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Gitmo inmate: My treatment shames American flag [W:508,759]

Why not get with repubs and share and combine the two reports and come out with a unified report? Are liberals such children that they can't work with others?
Repubs are publishing their own report.:shrug:
It's a little ironic that a GOPer would accuse anyone else of non-cooperation.



Sorry radio, not what I was doing...But kind of telling that you think so...
My posts are here for all to see.
Check'em out.....oh that's right....you already did.



Ah name calling...Ain't it great when you have nothing?
More irony.

And I wouldn't count the chickens on Benghazi until all the investigating is done...
How many Benghazi "investigations" have we had now?
Five?..six?....I've lost count....but this next one....yeah....this next one will expose Obama...or Hillary...or something.



Agreed, but please point out for us what in this report is anything new concerning how liberals feel about EIT?
Nothing new. Why all the apoplexy?



Good to hear, because that made you libs look kind of crazy.
More name calling, more irony.



That's great.
Well, I wouldn't say great.....good, maybe....but not great.
 
If they are not convicted, how can terrorists be properly punished?

Who cares about the ravings of the unrepentant, put them on trial for the sake of actual justice.

This is the falsehood of the criminal justice approach to terrorism. This is war. No trials necessary. Kill the enemy.
 
Any act of torture is condemnable. In my oppinion the scale or severity of the torture does not take away the fact that all acts of torture are dehumanizing. All acts of torture should be punished, no matter the scale.

Of course every act of torture condemnable. That is pretty trivial for our culture today. But to trivialize torture by stuffing it with soft porn and blasphemy endangers the progress we have made.
 
You're right in the case that no evidence obtained through torture is admissable in U.S. Courts. My argument is not one of criminal charges. As any naval and embassy territory is indeed U.S. territory (exactly why you can't be arrested by another nation's law enforcement on U.S. embassy territory) I'm saying that the actions are unconstitutional. We are guaranteed that we shall never have to face cruel and unusual punishment. The only reason that these "inmates" aren't receieving due-process is because there's no criminal charges being brought up. This is technically a very lenghty and unconstitutional interrogation.

There is a difference between gathering information to turn into intelligence and gathering evidence to prosecute a crime. Making unlawful combatants uncomfortable so they will tell us what they know is fine with me.

Dianne Feinstein committed a treasonous act that will result in unnecessary American deaths.
 
I don't recall the United States adopting similar methods againist the enemies we fought in previous wars.
We held something like 425000 German POWs on US soil during WWII. How many were brought to trial?
 
It's completely disgusting how many posters are giddy with the thought of torturing another human being. The president made the point that it doesn't matter that torture isn't effective. Even if it were effective, we shouldn't do it because it goes against everything that we stand for.

However, so many of these other posters seem to be making another point. That the information is secondary. We should torture to enact revenge on people we suspect may have been involved in harming us. They deserve everything we can do to them, rule of law and due process be damned. It's a ugly side to our country.

I suppose if making someone uncomfortable to the point of compelling cooperation is torture then you have a point. I think the ugly side of this country is the realization of just how many bedwetters we have here.

And of course treasonous Democratic Party senators like Dianne Feinstein.
 
Frankly, reason 1 there is a decent one IMO. An agency willing to risk alienating the very people tasked to oversee them by hacking their computers, accusing those same people of a crime, lying about what they did, and then doing NOTHING when the lies were found out should expect to get clipped because they ARE out of control. I can't believe that event has been brushed off. You can damn sure guarantee if that was a GOP committee, there would have been a dozen hearings by now.

Hi Jasper. You seem measured in this response so I will try to be as well...

I don't disagree that the CIA acting the way they did with respect to alleged spying, and hacking into the committee's work, but, as you say there are repubs that don't like that as well, and Feinstein has tremendous sway among her repub colleagues on the committee largely because up to now she has been very fair concerning matters of national security. She could have easily convened hearings on the CIA with repub support because as you say, repubs wouldn't stand for it either. Instead she chose to drop a bomb just before jumping out of the plane...Kind of cowardly if you ask me.

