Stanley A. McChrystal Quotes

Martin Luther King and his SCLC were demonstrating in St. Augustine, Florida against the segregation in that community. The local law enforcement officers had conspired with the local KKK groups to allow the group to beat the demonstrators and then arrest the demonstrators for disturbing the peace and demonstrating in the face of a local injunction against the demonstrations. Then the local authorities placed huge bail on the arrestees that they could not easily meet. While they were in custody, they were tortured in various ways. Judge Simpson, vacated the injunction and ordered that the demonstrators not be arrested, and if they were for any other crime reasonable bail be required. He also recommended prosecution of the wrong-doers. Remarkably, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents not to protect the civil rights demonstrators on the grounds that the FBI should not provide protective services. Hoover had a personal hatred of King who he claimed was a Communist, a sex pervert, and a law breaker. The President then threatened the Florida Governor to send Federal Marshalls into St. Augustine if the state could not maintain law and order. The Governor and the Georgia Senators pleaded to stop the demonstrations which were being intensified because King and the Civil Rights Demonstrators were gaining huge sympathy with the general public as a result of the journalists’ reports and Judge Simpson’s findings. The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was being filibustered by the Southern senators at that time and this was a tactical victory, but some of the civil rights demonstrators were paying a fearful physical price. Judge Simpson died 4 year later, hated by the KKK and other segregationists in Florida. However in time, even the local Floridians came to appreciate the Judge’s role. The graphic shows the Federal Courthouse named in Judge Simpson’s honor.

At that time in American History, the George W. Bush Justice Department had a small team of lawyers who wrote a legal brief that defined torture in such a way that many of the most common forms of torture were no longer legal torture, even though they had been torture in American law and were again torture after this embarrassing episode of American history. The renamed techniques were called “enhanced interrogation” and a few terrorist suspects were subjected to it before the rules and laws were changed and the “legal opinions” nullified. The FBI and military intelligence did not use the so called enhanced interrogation techniques as they felt that torture produced unreliable intelligence as the victim will say anything the questioner wants to hear to end the torture. They also thought the Justice department memo was sloppy and defective legal work. Senator McCain was a particular expert on torture in that he had, during the Vietnam War, been captured and imprisoned for 7 years during which he had been tortured on several occasions.

She was sentenced to death for the bombing of public facilities but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was released after independence. She raised the moral issue of torture which was very commonly used by the French then, but she was silent about the morality of exploding bombs and killing civilians. Women however did not fare very well in the independent, post revolution Algeria—see {36994} and {36995}.

Two years later the CIA adopted an official formal policy against inhumane treatment during interrogation and the manual was changed.

Neilson had flown in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. It was the first bombing of Tokyo in WWII. He was shot down and captured. He was tortured including the torture of ‘waterboarding.’ The Japanese who administered the torture and who allowed it were tried before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—the Tokyo War Crime Trials. They were convicted and punished. In the first decade of the 21st century the George W, Bush Administration argued that waterboarding was not necessarily torture despite the fact that Americans had tried and punished foreigners who engaged in the practice and even Americans who did. It was completely outlawed by military regulations but some Americans felt that it should be allowed by the CIA in dealing with terrorists.

He was finally brought to justice after being protected by the right wing for many years. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. See related quote.

Von Richthofen, cousin of the “Red Baron,” was justifying tactics that the Germans tried out in Spain before the Second World War—specifically the complete obliteration of Guernica by bombing and strafing although there were no military targets in the city. Guernica was the first city ever completely destroyed by aerial bombardment. The atrocity inspired Picasso’s great paining of that name.