GOOD NEWS ON NATURE

"Nim was raised as if he were human – almost. He was dressed in shorts, T-shirts and nappies. He would eat at the table with the rest of the family.



"Under LaFarge’s tuition he quickly began to pick up signs: 'eat’, 'Nim’, 'me’, 'hug’, 'sorry’."



(Project Nim: the chimp who was brought up like a child)







Fascists claim that Nature is essentially cruel.



Fascists justify such things as false flag terrorism on the grounds that this is how Nature works.



But Nature is a mixture of kindness and cruelty.



On 8 August 2011, we read of new research showing that chimpanzees can be unselfish and kind.



The research is published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(Chimpanzees Not Selfish) t



"It's now suspected that all primates and mammals possess empathy and associated charitable behaviors."



"Since empathy is an old mammalian trait, there is no reason why the sort of altruism we describe should be unique for the primates," says researcher Frans de Waal.



"I expect it will be found in dogs (and) rats," says de Waal.



It should be noted that insects, and many other creatures, help each other out.





De Waal and colleagues devised an experiment in which chimps chose 'tokens' which led to food.



The chimps nearly always chose the tokens that "would yield food rewards for both the selector and the nearby observing chimp."



Primatologist Christophe Boesch says: "All studies with wild chimpanzees have amply documented that they share meat and other food abundantly, that they help one another in highly risky situations, like when facing predators or neighboring communities, and adopt needing orphans."



Boesch said altruistic behavior happens in the wild.



Jack (left) and Ralph (right) from Lord of the Flies. (http://lordoftheflies.org/gal/lotf.htm)



1. Chimpanzees will help humans without any reward in return.[8]



Bonobos have been observed aiding injured or handicapped bonobos.[9]



Animals that cooperate are more likely to survive.



Cooperation is a very successful survival strategy.



It has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life.



(Evolution myths: 'Survival of the fittest' justifies 'everyone for ...)



http://lordoftheflies.org/



Research by Darlene Francis and Michael Meaney shows that kindly environments, involving hugs and warm touch, make individuals better suited to survival and reproduction.



"Rat pups who receive high levels of tactile contact from their mothers - in the form of licking, grooming, and close bodily contact - later as mature rats show reduced levels of stress hormones in response to being restrained, explore novel environments with greater gusto, show fewer stress-related neurons in the brain, and have more robust immune systems." (Darwin's Touch: Survival of the Kindest Psychology Today )



http://lordoftheflies.org/



In his book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that empathy helps survival.



"The nasty, brutish existence dominated by 'savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit' that Dawkins describes is far from the norm for animals that live in social groups.



"They thrive because of the cooperation, conciliation, and, above all, the empathy that they display towards fellow members.



"The support and protection they receive from living in a group more than compensates for any selfish advantage they might have achieved on their own." (Survival of the Kindest - SEEDMAGAZINE.COM)



So, we should choose leaders who believe, not in bombs, but in kindness and cooperation.







2. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, we find Ralph, the good guy who favours cooperation.



And we find Jack, the bad guy who believes in survival of the most brutal and devious.



Jack is the bully who tries to get his way by conning people, seducing people, or intimidating people.



Jack is the sort of person who becomes a politician or a spy.



We should choose leaders like Ralph and not leaders like Jack.



Superficial charm?



3. Jim Kouri is a vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police.



Kouri describes the personality traits common to psychopathic serial killers. (Oh-oh! Politicians share personality traits with serial killers: Study)



These traits include superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.



These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to American politicians.



We should stop voting for psychopaths.



Germans and English play football during World War I.



4. Most people are not psycopaths!



In the 1940s, Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall claimed that only 15-20% of America's World War II soldiers would use their weapons in battle.



The majority of soldiers at that time were not psychopaths. (On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, p. 4 - The Canadian National Newspaper: Twilight of the Psychopaths )



We should not support leaders who want to brainwash our children and turn them into killer soldiers.





5. Psychologist Oliver James, in The Guardian (Guardian Unlimited Special reports So George, how do you feel ...), wrote about George Bush that "The outcome of (his) childhood was what psychologists call an authoritarian personality.



"Authoritarianism was identified shortly after the second world war as part of research to discover the causes of fascism."



We should not vote for people like Bush.





6. Peter Dunn, at The New Statesman (New Statesman - So were the Tories right after all?), wrote: "For several weeks, I have been talking to psychologists and psychiatrists about what drives the Prime Minister.



"One view emerged strongly: there appears to be something worryingly adrift in the mind of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, a man who doesn't really know who or what he is.



"More technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath capable of reinventing himself with remarkable dexterity, like an actor...



"Therapists agree that the ability to disassociate yourself from the consequences of what you have done is a classic ingredient of the psychopathic condition.



"Dorothy Rowe, a much-published Australian psychologist, compares Blair's style to that of Michael Jackson, the singer. 'Both are dominated in adult life by fantasies,' she says."



We should not vote for people like Blair.



Strauss



The Jew who is the chief philosopher of many of the top people is Leo Strauss.



Strauss taught that those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality.



Strauss believed in false flag operations, because rulers have to use deception to achieve their ends.Strauss believed in Fascism.



Strauss believed that a country or Empire has to invent an enemy (such as al Qaeda).



