These things happen in war on all sides, and though they are not excusable, they are kindergarten exercises compared to car bombs, ambushes, rocket launchings and dangling burning bodies over bridges - and this is what the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were trying to find ways to stop.

It's ok to do "these things" like torture prisoners if we can get them to talk - It's just "torture-lite". —
- The end justifies the means. - Two wrongs make a right.

Morality has nothing to do with what someone else does, it only has to do with what you do. Two wrongs don't make a right.

An immoral act committed in self-defense is still immoral. One of the beautiful things about this abundant universe is that there is always another way to do anything. It's only a very rare event that doesn't give us time to find another way.

"- and this is what the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were trying to find ways to stop." I am appalled by this statement! I hope Pat Boone only made this statement in the heat of the moment and now regrets he ever made it.

The Red Cross estimates that over 90% of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were arrested by mistake. Amnesty International agrees. Even our own military estimates 40 to 60%. Several hundred prisoners have already been released, after the military discovered they were only innocent bystanders — including prisoners from the infamous cell blocks 1A and 1B where "valuable" prisoners were kept. Even women who were married to or knew someone important were arrested in hopes that they would talk - a violation of international law. Or as "Newsday" quotes a Pentagon official, they were used as "bargaining chips" against family members - also against international law and punishable as a war crime. Some of these women have claimed mistreatment.

Is it any wonder that the United States "unsigned" the agreement to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague to try countries and their leaders for war crimes. President Clinton signed the treaty. But on May 6, 2002 President Bush announced the withdrawal of the U.S.'s signature. This is the first time in U.S. history that we have "unsigned" a treaty (broken a president's formal international promise).

Congress has since passed a bill that authorizes force to free an American from the court. "Come on you cowpokes! To hell with Wyatt Earp, let's run him outta Dodge and break down the jailhouse door!"

Iraq (when Saddam Insane was in power) refused to sign the treaty. Israel signed the treaty but later decided not to ratify it. India, Cuba, North Korea and Communist China have not yet signed the treaty but have raised no objections to it. All other major countries in the world have signed and ratified it. The U.S. is the only country in the world, large or small, that is actively opposed to the court.

When the court was established, the United States threatened to end its participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations if it didn't get an exemption. Last year, the UN Security Council gave a second one-year immunity to the U.S. The one-year period ends June 30th, 2004. The US is now desperately seeking an extension to the war crimes exemption: "The US has since persuaded more than 60 countries to agree to bilateral immunity deals,[*] lobbying hard and threatening to cut military assistance to those that do not sign an accord." — From ABC News.
[*] Note: impunity agreements (correct legal term) are illegal under international law. The agreements exempt top U.S. government officials from prosecution. Note that one U.S. objection was that it didn't want U.S. soldiers to be subject to politically motivated prosecution.

Those more than 60 bilateral agreements mean that the United States promises to oppose war-crimes prosecution of the leaders of those 60+ countries, which would weaken the whole purpose of having an independent world court. Check out who some of these 60 (now 90) countries are. You will find some of the worst human rights violators on the planet. Don't talk to me about giving comfort to our enemies!

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has rebuked the United States for trying to get another exemption from prosecution and urged the Security Council to oppose the measure.

Facing almost certain defeat, Bush has now abandoned his plan to seek an open-ended permanent war-crimes exemption and is now pressing for an exemption only through June 2005. Eight of the fifteen Security Council members have already stated they will abstain from a vote - that's over 50%.

The court was established to try cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The treaty for the court mirrors the U.S. Constitution, giving the accused the same protections we have. Only the right to a trial by jury is excluded — it would be impractical to find an impartial jury for Saddam Hussein, for example. Instead of a jury the court uses a panel modeled after a U.S. Courts Marshal.

And yes, I have read the "reasons" the U.S. "unsigned"... I don't think much of any of them. The most absurd reason (and the most suspicious reason) is that the U.S. wants to have veto power over who the court tries - no other country has that power - it wouldn't be a "world" court if that was the case. It would be like giving Bill Gates veto power over corporate crime. Bill may be a good man in some ways, but he would be free to do whatever he wants. — "Power corrupts."

Even Bush's buddy, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, criticized the U.S. stand on the world court: "The concerns of the United States, though I understand them, are actually misjudged when you look at the facts."

174 million people were killed in genocides and mass murders in the 20th Century. — This court sounds like a good idea to me.

Freedom of the press is precious to us, but you can abuse any liberty and stretch it out of shape until it becomes license, and concerned citizens will call for limitations.

In this case, if CBS had really cared about the country, about our military, about doing the right thing, they would have taken these pictures, (which they had illegally) and asked the military and the Pentagon what was being done about the abuses (Although they most likely knew it, they would have been told that the matter was in hand and being taken care of).

Whether motivated by politics or ignorance, if our leaders believed what they were doing was right, why all the secrecy?

Indeed, a general implored them not to publish the pictures because of what he knew would happen as a result.

This was Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who admitted he hadn't read General Taguba's report that was completed over a month before. He said to 60 Minutes II, "hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk". If he was so concerned for the warfare of our troops, why hadn't he read the Taguba report? It was disseminated among the top military brass. Why wait until CBS was about to broadcast the pictures to be suddenly concerned about the risk to our troops? Did he hope that it could still be covered up? Wouldn't a public statement by Gen. Meyers a month before have softened the impact of the scandal and lessen the risk to our troops?

Even President Bush claimed he learned about it from media reports and not from Rumsfeld and Meyers. If true, he was left to learn of the explosive scandal, from media reports instead of from his own military leaders. If true, this is the height of incompetence! Rumsfeld and Meyers had to have known the damage it would bring to the country and to the presidency. Mr. Rumsfeld told congressional investigators he first learned about the abuses in mid-January. If they didn't inform President Bush — Why didn't they?

CBS could have cared less.
In their mad competition for rating points, dollars, and seeing a great way to blast the President and the war effort in Iraq which they have continually denigrated and opposed, they broadcast the abhorrent pictures - and not just to the United States, BUT TO THE WORLD!

Knowing full well that we were walking a tight rope, trying to fight a war, quell disturbances and build a republic for Iraq in the midst of all the terrorist resistance, CBS published these abhorrent pictures knowing they would destroy completely our image and standing in the Muslim world.

Several American reporters said that the torture in several Iraqi prisons was common knowledge to the Iraqi people — months before the pictures were on TV. Several articles about the abuses were published by European newspapers months before (not to mention the almost constant articles by the Muslim press).

Even our own solders out in the field had nicknamed the prison "Abu Grab" because of scuttlebutt about the sexual humiliation going on there.

The Associated Press reports that a May, 2004 Coalition poll commissioned by the Bush Administration found more than half of Iraqis believed that all Americans behave like the military prison guards pictured in the Abu Ghraib abuse photos. The poll showed that only 2 per cent of Iraqis see coalition troops as liberators, while 92 per cent said they were occupiers. – That should tell us something about our image in "the Muslim world".

We can't give the gift of democracy at gunpoint.

Someone had leaked over a dozen International Red Cross memos in January. The memos, sent to military headquarters in Iraq, the Pentagon, and to key members of the Administration (including Condi Rice), went back to mid-2003 and detailed the abuses. Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the International Red Cross, after many unsatisfactory responses and continuing reports of abuse, took the unprecedented action of flying from Switzerland to Washington and on January 13-14, 2004 met separately with Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He also tried to meet briefly with Rumsfeld, but was told the Secretary was "too busy". Kellenberger demanded an immediate halt to the torture and a thorough investigation. This was at the time when the investigation by General Taguba had (at last!) just started.

