I gave my reasons for not trusting that specific link. FindLaw I do trust, agonist.org is a very suspect entity as it is a blog-site. If you don’t know how to search out unbiased information, that is my fault not yours.
Anyways, there’s no point in talking about that part of this debate anymore.
I’m again going to restate that we haven’t seen any PROOF that the guardsmen in question were engaged in active intelligence gathering. We don’t know WHY they were doing what they were doing.
You can’t see pics of Iraqis being mistreated, then pull up a paper talking about intelligence procedures in Iraq and instantly say THEY WERE BEING TORTURED FOR INFORMATION.
Can’t do it, sorry. When I see a clear report linking THIS specific abuse with intelligence gathering efforts, then I may start to entertain the idea. Until then, there simply is no proof.
If you cannot accept that it could be just immature bullying, then I’m sorry. I can accept that it may have been intelligence gathering, but it just doesn’t seem likely to me.
It’s been several years since I was in the Army, but I doubt it has changed so fundamentally that goofy looking national guardsmen are being used for interrogations. Any fool would know such untrained persons would be extremely worthless for real intelligence gathering.
As for the “reasonable doubt.” The OP was talking about perjury. Perjury doesn’t just mean Rumsfeld lied, it means he committed a crime punishable by time in prison it isn’t policy decision that the OP was talking about, but a criminal action. And in criminal cases you must proove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime occurred (and you need to prove intent, as well) before you can convict.
Someone else in the thread already realized that.
If the OP had been talking about forcing Rummy to resign, it would have been a different matter entirely.
CNN just ran an interview with an Iraqi citizen who claims abuse at Abu Graib. I don’t see anything on the CNN website yet. Check out CNN later for a story about it or look for a transcript for “Live From…”.
I’ll let you judge for yourself, but from my perspective this guy seems very believable.
Here’s a brief summary (going from memory):
Says he was a prisoner under Saddam for three years after trying to get Iraq troops to not fight for Saddam when he thought Bush I was going to continue into Iraq after the first Gulf War.
After he was released he got asylum in Sweden
After Iraq fell to the U.S. he moved back to Iraq
Was arrested/detained by coalition forces (he had money in his car) and was taken to Abu Graib and told them he was from Sweden. He was accused of lying and held at the prison from October to December (confirmed by the U.S.)
He details physical abuse and sexual humiliation (plus some things he is not willing to discuss) by people in both civilian and military garb
A U.S. soldier gives him his military ID card and tells him to get justice
After he is freed, he comes to the U.S. in order to report the abuse and ask for compensation and the return of his Mercedes
The guy claims to be a big believer in the U.S. and democracy. Im afraid that we may have cured him of that. :mad:
What do you mean by “active intelligence gathering?” Were the guardsmen asking questions? No. Were they told to prepare the prisoners for interrogation? Yes. I doubt that MI told them what to do, and I sincerely doubt MI told them to take pictures of it, but I have a hard time believing those wild and crazy guardsmen could do that stuff with such impunity if they did not consider it part of their jobs.
I really wonder why you persist in raising the strawman of the guards being used for direct interrogation.
As for perjury, I’m sure they build in enough plausible deniability - unless their arrogance has gotten so huge they don’t even bother anymore.
Even if the allegations listed are true (and call me cynical, but I don’t think “unnamed sources allegedly told one reporter” is proof of anything), Rummy didn’t commit perjury by failing to disclose top secret information. In fact, people are required by law to keep top secret information secret. So if Rummy was aware of top secret information like that described by the New Yorker reporter, then Rummy was required by law to lie about it.
Second, as far as I know, there is no provision in the federal perjury statutes that talk about what someone “basically” said. You can’t convict someone of perjury for dancing around the truth. You have to actually show that something they said under oath was actually false. And no one here has even bothered to quote what Rummy actually said.
