When Will Americans Demand An End to Torture?

In honor of the end of Torture Awareness Month, I thought I'd send you all to download this statement (here) by some folks who have had the misfortune to partake of Dubya's hospitality in Gitmo. The story is fascinating, sickening. How do you give people their lives back, how do you restore them? We are responsible for this.

The documentary 'Road to Guantanamo' is getting good reviews, and I'm sure 90 percent of average Americans will never have heard of it. Find a way to see it, if you can. Don't sleepwalk through history.

On a lighter note, here's a little satire from Bob Harris. He has a point... it seems like the only Constitutional Amendment of the Bill of Rights that Dubya hasn't f&#*d with is the Second, and as a newly woken citizen I'm starting to value it more than I ever did before this travesty took the throne. Well, in case you missed it:

Bush Abrogates Third Amendment, Just to Complete the Set
by Bob Harris
July 4, 2007

American citizens will now be compelled to allow British soldiers to live in their homes, thanks to a new signing statement from President Bush.

By negating the Third Amendment, the new order completes the abrogation of the entire United States Bill of Rights. High-level White House sources have indicated that this was Bush’s sole purpose in issuing the statement.

While precisely which British soldiers are to live in which homes remains unclear, the signing statement is clear and unambiguous, according to a press release on the White House website. The statement, in Bush’s handwriting, contains the complete text of the Third Amendment — “No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law” — crossed out, with the words “Hey, Bigtime, we missed one! Bring on the redcoats!” and what appears to be a smiley face added underneath.

The new signing statement was written into the margin of an unrelated bill blocking any recount of votes in the massive GOP sweep of the 2006 elections, giving Republicans a resounding majority in 53 states. Some Democrats mildly protested the vote count in December, citing mathematical studies which they claimed demonstrated that only 50 states had existed prior to the election. Republicans denounced this as “math,” and the question remained unresolved for weeks.

The story gained further notoriety when bloggers in the state of North Florida found that three days before the election, the Veterans Administration had declared the entire black population of the state as Killed In Action in the 1944 battle of Anzio, even though several hundred Republican votes in the state were apparently cast by manatees. Some activists have argued that manatees, which typically inhabit warm, shallow estuaries, would be unlikely to have reached the appropriate polling places.

However, in January, a blonde tourist from Connecticut went missing, and the news channels dropped about the story completely.

“Bigtime” is believed to be a reference to Vice President Dick Cheney, although Cheney was unavailable for comment. The vice president has had an increasingly distant relationship with the press ever since accidentally shooting twenty-six people in the face over the course of three afternoons in October, 2006. Cheney has denied that alcohol played a role in the incident, and all twenty-six people have apologized to the vice president.

The signing statement — Bush’s once-controversial practice of amending and interpreting laws as he signs them, arrogating to himself the traditional roles of both the Congress and Supreme Court — was the 1,745th of Bush’s presidency. Previous signing statements have negated the prohibition of torture, eliminated oversight of Bush’s use of the Patriot Act, and declared “Englesh” the official language of the United States.

Some constitutional scholars claim that Bush’s total number of signing statements is actually 1,744, and that statement number 1,309 was, in fact, an uncompleted seven-letter game of Hangman.

This would be little comfort to the now-deceased residents of Balloo, Missouri.

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And now for a serious note. If you get mail from True Majority you may remember this message:

"The time has come to close the gates of America’s school of torture. The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) at Ft. Benning, GA – formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA) – has been teaching the techniques of torture since the end of the Second World War.

Over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and officers – many linked to the worst human rights crimes ever perpetrated in the western hemisphere – were trained at SOA/WHINSEC,1 at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Thousands of patriotic Americans have annually protested the torture school at Ft. Benning. Hundreds have gone to jail, many with lengthy sentences.
Now, with clear evidence of not only Latin American war crimes, but those committed by U.S. military personnel, Congress is ready to consider shutting the national shame that is SOA/WHINSEC.

This week, Rep. McGovern (D-MA) will introduce an amendment to a must-pass funding bill that would shut the SOA/WHINSEC. To make sure this amendment is attached to the bill, your representative needs to hear from you that the torture must end!

Thanks for helping restore America’s honor,

Judy Wicks
Convicted SOA/WHINSEC Protester
Owner, White Dog Café, Philadelphia
TrueMajority Member

For exhaustive details about the history of this SOA/WHINSEC and their victims, visit our friends at School of the Americas Watch.
http://www.soaw.org/new/

1 "¡No Más! No More!" The Nation, 3-30-2006
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060417/mulvaney

Well, folks, we're still teaching torture. What a legacy... from the land of the free.

On Friday, June 9, the House of Representatives voted 218-188 against an amendment to end funding for the controversial SOA (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).