Guantanamo Bay: Shame on you, United States

[InfiniteNow]

Welcome to the current state of sociopolitical discourse that we are experiencing in the United States of America.

 

It's quite sad that my parody in post #42 is exactly what has been put forth here in this thread, and what continues to be put forth in the US media, AM radio, and email chain letters.

 

 

One step forward, two steps back...

 

It's hard to nurish any rational hope with such disheartening encounters at seemingly every turn... :)

 

 

;)

[REASON]

I agree with you in principle IN, but I suggest that this type of discourse actually provides an alternative to the same old propaganda and spin that you get out of the US media, AM Talk Radio, and e-mail chain letters.

 

Mostly what you get from those sources is what you are hearing from questor. That is why I accused him of borrowing his talking points. I listen to conservative talk radio when I get the opportunity and rarely if ever is there a point-counterpoint discussion among knowledgeable participants on those programs. It's just a fathead "entertainer" and his or her partisan opinion, constantly touting themseves, and demonizing their opponents in an effort to maintain their ratings.

 

If there were more of this type of discourse as we are having on this thread, maybe more Americans would have alternate information to consider when formulating their beliefs.

[modest]

Are we to assume that piling naked bodies in a a hallway or threatening prisoners with a dog or waterboarding ( without death) is worse than cutting off limbs and beheading?

 

Is your argument really:

Hey, we torture, but

they

do it worse. We only physiologically scar them. There are worse cases where they actually get to cutting and killing. Our torture may be immoral but you can find cases that are even way more immoral.

 

Really? This is what you're going with? Really?

 

Let's hope Abdul Wali (the guy the CIA tortured and killed) was guilty of something. I bet as Abdul was turning himself into the American forces he was telling himself it would be ok because Americans don't torture people to death like the bad guys. I'm sure he was telling himself that America is fair and righteous. Listen to Hyder Akbar's story and you'll see the real consequinces of this kind of thing.

 

Why are not America's critics up in arms about the jihadists treatment of their prisoners? Where are the pictures of jihadists prison cells? of the murder of females who attempt to go to school, of the torture chambers where hundreds of innocent civilians have been murdered, of the constant barbarity of the suicide bombings killing innocents?

 

You'll notice Americans have always been up in arms about such things. There is one particular political party who always wants to intercede first while another political party has traditionally avoided such "nation building"

 

But, hey - what was my point earlier? We Americans have lost the right to piss and moan about the rest of the world's corruption on this issue. If our official policy is torture then we hardly have the right to demand better of others. Like I said - it used to be useful that we could.

 

Are we to believe it is more important to have a female or minority candidate as president than it is to have competent leadership? Why not list the accomplishments and positions of each candidate and then pick the best person for the job?

 

Other people have pointed out the ridiculous assumption you're making here and I will to: How can this statement not be making the assumption that black and female candidates are incompetent? I see no other way to read it.

 

-modest

[questor]

Perhaps your idea of competency does not demand much. I also said:

''Why not list the accomplishments and positions of each candidate and then pick the best person for the job?'' Do you have trouble understanding these words?

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

Perhaps your idea of competency does not demand much. I also said:

''Why not list the accomplishments and positions of each candidate and then pick the best person for the job?'' Do you have trouble understanding these words?

 

Like that's going to help! Last two times around we (well alot of americans apparently not including I) elected a failure of a business man, a deserter, and a man with financial links to our long time enemies in the middle east!

[freeztar]

Perhaps your idea of competency does not demand much. I also said:

''Why not list the accomplishments and positions of each candidate and then pick the best person for the job?'' Do you have trouble understanding these words?

 

Besides being way off topic, this attitude is not appreciated. It is completely possible, and certainly prudent, to debate or clarify without bringing a person's competence, or ability to understand, into question. Please refrain from such posts in the future.

[modest]

Perhaps your idea of competency does not demand much. I also said:

''Why not list the accomplishments and positions of each candidate and then pick the best person for the job?'' Do you have trouble understanding these words?

 

I have no idea what "Perhaps your idea of competency does not demand much." means or has to do with anything. It seems like bait - I'm not hungry.

 

Regardless - many people have raised valid objections to your post #65. Can I assume you are formulating some intellectual response? Hopefully one that does not involve claiming those objecting "hate America" or "have trouble understanding words".

 

-modest

[Boerseun]

"Guantanamo Bay: Shame on you, United States."

 

Indeed.

 

Consider the following snippet from Alternet.

 

This guy got slammed 17 years, for what amounts to nothing more and nothing less than a "thought crime".

 

Who says it won't be you next time?

 

The news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent.

