Tweet
Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
we need more photos of pretty girls in uniform
we need more photos of pretty girls in uniform
-
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. - Abraham Lincoln -
stop it Ted - I'm feeling frisky this week and that hits the spotAny views I may express here are personal and certainly do not in any way reflect the views of my employer. Tis the rising of the moon..
Look, I just don't anymore, okay?Comment
-
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. - Abraham LincolnComment
-
I think it's hard to deny that the tip-top of the administration wasn't involved. For heaven's sake, the now-US attorney general advised the President that parts of the Geneva Convention could basically be ignored. Our national policies regarding the detention and handling of "detainees" (or whatever we call prisoners these days) were not written and put in place by prison guards.Originally posted by DanS
It seems to come down to how systematic you believe the abuse to be, mindseye. If you believe the abuse was largely systematic, then you look at the administration as the culprit.
Unfortunately, I think politics comes into this a lot. It is convenient for you to think that the administration is the root of the problem as it is convenient for me to think that the abuse was not largely systematic and therefore the administration is not largely at fault.
And even if the administration were not directly involved, just look at their reactions. Where is the horror and indignation? Heads should be rolling right and left over this, people should be accepting responsibility and resigning over this. Our military has in multiple locations and instances been torturing and cruelly mistreating prisoners! Instead, blame is shuffled down the command pyramid, events are minimized as akin to college hazing practices, information is throttled, evidence hidden or obscured, and the news media's credibility attacked.
If the administration really weren't involved, I would expect them to be acting very differently. Instead, they appear to put personal political damage control ahead of national principals.
Blame also extends to the other end of the pyramid, to everyone who supported the war. Once war is unleashed and the normal rules of civilization are suspended, unpredictable bad things usually take place. It's another reason why wars should be a last resort. Anyone who supported this war helped create an environment where the possiblity of really bad things happening was suddenly dramatically greater.Comment
-
I saw you do it at least once.Originally posted by DanS
Did I ever?Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree...Comment
-
We did, but the one morning of it, as bad as it was, wasn't enough to really show us the true face of war.Originally posted by Spiffor
If the Yanks had the horrors of war shoved down their throats, maybe they'd be less prone of doing it.Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree...Comment
-
Well, well done mindseye. I agree 150%.Originally posted by mindseye
I think it's hard to deny that the tip-top of the administration wasn't involved. For heaven's sake, the now-US attorney general advised the President that parts of the Geneva Convention could basically be ignored. Our national policies regarding the detention and handling of "detainees" (or whatever we call prisoners these days) were not written and put in place by prison guards.
And even if the administration were not directly involved, just look at their reactions. Where is the horror and indignation? Heads should be rolling right and left over this, people should be accepting responsibility and resigning over this. Our military has in multiple locations and instances been torturing and cruelly mistreating prisoners! Instead, blame is shuffled down the command pyramid, events are minimized as akin to college hazing practices, information is throttled, evidence hidden or obscured, and the news media's credibility attacked.
If the administration really weren't involved, I would expect them to be acting very differently. Instead, they appear to put personal political damage control ahead of national principals.
Blame also extends to the other end of the pyramid, to everyone who supported the war. Once war is unleashed and the normal rules of civilization are suspended, unpredictable bad things usually take place. It's another reason why wars should be a last resort. Anyone who supported this war helped create an environment where the possiblity of really bad things happening was suddenly dramatically greater.
I've been screaming the same thing for the past year already.
The damage control is very insulting, like when Cheney came out last week and said he was, "offended" by Amnesty Internation.
Well I was ****ing offended when you and your morons LIED to your own people to go invade some place. What a *****.
America is doing some outrageous **** and nobody gives a damn.
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. - Abraham LincolnComment
-
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite highly publicized charges of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag."
Executive Director William Schulz said Amnesty, often cited worldwide for documenting human rights abuses, also did not know whether Secretary Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved severe torture methods such as beatings and starvation.
Schulz recently dubbed Rumsfeld an "apparent high-level architect of torture" in asserting he approved interrogation methods that violated international law.
