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

Are you unfamiliar with Obama's aggressive drone program he uses to assassinate people he chooses? Those strikes routinely kill nearby people. I do not see much argument against killing people the way i do about making them uncomfortable.

There isn't much argument because no one is defending it, and it's a different topic. If you want to discuss the drone program, start a thread. I'll participate.
 
There isn't much argument because no one is defending it, and it's a different topic. If you want to discuss the drone program, start a thread. I'll participate.

I started one thread. Apparently I failed to meet all of the requirements so it got squashed. I doubt I shall ever start another.
 
No. It is the report. And the damage has been done. The US will become isolated even more than under Obama. We will see Americans killed by lone wolf attacks within this country. We will see successful recruiting for the Jihadists. And the CIA will be demoralized and neutered. These are all bad things that flow directly from Feinstein's treasonous release of this report.

So the report and not what it reveals is the issue. Shoot the messenger isn't actually a good defense.

But I hope the CIA is neutered, at least to some extent. An agency that is arrogant enough to hack into the computers of Senators, accuse THEM of a crime, lie about what was done, etc. is out of control and if there was any justice, and Obama had any backbone, we'd have seen some extremely senior leaders of the CIA out on their asses, and brought up on charges.
 
It's difficult to properly summarize more than two centuries of American history in a paragraph, but all too often I've seen a Fractured Fairytales version of American history that tends to gloss over the fact that throughout our history we've done what we felt we needed to do to survive and prosper, even if that meant we didn't always act like a saint. But if you want to give a specific example of how I've mischaracterized or misrepresented those aspects of American history I touched upon I'd be happy to indulge you.


What you don't seem to get is that your evaluation through a modern lens is flawed. We DID largely act like saints, for the period those events took place in, in the context of that day.
 
Okay, tell me, under the GCs is it lawful to torture spies and saboteurs?
 
U.S. negotiators declined to adopt every provision of the Convention Against Torture, exactly because they did not want to tie the hands of any President in dealing with matters of national security. I am satisfied that section 2340 allows U.S. interrogators to deal pretty harshly with savages who have committed war crimes against this country, when the lives of many innocent Americans depend on making them tell what they know, and tell it fast. I am also satisfied that that law, which codifies such provisions of the CAT as our negotiators saw fit to agree to and the Senate saw fit to ratify, is not so broadly written as to make immoral, unconscionable acts legal.

Your assertion that the government of this country has repeatedly sponsored morally repugnant actions throughout our history is a slander against the United States that is false, disgusting and shameful. Do not try to associate me with your anti-American slurs--I could not cite even one example of any such thing, let alone a dozen.

Sheesh, we can start with slavery and all that entailed, running right up through the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. Many examples of how we treated the native Americans. Japanese internment. We have a holiday (Columbus day) celebrating a genocidal slave trader.
 
Were the individual you speak of, Americans, prisoners of war? If so they are protected by the Geneva Conventions. If they were unlawful combatants they are not protected.

All you're saying is if they were not protected by Convention or law, it was LEGAL to torture them. Whether it's legal doesn't change what was done.

You really don't understand the difference between wartime intelligence gathering and peacetime criminal justice do you?

That's not the point - it's either torture or it's not. The legality of it doesn't affect that determination in the slightest. I understand the problem, it's obviously torture, so you have to find some way to justify it or distinguish it from what we did. If you want to say it's OK to torture in wartime, but not on domestic prisoners, fine. There are meaningful distinctions there - it's rational to draw that line and it's one that can easily be drawn. What is pathetic is saying that one is torture because it's illegal, but if it's legal it's not-torture.
 
Individual slaves did not. But their offspring did.
Indians. Well, around here some of the tribes are deep into the gambling scene. Who can tell. All clans, tribes and people have been made slaves of other people at some point in time.

LMAO. An entire people had their rights extinguished, for hundreds of years. It wasn't just individuals.
 
My first point was that I saw no indications that you were quoting anybody.
My second point was harsh interrogation techniques are not intended to be medicine. Both points should have been very easy for you to understand.

You didn't look very hard - I had linked to the PHYSICIAN earlier. Sorry if you didn't keep up.

And my entire point was inserting food into the rectum wasn't medicine. If you agree, why demand a quote from a physician?
 
That gives you some idea how controlled and careful was the US activity.

What???? JoG wasn't held in whatever black site we waterboarded our detainees, subjected to waterboarding as just one of many interrogation techniques - torture. Different circumstances in every way.

And of course you can't address the example - cops getting tased in training doesn't mean that using a taser on a prisoner isn't torture.
 
The legality of it doesn't affect that determination in the slightest.

This is what we see all over today from the radical left....Laws don't matter. All that matters is what they personally think of it, and we should cede punishment based on their personal views on a matter.
 
I didn't claim that....

:doh You are j-mac, are you not? All I did was boldface your text in quotes and said I agreed with it. So how can you say you didn't write it?

How long will we have to hear about the injustices of one group or another? At some point don't the descendants of these groups loose the power to be able to claim victimhood?

You're shifting the subject, but let me say that from a moral standpoint the sins of one generation should not fall to the next. On the other hand, if a nation makes a promise it should keep it. We don't normally abrogate treaties when the signatories die, nor do we repudiate debts incurred by our grandparents.
 
