Freemasonry: a Cult of Neofascist, Militant, Genocidal, Capitalists and anti-Communists., page 3

reply to post by Lucifer777

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Where i think your wrong is the basic concept/ideology of capitalism on it's basic premise it's a wondeful concept but of course your gonna get people who corrupt it and take advantge but that gos with anything, as far as communism gos it's a terrible concept that in the end is way more corrupt then capitalism can ever be, communism strips away your rights and free will as a human being and only rewards those in power so it's way more corrupt.....

Neither system maybe perfect but give me capitalism and the freedom that gos with it over communism anyday..

Originally posted by AugustusMasonicus

Originally posted by Lucifer777
I will beat any price on salvation or double your money back in the afterlife plus 72 virgins.

In a previous post you were offering double the amount of virgins. Why are you gettting chincy now?

My apologies; I think that I have not been consuming enough Christian flesh and blood recently and sacrificing enough virgins; thus my responses have been becoming less diabolical.

Please ignore the offer of the 72 virgins in the afterlife (which is what the Muslims offer); that should read "144 virgins," though this offer is negotiable. If anyone is offered more than 144 virgins from any of my competitors in the multi-billion dollar religious market place, I will happily increase the offer. Frankly I think that having to have sex with the same 144 virgins for all eternity would be rather boring; so it should be considered to be merely an "introductory offer." I don't personally understand he fascination with virgins however; I would rather have 144 experienced older women, so if anyone shares my tastes, the offer can substituted with "non virgins." For those who are females, the offer would be 144 males, and for those who are from a GLBT background, either gender or both genders can be substituted.

For those who are Freemasons, I could substitute the offer of 144 "BDSM masters" who will humiliate you, beat you, apply electric shocks to your genitals, apply whipped cream and strawberries to your genitals and put you through mock executions and various sexual humiliations (as allegedly occurs in Masonic side degrees). For those of you Masons who are more "extreme" BDSM fetishists, I am quite sure that much more extreme tortures could be considered and that various torturers trained by the "School of the Americas" and the CIA could be employed to devise much more diabolical tortures.

Lux

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Originally posted by ManBehindTheMask

Tolerating Muslims and Christians is much like tolerating Nazis; we are not speaking of a harmless belief, but militant and genocidal faiths and systems of government (theocratic monarchy) which have contributed greatly to economic and social hell on earth, and to the enslavement of humankind. These are simply savage, primitive and barbaric religions.

You make some very rash and dangerous statements........if i were you id be careful about condoning the eradication of people of any religion..........i suppose that it wouldnt make you any better than those darn "Templars" during the crusades hmm? You contradict yourself..........

On the Impotence of Pacifism.

I don't see any contradiction in my position; ideologically I am not a pacifist. Militant, genocidal ideologies and religions such as Capitalism, Christianity and Islam will ultimately require a militant solution. Education and revolutionary propaganda (political education) may play a role in combating such ideological and religious viruses, however this has a limited effect on the fanatics of Capitalism and religion, since not all can be expected to be "saved" from the effects of a lifetime of religious and political indoctrination.

The texts of the Bible and the Koran portray a deity who is essentially a genocidal war god. As previously stated, I don't come to the same conclusion about the Buddhists, despite not being a Buddhist myself and having some serious disagreements with Buddhists, as they promote "sins of restriction" as virtues; further with regards to the Buddhist solution to the problems of economic hell on earth as that of the "Sanga," which is essentially a Communist collective which produces nothing and exists through begging; I don't find this kind of primitivist Communism to be progressive; however despite my disagreements with the kind of primitivist Communism promoted by Buddha, Buddhism is not a genocidal and militant faith. The genocides by the Japanese Buddhists against the Chinese and the Koreans had nothing to do with Buddhism, whereas the Biblical and Islamic faiths are clearly militant and genocidal faiths. You may feel that a pacifist response to such genocidal and militant faiths is appropriate, however I consider this to be rather naive.

Sorry OP

You do realize that you can make all the lengthy posts your heart desires..............bs. is still bs......

Contradiction and abuse is a poor excuse for argument and is usually the cry of the desperate in debtate. I try to write in short simplified essays that almost anyone can understand who has basic English literacy skills; I do realise that most Americans are barely literate enough to read a cornflakes packet and have 30 second attention spans (about the same time period as a McDonald's advert) and that such short essays my be considered "too long" for them; however although I try to express myself as simply as possible, I do realise that even this may be too much for the majority of the rather"dumbed down" and depoliticised proletariat.

Theres nothing in any of this that is even remotely close.........I love how people can site opinion as fact....

Opinions and judgements are not facts; they are a subjective analysis of fact. I don't think that I have a habit of expressing judgements and opinions as "facts."

I guess hate will allow you to swallow any pill, no matter how large or bitter........

"Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy." ....Che Guevara (Message to the Tricontinental; 1967)

Unfortunately hatred of one's enemies is an essential element of revolutionary propaganda; the idea of "loving one's enemies" is simply a ridiculous idea anyway. The Christian / Capitalist manifestation of "loving one's enemies" is more likely to manifest in dropping depleted uranium on them and in torture, genocide and economic enslavement.

Originally posted by Skyfloating
reply to post by Lucifer777

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They give you the choice to vote for gun toting bible-thumping jackboot fascists or whiny-eyed tree-hugging money-stealing communists. Reject the left-right paradigm.

On the ideology of political Nihilism and Political Atheism.

By "political atheism" the term is used metaphorically; it refers to such people as Gerald Celente who, despite being a rather insightful critic of the abuses of Capitalism, describes him self as a "political atheist. unencumbered by political dogma or rigid ideology;" though I think that the term "political agnosticism" is probably more descriptive.

The proponents of this kind of ideology tend to try to suggest that their ideology of political agnosticism gives them a "moral high ground," however I consider this to be a rather "confused" ideology; it is of course probably just a statement of honesty, since many people simply do not have "any" counterproposal to the current economic hell on earth created by Capitalism. I suppose that it is better to be simply honest about the matter than to fanatically promote a counterproposal which would provide no real practical solution, however political agnosticism is certainly the definition of "no practical solution."

Having grown up in the 1960's in Europe, it did seem to me that most of my generation in Eastern Europe just wanted a pair of Levi jeans, to listen to rock music and to emigrate to Western Europe from the repressive Communist police states of Eastern Europe. I most certainly have never admired the East European form of repressive Communism, and most of the Communist / Socialist contemporaries of my generation held similar views; that neither US Imperialism, nor Eastern European Communism were admirable or were "solutions" to economic hell on earth. Russia and Eastern Europe have now been transformed from oppressive police states into an alliance between the governments and organised crime.

The real breakthrough for criminal organizations (in Russia) occurred during the economic disaster and mass emigration of the 1990s that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Desperate for money, many former government workers turned to crime, others joined the large numbers of Soviet citizens who moved overseas primarily to the United States and the Mafia became a natural extension of this trend. Former KGB agents, sportsmen and veterans of the Afghan and Chechen Wars, now finding themselves out-of-work but with experience in areas which could prove useful in crime, joined the increasing crime wave.......

Backed by its extensive connection to the apparatchik (аппаратчик) power network of the Soviet Union, between 1992 and 1994 the Russian Mafia targeted the commercial centers of power, seizing control of the nation’s fragile banking system. At first the criminal gangs were content to merely “park” their large cash holdings in legitimate institutions, but soon they realized that the next step was the easiest of all: direct ownership of the bank itself.

One of the ways the Mafia got so much power was that after the breakup of the union, many state-owned industries were privatized.........the privatization backfired and rather than leading to widespread, but private-sector public ownership, instead led to ownership by an elite cabal of criminals.

en.metapedia.org...

..... top Russian public officials openly acknowledge the problem of the organized crime takeover of the Russian economy. For example, Russian Minister of Internal Security Kulikov, publicly admitted to seeing no solution to the problem of mafia control of the Russian banks but the re-nationalization of privately owned banks. Major Gromov of the Russian Tax Police told a September 19, 1994, Conference of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) that "almost all Russian banks are corrupt."
.........

CIA Director John Deutch testified in 1996, that, " ... corrupt officials supply the crime syndicates with export licenses, customs clearances, tax exemptions and government contracts .... Officials of law enforcement and security services provide criminals with protection from arrest and prosecution."

