Thread: Cheney vs. "Real Men" Who Don't Torture, Some Vids

I have one question which has been missing regarding Dick Cheney's strenuous assertions that torturing prisoners has saved thousands, "perhaps hundreds of thousands" of lives. (Hey, how about millions, Dick? No no, how about billions?)

Cheney's remarks point to a steady, gruesome routine of torture which has "kept us safe," but which now Obama has abolished. But if Obama has abolished it, now five months into his administration, and it was uncovering plot after plot, then where are all the attacks it was preventing?

The NeoCons have always held to their ultimate fallback position: final proof of the Bush administration's rightness is there have been no further attacks.

It establishes a causal link between everything which was done, and what didn't happen. It is a fallacy referred to by philosophers as "post hoc ergo propter hoc," the "false cause." This is illustrated by one philosopher as "the savage's claim that beating his drums is the cause of the sun reappearing after an eclipse." It links two things that have nothing to do with each other.

Could it be that Cheney is lying? That no attacks were prevented? (Please no laughter here, bear with me.) Could it be that torture is just another part of the effort to estrange us from our core values? Like the invasion of Iraq? Let's put the word of the tough-talking draft-dodger, Cheney, who had his first child nine months and a day (no kidding) after the only exemption from Vietnam became that of having children, against the word of a growing number of military men and former CIA officers who say, flat-out, that torture doesn't work, and prevents nothing. You can include former CIA operatives Bob Baer and Jack Rice, and former Air Force Interrogator Matthew Alexander. And oh yes, legendary CIA Director William Colby. Almost forgot him. (see these interview links on Youtube.)

The common thread seems to be that, when you torture, you get either, a) what you want to hear so it will stop or, b.) a dead guy whose heart finally stops or he drowns. The other point of agreement among the true tough guys is that torture makes many more enemies.

Let's remember Cheney is the man who said "we don't know if bin Laden was at Tora Bora" and was basically called a liar by the top CIA commander on the ground at the time, Gary Berntsen, by a Delta Forces kill team leader, and by CIA field commander Gary Schroen who said "I have no doubt he was there." Let's put his word against the word of his own FBI director, Robert Mueller, who said torture never prevented any attacks. It's kind of starting to line up, the fake tough guys against the real tough guys. Mueller was the leader of a rifle platoon in Vietnam while Cheney had "better things to do."

We are talking about Dick Cheney, the man who said Saddam was ready to launch an attack on US soil "in as little as 45 minutes," who used the testimony of a thoroughly discredited Iraqi National Congress operative, "Curveball," to prove that Saddam had biological weapons labs ("Curveball" claimed that he had been at the site of an accident in which a number of technicians died, proven false by German intelligence, one of whom told reporters he said "Mein Gott!" when he heard Powell using Curveball in his UN speech on television.)

Come to think of it, this same rationale was the be-all-end-all of discussion on the rightness of invading Iraq: the proof that Bush was right is that we have not been attacked again. Could it be that all we did when we invaded Iraq was...invade Iraq?

Bring forward the story of Dilawar, the 22-year-old taxi-driver who made the mistake of driving past Baghram AFB a few days after a rocket attack with three paying fares. The New York Times revealed:

"In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.

One form of torture used on Dilawar was the peroneal Strikes. Peroneal strikes are a specific form of beating, consisting of blows to the soft tissue and nerves just above the knee. Dilalwar was beaten to death at Bagram, and had been given so many peroneal strikes that a coroner testified that his leg tissue had ‘"basically been pulpified.’"

Orders from the top bring out sadists at the bottom. Dilawar, was 5'9", 122 pounds. Dysblog quoting the Times report tells us:

one guard noticed, for instance, that the bruise on his leg was "the size of a fist." Why would guards torture a man they considered innocent? At first it was all in fun: M.P.'s would drop by to give him common peroneal strikes just to hear him scream, "Allah! Allah! Allah!" This was done to him perhaps 100 times..."

19-year-old Murat Kurnaz disappeared into the House of Horrors That Bush Built even though according to 60 Minutes:

there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

Kurnaz says shocked him with electricity, and that he was hoisted up on chains suspended by his arms from the ceiling of an aircraft hangar for five days.

"Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down. And the doctor came to watch if I can still survive to not. He looked into my eyes. He checked my heart. And when he said okay, then they pulled me back up,"

Other documented, sadistic practices:

• Slamming A Prisoner’s Head Into Concrete Walls. In this torture a towel is wrapped around a prisoner’s neck and is then used to propel the prisoner head first into a concrete wall. This torture was so fraught with risk of serious injury to or death of a prisoner that the CIA kept a doctor on hand at all times to guard against death or crippling injury.

• Additional "Stress Positions" And Electric Shocks. "Palestinian hangings," they were hung by the arms with their feet on a drum through which electric shocks were applied to their feet; the shocks would cause the feet to "dance."

This is the time to send this post along with the permalink to it so the congresscritters can easily view the below Youtubes, and see that it's really OK, Real Men don't torture. Listen to the guys actually got their hands dirty, and say it doesn't work.

LINK TO CONGRESS EMAILS. LINK TO EMAIL WHITE HOUSE.

VIDEOS

Former CIA Operative Bob Baer on Hardball



Former CIA Director William Colby



Air Force Interrogator Mathew Alexander


Former CIA Operative Jack Rice Blasts Cheney

Nice post ralphlopez! Not ONE person in the MSM that condones torture has agreed to be tortured. I wonder why that is

Jesse Ventura came out and offered to waterboard Cheney. I have an idea myself. I will set up a "waterboarding booth" where you get to waterboard the pro-torture people for $5 a piece. If it's not really torture, then why doesn't Cheney, Malkin, O Reilly take up on anyones offer?

I also find it disturbing that 53% of religious people here in America condone torture. They're right! God HAS been taken out of America!

I thank you ralphlopez. Poignant thoughts.
Personally, I am so tired of Cheney talking through clenched jaw and gritted teeth, trying to save the legacy of one of the most non-sensical administrations I have ever seen. Go home and play with the grandkids, volunteer or stay in you undisclosed location! We don't need to hear every few days from a former politico who probably contributed more to the mess this country is in than we will ever know.
IMO, Bush would have been a better president if he had not surrounded himself with the tyranny of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the my-way-or-the-highway gang.

Originally Posted by jshhmr

Nice post ralphlopez! Not ONE person in the MSM that condones torture has agreed to be tortured. I wonder why that is

Jesse Ventura came out and offered to waterboard Cheney. I have an idea myself. I will set up a "waterboarding booth" where you get to waterboard the pro-torture people for $5 a piece. If it's not really torture, then why doesn't Cheney, Malkin, O Reilly take up on anyones offer?

I also find it disturbing that 53% of religious people here in America condone torture. They're right! God HAS been taken out of America!

here's a bumper sticker for you: "Who would Jesus waterboard?"

I think on the 53% of Christians it depends on how you ask the question. If you say "there is a bomb ticking and millions will die, do you torture?" - the answer is going to be yes for a lot of people. But that is a myth from TV and people watching "24", which I admit is a very well-made show, always has you on the edge of your seat. The truth is the Bush admin got a bunch of guys who got swept up in the wrong place and the wrong time, who don't know anything, and now you are making them hate you even if they didn't before. Real smart way to conduct the war on terror!

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson I read just came out again and said most of these guys were innocent, not the worst of the worst.


Ex-Bush official: Many Gitmo detainees innocent
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 16JM02.DTL

Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday.

"There are still innocent people there," Lawrence Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archiv ... ruths_abo/

largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released, [said Col. Wilkerson.]

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released.

Originally Posted by vortex

I thank you ralphlopez. Poignant thoughts.
Personally, I am so tired of Cheney talking through clenched jaw and gritted teeth, trying to save the legacy of one of the most non-sensical administrations I have ever seen. Go home and play with the grandkids, volunteer or stay in you undisclosed location! We don't need to hear every few days from a former politico who probably contributed more to the mess this country is in than we will ever know.
IMO, Bush would have been a better president if he had not surrounded himself with the tyranny of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the my-way-or-the-highway gang.

agreed. Cheney has been up to no good for a long time, you gotta wonder who was really running things..