And Voyager, your little equation makes no sense. First of all, the Geneva Conventions need not apply to every prisoner. The reason we can be sure of that is that the Geneva Conventions say that they don’t apply to everyone. The Conventions set forth certain factors that each prisoner must meet before they fall under the class protected by the Conventions. If the prisoner doesn’t meet those conditions, then the Conventions don’t apply.
That’s not Bush/Rummy’s fault. That’s how the Conventions were drafted. Those conventions weren’t drafted by Bush and/or Rummy. And they were drafted like that for a reason (to ensure that soldiers obey the rules of engagement).
Your 2nd through 4th lines make you look kind of wacky. Do you really think that American soldiers think that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply any more? Do you really think that, despite the presence of some damn fine lawyers in the JAG corps, that the military branches have decided that the Geneva Conventions have been overridden?
Not at all. Uniformed members of the Iraqi Army who were taken prisoners have been treated as POWs.
The whole point of laws of war like the Geneva Conventions is make armed conflict as limited in scope as possible, and to draw distinctions between 1)innocent civilians, 2) soldiers acting under orders, and 3) outlaws.
To give armed combatants, acting without sponsorship of a nation-state, dressed like civilians, the full protection of POW status is to encourage that as a tactic, resulting in the erosion of those lines, and inevitably, to more civilian deaths.
The OP didn’t address what the outcome should be if there is evidence that Rumsfeld committed perjury. There may very well be evidence that he committed perjury that is sufficient for him to lose his job, without the proof beyond a reasonable doubt required to send him to prison.
God, I’m salivating over the thought of Rummy in prison.
My equation was not very clear, I admit. The Geneva Convention sets certain minimum standards of treatment of prisoners, and, if signed by both sides, ensures that your prisoners are being treated well also. The Soviet Union was not a signatory during WW II, which is why Soviet prisoners of the Germans were treated much worse than American and British prisoners.
Let me try again. Terrorists, like aQ, are not covered. (I don’t know about the Taliban.) But, if you choose to abuse or torture even a terrorist suspect, and then you consider anyone you pick up a terrorist suspect, then you give a greenlight to abusing anyone you pick up. If a majority of the people you pick up are innocent, you are going to be abusing innocent people. Sure it is a classic slippery slope argument, but we seem to have slid right down it.
The two big problems are first, the proclivity of the administration to consider terrorist suspects guilty until proven innocent, preventing hearings or right to counsel, and second, calling anyone against us a terrorist.
I wasn’t aware that any of the insurgents were in uniform now, so I can’t see why abiding by the convention could make things worse. Not doing so has the chance of helping to recruit more insurgents, I’d think, so is counter-productive.
This certainly give me pause. Previously, I’d assumed that I was resonsilble for my actions and abilities, (or lack thereof). Now, I’m trying to reconcile your assertion that you would be responsible if I didn’t know how to search out unbiased information with my understanding of personal responsibility which says that I’d be responsible for such a thing if it were so.
Second, even if the world’s biggest liar says that water’s wet, it doesn’t make that statement false, useless or untrustworthy. The information should considered on it’s in re truthfulness.
I wish you would talk about this more as I’m pretty confused as to how you’d ever in the world’s wildest, wackiest dreams be thought to be responsible if I did not know how to search out unbiased info.
On page 18 of the Taguba report, (links previously provided) there’s is this
(U) I find that contrary to the provision of AR 190-8, and the findings found in MG Ryder’s Report, Military Intelligence (MI) interrogators and Other US Government Agency’s (OGA) interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses. Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s Report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to “set the conditions” for MI interrogations. I find no direct evidence that MP personnel actually participated in those MI interrogations. (ANNEXES 19, 21, 25, and 26).
Oh. My. God. I understand why you want to move on. Perhaps a few debating points were scored, and you’d rather not acknowledge the widely-known fact that the classified Taguba report was leaked to the world about two weeks ago, and has since been widely distributed.
