Danimal, great job on the translations!
Here, insultos means injury, as in threats of injury.
Not trying to sharp-shoot ya. You’re doing great.
(muttering to self) I have got to learn how to figure out how to work this msg board. Sure wish I could put some cool smile thingy in this msg for Danimal.
Olentzero, perhaps the rape analogy went too far, perhaps not, but here’s another one for you. Last time he was in town, Ex-tank and I went to the range to shoot at targets. He showed me a better grip than I had been using for firing a pistol, more comfortable, steady and accurate. Now, if I take it into my head to go shoot, say, John Corrado ( and hey, who dosen’t think about it now and then;) ), and am able to do so effectively because of the grip the Ex-Tank showed me, is Ex-Tank to blame? He certainly had no idea that I was planning moderatoricide when he demonstrated it. How is he to blame in any way?
Also:
So if we followed a communist system, we would react how? Like the Soviets in Chezckolsovakia? In Afghanistan? Like Cuba exporting soldiers all over the globe to brushfire wars? What is your point here? Nations don’t have friends, they have interests, no matter what stripe they are politically. I would argue that the massive civillian and government sponsored humanatarian aid that the U.S. is justifibly famous for is a direct outgrowth of that same capitalistic mindset you blame for so much of the world’s evils. It’s only when individual needs are more than met that one can look around to see where the excess may be needed.
Thanks, drillrod. I included the original Spanish precisely so that anyone who wanted to correct or improve my translation could do so.
From the news report Gadarene posted, it seems that since 2000 the SOA IS giving courses on civil rights and how not to use torture. What where they doing before? And, all the articles that people have quoted here, are they before or after the change mentioned in the news wires?
Just asking…
If I did, would Albany, NY be a terrorist training base?
I think the point’s flown over your head. The SOA wasn’t a terrorist training base, period. The fact that it’s trained thugs, murderers and terrorists is interesting - but then, so has Harvard. The United States is not, as Guinistasia seems to be claiming, training people to be terrorists. The fact that some scumbags took advantage of USA’s hospitality - and since you don’t really need training to kill peasants I’m not seeing how the SOA really helped them murder anyone anyway - isn’t relevant to whether or not the SOA is a “Terrorist training base.”
Let’s be up front here; how did the SOA help anyone be a terrorist? Do you think they train people to rape nuns there?
As for your claim that this is a capitalist thing, with all due respect, gimme a fucking break. Capitalists aren’t likelier than communists, monarchists, or anarchists to be terrorists - in fact, I’d say they’re less likely.
Don’t you think that’s a bit of a stretch? At least to me, it doesn’t sound like a very valid analogy here.
We’re not talking about the things people have repeated over and over in their replies here; for example karate instruction, driving school, or how to hold a pistol.
We’re talking about instructions on crowd control and coercion. How to respond to an insurgency is NOT the same thing as teaching someone self defense skills. The potential for disaster here seems substantially higher here than the other similarities others have pointed out.
The little disclaimer stating that it’s against the Geneva convention to employ torture as a method to extract information is of little value. Torture’s against the law? I’m sure some of the seedier elements of humanity may not take time out to make the moral observations that their instructors at the SOA may ask them to.
So then the Army’s only reasoning behind keeping such an operation going is that “we only train the good guys.”
Right. But how can they guarantee that those skills will remain on the side of “right?” How do they know if they’re not training the next Noriega (again)?
I read the articles that were on the site that Guinastasia posted the links to, and I agree.
I can’t say that this is a “terrorist training school” but it can easily be a “potential terrorist training school.”
It’s existence may have been arguable during the cold war, but now? And in light of this country’s determination to stamp out terrorism, I think it seems dangerous to have an operation like this still continuing.
Folks here have already posted many quotes from these manuals that state the use of force is not the way to deal with the local population.
The school simply doesn’t teach terrorist tactics. It teaches guerrilla war tactics. There IS a difference. Now if you don’t think the US should be training guerrilla war tactics where they might be used in war zones like Columbia, that’s an arguement I can understand. But I feel it’s inflammatory rhetoric to label the US as a terrorist sponsor because of this school.
