I want to say I think it’s a lie to say that the president lied to the American people.
It can be also easily inferred that because of FinnAgain exagerations, few US soldiers might have already died. POTUS powers are greater, so are the consequences of POTUS actions: simply a difference of scale, that’s all.
That’s why it becomes of paramount importance to look at the Causes.
First, they’re not exagerations. The military itself has charged their own with 18 cases of homicide and are investigating another 8 as criminal homicides. That doesn’t include all the cases of people with heart problems who may very well have been subjected to our admitted policies of exercising-till-they-drop.
Second, US soldiers would have died because someone read my posts on a message board? I didn’t know I’m that powerful. Neat.
Why does America hate America?
I for one welcome our new FinnAgain overlord.
Why thank you! Sometimes it seems like an overlord can’t get no respect.
Some of my slaves have even begun to roll their eyes at me when I command them to “Bathe her and bring her to me.”
The nerve!
Huh. You just don’t grok pheromones.
Naw, I grok in fullness.
It’s just that, as befitting my status as an Un-American antihero, I hate all things which remind me of America. I require that my concubines be cleansed of the stink of their capitalist filth before I have my way with them.
And of course we have the continuing one man trainwreck that is Uppy.
Yet again, he is using the oh-so-mature dodge of “I know you are but what am I?!?” when faced with any factual challenges.
After he has refused to discuss the factual claims I raised, either in this thread or the other thread, he now says I am the one who will not discuss facts.
He claims that I have called people stupid or assholes who do not interpret that data the same way I do, even when I specifically said that people could disagree on that, and after he, himself, said that those who disagree are slanderous, malicious liars.
He has the nerve to claim I’ve put forward no evidence, when I’ve given at least a dozen cites.
He has shown himself to have virtually no redeeming qualities, at all. When whooshed by Tom, Uppy turned militant and nasty. When Pitted for intellectual dishonesty and stupidity, he claimed that people hated him because he was a Republican and a Christian. When challenged on factual claims he wriggles and squirms like a worm in mud.
Am I alone in hoping that Uppy decides not to re-register when next year comes around? I mean, having some concentrated ignorance on hand for when we need to fight it is good and all, but maybe we could get a new pet moron who doesn’t shit all over the carpet? Could we maybe just get a maglite and shine it on him in order to scare him away?
FinnAgain, where’s your proof that dozens of people have been tortured to death by U.S. troops?
Just how stupid are you? Why don’t you look at the cites you’ve already been given rather than requesting that I give them to you, again.
I’m not about to repost them if you’re just going to ignore them, again.
Not yet conclusive, but here is information regarding 108 [who] Died In U.S. Custody as of last April.
Then there is the report that there have been Twenty-Seven Detainee Homicides in U.S. Custody among the reports detailing
(Now, I reealize that your immediate quibble will be that “only” seven have been “tortured to death,” but before you get excited in your innumeracy, I will point out that the exact causes of the more than 100 deaths have not yet all been documented and I suspect that we will come up with several more pretty soon,)
I think it’s also important to note that not all of them necessarily had to die while being beaten. If, for instance, we beat the hell out of someone and then dump them in their cell, and they die due to their wounds, I think it’s perfectly fair to say that they’d died as a result of torture. Being unnecessarily narrow in an interpretation of ‘deaths due to torture’ seems unnecessarily obfuscatory to me.
And just to throw a pair of pennies into the arena, Tom, I’d note that your first cite (which I’m sure I’ve given various versions of in both threads) has a quote which bears analysis.
This would, of course, imply that previous oversight was lacking. That there was inadequate training, and that medical facilities were not up to the level of dealing with problems. And of course, that excessive force was being used by soldiers.
I see no reason to mention these changes if nothing had to be changed.
I also see no reason to parse the 18 confirmed criminal homicides into torture/abuse/torture-lite/fratboy hazing/what have you. It’s the same actions in space-time no matter what label we slap on it. And while it would certainly be made worse if the soldiers were acting under orders, even if they were not that’s no defense. Someone in the chain of command has to be responsible, and as of yet all we’ve seen are scapegoats.
I also find the whole situation with not having proper medical facilities to be rather disturbing. The Geneva Convention and common sense would tell you that the place for a wounded/injured man is in a hospital, not a prison.
I still remember hearing stories from my grandfather while he was still alive. He was a medic and rose to the rank of Major in the US Army during WWII. He was awarded both the bronze star and the purple heart, and told stories of crawling into minefields to rescue wounded Nazi soldiers. It strikes me that if we can retain our moral standards while fighting the greatest threat to freedom the 20th century saw, then we certainly can do the same when arresting people who we can’t even charge with crimes.
I want to point something out as well about the nature of the alleged equivalency between Bush starting a war on intel he knew to be flawed, and me stating a case on information which has not been factually refuted.
Bush created a cabal of cronies in the form of the OSP. The OSP’s job was to take information which the experts had rejected and try to spin it or simply use it as if it hadn’t already been rejected. So, to put a finer point on it, Bush was accepting as ‘facts’ that which the experts were telling him weren’t true.