We should not vote for people who are fans of strauss.







~~~



anarchore left a comment on this post: Check out the anarchist Piotr Kropotkin, who found that Mutual Aid was the major factor in survival, not competition.



http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/kropotkin/mutaidch1.html







Malooga comments:



The standard academic work is Robert Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation."



May I also highly recommend Susan Rosenthal's "Power and Powerlessness," one of the most important, beautiful and moving books I have ever read. You can download a pdf for free at her website, or listen to it on mp3 for free download from the Unwelcome Guests website.



Also at Unwelcome Guests are many other fine free programs on cooperation.



For the opposite, I recommend Robert Hare's work and website on psychopaths.



Also, a lot of good information at radio4all.net, search "psychopath."



Less recommended is the book "Political Ponerology," which despite its good intentions, naively recommends testing people for sociopathic tendencies and then isolating them; assuming the sociopaths gain control of the testing apparatus and then use it to institutionalize empathic people who oppose them, the result would be a far worse dystopia than even today.



Canspeccy brings up some very important issues. How do we recognize psychopaths, and how do we protect ourselves from them? Also important, is why do people become psychopaths?



Thinkers like Louis Mumford, Jaques Ellul and Ivan Illich have wrestled with these problems and see the issue as having to do with our relationship with technology and how we have created hierarchical, compartmentalized societies that run like huge machines -- where the individual is subservient to the "mega-machine" of empire, shall we say.



It seems to me that the more we can structure our society at the local level where it works for people -- instead of people working for it -- and the more we can foster real community, the better we can reintegrate psychopaths into society and limit the damage that they can do.



Also recommended is Erich Fromm's "The Revolution of Hope, toward a humanized technology."



Global undemocratic governance is all about setting up unaccountable systems: Drones and smart bombs, derivates and commodity future indexes, debt financing, etc.



All of these positions literally cry out for psychopaths to fill them, or force normal people trapped in these positions to become monsters in order to survive.



We must work to oppose and dismantle all unaccountable systems and replace them with the most accountable localized solutions possible.



~~



"Nim began his life with a huge family of devoted caretakers, but for most of the rest of it he was isolated and lonely. He could sign 120 words, but could barely communicate with his own species. For Nim, who died of a heart attack at a relatively young 26, there was no happy ending." (Chimp Raised As a Boy in 'Project Nim'.)

NORWAY - INSIDE JOB

The Norway Attacks look like an inside-job, involving, among others, fascist elements within the Norwegian police, military and security services.

On 1 August 2011, James Petras writes about Norway (Organized Political Terrorism.):

According to James Petras:

1. The car bomb was a highly complex weapon.

It required expertise and coordination - the kind available to security services, such as Mossad, which specialize in car bombs.

Amateurs, like Breivik, usually blow themselves up or lack the skill required to connect the electronic timing devices or remote detonators.

2. A lone zealot could not do all of the following:

(a) Transport the bomb

(b) Obtain (steal) a vehicle

(c) Place the bomb at the strategic site

(d) Successfully detonate it

(e) Dress up in a special police uniform

With an arsenal of hundreds of rounds of ammunition and drive off in another vehicle to Utoeya Island

(f) Wait patiently, while armed to the teeth, for a ferry boat

(g) Cross with other passengers in his police uniform

(h) Round up the Labour youth activists and begin the massacre of scores of youths

(i) Finish off the wounded and hunt for those trying to hide or swim away.


3. According to witness testimony on Utoeya Island, shots from two distinct weapons were heard from different directions during the massacre.

4. Note 'the complicity' of top police officials.

The police took 90 minutes to arrive at Utoeya Island, located less than 20 kilometers from Oslo, 12 minutes by helicopter and 25 to 30 minutes by car and boat.

The police chief, Sveinung Sponheim, made the feeblest excuse, claiming problems with transport.

A helicopter was available.

It managed to fly to Utoeya and film the slaughter.

Over half of Norwegians own or have access to a boat.

In 2008, the Norwegian Queen (above) honoured the writer Knut Hamsun, a famous Norwegian fascist.

5. The obvious question arises as to the degree to which 'neo-fascism' has penetrated the police and security forces.

It looks a though the neo-fascists 'influence' the government.

6. The police did not save a single life.

When they finally arrived, Breivik turned himself over to the police. The police did not have to hunt or capture the assassin. An almost choreographed scenario.

7. The Norwegian military has no problem sending troops to Afghanistan, half way around the world and providing Norwegian Air Force jets and pilots to bomb and terrorize Libya.

And yet they can’t find a helicopter or a row boat to transport their police to stop a domestic attack.

8. The neo-fascist right want to 'send a message' to the Labour Party:

Either it must accept a full neo-fascist pro-Israeli agenda or expect more massacres, more elected fascists, more followers of Anders Behring Breivik.

~~

Norway joined NATO in suppressing reports of civilian Afghan deaths


General Harald Sunde was appointed as Norway's Defence Chief in 2009.

Prior to this, Sunde was the commander of the NATO’s Joint Warfare Center in Norway, and was assigned to Brussels to represent Norway in the NATO’s Military Committee.

He was also the commander of army Special Forces, namely “Hærens Jegerkommando” and “Forsvarets Spesialkommando”, from 1992 to 1996.

General Sunde graduated from the US Army War College in 1999.

~~

NAZI NATO; NAZI BRITISH

The British in India.



Nazi NATO is expanding.



Wayne Madsen has pointed out that even little Cyprus and Malta have been under strong pressure to join NATO.



And Israel, the countries in North Africa, and some of the countries in the Arabian peninsula may become linked to NATO.



(Wayne Madsen has written about NATO’S “Drang Nach Osten”m)



According to Wayne Madsen, NATO has offered "Associate membership" status to Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, India, Brazil, and South Africa.



"NATO is accomplishing what Adolf Hitler could only dream of: a Euro-Atlantic military alliance that dominates the entire world."



Bengal Famine 1943, while the British ran India.



Vladislav Gulevich has written about the Anglo-Saxon Roots of German Nazism.



Among the points made:



1. "From Imperialism to Fascism" by Prof. Manuel Sarkisyanz, has chapter titles such as:



England as the model for Hitler's 'Folk community'



Training new fuhrers by imitating England



Houston Stewart Chamberlain: British pioneer, seer of the third Reich



Britain's home-grown Fascism



Admiration of Hitler from Britain's establishment.



2. According to Sarkisyanz, Germany's Institutes of Education were modeled by the SS on British public schools.



3. From the early days of the Third Reich, British believers in racial supremacy met on a regular basis with their German imitators.