What would you do if you were a Senior Administration Official and the president of the Red Cross told you these things?

If I was one of these top officials and the president of the Red Cross told me that prisoners were being tortured and Red Cross memos were being ignored, I would immediately phone the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and tell him, if the abuses are true, they must Stop Immediately and to get back to me in One Hour with a report. (In this day of instant global communication, one hour isn't unreasonable.) Then I would call the President and tell him what I learned and what I did and to expect a report from General Meyers within the hour. To do otherwise would be complete incompetence.

Or, I would do nothing, because I believed the torture was "necessary for the good of the country and our war with the enemy". (Quote taken out of context from a speech on another subject by George Bush.)   This thinking is simply IMMORAL.

To be fair, neither Powell nor Rice had the power to confront Gen. Meyers. Perhaps Wolfowitz had more influence. But both Powell and Rice had access to the President, who did have the power.

And yet, according to President Bush, three (or four) of his senior administration officials didn't tell him anything! Also, they apparently didn't do anything - Or at most, whatever they did didn't accomplish anything. (See the article from the "Baltimore Sun" in the "Investigations by the Press" section below.)

So take your pick, incompetence or immorality.

(Or did I hear somebody say it wasn't the case of a government that had run amok – It was just a few rotten apples?)

According to documents leaked to the "New York Times":
A small unit of interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison began reporting prisoner abuse to senior military officers in November, 2003. "We were reporting it long before this mess came out", said one soldier.
Top military officials have said they only learned about abuses in January, 2004, after a soldier came forward with photographs. However, in October-November, 2003, the U.S. Army's chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal General Donald J. Ryder, visited Iraq to review prison operations. On November 6, 2003 he reported some of the abuses in a report entitled "Assessment of Detention and Corrections Operations in Iraq." The purpose of the investigation was not to discover abuses, but to make prison procedures more efficient.
The Taguba Report stated: "Many of the systemic problems that surfaced during MG Ryder's Team's assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation. In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment." [Underline added by me. — systemic - adj. - Being present everywhere or Affecting the entire body.]

The Army's investigation said military intelligence and 'other government agencies', "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses." Now the CIA confirms that some of its officers hid prisoners from watchdog groups like the Red Cross.
- Andrea Mitchell, NBC Nightly News, May 6th, 2004

Documents obtained by the "Los Angeles Times", show that in late 2001 when an US Army intelligence officer started to question John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban", he was given instructions that the "Secretary of Defense's counsel has authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and asked whatever he wanted". The documents show that Lindh's responses were cabled to Washington every hour. Lindh eventually pleaded guilty to reduced charges and was sentenced to 20 years after he agreed to drop claims that he had been tortured.

A secret Pentagon document dated March 6, 2003 written by military and civilian lawyers for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was leaked to the Wall Street Journal.

The report was written after staff at Guantanamo Bay complained normal interrogation tactics were not eliciting enough information. The report argued that because nothing was more important than "obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens ... normal strictures on torture do not apply."

The report said President George W Bush was not bound by laws banning the use of torture and has the authority to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, including torture. It stated that torturers acting under Presidential orders could not be prosecuted.
- From the "Wall Street Journal" lead story, June 7th, 2004
To read the original of this 56 page torture-is-legal, the-president-has-the-power-to-defy-congress memo,  Go Here .

"Congress shall have the power - to declare war and make rules concerning captures on land and water" - U.S. Constitution [underline added]. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the President has these powers.

Note that this memo is different than the memos obtained by "Newsweek" — See the "Investigations by the Press" section below. The memos described in the May 24th, 2004 Newsweek article covered the period of Dec., 2001 and most of 2002. The memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal was dated March 6, 2003.

Grant Lattin, a former Judge Advocate for the Marines said. "I am having a difficult time even following the logic, that somehow because this is a new type of war that these military commanders' authority has somehow grown larger than the restrictions that we have accepted in the Geneva Convention."

"They have to be right legally, and I think they have an obligation to be right morally. I think they failed on both counts," said Retired Admiral John Hutson, the former Judge Advocate General for the Navy.

Check the internet for dozens of similar quotes about these memos by other prestigious military lawyers.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Attorney General John Ashcroft about the March 6th memo, he said he wouldn't reveal advice he gave to President Bush or discuss it with Congress. Senator Joseph Biden asked the Attorney General if he was invoking Executive Privilege. Ashcroft said no. Biden told him, "You might be in contempt of Congress, then. You have to have a reason. You better come up with a good rationale."

We all know now that these things actually did happened in the prisons, for whatever reason, so we'll wait until an investigation finds out the "truth". – If an investigation can manage to find the truth after "executive privilege" is invoked. (And assuming a legitimate investigation ever happens.)

The advice given to the President, whether legally valid or not, is immoral! What does it matter to a moral person if torture is legal or not? We know that the lawyers worked on it for at least 14 months. (See the dates in the "Newsweek" and "Wall Street Journal" articles.) Why spend so much time and effort if they didn't think that Bush and Rumsfeld would be interested? Why go to all this trouble if no one was considering torturing prisoners in the first place?

I'm shocked and outraged that the lawyers even suggested it. Every person in America should be demanding these lawyer's termination.

When Bush and Rumsfeld got this legal advice, they should have fired the lawyers on the spot. Whether Bush or Rumsfeld carried out the legal advice or not is a separate question — Not firing these lunatics, is, in itself, a reflection of Bush and Rumsfeld's moral character. Any moral person would fire them, no matter what their value was. I would. Wouldn't you? I don't recall any news stories about President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld firing any of their lawyers (That would surely make the news.) I did a preliminary check on the internet and came up with nothing — I'll check some more...

- The legal memo leaked to the Wall Street Journal was also leaked to the New York Times - the Times reported essentially the same information as the Wall Street Journ. CNN also obtained a copy of the memo.

— Update 6/8/04:
- I did a more thorough search today to find out if any Administration lawyers were fired and still found nothing.

Last March, Department of Defense general counsel William Haynes, one of the principal lawyers in the 2002 "torture is legal" memos, and the March 2003 memo, was nominated by our President, George W Bush, for an appointment as a lifetime federal judge on the 4th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court. (!)

The General Counsel to the Department of Defense is responsible for "ensuring U.S. military compliance with the laws of war, the Geneva Convention, and federal law". In other words, his job is to ensure that things like what happened at Abu Ghraib don't happen.

(As a side note, Counsel Haynes has zero experience as a judge.)

The Washington Post obtained and published a White House memo dated Aug. 1, 2002 signed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay S. Bybee. In the memo, Bybee stated that torturing Al-Qaeda captives "may be justified" and "self-defense could provide justification that would eliminate any criminal liability." According to the Washington Post, the memo then continued for 50 pages to make the case for the use of torture. Bybee stated that "certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity" to constitute unlawful torture [underlines added]. He argues in his memo that pain must rise to a such a high level, a level that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions, in order to be considered torture.

Please, take a few minutes and just glance at this memo which has been published on the internet. I think you will reach the conclusion that Mr. Bybee is not only immoral, he is not sane.

Bybee is now a lifetime judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court. He was nominated by President Bush and confirmed by Congress. (!)

Many Americans think George Bush is a good man, if so, why is he so morally blind?

