Bush Regime Revelations: US Soldiers raped little boys

[_EAllusion]

Well that post was even more unhinged than is typical for ajax. Normally you'd read that and just assume a bad troll attempt, but that's probably just ajax being ajax.

He did indulge in a line of reasoning that ldsfaqs did on this thread as well. It's a common view, and I think it's worth mentioning how bankrupt it is. The assumption both make is that anyone detained for the US can be labeled a terrorist. In the case of ldsfaqs it is anyone detained at Abu Gahrib. In the case of Ajax, it's anywhere, but with a specific focus on GITMO. While they don't trust the government to competently run a student loan program, the government accusing people of being enemies and torturing them has their implicit trust 100% of the time. If the government says so, they must know what they're doing. (Well, unless the government is labeling white, radical right wing militants as a danger. Then - hold the phone everyone - people got rights.)

The problem is there is lots of reason to believe that many people in those circumstances were not guilty of any crimes. That's not to say it would be Ok to treat them inhumanely if they were, but we're talking about people who were detained on very questionable cases. To land in Abu Gharib, all it took was a neighbor whom you had a fight with to tell an American solider that you were suspicious. Boom. That's it. Goodbye neighbor problem. Yet, every last person who was there can be described as a terrorist? A terrorist is someone who uses violence to intimidate the public for political gains. What does the word terrorist even mean in this context other than a label of dehumanization?

[_Gunnar]

The USA used to have a reputation for the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Abandoning that commitment to humane treatment of prisoners is, IMHO, one of the wickedest and stupidest things we could have done. How can we persuade our enemies that our cause is the better cause when we lower ourselves to the same brutal standards that we condemn our enemies for? This stupidity on our part has probably created more potential terrorists against us than we have succeeded in eliminating. By far the best way to eliminate enemies is to convince them by our actions and ideals that both they and we would be better off by working together as colleagues to make the world a better place for all of us.

I have no doubt that much of the good will we have or could have created by American humanitarian efforts has been offset by our more recent inhumane treatment of those who are our enemies and, in too many cases, even merely suspected of being our enemies on very insubstantial evidence.

[_ajax18]

How can we persuade our enemies that our cause is the better cause when we lower ourselves to the same brutal standards that we condemn our enemies for?

I think it's unfair even by your standards to call the way the USA has treated POWs the same or worse than the way Iraq treated coalition POWs.

[_EAllusion]

I think it's unfair even by your standards to call the way the USA has treated POWs the same or worse than the way Iraq treated coalition POWs.

This statement can only come from a belief that the US must somehow be better than the nation you regarded as an enemy. The US's torture regime involved maximizing the mental anguish a person can be forced to endure while not producing "organ failure." Though that didn't stop us from going too far and murdering people from time to time. While skepticism is warranted in the case this thread is about, we know that the Bush administration in the abstract approved of sexually assaulting children to torment parents. We know a lot about what has definitely happened that is already quite heinous, but there's still a lot more documentation under wraps of government secrecy. What do you think Iraq did that was worse and how do you know?

[_EAllusion]

My favorite documentary on the subject of US torture is Taxi to the Dark Side by Alex Gibney. It was produced during a time with the Bush administration was still prevaricating on its role in the abuses at Abu Gharib and US torture policies generally. So a great deal of the film is simply dedicated to laying out evidence of the torture regime existing to the extent it did. It showed that rather than anything that had leaked at that time being simply the result of a few bad apples, it was the result of a coordinated policy coming from the highest levels of government. With the benefit of this now being admitted (and defended), the film now takes on a time capsule quality for the period in which it was produced.

The title comes from the film starting out by investigating the death of an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was implicated by the US military for having Taliban ties and involvement in a recent attack. He was picked up and interrogated. His interrogation involved sleep and sensory deprivation (because it's one of the worst things you can do to a person) and hanging him like a piece of meat from the ceiling of his cell while he was beaten for days. The beatings, in his case, went a tad too far and resulted in his death. His legs were so badly beaten that they had literally turned to a pulp like consistency. Crucifixion, while similar, would've probably been a more humane way to go.

Here's the thing. Dilawar was just a taxi driver. There's a lot of evidence he was innocent. He just got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. To make it more heartbreaking, people who implicated him were later determined to be Taliban responsible for the attack that Dilawar was taken in for. While the soldiers had taken Dilawar to suffer unspeakable torture, they let the people in his cab who were actually Taliban go with letters stating they were of no threat.

Then on top of all this, know-nothings like Ajax just go about their merry way insisting that Dilawar was a terrorist, because the US only detains terrorists.

