In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.

Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior.  With a straight face the official voices declared that those who had the audacity to resist our criminal violence were ingrates. Don’t believe it? You may be forgiven: it is rather unbelievable.

Not too long after that, another somersault in logic and truth took place. This time the contortion was of Olympian quality, as we saw the same filthy pundits—a great many of them liberals—talking with a straight face (as did the man in the White House and other administration flacks) that if the Iraqis continued to “misbehave”, continued attacking our troops, imagine that, “we’d leave”—yeah, that’s right, their punishment would be that we, the self-annointed saviors, would leave!

Buwahahahahahahah….! Isn’t that a threat to shit in your pants? They didn’t receive us as liberators!

Reality quiz:

What would you do if you were the victim of a brutal home invasion; if they raped your wife and daughter, killed your animals, beat the shit out of you, and robbed you blind, to boot—oh, and reduced your house to rubble—and then they declared with a straight face that if you were not grateful for all that, if you didn’t beg them to stay … they’d leave? How’s that for the mother of all Orwellian nonsense?

Only with a totally confused public can the revolting media creatures who pass for journalists and commentators in the US foist such a huge con on the public mind … with nary an audible  protest.

Yeah, it’s pathetic alright. And if we don’t watch it, it will happen again.

PATRICE GREANVILLE is editor of the Greanville Post, a site dedicated to political, cultural and historical analyses.

An Egyptian man who looks like Saddam Hussein says a gang of Iraqi kidnappers tried to force him to act in a pornographic film.

After refusing a $330,000 offer to play Hussein in a sex tape — which was purportedly planned to be sold to the media as an authentic recording of the deceased Iraqi dictator — Mohamed Bishr told al-Ahram that three men in black suits attempted to abduct him as he walked to a cafe in Alexandria on Sunday.

“The three men, who had guns hanging from their belts, forced me out of my car and shoved me into a van, hitting my head,” Bishr told the publication. For some reason, the abductors began arguing with each other and tossed him out of the vehicle, Bishr claims.

While plotting ways to destabilize Hussein before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA considered concocting a hoax video featuring a Hussein look-alike having sex with a teenage boy.

CNN

Prominent attorney Giovanni Di Stefano, who has represented former Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein and his right-hand man, “Chemical Ali,” or Ali Hassan al-Majid, is representing Charles Manson in his attempt for a new trial, Di Stefano told CNN.

Di Stefano has filed an application with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Manson, he said. The petition says Manson didn’t receive a fair trial when he was convicted 40 years ago because, among other things, he was not allowed to represent himself, Di Stefano said.

The prosecutor in the Manson case, however, said Di Stefano’s claim has no merit.

Manson was assigned a public defender after the judge in his case became frustrated with Manson’s behavior while he was acting as his own attorney.

Di Stefano said that was a violation of Manson’s Sixth Amendment rights and is grounds for a new trial.

For more information, see original article.

In Histories Are Mirrors, Hicks, a Pulitzer-winning New York Times staff photographer, documents the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, through 2004. Many of the wall labels offer only dates and locations, but the exhibit isn’t merely a timeline. Hicks’ best photographs capture the eternal features that crop up in the emotional landscape of wars everywhere: fear, pain, pride, rage, hubris, hope and hopelessness.

The show’s first images of the twin towers immediately recall the mute powerlessness of shocked Americans, resigned to observe the destruction as passive participants. Even photos of New York City emergency crews raise a paralyzing question: What do rescue workers do when there is no one to rescue?

Hicks then leaps into images and suites of photographs from a world away: A family in an open truck stares passively at an overturned vehicle in the bottom of a bomb crater; soldiers crouch and run in the violent confusion of a battle; an Afghan soldier firing an automatic weapon from a trench sets a rat-tat-tat pace for the succession of pictures on the wall.

In one image, an Afghan soldier dressed in modern camouflage gives orders to his men while wielding what looks like a medieval sword with a curved blade. Afghanistan’s geographic location has made it a region in conflict since antiquity, and Hicks’ photo implies that the country’s young men will be eternal soldiers.

In a photo titled “Mahawil, Iraq. May 14, 2003,” bodies wrapped in plastic dot the desert in a location where 3,000 corpses were recovered from a mass grave. This ghostly image resonates with another photo, “Nejaf, Iraq. August 21, 2004,” in which a number of Iraqi detainees are lying face-down in the desert, their hands cinched behind them with zip-ties. Both photographs recall the famous 1789 woodblock prints of the slave ship Brookes, its rows and columns of human ballast neatly accounted for if barely accommodated. In these compositions, Hicks’ subjects, like the slaves, are reduced to inert numbers before a rush of power, money and war.

