U.S. Torture To Come Roaring Back, As U.S. Continues Its Moral Degeneration. Obama Opened the Door.

Three of the top power positions of the U.S. Empire are being filled by men who are publicly and proudly pro-torture. First and foremost is the man at the very top, president-to-be Donald Trump, who during his campaign for the office promised to "bring back waterboarding and a lot worse." [1]

The designated Attorney General, head of the U.S. Department of "Justice," the racist and remorseless black vote suppressor Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, U.S. Senator from Alabama, is another public supporter of torture. Under his command will be a large part of the domestic repression apparatus of the U.S.: all U.S. prosecutors, the FBI secret police, the DEA drug and political police,  the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms police, the U.S. Marshals, and the Federal prisons- a total of about 114,000 personnel.

The man Trump picked to head the CIA, the U.S. global Gestapo, is Republican House Representative Mike Pompeo, a former U.S. Army tank officer, another torture-lover who for good measure has called on television for the execution of heroic, self-sacrificing whistleblower Edward Snowden. His new boss, Trump, also wants to use state power to murder Snowden. [2]

As the Republicans control the U.S. Senate, confirmation is pretty certain if not guaranteed for these vicious trolls. And Democrats are punks when it comes to fighting Republicans.

Looking at U.S. history, the arc of U.S. moral degeneration around torture comes clearly into view.
The U.S. has always tortured people, of course. Native American prisoners, slaves, and others of course were subjected to gruesome tortures. U.S. prisons have always been sites of torture, physical and psychological. Filipino insurgents were tortured during the invasion and subjugation of the Philippines around 1900.

The U.S. military and the CIA tortured countless thousands of Vietnamese during the invasion and occupation of Vietnam. We have a large body of evidence of military torture from the testimony of veterans.
And as part of Operation Phoenix, the CIA death squad program run by William Colby (later director of CIA), torture was routine, and at least 50,000 Vietnamese were murdered.

But officially torture was not acknowledged. Officially the U.S. didn't torture. An absurd lie, but in those days vice still felt the need to pay tribute to virtue in the form of hypocrisy.

Then came the regime of Bush the Younger (January 2001-January 2009), which pretty overtly systematized torture by the military and CIA, even issuing written directives and guidelines and instructions for carrying it out- while denying torture was torture. A phrase was cribbed from a Gestapo torture manual, "enhanced interrogation techniques," with the insistence that U.S. torture wasn't torture. To this day, the U.S. media rarely will call it by its right name, instead using the euphemism "harsh interrogation techniques." Perhaps they think this slight change proves their independence from state control.  The more daring among the commentariat and "journalists" once in awhile dart to the edge of the forbidden ideological zone and call it "brutal interrogation methods." Hint hint. (Oh, they are so brave!)

So torture became official policy, while it was denied that it was torture. (That's called having your cake and eating it too.) When photographic evidence of torture at the U.S.' Abu Ghraib political prison in Iraq surfaced, due to the carelessness and lack of sophistication of soldiers there who weren't schooled in secret-police deviousness but had the habit of thinking that whatever they did under orders was legitimate and no shame and didn't need to be treated as a deep dark secret, the Bush regime put on a burlesque act of shock and surprise and a handful of fall guy privates and a sergeant who had been a sadistic prison guard in civilian life had to be sacrificed to military courts martial.

Barack Hussein Obama paved the way for the coming torture holocaust of the Trump regime by refusing to enforce U.S. law and treaty obligations by prosecuting the Bush regime torturers. To be sure, this would have been politically difficult and would have involved a battle royale with the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) and the establishment media, but was absolutely necessary morally and politically. Of course, it would have been exceedingly naive to expect the political hustler and con man Obama to undertake such a necessary task. His only interest was in successfully climbing the greasy pole of U.S. establishment politics and sitting comfortably at its top, perched at the pinnacle of power. Like virtually all politicians of his party, power was his end, not a means to some other end, such as justice, or making the world better. (And don't believe their hype to the contrary.)

If you allow people to break laws with impunity, deterrence against law-breaking and evil-doing is destroyed.

With the precedent established that the executive branch could get away with more or less overt torture, there is no bar to the Trump regime's bringing torture back with a vengeance.