Testifying before the House Foreign Relations Committee on October 10, 1997, Mr. Freeh stated that at the present time "... the majority of [the Russian] banks are controlled by organized crime" His testimony was corroborated by Arnaud de Borchgrave of CSIS who gave evidence that two thirds of the Russian economy is "under the sway of organized crime" including most of its 1.740 banks; and by Giovanni de Gennaro, Deputy Director of the Italian National Police, who testified that the "Italian organized mafia figures [have been] investing money, operating in St. Petersburg banks." In June of 1993, the St. Petersburg branch chief Inkombank, Boris Yakubovich, was killed execution style, for resisting the mob's takeover of that major Russian bank.

www.russianlaw.org...

It is not without good reason that the former Russian President Yeltsin referred to Russia as "The biggest mafia state in the world, the super power of crime that is devouring the state from top to bottom."

In Russia, organised crime is entirely entwined with the police, the military, the judiciary, the government and the banks; it is essentially a criminal state. Since this is the "secret societies" forum and "all" crime syndicates are essentially hierarchical secret societies, and "Freemasonry" is the main subject here, it seems to me that in the UK it is the Freemasons who are the British equivalent of the Russian Mafia and who have entwined themselves with the police, the government and "especially" the banking community; however since they have done so over many generations they are now the "respectable" face of Capitalism, whose children are more likely to be highly educated and sitting in an office in the City of London, than a football hooligan type "gangster," involved in petty crime.

Personally I have never "experienced" life in economic hell, but having travelled throughout much of the Third World, it seems to me that the Capitalist system creates economic hell for the vast majority of people on earth. Personally, in the past, I worked for the Israelis for many years, and my own particular political ideology has much more in common with the Israeli Communists than with the Stalinists and Marxists; Israeli Communism is simply Kibbutzism, which is a form of syndicalism (some kibbutzim are agricultural, while others manufacture arms, for example) and which produces the highest standard of living of any of the Communist models, albeit a collectivist system which exists within the Capitalist system.

Of course, if one took a person who was an economic elite or economic "slave-master" from the Capitalist models of Beverly Hills or Hampstead and placed them in a Communist collective, they would probably not be very happy at the loss of their wealth; however that is not the point of collectivist revolution; the point is the economic liberation of the world, and this is a world of 7 billion people; most of whom are little more than economic slaves or sex slaves.

If one considers the rather small "middle class" of Africa, India, or the Third World in general, mostly what they seem to want is a comfortable home and the abundance of food; and yet they are surrounded by an ocean of the human misery and poverty of persons who have to toil their entire lives just to barely eat and to live in dire poverty, in a world where with modern agricultural techniques such as the hydroponic and poly house desert farming techniques perfected by the Israelis and the Saudis, it has been estimated that the abundance of food for our 7 billion brothers and sisters could be produced in a tiny corner of the Sahara desert the size of Texas.

Capitalist Genocide Food as a Capitalist Commodity.

If we set aside the millions of lives destroyed and impoverished by US Imperialism and their wars and military coups in the 20th and 21st centuries, the main cause of genocide in Capitalism is the use of a "food" as a Capitalist commodity. Probably most people on this forum are living in the First World Capitalist states where the recent rapid increase in world food prices and the doubling of the price of wheat in the past year, will not affect us very much, but this will have genocidal consequences in a world where it has been estimated that there are usually around 200 million people on the verge of starvation and where over 20.000 children die each day from the effects of poverty.

There are very simple solutions to the problems of the extreme poverty which effects the lives of billions of people, and this is agricultural collectivism. This is of course "Satanism" to the Christians, the anti-Communists and the devotees of the god of Capitalism, but it is also a solution opposed by the proponents of political agnosticism; the political agnostics are thus not innocent of the blood of the victims of militant and genocidal Capitalism.

Critique and Counterproposal.

Certainly the uselessness of the Left / Right paradigm is relevant when one considers the major political parties of the Capitalist First World, since both sides are generally in submission to the International Dictatorship of Capitalism, and neither side proposes radical change, and this has traditionally been a critique proposed by the Communist Left and which has now been integrated into modern conspiracy-theory-ism. However, when the political agnostic is asked what their alternative to forms of Capitalism and Communism is, they generally do not have any counterproposal; they are simply Nihilists who criticise all political ideologies and who have no political ideology of their own; they are "against" all political solutions, and when asked what they are "for" they are generally not "for" anything; it is simply an ideology of malevolence; it is the ideology of the child throwing all his toys out of the pram, and it is every bit as dangerous as the worst kinds of Capitalism and Communism; it is the ideology of the imbecile, and they have absolutely no moral high ground at all.

Originally posted by Skyfloating
reply to post by Lucifer777

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Your OP mentions genocide. I can tell you something about genocide. I`ll tell you a genuine secret. If you want to predict who is going to go on the next spree of genocide or mass slaughter of human lives just look who hates the Freemasons.

Remember when Hitler shut down all masonic lodges?

Remember when Stalin suppressed freemasonry?

These two alone have the blood of hundreds of millions on their hands.

Look at which groups hate Freemasons today and you can predict which groups will be responsible for the next genocide.

Why is this?

Its because genocide is fueled by hate

If one considers the Cuban Revolution, Freemasonry was not outlawed, but after the revolution of 1959, it most certainly went into decline; in the absence of a Capitalist system, the Freemasons there simply could not continue to exist as a Capitalist "gang" and it became just a rather silly cult of old men with their silly rituals, though it has recently started to revive with the emergence of a dual Capitalist / state Capitalist system in Cuba. I take a much more radical view, since Anarchists generally oppose the existance of "any" form of organised religion; however in the absence of a Capitalist system, the Freemasons are no more a threat to humankind than any other organised religious cult.

I think that mostly the anti-Masons have been Christian conspiracy theorists who simply consider Masonry to be a competitor in the multi-billion dollar religious cult market place, and for the Christians, the Masons are considered to have "false beliefs," while the various brand names of the Jesus business consider themselves to have "true beliefs." I do not wish to take sides in the matter, other than to encourage mutual animosity between these two competing groups of anti-Communists.

Clearly Capitalism is a militant ideology and the Cuba Communists did not take a "pacifist" approach to the pimps, bankers, casino operators and Capitalist corporations who were running Cuba. Similarly today many of the older generation of Italians still revere fascists like Mussollini because of his opposition to organised crime (i.e., the Italian Mafia); a revolution is not a "Tea Party," it is a war against militant enemies, and the judicial process is thus supended; in war one does not put one's militant enemies on trial, one simply executes them.

have no objection to the small minority of Freemasons who are ideologically Communist or Anarchist (they are more common among the French Freemasons, but almost non-existent in American and British Masonry); I really don't care about their silly rituals other than as a means to humiliate them; I simply consider them to be an anti-Communist Capitalist gang which has Messianic religious cult elements, similar to the Russian and Italian Mafia.

And hate hates absolutely and cant stand people who go around with ideals of charity, benevolence. friendship, brotherhood.

Most Neonazis and Neofascists probably also love each other and have entwined humanitarian ideals around their rather nasty and genocidal political ideology. Of course, to portray a militant, genocidal, Neofascist Capitalist gang of assorted loan sharking and state terrorist, narco-terrorist collaborating vermin such as the Freemasons as primarily charitable, benevolent, friendly and brotherly is an argument which could be also made by the propagandists of the Russian Mafia, or the proponents of just about any genocidal ideology or religion.

Remember when Hitler shut down all masonic lodges?

Remember when Stalin suppressed freemasonry?

These two alone have the blood of hundreds of millions on their hands.

Generally the ideological Capitalist or Nihilist will accuse all ideological Communists and Anarchists (almost all of whom are anti-Stalinists) of being responsible for the evils of Stalinism, rather than accusing Stalin and the Stalinists themselves, and the anti-Capitalists will accuse the ideological Capitalists and anti-Communists of being responsible for the blood of hundreds of millions of victims of the Capitalist system and their numerous wars and military coups and untold human misery created by impoverishment and economic slavery, but the anti-Communist is usually comfortable about that; they simply don't care as long their supermarkets are full (often with goods imported from the most impovished regions of the world); this is not a debate which can be won by citing the statistics of Capitalist and Communist genocides and over who killed the most people and who continues to kill the most people and create the most suffering and human enslavement.