The spin masters have already started to try to weasel out of this mess:

"Bush was not bound by laws banning the use of torture, and has the authority to approve ... including torture.", "torturers acting under Presidential orders could not be prosecuted.", "strictures on torture do not apply", "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning" A soldier can legally inflict severe pain on a detainee "if causing such harm is not his objective."
— I guess this is just kindergarten legal analysis to Lawrence Di Rita. If it was "not a legal analysis", why did lawyers work on it for 14 months? These lawyers were not minor bureaucrats. If the memos were "mere essays", why did some of the government's top lawyers work so hard on them? The war on terror and the Iraq war were going on — didn't they have something better to do than write "mere essays"?

Note that the 8/1/02 memo by Ast. Atty. Gen. Bybee wasn't titled "A Mere Essay on Implications of the Geneva Conventions". It was titled "Standards of Conduct for Interrogations". And it was not even titled "Suggested Standards...".

In a recent speech, President Bush said that although he agreed with the memos in that the al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners had no rights under international law, he assured the American people that nothing was put into practice, "I have never ordered torture." This is the first time the President has admitted he saw the memos. He took credit himself for not putting them in practice — That means he had to have seen the memos around the time when they came out and not later "from media reports". He can't claim credit for not implementing them if he didn't know about them. Bush earlier had said he didn't recall seeing the memos.

If no one put them into practice, where did the Abu Ghraib pictures come from? I'm sure the prison guards (the "few rotten apples") never saw the top-secret memos. Some of the abuses were so unusual those inexperienced guards would not have thought of them themselves.

It's business-as-usual when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. - The government's predictable spin-a-yarn policy goes on and on to dupe the gullible...

"I have never ordered torture." For obvious reasons, politicians carefully avoid saying anything that isn't ambiguous. Bush like any president, has had to be "careful" in his first four years in office -- there's a election coming up. If he is elected to a second term he can feel more free do what he wants - presidents can only serve two terms. — So it's surprising that Bush felt he had to make such a definite statement when a more fuzzy one would have been accepted by the voters just as well. Truman said, "The buck stops here." Kennedy accepted responsibility and apologized for the Bay of Pigs. I hope historians never have to put Bush's statement in with "I am not a crook", "I don't remember anything about arms deals", "Read my lips", and "I never had sexual relations with that woman".

"A 2002 order signed by Bush says the president reserves the right to suspend the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war at any time." - From ABC News [underline added]. In the order, he qualified that by stating that treatment was to be "appropriate and consistent with military necessity". What is "military necessity"? Those crazy administration lawyers were trying to justify torture because they thought it was "necessary". Is torture any more moral because it is "necessary"?

In his February 7th, 2002 "humane" torture order, the president didn't have to "order torture". Either through incompetence or design, the 2002 order didn't define "military necessity". The military and the CIA were free to supply their own definition.

Just in case you think I'm concentrating too much on the current administration, try checking out the CIAs research center that was set up in the 1950's to study "how to make unwilling people talk". The results were used in "Operation Phoenix" in Vietnam. You can read the declassified and leaked documents at the  National Security Archive of George Washington University. (A good source for research into what is going on.)

Donald Rumsfeld said early in 2002, that
"Enemy combatants"
- a term that turned out to mean anyone, including American citizens, the administration chose to so designate -
"don't have rights under the Geneva Convention."
At another time, Rumsfeld said: "The reality is the set of facts that exist today with al-Qaida and the Taliban were not necessarily the set of facts that were considered when the Geneva Convention was fashioned."

The claims were immediately challenged by international lawyers everywhere. Now we find they were carried out by our military just as Rumsfailed declared them. What on earth did he think would happen? Was he so stupid that he didn't think someone down the line would pick it up and run with it? I don't think Rumsfeld is stupid.

Commenting on the unusual absence of JAG presence for interrogations at Iraqi prisons, Admiral Don Guter, the Navy Judge Advocate General from 2000 to 2002 told ABC News:
"JAGs were clamoring for assignments of this kind of importance, so I know they were available. And if they're available and you don't send them, then I have to say you don't send them on purpose."

I wish the Administration would stop playing arm-chair soldier and quit telling our military how to do their job. They need to have more faith in our military.

A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 64 percent of Americans said that torture is "never acceptable". 64%? Who are those other 36%? Are they admirers of Saddam, Stalin, the Inquisition? Except for pure sadists (whatever that means), every torturer in the history of the world had "reasons" for torturing their fellow man. Do these 36% have "better" reasons? Do "better reasons" make it moral?

During the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh labeled American POWs "criminals" and since the United States was fighting an "illegal war" in Vietnam, the "Geneva Conventions do not apply". An outraged world reaction caused Ho Chi Minh to back down. Now we find our own leaders using the same faulty logic. - I wouldn't want someone to compare me to Ho Chi Minh.

We can't rationalize right and wrong into a spectrum of in betweens. We have to watch where we are going and correct our course as soon as we realize it is the wrong path — no matter how inconvenient it is at the time. This is the essence of morality. God gave all of us a built-in sense of what is right or wrong, and He expects us to use it. It's simple: we only need to put that sense above what we think or know is best for us or best for others. If we know what is best and that inner sense tells us something is somehow wrong, we need to pause. So many immoral people in history convinced themselves that they were right.

If we have free will, we can't blame other people or other things or circumstances for what we do. We have to accept total responsibility. Free will is all or nothing: if it's not complete free will, then it isn't free will at all. We all equally have this inate ability to tell right from wrong, from the holiest saint to the most depraved sinner.

We put too much importance on our ideas about the way things are. These truths become our gods. They dim our awareness, we can't see beyond them. For most of us, our sense of what is right and wrong still flows through — it's a very powerful thing. Others put so much importance on their crazy ideas that these "truths" cut off their awareness - and they do horrible things. If there is free will, it can't be God who "makes" us do good things and it can't be "Satan" who deceives us.  — God gave us all the tools we need. —  It is our choice and only our choice.

And what about Osama bin Laden? What about the terrorists? What about America's image with all our allies around the world? And what about America's own self image and confidence in their leaders?

Yes, what about Osama bin Forgotten?
The U.S. pulled almost all of our troops out of Afghanistan to fight in the war with Iraq. By April, 2003 there were only 8,500 U.S. troops there according to Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. It's now back to business as usual for the war lords in Afghanistan, only some of the names have changed. Opium production there is at an all time high according to ABC News. Terrorism experts claimed we had Osama on the run back in 2003 — If we had only waited another month or two, who knows?...  As it is now, if we capture bin Laden in 2004, it will be pure luck.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates 20,000 jihadists have been trained in Afghanistan camps since 1996. 2,000 were killed in the Afghanistan war. That leaves 18,000 left. That simple arithmetic assumes no new terrorists were recruited. Intelligence reports state that new trainees have been joining terrorists organizations at "unprecedented rates" since the invasion of Iraq.

I'll feel confidence in our leaders when they do what they say — I've been waiting so long...

We have killed 10,000 to 20,000 civilians in Iraq, and climbing, depending on who is counting and Not counting soldiers and insurgents. A few say 35,000 (the U.S. does not keep an official count.) — 3 to 10 times the number killed on 9/11. Only an idiot would expect the surviving friends and families of those men, women and children to love us.

Innocent civilians are innocent civilians, whether they die in an Iraqi village or in the Twin Towers.

"If a Person Dies, and No One Sees It, Are They Still Dead?"
-David R. Anselm, Jr.

