Gitmo updateFollow

This is not the America my parents came for. What a shame that a few people can make such a large stain.

Have you tried using windex? I hear it works wonders on just about anything.

That is just so wrong.

Not that everything else wasn't, but I just found that so disturbing...

is worse that it has to be pointed out by a Canadian.

I'm trying to teach history here, I don't have time to talk about some guy who makes beer!

This is candy assed stuff compared to what they do with the serious terror suspects in the formerly secret CIA prisons in Poland - and especially compared with what foreign governments are accused of doing to people the US handed over to them.

To me, it is beyond comprehension that a single person could know about this and vote to re-elect Bush - however more people did. Obviously people doubted the severity of what occured but to me this isn't an issue of degree. Abusing prisoners is just totally unacceptable. And the president could - at any time - end this with a single order.

It brings to mind a totally random connection: I think it's in the novel Stranger In A Strange Land (or some other R. Heinlein novel) where the Earth has a unifed government and some character is detained by them. Heinlein wrote that since the head ruler was raised in the USA ergo there was no chance the person would be seriously mistreated.

The damage will last at least a generation and it will "justify" countless atrocities.

Outside of perhaps Nixon, I cannot think of a single US president - or serious candidate for the office - of the modern era who could possibly have sat idly by while this occured.

You have government employees smearing menstrual fluid on prisoners as part of your penal system? No, Oh I see! You are too f'ucking stupid to understand the difference between illegal abuses that happen in correctional facilities and the government ordered/approved tactics being used in Gitmo.

Go shove that ignorant *** excuse up your mothers ****. It is tired, its played out and it nothing more than a weak handed attempt at justifying some pretty unjustifiable *****.

Nixon would at least have been smarter about it, I think. He was by all accounts too paranoid to let this situation fester as it has.

That, or maybe we just never would have heard about it unless Woodward and Bernstein were on the case.

Two flaws in that argument:

1. Government employees are involved in both cases. Implying that somehow abuses that occur at one are worse then those that occur at another is silly.

2. Abuses of those sorts are "illegal" in both cases. Implying that it's illegal in the correctional facilities but somehow "government ordered/approved" when done at Gitmo is disengenous at best.


There are treatments that are harsher then those that normal prisoners can be subjected to allowed at Gitmo. You're free to rail on all day long about those interrogations and whatever violations of whatever rules you believe that represents. The point here is that each of the things on that list are either "legal" in the sense that they can be performed as part of an interrogation at Gitmo, or they are not. If they are "legal", then you need to take this up with folks like the Attorney General, Congress, and the Supreme Court. If they are not legal, then as the earlier poster stated, they're in the same catagory as similar (and in many cases much much worse) abuses that occur in our normal correctional facilities every day.

And that's ignoring the fact that you're assuming that every single claim of abuse by the prisoners there is a valid one. For example, I have a hard time believing that they're actually being smeared with menstrual blood. I could believe that during an interrogation a prisoner might be smeared with some liquid with red food coloring in it and told it was menstrual fluid in order to freak him out, but that does not make the claim ultimately accurate at the back end.

This just highlights the problem with taking such claims as absolute fact. We should certainly investigate such claims, but we should *not* just assume that these things are happening purely because the claims have been made. I recal making a similar argument a year ago when the claims of torture were all the rage in the media. Oddly, not a single claim made was *ever* substantiated even after a couple years of investigations. Funny that...

It's trivially easy for someone to claim something happened. I don't happen to put a whole lot of weight on that. Forgive me if I'm insistent on waiting until such things are investigated before leaping to a conclusion.

Edited, Jan 5th 2007 5:32pm by gbaji

Sorry Gbaji,

One involves occassional illegal abuses of prisoners tried and convicted, while they are in the penal system.

The other involves the prolonged detainment without trial of suspected terrorists. Detainment which involves government approved coercion tactics in attempts to obtain confessions of crime.

So yeah it's kind of like comparing apples and oranges.


That aside it is still a f'ucking travesty that is dragging the nations reputation in the middle east and with your western allies.

Edited, Jan 6th 2007 1:42am by bodhisattva

no

I already did. I think the final tally was 233/202 in the House and 51/50 in the Senate

Except that *actually* smearing a detainee with menstual blood would be a violation of the prisoner's rights under the "inhumane treatment" clause, whereas smearing him with red-colored water and telling him it was menstrual blood is a valid "non-torture" technique for breaking a prisoner during interrogation.

You're not allowed to physically harm the detainees during interrogation. What do you *think* that leaves? A huge part of the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo is psychological. You convince the detainee that something's happening to him that is not actually happening. You make him feel like he's in danger. You make him believe he may be hurt (or even is being hurt). You disconnect him from the outside world and fill his head with doubts and fears. You keep him off balance and confused. That way he'll have a harder time thinking up a lie and is more likely to provide you with truthful information.

They're not "nice" things, but they are legal. And yeah. This means that sometimes prisoners will report that things have been done to them that were not actually done. They may report that something was done to someone else that was not actually done. Taking those claims at face value is pretty dumb...