[R-G] Horror Show Reveals Irag's Descent

[Friends]

http://www.legitgov.org/index.html#breaking_news

Horror show reveals Iraq's descent

By Hala Jaber in Baghdad 18 Jun 2006

The morning rush had begun at the health ministry's [single-storey Al-Tub
al-Adli] morgue
in Baghdad, and by 9.30am last Thursday 36 coffins already lined the street
outside...
Some bodies are pocked with holes inflicted by torturers with power drills.
Some show signs of strangulation; others, with hands tied behind the back,
bear bullet wounds.
Many are charred and dismembered.
So far this year, according to health ministry figures, the mortuary has
processed the bodies
of about 6,000 people, most of whom died violently.

Full story at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2230672,00.html
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"How far have we gone
where people don't want to air their views
for fear of ending up on some kind of terrorist watch list?"

--David Rowell,
editor of The Travel Insider magazine about air travel watchlists and
dissent
*****
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"To understand free speech
means freedom to speak what others do not like and even cannot stand to
hear? ...
Tolerating what you like is hardly a major achievement.
Hitler tolerated what he liked. So did Stalin. Idi Amin did too.
So did Genghis Khan, the Shah, and Henry Kissinger.
Free speech only becomes an issue
when someone says what others don't want to hear."

--Michael Albert
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"Only the grand scale and technocratic impersonality
of the crimes conceived and directed
by the [U.S.] ruling elite acting under cover of state authority
distinguish them
from garden variety killers."

--Darrell Hamamoto
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This country is in the grip of a President who was not elected,
who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits
who care nothing about human life abroad or here,
who care nothing about freedom abroad or here,
who care nothing about what happens to the earth...

The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war on innocent people in other
countries,
but it is also a war on the people of the United States:
a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living.

The wealth of the country is being stolen from the people
and handed over to the superrich.
The lives of our young are being stolen.

And the thieves
are in the White House."

Howard Zinn
*****
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral.
It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering.
It's that they just don't care ...
the same that could be said about a sociopath.
As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire,
as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power
and privilege
and prestige,
as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them
or
people close to them ...
then they just don't care about it happening to other people,
including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come
home -
the ones who make it back alive - with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome
eating away
at their bodies.
American leaders would not be in the positions they hold
if they were bothered by such things."


--William Blum

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"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are,
what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."

-William Blum

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"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little,
to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret;
to believing that the situation was so complicated
that the government had to act on information which the people could not
understand,
or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it,
it could not be released because of national security ...

To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to
believe me --
unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than
most of us
ever had occasion to develop.

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on
occasion, regretted.
Believe me this is true.

Each act, each occasion is worse than the last,
but only a little worse.
You wait for the next and the next.
You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock
comes,
will join you in resisting somehow.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once.
You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you
haven't done
(for that was all that was required of most of us:
that we did nothing) ...
You remember everything now, and your heart breaks.
Too late.
You are compromised beyond repair. "


--German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism to a
journalist
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"History is a joke
played by the victors on the vanquished
in front of an audience
that dares not laugh."

-- Michael Rivero
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