"In war, we always have collateral damage." - Tell that to an Iraqi mother with her dead child in her arms. Tell her in person. Look her in the eye when you tell her. Tell her it is all for the greater good. Tell her Iraq is better off without Saddam — the world is better off without Saddam. — She already knows this, but will she understand? True red-blooded Americans understand ...  Except me.

Our country chooses its friends in the world based on what's in it for us rather that the qualities of those friends. We have all met people that choose their friends this way – they don't become our friends. But our country always carefully tells us about the criminal qualities of our enemies.

Some people can't figure out why terrorists hate us. The Bush administration has often repeated the absurd statement that what motivates bin Laden and the terrorists is their hatred of our freedom and democracy. It's nonsense to think that Osama bin Laden hates us for what we are – he hates us for what we do.

Hate US? We are the best nation on earth. Sure, our CIA has been meddling in the middle east for decades, pitting nation against nation, tribe against tribe and religious sect against religious sect. And sure, we always take Israel's side, right or wrong. And sure, we've supported some oppressive Muslim dictators. And sure, we try to bully everybody. But that's no reason to hate us, is it? We're just doing our duty to make the world a better place. So, since there seems to be no reason, bin Laden must be a disciple of Satan.

We can't ignore the causes of terrorism if we want to put a stop to it. A few try to hide the causes from us, so I hope I'm not insulting your intelligence by pointing out the obvious: people always have reasons for doing what they do.

Violence and hate goes round in a circle - it always has - how many centuries does it take to figure it out?

There are two sides to any belief: a logical side and an emotional side. I'm nor saying that one side is good and the other is bad, or even saying one is better than the other. I'm only saying that it is helpful to know which is which.

We have lots of good reasons for believing what we do. We also have an emotional investment in what we believe. That investment makes it hard to consider switching sides on an issue — even in make believe.

As a simple test, try switching to the other side of an issue, for a day, for an hour, for a minute. Don't do it half-way – really get into it to the best of your ability. (I said this is a simple test, I didn't say it was easy.) This is only just a test, I promise you won't be harmed in any way (though there are some side effects.) You are NOT trying to change your beliefs, you are trying to become aware of what your beliefs actually are. When you take the test, if you say, "I'm just pretending, I know what's true." – you are cheating. I may be naive, but I believe most people have the ability to do this test honestly if they really try.

If you think this is silly or a waste of time since you already know what's what — you don't need to take the test - you are excused, I give up, have a good life. Your resistance should tell anyone and everyone how important the emotional side of an issue is to you. You are seriously hooked on the emotional side of your belief and your "reasons" are suspect.

Will you take this test? After all, it's only a test. Make it a one minute test. What harm could come to you? Is a minute of your time that valuable? What could anyone be afraid of? Do you think Satan will grab you?

Make switching sides a habit. The more you do it, the easier it is to honestly do it. Try it on anything that you know is true. I think you will find it priceless. - Beware: you will never be the same.

If you try this at all levels, over time you will find that you have faith that all beliefs are a leap of faith. It doesn't matter whether that's good or bad - it's all we have - God could have given us more if He though it necessary. You will find that you can no longer pretend to yourself that you know because it's so.

Only if you give this a fair trial can you rationally decide if what I am saying about faith is true or not. — Unless you don't mind putting yourself in the same intellectual category as those that believe in the tooth faerie.

And what did the beheaders of Nick Berg say, just before they callously sawed his head off while he screamed, "This is in retaliation for what you Americans did to our people at Abu Ghraib!" And how did they know about these interrogation abuses?

Iraqis who had been released from the prison had been already talking about treatment inside the prison to other Iraqis for months.

Though poor Mr. Berg blames George Bush and Donald Rumsefld, it is incontrovertible that his son would be home with him right now had it not been for the publication of those pictures. Mr. Berg is pointing his finger in the wrong direction.

Perhaps it might be "incontrovertible" if the killers didn't know what the average person in Iraq already knew about Abu Ghraib.

Poor Mr. Berg maintains that if his son had been released from U.S. custody before the escalation of insurrection in Iraq, his son would be back home right now. His son was released only after Mr. Berg submitted a wrongful arrest suit to a U.S. Federal District Court.

I'm sure Mr. Berg has no love for his son's killers. But why does that mean he has to shut up about his son's wrongful arrest and delayed release? It's amazing that some otherwise intelligent people believe that if a person talks about one thing, he is necessarily diminishing something else. I guess I'm too dumb to understand how this works.

It was a godsend for our leaders. At exactly the right time, it deflected the focus of Americans shocked by Abu Ghraib. The killers of Nick Berg were really, really Stupid. A few morons in this country have actually used this as justification for our own abuses. "See, you #@%#& bleeding-hearts, wake up! - This is the enemy we are up against."

It seems unnecessary to point out to an intelligent person that those masked Nick Berg killers don't represent all Muslims, but the Pentagon, Congress and the President of the United States do represent ALL the American people.
That's the nature of a democracy.

— Update 06/18/04:
I am shocked and saddened by the execution of Paul Johnson by "al-Qaeda" in Saudi Arabia - An innocent person caught between two opposing forces, devoid of wisdom. The killers demanded that prisoners be released and foreigners pull out of the Middle East. We would be crazy to release terrorists from prison. And, through wisdom or folly, we are mixed up with the hate of generations in the Middle East - to pull out now would be disastrous. Are the killers too dumb to know this? — Their demands are just words to cover their real agenda. Violence breeds violence. All violence is the result of a feeling of a lack of power - the frustration of not being able to do something else. The feeling of power that comes from violence soothes our deep feelings of powerlessness.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared 6/18/04 that Russia had intelligence that Saddam Hussein may have been planning terror attacks on the U.S. and had warned Washington. This followed the statement of the independent 9/11 commission the day before, that there was "no credible evidence" of Iraq/al-Qaeda collaboration. Since Russia strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, this is a curious statement. The Russians never say anything without having a reason behind it. Putin had a private meeting with Bush just a week before.

Everybody in this country now knows what experts were telling us before the war started — Iraq had never recovered from the Gulf War because of vigorous UN sanctions and was incapable of organized terrorist attacks. It takes a lot more than just 19 terrorists to plan and implement something like 9/11. Osama bin Laden is a very shrewd calculating leader who knows how to appeal to discontented Muslims. He had a highly coordinated worldwide al-Qaeda organization to help him and has so far eluded capture. Sadam Hussein was a cunning yet bumbling egomaniac that commanded an army that folded a week after the war began and had an organization that split into opposing groups at the same time. (And we still managed to slip into the quicksand of Iraq on our own...)

At the start of the war with Iraq, 70 percent of Americans told pollsters that Iraq had been responsible for 9/11. Nearly 50 percent had actually invented the belief that a majority of the hijackers had been Iraqis. — How did "intelligent" Americans get manipulated into believing these crazy ideas? Even the most conservative media said over and over again that al-Qaeda was responsible. Our government never once claimed that any of the hijackers were Iraqis. Terrorism experts stressed that there was no Sadam/al-Qaeda link even though the Administration repeatably said there was. In the 1990's, Saddam Hussein arrested and executed all al-Qaeda he could find in Iraq. One week before the start of the Iraq war, Osama bin Laden in a video shown on all the TV newscasts, urged the Iraqi people to rise up and kill their infidel dictator.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have continued to insist on an Iraq/al-Qaeda connection, "the evidence is overwhelming". After the overwhelming evidence was found to have no basis, the Administration recently put out "new evidence" that supposedly proves the claim. But as reported by newspapers around the country, senior U.S. intelligence officials flatly say this "evidence" is also false: See Knight Ridder Newspapers, 6/21/04 and Newsday, 6/22/04, to name just two.