And obviously those involved in a project for six years intended to release the findings and did. That should surprise exactly no one. It might be true that it was rushed a bit because of the change in control, but the committee has been fighting the WH and CIA for months at least over the details. At some point those involved just have to release it.

I have no problems with studies when they are done correctly, and when there is participation from both sides of the isle, then you have something to agree upon. Now, much like the Church report in the 70s not much will come of it, other than rendering aid to the enemy in this case.

Finally, I think it's a good thing to know what happened, so we go into this decision the next time with our eyes wide open about what will likely happen. We can't do that if we only know half or 1/4 or 1/10th of the story. And I can't see how this release has any long term bad effects on the ME. The damage was done with Abu Ghraib, complete with pictures, and continues with GITMO, with a steady drip of former detainees from there for the last few years to tell their story. And if there is any real damage from this release, it's a bunch of people defending torture as a legitimate interrogation technique, and denying that we did anything wrong during that period.

Again no...By releasing it as a one sided, questionable, tirade it settles nothing but for partisans, and the divide they hope to further...Like I said, Church tried after Nam to do this, and did it change anything that happened today? No, not really....Neither will this.
 
Of course every act of torture condemnable. That is pretty trivial for our culture today. But to trivialize torture by stuffing it with soft porn and blasphemy endangers the progress we have made.

Is the act of attacking a persons cultural and ideological values considered an act of torture.

If some torturerer had you tied up and forced you to watch as he burns the American flag right in front of you or made you watch videos of the twin towers collapsing on 9/11, would you consider those acts as torture?
 
A nice piece of enemy propaganda, for anyone gullible enough to be taken in by it. Since when does the Eighth Amendment apply to aliens detained outside the U.S.? And last time I checked, the Supreme Court was contriving a way in Boumediene v. Bush to make Guantanamo U.S. territory, using a lot of elaborate nonsense about de facto and de jure territory. Of course that result-oriented sleight-of-hand involved the majority in dishonestly overruling Johnson v. Eisentrager, a 1950 decision that was directly contrary, while refusing to admit that's what it was doing. Guantanamo is part of the territory of Cuba, occupied by the U.S. under the terms of a perpetual lease.

That's a misleading summary of the issues and the result. The facts are different - Germany =/= GITMO, and the Germans actually had a legitimate process that was followed - detailed charges and a hearing and a finding. The "hearings" set up for the prisoners at GITMO were a farce. Kangaroo court is a good enough description, and when decided the Executive branch had six years to set up a legitimate process and deliberately failed to do so.

So the core issue was whether we (the Executive branch) effectively terminated prisoners' rights held under our exclusive control, on land we'd continuously occupied without interference from the Cuban government for a century based on the distinction between an indefinite lease and U.S. owned territory. And the court rationally held that we could not - that the executive branch could not operate without any restraints with regard to those prisoners, and so ordered the Executive branch to provide these prisoners with actual rights to challenge their detention, which is a basic human right.
 
It amazes me sometimes, the extent to which some Americans seem to hate their own country. I can't imagine hating Canada so much that I'd contemplate spreading such nonsense.

You are not like the bedwetters. Most of them are little girls who want to live happily ever after without ever giving a thought to their safety or that of their families. And some are wannabe traitors who cannot wait to give aid and comfort to this nation's very real enemies. Many are democrats. It is the natural home for bedwetters and traitors like Dianne Feinstein.
 
If they are not convicted, how can terrorists be properly punished?

Who cares about the ravings of the unrepentant, put them on trial for the sake of actual justice.

It's what the Bush administration was doing, using military courts, in Gitmo. Obama didn't want to do that and some on the left challenged the process in your courts and I'm not certain, but I believe the Supreme Court upheld the principle but might have had some problem with part of the process. I'd have to research it again to be certain. In any event, Obama determined military trials weren't his thing. You could ask him that question.
 