But let’s take a public statement from Under Secretary of Defense Steven Cambone:
This was public testimony under oath. I hope that the Washington Times is a better source for you. There are literally dozens of web sites with this testimony on them, I hope you don’t think that both lefties and righties actually spend their day forging congressional testimony to put on their websites.
I’ve found an interesting little news article over in the Washington Post.
It seems to suggest that Martin Hyde wasn’t insane, and that the abuse (more specifically, the “goofy” pseudo-sexual abuse) was not linked to interrogation or intelligence gathering.
Those people in Abu Graib are citizens of Iraq. They are in their own nation. The USA is the terrorist who invaded that nation and keeps it occupied.
Every Iraqi has the right to attack and kill every member of the invading armies and everyone who supports these criminal activities and to undermine every action undertaken or sponsored by the invders/occupyers. Every citizen of every nation on this globe has that right when his country is invaded and lives under occupation.
By the way: You do realize that you bring here the US private contractors in your category of “armed combatants without sponsorship of a nation state” ?
I dunno, I will disregard anything at that link, as it represents a commercial interest, and not an official military or government report. You expect us to accept some editorial glorified blogger’s report?
Well blogs usually aren’t created for profit. And I said in later posts that I would accept sources like CNN.com, I just wouldn’t accept a source like agonist.org which was obviously a blog site.
The germaine portions of that article are, the pictoral evidence at Abu Ghraib was linked punishment and not intelligence gathering. I never asserted that no one was ever abused or tortured for intelligence gathering purposes over in Iraq.
If you can even recall back to my first post in this thread, it was mainly the ludicrous panty-torture, naked pyramids et cetra that I found highly ludicrous in the vein of intelligence gathering. And the Washington Post simply confirmed that it wasn’t intelligence gathering in those cases.
Okay, that’s what you may have meant, but it is not what you said.
Now you post a link to a news story that says that just three of those photographs of abuse were actually taken for entertainment purposes, butlater on in that exact same article it explains that abuse was part of the interrogation process.
In this thread, we have a newspaper story that you linked to, a public statement by an Under Secretary of Defense, and quoted portions of a classified Pentagon report (which apparently you don’t believe in because, despite the fact that virtually every news source in the world has quoted some portion of the report, I linked to a blog site rather than the Pentagon [which still hasn’t declassified the report]). Each of these pieces of evidence links prisoner treatment to interrogations.
Let me be clear: the human pyramid thing may well be a very cruel joke among those who perpetrated it. But please explain how this photo can possibly be interpreted as some kind of joke or random abuse, as opposed to an attempt to “soften up” a prisoner. I just don’t buy it.
I’m pretty sure that is a collection of phrases that can easily be interpreted to mean that I don’t think the most popular of the Abu Ghraib incidents are intelligence gathering, just because I found the techniques so inconsistent with standard intelligence gathering methods.
I said I accepted FindLaw, for example. I wasn’t demanding a release from the DoDs website itself. I just found the blog-site distasteful and wasn’t going to entertain anything from it.
I’ve already said the incidents MAY be linked to intelligence gathering. At the time I made that post I had heard nothing either way.
And the specific incidents to which I was referring ended up being bullying.
This above quote is directly from the Washington Post article. And basically confirms my suspicions, that the images I was seeing didn’t look like intelligence gathering, it looked like very stupid soldiers misbehaving. And that is what those pictures were.
And in response to one of your original question, yes, I read the entire article. I get the print edition of the Washington Post, and live in the general D.C. area so I read about 85% of the Post almost daily.
Find me a more official link for that picture, I’ll believe it when I see it from a more credible news source than “Yahoo.”
That particular picture with the dog? It could be part of a systematic interrogation program, I think it is much more likely that picture is part of interrogation gathering than the naked pyramid or the panty torture.
It’s not 100% certain, that Iraqi prisoner may have been acting up and the soldier was using the dog to scare him. So I can certainly see how even it may not be intelligence gathering, but I think pictures like that are much more consistent with intelligence gathering than the panty-torture stuff was.
