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mindseye
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A Yankee living in Shanghai
Apr 1999
time: 13:23
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quote:
Originally posted by DanS
I'm disappointed in you, mindseye. I expected a response a little more thoughtful from you. |
I apologize, my comment was ill-considered, I realize you are not trying to ignore the affair.
However, I really do feel we, as a nation, need to face this dead-on, no matter how uncomfortable or offensive viewing those photos may be. Our country has resorted to systematic prisoner abuse and torture. This was not some isolated misdeed. This is very serious stuff that strikes at the core of who we are and what we think we stand for.
What's the difference between the US shuttling around prisoners to avoid international Red Cross inspectors, and the Chinese shuttling around SARS patients to avoid WHO inspectors?
The difference is that the US has stooped far lower.
All of us - those who supported the war and those who didn't - had better take a long sober look into our national mirror and figure out how the f*ck we reached this shameful nadir.
The rug has been yanked out from underneath whatever remaining ability we still had to inspire freedom and promote our finest ideals abroad. Now how can we talk about "human rights" with a straight face? That's a loss to us -- and the world.
I'm afraid that the road to regaining our international credibility is going to be a long one, but the necessary first steps are confronting this horror in a very public way, to insure it's not minimized, to insure it doesn't happen again.
Personally, I think that's going to require regime change in America. The current leadership's track record of accepting responsibility is pretty abysmal. In Bush's White House, the buck stops anywhere but "here". 
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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:23
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It seems to come down to how systematic you believe the abuse to be, mindseye. If you believe the abuse was largely systematic, then you look at the administration as the culprit.
Unfortunately, I think politics comes into this a lot. It is convenient for you to think that the administration is the root of the problem as it is convenient for me to think that the abuse was not largely systematic and therefore the administration is not largely at fault. For you, showing the pictures publicly is the way to correct the problem, since it resides at the political level. For me, showing the pictures publicly doesn't correct the problem, since it seems to reside at the level of military discipline (no matter how high that goes, such as generals, etc.) -- a part of the military wasn't following and probably didn't even know the precise policies that were promulgated by the administration. Showing the pictures would only be useful if the bad apples aren't being punished and removed from positions where they can do harm.
The thing that gives me pause with this whole thing is the administration's memo about the WoT prisoners that uncomforably skated the edge of legality. For me, this goes directly toward how systematic the abuse was. But it was retracted after something like 2 months and really didn't appear to make it into the field in any event. Further, it wasn't retracted because of public outcry, but rather because the administration saw that it skated too close to the edge of legality.
There are other issues at play here, and I don't want to make it sound like I'm dismissing them here by omission. But this is a good start.
Last edited by DanS on 05-06-2005 at 23:51
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Ted Striker
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United States of America
Jan 1970
time: 21:23
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quote:
Originally posted by mindseye
I apologize, my comment was ill-considered, I realize you are not trying to ignore the affair.
However, I really do feel we, as a nation, need to face this dead-on, no matter how uncomfortable or offensive viewing those photos may be. Our country has resorted to systematic prisoner abuse and torture. This was not some isolated misdeed. This is very serious stuff that strikes at the core of who we are and what we think we stand for.
What's the difference between the US shuttling around prisoners to avoid international Red Cross inspectors, and the Chinese shuttling around SARS patients to avoid WHO inspectors?
The difference is that the US has stooped far lower.
All of us - those who supported the war and those who didn't - had better take a long sober look into our national mirror and figure out how the f*ck we reached this shameful nadir.
The rug has been yanked out from underneath whatever remaining ability we still had to inspire freedom and promote our finest ideals abroad. Now how can we talk about "human rights" with a straight face? That's a loss to us -- and the world.
I'm afraid that the road to regaining our international credibility is going to be a long one, but the necessary first steps are confronting this horror in a very public way, to insure it's not minimized, to insure it doesn't happen again.
Personally, I think that's going to require regime change in America. The current leadership's track record of accepting responsibility is pretty abysmal. In Bush's White House, the buck stops anywhere but "here". |
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mindseye
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A Yankee living in Shanghai
Apr 1999
time: 13:23
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quote:
Originally posted by DanS
It seems to come down to how systematic you believe the abuse to be, mindseye. If you believe the abuse was largely systematic, then you look at the administration as the culprit.
