AP news piece ["Dick Cheney indictment in south Texas moves forward"
printed in Aurora Sentinel Thur. Nov. 20] says:

'Raymondville, Texas--A Texas judge has set an arraignment for Vice
President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and
other officials accused of involvement in prisoner abuse....

'Willacy County District Attorney Juan Guerra accuses Cheney,
Gonzales, a state senator and others of involvement in prisoner abuse
at a federal detention center in south Texas....'

Dr. Szasz has already given a comparative study of institutional
psychiatry and the Inquisition. Makes one wonder if bureaucrats have
now decreed that political dissent is a form of mental illness (like
slaves who ran for freedom were diagnosed with drapetomania).
Jonathan Kirsch, in 'The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of
Terror in the Name of God,' warns:

'All the weaponry and tactics that have been deployed in the war on
terror are justified by precisely the same theological stance once
invoked in the war on heresy. Nowadays, of course, Osama bin Laden
is the Devil whose cloven hoof is detected behind every act of
terrorism around the world, but all concerns about the impact of the
war on terror on our civil liberties are checkmated by the same
theological absolutism that the grand inquisition once
invoked: "Either you're with us, or you're with the enemy," declared
George W. Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. "Either you're
with those who love freedom, or you're with those who hate innocent
life." When the argument was made by the Inquisition, the enemy
consisted of men and women who preferred to read the Bible in
translation, or who were persuaded that the sun revolved around the
earth, or who saw some merit in herbal remedies, or who happened to
have a distant Jewish relative. Nowadays, we might ask ourselves
whether the victims of the war on terror might not include more than
a few innocents, too.'

If Obama chooses to excuse Cheney and other war criminals, he along
with other Congressional leaders and bureaucrats should be tried for
complicity, after his impeachment! Or is it possible that CIA
psychiatrists could have them all declared insane so they wouldn't
have to stand trial? (Prosecutors in Nuremberg didn't go into some of
the more bizarre occult beliefs of the Nazis, because they didn't
want them to have the option of the insanity plea!)

