Remember our plans to introduce a free and democratic nation in Iraq? We have been following the rampant corruption and increasing use of Sharia law in the country. Now, the Human Rights Watch has issued a report that our billions of dollars and many lives were spent to achieve . . . “a budding police state” where torture and abuse is widespread. In the meantime, we have spent ten years cutting back on essential services and programs in the United States to fund this shining example of American intervention.
“Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for the New York-based group has warned that “Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy (in Iraq), the reality is that it left behind a budding police state.” This includes the torture or abuse of dissidents, journalists, and activists. It also included secret detention centers where people are tortured or simply disappear without access to the courts. Of course, we were accused of the same practices so they may have learned too well from the mentors in the creation of democratic free society. It appears that they have mistaken American exceptionalism to Iraqi exceptionalism.
Source: Washington Post
Credit to Glenn Greenwald. (See previous comment)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/28/iraq-us-constitution-and-civil-liberties
“Iraqi-American is imprisoned by US for saving his family from US sanctions
“A harrowing case of a Missouri engineer highlights the travesties routinely imposed on Muslim Americans”
“But US-imposed sanctions after the First Gulf War had decimated the value of Iraqi currency and were causing extreme hardship for his large family who remained in Iraq. That sanctions regime caused the death of at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1991, the writer Chuck Sudetic visited Iraq, wrote in Mother Jones about the pervasive suffering, starvation and mass death he witnessed first-hand, and noted that the US-led sanctions regime “killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used in human history”.
Sign the petition to close Guantanmo.
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/close-guantanamo-now/6cMPlxQw
Don’t forget to close your eyes and clap your hands, or it won’t work.
I predicted several years ago that 6 months after we leave Iraq there will be a “Strong Man” running Iraq again. I see no reason to modify that prediction.
It took 8 years to not find the imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. I could have not found the imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq in 1 day. How? By listening to the U.N. Weapons Inspectors instead of listening to the self-serving warmongers in the White House and Pentagon.
I would love to see an accounting of the gain in Dick Cheney’s stock portfolio from September 11, 2001 to December 31, 2011.
And I am still waiting for someone to explain to me why more than one American Soldier was eletrocuted in the defective Halliburton-built showers in Iraq. Why were they not shut down immediatly after the first death? The last number I heard was 22 dead, and that was probably a coverup of the actual number. Someone in the Pentagon and/or White House should hang for this and many other American outrages against human decency and common sense. I nominate Dick Cheney to be the first to climb the gallows stairs- but only after a fair trial in a civilian court. That’s far more justice than 22+ American Soldiers got in Dick Cheney’s deadly Halliburton showers. And far more justice than 4,484 Americans and 100,000+ Iraqis got in the foolish and evil Iraq War.
We should also abandon the world’s largest embassy in Baghdad and withdraw every American from Iraq. We have done enough harm there. It will save us from having to do a repeat of the Saigon embassy fiasco. Besides, the new Iraqi Dictator is going to need a large palace. It’s the least we can do- we created him.