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Smuggled from Guantanamo
'Spiders on Drugs' filmmaker Andrew Struthers is now a Tyee regular. Have a look.
Tortured laughter
[Editor's note: The Tyee is pleased to welcome Andrew Struthers as our first videocolumnist. He will say his bit through the short films he makes and accompanying notes. If you somehow missed, two weeks ago, his Tyee article "My Wild Million-Hit Ride on YouTube," explaining how Struthers's little film about the lowly wood spider managed to top YouTube, nabbing 2.5 million viewers so far, that account with the film itself is here. As well as being a Web 2.0 celeb, Struthers is an old-fashioned accomplished author. He lives in Victoria, and you'll find him here at The Tyee twice a month.]
This week, as my second film to showcase here on The Tyee, I offer a thoughtful documentary on water boarding, mistaken incarceration, and the perils of being born outside the U.S.
One of the things I love about YouTube is the almost complete absence of censorship or hierarchy, which has made it possible to screen politically touchy documentaries.
For example, you can watch Adam Curtis's three-hour doc on the War on Terror, The Power of Nightmares. This film has not been shown on American television because, as the head of one major network told Curtis, "We would get slaughtered if we put this out." The carte blanche used to cover such failures of executive nerve is that we are at war.
But as they say in Vietnam, it's not a war until John McCain gets taken prisoner and tortured for years. Senator McCain endured half a decade of weekly thrashings so brutal his shoulder blades were damaged beyond repair, to the point where he can no longer salute his own flag.
Safe in Canada?
That's why McCain introduced his 2005 amendment to the Detainee Act, limiting the power of the White House to torture enemy combatants picked up in Afghanistan. And that's a good thing, because, as The Power of Nightmares reveals, those detainees were mostly out-of-town jihadists who had come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, and were shopped to the Americans by Northern Alliance rebels, who hated them more than they hated the occupying enemy (and who also received a cash prize for each). Three of the prisoners were children under the age of 16.
McCain's amendment does prohibit torture, but when Bush ratified it, he attached a signing statement that made it clear he would use his executive privilege to circumnavigate the new law whenever he deemed it necessary in the higher cause of protecting American citizens from terrorist attack.
The Detainee Act itself was then promptly rewritten by Rumsfeld so that the anti-torture proviso only stands on U.S. soil, and specifically points out that Guantanamo Bay is not part of the U.S.
Nor is Canada. As the law stands, you or your children can be picked up by the CIA and flown to a secret prison, tortured for years without recourse to trial or habeas corpus, and your torture-induced confession can then be used against you should you ever see the inside of a courtroom. The terrorists may not yet have won, but the terror certainly has.
Bush & Co. declaim that unless you are a militant Islamist, you have nothing to fear. Cold comfort indeed, as this is the same crew that screwed up Iraq, Katrina and the last midterm. Their next fiasco might involve your fine self, a free plane ticket to a secret prison and more dunking than a Tim Hortons franchise.
It's a brave new world, in which we have all somehow become inmates of Guantanamo Bay.
Related Tyee stories:



21
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Sal Veritas
5 years ago
Well, um, *cough*...
Well, um, *cough*...
Fiat lux
5 years ago
No Arabs on 9/11 planes ????
I just received the enclosed posting from Europe, and looked at the websites provided, also at the list of names in the autopsies.
There's daily growing evidence that the 9/11 tragedy may, indeed, have been some kind of an inside job to justify going to war for an oil pipeline and oil resources.
Hard to say, but best to keep an open mind about it, after all, war is the ultimate economic competiton especially for systems built on the glorification of waste, accounted as "growth".
Of course, the only purpose of Canadian troops in Afgh. is to mentally climatize the public to the "empire's" "wealth creating" demands, in the now negotiated North American Union.
Ed Deak.
=========================================
...there were no Arabs aboard, as the
autopsies showed ( http://www.sierratimes.com/03/07/02/article_tro.htm ).
