Secret Prison - so says the liberal mediaFollow

Does anyone else find it ironic that, a couple months after Durbin was raked over the coals and declared a traitor for comparing our treatment of prisoners to a gulag, we find out about America using secret Soviet era prisons in Eastern Europe to house suspects?

So... this should help!

I hate the thought that we're not the good guys anymore.








Edited, Fri Nov 4 12:20:03 2005 by Elinda

No not worse than Monsanto,

Monsanto is the corporate equivalent of the still born love child of Hitler and Satan.

I wonder if Kerry will commit suicide for losing to the biggest idiot president we've ever had?

Union Carbide = teh Uberest debil

(darest we forget Bhopal)

TStephens,

The abuse and detainment of suspects is a major recruiting tool of insurgents and terrorists. Throughout the entire Iraqi war the US has tried to present itself to Iraqis, Americans and the world at large that the US is the good guy coming to bring apple pie american values of freedom, liberty and democracy to Iraq and the middle east at large.

However there is an inconsistency. The US has been abusing prisoners, holding people for indefinite lenghts of time without charge, etc. Whenever they do so it provides those they are fighting against to go "look at the american hypocrites" and so forth and continue to recruit. It is not putting the fear of Allah into them its just driving more people towards extremism.

What of the argument "we have to do it to protect ourselves!!!" ? This is another case of short handed thinking, tacit approval of abuse and torture under some murky guise of "national security" all the while breaking all the tenant that america loves and holds dear is not only hurting what american stands for it is increasing anti US sentiment in the muslim world which will come to bite you in the *** just as pulling out of afghanistan in the 80's or supporting Saddam in the 80's. Sure it seems good at the time but it lacks thinking down the road and will cause trouble in the end.

It is important for the US to deal with this problem in an open and transparent manner and not hide it or go to other countries to skirt US law. The US House and Senate which are both Republican dominated felt the same way and tried to pass the defense bill with an addendum requiring strict following of military codes of conduct when it comes to treatment of prisoners, however Bush promised to veto the bill because of that addendum.

As citizens of the United States you have to decide are the rights and morals on which your country founded solely the rights of US citizens or are they universal rights applicable to all people?

I see where you are coming from. There is a very entertaining spoken word piece by Henry Rollins arguing the same fact. Saying, either be the good guy or be so much of a f[/b]ucking monster that no one will dare fu[b]ck with you. No inbetween.

Im sure if you loaded up your filesharing program of choice and did some searching of Rollins Spoken Word you could find it.

Did Niccolo have ******** tatoos and front one of the better 80's punk bands?

Didnt think so!

Well. The problem is that calling it the "anti torture" ammendment is a bit of a stretch. The reality is that we have different degrees of treatment granted to prisoners based on where and how they are captured and what status they have.

What this addendum is trying to do is ensure that all prisoners, regardless of status, are treated identically. The problem is that this undermines the entire point of having preferential status for say POWs by granting some guy who fires at soldiers while hiding behind a row of children the same protections.

It's a semantic game because they say "we're just requiring the same guidelines that are in the UCMJ to all prisoners in government facilities". But the language in the bill is not quite identical to that in the UCMJ. It's similar, but changed enough to allow for broader range of challenges to occur.

What is "cruel treatment"? That's subject to vast interpretation. The UN rule on torture requires treatment that permanently damages the physical or mental health of the prisoner. So breaking bones is a violation, but putting prisoners in painful positions while questioning them is *not*. Adding in additional language, as this bill does, effectively removes a number of legal interrogation techniques that are not currently in violation of any laws on torture or treatment of the prisoners they're being applied to.


This is in direct response to the problems that the opponents to places like Gitmo have had. They've been trying for a couple years to proove that prisoners have been tortured, and they get great traction in the press and the public by listing off interrogation techniquest. But when they actually try to press any sort of legal charges, they are hampered by the inconvenient fact that those interrogation techniques are *not* actually torture, and are not actually illegal in any way. So, finding that the government has been working within the confines of the law, they've decided to change the law itself.


The danger here is the precident it sets. Should we be changing the rules for things like prisoner treatment based on the specifics of the day? Should we do it because one group of people have decided that the current rules don't meet their political agenda? My problem isn't necessarily with that specific goal in this specific case, but that while this change may seem to be innoculous, the precident of doing that could just as easily go the other way at some point in the future. If we establish a habit of changing the laws in order to allow a furtherance of a political agenda, what's to stop a group with an "evil" agenda to change the laws that get in their way? It could just as easily be a group deciding that those pesky things called "rights" are getting in the way of their cause, so let's remove them...


Bush will be correct to veto this. The specifics are poorly thought out from the get go. This is an issue which, when presented in a very simplisti manner "we're against torture!", seems obvious and justified. But have we assessed exactly what effect the change will have? How does it affect how enemy combatants will operate? How will it affect our ability to interrogate any prisoners? How will it affect any disencentive to operate in "illegal" ways on the battlefied? It just seems bizaare to me that our biggest problem in Iraq right now is dealing with combatants that hide out among civilian populations and attack us in ways designed to endanger as many civilians as possible, yet our response is to increase legal protections for those who use those tactics? That seems kinda backwards to me...