[_EAllusion]

One of the links I offered in that post details out some examples of torture that US used that we know about. It's Game of Thrones level of cruelty. With that as our standard, Ajax is free to describe how coalition prisoners of war were treated worse by Iraq.

[_ajax18]

One of the links I offered in that post details out some examples of torture that US used that we know about. It's Game of Thrones level of cruelty. With that as our standard, Ajax is free to describe how coalition prisoners of war were treated worse by Iraq.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123740&page=1

Surely you're old enough to remember the pictures of British Royal Airman John Peters on Iraqi television. They were beaten and forced to get on TV and say the war was unjust, divulge military secrets.

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-02/ ... mes-trials

ETA: EAllusion if your spin on this case is in fact true, it's still a very rare case and it was not used on soldiers in conventional warfare but rather terrorists. If the man was in fact innocent than this is a tragedy, but to say that the US generally treats POWs worse than Iraq is ridiculous. The majority of Iraqi POWs were treated according to the Geneva convention. It was only when the most radicalized decided to abandon conventional warfare and take on a terrorist campaign did the US have no other choice but to resort to some forms of "torture" to save American lives.

You've never responded to the fact that some of the people released from Guantanamo have recently made their way back onto the battlefield to fight the US again. What if this man helps orchestrate a terrorist attack that kills someone in your family? Will you still be glad we shut down Guantanamo and freed this man to continue his work?

[_subgenius]

Soooo..obviously Bush's fault?

We both know that had anything remotely similar to this happened in the past seven years, you and your idiot cult would be calling for Obama's head.

Another great example of KG post logic - justifying your thread title with a strategy of "preemptive stoopidity"

[_EAllusion]

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123740&page=1

Surely you're old enough to remember the pictures of British Royal Airman John Peters on Iraqi television. They were beaten and forced to get on TV and say the war was unjust, divulge military secrets.

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-02/ ... mes-trials

Yeah, that's not nearly as bad as some of the examples listed. Granted, the US had Ph.D. level psychologists designing torture protocols while Iraq wasn't known for having the most sophisticated of operations. It's not surprising that we'd be better at inhumanity. Pretty terrible that America is even worse than the example that you decided was your silver-bullet case of POW treatment being really poor, eh? That's a pretty good reason to think you don't pay any attention to what actually has happened. You certainly didn't read my links before responding.

What you linked was horrible. Truly horrible. I don't think you actually understand the US government chose to go that direction as well. Only the US government was a little more scientific about the best ways to break a human-being down on top of the sadism you think is the worst of the worst.

ETA: EAllusion if your spin on this case is in fact true,

That's not my "spin." You clearly didn't read any of the links I sent. Everything I said was found in the US military investigation on the matter. It's public record.

It was only when the most radicalized decided to abandon conventional warfare and take on a terrorist campaign did the US have no other choice but to resort to some forms of "torture" to save American lives.

I picked a case of a taxi driver doing something radical like driving a taxi. Since you didn't read anything I offered, this quote should summarize his guilty level well:

"In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said."

What he was accused of was a conventional guerrilla warfare attack, incidentally, not terrorism. I like how you put "torture" in quotes to imply that it's not really torture.

You've never responded to the fact that some of the people released from Guantanamo have recently made their way back onto the battlefield to fight the US again.

A person imprisoned and tortured by the US has become a dedicated enemy of the US once released? You don't say. That's a shocking development. You used an example of someone who has become involved with an organization dedicated to fighting the US to argue that anyone the US detains in such an environment should not be released. Even people who are innocent or lack sufficient evidence of guilt. This presumably includes numerous examples of people who already were released and haven't shown any inclination towards conventional or terror-based attacks on the US. This is such a profoundly anti-American notion, yet I imagine you view yourself as a patriot.

What if this man helps orchestrate a terrorist attack that kills someone in your family? Will you still be glad we shut down Guantanamo and freed this man to continue his work?

We haven't shut down GITMO, but I'd still be glad that we shut down GITMO if that happened and one of the released people just so happened to have committed a terrorist attack that harmed a family member of mine. It'd be extremely cowardly to force people to detained without due process in a super-max prison because I'm fearful of the tiniest of chances that someone I know might be harmed if people were given basic human rights. You favor refusing people basic human rights because you are bad at math and/or a giant coward? Do you apply this same logic to anyone accused of a violent crime? Because it would seem you should. After all, if the government gave people basic rights, then a bad person might get free and hurt someone you love! So much for land of the free and home of the brave.

[_Kittens_and_Jesus]

Soldiers fight for our freedom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, this idea needed to be abandoned after WW2.

The military has been solely used for monetary and political (still about money) gain since the end of that war.

Let's stop putting people in harm's way and asking them to kill 3rd world people for the financial and political gain of the elite.

They ought to be here to protect us.