Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture

[Jcrowley]

Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 7, 2006.

The thousands of mercenary security contractors employed in the Bush administration's "War on Terror" are billed to American taxpayers, but they've handed Osama Bin Laden his greatest victories -- public relations coups that have transformed him from just another face in a crowd of radical clerics to a hero of millions in the global South (posters of Bin Laden have been spotted in largely Catholic Latin America during protests against George W. Bush).

The internet hums with viral videos of British contractors opening fire on civilian vehicles in Iraq as part of a bloody game, stories about CIA contractors killing prisoners in Afghanistan, veterans of Apartheid-era South African and Latin American death squads discovered among contractors' staffs and notoriously shady Russian arms dealers working for occupation authorities. One Special Forces operator told Amnesty International that some contractors are in it just because they "really want to kill somebody and they can do it easier there ... everybody is like that, but a dangerously high element."

While most experts believe that Al Qaeda no longer has the ability to mount the kind of sophisticated attacks that brought it so much notoriety in the first place, its media operations are stronger than ever. From their caves -- or wherever they are holed up -- Bin Laden and his henchmen claim that the "War on Terror" is just a thin cover for a U.S.-led war on Islam. Rightly or wrongly, these incidents prove his point to millions of people around the world.

Osama Bin Laden's greatest victories in the crucial media war have been the series of prisoner abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and a number of detention centers across Iraq, the most infamous of which is Saddam Hussein's former torture complex at Abu Ghraib.

http://www.alternet.org/story/41314

[whistle]

1. Time to cut the pentagon funds off then

[mom cat]

2. Time to drastically cut Pentagon funding. They should be able to manage

quite well wit the trillions of dollars that have gone missing!

[ShortnFiery]

3. Shameful and disgusting ...

This is NOT the America that I want to live in ... these evil leaders must be thrown out! :puke: