US military in torture scandal

[Typo_Negative]

@New Iskander

Let’s hope so.

All I have done was asked a series of brutally unpleasant questions.
Those were questions.

In return, I got no answers, only hysterical smears, such as:
(Helpfully compiled by ‘Mapache’)

.

I quess I’ll take a stab.
**What if it was Saddam under hood? Doesn’t Saddam deserve exactly such treatment in eternity?

What if it was one of Saddam henchmen, getting an idea what his victims were going through? They have done such things to so many innocent people!

Don’t Saddam henchmen deserve to be hooded and their genitals wired with alligator clamps?

Wouldn’t that be the real Justice? ** The only relevant question is the last one. And the answer, my dear sir, is no. It would not be real justice.

We simply cannot play the justification game, for 2 reasons.

For the first, it allows everyone to play that game, including Saddam. I mean, what if Saddam’s victims were really, really bad people? Can you prove otherwise? That would make it OK, what was done to them. Right? He would be morally absolved, wouldn’t he?

Of course not. He’d still be a bloodthirsty thug, satisfying his own perverted desires.

For the second, it’s the same as wanting a rapist to raped in prison and seeing it as “justice”. While it may have an ‘eye for eye’ appeal, all it really does it put you on the side of a more powerful but equally vile rapist. You cannot applaud the act of one man and revile the **same act ** of another at the same time.

What you do not seem to understand is that no action by any prisoner can justify such vile acts by a guard. These acts are not “justice”, they are crimes. Those who do these acts are not heroes, they are just as vile criminals with the veil of authority. No state in the Union allows such acts. The military does not allow such acts. The states and the military have rules against these kinds of acts being perpetrated by prison guards, possibly because they realize that a guard who does such a thing is no better, if not worse, than the person being guarded.

If we are to try to claim moral superiority, we cannot tolerate such things.

I do not express myself well, but I hope this makes some sense.

[New_Iskander]

@spooje

I do not express myself well, but I hope this makes some sense.

Makes perfect sense. You were may be the only one who adressed the questions from the beginning.

[New_Iskander]

@Spavined Gelding

Read the damned report and then get back to us, friend…

I started reading and got that far:

i. (S) Writing I am a Rapest (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;

Compare this with my conjecture:

05-06-2004, 08:14 AM #287
They raped somebody, who complained to US guards. NYT mentions that a ‘victim’ pointed them out (for what, it doesn’t explain). US guards took those 7 into “hard site” section for dangerous criminals and gave them hell. The emphasis on sexual humiliation explains the nature of their crime. That was primitive Justice…Pictures were taken to show to the other inmates, to frighten wanna-be bullies and appease the ‘victim’.

You must admit that I wasn’t far from the truth in at least one case. At least in this one case US MPs were on the side of decency; while their actions might have been brutal and primitive, they were acting on the side of basic and elementary Good. Yet nobody entertained such a possibility for 92 posts. It was all about innocent Iraqi POW and evil US MPs. That’s what I was trying to point out when I said:

I find it quite remarkable that nobody here have wondered, who might be those people under hoods with their extremities wired?

I go back to the report now and I challenge you to read the first 92 posts and see if you can find a single one that contradicts what I just said. If you can’t, you must concede that there was a clear bias on display in this thread. We may argue whether that bias was commendable or malicious, but the fact of bias itself is easy to verify. All I did was to challenge that bias.

[Triskadecamus]

The questions were all about a theme.

The theme is that there are evil people, and to do evil to evil people is somehow not evil.

And to be drearily honest, there is a whole lot of looking for evil people going on, here, and in politics, and in Iraq, and everywhere else.

But it isn’t the people. It is the torture, the murder, the terror, and the self aggrandizement that is evil.

And to pretend that our evils are more acceptable than some other evil is just more of the same.

We have no possible victory in Iraq.

We have already lost.

We can do nothing there, but more evil.

We should stop.

End this war now.

Tris

[syncrolecyne]

New Iskander I understand where you are coming from, I really do. Since 9-11 I have felt a need to see people pay for what happened.

If President Bush had said something along the lines of “Were gonna go to Iraq, kick some Ay-rab ass, and make those sons of bitches wish they’d never been born”, then there would at least be no hypocrisy in what we are seeing.

But we went over there, in Bush’s words, to end the “rape rooms and torture chambers”, not to put them under new management and add additional staff. We are supposed to be bringing freedom, democracy, and human rights there. If we were the Peoples Republic or Holy Empire of America, and just going into Iraq to show the world who’s boss or that we don’t put up with anyone’s backtalk - it wouldn’t be half the scandal it is. But if we set aside the flimsy evidence of WMDs, the very unlikely Al-Qaida links, and phantom uranium purchases from Niger; the one fundamentally sound argument for toppling Saddam Hussein was that he was a cruel despot who ruled through arbitrary terror. We were supposedly going there to make Iraq a humane and rational place to live in, if not a perfect democracy. That was the fundamental aim of this whole damn war. The fact that Iraq produces a lot of oil was, frankly, an added incentive. How many impoverished and troubled nations in the world have such resources for develpment at their disposal? And this complete mess has, barring some miracle, completely undermined even the unspoken aims of the Bush administration.

After World War II, did we take Hess, Goering, and the other Nuremburg defendants and SS guards outside, strip them naked, sick hungry German Shepherds on them and then gas them? No, instead we gave them something which no one in the Third Reich ever recieved, an open hearing in a court with defense attorneys arguing on their behalf. We made that point in Germany, even if it did smack of “victor’s justice”, that they way people are punished has fundamentally changed. We established a basic rule of law again. We may be losing that opportunity in Iraq, unless we let the world know that while agents of the United States may commit horrible acts from time to time, we police ourselves very vigorously when thir crimes are uncovered.

If you can’t understand why what went on in Abu Ghraib is terrible, then I think you are beyond help here.

[New_Iskander]

@syncrolecyne

If you can’t understand why what went on in Abu Ghraib is terrible, then I think you are beyond help here.

What went on in that prison was Hell on Earth. I said this already so many times. I simply wanted to see a complete picture of what was going on there, not one-sided one.

@syncrolecyne

…while agents of the United States may commit horrible acts from time to time, we police ourselves very vigorously when thir crimes are uncovered.

I said exactly such thing many times, too. But every time I’d say this, my statements were summarily dismissed as another evidence of my presumed hypocrisy and attempt at ‘disinformation’.

We are trying to help Iraqi build a new social set-up. We are making mistakes and we are correcting them. That is the best example of real Democracy. We are not angels. We are trying to be decent human beings. We often fail. This is real Democracy, man-made, not brought from Heaven by an Archangel. That’s the best we can show them.

[pantom]

New Iskander, yours would be a good argument if we were intending to follow the rules from the start of this “war on terror”, but that simply has not been the case. The context for this scandal was set a long time ago, here:

Bush Says Geneva Convention Applies To Taliban, Not al-Qaida

Date: February 7, 2002

Washington – President Bush has determined that the Geneva Convention applies to members of the Taliban militia, but not to members of the international al-Qaida terrorist network, says White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
“Under Article 4 of the Geneva Convention, however, Taliban detainees are not entitled to POW [prisoner of war] status,” Fleischer said February 7.
“To qualify as POWs under Article 4, al-Qaida and Taliban detainees would have to have satisfied four conditions: they would have to be part of a military hierarchy, they would have to have worn uniforms or other distinctive signs visible at a distance, they would have to have carried arms openly, and they would have had to have conducted their military operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war,” he said.

from The United States Mission to the European Union

The problem with the above was and is that we don’t get to write the rules unilaterally as we go along:

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said that Mr Bush was wrong to take such a decision “without convening a competent tribunal, as required by the Geneva Conventions”.
They said the conventions provided explicit protection to all combatants captured in an international armed conflict.
“The administration is right to acknowledge that it has to play by the rules, but it can’t rewrite the rules to suit its purposes,” said the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth.
They also warned that the decision might put soldiers around the world at risk.
“It [the decision] is not left to the president of that country or the secretary of defence. If US soldiers were captured, we wouldn’t want the president of that country to make that determination,” said Alexandra Arrriaga of Amnesty International USA.

from US rewriting rules on prisoners

This is the slippery slope in action. Having started down this slope, at the President’s direction, we arrived at a place where, as the report by General Taguba points out, the MP’s at Abu Ghraib had no copies of the Geneva Convention on them and had received no training in it; among the prisoners, none had been given a copy.
Why? Because the President has long since determined that it’s not relevant. The responsibility started at the top. What that means is that we did these things at Abu Ghraib as a matter of policy to extract information. Yes, we have begun to punish those responsible for these particular abuses. But the true, systematic response would be to acknowledge international law. Simple step, one that you can be certain will not be done as long as this President remains in power.

[PatriotX]

@New Iskander

What went on in that prison was Hell on Earth. I said this already so many times. I simply wanted to see a complete picture of what was going on there, not one-sided one.

How complete of a picture would it have to be for the homosexual rape of young boys and “acting inappropriately with a dead body” to be "understandable?

[Squink]

The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy. I further urge governments to join America and others in supporting torture victims’ treatment centers, contributing to the UN Fund for the Victims of Torture, and supporting the efforts of non-governmental organizations to end torture and assist its victims.

Statement by the President - United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture June 26, 2003

[New_Iskander]

@SimonX

How complete of a picture would it have to be for the homosexual rape of young boys and “acting inappropriately with a dead body” to be "understandable?

What are you referring to?

[Larry_Mudd]

He’s referring to complicity in the rape of young boys and inappropriate actions with a dead body carried out by American soldiers, as related to us by U.S. officials.

NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers “severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and ‘acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.”

[New_Iskander]

@Larry Mudd

He’s referring to complicity in the rape of young boys and inappropriate actions with a dead body carried out by American soldiers, as related to us by U.S. officials.

In that case 'SimonX shouldn’t use the term “understandable” implying that he quotes me. I want to understand what was happening, but not to excuse. Apparently, lots of things were happening: someplace US MPS were disciplining some creep who raped a young boy while someplace else Iraqi guards were molesting other young boys; one US MP was handling his guard dog properly (and was later commanded) while another misused the dog; while at the same time prisoners were rioting in the yard and tower guards were opening fire at them (sometimes at least 3 times a day, as on 12-13-03). The place was Hell on Earth sometimes. It is very easy to say that all the bad things shouldn’t have happened while all the good things should. For there were good things happening and very important ones.

For all we know those MPs were put in this prison and ordered to hold it under control by all means necessary. They fulfilled the orders. We might think of them as a bunch of brutes looking for inmates to brutalize, while in reality they were with they backs against the wall all the time. If they were overwhelmed, they’d get no mercy and there would be a major uprising in Baghdad with all the consequences. They held the line. Now all the big shots are running for cover and waxing indignant how “un-American” it all was, while soldiers will have to face the military tribunal. Do they deserve it? Yes, they do, but don’t they deserve to be understood?

[Ms2001]

@pantom

This is the slippery slope in action. Having started down this slope, at the President’s direction, we arrived at a place where, as the report by General Taguba points out, the MP’s at Abu Ghraib had no copies of the Geneva Convention on them and had received no training in it; among the prisoners, none had been given a copy.

Apparently, some soldiers were aware of the Geneva Convention:

Soldiers’ warnings ignored
One of the soldiers witnessed military intelligence interrogators put one Iraqi naked under an outside shower for four hours in view of other prisoners, a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which the soldiers said they were briefed on.

[PatriotX]

@New Iskander

In that case 'SimonX shouldn’t use the term “understandable” implying that he quotes me. I want to understand what was happening, but not to excuse.
Yes, they do, but don’t they deserve to be understood?