The U$ military-industrial complex has developed highly sophisticated
remote controls for airplanes, for surveillance but also for targeted
attacks (see http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=6405 and
related models linked there). The 9/11 flights performed such quick
turns that would have rendered pilots unconscious anyway. And where
would the US black ops specialists have had to look for Florida-
flightschool board-cutter towelheads able to perform such air acrobatics
and high-precision targeting of the WTC towers?
apeman888
5 years ago
9/11 Conspiracy Theory
9/11 conspiracy theorists remind me of a monkey getting spooked by its own reflection:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmbMnS-Bb5Q
Sincerely
Andrew Struthers
clubofrome
5 years ago
The bigger the lie...
After you explore all scenarios, it must become apparent that once the economic collapse starts, it's going to get ugly. Either we're left to fight over the scraps, in what would be akin to the worst nighmare ever dreamed up in a hollywood B-movie, or we get the gas. Life imitates Dr. Strangelove and a new society re-emerges from the mineshafts after a few decades and once the surface has been sterilized of all former human society. Stores of oil and other essentials now secured and stored away for thousands of years into the future for this new master race. Why else would there be this stock piling of stolen wealth? They know we're not getting off this rock, ever. We may go camping on the moon and visit Mars for a long weekend, but that's where it ends. We fuk up earth and we're done. So either the military industrial complex is planning for the event or they soon will be. I think you could argue for both cases, but I'm putting my money on the former. They know, and the stage is being set for what will be the largest culling of the herd ever. I don't see anyway around it. Do you think they will allow chaos to happen all around them when they can just gas the lot of us?
clubofrome
5 years ago
The bigger the lie...
After you explore all scenarios, it must become apparent that once the economic collapse starts, it's going to get ugly. Either we're left to fight over the scraps, in what would be akin to the worst nighmare ever dreamed up in a hollywood B-movie, or we get the gas. Life imitates Dr. Strangelove and a new society re-emerges from the mineshafts after a few decades and once the surface has been sterilized of all former human society. Stores of oil and other essentials now secured and stored away for thousands of years into the future for this new master race. Why else would there be this stock piling of stolen wealth? They know we're not getting off this rock, ever. We may go camping on the moon and visit Mars for a long weekend, but that's where it ends. We fuk up earth and we're done. So either the military industrial complex is planning for the event or they soon will be. I think you could argue for both cases, but I'm putting my money on the former. They know, and the stage is being set for what will be the largest culling of the herd ever. I don't see anyway around it.
Our only chance is if Dr Evil gets a hold of the terminal virus first! Launching a pre-emptive strike and catching the MIC with their pants down! Thus preventing their plan of world domination, but also ending the line of this experimental species. Get ready Flipper, your turn is coming...
Lefty
5 years ago
Grrrrr
While Bush & Co are screwing the whole world, it appears that Premier Gordoccio Campbell and Steven Harper, ever ready to demonstrate their desire to suck up to power are screwing you - from children's services to softwood lumber deals. You and I are getting ripped off. They'ed make a pair of kapos alright.
Hey Ed, don't you know you don't need expert teams of dynamiters to implosively collapse modern steel buildings? They do it now by burning them down with kerosene. Thats right the technique even automatically cuts the girders into lengths suitable for easy cartage on flatbed trailers.
Fiat lux
5 years ago
I would like to see a
I would like to see a skyscraper, the size of the WTC towers, with nobody in it, of course, come down with the speed of freefall, from kerosene fires cutting girders.
The kerosene from those planes broke into millions of droplets at impact and the fires were not serious enough, according to the fire captain on the scene, who radioed down a few minutes before he and his crew were killed by the collapse.
There are also a lot of photos, I have some in my computer, showing people standing in the holes cut by the planes.
The Pentagon, definitely wasn't hit by an airliner. No wreckage was ever found, for the first time in history.
Now let's hear about "conspiracy theories" by the faithful.
Ed Deak.
Greg Felton
5 years ago
How right you are
Brilliant post, Ed!:
The truth of what did, and did not happen, on Sept. 11 is widely available and presented in rational easy-to-understand language.
Tragedy is, too many people prefer to believe a comfortable lie than an inconvenient truth.
I have a book coming out next month in which I devote a whole chapter to debunking the official narrative. One item of note is that a fire broke out in Tower I on Feb. 14, 1975, and burned hotter and for twice as long as the "fire" that brought down the tower on Sept. 11.
Interesting that the tower managed to survive the first blaze, isn't it?
The title of my book is The Host and the Parasite—How Israel's Fifth Column Consumed America (Tempe, AZ: Dandelion Books, 2007) 1-800-861-7899.
Coyote
5 years ago
Conspiracy, indeed...
The evidence that 911 was a burning of the Reichstag event, carried out by those within the US with an interest in launching Amerika into a war to secure Empire hegemony over the Middle East is significant and troublesome. In particular persists the evidence that, first released by French journalism sources if my memory serves, that the real motivation for the US assault on Afghanistan was Taliban refusal to allow the building of an oil pipeline across its territory by the US energy corp, Unocal.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1984459.stm
Which theory, while it may seem to make some difficulty explaining the diversion into Iraq, was but likely another aspect of the same US Empire strategy. Afghanistan's oil, or more particularly the oil of the northern 'stan states (Uzbekistant, Kazakstan etc) is a more long term project for the Empire corporate interest, whereas, in the thinking that then seems to have prevailed, Iraq's oil, so they thought, was more easily and readily available, and there was an older First Gulf War notion of grievance in the US that was no less ready to hand to provide like justification for this imperialist war. Additionally, the US has long had concerns about its "over-reliance" on Saudi oil, (all the 911 hijackers were actually Saudi nationals), and if Iraq's oil could more immediately be accessed amd brought under US Empire control, that problem of Saudi over-reliance could be solved in this one master stroke of invasion and conquest.
That the best laid plans of mice and men, and empire's from the beginning of time, are doomed to go awry is quite another matter that seldom gets brought into the equation by the empire strategists. And make no mistake, it is all going awry for these ambitious but fundamentally flawed Empire Freaks as well.
A future generation may get to know more definitively all the hidden secrets and motivations which have gone on here, but for those of us of this current day, we are no less justified in our "conspiracy theory" suspicions, based on no small body of evidence.
As "they" say, "Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me."
A modicum of paranoia by those of us within current evolving capitalism, and those under more immediate and brutal attack from it, in the name of a bullshitt notion of "democracy" of course, is certainly justified. Otherwise, one is but merely blissfully ignorant and running on little more than the vapour left in the empty tank of faith.
clubofrome
5 years ago
Assassins!
Careful, we may already know too much! Here's a theory, as heard from somewhere in the "Wilderness!" Drug money floats the US. We all know the war on drugs is a sham. Otherwise they would have shut down international trade in Meth by regulating effedrin years ago. Now they sit back and watch Mexican Pharma corps import it by the ton from India. Half goes to cold medicine the other half? Yup, Crystal Meth. Then there's the thousands of domestic labs producing homegrown. This drug when impure, to say, made without the main manufactured effedrin, is much less harmful and way less addictive. The recent documentary explains that we could easily shut this tap off by banning the drug or strictly regulating it. But know, it's way more importnat to have crap like sudafed on the shelf. Then there is all the other drugs that the US launders and distributes. The only time you ever here about a king pin going down is when he decides to keep too much of the USG share. Time to invade Panama! Next stop Columbia. Might as well wack Chavez while were down there...
RossK
5 years ago
Kudos to Mr. Struthers!
And the Tyee, for hooking him as a regular.
This is a powerful vidword post and it raises many important points to ponder, including just how fragile Canadians freedoms are becoming as the deep integration moves forward. And none of that requires one to buy into wild conspiracy theories (see cross-border scannable documents and no fly list harmonizations).
However, I do have one quibble with Mr. Struthers words this time around, and that is the fact that he ascribes a level of nobility to Mr. McCain's intentions that I feel are unwarranted. Specifically, I think it would be wrong to assume that Mr. McCain and his advisors did not understand how much, and how often, the Rovians have used signing statements to neuter and and all legislation they don't like. Further, if you actually examine the wording of Mr. McCain's own resolution carefully you will find that it is, itself, full of loopholes based on how it actually defines torture.
.
IAMC
5 years ago
US Fixation
How about examining the fate of a prisoner in Iran?
Why pick on the USA? They are not the problem. Radical Muslims are.
Jimmy Carter gave them their state in Iran to start all of this mess.
Where is this stupidity coming from?
Give your liberal heads a shake.
G West
5 years ago
Because Ron
No one's picking on the USA, Ron. Have you been down a hole for the last 3 ½ years?
Out of circulation? On an extended drunk?
They are the self-proclaimed bastion of freedom, liberty, democracy and detention without charge. They're the ones who trumpet their virtues while suspending habeas corpus. They're the ones who are fighting a disastrous war in Iraq that even Israel now says was a mistake and is creating a nightmare.
Next question?
IAMC
5 years ago
G West is a Dickhead
G.; My post didn't attack you or anyone posting on this website. Yet you feel you need to attack me and describe my as a drunk. Where are you coming from?
I simply stated a view that supports the history of our current conflict with those from The Middle East.
Jimmy Carter blew it. Liberals don't make good leaders.
Radical Muslim was marginalized until President Carter pulled the Persian Rug from underneath The Shaw.
Jimmy listened to his left wing Democratic advisers. They said " Jimmy, you are all concerned about human rights, what about this Shaw guy who has a secret police?
Jimmy didn't realize that The Shaw was a friend of the west. He was transforming Iran into a Western Democracy. He wanted Iran to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Carter facilitated the Islamist Revolution. That got us the Ayatollah . Radical Muslim now has a country, with oil and money.
Oh, how our world could have been better with The Shaw surviving in power.
Jimmy had to live with the nationalisation of American assets, a debt to the Saudis who he turned to to bail him out,and the hostage thing.
He was a disaster as President.
G West
5 years ago
Ron
You said:
I disagreed and gave you several reasons why?
Those who make justifiable critiques of the United States - especially as regards their treatment of prisoners and the denial of access to the justice system is hardly unfair.
The US bills itself as the bastion of justice, liberty and freedom - not to mention democracy. Iran does no such thing.
Pointing out the shortcomings of liars and bullies is nothing to be ashamed of.
In fact, you should be ashamed of supporting them.
By the way, I've seen no socialists and liberals posting here who trumpet Iran as a bastion of freedom. I guess you invented that, or did Rush tell you that's the way things are. Either that or you’re turning into a dipsomaniac.
George Bush is the worst President in the history of the United States. Bar none. He even beats Richard Nixon.
apeman888
5 years ago
...A modicum of civility, please!
IAMC and Gwest - take it outside. This is a Comments Section, not an Impotent Range Venting Section. You two are worse than the conspiracy nuts. Or maybe you ARE the conspiracy nuts, and this is all part of the Plan. Either way, lighten up.
-Andrew Struthers
PS: RossK - how exactly did I attribute "a level of nobility" to Senator McCain while simulataneously writing "It's not a war until John McCain gets taken prisoner and tortured"? Methinks 'tis a kind of magic, aye, and thou hast tricked thyself!
Beacon Hill
5 years ago
Time For New Material
I've got to admit that calling IAMC a drunk is becoming a tad stale.
G West
5 years ago
Ron and dipsomania
I dunno Beacon Hill, someone who posts this kind of thing:
and then turns around at the next opportunity and blames Islamic fundamentalism on Jimmy Carter must be drinking something besides tea and coffee.
I'd say being two sheets to the wind would at least be a half-excuse for believing such utter nonsense.
IAMC is more than a trifle stale. And I certainly worry that I'm driving on the same streets with him.
wcullen
5 years ago
9/11 Conspiracy Stories
For the BS behind the 9/11 conspiracy theories (those even worth addressing) see the current issue of Skeptic (Vol. 12 No. 4 2006).
apeman888
5 years ago
Also see
Thanks wcullen
Left-leaners might also benefit from the thoughts of their patron saint, Noam Chomsky, on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzGd0t8v-d4&mode=related&search=
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoDqDvbgeXM&mode=related&search=
-Andrew Struthers
apeman888
5 years ago
To Greg Felton
Dude:
Unlike Mr. Black, I believe in free speech. But I must ask you to peddle your crazy papers elsewhere.
-Andrew Struthers
PS: loved you as Schroeder in those old Charlie Brown cartoons