Law in the U.S. is merely a weapon to attack the weak, target victims, and feed the insatiable maw of the prison-industrial complex, whose roots trace back to Nixon (the slogan for this repression being "law and order") and was ramped up by the Clinton regime especially.

The other use of law is to have legal lackeys like John Yoo (for Bush) and his counterparts in the Obama regime concoct tortured legal rationales for criminal policies like torture (Bush) and assassinations (Obama). Obama added the extra wrinkle of treating the rationales themselves as state secrets, not to be revealed. A real Kafkaesque touch.

With the Bush regime having established the precedent that torture could be conducted openly with just a thin veil of mendacious nomenclature to provide a means of cynical denial, Trump and his minions now dispense with even the euphemisms.

Thus the U.S. has gone from hiding its torture by pretending it didn't exist, to pretending its torture wasn't torture by slapping a Nazi label on it, to dispensing with pretense entirely. A pattern of moral degeneracy.

It needs to be mentioned that torture didn't actually stop under Obama. Torture, psychological and physical, is a daily occurrence in U.S. jails and prisons. And the UN Rapporteur on Torture officially found that U.S. Army soldier Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was subjected to conditions amounting to torture in the Marine brig at Quantico. (Manning's treatment was highly irregular- being kept in Marine, not Army custody, being kept naked, not being tried for two years, during which time his rights were grossly violated, and more.) Obama has shown a vindictive streak numerous times, against whistleblowers, journalists who reveal state secrets (crimes), people who heckle him (he had Egyptian secret police thugs break Medea Benjamin's arm in the Cairo airport), and murdering the teenage son and nephew of Anwar al-Awlaki.

Obama is slick and smooth, Trump bombastic and crude. But both are gangsters.

What a subtle hint, Donald! From Al-Jazeera interview with Edward Snowden 
and Daniel Ellsberg. View clip here.

1]  Torture "a lot worse" means more "detainees" sadistically tortured to death, like the Afghan taxi driver chained by his wrists hanging from a wall whose legs were pulped by a club-wielding "contractor," one of those fascist military veterans the U.S. produces. (The victim was he subject of the documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side," a reference to Bush regime vice president Dick Cheney's assertion thatthe U.S. would have to go to "the dark side" in its "war against terrorism."

2] Pompeo claimed Snowden put "friends of mine" "in enormous danger" and called for his execution. After "due process," that is- see how fair Pompeo is? Pompeo told two whopping lies in this brief segment. That Snowden "released" the NSA documents to foreign powers, and the "enormous danger" canard. Obviously NO U.S. troops (who Army veteran Pompeo was referring to) were put in ANY danger, and Snowden didn't "release" the documents at all. He gave them to journalists and ONLY to journalists, and didn't retain copies. The journalists in turn are deciding what information to release to the public.
 
Watch liar Pompeo.

Compulsive Liars of FBI Blatantly Lie Again- Media Doesn't Notice

You may recall that for the last month or so, the FBI has been insisting that the only way they can get into the encrypted data on an iPhone used by one of two Islamofascists who committed a massacre in San Bernardino, California, is if the Apple Corporation creates a software program to break its own encryption on the phone. [1]

Well whaddaya know, turns out it's not so. The U.S. Department of "Justice" is dropping its court case to compel Apple to make cracker software for the FBI. The FBI, after a full-court press in the media for a month, claiming that the terrorists were going to destroy "National Security" if Apple didn't submit, said Never Mind. They "found" a company that can do the job. Surprise surprise.

Actually it was always obvious that the FBI could break into the iPhone of the dead killer without forcing Apple to create software that the FBI, contrary to its oh-so-innocent protestations, would then use routinely and in secret to break into the phones of whomever it doesn't like. (People like me. Although I personally don't have an iPhone.) For one thing, there's this outfit called the NSA (National Security Agency) that most certainly already has methods to defeat iPhone security. And the FBI has free access to the NSA's databases and can call on them for assistance. (They just don't want to admit it in open court.)

For another thing, there's an entire industry devoted to data retrieval. Edward Snowden even pointed this out weeks ago. So the FBI is availing itself of the services of a company that specializes in this.

