One of the grave tragedies of our times is how Iraqi deaths receive no accountability. This occurs at the point where President Obama and others hold the U.S. out as a major source to achieve global stability.

The question is this: How can the U.S. hold itself out as a guardian of peace and security when the subject of Iraqi deaths extending from that first “shock and awe” aerial assault to the present is ignored?

It should be recalled that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to assure Americans that newly developed U.S. “smart bombs” would penetrate the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but would bypass Iraq’s citizenry.

As for the U.S. dodging accountability, a comment made by General Colin Powell in the aftermath of the earlier Gulf War is instructive for the tragedy of avoiding responsibility that it denotes.

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According to a New York Times Special Edition almost two full f'ing years ago, and while you weren't looking because you were distracted by the dazzling light of the 2008 Presidential election campaign, both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had been finally brought to an end shortly after the November 2008 Presidential Election and before Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, and all US troops in both countries returned home immediately.

Across the country and around the world thousands took to the streets to celebrate the culmination of years of progressive pressuring of the Bush administration and Congress, but the rest of the media and most blogs never reported this because they were too busy shining you.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has publicly apologized to the country and the world on behalf of the Bush administration and admitted that the administration simply lied through it's teeth to justify the initial invasion, that she and Mr. Bush had known well before the invasion that Saddam Hussein lacked weapons of mass destruction, and that the hundreds of thousands of US Troops in the country in fact never did face instant obliteration.

"It was all complete and utter bullsh*t" Rice said tearfully, as she begged a weary nation for forgiveness, while she was led away in handcuffs by four burly officers.

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Originally published at Truthout

High-value detainees captured during the Bush administration's "war on terror," who were subjected to brutal torture techniques, were used as "guinea pigs" to gauge the effectiveness of various torture techniques, a practice that has raised troubling comparisons to Nazi-era human experimentation. according to a disturbing new report released by Physicians for Human Rights, an international doctors' organization.

PHR, based in Massachusetts, called on President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the US Congress to launch investigations into the role of physicians and psychiatric experts in the monitoring and assessments of the brutal interrogations.

"Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of [the] interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations," said the 27-page report, entitled "Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program." "Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."

The report is based on extensive research of previously declassified government documents that shows the crucial role medical personnel played in establishing and justifying the legality of the Bush administration's torture program. Many of the details contained in the document has already been painstakingly documented by Marcy Wheeler at her blog Emptywheel, and Truthout's own Jeffrey Kaye on his blog Invictus and in articles published on this web site and at Firedoglake.

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(from The Paragraph) During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Republicans latched onto three theories that allowed them to hand out tax cuts and pile up debt. One theory is “Starve the Beast“, which says to cut taxes now, so to bring on a budget crisis that would force cuts in social spending later. As one Republican consultant put it: “[W]e have to ‘starve the beast.’ Cutting their allowance is the only way to put politicians on a spending leash. And that means tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts.”¹ A second theory is “Voodoo Economics“, which says that tax cuts — especially for the rich and corporations — would heat the economy and actually boost tax revenue.² When Ronald Reagan touted this policy in the 1980 presidential race, George H. W. Bush, his opponent in the Republican primary, argued against it — and coined the term: “[I]t just isn’t gonna work … this type of what I call a voodoo economic policy.”³ A third theory is the “Two Santa Claus Theory“, which tells Republicans to play the tax-cut Santa so to rival the Democratic social-spending Santa. The author of the theory, Jude Wanniski, wrote: “The political tension in the marketplace of ideas must be between tax reduction and spending increases, and as long as Republicans have insisted upon balanced budgets, their influence as a party has shriveled …”⁴ These three theories came to a boil with the presidency of George W. Bush, which pushed through big tax cuts for millionaires and big spending hikes for the military.⁵ Seven months into his term, when a report showed that the surplus left by President Bill Clinton was quickly dwindling, Bush called it “incredibly positive news.”⁶ Later, Vice President Dick Cheney hit the same note, saying: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”⁷ After eight years of Bush — helped along by millionaires pumping their tax cut money into the Wall Street bubble, and the Bush regime borrowing gobs of money to waste on war — the economy crashed.⁸ Now, a year-and-a-half later, the country is still reeling from the Bush Crash — with one-in-five persons without full-time work, and cities and townships cutting teachers,firefighters and police.⁹

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The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has launched an investigation into Abu Zubaydah, the "high-value" detainee captured in March 2002 that the Bush administration wrongly claimed was one of the planners of 9/11 and a top al-Qaeda operative, according to several Capitol Hill sources.

The investigation of Zubaydah, who was tortured at a secret black site prison in Thailand, will be conducted alongside the committee's ongoing probe of the Bush administration's interrogation and detention policies. Zubdaydah has been detained at Guantanamo since 2006.

The panel will scrutinize thousands of pages of highly classified documents related to Zubaydah's detention and torture to determine, among other things, whether the "enhanced interrogation techniques" he was subjected to was accurately reflected in CIA cable traffic sent back to Langley, whether he ever provided actionable intelligence to his torturers, and how the CIA and other government agencies came to rely on flawed intelligence that led the Bush administration to classify him as the No. 3 person in al-Qaeda and its first high-value detainee, Hill sources said.

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Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the "worst of the worst."

During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, "all of whom were captured on a battlefield," are "terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden's] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker."

Click here to listen to Truthout's Jason Leopold discuss this story on The Peter B. Collins show (mp3).

But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.

And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners "are the worst of a very bad lot" and "dangerous" and "devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort."

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Yesterday we saw Helen Thomas talking with Paul Jay of The Real News about US Foreign Policy in the Middle East and her "one question" for Barack Obama about nuclear weapons in the region.

Today in part 2 of the interview Helen discusses with Jay the virtually total capitulation of US media to the Bush Administration and foreign policy establishment as they in almost complete lockstep became cheerleaders for war and manipulators and creators of public opinion rather than reporters, giving up any semblance of journalistic ethics.

Real News Network - March 28, 2010

If you want a stern dose of reality I recommend visiting an important website, one to keep you in touch with the real world in a society where media and political spin abound.

The site is USDebtClock.Org and all you need to do is look at the steadily changing, ever flickering numbers that literally jump out at you to get in touch with the real economic world. As I write this the grand total stands at over $12.4 trillion.

That encompasses $40,239 owed per citizen. While this figure has been quoted frequently when this verboten topic has been discussed the real figure of overriding importance that has tended to be overlooked is the amount per taxpayer.

While $40,239 is a far from insignificant figure, it is nowhere near as calamitous as the salient number determined by taxpayer in that the aforementioned figure includes a large population of children as well as numerous other citizens not paying current taxes.

The amount owed per taxpayer stands currently at $113,496. This leads us into another important category as the situation gets worse, not better.

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Sarah Palin is the same type of dream come true for media spin control operatives as was Ronald Reagan.

As a trained actor Ronald Reagan was accustomed to doing as directors told him. He was easily manageable for the Kitchen Cabinet of millionaires that launched him into politics in sixties’ California for his first run for governor along with his political strategy guiding hand, seasoned professional Stuart Spencer.

Spencer in concert with other handlers Reagan obtained when moving from state to national politics in a successful run for the presidency, resulting in two terms served, sought to turn a potential negative into a positive.

When skepticism was voiced over Reagan’s experience deficiencies in the political realm Spencer’s spin control campaign was to turn him into a “citizen politician” able to rise above partisan political considerations.

In the case of Reagan there was an effort made to make him look like the poised and responsive man in the neatly tailored suit, always ready to act on the people’s business and representing a sharp corporate style team.

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The latest effort of the Republican right and the leader they vigilantly rallied around not that long ago and have now forgotten is reminiscent of a ploy that occurred regularly within the now defunct Soviet Union.

When a former leader became too huge a burden to explain then he would be banished. Children would no longer study this leader’s period of history. An effort would be made within top leadership circles to erase that leader from memory.

The most celebrated example of Soviet attempted erasure came when Nikita Khrushchev took great pains to erase Joseph Stalin from memory. There were all those gulags, those knocks on doors in the middle of the night, then the transporting of opponents to undisclosed locations never to be heard from again.

The strategy was to treat the embarrassing historical period and the leader behind it as if those events and that individual never existed. Those Russians initiating that strategy are tactically similar to the Republican right and the eight years when they not only rallied mightily behind George W. Bush.

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