Saw Hannity and Colms last night for a few minutes--they were talking about the debate. Their guest was Tom DeLay. Is it a requirement of Fox news that to be a guest commentator you have to be charged with or convicted of a crime? Tom DeLay, G. Gordon Liddy, Ollie North....
Posted by CG at November 30, 2007 05:16 AMMary, think, for a minute, what our nation has come to in the last 7 years. We are now at a point where our Presidential candidates argue over a topic that has been defined and accepted since WWII...the Geneva Conventions. It took Bush and Gonzales to place America in opposition to these rules of humanity, and now deciding if centuries old torture techniques are really torture is what our candidates must debate. A sad state indeed.
Posted by T2 at November 30, 2007 06:19 AMTorture is "something Americans do not do?????!
Are you SERIOUS?! Do you people honestly believe that this is the first administration that has used torture without a blink of regret? Get real, please. The only difference between the Bush administration and its predecessors, Democrat as well as Republican, is the brazenly open way in which it does these things, and then lies about it - oh yes, and it got caught big time.
There is so much information easily available about the United States rich and lengthy history in regard to torture. It is shocking that progressive Americans do not know about it.
Please learn something about the history of the United States' use of torture. You can begin by reading "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror", Alfred McCoy, Metropolitan Books, and "Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture" by Jennifer Harbury, Beacon Press.
Posted by Shirin at November 30, 2007 06:46 AM"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Robert H. Jackson, Chief American Prosecutor
International Military Tribunal, Nurenberg, Germany, 1945-46
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_against_peace
Military aggression, human rights abuse and torture are the instruments of the cowardly, incompetent and intellectually lazy, signature characteristics of the corporate tools posing as statesmen and women in our security elite. A bipartisan elite, it loves and understands only money, power and force.
Posted by Pvt. Keepout at November 30, 2007 07:12 AMShirin I agree that we have done it but the military does not condone torture nor should they. If you want your guys treated humanely you just don't do it.
Posted by JohnT at November 30, 2007 07:16 AMJohnT, come on, please! What depth of hypocrisy does it require to declare self-righteously that you do not condone torture while using it as a standard tool? This is no more than cynical propagandistic sloganeering on the part of the military.
Or do you really believe that your military has never tortured prior to the current evil regime? We are talking here about an organization that exists for the purpose of killing people in large numbers and wreaking massive destruction...an organization that blithely and with conviction of the rightness of their actions, flattens entire towns and cities, killing families in their homes, and destroying homes, businesses, animals, infrastructure, history, and life with equal unconcern, if not at times glee (we have all seen the videos)...an organization that expects us to weep and beat our breast over the pain of the returning "heroes" who purvey of such death and destruction while shrugging away the permanent consequences of their actions, the death and despair they create, the lives they destroy forever, the destitute homeless men, women, children, infants, and elderly they create with their toys of mass destruction - not to mention the millions they leave behind afflicted with something far worse than mere PTSD...an organization, that uses well-studied techniques to systematically erase in nice, ordinary young men and women, the human abhorrence of killing fellow humans, deliberately turning turning nice youth, just out of adolescence into willing mass killers, and permanently warping the humanity of these otherwise decent Americans.
Do you really, honestly believe that such an organization would be squeamish about using torture?
Posted by Shirin at November 30, 2007 07:41 AMWe cannot forget the terrible consequnece that Depleted Uranium (DU) contamination will play on the generations of Iraqi's to come.
That was a little ignored fact when illegaly bombing the Iraqi's into submission and quietly remains so.
If any future U.S. administration were to admit the contamination they will have to also acknowledge Veterans who suffer from the many illnesses associated with DU.
Besides Iraqi reparations, I can't imagine the price of that "Butcher's Bill"!
Posted by Seven of Six at November 30, 2007 10:11 AMOf course, George the First made heavy use of DU in 1991 in southern Iraq, and his little boy completed the job by spreading it from one end of the country to the other. Oh - and the saintly Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton also did his part.
And all this in the name of liberation, too! More like the liberation of the grave.
Posted by Shirin at November 30, 2007 10:55 AMShirin: "Do you people honestly believe that this is the first administration that has used torture without a blink of regret? Get real, please. The only difference between the Bush administration and its predecessors, Democrat as well as Republican, is the brazenly open way in which it does these things, and then lies about it - oh yes, and it got caught big time."
b-b-but America is "exceptional"! Long past time to close most of our overseas military bases and take care of Americans here at home.
Posted by Gay Veteran at November 30, 2007 11:06 AM"Long past time to close most of our overseas military bases and take care of Americans here at home."
Indeed, but how likely is that now that Bush and Iraqi make-believe prime minister Maliki have (unconstitutionally under BOTH countries' constitutions) agreed to a permanent - excuse me, "long term" - American military presence in Iraq?
Posted by Shirin at November 30, 2007 11:09 AM