And yet, we’re in Iraq, and not in Korea, which is arguably the more dangerous and inhuman regime. Funny, that.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with the US being held to a higher standard than North Korea. Maybe I’ve just got more faith in our ability to meet it than you do.
On the other hand, xtisme, as I read somewhere else on the net, debating about differences in degrees of torture is like debating about differences in degrees of incest.
Well, if you only got head from your sister, but didn’t nail her in the ass, I think you’re in the clear.
Quite true…if we were talking about differences in degree. But we aren’t really, as you should know. Thats why I used the Lubyanka prison analogy…THERE you have a difference in degree between it and Gitmo. Nazi death camps and Gulags are set up for a completely different purpose. The torture there is almost incidental…its really not the purpose of the camp, which was to extract labor (in the gulag example) or to extract labor as a secondary purpose to causing the inhabitants to die as efficiently as possible. Thats not a difference of degree…its a fundamental difference of type. Gitmo isn’t a camp thats set up with the purpose of extracting labor…or the purpose of systematically killing its inhabitants in an as efficient manner as possible. Its set up to extract information and to keep potential terrorists imprisoned for as long as possible, thus keeping them out of circulation.
But I did enjoy your sister analogy. Very droll.
-XT
True, we are. On the other hand, do you think the attitudes of North Korea might be affected by seeing what became of Saddam Hussein, as (for instance) Libya seem to have been?
Not exactly a higher standard - ISTM you were suggesting that NK should be held to no standard at all. Part of my point was that it is not true that we can do nothing about the abuses of terrorist regimes. We can, and (in some instances) we should.
But if we adopt the attitude that “nothing can be done about Kim Jong-Il, so let’s reserve all our moral outrage only for comparatively lesser and unsystematic abuses closer to home and give the real monsters a pass”, then it will be true that terrorist leaders will care nothing for us.
It seems many of the serious assaults on the peace of the world come from those who believe that the rest of the world will do nothing - the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Kuwait, and South Korea, for instance.
Regards,
Shodan
I think I said something about ‘orders of magnitude’ in my quote. Still, if I were asked the question Dick Durbin asked, I would say, “Germany or Russia” rather than the U.S. because what’s been going down in Gitmo is a lot closer in my mind to those places, than to the U.S. I know that people have been tortured in US prisons on occasions, but I never heard of that happening with official sanction all the way from the top. Whole different animal … one I do not wish to be a part of.
And who has lost site of other atrocities? People generally start Pit threads on new revelations - such as when new allegations and new twists on the Gitmo and Abu Ghraib stories come to light. Have there been any new twists on torture in North Korea? Any new stories? No?
I saw your point. Your point was mindless lefty bashing, couched in some attempt at nuance.
I’m sure you don’t. But you also appear to me more than willing to shrug your shoulders at it and say, “You lefties are paying too much attention to this. You should stop being America haters who only complain about American atrocities and focus on others for a while.”
Where do you think I picked up the turn of phrase? Lefties need to start turning conservative rhetorical devices back on their opponents. It’s the only way they’ll ever start moving back into office.
Whoop-de-do.
Sure you are. You’re giving passive excuse to it. “Sure, they tortured, and, sure, it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as other people, so try not to mention it so much.”
By the way, props on the whole “insults in the quote box” thing. Very original.
Durbin giving in makes me crazy.
He was right. Getting hysterical about it is bullshit.
The Democrats in Congress have GOT to grow and KEEP some fucking balls.
And so I drop by to do my semi-annual “Spavined, you are brilliant and I adore you, thank you for being here.” post.
What makes you think all Americans support the government’s treatment of Jose Padilla? In other words, yeah, I’ve heard of Jose Padilla. Thanks for giving us another example of tactics recently used by our governement which appear much like those utilized by the Nazi party!
What makes anyone think that criticising the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo means we’re not against the government of North Korea? We’re allowed to have multiple opinions about multiple topics, last I checked. Just because we’re seeing frightening similarities between our government’s actions and those of the Nazi party doesn’t mean we support the psychopath in North Korea.
What the fuck do Jose Padilla or North Korea have to do with Gitmo?
The strawmen in this thread are forming ranks and threatening to take over.
