He was guilty of nothing, as the U.S. itself has apparently admitted given that they just up and released him, no more questions asked. He was a Swedish citizen in Pakistan. And yet, because he was denied, by Bush’s own long-defended policies, any legal appeal to challenge his status, he was in jail for 2 and 1/2 years where he claims he was tortured in a way consistent with what the U.S. has already admitted to as its policy (stress tortures, which as I’ve previously noted, are particularly disturbing given that they are exactly what you’d use if you wanted to leave no marks and make it sound “not so bad” to an American public that would otherwise be horrified by the deliberate and constant infliction of pain, even on criminals). According to him, the only reason he was even in Gitmo was because some villagers decided they could make some money by selling him to the police. Litterally he was a foriegn citizen whom the U.S. simply swept up into jail with no due process whatsoever and a definition of “on the battlefield” that is so loose that it would allow them to sweep up virtually any civilian who happens to be in the Middle East.
It’s hard to understand why something this horrifying, done in the name of America, done both according to a deliberate and President-approved policy of of our government, done against all the sensible rules and moral standards we are supposed to believe in and advocate to the rest of the world, isn’t more of an outrage. The SC struck the core of them down with only minor hubbub. America seems largely not to care.
Unlike Abu “Garreff” (a place that Bush didn’t bother to learn how to pronounce correctly), abuses like this are a direct result of explicit policies chosen by the Bush administration. Is he going to take responsibility for the treatment of people like this Swedish kid? Can they really just quietly release these people, who they apparently held pointlessly for more than 2 years, without any sort of apology or admission of having done wrong? Our legal protections, already meager in the face of expanded Presidential powers, exist to force the government to actually at least ATTEMPT to make a case that what it is doing serves some legitimate purpose. Without such pressures, why NOT simply incarcerate someone indefinately, do whatever you please to them, and so on? The President was the leader who led us into this territory. The SC has repudiated it. But the President has not even acknowledged that what he did has any consequences whatsoever.
I don’t think he should get away with it without saying SOMETHING. America’s memory hole is becoming disturbingly large.
I’m disturbed by this, but hardly surprised. When the Abu “Garreff” abuses came out, a lot of people tried to pass it off as an isolated incident. Certainly such abuses weren’t happening in Gitmo, where the annoying prying eyes of the press were nowhere to be found, right? Wrong. Many predicted that such abuses would turn out to be widespread and systematic.
He won’t apologize because he doesn’t have to politically. His defenders don’t care. God only knows how many more innocent people have been rotting Gitmo for the last two years, being subjected to daily torture and pointless interrorgations. The US has absolutely lost any pretense of moral authority it ever had before all this. The man in the OP was fortunate enough to be a citizen of a country that had the ability to lobby for release, but most of the Gitmo detainees are just dirty Arabs as far as Bush and the public is concerned. The Bushies felt the need to fill up cages for the placation and amusement of a bloodthirsty public. Never mind that there seems to have been no threshhold whatsoever for probably cause. All the White House has to do is call them “terrorists,” (an utterly meaningless word) and the public claps it’s flippers and barks like an obedient seal.
How many otherinnocent bystanders have been ripped away from their families, from their children, from their lives to be sold as political zoo exhibits for this corrupt and utterly sociopathic administration? Are any of them guilty of anything?
What’s going on at Gitmo is pure evil, IMO, as evil as the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, maybe more so. At least those detainees were not separated from their families and tortured.
Oh, far worse. At least with the Japanese-Americans (and some German-Americans and Italian-Americans, I understand), there was at least some promise that once the war was over, they would be released. But in the case of Gitmo, when is the War on Terror ever going to end? Also, Japanese-Americans were never simply “disappeared.”
The term “disappeared” has the very strong connotation of government sponsored assassination of political dissidents (especially under Central and South American dictatorships in the past thirty or so years.) I’m assuming you’re simply using the term to describe the black-hole legal status of the Gitmo detainees, and not implying that Bush is systematically killing dissidents.
Yep, we’re sure winnin’ hearts and minds, folks. When in any doubt at all, just assume somebody’s a terrorist, or at least a sympathizer. After all, they’re the lowest of the low, morally speaking, so they don’t really deserve rights anyway. And we have the superior morality thing all sewn up, so we know, brutha.
God, I hate the blatant, myopic hypocrisy of this administration.
You’ll probably disagree with me on this, but I think it is, at least in part, on account of the sheer number of threads that have been nothing more than wasted time and space discussing the opinions of disgruntled filmmakers, sites that are disguised message boards with second by second commentary on Bush’s visit to the elementary school, and even one thread whose OP has zero content, but was opened for the sole purpose of documenting bloopers and foibles. This is the kind of stuff that should be the focus. And even with content like Apos gave us, the point is being trivialized by remarks like the one you made. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I mean you’re telling conservatives that not only does Bush talk funny and have memory lapses, but that they as people don’t care about torture. They do care about torture, but now it’s no longer about torture; it’s about how they allegedly don’t care. It is just… bizarre how threads like this descend into jokes and giggles while the other crap goes on and on for ten pages.
I’m sure they do. It seems to me, however, that there is a strong area of contention over what constitutes torture. And that is the nub of the “not caring” argument.
This poster, for one, never lost sight of the content of the OP, sedcutive as the siren song of Bush jeering generally is. If that’s what you’re implying.
But I’ve also seen not Indication One that anyone in this administration “cares” about torture in the sense you mean. Unless you include Rumsfield’s oily semantic dance arguing that the abuses at Abu Ghraib don’t fall under the legal definition of the word.
Lib, it would have been the folks I predicted making the “Another Bush thread” comment that would have trivialized the torture issue, not I by predicting the comment.
I find this situation to be the vilest I have every heard of, of any the US gov’t and/or armed forces have been responsible for, since I have been aware politically.
Worry ye not for this guy. He’s a Swedish citizen, and he can sue in Swedish courts and will probably get a pot of money. Hell, he can sue in a US court and get a pot of money.
WORRY for the ones who are still there who are citizens of governments too weak to secure their releases or too indifferent to care.
Apologies here and there, not even making headline news, not even on the BBC, these don’t mean much at all.
If Bush is sincere about being horrified, and is truly apologetic, then maybe he should simply allow access by detainees to international agnecies such as Amnesty, and above all, scrutiny and access to legal counsel for all those detained under US wishes.
I don’t yet see any mention of a shipment of lawyers going to Gitmo, I don’t see any mention of how the US will transfer the imprisoned to the US judicial system in any way.
US prisons are capable of holding the most violent and extreme forms of inhumanity within their establishments, if Bush wants to regain any credibility he would make arrangements to remove so-called terrorists to recognised prison systems rather than the military institutions that have absolutely no independant scrutiny whatsoever.
Forget taxes, forget about any other government policy, if the US cannot do the right thing in a way that is seen to be right then it is already on the way to a very unpleasnt extremist future.
That would seem to be overreaching. However, we already know that not everyone who has been brought into Abu Ghraib will be walking out. I’m also sure I’m not the only one here curious to know what Bush meant by “Let’s just say they’re no longer a problem”.
Hmm… he says he was tortured. Right. I neither believe nor disbelieve him. Yes, I remember the stories of torture from Iraq; I also remember the faked stories in the British press. I also think of my friend who was interned at Changhi by the Japanese and he had it infinitely harder than even the true torture stories.