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The Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei (German for Secret State Police, abbreviated)
OGPU All Union State Political Board. Soviet Secret Police (1923 - 1934).
[Excerpt from Seymour Hersh's latest in the New Yorker]
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate "high value" targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror. A special-access program, or sap-subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level of security-was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All the so-called "black" programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051604A.shtml -- Those of us who were alive then remember the dreaded German Gestapo, which used all the techniques of terror, torture, and murder to subdue and control both the citizens of Germany and those of occupied territories and the comparable instrumentalities of the Stalinist era. Both used secretive tactics to carry out random, nefarious, and inhumane torture in their darkened prisons.
Seymour Hersh's forthcoming third New Yorker article, "How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib," of which the above are respectively web site and snippet along with Google's Gestapo and Ogpu references eerily suggest a parallel none too reassuring to the tactics and abuses being committed by the Bush administration in the name of combating terrorism. Given that the torture techniques outlined in Hersh's several articles and photo captured by ordinary small town Americans doing horrendous things to randomly arrested Iraqis, one cannot wonder but whether the Rumsfeld mind-set (roundly condemned by even the C.I.A.) does not smack of things truly vicious -- ghosts out of a nightmarish past.
Sometimes when I am fed up with what we Americans (or more accurately our government officials) are doing, I modify the spelling of our nation of which I am proud to be a citizen and for which I would have readily sacrificed my all in the line of duty -- to AmeriKa.
If this is what in fact we are seeing evolving before our eyes, I hope we can root it out before it destroys our reputation and the respect of the world for things American. I am ashamed to learn that we are ready to use such abuses of fellow human beings -- and to no good end. Such is the behavior of secretive totalitarian regimes.
Abu Ghraib looks all too much like an instance of the random use of terror to terrorize an occupied population! -- "A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy) -- Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
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