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I am guessing, the crucifixion was special entertainment for the supposedly Christian Trump and his supposedly Christian administration to remind them that Jesus Christ died by crucifixion. Nice way to commemorate these Easter days, right?
Dave DeCamp at Antiwar
Saudis Execute 37 in the Kingdom's Largest Mass Execution Since 2016
On Tuesday April 23rd, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia put to death 37
men on charges of terrorism, in their largest mass execution since 2016.
One of the prisoners was crucified after being beheaded. Most of the
prisoners were of the Shia minority, and according to Amnesty International the trials were shams that relied on information gained through torture and forced confessions.
One of the men executed was arrested for a crime he committed when he was only 16 years old. Abdulkareem al-Hawaj
was arrested January 16th 2014 at a checkpoint in Saudi Arabia’s
Eastern Province, for his involvement in anti-government protests in
2012. He was allegedly tortured and forced to sign a confession that
would seal his fate of capital punishment.
The Saudi Press Agency issued a statement,
"The Ministry of Interior announced that capital punishment has been
carried out in the regions of Riyadh, Makkah, Madinah, Eastern, Qassim,
and Asir on a number of culprits who have adopted the extremist
terrorist ideology and formed terrorist cells to spread corruption,
insecurity, chaos, sedition and sectarianism and threaten the public
peace and social welfare in addition to attacking security headquarters
by using explosive bombs, killing of a number of security men and
breaching of the trust in cooperation with hostile parties harming the
supreme interests of the country."
Not surprisingly this story has barely been a blip on the radar in
the mainstream media. Since the outrage over the killing of Washington
Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi has quieted down the mainstream media
has gone back to almost ignoring the war in Yemen and other human rights
violations of one of our major allies. A recent article from FAIR written on April 9th said MSNBC had failed to cover the war in Yemen at all up to that point in 2019......
Mostly on the shocking arrest of Julian Assange which has affected all people who love freedom and justice for one and all. If you value your own freedom of speech and hate injustice, you would be in camp Assange ... no matter what you thought of some of his views. People will always have their own views which might not align with everything you stand for ... but should that mean that you hold those particular opinions and views from them, against them? Some of your own views might be taboo and downright stupid sounding to others ... but I am sure you would hope that if you were one day to fall into a similar situation akin to Assange's ... you would hope for support from your fellow human beings.
Assange's only crime has been that he has made many of us far less stupid when it comes to watching/listening/reading government propaganda relayed through the MSM, which is the mode of operation of all war-loving (war dependent) governments of today .. the USA being at the forefront.
Article 1
Seymour Hersh at NewYorker in May 2004
Torture at Abu Ghraib
In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu
Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most
notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living
conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is
possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in
twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding
pits.
In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the
huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that
could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition
authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and
toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a
U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there
were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians,
many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway
checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common
criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the
coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the
insurgency against the coalition forces.
Last June, Janis
Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the
800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in
Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was
an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with
the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight
battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like
her, had no training in handling prisoners.
General Karpinski, who
had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant
in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an
interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times,
she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living
conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were
concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”
A month later,
General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a
major investigation into the Army’s prison system, authorized by
Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was
under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, wascompleted in late February.
Its conclusions about the institutional
failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically,
Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were
numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at
Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba
reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police
Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community.
(The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to
Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the
wrongdoing:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the
phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees;
beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to
stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed
against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical
light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to
frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one
instance actually biting a detainee.
There was
stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed
witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic
evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses
were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of
their “extremely sensitive nature.”......
Article 2
Karen J Greenberg at the TheNation on April 28, 2014
Abu Ghraib: A Torture Story without a Hero or an Ending
Despite all evidence to the contrary, many
Americans continue to believe that brutality, torture and rank
illegality is the road to national safety.
It’s mind-boggling. Torture is still up for grabs in America. No one
questions anymore whether the CIA waterboarded one individual
eighty-three times or another 186 times. The basic facts are no longer
in dispute either by those who champion torture or those who, like
myself, despise the very idea of it. No one questions whether some
individuals died being tortured in American custody. (They did.) No one questions that it was a national policy devised by those at the very highest levels of government. (It was.)
But many, it seems, still believe that the torture policy, politely
renamed in its heyday “the enhanced interrogation program,” was a good thing for the country.
Now, the nation awaits the newest chapter in the torture debate
without having any idea whether it will close the book on American
torture or open a path of pain and shame into the distant future. No one
yet knows whether we will be allowed to awake from the nightmarish and
unacceptable world of illegality and obfuscation into which torture and
the network of offshore prisons, or “black sites,” plunged us all.
April 28 marks the tenth anniversary of the moment that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were made public in this country. On that day a decade ago, the TV news magazine 60 Minutes II broadcast
the first photographs from that American-run prison in “liberated”
Iraq. They showed US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing
Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen
and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs,
or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with
wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.
Thus began America’s public odyssey with torture, a story in many
chapters and still missing an ending. As the Abu Ghraib anniversary
nears and the White House, the CIA and various senators still battle
over the release of a summary of a 6,300-page report by the Senate
Intelligence Committee on Bush-era torture policies, it’s worth
considering the strange journey we’ve taken and wondering just where we
as a nation mired in the legacy of torture might be headed.
Chapter One: Revelations
The odyssey started with the shock of those 60 Minutes II photos, followed two days later by the reporting of veteran New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh.
Having seen even more grim photographs and interviewed many in the
chain of command stretching from Abu Ghraib to the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and the Pentagon, Hersh painted a picture of a deliberate policy of
abuse. He traced Abu Ghraib’s crimes to pressure from
“military-intelligence teams, which included CIA officers and linguists
and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors,” urging
the production—and fast—of crucial information from US captives in Iraq.
Towards this end, the guards at Abu Ghraib were encouraged to “soften
up” the detainees for interrogation.
That summer and fall of 2004, the Washington Post, The New York Times, the ACLU and others got their hands on several Bush administration memos justifying
and legalizing torture. These had largely been written by John Yoo and
Jay Bybee, lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of
Justice, and they proved grim reading indeed. The documents provided
uniquely tortured definitions of torture that made almost any act in
which the infliction of pain didn’t rise to the level of “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” acceptable. As if that weren’t enough, they developed no less tortured
theories of executive power in which the president as
commander-in-chief retained the right to authorize torture for national
security reasons, despite its illegality under domestic, military and
international law..................
Lots of info in the article below.
Caitlin Johnstone at her blog
How You Can be Certain that the US charge against Assange is Fraudulent
Julian Assange sits in a jail cell today after being betrayed by the
Ecuadorian government and his home country of Australia. A British judge
named Michael Snow has found the WikiLeaks founder guilty
of violating bail conditions, inserting himself into the annals of
history by labeling Assange “a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own
selfish interest.” So that tells you how much of a fair and impartial
legal proceeding we can expect to see from the British judicial process
on this matter.
But the real reason that Assange has been
surrendered by the Ecuadorian government, imprisoned by the British
government, and ignored by the Australian government is not directly
related to any of those governments, but to that of the United States of
America. An unsealed indictment from the Trump administration’s District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accompanied by an extradition request, charges Assange with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer” during Chelsea Manning’s 2010 leak of government documents exposing US war crimes.
This
charge is premised on a fraudulent and manipulative distortion of
reality, and you may be one hundred percent certain of it. Let me
explain.
You can be absolutely certain that this charge is bogus
because it isn’t based on any new information. The facts of the case
have not changed, the information hasn’t changed, only the narrative has
changed. In 2010 the United States opened a secret grand jury
in Virginia to investigate whether Assange and WikiLeaks could be
prosecuted for the publication of the Manning leaks, and then-Attorney
General Eric Holder announced that the Obama administration was conducting
“an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into the matter. The Trump
administration has not turned up any new evidence that the Obama
administration was unable to find in this active, ongoing criminal
investigation (US government surveillance has surely acquired some new
tricks since 2010, but time travel isn’t one of them), and indeed it
does not claim to have turned up any new evidence........
