but here's the problem. as long as Saddam was doing what was in the best interest of the USA they were fine. last time i checked, the USA does not make the rules of the world.

Really...
Well, by golly we (they) keep on trying though ...
Time to focus on whats going on here and stop trying to fix everyone else.

yes no argument from me on that, we got millions of illegal aliens bankrupting our system if we don't stop it. we may not be a superpower anymore.

We are bankrupt because the Federal Reserve was established by a monarchy that designed it to fail...so we go into yet another war to fix everyone else's flawed systems, we can't even fix our own.
Torture, death, destruction...
and it the illegals fault were bankrupt. Oh my

they claim ssi is running out, yes it is because they keep borrowing money to fund there wars. illegal aliens are not helping matter. but for that you cant blame one party. both are at fault. republicans don't want them here because they wont vote for them. democrats want them here so they will vote for them.

I am not referring to any party... I am independent of any party. I'm talking about humanity.. We are all human, yet we think were all different, special. It is ok for this group, or that group to be tortured, it's this president fault were bankrupt, it's the illegals fault were broke.. geez wheres the love

We started out with a broken system, it couldn't work.

well for me is the illegals broke the law, we cant feed our own people, so why do we have to feed people who are not suppose to be here, i got here legal. they should try going buy the law. yes that's harsh, but its life.

Please provide a link to a reliable source for this. I cant find one.

INCUBATOR LIE

The day after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Kuwaitis living in the US hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton - a job worth $1 million a month. This was the biggest ever contract in the history of public relations to improve the image of their corrupt, oil-rich regime.

The story of how Iraqi troops, in the first days of the invasion, went into Al-Adan hospital, tore the sick babies from incubators and left them on the cold floor to die was graphically told to Congress on November 1990 before the crucial vote to send US troops (passed by about 5 votes).

What the audience didn't know however was that the 15-year old girl who made the moving, tearful testimony was none other than Niyirah al-Sabah - daughter of the US Ambassador to Kuwait. She had allegedly worked as a volunteer in the maternity ward of the hospital. But nurses who live in the two story white building opposite the hospital in Kuwait City claimed that they had never seen the girl before in their life.

The entire move towards the Gulf War had thus been motivated by a blatant lie. The girl had been "trained" by Hill and Knowlton. The renowned international human rights group Amnesty International took out full-page newspaper spreads to publicise the babies incident. It had unwittingly (and not for the first time) transformed itself from a charity to a propaganda tool. Andrew Whitley of Middle East Watch described the story as a fabrication but it took months for the truth to come out. President Bush mentioned the incubator incident in five of his speeches and seven senators referred to them in speeches backing a pro-war resolution.

Highly exaggerated reports of thousands of deaths were accepted uncritically, as the PR firm using Kuwaiti contacts inside the country smuggled 24 videotapes to a hungry, unquestioning and gullible mass media.

From http://hydraulix.bangor.ac.uk/nus/islam/pages/reports/gulf.html

Winston Churchill said we don't know the future so look to the past. When one look at all the lies in the past that led to the Iraq war one can only wonder why tar and feathers are not being prepared.

Oh so it is our job to stop genicide? Then what about all the other places it has occurred and is now occurring?

YOu bought into the whitewash and it is sad.

Torture is sick animalistic and ignorant action that has absolutely no place in an intelligent human community. So are we dumb or sick? Or both?

and all the experts say it doesnt work.

It works at getting false confessions. That is what they want

I still do not understand why they would take pictures. What were they thinking?

porn addiction

If Media Were Any Good

A week ago, I published a report on 1,200 photos of U.S. torture that I have examined but the public at large has not seen. I talked about the photos on a few progressive radio shows. I received calls from some advocacy groups that have been trying for years to get hold of these photos. But I received not one single inquiry from the corporate media. Even most good blogs ignored this story despite a handful of prominent blogs promoting it. This started me thinking and fantasizing: what would the world look like if we had major media outlets that were worth more than a warm bucket of spit?

Imagine if the media monopolies were busted, a diversity of private outlets were free to compete, and public media were developed, including free substantive air time for election campaigns. Imagine media outlets with democratic accountability. Imagine media outlets that judged a story important if the majority of the public said so, and not if those in power said so.

The majority of the public favors single-payer healthcare. Corporate media outlets are crammed with endless, often pointless, stories about healthcare that never mention single-payer. On Friday a House committee passed an amendment to allow states to create single-payer healthcare systems, and have you heard about that from a single corporate media outlet? Another amendment now up for a vote would create single-payer at the national level. Heard that one mentioned? Our existing media outlets (whose lead blogs follow more than bloggers admit to themselves) decide what's important based on the preferences of a small number of powerful people. And the fact that these preferences almost always differ wildly from majority opinion does not lead to any rethinking of the acceptability of this approach in a democratic republic.

The same treatment is accorded other people around the world by the U.S. media. Over in Iraq (remember that place?) an important deadline is approaching in the treaty that Bush and Maliki made, and which Bush misleadingly called a status of forces agreement in order to not call it a treaty. The U.S. Senate never consented to this treaty, was never asked to, and never demanded the right. But the Iraqi Parliament, which represented a public whose media -- even in the midst of a living hell -- better informed it of the treaty's terms than ours did, approved the treaty. But the parliament approved the treaty only on the condition that the Iraqi people be able to vote it up or down in a vote to be held no later than July 2009. Heard anything about this lately? Check your calendar, and then check your newspaper. What gives? If you could bring slaughtered native Americans back to life they could tell you the violations of their treaties were not heavily covered in the white man's press. The June deadline to withdraw from Iraqi cities was met in part by redrawing boundaries. Can you imagine the outrage if a foreign force did such a thing while occupying the United States? Some actions are deemed outrageous and others unworthy of extensive discussion. Some articles are written with that obnoxious air of "objectivity" while other articles are not written.

A democratic communications system that worked for the people rather than those in power, advertisers, and corporate partners would identify politicians by party and state but also by amount of money accepted from the corporations relevant to the issue under consideration. All the endless articles and chatter about healthcare would look different with the dollar figures inserted. A democratic media outlet would forego fluff and filler to engage in useful functions such as tracking whether elected officials fulfill their campaign promises, something I've done here and the St Petersburg Times has done here.

Democratic (small d) media would be very different from Democratic or Republican or Bipartisan media. It would treat laws as mandatory, not subject to the whims of those in power. It would treat enforcement of laws against those in power as more important than their enforcement against everyone else. Such media would not cover resistance to a war without noting that the war was (if it was) illegal. Such media would not cover the prosecution of low-level soldiers for crimes they were ordered to commit, without investigating their superiors and asking why they had not been prosecuted. Such media would not quote nonsensical statements by those in power about possibly investigating whether crimes had been committed without noting (when it existed) the publicly available evidence that in fact crimes had almost certainly been committed. And if a former vice president appeared on a democratic show and brazenly confessed to felonies, the producers would invite the attorney general to view the tape on the air and respond to it.
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About author
David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush" published by Feral House and available at Amazon.com. Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ConvictBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a member of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, and convener of the accountability and prosecution working group of United for Peace and Justice.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22926