In contrast, the case concerning the US’s pattern of ‘abuse’ is based on experts’ investigations; the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, investigative journalists, etc… who have not been gainsayed by any credible sources. Yes yes, some random folks on message boards have called these findings into question, but so what? Listening to the Keyboard Warriors over the experts would, indeed, be like listening to the OSP over the experts.
Now, back to facts:
Time.com has a very, very informative piece here. It gets into the climate in which these actions were taking place. I already cited this in post 205, but I’ll pull a few quotes from it now:
And The HRW report.
And this is just a snippet of all the evidence out there. We have heart failure listed as a ‘natural’ cause of death, even though our forces have had a policy of forcing prisoners to exercise till they drop; something which certainly causes one to question just how ‘natural’ those heart attacks were.
We have cases of military doctors lying and covering up abuses that our troops commited.
We have cases of military commanders covering up abuses that our troops commited.
We have cases of ‘extraordinary rendition’ when we send people to be tortured via practices which are worse than even those our forces will engage in. And we are just as morally culpable for those who we send to be tortured by other nations as those who we torture ourselves.
We have a case in which a military autopsy listed the cause of death for a prisoner as ‘natural’, when a civilian autopsy found skull fractures and concluded that the death was due to blunt force trauma.
We have cases in which detainees were forced to sign denials of abuse they had suffered or risk never being let out of prison.
Etc, etc, etc…
So if one were to hold the two side by side, they are nothing alike. Bush used non-experts to cherry pick data in order to conform to a pre-determined conclusion. Various experts and investigative journalists have investigated the data coming from our ‘detainees’ and our troops and found a pattern emerging from it.
Perhaps a torture apologist might make a ‘case’ based on the fact that we simply do not know how many people have died due to direct or indirect effects of torture. This is, of course, true to a degree. We may never know the exact number, but that’s part of what a coverup is all about. We do know that the military itself has termed 18 deaths criminal homicides, and is investigating another 8 deaths as criminal homicides. We know that the military has not investigated all such deaths. We know that some of these cases of ‘death via abuse’ may very well include more than one person. We know all this and more.
So perhaps the most anally accurate phrasing one could use is that there are at least 18 criminal homicides that our forces commited upon prisoners in our custody, eight more that seem quite likely, and a number of other probable incidents. This list, of course, only includes those prisoners who aren’t in our ‘secret’ prisons or those who’ve been farmed out to other nations for extreme forms of torture. All of this taken together means that an estimate of somewhere around 24 deaths, give or take a few, seems to be the absolute lowest estimate one could reach.
The question of whether it was “only” 18, or several more, is academic. And to cast the debate in terms of ‘malice’ ‘slander’ ‘lies’, etc… is to tacitly become an apologist for torture.
What, even the Army admits that there were at least 18 criminal homicides, but to estimate that there may have been a few more is slanderous malicious lying?
“18 is just fine, but if you think that there might been as few six more, you’re a slanderous America hating liar! Never mind that the Army itself thinks there might have been upwards of eight more. Why does the Army hate the Army?”
Team Apologist is scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
Only because you are incredibly dense. Smoking those party joints lately?
A true and good cause needs no lies to bolster it, it stands on its own merits.
Once again, a true and good cause needs no lies to bolster it, it stands on its own merits.
Oh, he lies constantly. He flipflops all over the place, on every subject. He piles lies upon lies. The exact and literal quotes, exactly as spoken, are all over the web, even on the official White House site for all to see.
Is that like technically or kinda sort technicality of perjury? There is the truth and there is the lie. There is no such thing as a “technical” lie. If Bush had really believed the stories he originally told us all, he could have made it right by saying “I made a mistake, I was wrong”. That would be understood and might even gain him some respect. But to repeatedly change his stories, and bullheadedly stick to every one of them, even as they change, means he didn’t believe his own stories. The way he attacks anyone who dissents, instead of fighting them with evidence and proof, simply makes him more of a liar. Reprehensible.
Need a henchman? What’s yer benefits package look like? 
A brief overview of my organization.
You do have to hate America though… but since you’re to the left of Ghengis Kahn, I think we can assume that’s already the case.
I just read your Top 100 Things, and I find your platform compatible with my philosophy. All hail Heinous Overlord Finn
Ahhhh, now that’s more like it!
Would you perhaps like your own Latin American country?
They were exaggerations; your subsequent appeals that even one case of torture is too many are the proof that you realize that.
Mind, I already said that you have nothing to be ashamed of and your cause is good. I will not call you a traitor, but I will have to call you a certain F-word.
Suppose you are a prosecutor in court. What happens if you overstate your case? Simple. You won’t obtain a conviction. You will Fail in performing your professional duty. In court, if you utter rush statements unsupported by factual evidence, your case will be thrown out, regardless how good it is. You will be a Failure.
[Hands in the air in a victory sign, in a Lex Luthor voice] Australia![/Hands in the …]