Originally posted by KSigMason
reply to post by Lucifer777

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Their duty to protect pilgrims along the route to the Holy Land. They were not loan sharks, that's skewing and revising history for your personal agenda.

As with modern Masonic Knight's Templars, though the Knight's Templars hid behind the titles of a military and religious order, in the economic sense the Templars were primarily loan sharks. If you gave them 16 ounces of sterling silver, they would give you a piece of paper which was a promissary note for a pound of silver. They would lend these promissary notes out at interest. It is from this where the myth of the lost Templar gold probably comes from; they did not have the power to create gold and precious metals, they simply had the power to issue paper money based on the belief that they had sufficient precious metals to cover their paper promissary notes. It is probably because of the interest on such loans that Phillip the Fair attempted to eradicate them from Europe. The alleged hoards of Templar gold were never discovered because I suspect that they did not exist; anyone who can issue paper money at interest and demand that it be repaid not in paper but in precious metals is likely to aquire a great deal of precious metals, but it is likely that their would be a great deal more paper in curculation that their supply of such precious metals.

And there there are those strange homo-erotic BDSM rituals, which the Templars were also accused of.

There was no BDSM accusations. There were charges of homosexual acts such as kissing, but in many opinions these charges were trumped up by the French King in order to avoid paying a debt he owed them.

....

Phillip even attempted to embarrass Grand Master, Jacques DeMolay, but instead the GM recanted his confessions that were given during torture and professed the innocence of the Order

....

From what I've read DeMolay lived for several minutes and from researching techniques of the time, the fire would not be at the base of the stake. Instead the fire would be placed in a circle around the stake to create an oven effect where the body slowly cooks and burns. Starting at the feet and moving on up the victim burns, and can take as long 15 minutes to die.

A fire at the base of the stake causes the victim to swallow the flame within a minute or so. The lungs and throat are burned; the throat closes and the lungs fill with fluid. In the end, the victim suffocates long before he is severely burned. Death occurs very rapidly versus the one I spoke about earlier.

Well since the "confessions" of the Templars were produced by torturing the Templars, I consider all such confessions to be worthless, which is why I used the term "accused of," though it can be established that the modern Masonic side degrees have BDSM style rituals. However since you are part of the US military, which has a habit of torturing people to extract confessions, I would consider all such complaints about the tortures of the Templars to be hypocritical.

Since I believe that we Communists should have a higher moral standard than the Capitalist vermin, I do not personally advocate the use of torture, though in the case of US state terrorists such as yourself I would consider it to be understandable if your enemies tortured you. Indeed the Viet-Cong had a very successful method of instilling fear into the American soldiers; they would crucify captured American soldiers and leave them in areas where the US patrols would find them. Since the Americans have a habit of torturing their Muslim victims and have a long history of collaborating with torturers and murderers in Latin America, I think that if their current Muslim enemies adopted the practice of crucifixion, that they might be more effective than the current practice of trying to blow their legs off rather than just killing soldiers. Of course I take no sides in the war between the Muslims and the Capitalists as they are both the common enemies of the Communists.


reply to post by jonnywhite

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I work in intelligence and I have religion. There many devout men and women of faith who work with me.

There's no need to be secretive about it.

Proverbs talks about keeping secrets.

Yes the existence of religious fanatics in the US state terrorist, narco-terrorist military is part of the problem. The biblical deity is essentially a genocidal war god and the existence of the Christian chaplaincy in the US military reinforces the idea that they will be eternally rewarded in heaven for their genocidal Capitalist, imperialistic behaviour. I am not personally a monotheist, but in terms of "belief" I do believe in the existence of the gods and goddesses (ancestral spirits) and in the existence of the eternal soul and the afterlife; your enemies, victims and allies will be your eternal enemies and allies, and great and terrible and dreadful and wrathful shall be the judgement of your enemies and victims; woe to they who ally themselves with the Anglo-American state terrorists, narco-terrorists; that Jewish primitivist Communist martyr from 2000 years ago, whom many of them claim to worship as a god, Jesus is unlikley to be of any assistance in protecting them from the eternal wrath of their enemies.

"Give me two, three.... many Vietnams.."

Lucifer
For Anarchism. For Communism.
The Final Revolutionary War of Economic Salvation and the non-miraculous feeding of the 7 billion.

"We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it, to his home, to his centers of entertainment: a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be, make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to disappear.".....Che Guevara

reply to post by Lucifer777

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The Templars were not loan sharks.

A loan shark is a person or body that offers unsecured loans at high interest rates to individuals, often enforcing repayment by blackmail or threats of violence.

Also, from what I've read and studied, the Templars w ere not allowed to charge interest, but instead charged rent. They used a secure, encrypted method to protect the moneys of the pilgrims traveling.

Just because I'm in the military doesn't mean I support everything that every soldier has ever done. Although, I don't consider everything that was done torture. I've been water-boarded and does it suck? Yes. Is it torture? No.

Communists don't have a higher moral standard. It's mot like they haven't committed atrocities and genocides. Don't be historically ignorant.

Was what some practices of the US soldiers appalling? Yes, but it was nowhere near how barbaric the Muslims have been to captured soldiers. Beheading journalists and bound soldiers. The IEDs have blown soldiers legs, j had a friend who approached a whining dog when a bomb detonated from within the dog. He luckily survived and didn't have lose all of his leg.

Originally posted by KSigMason
reply to post by Lucifer777

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The Templars were not loan sharks.

A loan shark is a person or body that offers unsecured loans at high interest rates to individuals, often enforcing repayment by blackmail or threats of violence.

Also, from what I've read and studied, the Templars w ere not allowed to charge interest, but instead charged rent. They used a secure, encrypted method to protect the moneys of the pilgrims traveling.

The "rent" system used by the templars "was" lending at interest; it is simply a play on words not to consider that to be "interest," or Usury; indeed it was a far worse and more primitive system than modern usury.

The Knights' involvement in banking grew over time into a new basis for money, as Templars became increasingly involved in banking activities. One indication of their powerful political connections is that the Templars' involvement in usury did not lead to more controversy within the Order and the church at large. Officially the idea of lending money in return for interest was forbidden by the church, but the Order sidestepped this with clever loopholes, such as a stipulation that the Templars retained the rights to the production of mortgaged property. Or as one Templar researcher put it, "Since they weren't allowed to charge interest, they charged rent instead."
en.wikipedia.org...

"In England, the Templars also acted as tax collectors," Baigent and Leigh noted. "Not only did they collect papal taxes, tithes and donations, they collected taxes and revenues for the crown as well—and seemed to have been even more fearsome in that capacity than [Britain’s] Inland Revenue [or the U.S. Internal Revenue Service]. In 1294, they organized the conversion of old to new money. They frequently acted as trustees of funds or property placed in their custody, as brokers and as debt collectors. They mediated in disputes involving ransom payments, dowries, pensions and a multitude of other transactions."

abhiseqa.blogspot.com...

Along with traders, wealthy pilgrims too made use of this system. "Checks" issued by Templars in Europe could be cashed in on arrival in Palestine, minus a hefty interest charge for this service. In The Temple and the Lodge, co-authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh explain the Templars' economic dimension, recording that the beginnings of modern banking can be traced back to them, and that no other organization contributed as much as the Templars to the rise of capitalism.28 History records Florentine bankers as having invented "checking accounts," yet the Templars were using this method of money transfer long before. It is generally accepted that capitalism first arose in the Jewish community of Amsterdam, but long before them, the Templars had established their own medieval capitalism, including banking based on interest. They lent money on interest rates of up to 60% and controlled a major proportion of capital flow and liquidity in the economy of Europe.

Using methods much like those of a modern private bank, they derived profits from both trade and banking, as well as from donations and armed conflict. They became as rich as the multinational company that, in effect, they were. At one time, the finances of the English and French monarchies were controlled and run by the Templars' respective offices in Paris and London, and both the French and English royal families owed the Templars huge amounts of money. The kings of Europe were literally at their mercy, hoping to borrow money, and most royal households had come to depend on the order. This let them manipulate the kings and their national policies for their own purposes.
www.harunyahya.com...

