• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

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

13 years, with no evidence that he was a combatant. The war ended in October. That's what I'm saying, kill him or let him go, holding him indefinitely for no given reason is wrong.

Take no more prisoners?
 
What about those not captured anywhere near any 'battlefield' which in the War on Terror (TM) is any random city street anywhere in the ME?

And it's nice to know you support targeting innocent civilians, kids and whatnot, so long as some are guilty. OBL would agree with you. And ISIS agrees with you on the public executions. Good to know you'd like us to descend to their level. And I can't see a downside of perhaps 1,000 public, televised executions.... Good ideas all.

Thank you. To hell with all enemies of the United States--wherever they may live.
 
Well, we can debate whether with perfect hindsight it was the right thing to do, but I'll gladly concede that the times have changed and that those who approved the program were acting with honest motives - to get information needed to protect the U.S. and our people here and abroad.

What worries me, or is a problem IMO, is the attempts to whitewash it and pretend that it was something other than what it was. I don't favor prosecuting anyone for what happened, but I find it abhorrent to cheer it as something we should be proud of or ready to do again. This was torture, and we need to decide if we're a country where torture is accepted as a legitimate interrogation technique.

Why don't you want prosecutions? Where the approved methods were left behind, it was criminal. Where this was lied about, it was a cover-up and deception of the citizenry. We can not let that precedent stand.

We must discuss the enhanced techniques as points on a continuous line from polite questioning to hiding the suspect slowly over months. We need to know, what we are talking about and explain, what we were doing. The approved methods were not torture in any intelligent definition of the word and saying it was, is wrong and doing us immense harm. If we let this stand, it would be crazy.
 
We made people uncomfortable. I am sure this makes you uncomfortable. Isn't it time to grow up?

I am not sure i know, what you mean. Of course we should "grow up" and learn to live with the fact that the methods approved for interrogation were not torture by a very long shot. That it now seems that in many more cases than thought the allowed limits were overstepped does not change this. Yes, you are absolutely right. We must grow up and stop misusing the language for political reasons.
 
Or left in detention with life sentences.

Nah, I disagree. These are either the worst of the worst or they don't belong there. Death or release and that should have happened no more than a year after they were first captured. If we can't drain them of info and/or determine their status as enemies of the US in that period of time, release them or tribunal and death.
 
The ones that got to Guantanamo were the very worst. Thousands of the small fish who were captured overseas were questioned and released. It was only where thorough investigation showed there was substantial, reliable evidence that a person was involved in hostile acts against the U.S. that he was sent to Guantanamo. Detainees the U.S. released, for whatever reason, have gone on to murder many dozens of innocent people. We should just have hanged the dirty sons of bitches as a lesson to anyone else who might be thinking about crossing the U.S., and been done with it.

Just after WWII, the U.S. Navy unceremoniously hanged almost 1,000 Japanese who had been convicted of war crimes in the Far East Tribunals. Because the Navy had no recent experience with hangings, a professional British hangman had to be brought in from Singapore. As one of the Americans recalled, he liked to get close to the criminal's ear and whisper, "Hello there, lad. D'ya know what I'm going to do? I'm going to break your f---ing neck!" I once saw a great photo of a U.S. serviceman giving a thumbs up sign as, a few feet away, a Japanese camp guard who had for years sadistically tortured him and his buddies took the drop with a noose around his neck. These lousy jihadist bastards deserve no better. To the Devil with them.
 
Nah, I disagree. These are either the worst of the worst or they don't belong there. Death or release and that should have happened no more than a year after they were first captured. If we can't drain them of info and/or determine their status as enemies of the US in that period of time, release them or tribunal and death.

That is interesting. I will think about it. Where would you set them free? Take Kurnatz as an example. Germany refused taking him for years and he was almost certainly totally harmless.
 
Maybe they do need a reminder.




Why do you think that the G.W. Bush mis-administration sent detainees to Gitmo?

If you don't know, I'll give you a clue: Because it was outside of the USA and detainees held there wouldn't have the rights that they would have in any U.S. territory.

You really should join the reality-based world.
 
The ones that got to Guantanamo were the very worst. Thousands of the small fish who were captured overseas were questioned and released. It was only where thorough investigation showed there was substantial, reliable evidence that a person was involved in hostile acts against the U.S. that he was sent to Guantanamo. Detainees the U.S. released, for whatever reason, have gone on to murder many dozens of innocent people. We should just have hanged the dirty sons of bitches as a lesson to anyone else who might be thinking about crossing the U.S., and been done with it.

Just after WWII, the U.S. Navy unceremoniously hanged almost 1,000 Japanese who had been convicted of war crimes in the Far East Tribunals. Because the Navy had no recent experience with hangings, a professional British hangman had to be brought in from Singapore. As one of the Americans recalled, he liked to get close to the criminal's ear and whisper, "Hello there, lad. D'ya know what I'm going to do? I'm going to break your f---ing neck!" I once saw a great photo of a U.S. serviceman giving a thumbs up sign as, a few feet away, a Japanese camp guard who had for years sadistically tortured him and his buddies took the drop with a noose around his neck. These lousy jihadist bastards deserve no better. To the Devil with them.

In principal, i have no objections. It would have to be not only spelled out in law, though. It would have to be fully explained and publicly transparent, why we chose this method.
 
Why do you think that the G.W. Bush mis-administration sent detainees to Gitmo?

