Ticomaya wrote:Intrepid wrote:I tried the bottom once..
..prefer the top
Do you mean that in the sense that you tried "catching, ..
.. but prefer to "pitch"?
Not that there's anything wrong with that .....
Given that I think I actually know what you mean... the answer is NO. I will gladly provide proof :-D
CodeBorg wrote:"Things i like about George.W.Bush"
Well, I like that he makes it obvious.
Politics is a political game. It is about power-brokers ... brokering power.
For themselves. A tank full of sharks. A pit full of snakes.
It's about buying votes, spinning stories, getting kickbacks, trading favors,
and creating the public "image" that sways and motivates people, and therefore
absolutely lies to them in calculated, button-pushing psychological ways.
Manipulative word games.
Politics has always been this way.
But with King George the W. it is obvious. He is not in charge. He simply speaks
the words he is fed, and tries to find the properly conniving and ruthless people to run
the show. Or rather, they have found and harnessed him. He has no clue or acumen,
as a truly good puppet should. He is merely the President.
He makes it obvious that the country is run by people who are NOT elected
every four years, and NOT beholding to the honest citizens of our great nation.
That the center of power is hidden from public gossip, immune to democracy
or prosecution, because George takes all the heat for them.
That's his job. He's the President.
He takes all the finger-pointing, the whining and the contrived blame,
leaving the power-brokers to have a peaceful, safely unexamined life.
I like that George is so unintelligent and predictably incapable
that the president's true role as a "public-relations lightning rod,
figure-head and hood-ornament" becomes obvious.
It's makes people think "This can't be right!",
he can't be serious, he can't mean what he says, . . .
there MUST be something else going on.
And then they realize that democracy is a calculated pretense
and pacifier for the uninformed. Our votes have already been spun,
purchased and harvested, by a TV commercial called "The White House".
The organizations that create the market for fear, and the products to harness it
are almost revealed now, to the American public. Because George W. is so scripted,
stiff and biblical, there MUST be something else going on.
Who is really calling the shots and running the country?
I like that George W. Bush makes it so outrageously clear.
Maybe a few more voters/citizens/people will lose their innocence
and stand up a little bit straighter.
Wow. And I thought there was nothing I liked about the w. Good on ya, CodeBorg.
CodeBorg wrote:
Who is really calling the shots and running the country?
could Cheney be Bush's ventriloquist ?
not2know, Betcha a cup of coffee and donut that people like physgrad will not change their minds after reading your link that proves him wrong.
Who is running the country. I am sure it isn't the bobble head doll running around the nation trying to convince us he is.
But, au, a bobble-head doll would never have that kind of smirk. LOL
au1929 wrote:Who is running the country. I am sure it isn't the bobble head doll running around the nation trying to convince us he is.
It's being run so badly that I assume it must be a committee.
au, The smirk is missing from the bobble-head Bush. LOL
May 16, 2005
Newsweek Got Gitmo Right
by Calgacus*
Contrary to White House spin, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo published by Newsweek on May 9, 2005, are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States. Several former detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram prisons have reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing on the Koran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it. Prior to the Newsweek article, the New York Times reported a Guantanamo insider asserting that the commander of the facility was compelled by prisoner protests to address the problem and issue an apology.
One such incident (during which the Koran was allegedly thrown in a pile and stepped on) prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in March 2002. Regarding this, the New York Times in a May 1, 2005, article interviewed a former detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said the protest ended with a senior officer delivering an apology to the entire camp. And the Times reports: "A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public _expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans." (Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt, "Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantanamo Bay," New York Times, May 1, 2005.)
The hunger strike and apology story is also confirmed by another former detainee, Shafiq Rasul, interviewed by the UK Guardian in 2003 (James Meek, "The People the Law Forgot," Dec. 3, 2003). It was also confirmed by former prisoner Jamal al-Harith in an interview with the Daily Mirror (Rosa Prince and Gary Jones, "My Hell in Camp X-Ray," Daily Mirror, March 12, 2004).
The toilet incident was reported in the Washington Post in a 2003 interview with a former detainee from Afghanistan:
"Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet. 'It was a very bad situation for us,' said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. 'We cried so much and shouted, "Please do not do that to the Holy Koran."' (Marc Kaufman and April Witt, "Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment," Washington Post, March 26, 2003.)
Also citing the toilet incident is testimony by Asif Iqbal, a former Guantanamo detainee who was released to British custody in March 2004 and subsequently freed without charge:
"The behavior of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet, and generally disrespect it." (Center for Constitutional Rights [.pdf], Aug. 4, 2004.)
The claim that U.S. troops at Bagram prison in Afghanistan urinated on the Koran was made by former detainee Mohamed Mazouz, a Moroccan, as reported in the Moroccan newspaper, La Gazette du Maroc. (Abdelhak Najib, "Les Américains pissaient sur le Coran et abusaient de nous sexuellement," April 12, 2005.) An English translation is available on the Cage Prisoners site (which describes itself as a "nonsectarian Islamic human rights Web site").
Tarek Derghoul, another of the British detainees, similarly cites instances of Koran desecration in an interview with Cage Prisoners.