It had already been pointed on tech websites that various means exist to get past the Apple encryption, such as merely copying the contents of the flash storage as many times as needed and trying out password possibilities on the copies until one worked. (That's called a brute force attack.) There was much repetition of the claim that after 10 wrong password attempts, all th date would be deleted and gone forever. Not so, according to some tech experts. The password would be deleted.

The point is, the FBI's original claim was bogus, knowingly false. But the U.S. media will never, ever, point out an FBI lie, no matter how obvious. (The BBC won't either, I've noticed.)

But in the meantime, we were subjected to a month of media attacks on Apple for selfishly putting profits ahead of "National Security" and Protecting the American People from Terrorism. (Funny, I thought corporate profits were the whole point of this system! That's the reason they overthrow governments and slaughter millions of people, to make the world safe for corporate profits.) As part of this propaganda offensive to aid and abet yet another FBI power grab, the media trotted out the usual suspects, giving a platform to various secret police poohbahs and the political enablers of the secret police state. Some of whom you might not have expected in such a role, such as the "progressive" mayor of New York City, that alumnus of the Clinton cabal, Bill "My Deeds Contradict My Words" de Blasio, who scolded Apple and lectured them on the necessity of "protecting" people's "safety" rather than worrying about their image and profits. His hand-picked police Commissioner, Bill "The Velvet Repressor" Bratton, chimed in likewise.

Apple, for self-interested reasons, dug in its heels. Other tech companies verbally backed them. But this is only a defeat for the secret police leviathan in the sense that a grab for still more repressive power was stymied. The principle that corporations have to act as accomplices to the secret police in making cracker software was temporarily staved off. But no legal precedent was set, since the case was dropped. In practice however the secret police still strip all of us naked of any privacy every second of every day. And the tech companies, and especially the phone companies, are still almost fully cooperative with the secret police, as they have been ever since the invention of the telephone. (The telegraph too, for that matter.)

We'll see what repercussions, if any, will be visited on Apple CEO Tim Cook for his effrontery. Remember what happened to the head of Qwest Communications, Joseph Nacchio, when at the beginning of the regime of Bush the Younger, the NSA went around to all the telecoms to tap into their networks illegally. Nacchio said Sure, just show us the warrant. He was the ONLY telecom exec to require a warrant. The NSA said Never Mind, and the next thing that happened was the Federal government found an excuse to indict Nacchio on a insider trading charge and he was socked with a 6 year stretch in prison.

By the way, the NSA was setting up this massive illegal spying in February 2001. That's 7 months before September 11, when agents of the U.S. Deep State, acting on the orders of Richard Cheney, blew up those three buildings at the World Trade Center, which has ever since been used as a justification for every state crime under the sun.

1] The San Bernardino massacre occurred December 2 of last year. The attack was carried out by a married ethnic Pakistani couple, who targeted an office party for the husband's co-workers, killing 14 of them. For details and background on the San Bernardino killers, see "Last Days: Preparing for the apocalypse in San Bernardino," New Yorker, February 22, 2016. For an interesting insight into how extremists go unnoticed by people who know them, see "San Bernardino and the Mechanics of a Double Life," New Yorker, December 16, 2015. This also refutes the demagogues who insist that the Muslim "community" shelters and hides terrorists.We just heard it again from the U.S. demagogues, including Donald Trump and the "talk" radio stormtrooper ranters, saying that the Muslims in Belgium "had to know" the terror suspects were among them. Like everybody knows who's hiding in a given apartment! It's called hiding for a reason.

Loretta Lynch Tells Her First Whopping Lie as New Attorney General of the U.S.

“I don’t have drones.” 

This bald-faced, outrageous lie was uttered by Obama’s newly-minted “chief law enforcement officer of the United States,” Loretta Lynch, in front of an assemblage of human drones from the corporate media. Then they all went off and played make-believe-it’s-true.

Lynch is the head of the Department of “Justice.” The FBI secret police is part of the Department of “Justice.” The FBI operates drones. So Lynch is being nakedly dishonest. (Of course, being a lawyer, if she was called on it, she would say she was being literal, that is, she doesn’t personally own a drone which she keeps in her garage. See? Not misleading at all! That would be a Clinton interpretation. Hey, what does “is” mean, anyway?)

