Complete ignorance. You people are among the most hypocritical in history.....
Funny coming from you......
Hmmmmm....hundreds of thousands? Yet, a few possible cases in GITMO and frat party behavior in Abu Graib is supposed to be the example of tyranny and evil? Some allegedlies and a just the hint of torture by American personel and Europe casts stones and builds a pulpit? You people exist just to pull America down to your levels. But we are supposed to label you as our "moral superiority?"
The French in Algiers, the Belgians in Somalia, Germans in Germany, today's secret prisons in Europe......your "superiority" is false and it is typical of Europeans to exaggerate the issues of America in an attempt to forgive your own behaviors. With hundreds of thousands freely tortured in Algeria by the French.....you people, especially the pathetic French, find the nerve to complain about a possible handful of individuals that may or may not have been tortured depending on whose defintion?
"As far as you know"......what a joke. You do know. You choose to lie about it and drag America through the mud you create. It's the same old European attitude. In your quest to deny the house that your kind exist in, you choose to exaggerate the few rusty nails in America to feel better about yourselves and to project the same old typical anti-Americanism. From colonizing the world, dividing tribes, forcing tribes to live together, starting two world wars, hosting the Cold War, a continued love affair for dictators, and vast genocides and torture along the way......you stand and pretend that a few recent stumbled American cases now vindicate you and that we must answer to the like of you? Didn't Spain just evolve out of a dictatorship? I wonder how many of your countrymen were tortured and executed by your own countrymen.
You talk of differences. The difference is that we judge ourselves and demand better. The American military has always been subjected to the Geneva Convention. America is an original signatory. It takes outside sources to stop genocide inside Europe, not once, but again fifty years later in Bosnia. And none of you demand better of your own...even as hundreds of thousands of Muslims are tortured systematically and as a matter of policy. But today you accuse America of conducting a genocide upon Muslims or conducting a war against Islam, despite the obvious truths right in everybody's faces.
And today you people criticize secret prisons in Europe even as your government's deny them. "As far as you know" is a joke at best.
So now you are going back in history to find instances where European countries have used torture? Is that all you got? We are talking about geo politics of today, not 50 years ago.
What the French did in Algeria is disgusting, just as is what the US did in Vietnam and what the Germans did during WW2. What does that have to do with the world today? Do you know if the French still officially support the use of torture as they did then? When was it the last time we heard of a detainee complaining over being tortured in a French prison?
As for Belgium in Somalia. That at least is closer in history to anything else you got even though it is almost 20 years old. Here we have a single unit as far as I know that abused its detainees. Unless I am mistaken it was not on orders by the political leaders.... another big difference between the case and what the US did under Bush.
And Germany.. what are you babling about? That Germany in the 1970s may or may not have tortured RAF people? 30 years ago? Or do you have some evidence that the German government has "secret prisons" where it tortures in Germany? Why is it you have to go back 20+ years to find your evidence?
And why did you leave out the Brits and what it did in Northern Ireland? Funny you "forgot to mention that".
I am no way in denial that our governments may or may not be abusing prisoners in the war on terror. I aint that naive. I dont trust our own government further than I can throw them and that is the ones I voted for.
But we have no evidence what so ever that they are at this moment in time. The only evidence we do have is what was presented in the original article, and even here the British did not use torture. That is why I say "as far as we know". It is no cop-out, no excuse, but reality.
We however have plenty of evidence that the US used torture on its "enemy combatants" and exported suspects to 3rd countries that tortured them for the US... totaly with the knowledge of the US. We have Abu Graib, Bagram and of course Gitmo, plus the "secret" prisons around the world. We have pictures. We have documentation that greenlights "harsh techniques" while justifying the use of said techniques and making them seem legal when they are not. We have Bush administration officials admitting that it happened. And yet the right in the US is still in denial and refusing to believe that the US used torture.
If anything it is you and your right wing friends that are in denial of the truth. Water boarding is torture. Sending people to Syria and Egypt means they will be tortured (which is ironic since the US refuses to send a known terrorist to Valenzuela because they fear he will be tortured..)
So yes as it stands now in this time in history, Europe has a far cleaner record (not perfect, far from it) on torture than the US. If we go back in time, then no, but then again human history regardless of nation or ethnic group has used torture since the dawn of time...
So no I am not in denial nor brainwashed to believe that we European's are better (or worse) on the issue of torture, but as it stands now there is no evidence of any form of official policy by any European government (minus the eastern block) in the use of torture on anyone. And this is the difference between Europe and the US.. the evidence against the Bush administration is there even though you refuse to believe or accept it, the evidence against European countries is next to non existent.