4. Hitler openly admired Great Britain's system of education with its strategy of producing 'masters of the world'.





5. Hitler sought to copy British colonial policies.



The British in India banned movies about German Nazism, evidently fearing that the similarities between the German fascists and British colonizers would not escape the local population.



6. The list of Britain's fascist sympathizers included:



Randolph Churchill



The family of Lord Ridsdale,



Lord Lamington,



Lord Londonderry



Sociologist and commentator Houston Chamberlain



Oswald Mosley



Leader of the House Of Lords Lord Halifax.



7. Until 1938 Hitler did not ban the operations of the British intelligence service in Germany.



8. Hitler said that the two races – the British and the German – were cousins and therefore were destined to jointly rule the world.



British toffs.



9. Sarkisyanz notes that eugenics was a British invention.



Francis Galton held that people can be divided into various grades.



HG Wells believed that "There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with an inferior race, and that is to exterminate it".



Hannah Arendt wrote about social stratification in Britain and the upper classes' undisguised contempt for the lower classes.



10. According to Sarkisyanz, the British courts on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, a British territory occupied by Germany, prosecuted residents on charges of resisting the occupants.



On the Channel Islands, a part of the local population took part in the degrading treatment of the inmates of the German-run labour camps.



http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2011/07/05/anglo-saxon-roots-of-german-nazism.html







CanSpeccy points out:



"Carroll Quigley's account of Cecil Rhodes' secret society was published in the 1960's, by which time Quigley considered the project - as a British undertaking - entirely defunct.



"Since then, Britain has been replaced by America as the dominant World power."



aangirfan: HOW THE CIA CONTROLS NATO AND BILDERBERG?



~~

THE GLOBAL ELITE AND THE SUPPRESSION OF DISSENT

In 2005, 47% of the world's population was living on less than $2.50 per day.

To remove these poor people from poverty would cost $507 billion per year.

(Thomas Pogge on Global Poverty)

The US military spends much more than $507 billion per year.

Around the world, the military is often used to help the rich elite to increase their wealth.

Around the world, the military is often used to prevent the poor from increasing their wealth.

In January 2001, The Atlantic had an article by Chrystia Freeland on 'The Rise Of The New Global Elite'

Among the points made:

1. In a 2005 report, analysts at Citigroup reported that the World is dividing into two blocs - (1)the rich elite and (2) the rest.

2. The rich elite have homes in places such as Mumbai, Moscow, Hong Kong, and New York.

3. Factors that have helped create certain billionaires include:

1. The revolution in information technology.

2. The liberalization of global trade.

3. Financial deregulation.

4. Tax cuts for the super-rich.

5. Insider privatization.

6. Monopolies given to certain individuals (eg rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.)

4. In India and China, between 1820 and 1950, per capita income was basically flat.

Between 1950 and 1973, it increased by 68 percent.

Between 1973 and 2002, it grew by 245 percent.

China's and India's super-elite have grown richer.

5. Worldwide, executive pay has skyrocketed.

Hege fund manager John Paulson profited almost as much from the crisis of 2008 as Goldman Sachs did.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of U.S. workers have missed out.

Between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population.

6. Mohamed El-Erian has an Egyptian father and French mother.

Mohamed El-Erian is the CEO of Pimco, the world’s largest bond manager, which is based in the USA but owned by Germany's Allianz SE.

Stephen Jennings is a New Zealander.

He co-founded the investment bank Renaissance Capital which has its roots are in Moscow.

In 2009 Jennings said: "The largest metals group in the world is Indian. The largest aluminum group in the world is Russian … The fastest-growing and largest banks in China, Russia, and Nigeria are all domestic."

7. A top man at one of the world’s largest hedge funds said that if changes in the world economy lift a large number of people in China and India into the middle class and and a smaller number of people in America out of the middle class, that's not such a bad trade.

A Taiwanese-born executive of a U.S. Internet company says the American middle class demands a higher paycheck than the rest of the world. He suggests that middle class Americans maybe "need to decide to take a pay cut."

Michael Splinter, CEO of the Silicon Valley green-tech firm Applied Materials, said that if he was starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be Americans.

Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, has said: "I can get (workers) anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business."

8. The Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has admitted that he had "treated business exclusively as a game" and "did not care much about social responsibility."

9. "The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth."

- Chrystia Freeland on 'The Rise Of The New Global Elite'


China in the 1940s (multipletext.com/2009/9_china_1940s.htm) had a huge gap between rich and poor.

How do you explain the economic situation?

Parts of Detroit are like parts of Jakarta.

Here in Jakarta there is a large posh shopping mall.

But most of the visitors to the mall do not have the money to buy the goods on display.

For most people, whether in Detroit or in Jakarta, incomes are too low.

On 23 June 2010, in the Financial Times, Douglas Bruce explained that without some trickle-down effect, any recovery will be stillborn‎

Douglas Bruce explains that "over the past few decades, the top earners in banking and other sectors have been increasing their share of a finite cake...

"Going back a generation or two... it was still possible for a middle-class father to support a family of four, but it now takes two earners to maintain most families, and that at a lower standard of living..."

Poverty in India

On 23 June 2010, Li Onesto wrote about: "Dying Detroit" - The Impacts of Globalization. Social Decay and Destruction of an Entire Urban Area

In Detroit:

Almost half of the children live in poverty.

The illiteracy rate is close to 50%.

Michigan state spends more on prisons than it does on higher education.

Many of Detroit's jobs have moved abroad, to where the wages are even lower.

India has palaces and paupers.

On 24 June 2010, at Global Research, Andrew Gavin Marshall wrote about: The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order

He points out:

1.2 billion people in the world live on less than $1 per day.

Nearly 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day.

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.

The richest 1% of adults own around 40% of global assets.

The richest 10% of adults own around for 85% of the global assets.

The bottom half of the world adult population own around 1% of global wealth.

The top 6,000 people in the world own 40% of the world’s assets.

The top 600,000 people in the world control 85% of the world’s wealth.

The bottom 3.4 billion own 1% of world wealth.

Zbigniew Brzezinski explains that increased literacy means greater political awareness, increased use of TV means greater awareness of global disparities, and greater use of the Internet means more instant communications.

