And he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those crazy kids!
Actually, I was going to say that, but I didn’t think it would be wholly appropriate…heh…
The sad, sick thing is the actual mechanism behind this travesty may still “get away with it”, i.e. Rumsfield may go, though I doubt it, but the shallow, incompetent, arrogant jerks may stay in power anyway. It’ll be hard to spin this one but BushRove has a formidable grip on political cynicism. Hell, read the polls. A distressing number of people still believe the cant instead of hard reality. “We’re fighting terrorism because our towers fell!”“We’re freeing those poor Iraquis! The good ones, that is. Or something.”
Still, it’s nice to see the press finally waking from their timid daze. And lest the politically polarized go ape-shit, no, I wasn’t a big Clinton fan either. Though the brouhaha over blowjobs got to be expensively and embarrassingly ludicrous very quickly, particularly in retrospect. The deafening sound of zippers being hastily closed all over Captiol Hill was preferable to planes bringing home coffins and international hostility.
I want the press to be all over politicians–all of 'em, of any stripe–like flies on cow flop. (A rather apt analogy, that.) Keep 'em scared and keep 'em honest. Good on Hersh, and Andrew Sullivan, and let the late-night comics have at it.
Sorry, I forgot when about 6 of our guys sawed off the head of the Iraqi EPW - that was horriable, wait a sec, no that was them sawing off the head of a US civilian.
Look I’m not sying there were/are not abuses but they are really minor and were under investigation before these photo’s came out.
I wonder what it’s like to have the simple, naive, sad belief that people who drive SUV’s support terrorism. FWIM I don’t think every single Iraqi is a terrorist.
I have heard this line of ‘reasoning’, but can’t buy it, and their actions prove otherwise. If you look at the bombing in Madrid, it is clear that the terrorists would want nations to pull out, I must conclude, at least for now that the terrorists would vote for J.F. Kerry, which I hope we are getting more of the terrorist scumbags then are rushing to sign up.
If you truly knew anything about the law of armed conflict, why not mention that the release of photo’s themselves are a violation of the GC, regardless of the content!
I did learn a little about the treatment of EPW’s, and basically it was to treat them fairly and respectfully, the theory being that other enemy soldgers would be more willing to give up and not fight it out to the last man. My personal suggestion was to send EPW’s to a resort, this way the entire emeny army would give up for a free vacation. Anyway this only applies to enemy soldgers in uniform, if they were not they could be shot on sight as a spy.
Murdering prisoners and beating 12 year old girls is “really minor”? You’re kidding, right?
According to the people who did it, they are related to al Qaida which would mean that they are not Iraqis (since Hussein was keeping al Qaida out of his country before we knocked out his security forces and let them in). The U.S. military, itself, agrees that between 70% and 90% of those detained are innocents who have been picked up in sweeps–and held for months without any attempt to determine that they are guilty of anything and and without notifying their families of their whereabouts (much as Hussein’s forced used to do)–so the people who were being abused are not only not the guys who killed Mr Berg, they are, by and large, the people we were there to save from Hussein.
Your willingness to subject those innocents to abuse, rape, and murder (all documented charges against the U.S. MP and MI personnel) because some other guys killed a U.S. citizen after that abuse speaks volumes about your ability to “reason.”
Well, tomndebb has already said it, and if you don’t respect his words then the sweet lord only knows who you’d believe, but just in case you learn through repetition: “the terrorists” do NOT equal Iraqis. To use the language of a recent thread on the subject, the so-called abused prisoners =/= the beheaders.
If we were to kill every single Iraqi detainee in Abu Ghraib, then go out in the streets, round up a few more, and kill them, we would not be fighting terrorism. Not even a little bit. We would be (and have been) killing the very same Iraqis who* we spared from the rape rooms, the torture chambers, and the mass graves of Saddam. Iraq is not the final battle in the War on Terrorism. It’s not really even a battle in the War on Terrorism. If the entire nation of Iraq were to suddenly collapse into the Earth’s core, the American mainland would not suddenly be safe. If it was any safer at all, it would be only slightly so. This is because Iraqi does not equal terrorist, and terrorist does not equal Iraqi, no matter how much you will it to be so.
No matter how hard you kick your dog, the guy who cut you off in traffic this morning isn’t going to be sorry.
- that should be “whom,” shouldn’t it?
Add to this that the leader of the group and likely executioner wasn’t even Iraqi but Jordanian and you’ve got the full set 
A letter in my local paper said something like, “Maybe the video of Mr. Berg being murdered will wake up the liberals and make them understand that we were right to invade.” The sort of thing that makes me want to use a line from Monty Python: “Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.”
Where is your faith in the president’s dot connecting skills? President Bush already told us that Zarqawi’s murder of Berg is an example of the connections between Saddam and al Qaeda that forced a peace loving president to invade Iraq.
Bush Uses Berg Killing to Revive Saddam-Al Qaeda Link Claims
Finally, the cesspool of Iraq gas has delivered up its smoking gun, and we antiwar weenies can climb aboard the torture-train with certain proof that we are doing the right thing!
