Bush Pens Torture Executive Order

By Kurt Nimmo

"In Bushzarro world, up is down, black is white, and abducting people and subjecting them to waterboarding is compliance with the Geneva Conventions. “Five years after he exempted al Qaeda and Taliban members from the Geneva provisions, Bush signed an executive order requiring the CIA to comply with prohibitions against ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ as set down in the conventions’ Common Article 3,” reports the Boston Globe......

Of course, all of this is simply for public consumption, as the CIA has a long and sordid history of “information extraction,” that is to say torture, more recently of the “no touch,” variety.....

Here I part ways with Mr. Sullivan. Indeed, there is a distinct and frightening “comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007,” a fact pointed out on numerous occasions by no shortage of commentators. It should be an obvious comparison after reading Laurence W. Britt’s Fascism Anyone?, where he lists the “common threads” linking fascist regimes. In addition to nationalism, “supremacy of the military/avid militarism,” cronyism and corruption, and control of the mass media, Britt lists “disdain for the importance of human rights” as a hallmark of fascism:

The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

Bush’s executive order, ABC News reports, “is the White House’s first public effort to reach into the CIA’s five-year-old terror detention program, which has been in limbo since a Supreme Court decision last year called its legal foundation into question…. Officials would not provide any details on specific interrogation techniques that the CIA may use under the new order.”

In other words, more of the same, although “clever … propaganda” will once again be used to get the “population… to accept these human rights abuses,” not that the public is paying attention to such things, as far too many of them have bought into the patently absurd demonization of the victims, never mind, upon closer examination, we learn that most of the victims are Afghan dirt farmers and largely innocent Iraqis. "