Now that the Senate report on CIA torture is out, it’s clear that it confirms many of the assertions and reports that I and other dissidents made since 2001. At the time, however, and well into the Obama era, those of us on the left — there were very few of us, since Democrats including Obama continued to support torture and coddling of torturers — who beat the drum about torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques” were smeared as un-American, liars, terrorist sympathizers and pussies.
I was, and continue to be, blackballed by many print and online publications as a result. “Radioactive,” one editor-friend called me — because I oppose(d) torture by Bush and then Obama.
Now people like Richard Engel on MSNBC are saying that “America lost its way after 9/11.” Well, fuck that.
I never lost my fucking way. And I’m still paying a price for it.
Here are some examples of the work that I did back then, which was right, and was widely suppressed:
7 Comments.
For what’s it worth, Ted. Yes, you are owed an apology. It is a profoundly bitter thing to know you’re on the correct side of an issue, on the morally sound portion of the thing, and because you have compassion and decency to get kicked in the teeth for it. So yes, you’re owed an apology. As are quite a few other people.
I, literally, have the crawling heebie-jeebies from what little of the report I have been able to read so far. I am actually nauseated from it. Out of 119 victims, 26 were innocent? That’s what? A 20% error rate? And those are the ones we know of. The report clearly hints (to me) that other victims could simply have been murdered and disappeared. For all we know, some of them might still be in cells in other countries. After this report, they’re probably all dead by now.
Maybe I’ll have more on this later, but right now, I’m just sick to death of it because all the criminals who did this — NOT to keep us safe, NOT because it HAD to be done, NOT for any reason other than to feed some sickness — will not face a moment’s jail time. They will NEVER be made to pay for what they’ve done.
*They will NEVER be made to pay for what they’ve done.*
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I hope you’re wrong.
I hope that other countries (Germany for one) will insist on trying war criminals — uh, kinda like Germans were tried. 🙁
Guilty or innocent of what? Of defending their homes from an illegal invasion based on lies?
If the herd is not brave enough to think independently I doubt it is brave enough to apologize.
Cowardly is as cowardly does.
Another thought that comes to mind, just now. We’re well and truly screwed. The single dead victim in sufficient. The CIA created a martyr by leaving him to freeze to death naked on a cell floor. There’s a sliver of a chance that if we actually had trials to determine who did what and who knew what and who was responsible for what that we could still arrive at a plateau to keep things from escalating further.
But that’s not going to happen, is it? If we’re lucky, the psychology associations will demand the two psi-ops goons who wrote the torture manuals be stripped of their credentials. The likelihood of Cheney, Obama and the rest being shipped to The Hague is so close to zero as to make no difference.
When the next plane is blown up or flown into a building, I wonder how the administration will try to trick us into believing it isn’t about how the U.S. tortured people and, by its own admission, for no reason at all?
Well, to make omelets, you have to break at least a few international laws … boo-hoo, and all that fag-crying game shit, but ya-know, payback IS coming. America has trained itself to become EVERYTHING that “the terrorists” were supposed to “hate us for.” We’ve become so accomplished at committing global war crimes that, as our military vets come back home and re-imbed themselves back into the country as law enforcers, they continue to commit the most severe and heinous of war-crimes that they were initially trained to impose only as American-empire sustaining conquistadors. Look where just a little bit of that shit left just Spain for centuries.
So now? America’s civilian population is the oyster of our own Frankenstein creation to brutalize. Fergeson and NY are just the light-hearted beginning. Before it’s over? Another class-civil war of racial advertisement will have afflicted (IS AFFLICTING) us. We’ll be calling the other one the “lesser” Civil War.
America has been completely retrained to “love-the-serviceman” but “hate-the-war.” This is how the traitors of our national character are re-invented. MILLIONS of them, and most are severely damaged goods. And — along with the mostly un-vetted, “open-border” class of Hispanic invaders coming from down south –they have dominately become everybody’s “Dexter-loving”, child-ass-fucking neighbors.
Meanwhile, as Zionland has hijacked all our launch-codes, America becomes internationally helpless. The dieback has already begun.
DanD
Good luck with that Ted. None of those people will ever even admit that they were wrong, much less admit you were right, or god forbid apologize to you. I am reminded of the arguments I used to get into 35 years ago with friend who considered themselves leftists about Afghanistan. I would try to calmly explain that the Red Army were the good guys, and the people we were supporting were horrific. They killed people for educating girls. They stoned women to death for talking to a man other than their husband. Etc. etc. They would reply with “but they’re just fighting for their freedom” and I would start to lose it, “yes, their freedom to treat women like chattel” and eventually my head would explode. These were nice considerate very liberal folks, and not a single one of them ever admitted that they were wrong, much less that I was right and they owed me an apology.