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

You are not curious.

Where were the individuals captured? Were they waging war against the "host" country? Were they in uniform and was the war declared? If so they are Prisoners of War and must be treated humanely. Anything else is an act of war. Under an actual leader we might go to war to resolve such a travesty.

You show yourself as one unschooled.

If they were like most of our prisoners in GITMO, they were captured on a city street, not engaged in any acts of 'hostility' at that moment, but turned in by a bounty hunter. The point is you're assuming that if they were arrested, they are guilty.

And to say a leader would go to war to resolve such a travesty just means we'd demand human rights for our own people to the point of declaring war to enforce them. If a country doesn't have the ability to wage war on the U.S., too f'ing bad for their people I guess. It's a nice version of rights you got there - essentially, if you're a powerful country, your people get them. If you're not, then your people don't have any and the U.S. has no responsibility to recognize any human rights for non-Americans. So they're not rights, but whatever can be enforced at the end of a gun.
 
No US adversary since WW2 has treated US captives decently. We have nothing left to lose on that score.

That's not the point - if your son gets captured, you would be SATISFIED he was treated fairly if he got the "he has no rights" treatment and "enhanced interrogation" you support for people not like you.

The point is we should treat our detainees with the same respect for rights that we'd expect/demand of others for our people. If your son/brother was waterboarded 5/183 times in custody, you know and I know and we all know you'd consider his treatment torture. And if some Congressman, a democrat, in testimony, said, "He wasn't tortured, he was just made to feel uncomfortable, I'm not sure the U.S. can intervene. His rights are being respected." if you were half a man, you'd likely have to be restrained to keep from punching him.
 
We are making people uncomfortable. They tell us stuff. We combine that stuff with other stuff. Smart people toss it in a salad bowl. What idiot told you it would STOP terrorism?

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?


In the first quote you responded to me after I said that the interrogations hasn't stopped terrorism and you asked what idiot told me it did so I could gather from your next statement you are the idiot saying they do stop future attacks aka terrorism when we interrogate them and they tell us what they know about future attacks, which could stop terrorism from occurring. Because I never said it helped to stop terrorism completely, right?


Also I understand shoving some food up your ass isn't uncomfortable for you but for others it is a little more than uncomfortable.
 
What a lazy individual. Did you plan to actually make a case? It looks to me like the system works pretty well. Most individual were released. Isn't that what you would expect? It is what I would expect.

You asked how many detainees weren't high value targets. The answer is the vast majority.

And what your response above glosses over is most were released after months or years of "enhanced" interrogation, solitary confinement, etc.
 
You have sided with the traitor.

It is clear what you are.

I've sided with, among others, the person who designed the SERE training program for the Navy, interrogators who spent a career actually trying to get information from captives through traditional means, many members of the top military chain of command, etc. If they are all traitors, then the term just means that they "disagree with right wing apologists for torture."
 
It is not torture unless you want it to be. We made people uncomfortable in order to get their information. We all have an agenda. You do. The Red Cross does, I do.

Yes. I believe we were well served by the men and women who stepped up and prevented additional attacks. And you side with our enemies. You sie with a traitor who has severely damaged the US. She may have done more damage to this nation than anyone other than Obama, Boehner, and McConnell. Not even Feinstein could out do the damage those three have done.

I'm just curious where and how you draw that line around torture. What makes waterboarding torture, when done TO us, but not-torture when done by us? Is it length of time or what? As far as I can tell, it boils down to U.S.A.! U.S.A.!U.S.A.! We don't do bad things!!
 
We killed American citizens without any due process. We routinely kill family members and bystanders with drone strikes. But that is okay compared to making someone uncomfortable. If we threaten to blow up your kids but don't do it that is horrendous. But if we actually do it that is okay so long as we don't threaten someone first?

Between you and me, I would prefer that someone threaten that they will kill my children but don't instead of just going ahead and shredding them.

Bizarre - who said it was OK? You quoted me saying it was NOT OK, so you must have been responding to a person not me or in your imagination.

And, again, justifying evil by pointing out that it's not as evil as some other act isn't actually a legitimate exercise.
 
You won't mind if I don't believe you will you? I could not read a 6,000 page report in two days and I am pretty fast.

Yes, whatever is in the report the treason is in releasing it. She intentionally damaged the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency. The damage is enormous and long lasting. She must be held accountable.