If you have property which you can secure a debt on, and the property is worth $100,000 and I lend you $100,000 and then charge you annually "up to" 60% (as the Knignt's Templars allegedly did) of the value of the property as a rent, and you still owe me the original $100,000, then whether I claim that the (up to) $60,000 dollars a year is "rent" or "interest," what possible difference does it make to you? But then obfuscation and sophistry is almost a Masonic religion and probably calling it "rent" makes a big difference to you, and $60,000 a year "rent" is better than $60,000 a year interest, if you say so.

The system of charging referring to usury as "rent" was used long after the Templars dissapeared from the banking scene and it was hardly a benevolent practice.

650 Years Ago:
How Bankers Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash


Six hundred and fifty years ago came the climax of the worst financial collapse in history to date. The 1930s Great Depression was a mild and brief episode, compared to the bank crash of the 1340s, which decimated the human population.

The crash, which peaked in 1345 A.D. when the world's biggest banks went under, "led'' by the Bardi and Peruzzi companies of Florence, Italy, was more than a bank crash -- it was a financial disintegration. Chroniclers reported, "all credit vanished together,'' most trade and exchange stopped, and a catastrophic drop of the world's population by famine and disease loomed."

Like the financial disintegration hanging over us , that one of the 1340s was the result of 30-40 years of disastrous financial practices, by which the banks built up huge fictitious ``financial bubbles,'' parasitizing production and real trade in goods. These speculative cancers destroyed the real wealth they were monopolizing, and caused these banks to be effectively bankrupt long before they finally went under.

....

The result was a disaster for the human population, which fell worldwide by something like 25 percent between 1300 and 1450 (in Europe, by somewhere between 35 percent and 50 percent from the 1340s collapse to the 1440s).

This global crash, caused by the policies and actions of banks which finally completely bankrupted themselves, has been blamed by historians ever since on a king -- poor Edward III of England. Edward revolted against the seizure and looting of his kingdom by the Bardi and Peruzzi banks, by defaulting on their loans starting in 1342. King Edward's national budget was dwarfed by that of either the Bardi or Peruzzi; in fact, by 1342 his national budget had become a subdepartment of theirs. Their internal memos in Florence spoke of him contemptuously as ``Messer Edward''``we shall be fortunate to recover even a part'' of his debts, they sniffed in 1339.

A ``free trade'' mythology has been developed by historians about these ``sober, industrious, Christian bankers'' of Italy in the fourteenth century``doing good'' by their own private greed; developing trade and the beginnings of capitalist industry by seeking monopolies for their family banks; somehow existing in peace with other merchants, and expiating their greedy sins by donations to the Church. But, goes the myth, these sober bankers were led astray by kings (accursed governments!) who were spendthrift, warlike, and unreliable in paying their debts which they forced the helpless or momentarily foolish bankers to lend them. Thus, emerging ``private enterprise capitalism'' was set back by the disaster of the fourteenth century, concludes the classroom myth, noting in passing that 30 million people died in Europe in the ensuing Black Death, famine, and war. ....

Even if we accept the highest figures ever given for Edward III's 1345 default against the bankers of Florence, the debt to them of the city government of Florence which they controlled, was 35 percent greater, and those bonds also defaulted.

More revealing is the latest work of the historian of Venice, Frederick C. Lane, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. This work shows that it was Venetian finance which, by dominating and controlling a huge international ``bubble'' of currency speculation from 1275 through 1350, rigged the great collapse of the 1340s. Rather than sharing the peace of mutual greed and free enterprise with their ``allies''-- the bankers of Florence -- the merchants of Venice bankrupted them, and the economies of Europe and the Mediterranean along with them. Florence was the fourteenth century ``New York,'' the apparent center of banking with the world's biggest banks. But Venice was ``London,'' manipulating Florentine bankers, kings, and emperors alike, by tight knit financial conspiracy and complete dominance of the markets by which money was minted and credit created.

........

Perpetual Rents

In Italy itself, these bankers loaned aggressively to farmers and to merchants and other owners of land, often with the ultimate purpose of owning that land. This led by the 1330s to the wildfire spread of the infamous practice of ``perpetual rents,'' whereby farmers calculated the lifetime rent-value of their land and sold that value to a bank for cash for expenses, virtually guaranteeing that they would lose the land to that bank. As the historian Raymond de Roover demonstrated, the practices by which the fourteenth century banks avoided the open crime of usury, were worse than usury.

....
Thus were the rural, food-producing areas of Italy depopulated and ruined in the first half of the fourteenth century. The fertile Contado (county) of Pistoia around Florence, for example, which reached a population density of 6065 persons per square kilometer in 1250, had fallen to 50 persons/square kilometer in 1340; in 1400, after 50 years of Black Plague, its population density was 25 persons/square kilometer. The famines of 1314-17, 1328-9, and 1338-9 were not ``natural disasters.''

forum.paradoxplaza.com...

Just because I'm in the military doesn't mean I support everything that every soldier has ever done.

That argument would not have been accepted in the Neurenberg trials, and neither would the argument be accepted by the Americans that an Al Queda ally is not responsible for everything which the CIA created Al Queda has done.

The history of US state terrorist, narco-terrorist imperialism is written in blood and in assassinations, military coups, wars and genocides. War, torture and genocide is what the US military do; from Vietnam to Iraq, they have consistently tortured their victims and it is no secret; it is not about a "few bad apples" but about systematic and endemic abuse.

If your chose to ally yourself (which you do) of your own free with the major terrorist organisation in the world today (i.e., the US miltary), then it is entirely fair to hold you accountable for that; even many of the Nazi military had more of an excuse than you, since most of them were conscripted and were not volunteers for war.

Although, I don't consider everything that was done torture.

Of course, you don't only torture, you do many other things also, such as littering Iraq with thousands of tons of depleted uranium, terrorising entire populations, black operations, false flag operations (such as 9/11), dressing up as Muslms and shooting and bombing Iraqi civillians to incite sectarian violence, etc.

I've been water-boarded and does it suck? Yes. Is it torture? No.

Oh well since you have not taken up my offer of 144 virgins in the afterlife, I will be sure to demand that the gods and your eternal enemies and victims have you eternally waterboarded, kept naked for eternity in stress positions, beaten, hooded, attacked by dogs, used as a punchbag and repeatedly sexually assaulted, etc.

The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness about itBy ignoring past abuses, opponents of torture are in danger of pushing it back into the shadows instead of abolishing it.

Naomi Klein

The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk...

....What was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City. It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture". It is here in Panama, and later at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found.

According to declassified training manuals, SOA students - military and police officers from across the hemisphere - were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation", humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions - and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment".

Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.

Yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the location's sordid history. How could they? That would require something totally absent from the debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials has been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam war.

It's a history exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his forthcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesises this evidence, producing a riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture", based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix programme and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training.

It is not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples". A startling number of torture's most prominent opponents keep telling us that the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11 2001, at which point the methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing in Newsweek on the need to ban torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies ... that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them". It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had launched the Phoenix programme and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating 40 interrogation centres in South Vietnam that killed more than 20,000 suspects and tortured thousands more."

Does it somehow lessen today's horrors to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture, that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, closer to home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8, Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now".

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never before"? I suspect it stems from a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this administration's crimes. And its open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented.

But let's be clear about what is unprecedented: not the torture, but the openness. Past administrations kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were committed in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush administration has broken this deal: post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimised by new definitions and new laws.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the real innovation has been in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability. This shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practised but officially and legally repudiated, there is still hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and those responsible deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man". Soon victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility, and danger, of that quest. This is a larger mirror of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.

.....
And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by the US and supervised by commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similar units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq's interior ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA's William Colby who, asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix, a programme he helped launch, replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese programme".

As McCoy says, "if you don't understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity, then you can't begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus: closing a prison, shutting down a programme, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But he warns, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."

Communists don't have a higher moral standard. It's mot like they haven't committed atrocities and genocides. Don't be historically ignorant.

I am not a Stalinst (and neither are the vast majority of European Communists); however war is war, and since the genocidal US state terrorists torture and murder and do not accord their opponents the rights of the Geneva convention, I simply cannot condemn whatever means are used against you. You do not respect your military enemies who are simply trying to get rid of an occupying army of cowards who often rain fire from the sky from the safety of their bunkers.

Was what some practices of the US soldiers appalling?

