No War No Torture

Below is a link to an article with excerpts of a Canadian documentary about Omar Khadr, one of the children who were captured in Afghanistan and tortured before being sent to the torture center at Guantanamo.  He was tortured there as well, of course.

Click here to go to the article.

Omar Khadr, former child prisoner at Guantanamo

Now released and back in Canada, he has told his story.

My tax money paid for these atrocities and others that continue at Guantanamo to this day and in black sites unknown to me around the world.  Let us not deceive ourselves that the torture has stopped.
I will be more confident that the US does not torture when there are arrests of US torturers up to the highest levels of government, trials, and serious prison sentences for those found guilty.

Paul Krugman, never one to mince words, wrote a brilliantly direct editorial in response to the current budding campaign of Jeb Bush to be president in the wake of his father and brother.  Krugman writes:

“The fraudulence of the case for war was actually obvious even at the time: the ever-shifting arguments for an unchanging goal were a dead giveaway. So were the word games — the talk about W.M.D that conflated chemical weapons (which many people did think Saddam had) with nukes, the constant insinuations that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11.

“And at this point we have plenty of evidence to confirm everything the war’s opponents were saying. We now know, for example, that on 9/11 itself — literally before the dust had settled — Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, was already plotting war against a regime that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. “Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] …sweep it all up things related and not”; so read notes taken by Mr. Rumsfeld’s aide.”

US troops in Iraq

You can read the entire article here .

Alas, as always, the US media are not willing to tell the truth or challenge authority.  So long as such attitudes prevail, it will continue to be difficult for the people in this country to stand up to its militarization and continual invasions.

Some of us opposed that war at the time, but it should now be clear that we must resist US wars and aggression, limit the military budgets, stop supporting the arms manufacturers and dealers, and become a peaceful, not a warlike nation.  One can only hope and work toward that end.