Salon
by Gary Kamiya
05/28/09
Obama has tried to lead America out of the shadows of the Bush years. He has projected a calm optimism, a reasoned determination, that is a breath of fresh air after the puerile, bullying bravado of George W. Bush and the dark, croaking counsel of his evil courtier Cheney. And he has said inspiring things about the importance of defending our laws, rights and traditions, even in the face of terrorist threats. But because Obama has failed to directly reject the irrational boogeymen his predecessors whipped up, and because he has continued many of their policies, he has not been able to spring us from their dank culture of fear...
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/05/28/culture_of_fear/
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
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Torture Photos Show Rapes of Detainees, Former Officer Confirms
The real reason Dick Cheney has become so loud: he's afraid
Each week brings shocking new revelations. The U.S. mass media is not reporting on the most explosive story of the week.
The world now knows why President Obama reversed his earlier decision to release the 2,000 photos of prisoners barbarically tortured, abused, and humiliated under the direction of the Bush/Cheney gang.
Some of the photos of the prisoners show U.S. personnel torturing, sexual assaulting and raping male and female detainees, including children. The existence of these photos was confirmed by former Major General Antonio Taguba. Taguba had earlier been in charge of the inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
On May 21, Cheney went on national television to defend torture and sickeningly attacked Obama for sacrificing "innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things." We'd like to hear him explain how rape and sexual assault are just "unpleasant things" that have spared innocent lives. The last few months has proven that the abuses, the sexual assault, and the most barbaric violations of human rights cannot be attributed to a few bad apples. Such tactics were commonplace, officially sanctioned and elevated to the level of government policy.
The torture methods, like the war itself, have never been about saving lives. A recent column in the Nation echoed what IndictBushNow reported last week: "The Bush administration, hellbent on justifying its forthcoming invasion of Iraq, was ransacking the intelligence bureaucracy to find or produce two things that, it turns out, did not exist: weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq and cooperation between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The Iraqi people have never waged war on the United States and no Iraqis took part in the attacks of 9/11. Bush & co. wanted to go to war, and were just looking for an excuse.
So why, given the recent revelations, has Dick Cheney responded so publicly in defense of the Bush administration's war crimes? He's afraid! He's not just concerned about preserving the administration's "legacy" -- he's concerned about preserving his own neck.
Don't believe us? Take it from Cheney's daughter, Liz, who recently explained her father's outspokenness on CNN: "He certainly did not plan when he left office to be doing this... Then when [Obama] suggested in the Oval Office itself that he would be open to the prosecution of former Bush administration officials including many who weren’t political appointees potentially, you know really, I think, made my dad realize this was just fundamentally wrong. We had to speak out."
Our argument for prosecution is becoming irresistible. The fact is that every revelation lays bare a whole new level of criminality. The more details come about the Bush administration's heinous acts and deliberate deception of the American people, the more people are starting to talk about justice. Already, many people who once said, "we need to move forward" are beginning to reconsider: no one can move forward until we have come to terms with the country's past. That means accountability: the indictment of the criminals.
--From all of IndictBushNow.org
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Cheney
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bush+legacy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=terror
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=torture
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Gary+Kamiya
