While I despise the Bush adminstration with every fiber of my being, this is perhaps the most overhyped story on this planet, well Europe anyway. I read a lot of news from there and all I keep hearing is this story. What exactly do they want, the U.S. is scum, overbearing, polluters of the world. Many in Europe now views us as the enemy moreso than even the terrorists any longer. Odds are these events did happen, is the U.S. going to be referred to the ICC or something, what exactly is the purpose of this on Europe's part.

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Trance = Heart, Mind, Body and Soul all in 1

Current fav. Global Experience = Madras

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Originally posted by NYCTrancefan What exactly do they want

Undeniable accountability that would require serious changes to Bush administration policy & methods. Its difficult because the administration is very good at spinning things. Rice has admitted, yes we do fly prisoners abroad but no they're not torched...

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what exactly is the purpose of this on Europe's part.

Punishment for those that aided the US. If you're going to be in the Europe club you can't help the US carry out policies the club disagrees with.

We also want:

Human Rights.

Right to a fair trial.

Right to Justice / Defence.

US has abused physically and mentally prisoners in Iraq in past.

And it does the same in these secret prisons.

Otherwise their was no need for 'secret prisons'.

'Secret Prisons' are torture labs, they are concentration camps of modern era.

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Fair enough then, I feel bad for those countries that harbor any support for the U.S. in Europe then. Odds are it is the Poland's, Romania's of Europe that will be singled out especially by Western Europe for sanctions or entry into E.U. in Romania's case.

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Trance = Heart, Mind, Body and Soul all in 1

Current fav. Global Experience = Madras

LOL@people who think wars are EVER fought fairly or "nicely".

The Terrorists are in it to win...and in case you haven't noticed, they'll do ANYTHING to get there.

I don't think a little simple questioning would or will EVER get a Terrorist to talk.........but I'll bet some good old fashioned torturing would do the trick...it's worked throughout history.

I wonder would you be as open minded about torture if there were any us troops held captive and tortured on the daily basis by the other side, or would you be screaming blood murder then and try to unite the world agains those inhumane barbarians who dont give a fuck about the Geneva conventions.

Also note, if torture does help a little to open their mouths, then the 25.000 to 30.000 civilian casualties helps alot in cemmenting their mouth shut.

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Americans have been tortured in every war I can think of since WW2 at least. Like I said, it happens in every war. It's not going to stop. There will never be one side that won't employ it. Human beings won't change. You have to fight back with the same visciounsness, or you won't win. I could care less about Al Quida being tortured...

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Originally posted by donnybrasco Americans have been tortured in every war I can think of since WW2 at least. Like I said, it happens in every war. It's not going to stop. There will never be one side that won't employ it. Human beings won't change. You have to fight back with the same visciounsness, or you won't win. I could care less about Al Quida being tortured...

Taken aside of the fact that it breaks just about every international treaty written on torture, from a "moral" standpoint, what is the sense of justice as we know it if we employ the same tactics as the very same shitheads that we are attempting to eliminate? By employing the very same evil tactics as our enemy, please tell me how we can be morally superior than the enemy itself.

Wait, I know, we don't torture the innocent, right? So all those individuals whom we've released from Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the other detention centers whom we have willfully tortured in efforts to obtain intelligence are not innocent, even though we let them go free, right? They deserved the torture given to them, despite the fact that they were innocent and had no intelligence to give whatsoever, right?

But wait, I know, we are fighting a war on terrorism, and we must, MUSt tell others to do as we say, not as we do, right? Because God forbid, if someone else were to employ the same tactics as us to prisoners, well gee, what the fuck then?:

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An Iraqi government search of a detention center in Baghdad operated by Interior Ministry special commandos found 13 prisoners who had suffered abuse serious enough to require medical treatment, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday night. An Iraqi official with firsthand knowledge of the search said that at least 12 of the 13 prisoners had been subjected to "severe torture," including sessions of electric shock and episodes that left them with broken bones. "Two of them showed me their nails, and they were gone," the official said on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. . . . U.S. troops found the first site last month when they entered an Interior Ministry building in central Baghdad to look for a Sunni Arab teenager they believed had been detained, officers said at the time. Several prisoners at that site appeared to have suffered beatings, and many were emaciated, U.S. and Iraqi officials and witnesses said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...1101002_pf.html

Ahh, we teachers have certainly taught the students well, haven't we?

But intelligence given through torture is always reliable, ain't it? It's always "worked throughout history", right?:

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[Bush Administration] officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition. The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/p...artner=homepage

This isn't surprising at all:

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Remarkably, of the nation's major newspapers, only the Wall Street Journal has editorialized in support of torture as a useful tool of American intelligence policy. Regrettably, that position does a huge disservice to the nation and its soldiers. There are really only three issues in this debate, and the Journal carefully turned a blind eye to all three: (1) is torture reliable, (2) is it consistent with America's values and Constitution, and (3) does it best serve our national interests? No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture produces reliable intelligence. While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated al Qaeda captives. Exhibit A is the torture-extracted confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda captive who told the CIA in 2001, having been "rendered" to the tender mercies of Egypt, that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda to use WMD. It appears that this confession was the only information upon which, in late 2002, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state repeatedly claimed that "credible evidence" supported that claim, even though a now-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 questioned the reliability of the confession because it was likely obtained under torture. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his "confession," and a month later, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements. Exhibit B is the case of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi deemed a "high-value" target by the CIA. After being beaten to an extent that he had several broken ribs, he was subjected to a form of crucifixion known as "Palestinian hanging." Forty-five minutes later, he was dead, never having revealed whatever vital, ticking-bomb information his American interrogator was seeking. If there is reliable evidence that torture has, in fact, interrupted ticking time bombs and saved lives, the gravity of the crisis created by the administration's free-wheeling torture policy demands straight answers which can be weighed and evaluated by a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission whose membership might include interrogators, jurists, theologians, national security specialists, military leaders, and political leaders. The damage to our national interests and the dismal record of war candor by this administration has made "trust us" an insufficient justification for such a profound change in American law and moral values....... http://www.alternet.org/rights/28585/

There's more to this article from the website. Now granted, that's a libral website, but get a load of the guy's credentials who wrote it:

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Brigadier General David R. Irvine is a retired Army Reserve strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner interrogation and military law for 18 years with the Sixth Army Intelligence School. He currently practices law in Salt Lake City, Utah.