If the report damages the U.S. or CIA, it's the acts that the report documents and not revealing them that did the damage. If we don't want the release of what we do to damage the country, we should not do those acts. Only idiots believed we could have an extensive "Enhanced Interrogation" program, renditions, etc. and keep that secret because unfortunately for the government we have a free press and free speech in this country.
 
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.

This statement conflicts with the one below. The grunts who supposedly crossed the line were acting on approved orders from their superiors all the way to the WH. So if you want to prosecute, that's the ultimate target, and we won't do that, so why would I support only prosecuting a few low level grunts who are made to be fall guys?

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.

I just disagree 100%. Once you agree that waterboarding is an acceptable technique, you've obliterated any meaningful moral or ethical line, and all that matters is results. What you're saying, ultimately, is that after we eliminate all bounds of behavior, we're shocked that a person who is ordered to be cruel to a prisoner for purposes of extracting information is TOO cruel. That is of course the documented history of torture as a tool and why we cannot accept "a little bit of torture but not too much" as official policy.

It's not unlike soldiers asked to kill the enemy without remorse. When we order them to do that, we KNOW they'll make horrible mistakes and will sometimes kill innocents. The video of the helicopter gunship firing on the van with journalists is an example. Those men in that helicopter aren't criminals. We make them into killers and they do as ordered. When they cross a line, that's (with VERY few and extreme exceptions) on the people ordering them into battle.

So when extreme cold is an acceptable technique for breaking a prisoner, we should expect some will die of hypothermia. When they do, if we want to prosecute someone, it's the person who decided that torture is a tool we will use, not the person or persons who take torture a bit too far.
 
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.

We approved waterboarding, which we prosecuted people for as war crimes, torture. How do you make the leap that when done TO us, it is torture, but when done BY us it's not-torture "by a very long shot"?

And if many of our 'techniques' were done to your son in a police station in Atlanta, you would RIGHTLY conclude he was tortured by his own government. It's impossible that any of us could see someone we love subjected to these 'techniques' and conclude anything else, but we go through elaborate self denial to avoid facing the truth of what we did to people not-like-us.

If we want to accept that, fine. I'll disagree, vehemently, but if we do, at least let's be honest about it.
 
Not hardly. It's a lie to say we can't deal with the world without being immoral and evil.

It's not just we, it's universal. The unacceptable becomes acceptable in direct proportion to the potential for defeat.
 
That's not the point - if your son gets captured, you would be SATISFIED he was treated fairly if he got the "he has no rights" treatment and "enhanced interrogation" you support for people not like you.

The point is we should treat our detainees with the same respect for rights that we'd expect/demand of others for our people. If your son/brother was waterboarded 5/183 times in custody, you know and I know and we all know you'd consider his treatment torture. And if some Congressman, a democrat, in testimony, said, "He wasn't tortured, he was just made to feel uncomfortable, I'm not sure the U.S. can intervene. His rights are being respected." if you were half a man, you'd likely have to be restrained to keep from punching him.

This is not a theoretical discussion, btw. If my son were captured by any of our present adversaries I would fully expect that he would be mistreated because every opponent of the US since WW2 has done that. Moreover, my son knows that and goes about his business regardless. On the theoretical level, our people merit civilized treatment because ours are not unlawful combatants. On the real level, that has never mattered to our opponents. I had the same view while I was on active service.
 
I don't consider water boarding as practiced by the US to have been torture.

I'm asking what this difference is, and you can't say. It's not surprising because waterboarding is waterboarding - it's 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 guess we just disagree. It's not a 'moral shortcoming' to consider many acts during wars too evil to contemplate doing to others. What you're saying is it's immoral to not embrace evil, so long as your ends are justified. That's the attitude of a sociopath, and a moral degenerate.

If you want to say that is what governments will DO, that's probably true, but that just demonstrates that no matter what form government takes it will embrace evil to ensure its survival, and the U.S. is no different than any tin pot dictator in that regard.
 
I'm asking what this difference is, and you can't say. It's not surprising because waterboarding is waterboarding - it's torture.



I guess we just disagree. It's not a 'moral shortcoming' to consider many acts during wars too evil to contemplate doing to others. What you're saying is it's immoral to not embrace evil, so long as your ends are justified. That's the attitude of a sociopath, and a moral degenerate.