Brzezinski sees an increase in anti-Americanism and anti-globalization.

"From the point of view of the global oligarchy, the only method of imposing order and control ...is through the organized chaos of economic crises, war, and the rapid expansion and institutionalization of a global scientific dictatorship."

A London mansion worth over £100 million.

In the USA, roughly 40% of the population fall below the poverty line at some point within a 10 year time span. (Poverty in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Israel has many millionaires and many hungry children.

"Once idealized as a socialist paradise, the Jewish state is increasingly becoming a country of two classes...

"35% of children are living in poverty, leaving Israel with this unhappy distinction: It ranks among Western countries with the greatest percentage of poor children, according to the Insurance Institute." (Poverty in Israel: The divide deepens between the haves and have .../ Israel will join OECD as its poorest member )



In 2006 it was reported that in the Calton area of Glasgow the average life expectancy of a male is just 53.9 years.

This is lower than in Bangladesh or North Korea or Iraq. (In Iraq, life expectancy is 67. Minutes from Glasgow city centre ...)

In January 2010, a report by the UK government's National Equality Panel pointed out that the gulf between rich and poor in the UK grew wider under Tony Blair's Labour Party than at any time since the Second World War.

In the UK, the richest 10 per cent of families have assets worth an average £853,000 - almost 100 times the £8,800 average wealth of the poorest 10 per cent. (Gulf between rich and poor grown under Labour and now widest since WWII - Daily Mail )

Glasgow slum

Our leaders would appear to be in favour of a feudal system where the upper class become very rich and the lower class become very poor.

Joe Stiglitz, formerly chief economist at the World Bank, told CNBC that "Market fundamentalism has eroded any sense of community and has led to rampant exploitation." (Stiglitz: America's Ersatz Capitalism Is A Joke )

The rich-poor gap has a lot to do with rotten leaders. (afrogeekchic.wordpress.com/.../)

According to the economists Howell and Diallo (2007), neoliberal policies have contributed to a US economy in which 30% of workers earn "low wages", and 35% of the labour force is "underemployed". (Neoliberalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

According to John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer (2006), "The U.S. economic and social model is associated with substantial levels of social exclusion, including high levels of income inequality, high relative and absolute poverty rates, poor and unequal educational outcomes, poor health outcomes, and high rates of crime and incarceration." (Neoliberalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Jews helped run the Moslem Ottoman Empire.

Who has gained from the policies of our rotten leaders?

"Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations.

"Today, though barely 2% of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews." (NEOCON FINANCIERS / BANKERS)

The use by feudal rulers of Jewish financiers has a long history.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, many kings depended upon Jews as financiers.

Royal power worked alongside Jewish money. (NEOCON FINANCIERS / BANKERS )

"1922: King Abdulla Ibn Hussein of Transjordan sits under the watchful eyes of his Jewish bodyguards, Habanni Yemenite brothers Sayeed, Salaah, and Saadia Sofer." (mochajuden.com/?tag=ruth)

Jews also played a major role in the medieval Muslim world.

Jews played a major role in the running of the Ottoman Empire. (NEOCON FINANCIERS / BANKERS)

"In late 19th-century Britain, the Jewish-dominated press championed imperialism, which benefited Jewish finance.

"And during the early stages of the Soviet regime, Jews were numerous in leadership positions, especially in the secret police...

"It was with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal that Jews gained long-term power in the United States...

(Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. NEOCON FINANCIERS / BANKERS )

Some people believe that Masonic Jewish bankers pull the strings.

In his book, "Under the Sign of the Scorpion" (2002), the Estonian Juri Lina says about 150 million people died as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, subsidized by the Masonic Jewish banking cartel. "The West pretended to oppose the Bolsheviks but in fact defended them." (savethemales.ca - USSR - Experiment Was "Social ...)

Jewish folks have been important in Latin America.

Around 300,000 Jews live in Argentina, mostly in Buenos Aires. (Argentine Jews Struggling with Money Problems and Security Fears)

In 2001, the economy of Argentina collapsed due to neo-liberal policies.



The feudal system, with its gap between rich and poor, is not unique to any one country or any one religion.

India has many millionaires.

But in 2006 it was reported that 35% of Indians live on less than $1 a day, which is much worse than Pakistan’s figure of 17%. (India - Rich and Poor)

Louis XVI

Is the situation today to be compared to that in France in 1789?

Norman Gash, at the National Review, 14 July 1989, wrote: Reflections on the revolution - French Revolution

(Norman Gash was a former Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews)

1. According to Norman Gash, in 1789 France was the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful state in Western Europe.

In 2010, the USA is said to be the most powerful state in the world.

2. Norman Gash asks: What reason was there for revolution in France in 1789?

Gash relates that, according to Napoleon, there was revolution because the middle class wanted more power for themselves and less power for the aristocrats.

It could be argued that, in the USA, the middle classes are getting restless. They see a corrupt elite enjoying too many privileges.

Louis XVI

3. Gash points out that in France, in 1789, "the climate of opinion was rational, liberal, and optimistic, the monarchy not averse to reform, the aristocracy itself permeated by ideas of the Enlightenment."

Why then was there a bloody revolution?

Gash explains that the 'system' appeared to make reform difficult.

Edmund Burke said that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation."

In the USA in 2010, the constitution appears not to be protecting the USA from disaster.

America's institutions seem incapable of preventing wars, discontent and hunger.

Bastille

4. Gash points out that the French revolution was a long sequence of events, stretching from 1789 until 1799.

There was "an extraordinary series of political improvisations:

constitutional monarchy,

republicanism,

single-party rule,

dictatorship of the proletariat,

oligarchy,

and finally military despotism."

If there are to be dramatic changes in the USA, the end result might be military despotism under an American Napoleon.

Napoleon was a fascist.

He attempted the total military domination of continental Europe.

He tried to have a New World Order, or as Gash writes "a new international order".

Napoleon

5. According to Gash, the French Revolution, Napoleon's Empire and the 1815 Congress of Vienna "foreshadowed the Europe of the future."

That means both good things and bad things.

Americans seeking revolution should study Europe's history.

6. Gash implies that bloody revolution was not necessary to bring about change in Europe.

Gash writes:

Even if the French Revolution had not taken place, "common sense suggests that the main lines of European evolution would have been much the same, though perhaps the pace might have been slower."