The former gang member and convert to Islam -- whose arrest in May 2002 was trumpeted by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft as that of a "known terrorist," who was "exploring a plan" to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city -- was once regarded as one of the most dangerous terrorists ever apprehended on American soil. Almost six years later, as he received his sentence, he was not actually accused of lifting a finger to harm even a single US citizen.

While this is shocking enough in and of itself, Padilla's sentence - in what at least one perceptive commentator called "the most important case of our lifetimes" - is particularly shocking because it sends a clear message to the President of the United States that he can, if he wishes (and as he did with Padilla), designate a US citizen as an "enemy combatant," hold him without charge or trial in a naval brig for 43 months, and torture him - through the use of prolonged sensory deprivation and solitary confinement - to such an extent that, as the psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty explained after spending 22 hours with Padilla, "What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being's mind."

Padilla's warders had another take on his condition, describing him as "so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for 'a piece of furniture,'" but the most detailed analysis of the effects of his torture was, again, provided by Angela Hegarty in an interview last August with Democracy Now:

Juan Gonzalez: And have you dealt with someone who had been in isolation for such a long period of time before?

Dr. Angela Hegarty: No. This was the first time I ever met anybody who had been isolated for such an extraordinarily long period of time. I mean, the sensory deprivation studies, for example, tell us that without sleep, especially, people will develop psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, suicidality within days. And here we had a man who had been in this situation, utterly dependent on his interrogators, who didn't treat him all that nicely, for years. And apart from - the only people I ever met who had such a protracted experience were people who were in detention camps overseas, that would come close, but even then they weren't subjected to the sensory deprivation. So, yes, he was somewhat of a unique case in that regard.

As if this were not worrying enough, it was what happened after Padilla's 43-month ordeal that sealed the President's impunity to torture US citizens at will. When it seemed that his case was within reach of the US Supreme Court, the government transferred him into the US legal system, deposited him in a normal prison environment, dropped all mention of the "dirty bomb" plot, and charged him, based on his association with two alleged terrorist facilitators, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, with participating in a Florida-based plot to aid Islamic extremists in holy wars abroad. When the case came to court last summer, the judge, Marcia Cooke, airbrushed Padilla's torture from history, insisting that it could not be discussed at all, and, after a trial regarded as farcical by many observers, Padilla and his co-defendants were duly found guilty.

Today's sentencing, after an unusually protracted two-week debate, has apparently brought the whole sordid saga to an end, with Padilla's torture only mentioned briefly in passing by Judge Cooke, who noted, "I do find that the conditions [for Padilla as an enemy combatant] were so harsh that they warrant consideration." Nevertheless, he received a longer sentence than either of his co-defendants (who were sentenced to 15 years and eight months, and 12 years and eight months, respectively), even though two jurors admitted to the Miami Herald that the jury as a whole "struggled to convict Padilla because the panel initially viewed him as a bit player in the scheme to aid Islamic extremists, unlike his co-defendants."

They certainly had a point. While the conviction of Hassoun and Jayyousi was based on coded conversations in 126 phone calls intercepted by the FBI over a number of years, Padilla was included in only seven of those phone calls. Groomed by his mentor, Hassoun, he had traveled to the Middle East and, in 2000, had applied to attend a military training camp in Afghanistan, using the name Abu Abdallah al-Muhajir. His application form, which, according to a government expert, bore his fingerprints, was apparently discovered during a CIA raid on an alleged al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan, but although the prosecution presented an alleged al-Qaeda graduation list with his Muslim name on it during the sentencing, they had been unable to provide any evidence during the trial that he had actually attended the training camp in Afghanistan.

In the end, Padilla's conviction hinged on the jury's determination that he had "joined the terrorism conspiracy in the United States before leaving the country." This was based on a single recorded conversation, in July 1997, in which he stated that he was ready to join a jihad overseas.

17 years and four months seems to me to be an extraordinarily long sentence for little more than a thought crime, but when the issue of Padilla's three and half years of suppressed torture is raised, it's difficult not to conclude that justice has just been horribly twisted, that the President and his advisors have just got away with torturing an American citizen with impunity, and that no American citizen can be sure that what happened to Padilla will not happen to him or her. Today, it was a Muslim; tomorrow, unless the government's powers are taken away from them, it could be any number of categories of "enemy combatants" who have not yet been identified.

I can't believe that Americans are willing to see their freedoms and liberties go down the tubes like this.

[Michaelangelica]

The USA has had nuclear weapons since around 1945, yet we have attacked

no one after WW2 with them.

Congradulations. how come you are making more now and putting rocket defence systems in UK and Japan?

 

We have had wars with North Korea and Vietnam, yet we do not occupy their countries or take their land for our own aggrandisement

.That's because you lost.