If you want to say that is what governments will DO, that's probably true, but that just demonstrates that no matter what form government takes it will embrace evil to ensure its survival, and the U.S. is no different than any tin pot dictator in that regard.

I'm saying that in the context of warfighting, good and evil have their place at the level of war aims, but at the tactical level they don't have meaning. At the tactical level there is only effective and ineffective. And it's not the dictators who are the most problematical -- they can safely ignore any supposed obligation to their people. The more democratic is a government the more firmly is it bound to do everything to protect its citizens and achieve victory.

As for water boarding, any comparison of the Japanese practice and our own reveals significant differences.
 
You're just saying that if it involves national security, all criticism is off limits. That's ridiculous
. Did I say that? Jeez, why can't leftists even quote properly and respond to a quote directly instead of responding to statements they themselves create? This happens with such frequency that it seems never getting it quite right is the signature of every leftist.
It's not 'immoral' to disagree with your government on matters of war.
Again, who claimed it was?
It would be unconscionable to expect citizens to not question decisions with such horrific costs, which we know going in. People of high ethics, fully understanding the issues, WILL disagree, often strongly, and when they do they have an obligation to protest what they feel is wrong.
Granted people with some knowledge have a duty too respond, not forgetting whose side they're on and how their government might be more effective. But let's not suppose one side is imbued with 'ethics' while their fellow citizens lack both ethics and morals. That feeds directly into your enemies hands, who also feel they're more ethical and moral than you. To believe that ethics and morals are exclusive to yourself is not rational.
We could post dueling opinion pieces all day, and yours is from an obviously right wing leaning outlet. But I'll take an early passage - 4th paragraph:
Anyone who disagrees with a leftist has to be 'right wing'. This is what you've been taught and this is what leftists clearly believe.
First of all, that no republican signed off in this era is hardly surprising. 20 years ago it would be - not today when votes that break exactly along party lines are the norm. Second, anyone with the slightest interest in the report knows that the committee has been fighting and negotiating with the WH and CIA for a year or so about what can and what cannot be released, at least. So the committee did not 'sit on' the report for two years. That's just misleading to the point of a lie.
Like Obamacare, this was designed, promoted and subsequently released on the American public by just one party. How is this constant divide doing the country any good? Can you not see the rifts these one-side initiatives are creating?

And, more importantly, this $4 million document, where no one involved was actually interviewed, effects national security and American lives. How is that ethical or moral?

Second, the author says several times the report is 'untrue' and 'highly biased' but doesn't provide details.
This article is just one among many being written. It is very worthwhile to do research and seek out diverse opinions on this very important document. Read what John Yoo has to say. He was certainly in a position to know what was going on. Read also what the CIA has to say, the former President and vice-President. How can there be a legitimate report when the sources with the information weren't interviewed?John Yoo: A torture report for the dustbin - NY Daily News
The side of the U.S.
No, you are with the Democrat Party. This is another clear instance of that party putting politics above the interests of the American people.
You avoided the point - questioning the government is the norm from conservatives on every issue except apparently the CIA on this subject.
We should always question the government but in sensitive areas of national security then perhaps there has to be a time of trust. No one should put the lives of their fellow Americans at risk in order to feel good about themselves.
Again, not the point. If right wingers can't accept the line from the various people about Benghazi after many hearings, you can't then question my 'morality' when I do the same with the CIA. .
Try to forget about this left wing/right wing wing/middle of the road argument. This is about national security and the lives of American people, as well as the lives of others in the democracies and those align themselves with the US in the war against Islamism. This does no good for anyone but instead creates unnecessary harm.
 
This is not a theoretical discussion, btw. If my son were captured by any of our present adversaries I would fully expect that he would be mistreated because every opponent of the US since WW2 has done that. Moreover, my son knows that and goes about his business regardless. On the theoretical level, our people merit civilized treatment because ours are not unlawful combatants. On the real level, that has never mattered to our opponents. I had the same view while I was on active service.

You're nicely avoiding the question by concluding that our enemies would disregard his rights and torture him. The point is you wouldn't be satisfied with that treatment - you labeled it 'mistreatment' but want to argue if we adopt the same methods, it's not 'mistreatment.' It's nothing more than the U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A. justification. If we do it, it's good, if your enemies do, somehow different.

