Guantanamo suicides "acts of war" says camp commander

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I am not implying that it is Fidel’s fault, and the fact that it is a US run facility is well known, however the fact still remains that every one is always condemning the US well how about the rest of the world

Sure but that's hardly an excuse to justify how far we have allowed (9/11) to corrupt our ethical principles. Guantanamo (for example) Puts the US in a difficult position to denounce human rights abuses, torture and the holding of political prisoners, when it is doing the exact same thing (and has been denounced by the entire international community, as well as several notable human rights charities) thing in Cuba.

"Yeah but..." isn't really a sufficient response to that argument. So rather predictably, people seize on the only thing they have left "anti-americanism", which is not what it is at all.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

From today's news

Guantanamo suicides 'not PR move'

[*Robert* 2]

That is indeed grand... writing off suicide as "acts of war". Now, if they had a bomb strapped to themselves, or killed others in the process, that would be a little different. To just hang themselves in their jail cells?!! Give me a break!

Unless of course, the bad US soldiers killed them and framed them by making it look like suicide... yeah... that's it!!! Geez!!!

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

That is indeed grand... writing off suicide as "acts of war". Now, if they had a bomb strapped to themselves, or killed others in the process, that would be a little different. To just hang themselves in their jail cells?!! Give me a break!

You say that, but that's not what they will say

You're missing the point they'll say, you're naive, anti-american, stupid. These people are evil they'll say, they'd cut your wife's head off in a heartbeat and buttrape your children while they wait for you to run screaming out of your burning house with a few good-sized spears sticking out of your back.

They may be right. Of course, the fact is that noone outside of the military (or rather the military interrogators) knows for sure, because noone has actually been charged with a crime or been subjected to due process of law.

That's right because "process of law" only applies for some people, some of the time. Talk about using the letter of the law to defeat the spirit of the law.

In this climate we might as well start calling Germans "huns" again

Edited June 13, 2006 by Fishdude

[*Robert* 2]

You say that, but that's not what they will say

You're missing the point they'll say, you're naive, anti-american, stupid. These people are evil they'll say, they'd cut your wife's head off in a heartbeat and buttrape your children while they wait for you to run screaming out of your burning house with a few good-sized spears sticking out of your back.

They may be right. Of course, the fact is that noone outside of the military (or rather the military interrogators) knows for sure, because noone has actually been charged with a crime or been subjected to due process of law.

That's right because "process of law" only applies for some people, some of the time. Talk about using the letter of the law to defeat the spirit of the law.

In this climate we might as well start calling Germans "huns" again

:lol:

You know brother Fishy... I sometimes feel bad when "playing" with them since they are obviously victims of poverty and a poor education system. They can't help their ignorance and lash out in the only way they know how... stupid and incite-full comments amounting to gibberish, and what my father would call "oral diarrhea"!

Edited June 13, 2006 by roi_aggie

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

You find these sorts of attitudes in a lot of countries - unfortunately it takes an event the magnitude of 9/11 to bring them to the surface. Make no mistake about it 9/11 did lasting damage to this country far beyond the destruction of a few buildings, 3000+ lives, 2 wars and an economic recession.

National-level disasters almost always push people towards conservatism. Just look at the Israel/Palestine issue - the more violence there is, the further apart the two sides become, and the more justified in their own national ideologies they become. The US as a whole has always been conservative, unfortunately 9/11 has pushed some people so far to the right that they are willing to give up their founding principles and civil liberties in the face of a perceived external threat.

That's certainly true in the US post 9/11, the attack has made a lot of people feel that US imperialism (which is what it is), just as with British Imperialism during the 18th century is justifiable. Our 3000 dead are more than the loss tens of thousands of lives in the 3rd world in two wars. If people didn't think that they wouldn't be doing it. As I said, some soft racism is at work here.

Its interesting too the massive misunderstanding in the nature of the 'threat' - from a few posts in the other thread you'd think that the insurgency is a single coordinated entity trying to defeat the 'march of democracy' in Iraq. The reality is that it is a disparate collection of groups and individuals with broadly different ideologies and goals. In other words, what we have in Iraq is a civil war, or the beginnings of one, based on ethnic and tribal rivalries that go back centuries.