Read more at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia

Amnesty’s 59-page report, titled “New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful detentions and torture in Iraq,” highlights the case of several men who were subjected to torture or who died in prison.

Among them was Riad Mohammed Saleh al-Oqaibi, arrested in September 2009 and held in a detention facility in Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone before being transferred to a secret detention facility elsewhere in the capital.

“During interrogation, he is said to have been beaten so hard on the chest that his ribs were broken and his liver damaged,” the report noted. “He died on 12 or 13 February as a result of internal bleeding.”

According to the rights group, methods of torture used against detainees include beatings with cables and hose-pipes, breaking of limbs, piercing of the body with drills and psychological torture in the form of threats with rape.

In addition to the central Iraqi government, the report blamed security forces in the autonomous region of Kurdistan of also being at fault, noting one case in which a detainee had been held for more than 10 years without charge or trial. That detainee was allegedly tortured by Kurdish security police.

Iraq’s fractured penal system means the ministries of justice, interior and defence all run their own prison networks, and reports of torture and mistreatment are common, the report concluded.

Human Rights Watch said in April that Iraqi men were raped, electrocuted and beaten in a “secret prison” in Baghdad, while MPs called for an independent enquiry into prison abuse in a parliamentary debate in June 2009.

Ramze Shihab Ahmed, 68, is an Iraqi refugee in the UK. He was arrested while on a visit to Iraq in 2009, and no-one knew where he was being held or what, if anything, he had been charged with. He left to Iraq in the first place, to find out the faith of his son Omar, after receiving information he was arrested by Iraqi police.

His wife Rabiha, 63, told Al Jazeera: “Ramze was very worried about Omar. We didn’t know why he had been arrested, and he said he must go to Iraq to help him,” Rabiha says. “He didn’t think he would be in any danger at all.”

Rabiha claims her husband confessed to terrorism charges under torture.

“They beat him. They put a plastic bag on his head until he lost consciousness, and then they woke him with electric shocks. They told him that if he didn’t confess, they would make his son rape him. They put a wooden stick into his anus,” she told Al Jazeera. “They have abused him in every way.”

The Iraqi government admits 4500 people have been released due to lack of evidence since April.  No chance al-Oqaibi or Ahmed or the other victims were innocent, right?  Read more here.

During planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group kicked around a number of ideas for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people.

One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project.

“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”

The idea was to then “flood Iraq with the videos,” the former official said.

Another idea was to interrupt Iraqi television programming with a fake special news bulletin. An actor playing Hussein would announce that he was stepping down in favor of his (much-reviled) son Uday.

“I’m sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday,” the fake Hussein would intone.

The spy agency’s Office of Technical Services collaborated on the ideas, which also included inserting fake “crawls” — messages at the bottom of the screen — into Iraqi newscasts.

Read More: Washington Post’s SpyTalk

When the Pentagon’s internal think tank decided in 2004 it needed a better understanding of Al Qaeda, it turned to an unlikely source: the terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, who was known as the chief purveyor of the discredited idea that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11 and many other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda.

Mylroie was paid roughly $75,000 to produce a 300-page study, “The History of Al Qaida,” for the Defense Department think tank, known as the Office of Net Assessment, a DOD spokesman tells us. The study, which is dated September 2005, was posted on an intelligence blog last month.

It documents the development of Al Qaeda and spends many pages dancing around the theory that has defined Mylroie’s career — that key Qaeda leaders acted at the behest of the Iraqi regime. She also argues that group-think among U.S. analysts has obscured the true nature of the terrorist group.

Those who know Mylroie’s work are shocked that the Pentagon would hire her.

Read More: TPM Muckraker

Turning on their TVs during the long holiday weekend, Iraqis were greeted by a familiar if unexpected face from their brutal past: Saddam Hussein. The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar’s anniversary of his 2006 execution.

No one seems to know who is bankrolling the so-called Saddam Channel, although the Iraqi government suspects it’s Baathists whose political party Saddam once led. The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus, Syria named Mohammed Jarboua, who claimed to be its chairman.

Viewers of al-Lafeta TV on Saturday saw the phrase “Raise your sword” next to a portrait of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The channel began broadcasting on Friday, the first day of an important holiday of the Islamic calendar, and the anniversary of Saddam’s execution three years ago.

The Saddam channel, he said, “didn’t receive a penny from the Baathists” and is for Iraqis and other Arabs who “long for his rule.” Jarboua has clearly made considerable efforts to hide where it’s aired from and refuses to say who is funding it besides “people who love us.”

Iraqis surprised to find Saddam on their TVs responded with the kind of divided emotions that marked his reign.

Read More: AP via AOL News