Actually, this "new" evidence was first reported a year ago in the "Weekly Standard" and later discounted as a confusion of two somewhat similar names: an Iraqi named Hikmat Shakir Ahmad and an al-Qaeda named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi. The fact that the al-Qaeda man can be definitely placed in Malaysia at the same time the Iraqi man was known to be in Iraq shows that they were not one single man with ties to Iraq and al-Qaeda. Sounds like Abbott and Costello: "Who's on first."

I'm sure next week the spin masters will come up with more "new evidence" in the hope that the average person will hear of the "evidence" and never learn the actual facts. After all, they only need to convince that 50% who believed that the majority of the hijackers were Iraqis. If they get 51% on their side, they can afford to ignore the 49% who may be able to think for themselves.

Our government has always been able to feed us deceptions so transparent that their careful exaggerations and half-truths are completely obvious to millions and yet, still convince the majority. We hear what we want to hear. I guess that's how democracy works when the people are uninformed and manipulated. Our founding fathers would have been astounded, puzzled and appalled if they looked into a crystal ball and saw a future with instant electronic communication and so many uninformed citizens.

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
-James Bovard

Our government's blame-a-few-bad-apples, business-as-usual babble in response to the Abu Ghraib debacle may be smart politics to sooth uninformed voters, but with our prestige at a all time low, now is the time for George Bush to be pledging adherence to international law and listening and reaching out to the people of Iraq and then follow up with the right actions. — Only this will help heal the wounds of our image.

"Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."

"No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever."
-Article 17, Third Geneva Convention

"You know, under the Geneva Convention, it's illegal to do things with prisoners of war that are humiliating to those individuals."
-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on NBC's Meet the Press, March 23, 2003
(When talking about possible treatment of our captured solders by the enemy.)
— Compare that to what he said in 2002 (above).

The Geneva Conventions do not enforce themselves. It has worked most of the time only because of the threat of similar treatment by the other side, if one side breaks the rule. American POWs can expect humane treatment only if our enemies can expect it from us.

America has lost credibility with Muslims and the Arab world internationally, perhaps forever; and every American life is in far greater danger from terrorist reprisal, no matter who and where we are!

Anyone who has read what the foreign press has written for the last two years knows our credibility had been lost long before CBS showed the pictures. If we are at greater risk from terrorists, it has been the Arab world's perception of our arrogant, egocentric policy that is to blame.

I completely agree with Pat Boone on this. No one should underestimate the importance of the way the world views us. There are several reasons why our danger from terrorists is far greater than it was two and a half years ago. – We bungled a lot of things everywhere. In our "war on terror" alone, we made more blunders than Inspector Clouseau did in the "Pink Panther" movies. — But, a major contributor to this fiasco was the actions of all those people at different levels who approved, carried out or didn't stop the prison abuses.

On September 12th, 2001 the French newspaper "Le Monde" had a large headline:
"We Are All Americans Now".
From the article under the headline:
"We are all Americans!...just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in 1962...how can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and therefore our solidarity?"

In two and a half years our prestige has gone from the highest in our history to the lowest in our history! (You guessed it - Even before CBS put the pictures on TV.)

Why? - How could this possibly happen? Insanity! - Why?

Sounds like something that could only happen in a Three Stooges movie.

— The rest of the world didn't suddenly change their ideas about what it is that makes a nation admirable...

Freedom of the press is a cherished commodity, guaranteed by our Constitution. But freedoms, if they are to be maintained and to have the original meaning, must be treated with grave responsibility and restraint.

For me, CBS has become "the enemy within", and I hope never to watch the network again. I think most Americans ought to reflect on the results of their irresponsible and unpatriotic behavior and perhaps narrow their viewing options by one network. The next time America or Americans suffer at the hands of terrorists, thank CBS.

Pat Boone

P.S. As of today, May 21St, you can add Brokaw, NBC and The Washington Post to the list. Have these media pariahs gone mad?! Who'll be next to fire at our own troops?

I'm not a fan of CBS. But even if the abuses in Iraqi prisons were unknown when CBS showed the pictures, I would say that what CBS did was right. You can't right a wrong by lying about it or pretending it never happened.

General Boykin, the Christian zealot who ordered General Geoffrey Miller, from Guantanamo, to extend his brutal methods to prisoners in Iraq, told several Christian evangelical groups,
"The US is in a holy war as Christian Nation battling Satan."
...He doesn't sound like a Christian to me - he sounds like a nutcase.

In the '50s I liked Pat Boone's singing and acting. And I still would like to hear some of his old records if I had them. So don't get the idea I am trying to be hard on him personally. Pat has the right and duty to speak up when he finds what he thinks is immorality. And I don't know if my awareness of that innate sense of morality we all have is any better than his. But since Pat is a prominent Christian and could be perceived by some as a kind of spokesman for Christianity, he has the responsibility to try to find out a little about what is going on in this country before he writes another letter.

Although I wrote this on the topic of Abu Ghraib, I could write similar articles on a dozen different topics, foreign and domestic. Or write much more on this topic – but I've already written more than enough for anyone to know what happened. And I'm convinced most people don't want to hear about it.

We all look at the world a little differently. We tend to notice and focus on those things that reflect our unique reality. And since we see what we know, the things we see reinforce what we know to be true.

It doesn't matter if those truths are true or not. Those thoughts only limit us. Our minds are cluttered with things and ideas that ultimately have no real value. So why does it matter how true they are? They tend to cover up our world's most precious gift – our experiences. We pay a dear price for our truths.

The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world... -Wallace Stevens, "Another Weeping Woman"

So... what does this have to do with Iraq, America, terrorism, politics,...?
— We all start from a different place. And our minds get cluttered up in different ways. And I know my clutter is better than your clutter...

I'm baffled trying to understand the logic of those people who say that anyone who disagrees with the system is unpatriotic. They may not all be morons: some may have their own motives for calling someone unpatriotic. We always put labels on people for emotional reasons. Then we rationalize why we are intellectually right. Please forgive me for using so many labels in this article. – I didn't think it was necessary to convince you of things that are self-evident from the facts, I was only trying to accurately describe my feelings.

I don't have a lot of patience with people who think that a person shouldn't be outraged about injustice or immorality wherever they find it. They have the strange belief that if someone expresses a negative opinion about our country or its leaders, that person must be so stupid that he is somehow forgetting about the "Real" enemy. There's more than enough hate in this world to go around. So, fortunately, we don't have to ignore anybody.

There's also more than enough love to go around.

"There's so many things going on in the world, Babies dying. Mothers crying. How much oil is one human life worth. And what ever happened to peace on earth."
-Willie Nelson

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we've been so credulous."
-Carl Sagan

There's lots of problems that we need to be concerned with, such as frequent ongoing massacres in Sudan or invisible errors (intentional and unintentional) in the ill-conceived new electronic voting machines. — But, there are people out there who try their best to prevent us from thinking about them. Its amazing that our government has managed to focus all our fears on terrorism. I'm not trying to minimize anything. But I am capable of thinking about more than one thing during the day.

If you want to add another fear to your day, and learn part of what is driving U.S. policy, type "peak oil" into Google (include the quotes) and check out some of the tens of thousands of articles that come up. Our leaders know peak oil isn't Chicken Little crying - there have been several government studies about it – they provide grim reading.