Such barbaric bheaviour is endemic and widespread; torture and murder is that the US military do; it is company policy, and since you claim to be in the "intelligence" dept. of the military I would remind you that Abu Ghraib was under the control of what you refer to as the "civillians" of the CIA; i.e., military intelligence, though "intelligence" is clearly a misnomer, particularly if you are representative of US "intelligence."

Yes, but it was nowhere near how barbaric the Muslims have been to captured soldiers. Beheading journalists and bound soldiers.

The guillotine was brought into use in France because it was considered to be the most humane form of execution which offered an "instantaneous" death, and is far more humane than hanging or the American methods of gassing or electrocution; or the effects of dropping Agent Orange or depleted uranium on people. Beheading is the "opposite" of barbaric; it is one of the most swift and painless deaths one could imagine. If the Muslims were going to play tit for tat, they might have considered using the barbaric methods of the American torturers of Abu Ghraib and beaten, sexually assaulted and humiliated their victims, and posted their imaged on the Internet, before giving them a slow death.

The IEDs have blown soldiers legs, j had a friend who approached a whining dog when a bomb detonated from within the dog. He luckily survived and didn't have lose all of his leg.

Yes I have been studying the methods of the Muslims. They may be rather primitive, but they are not stupid and their guerilla warfare tactics seem to be deliberate. Especially in Afghanistan, the Muslims appear to be using more and more IED's which are "specifically" designed not to kill terrorists (i.,e., the Anglo-American narco-terrorist mercenaries), but rather to permanently main them. I think it is to instil fear; a soldier is probably more afraid of being permanently bound to a wheelchair or going through life legless, as opposed to a quick death and being dispatched to their Capitalist god in hell. Obviously I cannot "approve of such methods" as I would prefer to see more executions and less maimings, however considering the long history of Anglo-American state terrorism and their barbarism, I can sympathise with such methods; it is rather like the Vietcong crucifying Americans and leaving them in areas where the Americans would patrol; it is fighting terrorism with terror. If you do not fear your nenemies, then your enemies are doing something wriong.

Anyway the Anglo-American narco-terrorists are the invaders and the Mulsims are the defenders; consider the lengths that you yourself would be willing to go to had the Muslims invaded the US and were torturers and genocidal murderers just like the US military has been; where your homelands littered with thousands of tons of depleted uranium and your wives giving birth to babies which looked like squashed tomatoes, you too might be willing to adopt such guerilla tactics against your invaders.

Anyway as I have repeatedly stated, as Henry Kissinger argued "(US) military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy." Your masters don't give a f*** about how many of you end up legless or paralysed for life, and you know it; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and now Lybia) are fought for economic reasons. If Afghanistan's major export was cabbages and not heroin, and Iraq's major export was potatoes and not oil, these wars would not have taken place and you know it; you are not conscripts but mercenaries for your Capitalist masters, and your reward is simply the reward that is given to those who serve the god of Capitalism; you fight forCapitalist coin.

I consider your winging over the deaths and dimemberments of your comrades to be pathetic. To show compassion is not appropriate to a brutal, genocidal terrorist and imperialistic invader. I consider you all to be morally subhuman vermin anyway; death and hell shall be your only reward. Your enemies and victims shall be your eternal enemies, and great and terrible and dreadful and wrathful shall be your judgement, from which the Capitalist devil whom you refer to as your god will be of no assistance in rescuing you.

Lux

reply to post by Lucifer777

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You're right. War is war. I do love how you excuse the tactics of others as a justifiable means to an end.

Originally posted by KSigMason
reply to post by Lucifer777

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Why do you keep posting the wrong things over and over again?
....
Freemasonry is not a religion and you really need to figure that out.

Originally posted by Masonic Light
Regardless of what some of our more timid brethren have claimed in recent years, Freemasonry is primarily a religious institution.

I recall in another debate over this matter, a particular Freemason ended up with stating "We are religious but not a religion" which is a bit like a person saying "I am angered but not angry." I think that it is just the "contradictory nature" of Masons; the person who cannot forumulate an argument, just loves to "contradict." However I think also that in recent years the Masonic religious cultists have certainly begun to claim that they are not a religion and that statements such as Albert Pike's "Every Masonic Lodge is a temple of religion; and its teachings are instruction in religion," are metaphorical. Of course Pike also claimed "Masonry does not pretend to be a religion" and it is unsurprising that a religious cultist can hold two contradictory positions at the same time, especially with Pike, whose main "Great Work," Morals and Dogma is the definition of plagiarism from numerous sources.

Clearly your religion is not a religion, you temples are not temples, your rituals are not rituals, your "worshipful" cult Masters are not Masters and they are not worshipful (worthy of worship). In cult insider "Newspeak" or "cult-babble" you can just attach new meanings to words and then contradict others who are using public definitions of the term; it is all too common, but it is rather boring.

Originally posted by KSigMason
reply to post by Lucifer777

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You're right. War is war. I do love how you excuse the tactics of others as a justifiable means to an end.

This is a typical response from an indoctrinated member of the world's leading terrorist and narco-terrorist organisation (i.e., the US military); US military has a long history of overt and covert wars, narcotics trafficking, assassinations, military coups, black operations, false flag operations, and have no problem dropping throusands of tons of depleted uranium, napalm or dioxin (Agent Orange) on civillians, or of horrificually torturing individuals. For the purposes of US economic imperialism and narco-terrorism, the "ends justify the means" but when the Muslims start blowing the legs off your own troops you start crying and complaining about it; typical bully.

Lucifer

-----------------

Originally posted by AugustusMasonicus

Originally posted by Lucifer777
Beheading is the "opposite" of barbaric; it is one of the most swift and painless deaths one could imagine.

How can anyone possibly prove that statement? Did Consumer Reports have a write-up on performance aspects or customer feedback?

I am aware that the education level of Americans is barely sufficient to read Superman comics, but I think that most people on this forum would realise that beheading is an instantaneous and relatively painless death, especially when one compares it to the "School of Americas" & US military methods of genocide and of torturing people.

Perhaps if Ksigmason, who claims to work for the US military in "intelligence (which is really an insult to all "intelligent "people)" would like to volunteer, we could test this out; purely in the interests of a scientific study of course, I would be only too happy to waterboard him, strip him naked, handcuff him in excruciatingly painful stress positions for days on end, as his sits in his own urine and faeces, apply electric shocks to his genitals, sexually assault him by inserting painful objects into his anus, force him to sexually assault other prisoners, force other prisoners to rape him, beat him, drill through various parts of his anatomy with power drills, have trained dogs attack him, photograph him and post the photos on the internet. I predict that it would probably not be long before he would beg for a relatively painless execution through beheading, if offered the choice. After we beheaded him (again, purely in the interests of science and for performing a consumer survery) we could ask him which he preferred, the torture or the beheading? If he refused to answer, we should just assume that he is being stubborn and refusing to cooperate.

Such tortures have been practiced of course by the US military, military intelligence, private US military contractors and in the CIA controlled Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and such tortures were common among CIA backed "anti-Communist" regimes of the far right in Latin America; they continue to be commonplace also among the US military trained Iraqi forces. "Torture" is just "business as usual" for the US military from Vietnam to Iraq, to their modern day "US torture flights" referred to as "extraordinary rendition" where European (and other) citizens have been kidnapped and dissapeared to various torture chambers in various parts of the world.

Lucifer

Iraq torture 'worse after Saddam'

BBC News 2006

.........

Bodies found in the Baghdad morgue "often bear signs of severe torture", said the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq in a report.

....


"What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," the Austrian law professor said.

"The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein," he added.

Brutal methods

The UN report says detainees' bodies often show signs of beating using electrical cables, wounds in heads and genitals, broken legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns.

Bodies found at the Baghdad mortuary "often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances".

Many bodies have missing skin, broken bones, back, hands and legs, missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails, the UN report says.

Victims come from prisons run by US-led multinational forces as well as by the ministries of interior and defence and private militias, the report said.

news.bbc.co.uk...

U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq
2005

www.aclu.org...

CIA, Navy Seals and Military Intelligence Personnel Implicated

www.aclu.org...

NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.

""There is no question that U.S. interrogations have resulted in deaths,"" said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. ""High-ranking officials who knew about the torture and sat on their hands and those who created and endorsed these policies must be held accountable. America must stop putting its head in the sand and deal with the torture scandal that has rocked our military.""

