America on the Brink of Horror

[Jim Sagle]

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Torture, Murder, Bush, Kissinger and The Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina

October 9, 2006

Dateline -- Buenos Aires, Argentina

For some 30 years, the Argentine women known as the Madres (Mothers) de La Plaza de Mayo have marched every Thursday in front of the Presidential Palace of Argentina. They gather in memory of their children and grandchildren, who were among the estimated 30,000 people who disappeared during "Operation Condor." Another 50,000 people were murdered.

What happened during Operation Condor is so horrific – all done in the name of the safety and security of "the nation" – that it is barely speakable. The torture included one of the Bush Administration’s favorite techniques – waterboarding – and many other methods. Families were forced to watch or listen to their love ones being mutilated. Friends were required to conduct torture on those that they knew. Pregnant women were allowed to stay alive until their babies were born, then they were murdered. Their children were given to military families who adopted them.

It is not a large leap – however much Americans would like to think otherwise – from the summary arrest, torture and occasional murder of foreigners to applying the same process to residents of the United States. Suspicion or politically-motivated accusations of the government become equivalent to a sentence of guilt. Bush has already declared persons who disagree with his Iraq policies "tools of the terorrists."

For some nations, their long nightmare of people being declared "enemies of the state" by faceless men, then tortured and killed is over.

For the U.S., the long nightmare of the disappeared is just beginning to take shape.

More…

How can we have sunk so low in six short years...

[Freedom_from_Chains]

1. People turn a blind eye because sometimes the truth is just too

horrible to look at.

[HereSince1628]

2. How did we sink so low so fast? Because

Our beloved DCDems didn't or couldn't believe it would happen here, and when it did they had no idea about how to be an effective opposition party and, apparently in the interest of not looking weak on terror, lacked commitment to protecting the consititution from its abuse by those in power.

So we are reliving an old story from the history of totalitarian movements.

[jus_the_facts]

3. When history repeats....do we notice?!

[Jcrowley]

4. Front Page

K&R

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. But why is Argentina complaining?

They are a wonderful vacation spot these days, now that their free market experiment collapsed. Makes you kind of wonder where Argentina would be today, if they went the other way?

[bullimiami]

6. so low, so quick. how? because the veneer of civilization and morality is

very thin. a handful of powerful people is all it took.

we will see if we have what it takes to stop it.

[mopinko]

7. not 6 years.

the slide started in earnest in the raygun years. all the same actors now have ultimate power. our long time coming nightmare has arrived.

[davekriss]

8. There was a chilling art display...

...in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a year ago. You walk into a slightly darkened room in the back of the gallery and you see little insets in the walls. Within these insets there stood simply a pair of mundane high-heel shoes. The shoes were backlitted, and sat behind a stretched yellowing parchment roughly sewn into the wall to form a cover. The parchment reminds one of drying, yellowed skin. You walk around the room and there are dozens of shoes embedded in the wall this way, red shoes, black shoes, shoes for office work, shoes for the Saturday night dance. Why shoes behind decaying skins? Each pair or shoes quietly speaks of troubled past. You feel uncomfortable, the lighting and stretched skin drives you to an increasing sense that something is not quite right. When you walk out of the back-room, into the bright light of the main gallery and read the sign, you burst into tears. The shoes, they are memorials to women tortured and disappeared during the American Holocaust in Central America during the Reagan-Bush years. For each pair of shoes, there is a name. There was a woman who is no more, who had to die so a right-wing client state stays safely in the fold of the American neo-imperial political-economic model where profit precedes humanity.

Could it happen here? Well, John Negroponte was Ambassador to Honduras during some of the worst years of the Holocaust. He's now Director of National Security, instead of overseeing "intelligence" operations in a few unfortunate nations on Central America, he's now overseeing all "intelligence" now that he's back from Iraq after implementing the "Salvadoran Solution". It COULD happen here!

[GeorgeGist]

9. On the BRINK?

Americans are just beginning to crawl out of the abyss.