Gash lists the products of European society which would have come about either by gradual evolution or by fast and bloody revolution:

A. Liberalism based on representative institutions.

B. Nationalism based on linguistic unity.

C. The rise of the sovereign state.

D. The centralization of administrative power at the expense of provincial.

E. The increasing responsibility of government for the welfare of its subjects.

F. The ability to mobilize a whole society for war.

G. military defeats in consequence giving rise to revolution and revolution to tyranny.

H. International conflicts followed by international institutions to preserve harmony.

America is changing.

The changes will be a mixture of good and bad.

The changes will happen, even without a revolution.

French Empire 1811

7. According to Gash, the French Revolution helped to shape European society in two notable ways.

A. Force was used to bring about change. "Liberalism and reform marched behind French bayonets."

The ideas of liberalism and reform had many of their origins in England.

B. The awakening of nationalism.

Gash writes that: "ideas that march behind bayonets are rarely popular; reform at the hands of a conqueror earns little gratitude. French rule brought not only enlightenment but hardship."

It was not long before there were nationalistic revolts against the French.

In Germany, later in the century, "Bismarck exploited the German national feeling first evoked by Napoleon I."

Any attempt by an American dictator to bring about a New World Order would result in nationalist revolts.

WHOSE WAR?

Website for this map

Who are we to blame for all the recent wars:

Al Qaeda (tool of the CIA in Kosovo, Libya and elsewhere)?

Israel (and its imperialism)?

The USA (and its imperialism)?

Big Corporations (who profit from wars and reconstruction)?

Elite Fascists (the feudal overlords)?

1. The 24 March 2003 issue of "The American Conservative" had an article about Iraq entitled: "Whose War?"

(The American Conservative - Whose War? / Pat Buchanan's Iraq Conspiracy - TIME)

The article, by Patrick Buchanan, pointed out that American foreign policy had been hijacked by a 'cabal' of 'neoconservatives' such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams.

These neocons, wrote Buchanan, are "deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian peoples' right to a homeland of their own."

Buchanan sees a (Jewish) cabal as being responsible for the war in Iraq.

2. But, it's not just 'the Jews'.

The alleged 'fascists' such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and George W Bush have been in alliance with Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams.

They have also been in alliance with 'fascist' Moslems and 'fascist' Hindus among others.

To be fair, Buchanan DOES see that it is not just one nation that is capable of 'evil'.

Buchanan has claimed that the British started the terror bombing in World War II, causing the Germans to retaliate.

And he has claimed that, in World War I, 'lying British propaganda' got the U.S. into war with Germany.

The British are bad?

The first bombing of the villages of Iraq was by the first British Labour government in 1924.

British soldier in Malaysia

3. Why was Iraq invaded?

The following are extracts from a post at the excellent gowans.blogspot (What's Left)

http://gowans.blogspot.com/2006/03/weve-done-it-before-so-why-all-shock.html

"The United States, like other advanced capitalist countries, has been aggressively expansionist from the beginning.

"From the moment of its founding, it has been driven to extend its domain on behalf of the dominant economic group and has used force to do so.

"The logic of the US slave system drove the United States to annex Texas and wage war on Mexico.

"Later, the logic of capitalism drove the US state to acquire the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii and Samoa as colonies and semi-colonies and dependencies, and to intervene militarily over and over again in Latin America to establish an effective suzerainty over the Western hemisphere.

"The same logic demanded wars be fought in the post WWII period, on north Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, as the weakening of Japan, Germany, Britain, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, opened up space for the US to pursue profit-making opportunities for its corporations on a worldwide basis.

"(I use corporation throughout in its broadest sense, to include manufacturing, service, resource-extractive and financial corporations.)


"Countries that stood in the way, that nationalized assets owned by US corporations and closed their doors to further exploitation by US economic interests, were attacked, if not militarily, then in other ways.

"The same logic is behind aggression, by threat of military intervention, economic blockade, and the financing of internal subversion, carried out today against Cuba, north Korea, Belarus, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Iran – all countries which rank at the very top of the list of states considered by Washington to be economically 'unfree' (that is, that block, limit or place conditions on US investment and exports.)

"Viewed within the context of US history, and the social and economic forces which have shaped Washington’s foreign policy, the US aggression against Iraq can be seen to be part of this coherent whole, not an anomaly that has sprung from an immanent lust for power residing deep in the psyches of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, nor a consequence of a unique set of events arising out of a social-economic vacuum.



What's Left continues:

4. "This has important implications for understanding what realistic options are available to those who seek to change this recurrent pattern of war, of domination, and of spoliation of foreign countries.

"New personalities won’t do it, because personalities aren’t the cause.

"Third parties alone won’t do it, because third parties, as any other, are subordinate to the same systemic logic that has driven all parties in power, whether conservative, liberal, socialist and even communist (e.g. Yugoslavia) to pursue policies that facilitate the profit-making of the dominant economic class, including by the use of force to extort or secure opportunities from unwilling third countries.

"The solution is to step outside (to overthrow) the logic that compels this behavior, not to tolerate it or assume wrongly it can be tamed and harnessed.

What's Left continues:

The Lead-Up to the Invasion

"Two events are distantly critical to the decision of US planners to target Iraq for regime change:

*The 1958 revolution that overthrew the British-dominated monarchy,

* and the expropriation of British and US oil companies in the early 1970s.

*The first established Iraq’s nominal political independence;

*the second imbued the first with significance, by giving Iraq control over important economic assets.

"The constitution under Saddam Hussein held that 'natural resources and the basic means of production are owned by the People.'

"Oil revenue was used to 'underwrite a handsome program of social supports, including free education through university' and medical care considered "the finest in the Middle East" (Workers World, August 20, 2005).

"The price of basic goods was subsidized, and a largely state-owned economy was used to provide jobs – and income – to millions of Iraqis.

"While not socialist, Iraq’s economy had many features of a socialist economy, and all the hallmarks of an economy advanced capitalist countries love to hate: restrictions on foreign ownership; preferential treatment of domestic firms; state intervention in the economy to achieve public policy goals; and limits on the sphere of private investment.