Let’s put on our realpolitik cynical glasses for a minute. Don’t much like them, but they can sometimes lend perspective.
We had to know this shit was likely. Only a moron would not have realized that this is a situation wherein “Caesars wife must be above suspicion” because any opening, however slight, offers aid and comfort to our enemies.
If we had to “Gitmo”, we should have bent over backwards, double, if needed. We should have invited international scrutiny, Red Cross, Red Crescent, and yes, Amnesty Int. Videotaped every interrogation and made the tapes openly available. That fellow who started losing his marbles and tearing his air? Whisked immediately to a mental ward or hospital, to be treated by Muslim therapists. Don’t allow the smallest chance for disinformation!
Needless to say (I hope), even the slightest disrespect for religious symbols is right out!
We should have set brutally high standards for ourselves, and rigorosly enforced those standards, openly, publicly, and without so much as a hint of reluctance. It was shatteringly obvious that any covering up would be instantly of service to our enemies. We don’t have to worry about what our enemies think, we have to worry about what people think who are not yet our enemies!
The same rigorous standards that would have protected us against lies would equally protect us from failing to meet our own standards.
After all, if we aren’t willing to be the Americans, who will? If not us, who? If not now, when?
I’ve not seen any evidence that this is the case.
Short of military intervention, no, we can’t do anything about the abuses of terrorist regimes. Do you think we should invade North Korea? No? Then what’s the point in talking about how awful North Korea is?
Do you think that Hitler would have stayed out of Poland if there had been more anti-Nazi rallies in London? Seems pretty unlikely, to me.
Harumph. Intelligent, incisive, closely reasoned. Pretty much ok, paragon-wise. Got that whole Orville Redenbacher thing going on.
Probably wears a bow tie.
The point was to DirkGntly that American Citizens are being denied rights of due process; it’s not just them foreigners at Gitmo. And I don’t see the American public making a big deal about Padilla, so I assume they are supporting the government’s actions. Please quote me where I mentioned Nazis (or North Korea, or …)
My response from the “How is Gitmo a gulag” thread:
My bolding.
I guess I need to a little further on why I feel this way.
I actually took the time a few years ago to talk to a friend’s mother who is a holocaust survivor (who lost 10 of her relatives from the Aushwitz concentration camp), and her story on what she endured would not match ANY story from a current survivor of Gitmo, should I be ever get a chance to talk or hear from one. Rather than surround myself with the bullshit from both sides of the aisle, here on the SD and from our country’s representatives, I actually took the time to know what an actual death camp is through the first hand account of a person who lived through it when other members of her family didn’t. So, when I hear some of you mock each other about whether Gitmo is like a Nazi Death camp or not, I just see some posters here who have no qualms about being deceitful to match their party’s lines. I have lost respect for you.
Comparing a Gitmo to a Nazi death camp is total exercise in dishonesty…sure, torture happened at both sites, but while that’s the main divisive point at Gitmo, it was just one of many atrocities at a Nazi death camp. Take the time to seek a holocaust survivor and talk to them to give yourself a better perspective.
Really, it would help you make better comparisons in the future…honest comparisons that is.
Finally, for the last two years, I feel I have been an abandoned citizen by the dishonesty of both parties…they are far from worthy of my vote in the forseeable future, and virtually none of you are helping the matter at all.
I agree. It simply seemed as if your subtext was “And so therefore we can see that Americans believe in torture or abandoning due process for American citizens and that this means that outrage abandoning due process for foreigners is not important or unAmerican.” This is not true. If this was not the underlying sentiment, then I apologize.
Yes, well, our news outlets do get clogged up with stories of runaways brides, don’t they? Nevertheless, a quick Google of Jose Padilla reveals multiple sources of websites, editorials and straight journalistic sources decrying the treatment Padilla has received, and calling for the government to either charge him or release him. Not the least of these is when the “U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the Bush Administration lacked the authority to designate a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil an “illegal enemy combatant” without clear congressional authorization (per 18 U.S.C. § 4001(a)); it consequently ordered the government to release him from military custody within thirty days[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos�_Padilla#endnote_reuters1). However, the court has stayed the order pending appeal.” ((from Wikipedia)
Ah. You didn’t, and I apologize that the formating in my post made it appear as if my entire post was a reply to yours. In the second paragraph of my post, I was replying to the general North Korea hijack of the thread, since I wasn’t able to pin down exactly where it started. In the third and final paragraphs, I was addressing both the Padilla issue and the North Korea issue with one blanket “so what?” because I think that both are irrelevant to the discussion of the government’s treatment of prisoners at Gitmo, and most especially irrelevant to Dick Durban’s statements and the recants regarding that treatment.
