Comments on: Pentagon Releases Memo On Harsh Tactics

Declassified 2003 Memo Says Bush's Wartime Authority Trumps International Ban On Torture

[finewoven]

To watch BBC, for example, as opposed to a "news" media like Fox, is a real eye-opener for many. And I suppose many choose to close their eyes. So how do we change that here in America?
Posted by kissamaarse at 11:41 AM : Apr 02, 2008

I know your point was directed to Prinzowhales; but I too have traveled the world and talked to several people in regard to American values. Consider the BBC, which has barely any advertising, and is pretty much a monopoly on broadcasting--the view presented are not diverse. In fact, diversity is a hardship to many people outside America because they have so much invested in their nationalism. Consider France, or Germany, how they despise American values. And the middle east is a pronounced hater of Western ideals.

Each time I travel abroad, I cannot wait to get back to my home country where the diversity is a value that helps people grow. I thought the Bush Administration was making strides in diversity too, but it turned out to be cronyism. That''s where we fall short.

[prinzowhales]

kissamaarse--A beginning would be to never accept the lesser of two evils as being anything but evil, always call a spade, a spade and never put lip stick on a pig and imagine that it is anything other than a pig.

[prinzowhales]

Hannah Arrendt did not have Americans in mind when she wrote of the "banality of evil" and the "evil of banality" to describe the everyday, calm, bureaucratic ease with which the Nazi scribblers approved and conducted the ''business'' of the camps and machinery of death...of people like Eichmann and others who go to work...enjoy lunch at a nice restaurant and go about running things in nice, neat middle class surroundings where the screams and blood of their victims and the anguish of their families never intrude or spoil the taste of the pastrami on rye and nice, crisp little salat...I wonder who Hannah Arrendt would be thinking about today when she considered the banality of evil...and the evil of banality.

[kissamaarse]

Prinzowhales:
Yes, all those conditions exist, and many people do not have the capacity, or the desire, apparently, to scratch through the superficiality. I have lived abroad on a number of occasions, and it really does bother me that foreigners seem far more aware of what happens in America than many Americans do, indeed even the school children. To watch BBC, for example, as opposed to a "news" media like Fox, is a real eye-opener for many. And I suppose many choose to close their eyes. So how do we change that here in America?

[prinzowhales]

Americans can hide their heads in the sand...better to have their kids irreparably damaged by thimerasol than to make a scene...better to have them placed in the public propaganda prisons known as public schools to learn "acceptance" rather than "discernment"... better to do what your neighbor is doing...

American individualism? If they gathered in Central Park wearing Mao pajamas and performed in sync exercises, they could not be conforming to the mores of this sick-arsed society...a sick-arsed society that accepts rampant criminality...that accepts a Regime that imports dangerous narcotics...that wages wars against innocents and tortures them...with the approval of memo scribblers in Washington and paid for with their taxes...a sick-arsed society that gives a tinker''s d*amn about Brittainy Spears more than they do about what their children are learning... how they are behaving....why we have more prisoners than country''s that dwarf us in population...why the economy is going to ''ell...why cancer rates increase to the point where one-in-two Americans will succumb to this disease after a forty year multi-billion dollar ''war'' on it. This is a sick society...and the renditions...the calm, calculating appropriate memos that legitimize torture and extend the power of the president beyond any Constitutional bounds are issued and rescinded without any action by a Congress of swine who are slopped at the same fascist troughs from which the current Regime feeds.

[finewoven]

these american liberals has a cozy asociation with terrorists THAT THEY CONSIDER THEM a brethrens...CLOSE ENOUGH TO FIGHT FOR THIER RIGHTS.
Posted by libsrweak at 10:45 AM : Apr 02, 2008

Personally, I''ve often viewed this the other way around. Whenever there needs to be a Republican push for legislation or something else involving Iraq, an Al Qaeda video pops up in the media as a scare tactic to get people rallied to the Republican views. It happens so often that there is a consistent correlation between terrorist''s threats and Conservative wrangling of issues. I sometimes wonder if the religious nature of the extremists of Islam is the brethen of the religious right in the GOP. Lord help us[sic].

[prinzowhales]

kissamaarse--I ammended my statement with "in large part"...I''ve talked to so many Americans who prefer ignorance on every issue from the Federal Reserve through the Income Tax to corporate mal- and mis-feasance that, of me, it is the electorate that is answerable for the sins of their elected leaders...
"Fool me once, shame on you...Fool me twice, shame on me..."...as Fearless Leader once tried to say....

[prinzowhales]

And, while Merck murders Americans by the tens of thousands, the CIA imports drugs on the very planes that are tied to the renditions! Two down in Mexico with tons of drugs on board!! Is anyone suggesting that perhaps, it is the Bush White House and the scum-sucking dogs that run the show in Washington that need the kind of treatment approved by their memo sribblers? If not, I am!

[kissamaarse]

Prinzowhales:
I agree with you about Merck and other large companies who put garbage into the market place simply to maximize profits at all costs, but your "arse-licking" comment is over the top. Yes, people are duped and they are dumbed-down, and our culture is one of hyper-consumerism, but why the degrading comment about all Americans?

[prinzowhales]

Was the torture harsh, dude?

"The Pentagon on Tuesday made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush''s wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture."

It approved torture...you can rescind memos till ''ell freezes over, but, as the continued renditions prove, torture continues unabated...while the paper-pushers try to baffle us with BS about their memos.

Why aren''t they applying these techniques to the murdering terrorists at Merck, who knowingly exposed the users of Vioxx to death...sending tens othousands of them to a premature grave? Not one renditioned Big Pharma executive...And the hundreds of thousands of autistic children...lifes ruined by the senseless jabs by these heinous b*stards?!! Merck has done more damage to Americans than all of the CIA''s al Qaeda!!
Yet Americans...arse-licking appropriate dogs that they, in large part, are today...demand nothing but to hear who got voted off the island, out of the house, off the singing show or who made the final four.