"Henry Kissinger pseudonymously wrote an article in 'the March 1975 issue of Harper’s, titled 'Seizing Arab Oil’' in which he 'unabashedly outlined plans for a U.S. invasion to seize key Middle East oil fields to prevent Arab countries having control over the U.S.’s most vital raw material'.

(Linda McQuaig, "History will show US lusted after oil," The Toronto Star, December 26, 2004).


The article continues:

Iraq was at the center of the plans.

Owing to the dangers of a possible Soviet response, Kissinger’s plan was never carried out.

But after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, all kinds of possibilities opened up for the US.

"Kissinger’s old idea was taken up by the Project for a New American Century, whose membership included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz" (McQuaig).

The Project members, some of whom would soon become key figures in the Bush administration, urged then President Bill Clinton to step up efforts already in place to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s government, "whose control over 'a significant portion of the world’s oil’ was considered a liability" (McQuaig).

The liability, however, wasn’t one of the US being dependent on Arab countries for access to a vital resource, but of US oil companies being cut out of the action.

It’s widely believed that the US is highly dependent on imports of Middle Eastern oil, and that Arab control over the region’s petroleum resources leaves the United States in a highly vulnerable position. It’s true that production decisions made by oil-producing Arab countries can affect the price of oil on the world market, but the US depends on the Middle East for comparatively little of the oil it consumes.

For the US, maintaining tight control over the Middle East isn’t crucial to ensuring US manufacturers and consumers have uninterrupted access to a vital resource. Half of the oil the US consumes is produced domestically. Of the remaining half, the bulk, 80 percent, comes from two neighbors, Canada and Mexico. And a significant part of the remainder comes from Venezuela, also close by. Only a small fraction comes from the Middle East, and most of that, from Saudi Arabia.

James Arlin, US ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Kissinger, told author and journalist Linda McQuaig that "the plan to take over Iraq [was] a revival of the old plan that first appeared in 1975. It was the Kissinger plan" (McQuaig).

But the aim of the plan wasn’t to safeguard US access to vital oil supplies. In reality, Middle Eastern oil mostly flows to Europe, China and Japan.

Instead, the aim was to carve out and reclaim investment opportunities for US-based oil companies in the Middle East, which would sell oil from the Middle East to Spain, France, Germany, China and Japan.

Other US-based transnationals could profit too.

If Iraq was turned over to the control of a Washington-selected puppet government, US engineering giants, like Bechtel, could snap up contracts to build Iraq’s infrastructure.

American capital could invest in Iraq’s public utilities. Iraq’s military could be integrated into a US-led military alliance, to become a customer for war machinery produced by Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and other key Pentagon contractors, some of the largest and most influential corporations in the US.

In the summer of 2003, then US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked why Iraq, which didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, was invaded, while north Korea, which claimed to have a nuclear deterrent, wasn’t.

One of the reasons is plain enough, though Wolfowitz didn’t mention it. North Korea’s claimed nuclear arsenal makes Washington think twice about a ground invasion; Iraq, on the other hand, was easy pickings.

But Wolfowitz decided to draw attention to another reason.

"Let’s look at it simply," he said. "The most important difference between north Korea and Iraq was that economically we had no choice in Iraq"

("Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil," The Guardian, June 4, 2003).

With Britain’s investments in Iraq having been nationalized after the revolution against British rule, and corporate America on the sidelines owing to Washington’s sanctions and Baghdad’s hostility, European transnationals were busily working deals in Iraq.

The French oil giant, Total Fin Elf, landed a $4 billion contract to develop Iraqi oil.

The Russian oil firms, Lukoil and Zarubneft, netted drilling agreements worth tens of billions of dollars.

Scores of German firms inked deals to furnish Iraq with weapons and industrial machinery.

But the problem for the Russian, French and German companies that signed deals with Baghdad was that with Iraq crippled by sanctions, the country was in no position to become the bonanza of profits the European transnationals desperately wished for.

But if sanctions were lifted, and Iraq was allowed to get back on its feet, the profits might start rolling in, with competition from their effectively frozen out British and American rivals held at bay.

Through the late 90s pressure to lift the sanctions started to build.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children under the age of five, died from otherwise easily preventable diseases that had spread unchecked as a result of the privations imposed by the sanctions regime.

The political scientists, John Mueller and Karl Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs, pointed out that sanctions had "contributed to more deaths during the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction throughout history" (Foreign Affairs, May 1999).

The sanctions had become weapons of mass destruction themselves, "sanctions of mass destruction" the Mueller’s called them – far deadlier than the chemical weapons Iraq and Iran had lobbed at each other in the 80s, and deadlier than the invasion of Kuwait the sanctions were ostensibly meant to punish Iraq for.

What’s more, after years of UN inspectors supervising the destruction of Iraq’s banned weapons, it had become clear that Iraq had been effectively disarmed.

Saddam Hussein’s weapons chief, and son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told UN weapons inspectors and the CIA in 1995 that he had ordered the destruction of all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

A transcript of his debriefing, obtained by Newsweek (March 3, 2003) has Kamel telling UN and CIA interrogators, "All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear – were destroyed"

("Missing From ABC’s WMD 'Scoop’, Star defector Hussein Kamel said weapons were destroyed," FAIR Action Alert, February 17, 2006, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2825 ).

The justification for continuing to uphold the sanctions regime had melted away.

The US and Britain, however, weren’t going to relinquish their grip on the noose they had wound tightly around Iraq’s neck.

Kamel’s admission that Iraq had destroyed its weapons was hushed up (Newsweek, March 3, 2003).

If sanctions were lifted, French, Russian and German firms would share in the bounty of Iraq’s oil economy, while American and British transnationals looked on enviously.

It was clear to US planners what had to be done.

Despite Iraq’s being crippled, wracked by war, and deprived of the means of defending itself from attack by the US, it had to be presented as a clear and present danger.

A US-led war would be necessary to change the regime in Baghdad.

