Ok. Can't help myself. A couple of these responses were just a bit over the top...
Driftwood the Eccentric wrote:
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To him they're nothing more than a people the US has oppressed fighting for their freedom.
Well, saying you've oppressed them is a stretch, you've really just walked into their country(in the case of Iraq) with absolutely no grounds for doing so, killed a bunch of people, threw out their leader(yes, he was an evil *******, but it doesn't justify this), put your own in, and then began a campaign of randomly searching residences and arresting peopel with no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in terrorism and threw them into a terrible terrible place where you claim, depsite whta the rest of the world thinks, that thye have no rights and are less than human.
Very few of the people detained at Gitmo came from Iraq. My understanding is that there were a total of 4 Iraqi citizens who were recently released from Gitmo to the Iraq government's custody. They were all captured fighting in Afghanistan, though. There's supposed to be one remaining Iraqi citizen in Gitmo at this time.
You're arguing against the invasion of Iraq, not the detention of prisoners in Gitmo. Off topic just a bit is all...
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People like him actually think his neighbors, in the military, are randomly slaughtering innocents over there.
A lot of them are.
How many is "a lot"? I'm sorry, but this is offensive to the massively overwhelming percentage of US military personnel who have *not* gone around randomly shooting innocent civilians.
The correct answer is: "A ridiculously small percentage when you consider the environment they have been placed into".
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And when he can't back up anything he says he reverts to insults and name calling, a true sign of intelligence.
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I hear about it all the damn time. OH NO! Another few soldiers killed, I guess we'll just have to throw more kids over there against their will to fall in massive numbers due to their own former-president's pointless, pointless war.
So they're "kids" thrown in against their will when they die, but "a lot" of them participate in the slaughter of innocent civilians? Not only is this obviously contradictory to your earlier statement, but it's offensively political at the same time. What you call the soldiers and how you treat them varies based on which is politically convenient for "your side".
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No, torutre, according to those with any intelligence whatsoever is:
Waterboarding
Humiliating prisoners and taking pictures
Using violent and painful methods of extracting information
No. The correct definition of torture is:
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Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
Waterboarding has yet to be officially defined as torture by the UN commission on torture. Probably because it's a technique that many members of the commission use on their own prisoners. There's a pretty amusing game of semantics involved with the issue actually.
Pain has to be "severe" to qualify as torture. Again. This gets into semantics. Most rational uses of the term define it in the context of physical or mental damage inflicted. Pain by itself does not constitute torture.
No definition of torture includes humiliation by itself. That may be a violation of other rules, but does not make it torture.
IMO, it's important to step back from the details and definitions for a second here. There must be some range of actions which constitute "interrogation" but do not constitute "torture". And while I'm sure some civil liberties lawyers would like to apply the most restrictive rules for interrogations in all cases, the reality is that this is pretty unreasonable, especially in the case of those detained at Gitmo.
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Also, I'm pretty sure you'd be crying foul if some coutnry was refusing a Christian a bible or not allowing them to pray.
You're aware that there are places in the world where people are put into prison simply for being Christian, right? Odd that I don't see the same degree of outrage for their plight that you show for prisoners caught violating the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
I get that this is "us" doing it. But let's not lose sight of a larger world picture here. While you may view our treatment of the prisoners in Gitmo as horrible in relation to the treatment we demand of our own citizens within our country, it's downright luxury in relation to how many prisoners are treated around the globe every single day, and for allegations of acts far less dire. You're holding the US up to a much much higher standard. And while that's perfectly legitimate, I think it's important to remember that this is what you are doing. We're not "worse than them", or even "no better than them". We're so much better than them, that we dislike treating others even just a bit less well than we treat ourselves and we wring our hands constantly over it.
Don't forget to put things into context when you look at a place like Gitmo.
but 