Last I heard a bunch of Cubans dumped here by plane by Castro years ago are still in Federal prisons with no release date.

So there's precedent for holding people on US soil without due process.
Yes, and that's exactly the same loophole that's being used in this case. You can hold them if they're considered "enemy combatants". Thank you.
 
This is what we see all over today from the radical left....Laws don't matter. All that matters is what they personally think of it, and we should cede punishment based on their personal views on a matter.

I didn't say laws don't matter. Of course they matter with regard to whether we prosecute and jail Cheney and Bush and the people all up and down the line involved in torture, or Obama for the drone program, etc. But no one is talking about that, or at least I'm not.

If you want to explain why waterboarding isn't "torture" then for this discussion you must be able to do it without regard to what lawyers conjured up to fit it in a legal box. It doesn't matter for purposes of the ethics of it or the morality or the effect of those 'techniques' on our reputation or what kind of country - do we respect human rights or not - we want to be.

What's funny is I KNOW without a shred of doubt that if Obama gets his OLC to write a memo legalizing seizing all your guns, it won't matter what the lawyers say. But you want to hang your hat on that same BS rationale in this discussion, when if it was something you opposed you'd care exactly ZERO what Holder's DOJ or an Obama flunky wrote in a memo or got some court to sign off on. You know this, so don't pretend otherwise.
 
So taser's are now "torture"?

Of course, if used in an interrogation, repeatedly (e.g. 183 times over 5 sessions). If that's not torture, then what is?
 
:doh You are j-mac, are you not? All I did was boldface your text in quotes and said I agreed with it. So how can you say you didn't write it?

Well, I would say that is was interpreted differently. But ok...

You're shifting the subject, but let me say that from a moral standpoint the sins of one generation should not fall to the next. On the other hand, if a nation makes a promise it should keep it. We don't normally abrogate treaties when the signatories die, nor do we repudiate debts incurred by our grandparents.

At some point the endless victimhood has to stop. People need to take responsibility for changing their own circumstance if that is what they desire. Seems to me this endless victimhood is just excuse for never having to say that anything they do is wrong....We don't do that with children, they'd be spoiled, we shouldn't do it with entire segments of society either.
 
I didn't say laws don't matter. Of course they matter with regard to whether we prosecute and jail Cheney and Bush and the people all up and down the line involved in torture, or Obama for the drone program, etc. But no one is talking about that, or at least I'm not.

If you want to explain why waterboarding isn't "torture" then for this discussion you must be able to do it without regard to what lawyers conjured up to fit it in a legal box. It doesn't matter for purposes of the ethics of it or the morality or the effect of those 'techniques' on our reputation or what kind of country - do we respect human rights or not - we want to be.

What's funny is I KNOW without a shred of doubt that if Obama gets his OLC to write a memo legalizing seizing all your guns, it won't matter what the lawyers say. But you want to hang your hat on that same BS rationale in this discussion, when if it was something you opposed you'd care exactly ZERO what Holder's DOJ or an Obama flunky wrote in a memo or got some court to sign off on. You know this, so don't pretend otherwise.

I think your mistake is in thinking that these people are afforded the rights I am. That is not the case. Further if you really think that this will lead to Bush or Cheney being prosecuted in ANY court, you are mistaken...Obama when he took office instructed Holder to do an extensive investigation on whether or not any of those involved could be prosecuted for what took place, and guess what....Nothing...No indictment, no prosecution, so this is just a fantasy of yours.
 
What???? JoG wasn't held in whatever black site we waterboarded our detainees, subjected to waterboarding as just one of many interrogation techniques - torture. Different circumstances in every way.

And of course you can't address the example - cops getting tased in training doesn't mean that using a taser on a prisoner isn't torture.

I don't care at all about cops and tasers. And the detainees subjected to EIT had every bit of the safeguards as JoG.
 
From the FBI FAQ:

The new Summary definition of Rape is: “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or
anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without
the consent of the victim.”

"Rectal rehydration", used on at least five prisoners, fits the description.
 
I think your mistake is in thinking that these people are afforded the rights I am. That is not the case. Further if you really think that this will lead to Bush or Cheney being prosecuted in ANY court, you are mistaken...Obama when he took office instructed Holder to do an extensive investigation on whether or not any of those involved could be prosecuted for what took place, and guess what....Nothing...No indictment, no prosecution, so this is just a fantasy of yours.

The question is whether what we did was "torture" or just some Orwellian phrase like EIT. Whether it's torture or not has NOTHING to do with whether the person on the receiving end had protections under the Geneva Convention under which we could be PROSECUTED for doing it. It's whether we could torture them without restraint and face no legal consequences.

And of course Cheney, Bush and Obama will not be prosecuted - I haven't suggested they should be, and this discussion isn't about that. If we want to talk legalities, then all we should be citing are various laws, treaties and court cases. Last time I checked, almost no one is doing any of that.
 
From the FBI FAQ:

The new Summary definition of Rape is: “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or
anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without
the consent of the victim.”

"Rectal rehydration", used on at least five prisoners, fits the description.

Per General Hayden:

"That was a medical procedure. That was done because of detainee health. But the people responsible there for the health of these detainees saw that they were becoming dehydrated. They had limited options in which to go do this. It was intravenous with needles, which would be dangerous with a noncooperative detainee. It was through the nasal passages."
 
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