The documents released today include 44 autopsies and death reports as well as a summary of autopsy reports of individuals apprehended in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documents show that detainees died during or after interrogations by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and ""OGA"" (Other Governmental Agency) -- a term, according to the ACLU, that is commonly used to refer to the CIA.

...... The autopsy reports list deaths by ""strangulation,"" ""asphyxiation"" and ""blunt force injuries."" An overwhelming majority of the so-called ""natural deaths"" were attributed to ""Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease.""

While newspapers have recently reported deaths of detainees in CIA custody, today's documents show that the problem is pervasive, involving Navy Seals and Military Intelligence too.

The records reveal the following facts:

A 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood. The exact cause of death was ""undetermined"" although the autopsy stated that hypothermia may have contributed to his death. Notes say he ""struggled/ interrogated/ died sleeping.""....

An Iraqi detainee (also described as a white male) died on January 9, 2004, in Al Asad, Iraq, while being interrogated by ""OGA."" He was standing, shackled to the top of a door frame with a gag in his mouth at the time he died. The cause of death was asphyxia and blunt force injuries. Notes summarizing the autopsies record the circumstances of death as ""Q by OGA, gagged in standing restraint."" ...

A detainee was smothered to death during an interrogation by Military Intelligence on November 26, 2003, in Al Qaim, Iraq. A previously released autopsy report, that appears to be of General Mowhoush, lists ""asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression"" as the cause of death and cites bruises from the impact with a blunt object. New documents specifically record the circumstances of death as ""Q by MI, died during interrogation.""

A detainee at Abu Ghraib Prison, captured by Navy Seal Team number seven, died on November 4, 2003, during an interrogation by Navy Seals and ""OGA."" A previously released autopsy report, that appears to be of Manadel Al Jamadi, shows that the cause of his death was ""blunt force injury complicated by compromised respiration."" ....

An Afghan civilian died from ""multiple blunt force injuries to head, torso and extremities"" on November 6, 2003, at a Forward Operating Base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. (Facts in the autopsy report appear to match the previously reported case of Abdul Wahid.)

A 52-year-old male Iraqi was strangled to death at the Whitehorse detainment facility on June 6, 2003, in Nasiriyah, Iraq. His autopsy also revealed bone and rib fractures, and multiple bruises on his body. .....

The ACLU has previously released autopsy reports for two detainees who were tortured by U.S. forces in Bagram, Afghanistan, believed to be Mullah Habibullah and an Afghan man known as Dilawar.

""These documents present irrefutable evidence that U.S. operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogations,"" said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. ""The public has a right to know who authorized the use of torture techniques and why these deaths have been covered up.""

The documents were released by the Department of Defense in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

Abu Ghraib Inmates Testify to Abuse and Torture
In Their Own Words: Iraqis Describe Their Ordeal
By Pierre Tristam, About.

middleeast.about.com...

As part of its investigation of reported abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command took sworn statements from many individuals formerly imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prison. The Washington Post obtained the testimonies and published them in 2004. The testimonies were reprinted in Mark Danner's book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York Review of Books, 2004).
The most relevant testimonies are reproduced here as they originally appeared, reflecting the the former inmates' original syntax and wording as rendered by military translators.

The testimonies lend detailed, graphic explanations and some context for the scenes depicted in photographs of abuse and torture.


Sodomized With a Glow Stick
Testimony of Inmate Whose Name and Number Were Blacked Out by Military Investigators
A few days before they hit me on my ear, the American police, the guy who wears glasses, he put red woman’s underwear over my head. And then he tied me to the window that is in the cell with my hands behind my back until I lost consciousness. And also when I was in Room #1 they told me to lay down on my stomach and they were jumping from the bed onto my back and my legs. And the other two were spitting on me and calling me names, and they held my hands and legs. After the guy with the glasses got tired, two of the American soldiers brought me to the ground a tied my hands to the door while laying down on my stomach. One of the police was pissing on me and laughing on me. He then released my hands and I want and washed, and then the soldier came back into the room, and the soldier and his friend told me in a loud voice to lie down, so I did that. And then the policeman was opening my legs, with a bag over my head, and he sat down between my legs on his knees and I was looking at him from under the bag and they wanted to do me because I saw him and he was opening his pants, so I started screaming loudly and the other police starting hitting me with his feet on my neck and he put his feet on my head so I couldn’t scream. Then they left and the guy with the glasses comes back with another person and he took me out of the room and they put me inside the dark room again and they started beating me with the broom that was there. And then they put the loudspeaker inside the room and they closed the door and he was yelling in the microphone. Then they broke the glowing finger and spread it on me until I was glowing and they were laughing. They took me to the room and they signaled me to get on to the floor. And one of the police he put a part of his stick that he always carries inside my ass and I felt it going inside me about 2 centimeters, approximately. And I started screaming, and he pulled it out and he washed it with water inside the room. And the two American girls that were there when they were beating me, they were hitting me with a ball made of sponge on my dick. And when I was tied up in my room, one of the girls, with blonde hair, she is white, she was playing with my dick. I saw inside this facility a lot of punishment just like what they did to me and more. And they were taking pictures of me during all these instances.”

Allegation of Child Rape
Testimony of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Inmate #151108
They stripped me of all my clothes, even my underwear. They gave me woman’s underwear, that was rose color with flowers in it and they put the bag over my face. One of them whispered in my ear, “today I am going to # you,” and he said this in Arabic. Whoever was with me experienced the same thing. That’s what the American soldiers did, and they had a translator with them, named Abu Hamid and a female soldier, who’s skin was olive colored and this was on October 3 or 4, 2003 around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. When they took me to the cell, the translator Abu Hamid came with an American soldier and his rank was sergeant (I believe). And he called told me “faggot” because I was wearing the woman’s underwear, and my answer was “no.” Then he told me “why are you wearing this underwear,” then I told them “because you make me wear it.” […] They forced me to wear this underwear all the time, for 51 days. And most of the days I was wearing nothing else.

I faced more harsh punishment from Grainer. He cuffed my hands with irons behind my back to the metal of the window, to the point my feet were off the ground and I was hanging there, for about 5 hours just because I asked about the time, because I wanted to pray. And then they took all my clothes and he took the female underwear and he put it over my head. After he released me from the window, he tied me to my bed until before dawn. […]

They brought three prisoners completely naked and they tied them together with cuffs and they stuck one to another. I saw the American soldiers hitting them with a football and they were taking pictures. I saw Grainer punching one of the prisoners right in his face very hard when he refused to take off his underwear and I heard them begging for help. And also the American soldiers told to do like homosexuals (#ing). […]

I saw [name blacked out] #ing a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass. I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [Name blacked out], I think he is [name blacked out] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.

In the cell that is almost under it, on the North side, and I was right across from it on the other side. They put the sheets again on the doors. Grainer and his helper they cuffed one prisoner in Room #1, named [name blacked out], he was Iraqi citizen. They tied him to the bed and they were inserted the phosphoric light in his ass and he was yelling for God’s help.

What Was the Chain of Responsibility for Abuse and Torture at Abu Ghraib?
By Pierre Tristam,

.....As a Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry concluded in December 2008, "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

In reality, the chain of responsibility for abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and in other prisons elsewhere began with decisions made by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet. They approved what they termed “harsh interrogation techniques,” abuse and humiliation tactics, including those used at Abu Ghraib.

The techniques were also applied in prisons at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in secret “black sites” established by the CIA in Eastern Europe, Thailand and North Africa. Abu Ghraib got most of the attention because of the leaked photographs and videos that documented the abuse and torture.


Enlisted as Scapegoats

Gary Myers, a lawyer for one of the dozen-odd enlisted men and women charged as a result of the Abu Ghraib scandal, said in 2004 that the military was turning low-level soldiers into scapegoats for “a monumental failure of leadership.” The real story, he said, was not the enlisted, but “the manner in which the intelligence community forced them into this position” by demanding that they “soften up” suspects for interrogation. Well-documented subsequent disclosures proved Myers right.

There was a reason for the abuse and torture uptick at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003.

..... Unhappy with intelligence being culled from Iraqi prisoners, Rumsfeld ordered interrogations toughened, using tactics adopted at Guantanamo Bay in April 2003 (and approved by Bush). Rumsfeld, who criticized the United States for “having too soft an underbelly,” ordered Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantanamo, to “Gitmoize” Iraq, in the words of Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Kapinski. Kapinski was in charge of all prisons in Iraq under U.S. military control.


