A teddy bear for Gitmo

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by S.A.M., Aug 29, 2008.

  1. John99 Banned Banned

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    Define: Torture
     
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  3. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    SAM:

    Actually, I have followed all of the court cases regarding the legal status of Guantanamo prisoners. Some of the strongest opposition to the position of the administration has come from US lawyers, standing up for due process rights.

    I note that you are unable to quote the part of whatever decision you were supposedly referring to.

    What action by the American people (as opposed to the current executive government) would you like to see to "fix" the problem?
     
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  5. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    As someone who is so thoroughly informed, its not puzzling to you that you do not know of this? See below




    Something along these lines would be fine by me:

    You know, making confessions obtained under torture inadmissible.

    Of course, I would like the Americans to at least pretend to act outraged at statements like this:

    You can find them in the McClatchy papers or CCR. Not exactly mainstream, eh?

    http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/24654.html

    http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/judges-dismiss-suit-seeking-damages-guantanamo-torture

    What do you think? Are people kidnapped and tortured by Americans, persons? Should they have the right to redress? Whom should they apply to for redressal?
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2008
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    We are in the awkward position of our Executive Branch being out of control. Since the Rooseveltian Era began in 1933, we have watched our Supreme Court adopt a policy of activism rather than one of safeguarding the Constitution. As a result, whenever the President and the Supreme Court majority are of the same political persuasion, there are no "checks and balances" by the Judicial Branch on presidential excess. Congress is usually closely balanced between the two parties (right now there is exactly a one-vote majority in the Senate) so the Legislative Branch does not step in to do its own job. So we have the unfortunate situation of a "democracy" in which a vast majority of the people are opposed to the president's policies, but we can't change the government quickly enough to do anything about it.

    Still, this is better than so-called "democracy" works in places like Israel, Egypt, Mexico, Pakistan and Russia. We will have a new president in January, it will almost certainly be Obama (McCain's choice for running mate of an unknown anti-abortion female, embroiled in a controversy of political propriety, from a state that most Americans probably think is part of Canada, is a high-profile concession), and he will begin the arduous task of ending what Bush has done. Unfortunately much of it can never be undone, but he CAN bring the troops home and he CAN shut down the offshore prisons. There is nothing more we can do within our own legal system. The wounds of the Civil War are unhealed after 140 years, and Timothy McVeigh's understandable but poorly executed attack on a federal building with an on-site day-care center is still fresh in our memory; Americans are not going to go outside the law even to bring down a complete loser of a president. Our democracy works better than Israel's and we will bring down our government by peaceful, constitutional means. I'm truly sorry if it doesn't work well enough and fast enough to suit you, because it's even worse for those of us who live under its authority. But it's better than living in a country where the citizens shoot at each other to solve their problems. We'll get the assholes in charge to stop shooting at the foreigners.
    Well okay, I'll accept that as an honorable disagreement. Personally I think they rank about equally, since destruction of infrastructure tortures a lot more people than prison camps, and contributes indirectly to their deaths by the loss of health and safety services, degradation of sanitation, shelter and nutrition, and increase in lawlessness.

    But my point is that the war as a whole, including all of its facets, is greater than the illegal prison issue, which is "merely" one of those facets. If there were no war there would be no prison camps. And as long as our maverick administration has the "fog of war" to hide its secrets and "patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel" to shame the public into not questioning its actions in the name of "national defense," it's going to get away with crimes against civilization.

    Even today informed, thoughtful, educated Americans get a very uncomfortable look when I talk about the "Homeland Gestapo," and say, "Come on Fraggle, as bad as this is, this is hardly Nazi Germany." I have to point out that this is exactly how the Nazis got their start. They manufactured a crisis and then counted on German patriotism to excuse their "extremism in the name of liberty." Fortunately, then they see the parallel. I guess this really is not Nazi Germany, but it's frightening to realize how easily something like that can happen.