Desecration of the Koran was also mentioned by former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and reported by the BBC in early May 2005. (Haroon Rashid, "Ex-Inmates Share Guantanamo Ordeal," May 2, 2005.)
*Calgacus has been employed as a researcher in the national security field for 20 years.
From NYT:
U.S. Presses Newsweek to 'Repair' Damage From Flawed Report
By DAVID STOUT
Published: May 17, 2005
WASHINGTON, May 17 - The Bush administration kept up the pressure today on Newsweek magazine to do something beyond retracting an article asserting that investigators had confirmed the desecration of a Koran by American interrogators trying to unsettle Muslim detainees.
yes but it was only psychological torture, it wasn't meant to be blasphemous....Some of these Islamists have no sense of humour
Steve, Tell that to a Islamist - face to face.
cicerone imposter wrote:From NYT:
U.S. Presses Newsweek to 'Repair' Damage From Flawed Report
By DAVID STOUT
Published: May 17, 2005
WASHINGTON, May 17 - The Bush administration kept up the pressure today on Newsweek magazine to do something beyond retracting an article asserting that investigators had confirmed the desecration of a Koran by American interrogators trying to unsettle Muslim detainees.
Maybe they could send them a nice ham.
c.i. -- here's Molly Ivins' take on the matter.
Don't Blame Newsweek
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
Tuesday 17 May 2005
Austin, Texas -- As Riley used to say on an ancient television sitcom, "This is a revoltin' development." There seems to be a bit of a campaign on the right to blame Newsweek for the anti-American riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Islamic countries.
Uh, people, I hate to tell you this, but the story about Americans abusing the Koran in order to enrage prisoners has been out there for quite some time. The first mention I found of it is March 17, 2004, when the Independent of London interviewed the first British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner said he had been physically beaten but did not consider that as bad as the psychological torture, which he described extensively. Jamal al-Harith, a computer programmer from Manchester, said 70 percent of the inmates had gone on a hunger strike after a guard kicked a copy of the Koran. The strike was ended by force-feeding.
Then came the report, widely covered in American media last December, by the International Red Cross concerning torture at Gitmo. I wrote at the time: "In the name of Jesus Christ Almighty, why are people representing our government, paid by us, writing filth on the Korans of helpless prisoners? Is this American? Is this Christian? What are our moral values? Where are the clergymen on this? Speak up, speak out."
The reports kept coming: Dec. 30, 2004, "Released Moroccan Guantanamo Detainee Tells Islamist Paper of His Ordeal," reported the Financial Times. "They watched you each time you went to the toilet; the American soldiers used to tear up copies of Koran and throw them in the toilet. ..." said the released prisoner.
On Jan. 9, 2005, Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Sunday Times of London, said: "We now know a great deal about what has gone on in U.S. detention facilities under the Bush administration. Several government and Red Cross reports detail the way many detainees have been treated. We know for certain that the United States has tortured five inmates to death. We know that 23 others have died in U.S. custody under suspicious circumstances. We know that torture has been practiced by almost every branch of the U.S. military in sites all over the world -- from Abu Ghraib to Tikrit, Mosul, Basra, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
"We know that no incidents of abuse have been reported in regular internment facilities and that hundreds have occurred in prisons geared to getting intelligence. We know that thousands of men, women and children were grabbed almost at random from their homes in Baghdad, taken to Saddam's former torture palace and subjected to abuse, murder, beatings, semi-crucifixions and rape.
"All of this is detailed in the official reports. What has been perpetrated in secret prisons to 'ghost detainees' hidden from Red Cross inspection, we do not know. We may never know.
"This is America? While White House lawyers were arguing about what separates torture from legitimate 'coercive interrogation techniques,' the following was taking place: Prisoners were hanged for hours or days from bars or doors in semi-crucifixions; they were repeatedly beaten unconscious, woken and then beaten again for days on end; they were sodomized; they were urinated on, kicked in the head, had their ribs broken, and were subjected to electric shocks.
"Some Muslims had pork or alcohol forced down their throats; they had tape placed over their mouths for reciting the Koran; many Muslims were forced to be naked in front of each other, members of the opposite sex and sometimes their own families. It was routine for the abuses to be photographed in order to threaten the showing of the humiliating footage to family members."
The New York Times reported on May 1 on the same investigation Newsweek was writing about and interviewed a released Kuwaiti, who spoke of three major hunger strikes, one of them touched off by "guards' handling copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stomped on. A senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology. A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans."
So where does all this leave us? With a story that is not only true, but previously reported numerous times. So let's drop the "Lynch Newsweek" bull. Seventeen people have died in these riots. They didn't die because of anything Newsweek did -- the riots were caused by what our government has done.
Get your minds around it. Our country is guilty of torture. To quote myself once more: "What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own this country, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elected to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them."
-------
MA, No matter how many reports we hear about the abuse of our military towards prisoners or their religion, this administration is gonna white-wash everything to make it look like only a few (without authority) are responsible. The American populace is too stupid to know or care, and the Bushies will continue to make this world a less safe place for everybody.