Bringing Gitmo to Abu Ghraib

Miller changed the policy at Abu Ghraib, centralizing interrogations operations at Abu Ghraib and putting intelligence officers, rather than trained detention officers, in charge of running the prison, and employing military police in the interrogation process—a break with past practices. Prison guards, he ordered, “must be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.”

The Washington Post reported in June 2004 that as of September 12, 2003, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq at the time, approved letting Abu Ghraib guards use 32 harsh interrogation tactics, including “military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished.” The directive hues closely to the tactics used at Guantanamo.

Bush had decided that so-called “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. Inmates at Abu Ghraib were, however—even though the same interrogation tactics applied there as they did at Guantanamo.


Few Convictions, No Higher-Ups

The School of the Americas (SOA), in 2001 renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers, located at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Initially established in Panama in 1946, it was kicked out of that country in 1984 under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty. Former Panamanian President, Jorge Illueca, stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” The SOA, frequently dubbed the “School of Assassins,” has left a trail of blood and suffering in every country where its graduates have returned.

Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins.

www.soaw.org...


SOA Manuals Index

On September 20, 1996, under intense public pressure, the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals that were used at the School of the Americas for years. These manuals advocated torture, extortion, blackmail and the targeting of civilian populations. A Washington Post article by Dana Priest broke the story.

The release of these manuals proved what SOA Watch, thousands of Latin Americans and numerous human rights organizations had been saying for years: that U.S. taxpayer money had been used for the teaching of torture and repression.

Material from CIA and Army manuals written in the 1950's and 1960's was incorporated into these seven Spanish-language training guides. More than a thousand of these manuals were distributed for use in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru, and at the School of the Americas between 1987 and 1991. An inquiry was triggered in mid-1991 when the US Southern Command evaluated the manuals for use in expanding military support programs in Colombia.

In March 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney received an investigative report on "Improper Material in Spanish-Language Intelligence Training Manuals." Classified SECRET, the report noted that five of the seven manuals "contained language and statements in violation of legal, regulatory or policy prohibitions" and recommended they be recalled. The memo is stamped: "SECDEF HAS SEEN."

The National Security Archive ran released their declassified documents dealing with all of the manuals in May 2004, after the Abu Ghraib scandal put torture at the hands of U.S. and U.S.-trained soldiers back in the news.

...Read the manuals themselves below:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

U.S. Army Training Manuals used at the SOA

In English and Spanish. The translated, English-language manuals are available here in HTML format only. www.soaw.org...

International Socialist Review Issue 9, Fall 1999

School of the Assassins

By Katherine Dwyer

www.isreview.org...



ON AUGUST 11, 1999, the New York Times reported that a former torture victim in Paraguay had unearthed five tons of documents revealing atrocities committed under Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner during his 35-year rule. Stroessner was part of "Operation Condor," an initiative backed by the U.S. to coordinate efforts between the military and police in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia to crush dissent. New York Times reporter Diana Jean Schemo describes how Condor "allowed security officials to take part in joint interrogations, to pursue people across borders and to order surveillance on citizens who sought asylum in other nations."

Operation Condor facilitated the torture, imprisonment and, in many cases, the murder of so-called subversive elements. Martin Almada, the man who obtained the documents from a Paraguayan judge, is a former schoolteacher who was held captive and tortured for four years for the crime of writing a dissertation that criticized the Paraguayan education system. Almada's wife died from a heart attack after hearing her husband's screams as his jailers held a phone receiver to Almada's mouth while they tortured him.

The officials who ran "Operation Condor" were trained at the notorious School of the Americas (SOA), a training center for Latin American and Caribbean military and police officers originally located in Panama. It...... The U.S. General Accounting Office conducted an investigation into the SOA in 1996 revealing that the school used training manuals advocating torture, "truth serum" to extract confessions, false imprisonment, bounty hunting, blackmail and execution. Pentagon officials initially claimed they had no idea what had been going on at the SOA, because the staff members assigned to review SOA teaching manuals couldn't read enough Spanish to understand what they said.

In 1997, however, the U.S. government was forced to publicly admit that it runs a school that has trained numerous Latin American dictators, generals and death-squad leaders who, as graduates of the SOA, have committed innumerable atrocities in their home countries. This admission prompted a series of editorial condemnations in the most prominent U.S. newspapers. The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and many other papers either ran articles critical of the SOA or called on the U.S. to close it altogether.

.... The SOA is a window into the lengths that U.S. rulers are willing to go to defend their interests abroad.

For example, in January 1998, Defense Secretary William Cohen wrote, " .....We have ensured that the school is an effective transmitter of our values to the military leadership of the region."....

....A look at the SOA's history will show just what kind of ³values" the school instills in its graduates......

Between 1961 and 1966, militaries overthrew nine Latin American governments, including those of Guatemala and Honduras. This is where the SOA got its nickname, the "school of coups," in Latin America.

In reality, the SOA provides personal contact between likeminded military personnel from the U.S. and Latin America and, more importantly, trains the military cadre of Latin America in the dirty tricks that the U.S. has mastered as a world power--including assassination, mass murder and torture. From U.S. policymakers' perspective, the SOA's project is no aberration. On the contrary, the horrors that emerge from the SOA are entirely consistent with U.S. policy since the beginning of the Cold War.

........
What they do at the SOA

The SOA has trained more than 60,000 military and police personnel in "counterinsurgency" over its 50-year history. According to the Pentagon, "counterinsurgency" entails "a combination of military, paramilitary, political, economic and civic action carried on by a government in order to destroy any movement or subversive insurgency."

Moreover, students learn from manuals such as Handling of Sources, Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla and Interrogation--which were found, in an official investigation ordered by President Clinton, to contain passages that "condone practices such as execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."11 One of the manuals suggests that government agents seeking information should "cause the arrest of the employee's parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating."

Nothing clarifies the SOA's teaching better than the testimony of the many people who have suffered under the hand of its graduates. When Diana Ortiz brought her story to the White House in 1996, she described just part of her ordeal at the hands of Guatemalan security forces under SOA graduate General Hector Gramajo: "They took me to a clandestine prison where I was tortured and raped repeatedly. My back and chest were burned more than 111 times with cigarettes. I was lowered into an open pit packed with human bodies--bodies of children, women, and men, some decapitated, some lying face up and caked with blood, some dead, some alive--and all swarming with rats."

Teaching torture at the SOA is well documented. One SOA graduate admitted in the documentary Inside the School of Assassins, that "they would bring people from the streets [of Panama City] to the base, and the experts would train us on how to obtain information through torture...They had a medical physician, a U.S. medical physician, which I remember very well, who was dressed in green fatigues, who would teach the students...[about] the nerve endings of the body. He would show them where to torture, where and where not, where you wouldn't kill the individual."

....No one knows exactly how many SOA graduates have been involved in atrocities, since new information surfaces all the time. Yet it is no accident that the countries with the worst human rights records also have the highest proportion of SOA graduates, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia and Guatemala. Of the 10 presidents of Latin American countries who graduated from SOA, all took power through illegal coups.

A look at just how many SOA graduates were involved in some of Latin America's worst atrocities shows that these are not a few rogue individuals. In 1993, Newsweek reported just a fraction of the SOA's astonishing legacy: 19 of the 27 Salvadoran officers responsible for killing eight people at Central America University were SOA grads, as were almost three-quarters of Salvadoran officers involved in seven additional massacres. Six Peruvian officers involved in a death-squad murder of nine students and one professor near Lima were grads of the SOA, as were at least four Honduran officers accused of organizing the notorious Battalion 316 death squad. In Colombia, 105 out of 246 officers accused of human rights violations have SOA credentials, as do 10 of 12 Salvadoran officers accused of massacring 900 civilians in El Mozote village--and the grisly list goes on.

....

Leuer cites El Salvador as just one shining example of how SOA training helped "to curb, reduce and change ingrained patterns of behavior abusive to the citizenry." As one author points out, "the fact that only two-thirds of the officers named for the worst atrocities in El Salvador were SOA graduates is apparently something of a success story."

....