When I tried a search just now, the site at the top of the Google results page claims: "Over 600,000 visitors since 1/8/2004", "Deal with reality, or reality will deal with you." and "George Bush and Hummers are not the problem. John Kerry and Hybrids are not the solution."

— I just read "The End of Cheap Oil" in "National Geographic", June, 2004. Read it. It's a good article even though N.G. felt it best to err on the conservative side of every point. And they talk a lot about reserves. The theory of peak oil isn't mainly about reserves, it's about production and consumption.

About the only sites (and those sites dumb enough to believe them) that are pooh-poohing the theory of peak oil (and global warming or any other hot topic) are those pseudo-scientific think-tanks that are completely funded by big corporations and special interest groups (polluters, war contractors, pharmaceutical companies, political groups, etc.) — that have a reason to pull the wool over your eyes. They tell their "researchers" what they want to hear and then tell them to "prove" it to the ignorant.

The only reason for these so-called think-tanks' existence is propaganda.

Although similar organizations have been around for centuries, one of the first modern ones is the Heritage Foundation, a favorite of the late President Reagan. Over the years it has matured into something more legitimate and has gone from something like 2% accuracy to almost 50%. President Bush has expressed his dislike for the Heritage Foundation but has praised some of the more deceitful think-tanks.

The Carlyle Group fits in here somewhere because of their association with certain think-tanks, even though it is a private investment bank rather than a think-tank and even though their purpose isn't propaganda. Try typing "carlyle group" into Google (include the quotes). Don't waste your time with all the "conspiracy theories" you'll find in Google's results (even though more than a few may be true) — the basic facts speak for themselves without adding any theories. If you don't know anything about the Carlyle Group, you are a dangerously uninformed American. (Sorry about that, but I know you will be able to figure out what I mean by "dangerous" when you check out the Carlyle Group.)

To check out any scientific or political think-tank or "Institute of..." go to  www.mediatransparency.org/fundometer.php OR  www.disinfopedia.org — all of these junk science/political organizations (along with the legitimate ones) are required by law to disclose the sources of their funding. Don't believe me — check it out yourself — "Follow the money".

As an example, a survey recently published by the "Pew Research Center for People And The Press" found republicans have become more distrustful of most major media outlets over the past four years, while people who watch Fox News has jumped from 17 percent to 25 percent. The Pew Research Center is mainly funded by The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc. that gives away about $30 million a year to a bunch of these propaganda "think-tanks". Harry Bradley of the war-profiteering Allen-Bradley Company wants everybody to watch his long-time buddy Robert Murdoch's Fox News. The survey, even if accurate, was obviously designed to get more republicans to watch Fox News. - If you distrust the news - watch Fox. Maybe I ought to sell that slogan to Fogs News. But then I would be contributing to the propaganda. Although my slogan is no more deceptive than "Fox Facts, by distinguished scholars, bla, bla, bla" (translation - think-tanks).

Many public opinion polls ask the wrong people the right questions - phrased in such a way to guarantee the "right" answer. There are even fake polls aimed at key swing voting districts - their object isn't to gather information, but, with the questions themselves, to sway your opinion. "Do you believe it was right for Senator So-and-So to vote for a bill that gives billions of dollars to millionaires?" (They don't say whether Senator So-and-So voted for or against the bill...)

Another example:
Republican pollster Frank Luntz, appeared as a guest on the May 21 Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes and purportedly showed that a majority of Democrats say if they had the choice they would prefer Senator Hillary Clinton over Senator John Kerry. Luntz admitted radio host Rush Limbaugh had a role in instigating the survey... [no comment — Sorry, I can't resist - Rush Linbaugh said about the prison torture, "The troops were just blowing off a little steam." Widely imitated but never surpassed, Rush is the grand master at telling his listeners what they want to hear. He would have made a very successful politician.]

The "Luntz Research Companies" is funded by the well-known "American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research" which is heavily funded by, guess who? - The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

In fairness I have to say that the American Enterprise Institute is in the process of becoming a little more legitimate. And Frank Lutz, like some other pollsters, sometimes does put out a few scientific polls. (Much more often than Fox News' own distorted "Opinion Dynamics" polls.) – But Hillary Clinton? - My advice to Frank Lutz: Don't get too carried away with a biased poll or no one will believe you.

– Sorry to keep picking on Fox News – but if the shoe fits... When the 9/11 Commission reported finding no evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly criticized the newspapers for reporting it! Michael Moore used some of actual news footage in "Fahrenheit 9/11" that he found in the Fox archives that were never aired by Fox News. – To be fair to Fox, I don't know which news clips Moore is talking about and I don't know the reasons Fox didn't air them. (Although I do know about Fox's news policy.)

Although I'm using opinion polls as an example, there's a lots of other ways the news media (right and left) and our government tries to con us. After a recent sanitized, "guided" tour of Guantanamo, Fox News reported they were surprised at all the "amenities" we have graciously given to these scum-of-the-earth prisoners. (Fox's actual words were slightly more subtle; I tried to render the announcer's tone of voice as accurately as possible.) Does Fox News think we are so stupid that we have to be reminded of these prisoners' moral character? Or are they implying that this makes our inhumane interrogation of them less immoral or even justified? Deflect their focus and control of the ignorant is half-way complete. "Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, ... have kept their subject towns distracted" - Machiavelli, "The Prince"

When two people disagree, it doesn't mean one of them is stupid. Remember what I wrote about how we focus on and notice those things that support our beliefs? That's how we "know" the other person is "wrong". Jesus explained why some people needed to hear his parables in order to understand what his disciples already knew: "...so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not hear" (Luke 8:10). All governments know this. Machiavelli wrote about it in 1532 in a book that has been read by millions. Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, wrote about it in the 1930's. Only if we know the pertinent facts that support and discredit our beliefs can we call ourselves informed. I could have written about the other side of things, but everybody knows that already from watching TV. I'm not trying change you, I'm just pointing out how the media is not serving America.

TV programs (not just news shows, documentaries too) try to project the illusion of balance by including "experts" from "both sides". These experts are carefully chosen and usually, the guests carefully avoid anything that might brand themselves as on the radical left or right - they want to influence the most people by appearing to be near the "rational" middle. This pseudo-balanced reporting has little value to anyone except to those people who don't want you to know certain things.

It's frightening how much we are being manipulated! — Find out yourself.

You can see so-called "experts" from these bogus institutes Every Day on CNN, MSNBC and especially Fox News, commenting on the news. (PBS and C-Span are somewhat more responsible.) These TV newsmen could find out in a couple of minutes who funds the "expert". (They know that already, but their big bosses won't let them tell you.)
If the caption on TV reads:
"Mr. So-and-So, senior fellow from Such-and-Such Foundation."
— BEWARE.

I hope I've added to what you aready know about the natural inclination of politicians to lie when they think they can get away with it. And that media conglomerates are in an position to easily promote their own bias. But to put things in perspective, the media corporations are in business to make money and they have an financial obligation to their shareholders. And they know if viewers don't like the program, they will click to another channel.
"We have met the enemy... and he is us."
-Pogo by Walt Kelly, circa 1953-54

Condensed from "The Baltimore Sun", May 12, 2004

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that he and other top officials kept President Bush 'fully informed ... in general terms' about complaints made by the Red Cross and others over ill-treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Powell said that he, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld kept Bush "fully informed of the concerns that were being expressed, not in specific details, but in general terms as part of my regular briefings of the president."