And U.S. soldiers are sometimes unlawful combatants, unless the special forces operating in deep cover wear approved uniforms while doing it. If one of them is captured and is interrogated non-stop for two weeks, waterboarded 183 times over 5 sessions, kept awake for 6 days, shackled with his hands over his head, standing for 3 days, subjected to freezing conditions, solitary confinement for months or years, had food inserted into his rectum for no purpose, etc. we will obviously and correctly conclude he was tortured.

It would be a lot easier if you just embraced your own conclusions. You are fine with torture, in part because our enemies will do it, and in part because war is hell, we kill people without remorse and so there is no moral line between killing and torture when employed to win a war. I get it, but don't understand why you feel it necessary to go through the mental flips to pretend that's not your position.
 
I have no idea what you're trying to say. Good day.
No idea what he was trying to say? I understood it perfectly and so did most others, I'm sure. Perhaps you should start thinking these issues through before responding with those tiresome and meaningless one-liners of yours.
 
You're nicely avoiding the question by concluding that our enemies would disregard his rights and torture him. The point is you wouldn't be satisfied with that treatment - you labeled it 'mistreatment' but want to argue if we adopt the same methods, it's not 'mistreatment.' It's nothing more than the U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A. justification. If we do it, it's good, if your enemies do, somehow different.

And U.S. soldiers are sometimes unlawful combatants, unless the special forces operating in deep cover wear approved uniforms while doing it. If one of them is captured and is interrogated non-stop for two weeks, waterboarded 183 times over 5 sessions, kept awake for 6 days, shackled with his hands over his head, standing for 3 days, subjected to freezing conditions, solitary confinement for months or years, had food inserted into his rectum for no purpose, etc. we will obviously and correctly conclude he was tortured.

It would be a lot easier if you just embraced your own conclusions. You are fine with torture, in part because our enemies will do it, and in part because war is hell, we kill people without remorse and so there is no moral line between killing and torture when employed to win a war. I get it, but don't understand why you feel it necessary to go through the mental flips to pretend that's not your position.

US Special Forces are well aware of the different levels of risk they run under different deployment scenarios. Our treatment of unlawful combatants is not mistreatment because they have no right to expect a Geneva Conventions level of treatment. Our personnel have the right to expect Geneva Conventions treatment except in a very few exceptional circumstances, but we never get it regardless.
 
It's not just we, it's universal. The unacceptable becomes acceptable in direct proportion to the potential for defeat.

Sure, evil is universal. We agree on that. What we shouldn't accept is evil in service of some 'greater good' is not evil.
 
No idea what he was trying to say? I understood it perfectly and so did most others, I'm sure. Perhaps you should start thinking these issues through before responding with those tiresome and meaningless one-liners of yours.

Perhaps you should save your little admonishments for someone who cares.
 
Sure, evil is universal. We agree on that. What we shouldn't accept is evil in service of some 'greater good' is not evil.

You are applying the word "evil" where it has no meaning. It's like asking what color is a symphony.
 
No, but at some point, say after waterboard #73, a reasonable person might conclude that the process isn't working with this guy.
Maybe try a different tack?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't KSM waterboarded several years after his capture?
What vital info would he be able to divulge at that point in time?
They got the information they sought and that's what counts. "People Sleep Peacefully in Their Beds at Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready to Do Violence on Their Behalf".
 
US Special Forces are well aware of the different levels of risk they run under different deployment scenarios. Our treatment of unlawful combatants is not mistreatment because they have no right to expect a Geneva Conventions level of treatment. Our personnel have the right to expect Geneva Conventions treatment except in a very few exceptional circumstances, but we never get it regardless.

Again, if one of our soldiers was subjected to that treatment, we'd rightly conclude he was tortured. Anyone who said otherwise would be ridiculed. Not ONE American would defend such treatment as an acceptable way to interrogate our personnel.
 
Again, if one of our soldiers was subjected to that treatment, we'd rightly conclude he was tortured. Anyone who said otherwise would be ridiculed. Not ONE American would defend such treatment as an acceptable way to interrogate our personnel.

Our captured personnel are routinely tortured.
 
You are applying the word "evil" where it has no meaning. It's like asking what color is a symphony.

Well then we disagree on that. Of course you don't enter into a moral black hole where no standards exist when you engage in 'war.' Where raping women, dismembering children, etc. are just tactics that can and should be embraced if they serve the purpose of winning, etc.
 
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