"It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea," Schulz told "Fox News Sunday."
Can Bush's enemies get any more incompetent? Yet another victim of BDS...KH FOR OWNER!
ASHER FOR CEO!!
GUYNEMER FOR OT MOD!!!Comment
-
That one really was off the meter, wasn't it? The sheer scale of his hubris was dazzling.Originally posted by Ted Striker
The damage control is very insulting, like when Cheney came out last week and said he was, "offended" by Amnesty Internation.
Well I was ****ing offended when you and your morons LIED to your own people to go invade some place. What a *****.
Then again, this is the same guy who was deeply "offended" when Kerry mentioned the mere fact of his daughter's homosexuality.
Gee, who could've guessed Mr. "F*ck You!" was so sensitive?Comment
-
I addressed that memo. That memo was in force for about 2 months, as far as I remember, and was retracted. It was never implemented. Don't get me wrong. It does give me pause.I think it's hard to deny that the tip-top of the administration wasn't involved. For heaven's sake, the now-US attorney general advised the President that parts of the Geneva Convention could basically be ignored. Our national policies regarding the detention and handling of "detainees" (or whatever we call prisoners these days) were not written and put in place by prison guards.I came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts. ~ Rudyard Kipling, 1891Comment
-
I used to be involved with AI. When I heard the "gulag" comment, I lost an incredible amount of respect I had for the organization as non-partisan. I'll let the WaPo editorial on the matter do the talking.The damage control is very insulting, like when Cheney came out last week and said he was, "offended" by Amnesty Internation.
'American Gulag'
Thursday, May 26, 2005; Page A26
IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.
That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference held to mark the publication of Amnesty's annual report, the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times." In her written introduction to the report, Ms. Khan also mentioned only two countries at length: Sudan and the United States, the "unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power," which "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights."
Like Amnesty, we, too, have written extensively about U.S. prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have done so not only because the phenomenon is disturbing in its own right but also because it gives undemocratic regimes around the world an excuse to justify their own use of torture and indefinite detention and because it damages the U.S. government's ability to promote human rights.
But we draw the line at the use of the word "gulag" or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as "hysterical."I came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts. ~ Rudyard Kipling, 1891Comment
-
I addressed that memo. That memo was in force for about 2 months, as far as I remember, and was retracted. It was never implemented. Don't get me wrong. It does give me pause.
Source? I seem to recall that Gonzales memo wasn't retracted by the DoJ till just prior to his confirmation (where he obfuscated in answering questions on the contents of the memo). And you might recall that he's, you know, the Attorney General of the United States. Not exactly an insignificant position."Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. "
-BokononComment
-
My apologies. It was the implementation memo for Gitmo prepared by counsel (not the top-level legal memo) that was retracted by Rumsfeld after about one and a half months, on January 15, 2003. As he rescinded the memo, Rumsfeld immediately convened a working group to discuss what was proper interrogation technique in light of a broader range of issues rather than just legal issues.
The original memo...
"While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time. Our armed forces are trained to a standard of interrogation that reflects a tradition of restraint."
and the rescision...
"In all interrogations, you should continue the humane treatment of the detainees, regardless of the type of interrogation technique employed."
Last edited by DanS; June 7, 2005, 13:15.I came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts. ~ Rudyard Kipling, 1891Comment
-
Incidentally, the Administration has a policy of sending suspects to places like Syria and Egypt to have the **** tortured out of them, "extraordinary rendition." Irrespective of what any memo says.
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. "
-BokononComment
-
I agree that the AI use of "gulag" was inaccurate and ill-advised ... and unfortunate, as this administration & its friends are quite adept at seizing on such trivia to obscure a larger, more important allegation (e.g. the recent Newseek stunt, "Rathergate" etc.).
Jimmy Carter has the right idea: a couple days ago he advocated the US close Gitmo in order to demonstrate its commitment to human rights.
A bold move like this is needed if we are to recover some portion of our squandered credibility.Last edited by mindseye; June 10, 2005, 12:26.Comment
Comment