--- In thomasszaszdiscussion@yahoogroups.com, "sangchenyeshe"
<sangchenyeshe@...> wrote:
>
> Saw in a recent AP piece [in "Aurora(CO)Sentinel," Tuesday Nov. 18]
> that "Obama's incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal
> charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in
> harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the George W.
> Bush presidency." [For more on these charges see Manson family
> prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's new book 'The Prosecution of George
W.
> Bush for Murder'.] It should be noted that some of
> these "interrogation techniques" are remarkably similar to
> psychiatric treatments supported by Joe Biden, Obama's VP choice.
> In 'Pharmacracy', Thomas Szasz describes government practices for
> which there still hasn't been full accounting:
>
> 'The "scientific control" of behavior based on the "science of
> psychiatry" is a gigantic confidence game which consists of
> transforming, by means of psychiatric jargon, what is perfectly
> obvious into what is impenetrably mysterious. Its inevitable
result
> is a series of crimes against humanity, usually perpetrated by
> the 'creme de la creme' of the profession. In the 1940s and 1950s,
> some of the most prominent American medical institutions,
> psychiatrists, and psychologists were engaged in
> medical "experiments" that differed only in degree and scope from
> those engaged in by Nazi physicians experimenting on the inmates of
> concentration camps. Working in secret for the CIA, psychiatrists
> systematically poisoned people and used electric shock treatments
to
> destroy their memories, ostensibly in an effort to discover methods
> of "mind control." Like all psychiatric "abuses," this massive
> criminal conspiracy against the public was quickly forgotten.
>
> 'As long as we have no historical-moral accounting and hence no
> collective memory for psychiatry's crimes against humanity--similar
> to the accounting and memory for the wrongs of Christianity
> recognized by the papacy, slavery recognized by the American
people,
> and the Holocaust recognized by Germany and the Western world--
> no 'ad hoc' criticism of psychiatric "abuses" will have any impact
> on the prestige and power of psychiatry and no criticism of the
> concept of mental illness will be persuasive.'
>
> If the incoming administration is willing to overlook the CIA's
> employing psychiatric violence, is it possible that Obama will go
> further, using his executive power to overturn Executive Order
> 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting assassinations?
>
> '...what reaction could be expected from the American people in the
> event that they became aware that a policy such as assassination
was
> being pursued by their government[?] No accurate answer is
> possible, but the author suspects that if such compromise should
> occur, the reaction of the average citizen would be one of initial
> surprise followed by acceptance of the act if its need were
obvious.'
>
> --from 'Selective Assassination as an Instrument of National
Policy'
> (Paladin Press)
>
> If the public can be expected to accept assassination, it is likely
> that barbarisms like lobotomy, electric shock, and chemical
> castration will continue.
>
> How did the Liberal elite come to embrace violence as a political
> tool? Author Stephen Marshall ,in 'Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: The
> New Liberal Menace in America,' explains:
>
> 'Faced with the loss of prestige and influence in the world and the
> real threat of economic decline, a core group of highly
influential
> [Baby-]boomer liberals blinked. Realizing they are losing ground
in
> a competition that will not favor those who play by established
> rules of liberal society, they have thrown in their lot with
empire,
> playing good cop to the neoconservatives' militarized, warmongering
> bad cop. Worse, they are pimping a system that has been reduced to
> a memory of its original intent. It is 'the idea' of America that
> they are proposing that soldiers die for. Modern liberalism is not
> based on the archaic virtues of "individual liberty" as pronounced
> by its founding philosophies. Modern liberalism is now involved in
> a mortal struggle for its own survival, giving way to a system that
> has a tendency to exploit far more than liberate. It is the
> antithesis of that proscribed by its originators. And yet they are
> willing to maintain the illusion that America is bringing an
> evolved, humane political and economic system without acknowledging
> it's a front for the free market engine that, once implemented,
will
> ensure the short-term strengthening of their own economy. If the
> neocons are wolves on the hunt for food and territory, then the
> liberals are wolves in sheep's clothing.'
>
> Now I understand why Dr. Szasz sometimes refers to himself as
> a "Libertarian" psychiatrist!
>
> --- In thomasszaszdiscussion@yahoogroups.com, Martin Kessler
> <titaniummdk@> wrote:
> >
> >
> > This has been one of the most disappointing presidential
> elections - a hobbesian choice. I couldn't stand either one of
> them. And the VP part made the mess smell even worse. Sarah
Palin -
> a dinosaur, Joe Biden - instituted the office of the "Drug Czar" -

> Your quote from Szasz's Pharmacracy, confirms Biden's hostility
> towards free market drugs and freedom from forced (drug treatment)
> religious conversion.
> > Martin
> >
> >
> >
> > To: thomasszaszdiscussion@: sangchenyeshe@: Sun, 9 Nov 2008
> 22:39:04 +0000Subject: [ThomasSzaszDiscussion] two-party system
> >
> >
> >
> > 'I am not alone in regarding the two-party system as a false
> stratification, a dumb-show concocted for the public as a means to
> distract attention from the ruling elite.'--Adam Parfrey,
from 'Cult
> Rapture''"I would hopefully be a good role model. I'm in recovery,"
> declares Cindy McCain, wife of Senator and former presidential
> hopeful John McCain (R-Az). Mrs McCain had used controlled
> substances that she had stolen while she worked as a member of
> a "charity she had set up to send medical relief to the Third
> World."'--Thomas Szasz, from 'Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in
> America''...American law, medicine, and public opinion now regard
> not only involuntary confinement in a mental hospital, but also
> involuntary participation in a so-called drug treatment program as
a
> bona fide medical treatment. The following statement, in 'The
> Handbook of Drug Control in the United States', edited by
University
> of Delaware Professor James Inciardi and U.S. Senator Joseph Biden,
> Jr. (D-Del), is illustrative: "Civil commitment is frequently used
> with addicts who are arrested for criminal activity; with criminal
> charges pending, the addict can be coerced into treament and
> retained long enough to receive the benefits of a treatment
> program."'--Thomas Szasz, from 'A Lexicon of Lunacy: Metaphoric
> Malady, Moral Responsibility, and Psychiatry'Wonder why Mrs. McCain
> hasn't been involuntarily commited. Maybe that'll be Biden's first
> order of business!
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
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