriakou for daring to say on television that the CIA tortures people and it’s wrong. (No torturers have ever been prosecuted, of course.) Under Obama the FBI goes around kicking down the doors of whistleblowers in terror raids.
But it’s false and deceptive to pretend that the only time the U.S. tortured “folks” was some Muslims during the Bush II reign. The U.S. has ALWAYS tortured people. And it has only gotten more systematic since World War II, when the CIA eagerly studied Nazi torture techniques in the aftermath of that war. The U.S. is the torture specialist. It trained the Latin American fascist regimes in torture, under a program started by John F. Kennedy, hidden inside a division of the so-called “Alliance for Progress” called the “Office for Public Safety,” a chilling Orwellian name if ever there was one.
Today the U.S. tortures tens of thousands of prisoners by keeping them locked in solitary confinement in tiny cells for months, years, even decades at a time. It imprisons huge numbers of the mentally ill in its prisons with little or no treatment. Its police deliberately inflict pain on prisoners (especially to obtain “confessions”) and on “leftwing” protesters. And Obama personally likes to kill, and arranged for the Egyptian secret police to break the arm of American anti-war activist Medea Benjamin in revenge for her shouting awkward questions at him about drone assassinations during one of his speeches. [2]
Nowadays, with expectations so low, and the militancy beaten out of demoralized dissidents, some will take this pathetic, decade-late admission of the undeniable as some kind of "progress," a "hopeful sign," and will speculate if it portends a "change in direction" for the U.S., a nation that for over two hundred years has practiced genocide, wars of conquest, exploitation, and that has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for ever more power. And some people just can get enough of swallowing the deceptions, ruses, and feints of Obama, the man with the "left" head-fakes who then breaks right.
1] For an essay with examples of the contrast between U.S. rhetoric and reality, see: "McCain's Broadside At Putin Also Applies To The U.S."
2] See "Obama Has Egyptian Military Regime Break American Peace Activist's Arm."
"We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values," said Obama at a White House “news conference.” (“Values” meaning the usual mendacious rhetoric and political propaganda that is diametrically the opposite of their actual actions, motives, interests and goals. You know, all that guff about human rights, freedom and democracy, the blah blah blah as they overthrow governments, support military dictatorships, aid and abet and directly commit mass murder, and spy on everyone on the planet for good measure.[1])
But Obama still made a point of defending the torturers:
"It's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had," he said. "A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots." Yeah, what kind of sanctimonious, self-righteous person would criticize a torturer? They have a tough job to do.
And according to Obama, all in all, the repression, wars, assassinations, and destruction of civil liberties and human rights for Americans and others has been a good thing:
"We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values."
Even though the President of the United States himself has finally dropped the euphemisms and used the “T” word officially, propagandists such as those at the British Reuters still couldn’t bring themselves to say it, even while quoting Obama in their stories. Reuters called it “harsh questioning techniques of militant detainees,” compounding their sin by pretending that all the torture victims were indeed militants. This is belied by the fact that almost everyone imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, for example, have been released.
Obama has done his utmost in the five and a half years of his reign to protect the CIA. He imprisoned former CIA officer John Kiriakou for daring to say on television that the CIA tortures people and it’s wrong. (No torturers have ever been prosecuted, of course.) Under Obama the FBI goes around kicking down the doors of whistleblowers in terror raids.
But it’s false and deceptive to pretend that the only time the U.S. tortured “folks” was some Muslims during the Bush II reign. The U.S. has ALWAYS tortured people. And it has only gotten more systematic since World War II, when the CIA eagerly studied Nazi torture techniques in the aftermath of that war. The U.S. is the torture specialist. It trained the Latin American fascist regimes in torture, under a program started by John F. Kennedy, hidden inside a division of the so-called “Alliance for Progress” called the “Office for Public Safety,” a chilling Orwellian name if ever there was one.
Today the U.S. tortures tens of thousands of prisoners by keeping them locked in solitary confinement in tiny cells for months, years, even decades at a time. It imprisons huge numbers of the mentally ill in its prisons with little or no treatment. Its police deliberately inflict pain on prisoners (especially to obtain “confessions”) and on “leftwing” protesters. And Obama personally likes to kill, and arranged for the Egyptian secret police to break the arm of American anti-war activist Medea Benjamin in revenge for her shouting awkward questions at him about drone assassinations during one of his speeches. [2]
Nowadays, with expectations so low, and the militancy beaten out of demoralized dissidents, some will take this pathetic, decade-late admission of the undeniable as some kind of "progress," a "hopeful sign," and will speculate if it portends a "change in direction" for the U.S., a nation that for over two hundred years has practiced genocide, wars of conquest, exploitation, and that has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for ever more power. And some people just can get enough of swallowing the deceptions, ruses, and feints of Obama, the man with the "left" head-fakes who then breaks right.
1] For an essay with examples of the contrast between U.S. rhetoric and reality, see: "McCain's Broadside At Putin Also Applies To The U.S."
2] See "Obama Has Egyptian Military Regime Break American Peace Activist's Arm."
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