I believe, because using torture doesn’t cross the minds of good and helpful people, they simply weren’t concerned with it, which is considerably different from ACTIVELY TEACHING IT. Bullies generally don’t need instructions on how to bully, but, like any intelligent creature, they are capable of imagining other uses for seemingly unrelated things. (Cue the theme music for "Man, the Toolmaker) They don’t need someone else to come up with creative uses for, say, extension cords. They come up with them on their own. In fact, it is condescendingly Americentric to imagine these guys need us to teach them how to be bad.
America is not perfect, but it is also not the Great Satan.
You fucking son of a bitch. I used to respect you, but no more.
You and Ex-Tank went shooting, and nobody called me? Bastards.
[sup]Okay, it’s probably my fault for not reading MPSIMS enough.[/sup]
Yet ANOTHER dumb ficking thread where the rhetoric was so thick it prevented half the people from seeing the truth.
And if you cut it with a knife, you were a terrorist to. :rolleyes:
And it seems like they are only helping their opponents build strawmen to burn.
It’s a Pit thread, not GD. Fuck this conversation.
Learning chemistry does not make one a bomb-manufacturer. I would think that is obvious, but apparently some people have a different level of perception. Learning engineering does not make you sabatoge bridges. I would think this, too, is obvious, but apparently not.
John, while the example may have been somewhat over the top, it is a shame that the implication is too strong. After all, high testosterone levels are what make terrorists, just ask any feminist.
For the record, the SOA were the ones who assasinated anyone who had any information about the NASA moon hoax, too. And they don’t like teddy bears.
Guinistasia, you might want to take a look at the very first fucking thing you quoted to give you some proper perspective here.
em added
This takes the logical form ~P–>Q, or “no force” implies “positive results”. I know its a startlingly difficult one to grasp, being able to be expressed in four symbols.
Olentzero, if only we had trained Lenin at the SOA everything would be alright. sigh Well, a shame we can’t undo that.
Now we are linking soldiers and terrorists explicitly. Good one, man.
Fuck off.
But don’t you see, dropzone, the first premise IS “America is bad.” What other kind of conclusion do you expect from such a starting point?
According to the wire report I posted, though, RickJay and dropzone, “Four years ago, the Pentagon acknowledged that training manuals used at the school recommended bribery, blackmail, threats and torture against insurgents.” So they did used to do those things at the SOA. They may not now, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t at one time valid human rights concerns surrounding the school. Cut Guin a little slack.
Of course I saw that. It is why I’m doubly offended, both by the assumption that America is training these guys to be evil and that, without our intervention, they would be good. Perhaps an earlier intention was to give them whatever tools they needed to fight the war against International Communism, with a blind eye turned to the means they used, but I know that in recent years that has not been the case. Democracy has been growing in South America, and I give at least some credit to the refocussing of the School of the Americas’ agenda.
Of course not. These people are already officers in their respective national militaries when they enter the SOA/WHISC. These militaries are run by governments friendly to the US and its interests (I don’t believe any Sandinistas were accepted into the courses), and which were already carrying out terror campaigns against the civilian populations. The SOA, by providing training to officers, merely helps that terror campaign become more effective. Which is still no better.
Capitalism has everything to do with it. Britain, France and Spain have been capitalist countries for centuries - the drive for profits led them to colonize America, Africa, and many parts of Asia for the raw materials found there. Just because the US threw off the yoke of colonial oppression in 1776 doesn’t mean they somehow magically transformed capitalism into a system that didn’t require expansion beyond national borders to realize profit. The Spanish-American War in 1898 was imperialist expansion in the classical sense, but the necessity exerting political and economic influence in independent countries in order to guarantee the continued supply of profitable cash crops (at the expense of real democracy and the needs of the general population) has in no way lessened over the subsequent century.