The war would be said to be necessary to force Iraq to comply with UN demands that it disarm.

A new government would be installed, with much fanfare about democracy and freedom.

The new government would change Iraq’s laws to usher US and British corporations back into the county.

Beginnings of the War

The war didn’t begin in March 2003.

In fact, it can be said to have continued uninterrupted from the moment the Gulf War began in 1991, shifting form and intensity in the interim, but never coming to a close.

The period between the formal cessation of the Gulf War and the invasion of March 2003 was marked by sanctions and blockade, their object the same as that of the Gulf War: to bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein and replace it with a puppet government that would open the country to exploitation by US- and British-based transnationals.

The outcomes, too, in terms of death and misery, were the same, if not greater in magnitude.

Over a million Iraqis were estimated to have perished as a result of sanctions, enforced during the presidency of the Democrat, Bill Clinton, victims of hunger and water-borne diseases, easily prevented if Iraq had been allowed to rebuild the water and sewage treatment facilities US and British forces had deliberately destroyed.

During the Gulf War, coalition forces bombed Iraq's eight multi-purpose dams, destroying flood control systems, irrigation, municipal and industrial water storage, and hydroelectric power plants.

Major pumping stations were targeted, and municipal water and sewage facilities were razed.

These attacks were prohibited under Article 54 of the Geneva Convention.

But illegal US attacks on civilian infrastructure had been carried out by US forces before, in other wars.

In the war on north Korea, to name just one example, the US leveled north Korean dams, causing extensive flooding, even though dams, as civilian infrastructure, are outlawed as military targets.

US compliance with international law and conventions and the rulings of international courts is notoriously spotty and invariably one-sided.

The US does what it likes, when it likes, and complies with international law when there’s nothing to be lost.

It can do this, because there is no overarching sovereign to enforce compliance, and because the information environment is controlled by the US state to make Americans believe the United States is an upholder of international law and all that is good.

The Gulf War attacks on Iraq’s civilian infrastructure were aimed at throwing Iraq to the mat.

The straightjacket sanctions that followed were aimed at keeping it there.

Accordingly, materials vital to the wellbeing of the population, chlorine for water treatment, for example, were blocked from entering the country on grounds they could be used to make chemical weapons.

The consequences for the Iraqi population were grim, but they had been fully anticipated by US planners, and accepted.

Washington knew sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding, and that epidemics would ensue.

But the results, said Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright in a 1996 60 Minutes interview, were "worth it."

Writing in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive, Thomas Nagy, a George Washington University professor, cited declassified documents that showed the United States was aware of the civilian health consequences of destroying Iraq's drinking water and sanitation systems, and knew that sanctions would prevent the Iraqi government from repairing the degraded facilities.

One document, written soon after the bombing, warned that sanctions would prevent Iraq from importing "water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals" leading to "increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease."

Another listed the most likely diseases: typhoid, hepatitis A, diphtheria, pertussis, meningitis and cholera. As anticipated, disease ravaged the population, carrying off the weakest.

At least a half a million Iraqi children died needlessly, by UNICEF’s estimates.

Fitting the Intelligence to the PolicyAfter more than a decade of sanctions, Washington made the improbable claim, at the point pressure was building to lift sanctions and a pretext to invade had to be found, that Iraq had reconstituted its weapons of mass destruction program.

That a country that had been blockaded and harassed for over a decade could pull off such a feat was beyond belief, but no claim then, or since, as ever been shelved by Washington on grounds of absurdity.

The techniques of mass persuasion, aided amply by the compliance of the mass media, ensure that obvious lies can be readily passed of as truths, and are, on an almost daily basis.

The passing of the war from one of slow strangulation with deaths coming in small numbers ever day, to renewed military intervention where deaths come all at once, began, not in March, 2003, with the unleashing of the terror bombing campaign dubbed "shock and awe," nor in October, 2002, when the US Congress authorized the Pentagon to launch a land invasion.

The new phase of the war began secretly, without authorization from the US Congress and without the imprimatur of the UN, in May, 2002, soon after British Prime Minister Tony Blair privately pledged Britain’s full cooperation in the conquest of Iraq at a summit meeting with President Bush in Texas (Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2005).

In May of that year, US and British pilots begin to fly secret bombing raids.

The aim of the raids, which the British Foreign Office warned in a leaked internal memo were illegal under international law, was to weaken Iraqi air defense and provoke a reaction from Baghdad that could be used as a pretext for war (Times Online, June 19, 2005).

By the summer, Iraq had not reacted and Washington was left without its desired pretext for war.

Bush decided he could delay no further and that a land invasion must go forward.

On July 23, 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, returning from a visit to Washington, told Blair that Bush "wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and [weapons of mass destruction.]

But, said Dearlove, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

"The case was thin,"

"Saddam was not threatening his neighbors," and Iraq’s "WMD capacity was less than that of Libya, north Korea or Iran" (Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2005).

The thinness of the case hardly mattered.

Intelligence could be readily fit to the policy, and lies could be told, on top of innuendo and sly suggestion.

By August, Vice-President Dick Cheney was warning that "Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" and that "there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, our allies and against us" (Times Online, June 19, 2005).

This was all duly reported, with hardly a jot of skepticism.

Similar nonsense issued from the mouths of other Bush administration figures in the months that followed, amplified and passed along uncritically by a jingoistic media.

On September 12, 2002, Bush said: "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

On October 5th: "We have sources that tell us Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons – the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."

The State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, was a model of prevarication.

"Saddam Hussein has upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents," Bush warned. "Saddam Hussein has recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" and had "attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons productions."

Iraq had "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas."

