From the New York Times:
There's more at the Washington Post:Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.
The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.
In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.Tell me, tell me, tell me true.
What's mean
For me and you?
From The Times:
Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”Torture is a war crime and they allowed torture to be committed.
11 comments:
John K: (Yawn) This again? The real question is this. If Obama is elected is he going to close Gitmo? I think not. After all, the Democrats may talk liberal when it comes to this war, but they act conservative. Do I need to remind anyone of recent votes?
So the next President will be faced with a hard reality. Do I stop programs that are successful in keeping America intact to pacify some lefty loons who feel guilt over every little thing or do I keep America safe. Bush has kept the country safe and won. The next President will do the same. After all reality is tough to deal with. The lefties in here live in some sort of fantasy world. They never have to live with their choices. They just criticize and then feel superior.
What part of "illegal" don't you understand, John K?
Oh that's right, you're a conservative - you don't understand the term at all!
Bush won?
I knew the Steelers story was big, but I never expected it to crowd out the recent news that Afghanistan has been pacified, Iran successfully occupied (after being identified as the right country, rather than the wrong country, after all), bin Laden captured and all of those dead and brain-damaged American soldiers and Iraqi civilians just unsubstantiated rumors.
Or is "Bush won" just another shorthand in the list with "Mission Accomplished," "Dead or Alive" and "Bring 'em On"?
Bin Laden finally captured? After seven years of haplessness we finally brought the September 11 mastermind to justice? I can't wait for the Colbert Report tonight.
John K: I fully understand illegal. I also understand the left thinks anyone who disagrees with them is illegal. Next question.
Heck, put Kucinich into the White House and see how long he lasts as a liberal. Once he starts to sell Americans out to foreign govts for his own personal feelings he will change. Bill Clinton did as well as all the other liberals.
It is so easy to stand outside the line of decision and responsibility and throw stones and yell illegal.
Lefties never take responsibility for anything.
Remember left wing kooks, Abe Lincoln started out in 1861 as a liberal. He changed his mind real quick after the first battle of Bull Run.
John K : Part Two--Woodrow Wilson was a huge liberal. Huge! Then the German got serious and sank a few of our ships and Wilson looked at a map of Europe dominated by the Kaiser and did not like what he saw. Wilson also campaigned on the slogan of keep us out of the war. How did that play, Wilson lied and soldiers died.
By the way, did Pershing or Wilson ever catch that bandit (terrorist) Pancho Villa? Did we get congressional approval to invade Mexico to look for him?
Only an idiot would compare a "liberal" like Woodrow Wilson to modern day liberalism.
It is my understanding that the right's response to anyone who disagrees with is to label them as "un-American."
Now, if John K. knew much about the current debate over torture, which it most assuredly is, he would know that many of those techniques were used by the Communist Chinese to ellicit false confessions.
Now, by his standard of success, we must accept that Bill Clinton was extremely successful at preventing terrorists attacks against the country - and he did it without attacking the civil liberties of Americans.
Of course, these programs have nothing to do with keeping the country "intact." It is sad and pathetic that anyone believes that a terrorist attack could destroy or bring this country to its knees; I have far more faith in our people and our country than that. But of course that has been the M.O. of conservative gas-bags, that the country is so fragile, so on-the-brink, that terrorists could destroy us.
I'm not sure why he mentions Pancho Villa as he was certainly no threat to the United States.
Per his diminished wit, John K. would no doubt consider our first three Presidents cowards of the highest order, each one taking great lengths to avoid war, Adams and Jefferson especially, and at a time when merchant vessels were openly attacked by the French and British, when American citizens were captured and forced into service.
Torture, my friend, is no small thing and for myself it is far beneath the dignity of a nation that considers itself a beacon of liberty to the world. It is the province of small minds and an un-Christian conscience, those too stupid but to resort to the most base and vile forms of violence and inhumanity. When we behave like animals, what have we become?
Obviously, discussion and discourse is not possible with such a piddling mentality as evinced by a "tried and true" keyboard patriots like John K., who blusters away with all his limited wit and wisdom, miscontrued historical references and logical fallacies behind the safety of his computer screen.
A Europe dominated by the Kaiser? Does the fool even have a basic understand of WWI? Has he somehow not passed a basic highschool history course?
He throws Wilson in our face as if it is to prove his point. But is it not proof that liberals do defend the country? FDR was certainly no conservative; was he another liberal who suddenly stopped being a liberal?
I'd also like to point out that since John K., having chosen to mindlessly apply the word "terrorist" as a blanket term for whatever suits him, that he must acknowledge that Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty were also terrorists.
Now, to be fair to John K.'s stupidity, he will no doubt regard this as my equating the Sons of Liberty to contemporary terrorists. It is to be expected from a person who believes in a war against a noun, that it is possible to win such a war and has deluded himself into believing that it has, in fact, already been won.
It must be easy being a conservative...you don't actually have to accomplish anything, you just have to say you have and, poof, it happens as if by magic. It must be terribly easy to go through life as a selfish blockhead dispossessed of all rational or intellectual faculties. Heaven forbid any cogent thought depress itself upon the conservative mind and displace the base impulses for violence and greed.
If it can't be blown up, killed, tortured, bought off, sold-out, exploited, manipulated, deceived, lied to, bombed to oblivion, wiped off the face of the earth, condemned, villified, nuked, profited from - all for self-aggrandizement - it's just not worth their time.
Heaven help them if they ever meet the god they are so fond of exploiting for political gain.
John K: 17 Peacekeepers were killed in Darfur this week. The liberals have been talking about this issue for years. What did any liberal in here do this week to solve the Darfur problem? Hmmm? Are they torturing the people of Darfur? What has the left done to solve the problem? Well they called it illegal. Which makes the dead peacekeepers feel so much better. And of course the well fed liberals here in the US can rest easy in their whining.
To John K:
You have to ask yourself whether any of your ranting about liberals and terrorists has produced one more barrel of oil or brought down the price one cent.
It hasn't.
You lose.
I win!
LMAO
I own this blog!
John K: Uh yah, hello lefties, they are torturing people in Darfur. And not one lefty, with all their concern has stopped it.
The left is so consumed by their hatred of Bush that they think all wars and all torture started in March 2003. They fail to look back ten years into history let alone 100 years. Wilson had no problem chasing bandits (terrorists) under Pancho Villa into a sovereign country without the approval of congress. They just think Bush does all this. And that is why no one takes the left seriously. Not even Obama. You watch what he says when he gets back from Iraq.
Lincoln and Wilson were both warmongering assholes. What's your point, John K?
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