Lynch had summoned the corporate media to hear her announce an investigation of the brutal Baltimore police, who just murdered Freddie Gray, the latest in an innumerable series of crimes. Had there not been violent demonstrations as a result, nothing at all would be happening. As usual, only violence forces the rulers to make concessions. I don’t say that as an endorsement of violence, just a sad fact in this repressive society. It must also be noted that only the violence of the oppressed is “violence,” not the much greater, ubiquitous, systematic, and deliberate violence of the state and its agents. The elites only decry “violence” when it comes from the underclass. [1]

The New York Times dropped Lynch’s lie into the last two paragraphs of a sixteen paragraph story that read as a complete non sequitur to the article itself.  Here are the last two paragraphs. Notice how the NYT dismisses the real life experiences of the eyewitnesses who were the targets of this sinister sneaky state surveillance as “rumors:”

“At the news conference, the attorney general refuted rumors about Justice Department drones conducting surveillance of the city during last week’s unrest.

“I don’t have any drones,” she said.

There it is, a whopping lie, stuck at the very end of the article. [2] The NY Times lets readers believe the lie is true. It doesn’t point out the blatant falseness of Lynch’s Lie. Thus it is an accomplice once again in perpetuating a nightmarish police state by pretending it doesn’t exist. And so is most of the rest of the corporate oligarchy’s propaganda system, with a few honorable exceptions. (McClatchy comes to mind.)

As far as “refuting rumors,” since the “refutation” consisted of a blatant falsehood, nothing was refuted. The eyewitness accounts of those on the ground still stand- even if the New York Times, instead of reporting them, airily brushes them away as “rumors.” What high-handed assholes. The Times wants to make sure that just in case any of its oh-so-respectable readers heard some truths they're not supposed to know, those readers realize those are just rumors.

Thus does the NY Times turn falsehood into truth, and truth into falsehood. And designates a naked lie as a refutation of the lived reality of those being targeted.

These days, it is standard operating procedure to use drones, and cellphone signal grabbers, and cameras, and facial recognition technology, and license plate readers, and on and on, to spy on ALL protests that those in power don’t like. The information is added to the police state databases, and software is then used to spot patterns, map social networks, and pick out individuals for personal destruction.

As for Lynch’s crude lie, it doesn’t match the self-righteous unction of the lies of her predecessor, Eric Holder Jr. He beat his chest in public about his “opposition” to the death penalty, while unleashing his minions to pursue precisely that penalty in various cases. He claimed to oppose mass incarceration while making sure to continue it. He redefined due process to mean NO due process. He contemptuously refused to turn over subpoenaed documents to Congress in various DO”J” scandals and fulminated he was the victim of racist disrespect. He let the top echelon of the financial elite buy their way out of trouble, and offered up fatuous sophistries in justification. All in all, the po’ girl from the humble background (so we are told, and expected to celebrate how she rose to be a chief persecutor) probably lacks the sly cunning of corporate lawyer Eric Holder. But we shall see.

1] And when violence comes from revolutionaries, the elites get positively hysterical. They’re still denouncing the “violence” of “Sixties radicals.” Some asshole just wrote yet another book attacking the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, etc., and is getting a big boost from bourgeois media for his ideological effort. Talk about beating a dead horse. Perhaps they fear a return of such militancy, given the unrest their murderous police have managed to stoke, on top of the daily grinding oppression in a society in which the poor are preyed upon by the human hyenas who wield political and economic power over the powerless. I have no time for a book that wants to excoriate the Weatherpeople for planting a few bombs that killed no one (by design) while ignoring the six million tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, which helped killed millions of people. It was those bombs that animated and radicalized the Weatherpeople in the first place.

2] “Justice Department Begins Civil Rights Inquiry Into Baltimore Police,” New York Times, May 8, 2015.

Update: the NY Times changed the title to the pro-police "Baltimore Case Is Full of Conflicts, Lawyers for Officers Contend." The link above goes to that article instead of the original one. The substituted article w deletes Lynch's lie.


And these smarmy, underhanded propagandists like to hammer the elisions and sneaky deletions from history of their opponents in Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union). Nothing like a pot calling a kettle black.

But I was a step ahead of the commissars at the NY Times and their Soviet-style journalism..I saved the article webpage in its original form before they pulled their switcheroo. You can view it at "Here's That Mysteriously Vanished NY Times Article, Resurrected from the Grave!"