I too used the word understand instead of excuse. I used it in one of it’s looser senses, hence the quotation marks. Imagine them as manual, two-fingered, air-quotes if it helps. I’d no wish to imply that I was quoting you.

As an entirely unrelated aside, IIRC, you previously spoke of the possibility that certain, otherwise objectionable incidents had the potential of being “justified” and/or “deserved” and/or “justice.”

@New Iskander

For all we know those MPs were put in this prison and ordered to hold it under control by all means necessary. They fulfilled the orders. We might think of them as a bunch of brutes looking for inmates to brutalize, while in reality they were with they backs against the wall all the time. If they were overwhelmed, they’d get no mercy and there would be a major uprising in Baghdad with all the consequences. They held the line. Now all the big shots are running for cover and waxing indignant how “un-American” it all was, while soldiers will have to face the military tribunal. Do they deserve it? Yes, they do, but don’t they deserve to be understood?

Under which probable, (or if not probable, then possible), circumstances could the the rape of women and children, the concealment of dead body, "inappropriate"acts with dead body, etc have the ability, (if not ability then potential ability), help the perpetrating parties “hold the line,” so to speak?

[Cervaise]

@New Iskander

For all we know those MPs were put in this prison and ordered to hold it under control by all means necessary. They fulfilled the orders. We might think of them as a bunch of brutes looking for inmates to brutalize, while in reality they were with they backs against the wall all the time. If they were overwhelmed, they’d get no mercy and there would be a major uprising in Baghdad with all the consequences. They held the line.

Personally, if it came down to that choice, I would rather die a horrible, painful death than allow myself to be connected in any way with the rape of a child.

Your views on the matter, it would seem, are equally clear.

[Spavined_Gelding]

It is starting to appear that the thing the MIs and MPs backs were against the wall about was producing evidence of weapons of mass destruction and a Saddam-BenLaden connection.

[Desmostylus]

@New Iskander

For all we know those MPs were put in this prison and ordered to hold it under control by all means necessary. They fulfilled the orders. We might think of them as a bunch of brutes looking for inmates to brutalize, while in reality they were with they backs against the wall all the time. If they were overwhelmed, they’d get no mercy and there would be a major uprising in Baghdad with all the consequences. They held the line. Now all the big shots are running for cover and waxing indignant how “un-American” it all was, while soldiers will have to face the military tribunal. Do they deserve it? Yes, they do, but don’t they deserve to be understood?

And maybe, for all we know, the abused Iraqis were actually pod-people invading the earth from the Planet of the Vampires.

OTOH, if we actually care to look the available facts surrounding the situation, we find that there’s absolutely no evidence to support the invasion of pod-people theory. Likewise, there’s absolutely no evidence that would support you latest silly contention, either.

[World_Eater]

Bolding mine.

@pantom

from US rewriting rules on prisoners

This is the slippery slope in action. Having started down this slope, at the President’s direction, we arrived at a place where, as the report by General Taguba points out, the MP’s at Abu Ghraib had no copies of the Geneva Convention on them and had received no training in it; among the prisoners, none had been given a copy.

Yes, because we all need a copy of the Geneva convention to tell us shoving a broomstick handle up some guy’s ass is wrong :rolleyes:

One of the guys bitching about receiving training and not being made aware of the rules of the Geneva convention was a fucking civilian prison guard. A modicum of morals and common sense are the only training one should need.

[World_Eater]

Excuse the screwy grammar, I should have previewed.

/off to get coffee

[Liberal]

@Cervaise

Personally, if it came down to that choice, I would rather die a horrible, painful death than allow myself to be connected in any way with the rape of a child.

Your views on the matter, it would seem, are equally clear.

Despite that you have never responded to my repeated questions about Almost Famous, I’ve always held you in high regard. But I believe you’re missing the boat here. I don’t think you can rightfully say what you would do upon facing a “horrible, painful death” unless you had done so. And you especially cannot use that extremely iffy and safe declaration to condemn the morality of someone else.