Canadian Govt Names USA as a Torture State

Oh my this might cause me to lose sleep. The Canadians called us names.

 

No opinion on this MP?

 

C'mon Canadians how many times do we have to tell you? It's not torture if we call it something else! It's aggresive in-terror-gation! Get it through your heads already. We're the good guys...we only use false flag terrorism and aggresive in-terror-gation techniques because the bad guys force us too!

 

Yes indeed, I'm sure the 850,000 Canadians who visit the US annually are terrified of being tortured by US authorities.

 

According to declassified training manuals, SOA students - military and police officers from across the hemisphere - were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation", humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions - and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment".

Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.

Yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the location's sordid history. How could they? That would require something totally absent from the debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials has been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam war.

It's a history exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his forthcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesises this evidence, producing a riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture", based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix programme and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training.

It is not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples". A startling number of torture's most prominent opponents keep telling us that the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11 2001, at which point the methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing in Newsweek on the need to ban torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies ... that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them". It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had launched the Phoenix programme and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating 40 interrogation centres in South Vietnam that killed more than 20,000 suspects and tortured thousands more."

Does it somehow lessen today's horrors to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture, that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, closer to home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8, Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now".

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never before"? I suspect it stems from a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this administration's crimes. And its open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented.


SOURCE

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

 

We have a leftist vendetta in this country against "legislating morals," and you criticize current leaders for not doing that?

And if Canada thinks they can "name us ..." I hereby name Canada a *&$%)($^ state (just so there is no need to censor)

 

I appreciate your kind, understanding, Christian spirit, with words that would come straight from the Lord Jesus Christ himself spoken in truth and grace. Thank you so much.

Now, if you want the truth from a secular perspective and from the Canadian point of view I suggest you look here:

http://start.shaw.ca/start/enCA/News/NationalNewsArticle.htm?src=n011931A.xml

 

We have a long history of torture and using false flag terrorism to overthrow governments behind us. If that offends you do something to stop it and change the way things are done in our name don't deny it and act like it isn't so. Calling Canada names because it sees what we refuse to isn't going to change history or help us live up to our claims of moral superiority.

 

I trust your source, The Guardian, about as much as your trust embedded reporters in Iraq. They are one of the most anti-American papers in the UK. A few samples of their work:

"[Bush is] a lying, sniggering, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat....On November 2, the entire civilized world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. -- where are you now that we need you?"

The Guardian regularly publishes Islamic religious fanatics such as Faisal Bodi, Anas Altrikriti, Azzam Tamimi, Osama Saeed etc.

The Guardian featured Seumas Milne, on Sept 13, 2001 who wrote, "Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it...the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming. "

And so on.

That being said, I don't approve of torture. Most civilized people do not. But probably the majority of the world's intelligence services have practiced it at one time or another. Nobody here ever said the US was perfect.