    During the Vietnam War it was much more difficult to get a hearing. War protesters were beaten up by both police and civilians. It took twelve years to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam. If we can bring them back from Afghanistan and Iraq in only seven or eight, it's a shame we can't do better, but that is progress. Also one must recognize that the death and destruction we've caused in Afghanistan and Iraq is far less than in Vietnam. That's also progress.

    I was born at a time when half the world was engaged in a war that killed three percent of the human race, left an entire continent in ruins, turned half of an ethnic group into refugees, and turned two cities into nuclear wastelands. This war pales in comparison to WWII, as have all the wars that followed it. As a pacifist, a libertarian, and a lover of civilization, I weep for the victims of this war as much as anyone. My outspoken criticism of my government has gotten me in so much trouble in my real life that I usually laugh off Sam's uninformed gibes until she goes overboard and makes up her own facts. Or perhaps to be more charitable, simply believes that she understands America when she clearly doesn't have a clue.
    As a libertarian I can't argue with that. Causing direct harm to another human being is the worst crime. Arson and destruction of property cause only indirect harm, which under a libertarian government would be handled by tort and easement law in the civil courts. Still, when it's done systematically, by a government, it can have consequences that are just as bad.
    That's my point. It does lead to death. Civilians die every day in Iraq due to roving armed bands of religious zealots, breakdown of sanitation and unavailability of medical care. This is our fault. The infrastructure worked very well under Saddam, except of course for the plight of the Kurds.
    It's not our "leisure." It's a problem with the way our political system works. It's taken more than two hundred years for it to get this bad because it's a problem that the Founders could not possibly have foreseen.

    At heart, this is still yet another problem caused by religion. As an outsider I can't help seeing the underlying animosity among Christians, Muslims and Jews at the root of all this. Yeah sure, poverty, colonialism, consumerism, yatta yatta. But none of these idiots would have taken up arms against each other if they weren't convinced that their god was on their side. The foundation of Israel, the overthrow of the Shah, the Wahhabi kingdom, the tension between Pakistan and India, the Taliban, the Sunni-Shia dichotomy... and on my side the Christian people regarding all of them as "heathens"--this is arguably the root of the whole damn problem.

    Religion sucks.
    Sam is a Muslim and Muslims believe that the afterlife is more important than the maintenance of civilization in this trivial temporal world, and that every dead baby will be greeted with lollipops and puppdogs by Allah. (Whoops, that particular imaginary god thinks puppydogs are too "unclean" to play with, what a fucking horrible heaven that must be!) I'm sure she would like to see us rise up in arms and overthrow our government. You can easily glean this from her writing, because she consistently finds the humiliation of prisoners more offensive than simply killing people. That is classic Islam. They would rather be shot at than insulted. Drawing a disrespectful cartoon of Mohammed is a bigger crime than destroying an entire country.
    Once again, I point out the interesting fact that you complain much more often and much more loudly about a relatively small number of your people being tortured, than about a relatively large number of them being killed. There's something in your culture that finds the insult and humiliation of torture far more offensive than "mere" death. More offensive by two or three orders of magnitude.
     
  8. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    What do I understand by the fact that you are more interested in dissing my religion than in the fact that your justice system hs decided torture should be expected and detainees are not persons who can expect redress? Tell me if your wife was being held in an unknown secret location being tortured for several years, if you had no contact with her for the duration of those years, what would your expectations be? Wait for the war to end? Get her out asap? If she did get out, would you want redress? Or not?

    I am frankly flummoxed by the attitudes I see here. To minimise the effects and consequences of torture, which is something that can be stopped immediately and harp on unknown fantasies of the future when Americans will stop invading defenceless countries seems like chronic denial to me. Or that you consider Islam to be incompatible with civilisation when its your country with the moronic invasions, occupations, torture camps and court rulings.

    Not to mention, unlike you, I have no confidence that:

    1. Obama will win
    2. That if Obama wins, it will make any difference.
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2008
  9. John99 Banned Banned

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    agreed.
     