The legacy of human rights abuses continues despite SOA claims to the contrary. A 1998 U.S. State Department report on human rights in Colombia reveals that while the curriculum may have changed, the lessons learned at the SOA have not. In addition to noting incidents such as the murder of 30 peasants by one SOA graduate, the report describes how General Rito Alejo del Rio ordered a raid on a human rights group called "Justice and Peace." During the raid, military personnel copied part of a database cataloguing 40,000 human rights cases. It is not clear what has been done with the names they found associated with these cases. No doubt, the 300 U.S. military personnel currently stationed in Colombia to help the government defend itself against rebel advances--100 of whom are drug enforcement agents and CIA operatives--will have a few ideas. Already, the U.S. has aided in the death of more than 35,000 people in Colombia by training almost 10,000 members of Colombia's military at the SOA.

.....

The recent war in Colombia shows how far they are willing to go. While the U.S. claims that it is helping prop up the Colombian government as part of their "war on drugs," in reality the U.S. is attempting to prevent left-wing rebels from destabilizing a region that continues to be vital to U.S. economic and political interests. Due to Colombia's strategic location between the Panama Canal and Venezuela (which supplies more oil to the U.S. than any other country), U.S. officials continue to back one of the most brutal militaries in the world in order to stabilize the region. Right-wing death squads in Colombia have already displaced 1.5 million people from their homes. Even though the Colombian military has been accused of more human rights abuses than any other in Latin America, U.S. officials have proposed sending $1 billion in emergency military aid to Colombia. It is no coincidence that Colombian military personnel make up the highest percentage of SOA graduates.

reply to post by Lucifer777

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Our institution is very religious as we require our members to be men of faith and our ceremonies are pulled from Scripture. We are not, however, a religion. It's not contradictory. 

Pike does state that Freemasonry is not a religion nor should it be substituted as such. Our buildings are called temples. Worshipful is defined as one worthy of respect.

Chiefly British Used as a respectful form of address.

You would think a Brit would know this.

Except they it's not always swift as they have often sawed away at the persons neck causing agonizing pain.

I have worked for the military for nearly a decade now. 

I would be only too happy to waterboard him, strip him naked, handcuff him in excruciatingly painful stress positions for days on end, as his sits in his own urine and faeces, apply electric shocks to his genitals, sexually assault him by inserting painful objects into his anus, force him to sexually assault other prisoners, force other prisoners to rape him, beat him, drill through various parts of his anatomy with power drills,  have trained dogs attack him, photograph him and post the photos on the internet.

Only if we cuddle afterward. 

Originally posted by AugustusMasonicus

Originally posted by Lucifer777
I am aware that the education level of Americans is barely sufficient to read Superman comics, but I think that most people on this forum would realise that beheading is an instantaneous and relatively painless death, especially when one compares it to the "School of Americas" & US military methods of genocide and of torturing people.

While it was quite difficult to pry myself from the engrossing exploits of one Clark Kent I did happen to stumble upon this rather quickly which enabled me to resume my mindless adventures with the Man of Steel.

Hillman also goes on to point out that the so-called painless guillotine is likely anything but. He states that "death occurs due to separation of the brain and spinal cord, after transection of the surrounding tissues. This must cause acute and possibly severe pain." This is one of the reasons why the guillotine, and beheading in general, is no longer an accepted method of execution in many countries with capital punishment.
­Hillman, Harold "An unnatural way to die." New Scientist, October 27, 1983, pg 276-278

I, unlike you, actually took the time to read about this topic prior to posting. Nice try though Lex Lucifer.

Beheading is probably more of a "quick death" than Masonic throat cutting, however It has been suggested that the brain remains conscious for a few seconds after beheading, and it is quite possible that it is very painful for those few seconds; however I simply found it to be ridiculous for Ksigmason, who claims to be part of the US military intelligence, to complain about Muslims beheading people and blowing up US soldiers, when he belongs to the world's leading imperalistic, terrorist and narcotic's trafficking organisation (i.e., the US military) which has a long history of subhuman brutality, torture and genocide.

The type of "beheading" practiced by Al Qaeda and similar groups differs from traditional judicial beheading. Traditional beheading is done quickly, with a massive steel blade, which cuts through the neck from the back, first severing the spinal column, then cutting the four large blood vessels, the trachea, and the esophagus. Unconsciousness is nearly instantaneous, and brain death occurs shortly thereafter.

en.wikipedia.org...

The US miltiary does not seem to care how it tortures and commits genocidal mayhem, and thus they can only expect similar terror in response; they only seem to care when they are retaliated against. Anyway, as Henry Kissinger stated military men are "dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for (US) foreign policy;" what does it matter to the masters of war how such dumb stupid animals are exterminated? They are subhuman vermin anyway who are unwirthy of life, and both their masters and their enemies seem to share the same judgement.

Originally posted by KSigMason

Except they it's not always swift as they have often sawed away at the persons neck causing agonizing pain.

I have worked for the military for nearly a decade now

.....

Only if we cuddle afterward.

I was only speaking of a hypothetical scenario in the interests of science to see if your would prefer US style torture and sexual assault or a quick beheading. If you US military girls cuddle after you torture people, that would be unsurprising; I have no objection to US miltiary personel cuddling or being cuddled after they are tortured and exterminated.



Personally I do not believe in judicial execution; executions are only necessary in a temporary revolutionary scenario (i.e., a war), and I do not believe in torture; however whatever means are used against the US state terrorists, no matter how barbaric, I simply consider it to be a natrual karmic (moral) reaction against US barbarism, torture and genocide. What goes around comes around; in this life or in eternity.




There is an old Scottish Masonic joke, where a Freemason is found dead in a prison cell, where the chief of police was also a Freemason; the prisoner was found handcuffed; his throat was cut, his tongue torn out, his body quartered and he was disemboweled. When the coronor, who was also a Freemason, came to give his verdict on the case, he remarked that it was "the worst case of suicide that he had ever come across." Freemasons tend to laugh at that joke because they understand that it could only be ritual murder and not suicide.

Since "suicide" is out of the question, the Masonic rituals can be considered to include the incitement of ritual murder, involving the cutting of the throat, the tearing out of the tongue, the quartering of the body and disembolweling; thus I consider Freemasons who object to Islamic beheading, to be simply practicing gross hypocrisy; not that I in any way wish to defend the Muslims at all; I merely seek to assist the mutual animosity between the Muslims and the Anglo-American state terrorists and their collaborators and apologists..

Lucifer

reply to post by Lucifer777

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Hey Lucifer, who to you isn’t a genocidal fascist?
Are the girl scouts okay?

reply to post by Lucifer777

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"There is an old Scottish Masonic joke, where a Freemason is found dead in a prison cell, where the chief of police was also a Freemason; the prisoner was found handcuffed; his throat was cut, his tongue torn out, his body quartered and he was disemboweled. When the coronor, who was also a Freemason, came to give his verdict on the case, he remarked that it was "the worst case of suicide that he had ever come across." Freemasons tend to laugh at that joke because they understand that it could only be ritual murder and not suicide." quote.
**************************************************

Sorry to go ever so slightly off track here but it would be interesting to know your views on the Jack The Ripper murders since the above description so fits the mutilations carried out on the numerous prostitutes in Whitechapel in 1888.

reply to post by RufusDriftwood

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The penalties are only symbolic, and would only apply to a Freemason. The joke wouldn't have worked if the prisoner wasn't a Mason.

For the same reason, the Ripper murders weren't some kind of Masonic ritual murder.

Originally posted by no1smootha
reply to post by RufusDriftwood

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The penalties are only symbolic, and would only apply to a Freemason. The joke wouldn't have worked if the prisoner wasn't a Mason.

For the same reason, the Ripper murders weren't Masonic.

edit on 19-4-2011 by no1smootha because: (no reason given)

I don't agree.I truly believe the Whitechapel murders were carried out by masons out to protect the royal family from scandal. However, I have to confess the masons of the Victorian period here in England were far removed from todays freemasons. They had different morals and ideals from their modern counterparts. You can't blame todays freemasons for ritual murders that happened in 1888 just like you can't blame todays Britains for crimes carried out against foreigners during the height of the British Empire.

reply to post by Christophorus0

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"God has but one eye, because with Him all things are right. " quote.

So god is like some omnipotent version of Peter Falk or Gordon Brown!? lol

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