Rumsfeld, testifying before Congress, said he told the president in late January or early February about an investigation being conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba into alleged abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison.

[President Bush claimed he learned about the abuses from media reports – Are Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld lying? I've known a couple of people who lied for the sheer joy of it, but everyone else lies to conceal something.]

Condensed from "The New Yorker", May 15, 2004

Article by Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.

Stephen Cambone, Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, was put in charge by Rumsfeld of a new program to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate "high value" targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror.

But by mid-2003 the success of the war was at risk. The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Cambone, was to get tough with Iraqis. The Taguba report quoted General Miller from Guantanamo as recommending that "detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation." The rules of the operation were "Grab whom you must. Do what you want."

By fall-2003 the C.I.A. had had enough. They said, "No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan-pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets - and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets" and the agency ended its involvement in Abu Ghraib.

By this time hard-core special operatives under Cambone were working in the prison. A Pentagon consultant said. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program."

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, "We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar."

Condensed from "Newsweek" May 24, 2004

The Roots of Torture
By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff

A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, George W Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to methods used at Abu Ghraib.

It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers according to internal government memos obtained by NEWSWEEK.

A small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration stated we are in a position in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, according to copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos obtained by NEWSWEEK.

The Bush administration's approach was that America's enemies in this war were "unlawful" combatants without rights. On Dec. 28, 2001, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel argued that U.S. courts had no jurisdiction to review the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. And on Jan. 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel coauthored a memo concluding that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the conflict in Afghanistan.

When State Department lawyers saw the Yoo memo, they "were horrified".

By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that President Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all. A Justice Dept. memo from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to Bush states: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

The memo also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the President to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. — That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions and also charges based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars war crimes, which were defined to include any grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.

When Colin Powell read the Gonzales memo, he "hit the roof," says a State source. Desperately seeking to change Bush's mind, Powell fired off his own blistering response the next day, Jan. 26, 2002, and sought an immediate meeting with the president. The proposed anti-Geneva Convention declaration, he warned, "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice" and have "a high cost in terms of negative international reaction."

With the legal groundwork laid, President Bush began to act. First, he signed a secret order authorizing the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness.

While the CIA could do what it liked the Pentagon was bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Pentagon determined that such CIA techniques were "not something we believe the military should be involved in." But the Pentagon's resistance to rougher techniques eroded month by month.

Toward the end of 2002, orders went out that the Geneva Conventions were to be reinterpreted to allow tougher methods of interrogation. There was "almost a revolt" by the service Judge Advocates General, or JAG.

The JAGs made a final, futile effort to reverse the trend, they went to see Scott Horton, a specialist in international human-rights law. Partially, the JAGs wanted to find out if Horton could come up with something that could be used to convince the administration to reconsider. But mainly, they wanted a widely respected outside person to know of their opposition: to protect themselves from prosecution if they were ever setup as the fall guys.

The JAGs told Horton the U.S. military's 50-year history of observing the demands of the Geneva Conventions was now being overturned. "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity about how the conventions should be interpreted and applied." The prime movers in this effort were DOD Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith and DOD general counsel William Haynes. There was, they warned, "a real risk of a disaster" for U.S. interests.

In April 2003, new and tougher interrogation techniques were approved.

At Guantanamo under Gen. Miller, a new set of interrogation rules became doctrine. Rumsfeld pointed out that Gitmo was producing good intel. So he directed Steve Cambone to send Gitmo commandant Miller to Iraq to improve what they were doing out there. The order was signed by General Boykin.

On Nov. 19, Abu Ghraib was formally handed over to tactical control of military-intelligence units. Coalition commander in Iraq, Gen. Sanchez, didn't begin an investigation until two months later, when it was clear the pictures were about to leak.

Condensed from The Washington Post June 9, 2004

The Bush administration assures the country, and the world, that it is complying with U.S. and international laws banning torture and maltreatment of prisoners. But, breaking with a practice of openness that had lasted for decades, The Bush administration has classified as secret and refused to disclose the techniques of interrogation it is using.

The Bush administration has responded that its civilian lawyers have certified its methods as proper - but it has refused to disclose, or even provide to Congress, the justifying opinions and memos.

This week, thanks again to an independent press, we have begun to learn the deeply disturbing truth about the legal opinions that the Pentagon and the Justice Department seek to keep secret. According to copies leaked to several newspapers, they lay out a shocking and immoral set of justifications for torture.

There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments.

Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security."

The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy - even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice.

What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should.

Condensed from The Washington Post June 21, 2004

Responding to a statement by Secretary Rumsfeld who criticised a "Washington Post" article detailing how senior Defense Department officials contributed to the abuse of prisoners, The Post wrote: "Since Mr. Rumsfeld referred directly to The Post, we believe we owe him a response. ... What strikes us as extraordinary is that Mr. Rumsfeld would suggest that this damage [to our chances for success] would be caused by newspaper editorials rather than by his own actions and decisions and those of other senior administration officials. ... Dictators who wish to justify torture, and those who would mistreat Americans, have no need to read our editorials: They can download from the Internet the 50-page legal brief issued by Mr. Rumsfeld's chief counsel. ... We believe there is a way to mitigate and eventually overcome the debacle, but it is not by asking newspapers to go mute. ... What is needed is a full and independent investigation ... and a forthright and unambiguous commitment by President Bush to strictly observe U.S. and international law in the future."

Condensed from The Financial Times June 10, 2004

This week's revelations that Bush administration lawyers had sought to find legal justifications for torturing terrorist detainees have left Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale University's law school and a former US assistant secretary of state, "dumbfounded". "They are blatantly wrong."

Scott Horton [see Newsweek's article above], says that "to make an argument that the president's wartime powers give him the right to avoid these statutes is preposterous. The government lawyers involved in preparing the documents could and should face professional sanctions. There are serious ethical shortcomings here."

Elizabeth Rindskopf-Parker, dean of the McGeorge school of law and former General Counsel to both the National Security Agency and the CIA, says that "several decades of work to insure that our intelligence and national security agencies as well as those of other nations have been severely undermined for benefits that are at best speculative."

One veteran lawyer says the memos "should have had a clause noting that 98 per cent of the international lawyers in the world would disagree."

Because of the clear moral principles involved, many legal experts wonder why such legal questions about torture came to be asked by the Bush Administration in the first place, even in the face of the terrorist threat. "These lawyers and officials seem oblivious to the first question that any law-of-war expert must ask: 'Would we tolerate such treatment of US prisoners?'" says David Scheffer, a former US ambassador for war crimes. "If the answer is no, then the subject is closed."

Miscellaneous news summarized from the Associated Press:

CNN is suing the state of Florida to release 20,000 names of felons not allowed to vote. CNN wants to investigate the names before the 2004 election.

In the 2000 election, tens of thousands of predominately black democrat voters in Florida were denied the right to vote. Award winning journalist Greg Palast, who writes daily for BBC Television, The Observer and The Guardian British newspapers, researched the 2000 Florida "felon" list and discovered almost 90% should have been allowed to vote.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School conducted a joint investigation that showed in the year 2000, 1.9 million votes were cast and not counted in the U.S., over a million of which were cast by African-Americans, even though black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

Three days before the 2000 election, the London Times published a front page story about the questionable "felon" list. When asked later about the Times article, CBS TV said they didn't publish anything about it because they phoned Florida Governor Jeb Bush's office and a spokesman told them there wasn't anything to it (Great investigative reporting!). That's like asking the fox where the hens went.