Unfortunately, I think politics comes into this a lot. It is convenient for you to think that the administration is the root of the problem as it is convenient for me to think that the abuse was not largely systematic and therefore the administration is not largely at fault. |
I think it's hard to deny that the tip-top of the administration wasn't involved. For heaven's sake, the now-US attorney general advised the President that parts of the Geneva Convention could basically be ignored. Our national policies regarding the detention and handling of "detainees" (or whatever we call prisoners these days) were not written and put in place by prison guards.
And even if the administration were not directly involved, just look at their reactions. Where is the horror and indignation? Heads should be rolling right and left over this, people should be accepting responsibility and resigning over this. Our military has in multiple locations and instances been torturing and cruelly mistreating prisoners! Instead, blame is shuffled down the command pyramid, events are minimized as akin to college hazing practices, information is throttled, evidence hidden or obscured, and the news media's credibility attacked.
If the administration really weren't involved, I would expect them to be acting very differently. Instead, they appear to put personal political damage control ahead of national principals.
Blame also extends to the other end of the pyramid, to everyone who supported the war. Once war is unleashed and the normal rules of civilization are suspended, unpredictable bad things usually take place. It's another reason why wars should be a last resort. Anyone who supported this war helped create an environment where the possiblity of really bad things happening was suddenly dramatically greater.
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Ted Striker
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United States of America
Jan 1970
time: 21:23
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quote:
Originally posted by mindseye
I think it's hard to deny that the tip-top of the administration wasn't involved. For heaven's sake, the now-US attorney general advised the President that parts of the Geneva Convention could basically be ignored. Our national policies regarding the detention and handling of "detainees" (or whatever we call prisoners these days) were not written and put in place by prison guards.
And even if the administration were not directly involved, just look at their reactions. Where is the horror and indignation? Heads should be rolling right and left over this, people should be accepting responsibility and resigning over this. Our military has in multiple locations and instances been torturing and cruelly mistreating prisoners! Instead, blame is shuffled down the command pyramid, events are minimized as akin to college hazing practices, information is throttled, evidence hidden or obscured, and the news media's credibility attacked.
If the administration really weren't involved, I would expect them to be acting very differently. Instead, they appear to put personal political damage control ahead of national principals.
Blame also extends to the other end of the pyramid, to everyone who supported the war. Once war is unleashed and the normal rules of civilization are suspended, unpredictable bad things usually take place. It's another reason why wars should be a last resort. Anyone who supported this war helped create an environment where the possiblity of really bad things happening was suddenly dramatically greater. |
Well, well done mindseye. I agree 150%.
I've been screaming the same thing for the past year already.
The damage control is very insulting, like when Cheney came out last week and said he was, "offended" by Amnesty Internation.
Well I was ****ing offended when you and your morons LIED to your own people to go invade some place. What a *****.
America is doing some outrageous **** and nobody gives a damn.
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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:23
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quote:
The damage control is very insulting, like when Cheney came out last week and said he was, "offended" by Amnesty Internation. |
I used to be involved with AI. When I heard the "gulag" comment, I lost an incredible amount of respect I had for the organization as non-partisan. I'll let the WaPo editorial on the matter do the talking.
quote:
'American Gulag'
Thursday, May 26, 2005; Page A26
IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.
That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference held to mark the publication of Amnesty's annual report, the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times." In her written introduction to the report, Ms. Khan also mentioned only two countries at length: Sudan and the United States, the "unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power," which "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights."
Like Amnesty, we, too, have written extensively about U.S. prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have done so not only because the phenomenon is disturbing in its own right but also because it gives undemocratic regimes around the world an excuse to justify their own use of torture and indefinite detention and because it damages the U.S. government's ability to promote human rights.
But we draw the line at the use of the word "gulag" or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as "hysterical." |
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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:23
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My apologies. It was the implementation memo for Gitmo prepared by counsel (not the top-level legal memo) that was retracted by Rumsfeld after about one and a half months, on January 15, 2003. As he rescinded the memo, Rumsfeld immediately convened a working group to discuss what was proper interrogation technique in light of a broader range of issues rather than just legal issues.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...anguage=printer
The original memo...
"While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time. Our armed forces are trained to a standard of interrogation that reflects a tradition of restraint."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-sr...ts/dodmemos.pdf
and the rescision...
"In all interrogations, you should continue the humane treatment of the detainees, regardless of the type of interrogation technique employed."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-sr...03rumsfelda.pdf
Last edited by DanS on 07-06-2005 at 22:15
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03-06-2005 13:45
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