We have fought no wars in the last century to subjugate or exploit another country.

I am no historian but it seems to me that USA has stuck its nose in a lot of South American and Carribean countries.( Panama,Dominican Republic,Cuba, Nicaragua,Haiti,) and lots of little skirmishes like Greek Civil War, Ireland, Lebanon,Kosovo, Gulf War, Not to mention the Phillipines and covert wars run by the CIA such as Afghanistan (when the Russians were there)

If we are able to achieve our objective in Iraq, it will become a civilized member of the modern world without barbaric attacks on its neigbors.

What do you call "civilised" -Guantanamo Bay?

What is the Iraq objective?

We supplied thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars to help defeat Fascism

and rebuild a devastated Europe.

Actually it was trillions

We are now trying to defeat a barbaric enemy who is intent upon imposing his will and Sharia law upon the whole world, who has killed innocent men, women and children of several Western as well Eastern countries without any display of conscience or mercy.

Yes perhaps, but I am sure 'he' says the same thing about you. Everyone 'Demonises' their enemy. The first casualty in war is truth. How many civilians have you killed in Iraq now?

Our own ill-educated and unaware citizens do not understand this effort and continually criticise our efforts. The countries that we saved from Nazi

domination criticise our efforts. What will be our reward for spending billions of dollars and losing thousands of soldiers? I am afraid it will be nothing, and the ingrates will just continue to demand our foreign aid and our protection when attacked. Why would it not be to our advantage to let others take over our position in the front lines to see how their methods will work?

You made a lot of money out of WW2 by appropriating German (& British) inventions, ideas and technology. Not to mention the billions in stolen Japanese gold and precious stones that they had taken from Korea and China and SE Asia, and hid in the Phillipines. The reason you insisted that Japan pay no repartitions to the countries they had robbed and raped. The USA had it all.

 

USA foreign aid is now mainly self serving and politically motivated.

 

So how is this relevant to closing Guantanamo Bay?

 

BTW PS

c. 55,000,000, people died in WW2.

Including illness and misadventure 405,399 Americans died

WW1 c. 15 000 000 died , 116,516 Americans died (over 50% from sickness -flu?) Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls

Iraq, Saddam Hussein (1979-2003): c. 300 000 killed

Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls and Casualty Statistics for Wars, Dictatorships and Genocides

Iraq USA and friend (1990-):150,000- 350 000- 600,000??(4,238 troops)

Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls and Casualty Statistics for Wars, Dictatorships and Genocides

Iraq Coalition Casualties

USA Homegrown Homicide

• # USA 1960-96: 666,160 murders and (non-negligent) manslaughters (Statistical Abstract of the United States, http://www.census.gov/statab/freq/98s0335.txt)
  
• # USA 1900-59: 390,136 murders (Watenburg, The Statistical History of the United States, 1976)
  
• # USA TOTAL: 1,056,296 (more or less -- depending on how you want to count manslaughters)
  

Twentieth Century Atlas - Casualty Statistics - United States

 

Civilisation? Move to New Zealand!

[questor]

Freeztar, if you are going to issue reprimands concerning these conversations,

am I to assume you will also reprimand those who agree with you when they break your rules of conduct?

Modest says:

''Other people have pointed out the ridiculous assumption you're making here and I will to: How can this statement not be making the assumption that black and female candidates are incompetent? I see no other way to read it.''

 

Are the words ''ridiculous assumption'' in keeping with your rules?, and does the phrase ''I see no other way to read it'' mean something other than a lack of understanding of the statement?

[questor]

Michael, since you seem to be the most vocal America hater in the group, tell me which country of those you have mentioned have suffered the most at the hands of the US after hostilities ended? And in what form does the suffering exist? I would also be interested in knowing why you have such a hate for the US. Have you had personal damage from America or Americans?

[freeztar]

Freeztar, if you are going to issue reprimands concerning these conversations,

am I to assume you will also reprimand those who agree with you when they break your rules of conduct?

Modest says:

''Other people have pointed out the ridiculous assumption you're making here and I will to: How can this statement not be making the assumption that black and female candidates are incompetent? I see no other way to read it.''

 

Are the words ''ridiculous assumption'' in keeping with your rules?, and does the phrase ''I see no other way to read it'' mean something other than a lack of understanding of the statement?

 

Questor, if you have concerns about this issue, then feel free to PM me or another moderator. Let's keep the thread on-topic and civil. Thanks.