In the 2000 election, after 36 days of misdirected ballyhoo about "chads" and "butterfly ballots", the Supreme Court decided that expediency was more important than democracy, and George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. As a result, he won the Presidency by five electoral votes, the closest election in U.S. history.

It's all part of the widely criticized 2002 federal "Help America Vote Act" that, through either incompetence or design, has the opposite effect. It has become more and more popular for Washington to give projects warm and fuzzy names to manipulate fuzzy-minded voters.

"The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do."
-Joseph Stalin

This is in addition to the Government's estimate of $3,400 the average taxpayer will pay for the war in Iraq through June, 2004.

In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer quoted Adolf Hitler's 1941 "Commissar Order": "The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion ... All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies ... German soldiers guilty of breaking international law will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it."
The Crown Jurist of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, wrote that, "In times of emergency and crisis, the actions of the Leader were not subordinate to justice, but constituted the 'highest justice'."
— I challenge anyone to tell me the basic moral difference between Hitler's "Commissar Order" and the Bush administration's "torture is legal" memos.

Shirer writes: "The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away... The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans... On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm."

Just as a purely intellectual exercise, compare what has been happening for the last few years with Shirer's description of how Hitler came to absolute power in Germany. The book can be found in any library.

General Anthony Zinni, former commander-in-chief of all U.S. forces in the Middle East said, "Criticizing the President, the war, or the conduct of the war does not put our troops in danger. Look, there's one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that's the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up."

In 1918, Theodore Roosevelt said, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

"The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny."
-William Ellery Channing, 1780-1842, American minister and author

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
-Harry S. Truman

"When even one American-who has done nothing wrong-is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth-then all Americans are in peril."
-Harry S. Truman

"A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority"
- Stanley Milgram, 1965 - Psychologist
His experiments showed that obedience to authority was so ingrained in the average US citizen they were prepared to cause lethal harm when instructed by authority figures.

"The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
-Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at MIT

Liberty can not be preserved without general knowledge among people."
-John Adams

"What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
-Thomas Jefferson

"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society."
-Rocco Galati, notorious constitutional lawyer writing about the Patriot Act, our government's smear of civil liberties and due process in the name of "security". - Don't rely on what you hear, read the Act yourself, it only takes a half hour for a person of even ordinary intelligence to figure it out. That's why it was pushed through Congress before anyone had the time to read it. The bill's supporters knew that one extra day wouldn't have made any difference to our security — they didn't want it discussed on the House and Senate floors. The passage of the Patriot Act is a blatant example of unpatriotic, back-room "democracy". - That alone is reason for Congress to revisit it.

The ultimate aim of the terrorists isn't to kill, that's just the means. To put it in the context I'm talking about here, their aim is to deprive us of liberty and our constitutional rights and in this way, destroy us. Ashcroft and Congress fell for it hook, line and sinker.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Ben Franklin

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
-James Madison

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson

"Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and.. the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer."
-H. L. Menchen - 1956

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
-Bertrand Russell

Fear always springs from ignorance.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions..."
-Gore Vidal

"Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state."
-David McGowan

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
-Mark Twain

"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers."
-Jose Narosky

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be."
-Thomas Jefferson:

"We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom."
-Stephen Vincent Benet

"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph."
-Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."
-John Flynn, 1944

"The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal."
-Mark Twain

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
-Thomas Jefferson

"Half a truth is often a great lie"
-Benjamin Franklin

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."
-Adolf Hitler

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." -Herman Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshall, at the Nuremberg trials

"The price of greatness is responsibility."
-Sir Winston Churchill

"Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

In 1961, in his farewell address to the nation, President Eisenhower thought it important to give the people of the United States this advice:
"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought of unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Sources for research:

Don't believe me:
Check it out yourself. – You owe it to yourself

The information above was not taken from the sensational tabloid press but from some of the most respected newspapers and journalists in the world. I'm giving you internet links, but, as you already know, the internet probably has a hundred million pages of untruths and half-truths. Ignore all internet sources that aren't generally accepted sources like major newspapers, radio and TV. If an official document is available, read it.

You can usually find evidence for both sides of an opinion. Some "facts" are invented or distorted, either intentionally or because of sloppy research. Sometimes the facts are good, but irrelevant. Sometimes the facts are incomplete – one critical piece of information can reverse a conclusion. Sometimes the facts are good, but the writer's conclusions are illogical. And, you can find good research, good logic and honesty on both sides of an issue. But 99% of what people write is the result of Starting with a Conclusion and then showing why you are Right. This isn't a valid way of finding what's what. It's ok to have opinions, but if you check things out starting from that view, you are wasting your time. We always know when we are trying to con other people, but almost never catch on when we fool ourselves.

I never intended to give you exact references. (And, I'm sorry to report, I've lost some of them anyway.) — My intent was, by checking the sites below you will be able to easily verify what I am saying, and find much more that I didn't have space for.

For International Red Cross press releases go to their own website:
 www.icrc.org/eng/

To read the actual government documents go to:
 National Security Archive of George Washington University.

    USA Sites  

Google Advanced News Search:
 news.google.com/advanced_news_search

Yahoo! Advanced News Search:
 news.search.yahoo.com/usns/ynsearch/categories/advanced/

Daypop - current events news search:
 www.daypop.com/

News Index - search:
 www.newsindex.com/

Overture - All the Web News Search:
 www.alltheweb.com/?cat=news

U.S. Library of Congress Search:
 http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First

    Foreign News  

Multilingual MetaNews Translator:
 www.humanitas-international.org/newstran/index.html

News Now:
 www.newsnow.co.uk/

World News Network:
 www.wn.com/

HeadlineSpot:
 www.headlinespot.com/

Foreign Press Association Netherlands - Search:
 www.bpv-fpa.nl/

Online newspapers & magazines - international press:
 www.lengua.com/zeitung.htm

Also do searches on the Reuters:  www.reuters.com/ and AP web sites:  www.ap.org/ — Reuters and AP are good because they report lots of news, not the filtered version you get on TV.

There are many made-up quotes of famous people on the internet. It took me a while to check the quotes above. To check out quotes and the truth behind propaganda emails you receive, see  HoaxBusters and  Urban Legends

If you had "fun" checking out the facts about the prisoner abuse, you may want to check out the many other things that over the years have never made it into most history books. For now, try going back 60 years and find out about the powerful people and companies who contributed to Hitler's Nazi Germany just before and during WWII. Immorality isn't something new.

Just one example:
"General Motors and Ford became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts. GM's plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps. On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored 'mule' 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich's medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as 'the backbone' of the German Army transportation system. After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by their Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing... Ford received a little less than $1 million, primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne. "
- Official report from the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, February 26, 1974, United States Government Printing Office, Washington.

— I'm not making this crazy stuff up!

Some of the Americans and companies that, not accidentally, but deliberately aided Hitler's Germany during or just before WWII were: William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's daddy), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (Founder of Gulf Oil, Head of Alcoa, and Secretary of Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolege, and Hoover), DuPont, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil), Henry Ford (an outspoken anti-Semite), the Ford Motor Company, ITT, IBM, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush (grandpa of G.W.Bush and father of Bush Sr.), Samuel Bush (great-grandpa of G.W.Bush and grandpa of Bush Sr.), National City Bank, and General Electric. — Have fun checking.

"I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore Toto. We must be over the rainbow!"
-Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz"