People who feel the need to answer the canard that "if you were/are against the war in Iraq then you were/are for Saddam Hussein continuing in power" will soon have the perfect rebuttal. Former CIA asset Saddam Hussein Al-Tikrit is being replaced with current CIA asset Ayad Allawi. If we are patient there will soon be a list of atrocities related to Allawi that we can cite to people who repeat that absurd lie. They may have already started. Of course, there are a few problems, one is that while Hussein was no doubt a brutal tyrant, the stories about him are both well known and in some cases wild, untrue fantasies concocted by the Office of Special Plans and other Black Ops organizations in the government. In the case of Allawi, as long as he follows Washington's orders, such stories will be suppressed, spun and countered with lies. Just as any nasty story, no matter how untrue that could be spun about the former dictator found its way into the mainstream press, it will be unlikely that the things Iraq's new dictator actually does will make it into the establishment media. (Expect anything that does get over the wall to be attacked by ClearChannel's stable of populist demagogues.)

The thing to remember is that no one who make the "anti-war pro-Saddam" statement actually believes that. Nor do the people care if an Iraqi dictator is brutalizing Iraqis (much as they don't care that Islam Karimov is brutalizing Uzbekistanis). They just like to say it to put you on the defensive. After all, this war has been a debacle. The one thing that I learned from the war is that as bad as the Democrats are, the majority of Republicans (excepting a small number, like Representative Ron Paul) should never be allowed near the levers of power under any circumstances. Thus, in our two party system, the slightly less awful Democrats win by default. (By the way, I am aware that plenty of individual Democratic politicians are indeed worse than their Republican opponents, but I'm talking about en masse. It's a Hobson's choice, really. No choice at all.)

Well, this has hit the news:

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB

Pictures are worth a thousand words, (Not work safe!):

Photos of Iraqis Being Abused by US Personnel

Way back, soon after the degenerate in the White House posed for his "Mission Accomplished" pictures on the U.S.S. Lincoln, and it still seemed like the American colonial project in Iraq was going smoothly, I was collecting stories of thug-like American soldiers, stupidly humiliating ordinary Iraqis for no reason other than that it "felt good." Or as I told my brother, and this is meant sarcastically, "These soldiers think, if you can rub someones face in the dirt, why not do it? I mean, what's going to happen? That person or his/her relatives aren't going to go home, grab and RPG and start trying to kill you, right?"

Well, we now have the story to end all stories, torture, rape, sexual humiliation and murder all coming out of one of Hussein's most notorious prisons, but this time perpetrated by grinning American soldiers instead of the CIA's former man in Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

I have to ask this, what kind of idiots take pictures of stuff like this?!?! Are these people's IQ's in the single digits as well as being morally depraved?!?!

For example, on Falun Gong's website, I see pictures of the results of Chinese torture, but you know what I don't see? Pictures of grinning Chinese guards doing the torture as it happens. The reason why you won't see any pictures like that is because the Red Guard won't take them, so they can have plausible deniability later. I. E. so they can say, "Yes, the members of Falun Gong are so brainwashed by their cult that they do that stuff to themselves. It is regrettable, and one of the reasons why we send them to our Reform Through Work camps is to get them to reject that superstitious brainwashing." Intelligent, non-brainwashed people won't buy it, but it works with brainwashed Commies and people who don't want to know what is going on. The best they have are drawings of what goes on.

Well, I mean knowing what goes on in American prisons, where cruel and unusual punishment is carried out on a daily basis administered by fellow inmates, I'm not surprised by what goes on in America's foreign prisons.

So, now we all wait for blowback.... (Of course, it may be twenty or thirty years before we get hit and I'll hopefully be living in Thailand or a nice island someplace by then.)