  10. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    What do you think I was trying to explain to you before? Why has it taken you so long to realize these things? No worries, though, at least you're starting to come around.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  11. ashura the Old Right Registered Senior Member

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    I have two problems with this statement. The first is that this sort of laxness when it comes to the rules and boundaries of what we're allowed to do to "enemy combatants" under our authority is exactly what leads to abuses. If you don't define it clearly, the boundaries will be pushed.

    The second is the assumption that the abuse that's going on in prisons is done by small fry, some "bad apple", who decided to abuse his or her authority. That's simply not the case. The decisions to push the boundaries came from the top, and they slowly spread to the bottom. Lawyers in the administration did their best to misinterpret existing laws barring torture in any form, twisting the law to allow the President to do whatever he wants in the name of national security. That sort of thinking led to the CIA expanding it's extraordinary renditions, which handed over the accused to other nations such as Syria and Egypt to squeeze information out of them. Make no mistake, those nations conducted torture and under the US' authority.

    The CIA disliking the fact that they couldn't be more directly involved with the prisoners decided they'd prefer to handle the squeezing themselves and set up their operations at the "legal black hole" that is Gitmo. From there, stories of their supposed successes led to the Department of Defense, and Rumsfeld, getting jealous and subsequently approving the military to use the CIA's methods. Eventually, that's how the small fry got involved.

    This was official US policy to extract information, not some low level grunt deciding to relieve his stress by fucking with a prisoner. In certain cases where the FBI was involved and witnessed the lengths to which the CIA was going, agents reported the abuse and what they clearly recognized to be torture to the higher ups and the FBI completely cut themselves off from those cases to avoid the legal ramifications. Any attempt to stop it were ignored thanks to the incredible amount of power the CIA received post-9/11.

    Seasoned interrogators who were fluent in Arabic and had been handling the Islam terrorism problem for years, and who recognized that torture simply isn't a good tool to extract information, were shunned when they tried to intervene. Meanwhile, lawyers and the CIA's CTC, which at the time of it's explosion of power had not even one experienced interrogator in their staff, were the ones deciding what should or shouldn't be used.
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sorry, I realized that line was inappropriate and deleted it as quickly as the server would work. You must have nothing better to do today than argue with people who take the Serenity Prayer seriously, ready to pounce on every post. ("Goddess grant me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference.") I apologize for the insult, it was sincere but off topic in this thread. Here, as always, I diss ALL of the stupid, worthless, uncivilized Abrahamic religions. The current situation in the Middle East is just the latest in an endless series of crises caused by the friction among them. Sure there are other issues, but if they weren't Abrahamists they wouldn't have that irrational conviction of "God is with us against the infidels" that gets in the way of compromise.
    It is a widespread fallacy to believe that bereaved people are rational and should be allowed to make policy. Isn't that how most wars start? But to answer your question, of course I think it's wrong to have to wait for the war to end before we can close down the prisons. But reread the Serenity Prayer. It is simply something we're going to have to do. The alternative is to have another Revolution or another Civil War, and there aren't many Americans who think that would be better.
    How? You display your ignorance of America at every turn. Let's say you're not a Muslim, you're a U.S. citizen and you're loaded with charisma, so Americans will listen to you. You've got tens of millions of us who agree with you. Just exactly how will you and your followers shut down these prisons any faster than the 18-month timetable that Iraq has given us to get the hell out of their country, much less the four months until Bush leaves office and his presumptive successor will start doing what we want?