Define "mistreat". Isn't that really the problem?

Some would argue that holding prisoners *at all* is mistreatment. What standard do we use? It's really simple to just say "don't mistreat prisoners", but at some point, you have to be a bit more specific then that. What we're really seeing is that some people don't agree with the current legal standards, and they're trying to change them by using rhetoric "We're *torturing* people", even though we're actually *not* torturing anyone by the legal definition.




Great! That's the standard we're using already. So why toss in an addendum? Because they want to add in slight wording changes to raise the standard. Isn't that a problem? Shouldn't this get a bit more attention then the rhetoric that's pushing it? I think so...



You're playing rhetoric games yourself now. We're "abusing" prisoners? By who's definition? See. If you don't state the definition you are using, you can call any level of treatment "abuse". But what we've found so far in nearly every single case of alleged "abuse" reported over and over in our media is that when legal experts examine the specifics, they find that the interrogations were conducted in accordance with current laws.

But that does not stop some people from calling it abuse in an attempt to change the standards themselves. And I'm not wholey opposed to that. If sufficient people believe that the techniques being used are wrong, then we should change them. What I *am* opposed to is the "around your back" way they're going about it. If you don't like the way the current law works, then say so, be honest about it, and push for change. Don't play around with semantics of words like "abuse" and "torture" to gain support for your changes while implying that we're violating the current law and you're just "re-affirming the same rules". That's simply not so. We *are* using the standards the authors of this addendum claim they just want us to adhere to. The fact is that the addendum changes that standard. Saying they're just enforcing the current one is a lie.



Huh? What does this have to do with Plame?



So you assume some kind of mafia-esque operation's going on, based solely on a few people telling you that's what's going on? You're aware that while there are hundreds of allegations of abuse at various prisons, virtually 100% of them, when actually investigated, turn out to be exagerrations or mis-application of terms like abuse and torture. This does not stop the media from playing up the allegations, but my point is that shouldn't we base an assessment of how we're treating these prisoners based on the *facts* of their treatment, and not based on the claims that any random person can make?

So if 100 people all claim something, you assume it's true? Even after multiple investigations over several years have turned up nothing? Funny that. I'm still waiting for the results of the Gitmo investigation. Last I'd heard, despite the massive media coverage of the alleged abuses there, the only findings of fact were a couple of very minor infractions (statisticaly lower rate of incidents there then in any other prison in the US).

Yet the perception is that we're horribly abusing and torturing prisoners. No proof. No evidence. Just the same old rhetoric methodologies. Repeat the rummor often enough, and many people will believe it's true.


And before some logical fallacy challenged individual jumps in: I'm not saying that there are no instances of abuses that have occured in any prison anywhere. I'm saying that the rates of such things are not abnormally high, nor do they represent any sort of systematic failure. Despite a massive spin campain to make people think so. Even the abuses at Abu-Ghraib were not classified as "torture". They were abuses, and should not have occured, but are hardly the massive rate of abuse that some would like us to believe (and they occured only during the first 3-4 months after the invasion). There's no evidence at all that current prisoners are suffering violations of our codes of treatment. None at all.

Some would argue that holding prisoners *at all* is mistreatment. What standard do we use? It's really simple to just say "don't mistreat prisoners", but at some point, you have to be a bit more specific then that. What we're really seeing is that some people don't agree with the current legal standards, and they're trying to change them by using rhetoric "We're *torturing* people", even though we're actually *not* torturing anyone by the legal definition.
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the geneva convention defines mistreatment very well. we crossed the line.

end of story.

all that is left is for the addministration lawyers to go through the fine print and "redefine" the intentions of that fine document so they can do what they want to do.

you want to get pissy about the fine print, the geneva convention clearly FORBIDES questioning a prisoner AT ALL other than for identification purposes. no quid pro quo, no grey area, no questioning AT ALL outside of identification purpose.

ANYTHING used to coerce a prisoner for any reason is pretty much torture. holding their head under water = torture. stripping them naked and hanging them in their cell = torture. beating the tar out of them = torture. mental abuse = torture, this includes desecrating thier beliefs, humiliation, and degradation of any type.

there is no grey area. the front page of the miami herald, with a picture of soccer star Diego Maradona holding a picture of Bush with the words "WAR CRIMINAL" across the top is indicative of how the MAJORITY of the WORLD views our actions. it is also indicative of how over half of this country feels.

you cannot LEAD anyone without honor and integrity, you can only DICTATE.

iraq has plunged this country into a hole so deep, we may never recover.

but lets argue exactly what "torture" really means, shall we? im sure we can show the rest of the world how GOOD we are once we have our laywers explain to them we didnt EXACTLY commit a crime.