[REASON]

The replies to my post show quite clearly that there are at least two Americas in many respects. I have never in any post advocated the use of torture, nor do any of my friends, but it seems that certain mind-sets can only view people through a narrow prism of pre-conceived ideas demanding that all people of certain groups are always guilty of thinking the same way. Due to their inability to process data, if one disagrees with them, then they must be guilty of a set group of offensive thought patterns: including racism, no respect for minorities, unfairness, elitism and being one of the Americans one must hate to be in synch with liberal sycophants. These ideas have all coalesced into an unreasoning hatred toward G. Bush and anyone one else who would espouse conservatism. It is interesting to note that the knee jerkers have already started to formulate their attack upon a fellow American and slyly start the character assassination with the intimation of racism, even though I mentioned nothing at all derogatory about race, and the implication that I stand for torture even though I have said I do not. Thus it is in the USA today. As I said, the rest of the world can stand by and watch

Americans tear up their own culture and society. Instead of arguing with me over the truth or essence of my statements, character assassination and untruths take precedence. America is indeed headed for great changes for the worst and those causing the changes cannot see the damage being done.

 

Michael, since you seem to be the most vocal America hater in the group, tell me which country of those you have mentioned have suffered the most at the hands of the US after hostilities ended? And in what form does the suffering exist? I would also be interested in knowing why you have such a hate for the US. Have you had personal damage from America or Americans?

 

Well questor, it appears we have a classic example of whoever smelt it, dealt it, and it reeks of hypocrisy. Why am I never surprised that the first person to cry foul and take on the victim role, ends up being the perpetrator? Because hypocrisy emanates from those who can only find fault in others and never with themselves. I suspect that if your eyes were opened, you'd realize that you didn't have to look very far to understand why Michael, or anyone else for that matter, would have a current distaste for what America has become.

 

Quit acting like your version of America is the only America there is. I don't particularly prefer your representation.

 

So back on topic. You stated in your post above that you do not stand for torture. So the next obvious question is: Do you believe we have engaged in the torture of detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or any of the other military detention centers or black sites around the world?

 

If not, why?

 

If so, why do you then take such a defensive position when others who share your dislike for torture policy express it, such as has been done on this thread?

[questor]

Reason, yes, I am willing to discuss the subject of torture. First, let us define our terms. Tell me your definition of torture, since some of the reported acts committed are not considered torture by everyone. Second, give me a ballpark guess on how many prisoners were so treated, out of the hundreds confined? Third, since there are varying reports about the general living conditions of most prisoners, would you describe your opinion of that subject?

Since the presence of torture seems to be an important topic to you, what would you suggest we do about the torture being committed by our opponents? Has that subject been covered sufficiently for you? Has the global outcry met your standards? Do you think that Bush issued a directive that prisoners be tortured? This seems to be the opinion of some.

[questor]

Freeztar, I have desire to resort to PM's over a public policy of the site. I am assuming the site welcomes free speech even though we obviously do not have unanimous agreement. All that needs to be said is that all participants are bound by the same rules.

[Michaelangelica]

Michael, since you seem to be the most vocal America hater in the group, tell me which country of those you have mentioned have suffered the most at the hands of the US after hostilities ended? And in what form does the suffering exist? I would also be interested in knowing why you have such a hate for the US. Have you had personal damage from America or Americans?

questor You are just not listening .

I am not a USA hater but neither do I see the Country though rose-tinted glasses - or rewriting history as you seem to be doing.

 

Your response seems to be typical of Yanks, when your country is criticised, of dismissing criticism as it comes from 'USA haters' and is therefor is not valid. "And after everthing we did for them in the war-ingrates"

Remember Australia has fought beside you in most of your wars -as it is now.

My criticism is motivated by concern about what both our countries are loosing -democracy.

 

As for torture, research sponsored by your CIA, has shown that sensory deprivation is the most effective form of torture. It is able to break a person within 24-48 hours.

While not complete sensory deprivation, living in a windowless, featureless cell for 23 0f 24 hours, for years on end, at GB is sensory deprivation

[questor]

Michael, I am listening and I am understanding. You and others, including many of my countrymen are constantly taking shots at the US. Are you getting a lot of criticism directed at your country? If not, why not try helping other countries with more military or financial aid, or try to help them achieve

freedom. The more you help, the more enemies you make. The opponents you don't help think you are scum and need to be eliminated. This helps to explain foreign hatred of the US , but does not explain the home grown self hatred. To those who have been my opponents and critics on this thread, I would like to hear what positive comments they might have about their homeland. My impression is that most Americans engaged on this thread have nothing good to say about their lives in the US. As I have said, it shows that there are very large differences in the attitudes of Americans.

By the way, there seem to be a number of people who seem to have lost or think they are losing their civil liberties. I wonder where they lost them. I live in the States, and I still have all of mine.