What Kind Of Nation Would Allow Itself To Be Ruled By Madmen?

We once famously asked in the years following the end of the evil regime in Germany in 1945. From Tom Dispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174953/why_cheney_won_t_take_down_iran Reality Bites Back Why the U.S. Won't Attack Iran By Tom Engelhardt wherein we find: An "unnamed Administration official" -- generally assumed to be Karl Rove -- famously put it this way to journalist Ron Suskind back in October 2004: "[He] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" Now that's one fine madness. And...it certainly reminds me of some of the nonsense old Kaiser Willy used to say; he and some of his successors as leaders of Germany. We have been led and ruled by madmen for at least 8 years; totally corrupt, for their absolute power has corrupted them absolutely. What kind of nation would allow itself to be ruled by madmen? The answer is: a nation whose fondest aspirations and dreams closely approximate the madness of those madmen. In sum, a nation whose view of reality is so skewed that it is lunatic.

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Wednesday, July 02, 2008 The Abyss Has Drilled Fracking Laser Holes in Our Skulls with Its Stare... Shrillblog The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. ...other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.” The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance”...