I also don't agree with the ideology presented by a few people here that the US has some sort of God-given moral right to 'fix' the world, and that everything we do is in pursuit of those ends. Again that morality is highly selective, based on the government's choice of battlefields. One country that did harbour terrorists, vs. one that harbored a guy who had outlived his usefulness (and was subsequently infiltrated by terrorists)

Again from some posters you'd think that it was simply a case of the US vs. some sort of coordinated underground army. Its certainly more convenient to group the enemy into a single mass, but that's not the reality. The sooner we recognise that, the sooner we'll realise the magnitute of the mess we've gotten into.

Edited June 13, 2006 by Fishdude

[*Robert* 2]

The United States has thwarted democracy, inserted puppet dictators, smothered human rights, and stifled freedom in many countries in the Middle East. Did we think that our long history of ignoble intervention in the region would leave no angry aftermath?

This tendency to deny responsibility for the consequences of dubious deeds is a hallowed American tradition that is familiar to me as an African-American and a descendant of enslaved Africans. Denial doesn’t expunge the errors of history; it compounds them. Victims of those errors don’t disappear, and their quest for justice doesn’t dissipate.

When history’s victims inevitably lash out, their grievances are downplayed and they become targets of revenge rather than mediation—perpetuating the cycle. One of the roles of progressives is to connect the dots linking present disorders to past injustices. But fear of future terrorist attacks has convinced pro-war progressives to abandon that role and push for a muscular response to the present danger. But instead of discouraging potential terrorists, our military aggression likely is seeding vast fields of future antagonists, and nothing we have in our high-tech arsenal will be able to stem that hostile tide.

If we deny the historical context that connects the “asymmetrical warfare” that we call terrorism to the past, we are only postponing a necessary reckoning. The pro-war progressives know this, but they are fearful, and fear is the right’s best recruiter.

The Arab world has legitimate grievances, and by ignoring them we are feeding the totalitarian impulse driving the Islamist cults. Were the administration more skilled in diplomacy and not dominated by the bellicose neocons that have hijacked U.S. foreign policy, it might have used the world’s sympathy following 9/11 to organize a more efficient global fight against terrorism. After all, diplomatic pressure from Libya and Egypt is what forced Sudan to eject Osama bin Laden in the ’90s. Such an approach would have put the pressure on Muslim groups to speak out more vigorously against terrorism as an affront to Islam.

What’s more, the United States could easily have helped to dry up grassroots support for Islamist cults with a tangible expression of assurance that it seeks to assist rather than destroy the Muslim world. Political gestures could have been modeled on the European Union’s efforts at the 2001 U.N. conference on racism, when it vowed to forge new relationships between the colonized and the colonizers of history.

Instead, the Bush administration launched an illegal military invasion of Iraq for what now appears to have been a fraudulent pretext; appointed Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, an open admirer of Israel; Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to head up Iraq’s reconstruction effort; nominated the well-known Islamophobe Daniel Pipes to the U.S. Institute of Peace; and continues to act in a way that seems designed to produce exactly the hatred of the United States that the radical Islamists want to provoke.

Not my words, but I totally agree with what is being said.

Edited June 13, 2006 by roi_aggie

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

These people are evil they'll say, they'd cut your wife's head off in a heartbeat and buttrape your children while they wait for you to run screaming out of your burning house with a few good-sized spears sticking out of your back.

Yeah, that's what they usually say. Just haven't come up with a good explanation yet why and how hundreds of these "worst of the worst" have already been released after having been in captivity for years. But what do I know: Maybe they managed to convert them into not so evil terrorists and deemed their release relatively safe for that reason. Of course, one could argue more credibly that those already relased and those whose release is pending never were evil terrorists and should have never been held for years to begin with. Precisely the thing - coincidentally - that a court of law may have determined a good long while ago. Instead, we produced and now released hundreds of what I wouldn't be surprised to be genuine haters of America. The sort of individual that is quite likely to engage in acts designed to hurt the US and it's people. Gitmo, IMHO, is more about creating the "monsters" we're supposedly fighting than anything else...

Edited June 13, 2006 by ET-US2004