Leftists certainly don;t complain much about these continuing stonings and beheadings. In fact to raise the question is to be called "Islamophobic".

Complete and total bullsh!t. What's Islamaphobic is when people use statistics from the worst Muslim countries to justify the bigotry of Muslims living in Western nations -- most of who are no worse than Christians.
 
Is the act of attacking a persons cultural and ideological values considered an act of torture.

If some torturerer had you tied up and forced you to watch as he burns the American flag right in front of you or made you watch videos of the twin towers collapsing on 9/11, would you consider those acts as torture?

I certainly hope, if it should ever come to it, that that is the torture they choose for me.
 
Why do so many people accept that it's ok for a man to be held for 13 years with no charges pressed, no evidence of his guilt shown, just because he's a foreigner? If he's a terrorist, charge him and execute him, if he's not, then let him go. 13 years is just ****ing ridiculous.

He is similar to a prisoner of war. An unlawful combatant can, and should be held until the war ends. Or we should have a military tribunal, determine his guilt or innocence and then release or execute him.

This wasn't shoplifiting.
 
On the contrary, we never put POW's on trial. And those were lawful combatants.

What would you call the Tokyo Trials (IMTFE) and the like?

And there's a difference anyway because in a traditional "war" those held as POWs (as opposed to accused war criminals, subject to hearings like IMTFE) were released or subject to some tribunal at the end of the war. With the indefinite War on Terror (TM) that's not an option because the war won't end or we/they have no way to determine an end except when we arbitrarily say the "war" has ended, and they'd be effectively sentenced to life in prison without charge or trial.
 
What would you call the Tokyo Trials (IMTFE) and the like?

And there's a difference anyway because in a traditional "war" those held as POWs (as opposed to accused war criminals, subject to hearings like IMTFE) were released or subject to some tribunal at the end of the war. With the indefinite War on Terror (TM) that's not an option because the war won't end or we/they have no way to determine an end except when we arbitrarily say the "war" has ended, and they'd be effectively sentenced to life in prison without charge or trial.

Yes, they are effectively sentenced to life in prison without trial. What's your point?
The Tokyo trials concerned unlawful acts by lawful combatants.
 
I agree with your last sentence in a general sense, but disagree that it applies in this case.

If we were capturing people who are perpetrating crimes of humanity against non-Americans and holding them at Gitmo (for instance, Palestinians), that would be a very true statement. But the ones we captured were accused of or thought to have committed crimes against Americans. So it's policing crimes against its own citizens and also, on many occasions (like Khalid Sheik Mohammed), crimes committed on our shores.

They were not committing crimes. They were unlawful combatants waging war. They should have been made uncomfortable for as long as they had something of value to tell us. Then, as in 1001 Arabian Nights, or the Thousand and One Nights for the purists, once the interrogator grew bored they should have been tried, convicted and executed.
 
He is similar to a prisoner of war. An unlawful combatant can, and should be held until the war ends. Or we should have a military tribunal, determine his guilt or innocence and then release or execute him.

This wasn't shoplifiting.

To be accurate, just go ahead and say, 'should be held forever, without a meaningful opportunity to challenge his or her detention.'
 
That would make sense (still would not be right, but perhaps sense) if we did something with all this, but largely we just held them somewhere without process or trial.
This is what one does with prisoners of war. They do not get due process. They are being held because they are unlawful combatants who are in a war still being waged against the US. When the war is over they may be returned.

5, 10, even more years depending upon the subject in question. The jury is still out on the matter of all the torture doing something meaningful for intelligence operations.
The jury is not actually out. That lying sack of excrement, the treasonous Dianne Feinstein gave aid and comfort to our enemies. She and her Democratic hatchet holders damaged the nation and its ability to protect us. In addition she lied about interrogations not providing information that could be turned into intelligence.
 
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