Wednesday, December 07, 2005

 

Dowd: Condi tortures the language

I reckon we CAN blame Bubba for this. He dared speak the truth: It does depend on what your definition of "is" is.

Amazing that the same people who condemned Clinton for parsing the language to hide a peccadillo that shamed mostly just himself cheer the same when used to obfuscate a truth that shames us all.

Dowd buried her lead, though:

When Rice was a Stanford professor, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of willfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip.

Read all about it, via the Times of India, of all places.

--ER

Comments:
If anyone is being tortured in those prisons, it is the Enemies of America being tortured in order to protect Americans.

It don't bother me too much if an Enemy Combatant, captured on the feild of battle, gets walked around the compound on a leash, or has the A/C turned down a little too cool to suit him.

If you can prove that we have started sawing off people's heads, then maybe I can join you in your outrage.
 
In point of fact several detainees have died under torture in Afganistan and Iraq and homicide investigations are on going.
But that is not the biggest danger.
The danger is, that those who do the torture damage themselves as much as, or more than, the ones they torture. If this happens because someone makes a mistake or gets out of control it is unfortunate. If it happens as a matter of military or government policy, then we have a policy that not only hurts those we torture but destroys those that we have doing the torture, and those individuals are our own children.
If it is POLICY, then we are saying to our 19 year old men and women, go and behave this way even though we know that it is not a worth while acivity and yeilds no results and doing it will destroy your soul when you do it.
How then can we let our leaders destroy our own because they, the leaders, are misguided and/or stupid about what this really is and really does?
It is one thing to kill and die in battle. It is a whole nother thing to debase ones self by debasing another human being.
When you do that, there is not enough years left in anyones life no matter how long they may live, that they can ever recover from such an act.
 
Point of fact? Where's the evidence? Where's the proof? Maureen Dowd's word? Please! She's the biggest Bush hater on the planet. I'd believe Aliens from Mars and Venus are her parents before I'd believe anything she says, especially about any Republican. Why is Maureen Dowd and the New York Times the only sources?

And the New York Times? After they have had how many false stories printed in their pages? Come on, show us proof.

And I mean real proof. From CREDIBLE sources.
 
I'm staying away. I'm staying away. I'm staying away. Oh but the fun I could have with that.

Sheesh!
 
Mark, I went to Fox.com to see if a credible source had reorted the deaths as well. Here is a report about 27 detainees killed while in custody. I'll grant you that Fox did not have many stories like this, and those that they had were mainly about how the soilders were acquited of the charges rather than about the act themselves.
But Mark, you only reacted to the first sentence in my post. Did not the rest of it interest you at all?

Here's the Fox News item:

Army Won't Prosecute for Detainee Deaths
Saturday, March 26, 2005
AP WASHINGTON — Army officials have decided not to prosecute 17 soldiers involved in the deaths of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a military report says.

Military investigators recommended courts-martial for the soldiers in the cases of three prisoner deaths for charges ranging from making false statements to murder. Officers rejected those recommendations, ruling that the soldiers lawfully used force or didn't understand the rules for using force, or that there was not enough evidence to prosecute.

Eleven U.S. Army soldiers are facing murder or other charges involving the deaths of detainees in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army Criminal Investigation Command (search) released a report Friday detailing the cases of 27 detainees killed in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan between August 2002 and November 2004.

Twenty-four cases encompassed the 27 deaths; 16 investigations have been closed and eight remain open, according to the Army report released Friday. Five cases were referred to other agencies, including deaths involving Navy and Marine troops and CIA operatives.

"We take each and every death very seriously and are committed and sworn to investigating each case with the utmost professionalism and thoroughness," said Chris Grey, a spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command.
 
It’s about time you got off your ass and quit talking about cats, dogs, and snow. I knew you would go into hiding last week when all the good economic news started to come out. Eleven straight quarters of strong GDP, 215,000 jobs created in November, four million the last four years, and interest rates so low you can’t help but buy, buy, buy. I’m glad somebody finally failed to structure his or her sentence to suit you so you’d have something to bitch about.
 
There are lots of reasons not to torture, and it's disgusting, frankly, for self-proclaimed Christians to justify torture in any way. Jesus was an enemy of the Roman state, remember?

The reasons:

1. Doing away with the Geneva conventions means that there is no reason for our soldiers to be treated well in captivity. We've pre-emptively thrown out our leverage. Nice job, and any soldier worth his salt is going to be worried and pissed off about it.

2. Torture doesn't work. Most people being tortured will say *anything*, and then you have the problem of sifting the needle of truth in the haystack of bullshit.

3. The way that torture *does* work is that it terrorizes a population into keeping its head low and its mouth shut, lest anything they do or say might be reason for being picked up and tortured. This method of stifling political dissent is incompatible with democratic principles, and I'll remind you all that it is also, supposedly, our main objection to the Saddam Hussein regime. If we think torture is a valid political tool, then why didn't we just leave Saddam in place? After all, Iraq was stable, it posed no threat to us, and it was a secular state. Now it is unstable, a breeding ground for anti-Americanism and Islamic theocracy.
 
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