On review of the story, it doesn’t actually say the kidney failure was permanent. Tylenol poisoning, for instance, causes temporary kidney failure from which they recover if you live through the episode.
Maybe the kidney failure here was likewise (if more serious) temporary.
Frankly, I was simply responding to the only part of the this thread that I understood. It’s commonly stated that ObL is on dialysis, but most “experts” I’ve heard in the last few years dispute that claim.
while grateful for any small kindnesses, may I presume so far as to direct your attention, (like partner xt’s) to the issue of ameliorating Turkestani’s current plight and granting him asylum by way of making amends for holding him wrongly for four years, and for intervening in his life so as to render him stateless (whether he would have been stateless if the Taliban had cut him loose before we got him is, I suppose, problematic, but we appear by our intervention to have rendered that question moot…)
Well I already stated the defense. “It’s war, shit happens.” And indeed, I can’t say that I feel bad for the guy–we could just have shot him so we didn’t have to deal with the whole sorting bit.
Taking four years to sort them does indeed sound long, but that I can tell the Bush administration is a pinnacle of inefficiency caused by short-lived favoritism leading to bad appointments and quick firings so… Well, so pretty much this thread seems to have more to do with y’all wanting to suck each other off than debate any real issue. The main reason why the democrats are having such a hard time getting rid of Bush is because you’re attacking him based on his values–which are just plain Republican values so that just alienates the other half of the country. Start pointing out all the ways he mismanages everything and you’re going to make a lot more headway. But just going in saying, “He sent troops over in a war AND PEOPLE DIED!” or “He put prisoners of war in jail AND WON’T RELEASE THEM UNTIL THEY’VE BEEN SCREENED!” just makes all the republicans scratch their head and go, “…you expected something else?” You add a “more people died than would have if he could manage to find his own ass with both hands” to the first one or “They had a year to plan ahead for the war, and by their own admission once they started finding prisoners of war, ‘We just started getting all these prisoners and it was all pretty hectic so we just had to send them off to be dealt with later’–so in that full year they had never put two seconds thought into preparing a crew to take and sort prisoners–and why was everything so hectic to begin with? Was dealing with POWs that much of an alien idea in previous wars?” Etc.
But will you at least agree he should be given the equivalent of witness protection program refuge–based both upon his needless four year imprisonmengt (water under the bridge, but still) and what seems to be at least the basic potential to be a useful confidential informant, as they are called?
Maybe you read a different article than I did, but the one you linked to (and the one I read) lists him as a guy who got kicked out of his home country for doing hashish, picked up by al Qaeda and tortured until he would admit that he was there to commit Bin Laden–which he denies he was there to do.
So in most likelihood he’s a drug-addict with no country and a beef against the US. Why would anyone want him as an informant, and why would anyone believe he would remain hidden in “witness protection” and not write a book about the evils of the US so he could buy some drugs?
Anyways, I’m not particularly impressed by the topic, and I’ve no desire to defend Bush, so I’m done here. But alaric, doodums, you need to either get everything out in a single shot or not quote a single post five times to bump your own thread.
I don’t blame you for hitting the bottle after reading The Penal Colony, and it might explain the erratic leaps in your thought processes (yeah, like I’m one to criticize?).
Sexual techniques are usually posted in IMHO and MPSIMS, the “party” forums. GQ and GD are the “serious” forums. If this were Café Society, I’d tell you about a movie titled The Tin Drum…
Because he’s been accused of smoking hash you think he deserves to be deprived of his freedom?
Who guves a shit if he writes a book about the evils of the US? That is his right, it is it not? You got something against fee speech? You got something against knowing the truth?
I am still parsing Dr. Deth’s comment, and haven’t settled upon an interpretation, but I THINK his rejoinder was directed not at turkestani, nor , indeed, at any of th people metaphorically linked to Stalin–I( think he was referencing STALIN himself,and had somewhere so extavagantly cast loose of any moorings in reality that he conceived of himself as defending the bulwarks of western civilzation against some degenerate (perhaps moi) who wanted to make Stalin out to be the hero of anti fascism that he was (when he found it convenient).
(In passing, Russia DID save our collective bacon in wwii, there is no real debate about that as a military fact.)
My only point was to point out why our government wouldn’t want him in the country, wouldn’t want (or even need) to put him in witness protection, and wouldn’t want to hire him as an information source. Alaric misread the article as that the guy was some super-soldier out to kill Bin Laden, which is false.
That the reasons our government particularly don’t want him aren’t particularly admirable is true, but I can’t think of any president that–having the legal right to do so–wouldn’t try and get hot-potato subjects deported to France. But it’s not like CNN can’t follow the guy to whatever country he is dropped off in. So certainly it is an instance of Bush and Co. being slimy. But as said previously in this thread, if you hate Bush and Co. you’re going to do a lot better bringing it up as a case of mismanagement than as one of injustice.
So then the guy wasn’t picked up by our soldiers in a raid in a foreign country?