Before some idiot pounces on your choice of source, Squink, here’s the same thing from Reuters:
Complete and utter fucking idiot. Global laughing stock. Corrupt, venal asshole.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that I have seen multiple analyses pointing out that the U.S. claim that the knife-wielder was Zarqawi has to get over the little obstacle that the person on the video spoke with a regional accent different than the accent of the region from which Zarqawi hails (and that the knife-wielder hopped around pretty well for a guy with one leg), my faith in the President’s ability to tell the truth under any circumstances is stored right next to Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Find one, you’ll find the other.
Given that Colin Powell is now saying the evidence for WMD he presented last year to the UN was “inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading,” I guess your faith will have to be nonexistent.
Five years and almost 5,000 posts, and this worthless piece of shit kanicbird has never been pitted?? (At least s/he’s still covered under warranty. 
Sorry.) It’s OK to torture innocent Iraqis because some other Muslims attacked the WTC? I’m tempted to suggest that you be subjected to rape before being beaten to death so you can properly judge whether those are “minor abuses.”
By the way, anyone have any clue what this means?
This sounds very like NI Paramilitary “logic”. About 15 years ago we were bombed out of our house by the IRA because one of their guys got shot in our area and, we presented a convenient target, as our daughter was the only kid in the street who attended a state school. We had no paramilitary links, ever. It’s always easier to pick an “easy” target than to take the trouble to find the correct target - something that Bush is obviously aware of, or he’d still be chasing Bin Laden instead of being bogged down in Iraq.
Some of my friends in the USA, though, seem to be convinced that BL has already been captured and is being kept “on ice” somewhere - to be produced as a great victory for Bush just before the election.
One more for the road:
http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/9316830p-10241546c.html
Soldier complains about all the civilian killing he got to do, and the blase attitude about it from his superiors. Sounds a little cooked to me, too good to be true, but who am I to argue with the Sacremento Bee.
Dude, who said everybody who drives an SUV supports terrorism? Since you’re responding to me, I’m going to assume you’re implying I ever made such a statement, and I can assure you, I have not.
You don’t think ever single Iraqi is a terrorist? Then explain this quote
You’ve been told in this thread, but I’ll repeat it since you apparently have reading comprehension problems The prisoners at Abu Ghraib were not all terrorists. In fact, 70-90% of them had nothing to do with either terrorism or the insurgency or Hussein.
So either you
A) Do not read the news and educate your fool self before spouting off
B) You do read the news but you don’t understand it.
C) You read the news but you still believe they were all terrorists scum bags who got what they had coming to them.
I read this line 4 times. You can’t really be saying what I think you’re saying? If/When Kerry wins, are you going to burst in and shout OMG!!!111!! THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON!!!?
“WTC attacked. 3000 lives lost. American beheaded… compare that to frat-house hazing. No moral equivalence.”
How blind must one be to actually think like this? They are sanctioning torture against Iraqis who had nothing to do with the rest of the crimes. Even senators were making statements to this effect. (Joe Lieberman?). How morally depraved must Joe Lieberman be to use this for political self-aggrandizing?
And I am sure we will punish them just like we punished the killers of the four security contractors in Fallujah.
I want to add here, honsetly and truly, I do NOT understand the meaning of an illegal war, those who use these terms, to me have a fundenmental misunderstanding to what war really is. I state this to help you understand where I’m comming from.
As I stated we should not be murdering prisoners (We can ‘kill’ spies on the spot according to the GC, which terrorsits bascially fit the description of a spy). Those who do murder EPW’s should be handled by the millitary justice system, which I do believe is working (an investigation was underway). The wrongs are being corrected, no one is perfect and there are bad apples on both sides. I beleive the best way to handle the abuses are ways that don’t weaken our position in the war. I see the news harp on the EPW abuse, I truly feel they are hurting the war effort.
OK I was fumming reading this thread and this was just my anger comming out.
I wouldn’t say they have already won, but it would look like a victory for them. Who do you think the terrorists who are inside the US right now are planning to vote for? The terrorist attack on Madrid has shown that the terrorists would perfer a weaker-on-terrorism leader. I would assume, absent any other information, that they would want the same for the US Pres.
You are making some assumptions here, which is understandable from my rant that I corrected above. Basically I think most EWP’s are treated fairly, some have been humiliated, this was the 1st ‘breaking news about absue’ we heard of. It looked hyped up and unquestionably not abuse. Also I don’t think terrorists (yes just talking the terrorists EPW’s here, not the 12 yr olf girls) should be covered by the GC and should be treated like spies.
To rap up, war is hell, I think this is something we can all agree on. It makes it a bit nicer when rules of engagement are followed, but unfortunatly when one side doesn’t want to follow these rules, there is nothing you can do about it, no court you can appeal to, you can’t cry foul. You are at war in it’s most grusom and hellish form. War is just not men, bombs, guns and IED’s but it is phychological warfare too. We might have to ‘shock’ the enemy’s population to lessen their moral, and they will try to do the same to us. It really bothers me when we hurt our own moral with things like day after day of prisoner abuse stories, I have to wonder who’s side are these people reporting these things are, and why are they blowing it way out of proportion. The biggest enemy might be from our own country supporting the enemy in ways that will cost more lives on both sides.