    I am "frankly flummoxed" (I wish you would spend more time studying our history and politics instead of our slang) that you are more concerned with the plight of the aforementioned nasty people who were fighting America one way or another and are still alive, than the totally innocent non-combatants who are dying every day in Iraq at the hands of our soldiers, our private "security" forces, and roving Islamist bandits.
    It's called "working within the Constitution." We need a new generation of leaders who will stop using that venerable document for toilet paper. Truman started the convention of going to war (Korea) without the pesky Constitutional formality of waiting for Congress to declare one, and neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has slapped down any of his successors for doing the same thing (Vietnam, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq). As I said, this is a much bigger and scarier problem than a few hundred members of the religion that calls us The Great Satan being tortured, the majority of whom were captured while taking up arms against America and could have been simply killed off without raising much of a protest. This sets the American government up to be unaccountable to anyone. All these people need is the engaging personality and rhetorical skills to get elected, and then they can start bombing anybody who pisses them off without having to even apologize, much less go on trial. As a citizen of both America and the world I find this far more disturbing than Guantanamo.
    Islam has the same track record as Christianity: destroy an entire civilization because the people are only "infidels" and don't have any rights. You barely have to go back a hundred years to find the atrocities of Islamists. Abraham, if he was a real person, was one of the greatest villains in history.
    Well I can't argue with that. I just hope you're wrong. There's no question that McCain would make this all worse. I think it was a mistake for the Democrats to be so over-confident that they picked this election to break the race (or gender) barrier. But I understand people who say, "If not now, when?"

    Kennedy not only broke the Catholic barrier but defeated the incumbent Vice President of a very popular administration. And people are calling Obama "the black Kennedy."
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2008
  13. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    The same way you do anything in a democracy. You force the government to pay attention

    http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200809/s2351326.htm?tab=asia

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968


    I think Americans are too complacent about democracy. Whats the point, really?

    Well I must have some glitch, because I still see it?
    I see you avoided the question I asked you. But to give a more relevant example, the family of Manadel al Jamadi had no idea for a year [2003 to 2004] what had happened to him. The first inkling they got was his ice packed body with a grinning US soldier over it, splashed across the media outlets. It was only a year later [2005] that the details of his death were released. They never received his body. They probably cannot find it, as it may be in an unmarked grave somewhere. After that, every single person in Iraq or Afghanistan with a missing family member has two nightmares: one, their missing family member is dead; two: he or she is not dead. Thats not a choice I would wish on anyone. And with five to seven years of incarceration, that is a long long time to suffer the not knowing.
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2008
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    We aren't talking about bad apples, we're talking about deliberately established policy and infrastructure. Abu Ghreaib was deliberately set up to be not clean and not legit. This is not "in the nature of" American federal prisons, yet, and sane people will not allow it to spread any further than it has.
    The captives at Gitmo, Abu, etc, were mostly in violation of nothing. They had a perfect right to be where they were, doing what they were doing. Their captors and torturers are in violation of Geneva - we know that because the President found it necessary to get a specific pseudo-legal exemption from Geneva for their operations.
    Again: not really. Scott's delusion about "bad apples", for example, is based on the media coverage, so you can see that most of these things that SAM is talking about, and I am talking about, and so forth, have not been presented factually and accurately in the major media to a US audience. For example:
    Now how many Americans have been presented with Gitmo and Abu and Bagram as consequences of policy - deliberate creations of people who set out to create American torture prisons and succeeded ? Are both candidates really and equivalently aware of that, think you ?
    So? As Sam has noted, it's been years now. They are still going, and their perpetrators remain free and unpunished.
    In the first place, that characterization of "the majority" is false. In the second, the establishment of torture centers and their public acknowledgment is indeed scarier than the prosecution of imperial executive war, not because it's worse but because its a further long step down that bad road. It's a worse sign.
     
  15. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    FR i must say this, i would LOVE to debate you on crimes like arson, theft and distruction of property becoming civil torts.

    concidering the inequity in access to the courts because of cost (this was a tute question from just health last week actually) its hardly concivable that for instance a poor house owner has the money to take an action against a ritch property developer who torched there house to lower the cost to buy it. however tha is a debate for another thread
     
  16. lepustimidus Banned Banned

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    To anyone here who acts as thought S.A.M isn't lying, may I quote one of her original assertions?

    That's a blatant lie. The fact is that the issues of torture and prisons are discussed in America. You could argue that they don't receive the amount of attention that they merit. But they are discussed, and there has been outrage expressed by many members of the America public. For crying out loud, the American news we receive on the international channel here in Australia has raised these issues on numerous occasions.

    Fraggle is right to call her on her bullshit, and I can't blame him for being agitated.
     

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