If you don't know, I'll give you a clue: Because it was outside of the USA and detainees held there wouldn't have the rights that they would have in any U.S. territory.

You really should join the reality-based world.

I remember there were alternatives, none very appetizing. But then, we have become a soft culture pampered by all those good years.
 
This sharp difference between torture done TO us versus non-torture done BY us. Same technique, same purpose, same result, but.... DIFFERENT!!

BTW, I'm joking here on this thread for the most part, but this myth that our waterboarding is somehow less barbaric than that done TO us is the most pathetic argument in defense of the program of any. At least the sadists and other torture cheerleaders have the courage of their convictions. You're hiding behind a fiction so you don't have to admit what some of the others do. If you defend waterboarding, no matter how the propagandists on our side present it, you support torture.

I don't consider water boarding as practiced by the US to have been torture. But make no mistake, if incontrovertible torture were the difference between victory and defeat, or between successful and unsuccessful defense of the US, then I would be wholeheartedly in favor of it. The moral shortcoming is among those who would limit what they would do to defend our country or secure victory.
 
I do not trust government. If a politician tells me something or if a bureaucrat tells me something I would not believe it for a moment.

But I do believe a process whose intent is to determine who is dangerous to us and who is not will work reasonably well given that it is our interest to make that determination. If it were not so we would have tens of thousands of prisoners and not just a few. Most were caught, documented, evaluated and released.

You do not trust the government but you believe every word out of Lyin' Dick's mouth? Good heavens you are conflicted. :shock:
 
We've heard this crap from ones who were released and returned to their terrorist ways.

Behead him and get it over with. 8)

Honest...seeing the way Isis acts and then considering how al Queda acted...idk if I can care. Especially with the release of the justification for rape of prepubescent girls that Isis just did. I'm sick of them.
 
I don't consider water boarding as practiced by the US to have been torture. But make no mistake, if incontrovertible torture were the difference between victory and defeat, or between successful and unsuccessful defense of the US, then I would be wholeheartedly in favor of it. The moral shortcoming is among those who would limit what they would do to defend our country or secure victory.

But that's a creation of something that hasn't existed, doesn't exist, and there's no likelihood of it existing.

As dfor what you consider waterboarding to be or not to be isn't the issue. The US and the rest of the world has considered it torture. That Bush and his people got some to accept their redefinition just suggests to me that those who bought it were willing to suspend their disbelief like we do for any good fiction.
 
I've already provided reports from the time...He was waterboarded 5 times...But I suspect that you don't care if you were being dishonest about it anyway.

Just so I'm clear, this is how we're counting this.

If I hit you in the face, wait a minute, hit you again, and do that 36 times in one day, then that counts as ONE? But if I hit you in the face 17 times on Monday, and 18 times on Tuesday, that counts as TWO in right wing land. That's great.

And if Person A gets hit 1 time on Monday, and person B gets hit 35 times on Monday, A and B have each been beaten only once! I am pretty sure B will be surprised his treatment counts on the "Right Wing 'We do NOT torture'" scale the same as what A got, after all he was struck 35 times versus only once....
 
But that's a creation of something that hasn't existed, doesn't exist, and there's no likelihood of it existing.

As dfor what you consider waterboarding to be or not to be isn't the issue. The US and the rest of the world has considered it torture. That Bush and his people got some to accept their redefinition just suggests to me that those who bought it were willing to suspend their disbelief like we do for any good fiction.

You are wishing the world away.
 
Your assertion was that human rights are overrated. I assume that was meant sarcastically. Regardless, the proposition opens another discussion.

No, I'm mocking your statement that prisoners of a certain category have no rights. Maybe they don't, but if you approve of us behaving as if our detainees have no rights, then all our talk of human rights and the rest is just a nice bedtime story we tell ourselves to pretend we're somehow different than our enemies.
 
No, I'm mocking your statement that prisoners of a certain category have no rights. Maybe they don't, but if you approve of us behaving as if our detainees have no rights, then all our talk of human rights and the rest is just a nice bedtime story we tell ourselves to pretend we're somehow different than our enemies.

The language of human rights is the political vocabulary of our era. Some of it matters; some does not.
 
You do realize you have it completely wrong when Kobie likes it, don't you?

We made people uncomfortable. We did it so they would tell us what they knew about future attacks. You do remember what happened on September 11? Did you go to the streets and pass out candy to the children?

"Uncomfortable." You do realize that sounds ridiculous. When it was done to us, it was torture. Now we've redefined the horrific physical and psychological effects of torture to making people "uncomfortable." Question, though - if it just makes people uncomfortable, why would we need medical personnel on hand when we do it? No one has ever died from being uncomfortable.
 
Sigh. They have control of oil fields. Do I really give you far more credit than is due?

Hilarious - I'll quote myself: "How can a group like ISIS have oil fields? They might control them temporarily, but they're not yet a country."
 
Ah, so you are not an actual medical doctor. You simply play one on the Internet. Thanks for playing!

No, but I can quote them, which I did. If can find any medical doctors defending rectal feedings as a legitimate medical procedure, please cite them.
 
You are welcome to your interpretation. Interrogations are not intended to be pleasant.

I am pretty pleased to be me. You see, I progressed from childhood into adulthood. I encourage you to do the same.

I don't understand what is difficult here. If you're on board with the U.S. as a country that embraces torture as a legitimate interrogation tool, have the courage to admit that is your position.
 
Back
Top Bottom