Semi-Open Weekend Thread: The Fairer Sex? There were Female Nazis Too. Introducing the CIA Report's 'Queen of Torture'

As is our habit, do consider this our semi-open weekend salon.

I hope that you have a good weekend feeding the gross and ugly maw of American greed and consumerism. My only purchase has been a copy of the new Planet of the Apes movie that was on sale for 13 dollars at Target. The powers that be claim that today is the best day for bargain hunting. I am going to wait until Sunday or Monday--the sales will be extended--to see what Chinese sweatshop produced clothing items I can procure.

What is your shopping strategy? Do you have any "must have" items that you are still searching for?

Today's sojourn to downtown Chicago will consist of looking for chaos and trouble as the consumer drones run amok, topsy turvy, bumping into each other for cheap gropes, pick-pocketing, and to experience the triumph of spending their money faster than everyone else.

Repeat after me:

Hail HYDRA!

Hail Festivus!

The shame of a nation continues. The mass media has nurtured a limited attention span among the American people. What should be the outrage of the year or decade is massaged into a tiny box of fleeting attention that lasts a minute or a second. Subsequently, the CIA torture report has already been thrown down the American people's memory hole (I doubt that will be the case for the country's enemies abroad).


Moreover, as I wrote here, and also explained in my opening promo on the last episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show, the United States is a violent and bloodthirsty country where torture was and remains the norm. In many ways--as revealed by recent polling data in support of torturing "terrorists"--the United States people do not have a conscience. I worry that American exceptionalism serves as a mask for mass sociopathy. Am I alone in my concern?

Bush, Cheney, and the other architects of, participants in, and enforcers of America's torture program should be put on trial for war crimes. In that trial that will never be, one of the defendants should be be a woman, she who is one of the head monsters.

The New Yorker offers the following details on the 'Queen of Torture':

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked. 

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.” 

Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

Her conclusion that there were black Muslim terrorists hiding out in Montana (Montana? Really? Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle need to team up with Mel Brooks to make a satire about said mess) is laughable except for the violence inflicted on her prey to obtain it:

As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as “torture.” She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. 

But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity. Later, in 2007, she accompanied then C.I.A. director Michael Hayden to brief Congress, where she insisted forcefully that the torture program had been a tremendous and indispensable success.

Once again we are reminded that women are not the gentler and fairer sex. The Queen of Torture is part of a bureaucratic machine of violence and cruelty that rewarded and incentivized the violation of basic human rights by its members and agents.

History provides many such examples of female monsters. For example, the Queen of Torture can trace her line back to female Nazis:

The Daily Mail, in a story about the recent book Hitler's Furies, details how:

Blonde German housewife Erna Petri was returning home after a shopping trip in town when something caught her eye: six small, nearly naked boys huddled in terror by the side of the country road.

Married to a senior SS officer, the 23-year-old knew instantly who they were. 

They must be the Jews she’d heard about — the ones who’d escaped from a train taking them to an extermination camp. 

But she was a mother herself, with two children of her own. So she humanely took the starving, whimpering youngsters home, calmed them down and gave them food to eat.
Then she led the six of them — the youngest aged six, the oldest 12 — into the woods, lined them up on the edge of a pit and shot them methodically one by one with a pistol in the back of the neck. 

This schizophrenic combination of warm-hearted mother one minute and cold-blooded killer the next is an enigma and one that — now revealed in a new book based on years of trawling through remote archives — puts a crueller than ever spin on the Third Reich.
Because Erna was by no means an aberration. In a book she tellingly calls ‘Hitler’s Furies’, Holocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower has unearthed the complicity of tens of thousands of German women — many more than previously imagined — in the sort of mass, monstrous, murderous activities that we would like to think the so-called gentler sex were incapable of.

America's Queen of Torture has many sister ancestors:

Because Erna was by no means an aberration. In a book she tellingly calls ‘Hitler’s Furies’, Holocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower has unearthed the complicity of tens of thousands of German women — many more than previously imagined — in the sort of mass, monstrous, murderous activities that we would like to think the so-called gentler sex were incapable of.

The Holocaust has generally been seen as a crime perpetrated by men. The vast majority of those accused at Nuremberg and other war crimes trials were men.

The few women ever called to account were notorious concentration camp guards — the likes of Irma Grese and Ilse Koch — whose evil was so extreme they could be explained away as freaks and beasts, not really ‘women’ at all. 

Ultra-macho Nazi Germany was a man’s world. The vast majority of women had, on Hitler’s orders, confined their activities to Kinder, Küche, Kirche — children, kitchen and church. Thus, when it came to responsibility for the Holocaust and other evils of the Third Reich, they were off the hook.

But that, argues Lower, is simplistic nonsense. Women were drawn into the morally bankrupt conspiracy that was Hitler’s Germany as thoroughly as men were — at a lower level, in most cases, when it came to direct action but guilty just the same.

The Nazis were put on trial at Nuremberg. America's monsters will not face any consequences for their deeds in this, the mortal world. This is the American way. Those white folks who lynched, tortured, and murdered black folks by the many thousands were "respectable" citizens...there were Presidents of the United States who were KKK members.

Cheney, Bush, and the Queen of Torture will be feted by their supporters, deified by a sociopathic authoritarian-leaning American people.

Do you have any news items, or information, personal or in the public interest that you would like to share?