Weirddave wrote:
Good question. If, say, you had exhibited homicidal tendencies in general in the past - talking about it, settinig up situations where it actually looked like you were going to take somebody out but backing out at the last minute saying you were only joking, etc. etc., and ExTank was aware of this, then I’d certainly hold him responsible to a degree for showing you how to better wield a gun. On the other hand, if you exhibited no homicidal tendencies at all and suddenly one day just snapped and took somebody out after ExTank had showed you how to use a gun, then I wouldn’t hold him responsible. He had no more idea than the rest of us that you were going to do that.
The US is not completely unaware of what’s going on in Central America. Not only that, it has consciously chosen sides in the civil wars that have raged across those countries in the past several decades. And it has offered military training to the military of the side it supports. Therefore I hold the US responsible for training terrorists. By this I do not mean that they made terrorists out of otherwise normal people, but that they offered training to people who were already terrorists and had learned that in fighting against a civilian population.
My point is that the drive for profits underpins the logic of the system. If we followed a real communist system in which the goal was meeting actual human need instead of generating profits, the poltical and economic interference we see happening now would be rendered unnecessary.
Which is why I support the abolition of nations.
I would argue that the continued existence of poverty here in the US, alongside unemployment, homelessness, and almost 50 million people who have no access to even the most basic health insurance, shows that capitalism has utterly failed to meet individual needs in the first place.
RickJay and I conversed thus:
If there were a civil war already going on in Canada, and you were fighting on the side supported by the United States against civilians, at which time you were shipped to Albany for training, then yes, I would argue that Albany housed a training base for terrorists. The SOA is doing all those things; Albany is doing none. That I know of, anyway.
Finally, Blackclaw said:
Which are then taken home and used against civilian populations by people who were already fighting that same civilian population. Ergo, by RickJay’s definition
the SOA trains terrorists.
Olent, can we PLEASE leave the communism/capitalism out of it?
Most of the people in these countries, the ones who are attracted to various movements, have no idea what communism is. The reason they are so desparate-in the past-is that they were starving. Spend a few days without food or shelter, leaving in squalor, and see if YOU don’t feel like lashing out at someone.
Okay, maybe it’s NOT quite a school of terrorism. But the fact is, the majority of people there have turned out to be notorious human rights abusers, not to mention that some of the tactics taught WERE that of torture and such.
[Terry Jones]
There you go, bringing Class into it.
[/Terry Jones]
Who me? I don’t think it’s class, just hunger.
It was a “Holy Grail” reference. You were Terry Jones to Olent’s Michael Palin. :rolleyes:
I thought memorizing that movie was a prerequisite to joining the SDMB.
snort Lenin wouldn’t have touched the SOA with a hundred-foot pole.
As Valkyrie is wont to say: “Ooh, ouch!”
Soldiers and terrorists may share the same background of military training (I’d argue they do more often than not) but that does not mean all soldiers are therefore terrorists. Most soldiers don’t see themselves at war with much of anything unless there’s actual fighting going on. McVeigh saw himself at war with the US government, hence he blew up the Murrah Federal Building. Why did he see himself at war with the government? 'Cos the arguments of the right-wing lunatic fringe militias made sense to him. bin Laden sees himself as at war with the US - and for more reasons than some ideological conflict between fundamentalist Islam and Western-style progressivism! Nor is he the only one with that point of view. The US has been fucking around in the Middle East just as badly as it has been in Central America. Hence the bombings of the WTC in '93 and of American bases and embassies throughout the Middle East. And, of course, September 11th. And while bin Laden didn’t actually go to school at the SOA, the same situation applies to him as to the SOA graduates. He was a terrorist before the CIA recruited him in the Afghan war, and their involvement/training/money and guns helped him become a more effective terrorist.
'S not my first premise. My first premise is “Capitalism is bad”. There is a lot that’s positive and negative about America, but those things aren’t uniquely American, either.
Nope, never seen it, sorry. :o
I HAVE seen the History Channel video about the Crusades narrated by Terry Jones, if that helps?
Well, no, not at all. You see, there’s this scene…
Nah, you’d have to see it.