Nope. His words were misinterpreted but not inaccurate. I’m not a politician who has to keep millions of people happy so I’ll repeat that the reports out of Gitmo and the other prison camps are FAR more reminiscent of the treatment of political prisoners in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia than they are of the America I want to be proud of.
And I am not referring to the death camps, whose sole purpose was genocide. He should have made that clearer AND the morons who misunderstood should have figured it out on their own before jumping to conclusions or listening to those evil people who chose to misinterpret for their own political gain.
I mentioned Libya, which we have not invaded, nor threatened to do so. Yet Ghaddafi has agreed to divest himself of WMDs. IIRC, he did so a few days after the invasion of Iraq. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Ghaddafi took a good long look at what happened to Saddam, and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. In the same way his sponsorship of terrorism trended sharply downward after Reagan bombed the crap out of him after the terrorist bombing in Rome.
But why should we talk about terrorist abuses abroad? For this reason -
Ghaddafi’s infant daughter was killed in the bombing raid Reagan ordered.
Isn’t that a dreadful thing? Yes, of course it is. But if we shrug our shoulders and say, “there is nothing we can do about foreign human rights abuses, and let’s not talk about it or worry about it”, we are then pushed to condemn, not Libya in the 80s for sponsoring terrorism, but the US for responding to it and killing a little girl.
Same thing in Iraq. Were the incidents at abu Gharib dreadful things? Sure they were. Were they at all comparable to what Saddam did in the same prison for decades previously? No, of course not, and willful blindness to one side of the moral equation does nothing to balance it.
And that’s what comparisons to the Nazis or the gulags do - they show a kind of willful blindness that distorts the thinking.
It’s sort of like Mel Brooks’ description of the difference between tragedy and comedy.
Same thing here. Gulags and torture are where some assholes at one prison in Iraq play what amounts to nasty pranks on Iraqi prisoners. But Saddam’s security forces breaking people’s arms with clubs and cutting out their tongues and rape -
That’s nothing. Let’s not talk about it.
Regards,
Shodan
Horseshit. Whatever happened to…“Say what you mean, and mean what you say. Otherwise, don’t say it.” That should apply to any public representative, of any political background. You owe it to your constituents/citizens at least that basic level of respect. Otherwise, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
How’s this example for being misinterpreted: Any home in America that serves food is like Gitmo since they serve food there, so it can’t be that bad. Am I being inaccurate or misleading? Uh, yeah. Another horrible comparison and quite dishonest, just like other idiots who use the Nazi and gulag references. Durbin is no better than Bush in that regard.
Actually, its quite easy to avoid such an infection of disinformation with the vaccine of fact. Ghaddaffy Duck had been in negotiation over his possible return to good graces for quite some time before the invasion. A factoid which has been pointed out in these boards on any number of occassions, yet somehow seems to have eluded you.
Considerable question about that, as well.
There is no “moral equation”. Wrong is wrong, it doesn’t get less wrong by any process of comparison. Only if you are suggesting that our commission of crimes somehow is to be taken as retribution and correction of Saddam’s crimes. But I doubt even you would try to float such a lead balloon.
There was no such comparison. Period. Full stop. Durbin’s words were twisted into that shape for partisan purposes.
You’re absolutely disgusting. Completely. If I met you in person after this I would be hard-put not to spit in your face for continually and disingenuously ignoring the difference here, that difference being that this absolute SHIT is being done IN OUR NAME!
NOTHING Saddam did excuses what members of the US military are doing IN OUR NAME at Gitmo, what they did at Abu Ghraib, what they’re doing at other military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, whatever the HELL is happening to prisoners being held by their home countries at the request of the Administration. The tu quoque fallacy doesn’t work, anywhere, but especially not here.