So he kinda seems to know what the fuck he's talking about. There are other means of interrogation that are more effective and reliable which are at our military's disposal.

Our actions to torture are not justified, not legally, morally, nor strategically. And your plea for its continuance is quite uncompelling.

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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

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Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Taken aside of the fact that it breaks just about every international treaty written on torture, from a "moral" standpoint, what is the sense of justice as we know it if we employ the same tactics as the very same shitheads that we are attempting to eliminate? By employing the very same evil tactics as our enemy, please tell me how we can be morally superior than the enemy itself.

I don't see any religious extremists from this country flying planes in to buildings full of innocent people in Baghdad...but I'm sure some clever poster in here will say that by defination, the whole U.S. military machine has a conflicting religion to the muslim one at it's core, and by default, when that machine kills Iraqi civilians, then it is a form of state sponsored Terrorism.

Are we morally superior to our enemies? I think we are not perfect, but I think that we are superior in our beliefs and our sense of inherent rights to religious and social freedoms. So from that stand-point, I think that when it comes to employing torture tactics, we're still on the moral high-ground when all is said and done. I don't know about you, but I want to win this war on Terror, as bad as the Terrorists want to wipe us off the face of the earth. It's a war of anihilation, this one...the Terrorsist are not willing to comprimise.

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Originally posted by donnybrasco I don't see any religious extremists from this country flying planes in to buildings full of innocent people in Baghdad...but I'm sure some clever poster in here will say that by defination, the whole U.S. military machine has a conflicting religion to the muslim one at it's core, and by default, when that machine kills Iraqi civilians, then it is a form of state sponsored Terrorism.

That's a bit of a stretch, but extremism by any measure must be carefully avoided. Of course no religious extremist in this country dare goes to such a measure, but some extremists have been known to murder doctors that perform abortions, which last I checked, is still legal. Some have also blown themselves up along with innocent (albeit brainwashed) children (Waco). Some have also called upon the assassination of another sovereign countries' leader (Roberts), as well as blame the entire 9/11 fiasco on homosexuals. Some religious extremists in my own backyard go out and protest at funerals of soldiers laid to rest, stomping on the American flag in the process.

Are these as severe as flying in a building full of innocent people? No, but it's hard to argue just how much further they have to go to the extremist corner.

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Are we morally superior to our enemies? I think we are not perfect, but I think that we are superior in our beliefs and our sense of inherent rights to religious and social freedoms.

Agreed.

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So from that stand-point, I think that when it comes to employing torture tactics, we're still on the moral high-ground when all is said and done.

No.

Holding those moral and ethical values so dear does not make exceptions, otherwise you are compromising those very same morals we hold so tightly.

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I don't know about you, but I want to win this war on Terror, as bad as the Terrorists want to wipe us off the face of the earth. It's a war of anihilation, this one...the Terrorsist are not willing to comprimise.

Compromising does not = stop torture

Where did you come up with that equation? We can obtain reliable intelligence by other means that does not include torture (which I have yet to see anything that indicates intelligence gained from torture is reliable - perhaps you have some?). We can still obtain the moral highground, but not through these current means.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

quote:

Originally posted by donnybrasco I don't see any religious extremists from this country flying planes in to buildings full of innocent people in Baghdad...but I'm sure some clever poster in here will say that by defination, the whole U.S. military machine has a conflicting religion to the muslim one at it's core, and by default, when that machine kills Iraqi civilians, then it is a form of state sponsored Terrorism.

No I haven't seen religious extremists from this country flying planes into buildings. What I have seen are US sponsored and trained para-military groups conducting terrorism operations against innocent civilians and legitimately, democratically elected governments, under the full discretion and understanding of the President of the United States of America. Sure it's not religion but it's geopolitical beliefs. Be careful how you characterize state sponsored terrorism.

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Are we morally superior to our enemies? I think we are not perfect, but I think that we are superior in our beliefs and our sense of inherent rights to religious and social freedoms. So from that stand-point, I think that when it comes to employing torture tactics, we're still on the moral high-ground when all is said and done. I don't know about you, but I want to win this war on Terror, as bad as the Terrorists want to wipe us off the face of the earth. It's a war of anihilation, this one...the Terrorsist are not willing to comprimise.

Oh ok ... so fuck the whole concept of principles ... we're a little bit better than our enemies so we occupy the moral high ground and therefore we are moral??? Furthermore, if we're so respectful of social freedoms, and the principles of democracy and the majority in Iraq want us to leave ... WHY ARE WE STILL THERE??? Oh, you mean we know what's best for them?? We're the intellectual elite that can speak for the masses??? Jesus fucking christ you're a goddamned democrat! The older conservatives know exactly what I'm talking about. Are you really a conservative??? Do you know what a conservative is, or would you care to accurately recharacterize yourself as a republican? (Hint: A conservative != a republican and has NEVER been a Republican circa 1999)

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Retro ...

Last edited by occrider on Dec-14-2005 at 04:35