This was a farrago of half-truths, bald-face lies, and deliberately misleading insinuations crafted to present a crippled, war-ravaged and disarmed country as a clear and present danger. (Canada has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that can be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas too: its commercial aircraft and weather balloons.)

The warnings built toward a critical date, February 5, 2003 – when US Secretary of State Colin Powell would present the US casus belli to the UN Security Council.

The presentation, as Dearlove’s words adumbrated more than half a year before, was based on cherry-picked intelligence and outright falsifications fixed around a policy of war decided on long before.

Picasso’s haunting painting Guernica, which hangs outside the doors of the Security Council chamber, was covered over for the occasion.

The painting depicts the horrors of Nazi bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica, one of the first uses of bombing civilians as the main method of war, though not the first.

"The first conspicuous peace-time demonstration of strategic bombing…was the bombing of the villages of Iraq by the first (British) Labour government in 1924."

Bombing civilians was "a more economic way of punishing villages for non-payment of taxes than the old fashioned method of sending an expedition"

(R. Palme Dutt, Problems of Contemporary History, International Publishers, New York, 1963, p. 62).

Torture Chambers

When, after the invasion, the team of US weapons experts sent to Iraq to find banned weapons failed to find any, George Bush increasingly turned to Plan B: depicting the deposed Iraqi government as a criminal regime whose ouster had been a humanitarian necessity.

To reinforce this claim, Bush repeatedly referred to the "dictator’s rape rooms and torture chambers."

What Bush didn’t point out was that the United States was exercising its own dictatorship in Iraq, that its troops were engaged in the sexual abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and that it was operating its own torture chambers, not only in Iraq, but elsewhere, in secret prisons in Eastern Europe and most notoriously on a strip of land the US had long ago effectively stolen from Cuba and was refusing to give up, Guantanamo.

Guantanamo, a concentration camp, may yield to another prison as a shibboleth for the brutality of the US state’s treatment of political prisoners.

That prison is the US prison at Bagram, in Afghanistan.

With the US Supreme Court ruling that prisoners at Guatanamo must be given basic due process rights, the US has redirected the flow of prisoners to Bagram, where there are no due process rights.

The conditions at Bagram are even more primitive than those at Guantanamo, with men penned in overcrowded cages (New York Times, February 26, 2006).

The horrors of Washington’s own torture chamber at Abu Ghraib, the US run prison in Iraq, were not hushed up, though not for lack of trying.

Leaked photographs were flashed around the world: of blood-streaked cells; of the battered face of a corpse packed in ice; of guards threatening cowering prisoners with dogs; of hooded prisoners being forced to masturbate; of naked prisoners being forced to lie in a heap; of men being made to wear women’s underwear on their heads; of a prisoner "standing on a box and wearing a hood and electrical wires" (The Guardian, February 17, 2006).

There are other images, which depict the cruel, brutal reality of occupation: The US soldier exonerating himself for desecrating the Koran, explaining that only a few drops of urine had splashed onto the Islamic holy book. The desecration was never intended, he said. He was only urinating on the head of a prisoner.

The horrors of the US occupation seemed to be summed up in the words of one Iraqi who had been picked up by US forces and thrown into prison –and as is the practice - without charge: "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house"

(Abu Ghraib prisoner, cited in "What I heard about Iraq in 2005," London Review of Books, Vol. 28, No. 1, January 5, 2006).

Human Rights Watch, which presents itself as a neutral human rights watchdog, but is in reality connected to the US foreign policy establishment, functions, whether intentionally or not, to furnish the US state with human rights pretexts to intervene in countries that impose restrictions on US investment and exports.

The group’s standard operating procedure is to provide fodder that can be used by Washington to justify military intervention in countries too weak to defend themselves, as crusades for human rights.

It serves another function of upholding the fiction that the United States is the world’s champion of formal civil liberties by acknowledging US human rights abuses, but painting them as anomalies, regrettable departures that call into question an implicitly assumed American moral authority.

Even so, while the organization’s indictments of US behavior serve the purpose of reinforcing the deception that the US is a defender of human rights, and not one of the world’s most zealous enemies of the exercise of any right that stands in the way of the profit-making activities of US corporations, its complaints against the US state are telling.

"In the course of 2005, it became indisputable that the U.S. mistreatment of detainees reflected not a failure of training, discipline or oversight, but a deliberate policy choice," the group said. "The problem could not be reduced to a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel" (New York Times, January 12, 2006).

The US Navy’s general counsel foresaw the horrors that would be perpetrated by US occupation forces at Abu Ghraib two years before the US practices of torture and humiliation came to light. His conclusions were based on the fact that the US state was operating on the basis of "legal theories granting the president the right to authorize abuse despite the Geneva Conventions" (Washington Post, February 20, 2006).

Last month, Robert Grenier, the head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center was sacked "because he opposed detaining al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogations and using forms of torture" (Times Online, February 12, 2006).

Also last month, a UN Human Rights Commission report condemned the United States for "committing acts amounting to torture at Guantanamo Bay" and seriously undermining "the rule of law and a number of fundamental universally recognized human rights" (Times Online, February 15, 2006).

The US state has adopted mistreatment and torture as a policy choice.

Embarrassed by the revelations of systematic abuse at Abu Ghraib, and persistent evidence that "battlefield detainees" were being tortured at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, US legislators sought to impose restraints on the state, limiting the latitude of US government employees to practice torture, or what is euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

This didn’t sit well with the Bush administration, which wanted carte blanche to treat prisoners in any way it desired.

Vice-President Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked the US Congress to exempt the CIA from the legislation banning "cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody" (Washington Post, November 2, 2005).

In Cheney’s and Goss’s view, the CIA would continue to humiliate, degrade and torture Iraqis and others in US custody for resisting US domination and invasion of their homelands – that is, doing to the Americans what the resistance movements throughout Europe did to the Nazis.

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