This is from the 2016 Flintstones comic and it's WILD
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flintstones_(2016_comic_book)
TIL its an actual book, not just a couple of panels, thx!
To be fair, in the aughts the US George W. Bush administration totally did torture for no good reason (except so that plutocrats could enjoy knowing brown people were suffering) and the US public let them get away with it, and even let the congressional report stay classified.
The Palestinian genocide's been part of the plan for a century now, though it was originally a British colonial plan.
The only difference now is that news media moguls don't control the narrative. Hopefully that's enough to get them to stop, but I doubt it.
Watching Iran's recent attempted revolution, violence is always unthinkable until the hour it's inevitable. They'll keep killing until enough people decide collectively it's time to kill back. Our plutocrats would rather scorch the Earth than lose their power, and this is exactly what is happening. Even if we just want them to be part of an egalitarian society with the rest of us.
I'm pretty sure it's not a good thing that Mahsa Amini has to die before Molotov cocktails are thrown and precincts are burned, if that is what is necessary to stop genocide. The problem is, it isn't going to help Mahsa Amini. It didn't help Armita Geravand. Whoever triggers the next public unrest won't be helped either, so this paradigm sucks.
So I wonder if all of Palestine will have to be lost before the people of the world are willing to take seriously the threat that our plutocratic elite present to the rest of us (and themselves). I hope not. But then I'm afraid the death of five million Palestinians still won't be enough.
The US did it not because they hate brown people, but because they value profit over brown people. The racism was profit-driven, out of pure greed for the military industrial complex, not because old neighbor Jim hates Muslims.
The sheer scale of war crimes the US has committed worldwide is purely out of desire for ever-increasing profits at the cost of unimagimable cruelty to human beings it considers unworthy of sympathy.
In 1991, for example, the US bombed an Iraqi air raid shelter housing women and children, murdering 408 people. On the lower floor, there was a liquified 1 inch layer of human fat, and multiple bodies fused together.
Donald Rumsfield and Dickhole Cheney. Raytheon and Halliburton.
It's beyond disgusting.
Oh, when it comes to torture, we can rule out actual proper interrogation, given the military (and CIA) were schooled enough to know the techniques developed by Hanns Scharff (which do not require violence or cruelty) are far more effective than enhanced interrogation. To the contrary, Rumsfeld actively sought to circumvent Geneva Convention proscriptions against torture, even trying to suggest waterboarding isn't torture. (Plenty of pundits, whether right-wing and trying to be macho, or left-wing and trying to demonstrate that they are being impartial, got waterboarded by SERE to get a first-hand experience, and they all found it was unbearable, traumatic and caused lasting -- possibly permanent -- psychological symptoms. It est, waterboarding looks, smells, waddles and quacks like torture.)
The only reason people were tortured by agents of the United States, either by the US armed forces, or by CIA in its extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program, is because plutocrats with influence within the government wanted revenge over 9/11 and blamed every Arab Muslim in existence, and wanted them to suffer.
This doesn't necessarily inform the countless other war crimes that were committed in the global War on Terror, or Iraqi Freedom, but there really is no strategic or diplomatic reason to torture, so it had to be done for aristocratic kicks.
