"The islamo-fascists housed at Gitmo would take your staff member and cut her head off without a moment's hesitation, unless she submitted to Islam."

Hmmm. I'm not so sure if they would refrain from cutting off a head even under THOSE circumstances.

Civilized and honorable? These guys? I don't think so!

-- R'cat

Posted by Romeocat at June 2, 2005 09:20 AM

Amnesty International is ok only when they criticise enemy regimes? I mean, gosh, how about addressing the substance of the report? One word that is not even in the report is a bit trivial it would seem, especially for an organization that is so used by the US when it sees fit.

Posted by steve at June 2, 2005 09:59 AM

There is clearly no comparison between the two. These Islamist thugs are sitting on thrones down at the Bay and most likely eating delectable and healthier meals than I am--serious! To make this hideous and disgraceful comparison exhibits their hatred towards our troops -- In fact, America.

Posted by BronxPundit at June 2, 2005 10:56 AM

Steve, no one, not AI, not the Republicans, not the Democrats are right or wrong all of the time. AI can be correct when critisizing enemy regimes and incorrect when criticising us as they are in this case. Conversly, they can be wrong criticising others and correct criticising us. But in this case, the case of calling Gitmo a "Gulag" they are dead wrong and you know it. And that was the point of my post.

Posted by GM Roper at June 2, 2005 12:43 PM

Actually GM, it's a case of Unreal Perfection as the unspoken alternative -- and all imperfections are sort of kinda like similar in being imperfect.

This is a weapon in the moral superiority war.

A few US soldiers wrongly abusing prisoners show they are not perfect, therefore the US regime is equally evil.

AI is, implicitly, supporting inaction in the face of genocide.

Posted by Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at June 3, 2005 02:11 AM

GM,

Nice job of boiling this down to a few words. The verbosity folks don't seem to have anything to say on this.

I wonder if any involved in making the gulag charge have read anything written by the former dissidents from the former Soviet Union, chief among them (in terms of writing about the Gulag), Alexandr Solzhenitsyn?

Posted by tad at June 3, 2005 08:47 AM

Of course, Tom is correct. Where was Europe in the face of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina? Many may call the introduction of US military forces as examples of imperialism, but that just illustrates personal bias or political agenda; clear thinking persons will recognize America as a Guardian of Liberty. It is the USA, after all, who demanded an end to the mass murder of a people because of their ethnicity or their religion.

AI and the ICRC, by insisting that the USA is the bad guy, actually encourages an increase in terrorism and if nothing else, shows how seriously flawed the thinking is among some Europeans. Do not be surprised to find out that AI and the ICRC are being funded nations who oppose the USA's role as a champion of the captives of terror.

Posted by Mustang at June 3, 2005 09:01 AM

there's not much one can say to the cheap tactic of not referring to what a report said to criticise the report. I'd be curious what is in the report that GM is critical of, instead of dismissing the report based on what is not in the report. only reasonable, no?

Posted by steve at June 3, 2005 02:04 PM

Steve, I wasn't referring to the report, though I am working on something to do just that. The point of my post was specific to the term gulag. Nothing more, nothing less. Not a cheap shot, but a specific target. I took aim at the word gulag and the AI for using it, for allowing it, for mis-using it and I hit the target dead center methinks.

Cheers! :-)

Posted by GMRoper at June 3, 2005 03:14 PM

Note, GITMO does not house primarily illegal combatants. You and I have no way of knowing that, aside from making a leap of faith that by now has been shown to be quite unwise. hundreds of 'illegal combatants' have been released from GITMO alone and you and I have no way at all of knowing how many of the detainees in foreign torture centers are 'illegal combatants'. We can guess some are, but it would be a leap to presume that the majority have committed any kind of crime, given the now known record of detaining all kinds of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time chosen by the wrong people as 'illegal combatants'...

Posted by steve at June 3, 2005 03:52 PM

Mustang, I'm not sure why (or if) anybody considered
the introduction of forces into Bosnia as `examples of imperialism'. Who are you talking about?

Posted by jim hitchcock at June 3, 2005 03:57 PM

AI utilizes the qualifier "of our times". The inference of "gulag" certainly elicits strong sentiment and perhaps that was their intention. But I find it a bit presumptous to advance an argument that their intention was to draw an identical comparison to the historical gulag told of by Solzhenitsyn. Many of the detainees have been released after having been characterized as having no intelligence value or having been found to have not constituted a threat. At the center of the problem is the fact that the United States, having been held up as the shining example of freedom, due process and forever in the pursuit of human rights, can set up a system whereby no due process is afforded to those whom they accuse. The fact that many have been detained who have turned out not to have been a threat exemplifies the problem with this. And furthermore, what exactly is the connection between the World Trade Center and the AI Report? The inference is certainly clear, however it is a stretch to imply that those held in Gitmo are directly responsible for the jpeg posted.

Posted by Mike Miller at June 3, 2005 05:48 PM

Actually the comparison might be wrong in that Solz at least knew the reasons for his detention! Most GITMO detainees have no clue why...

Posted by steve at June 3, 2005 07:49 PM

Good point Steve! I concur.

Posted by Mike Miller at June 4, 2005 08:37 AM

Steve writes: "Actually the comparison might be wrong in that Solz at least knew the reasons for his detention! Most GITMO detainees have no clue why..."

Steve, surely they have an idea that captured while fighting is a reason. These were not people randomly picked off of the streets of Kandahar or Baghdad. The vast majority of Gitmo prisoners are Taliban or Al Qaeda. Your evidence that they don't know is.....?

Posted by GMRoper at June 4, 2005 09:10 AM

Which ones were captured while fighting? Easily a few hundred were not. Of those, which ones were tortured? 10, 50, 100, ??? Who knows. Then who knows in the other torture centers around the world we send them to..., no?

Posted by steve at June 4, 2005 09:50 AM

"Which ones were captured while fighting?" Who knows exactly, yet you are unequivically stating that none of them know.

"Easily a few hundred were not." Your source?

"Of those, which ones were tortured? 10, 50, 100, ??? Who knows." Precisely, no one know, IF ANY, yet, AI maintians it is often enough to label Gitmo a "gulag of our times"

Bad logic my friend, bad logic. Stating something is true is not the same as it being true.

Posted by GMRoper at June 4, 2005 11:48 AM

The military will not tell us how many are innocent of any crime, but we know that at least several hundred have already been returned to their home country, plainly not terrorists [or the US would not even consider returning them of course].

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00816FD3B5E0C728CDDAB0994DB404482

And I'd note, mentioned almost in passing:
" Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early months of the war on terrorism and have been held for more than two years without hearings or access to lawyers. In many cases, they were captured by warlords and turned over to U.S. forces.

Since the camp was established in January 2002, the military has released 129 detainees and turned over 27 captives to the custody of other countries. There are currently 585 prisoners there. "

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9395797.htm

Now, what we also know is the torture camp at Abu Ghraib and other US prisons in Iraq also were used to torture mostly prisoners who had no involvement in 'terrorist' activities. THat is a basically widely acknowledged and uncontroversial fact by now.

I don't buy that the main assertion by AI is Gulag, in fact it's not even in the official report, which I believe is quite accurate in its description of practices that even the virulently pro-war Thomas Friedman now declares against the interests of empire building [if one desires empire building as a main goal of US foreign policy in the first place, I don't, but Friedman certainly does and tries very hard to find rationales for it in his prominent NYT column].

Posted by steve at June 4, 2005 01:58 PM

You know GM, I work at 120 Broadway about a block from the WTC site which I pass by every day. I'm not comfortable with things like this (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/americas/11775087.htm):

"One Guantanamo prisoner told a military panel that American troops beat him so badly he wets his pants now. Another detainee claimed U.S. troops stripped prisoners in Afghanistan and intimidated them with dogs so they would admit to militant activity.

"Tales of alleged abuse and forced confessions are among some 1,000 pages of tribunal transcripts the U.S. government released to The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit - the second batch of documents the AP has received in 10 days."

1,000 pages. Imagine that.

Posted by Randy Paul at June 4, 2005 07:13 PM

Actually, GM to give you an idea as to how cloe I work, that building with the green top that looks like it's right between the towers is where I work. It's the Equitable Building.

Posted by Randy Paul at June 4, 2005 07:29 PM

Randy, I've seen hundreds of transcripts over the years. 1000 pages is 1000 pages, it may have one allegation or 100 allegations or, just 1000 pages. Too, those in custody have, by all accounts been trained to lie about their conditions.

Have abuses occurred, sure, no doubt. Again, though, where they do occur, I hope that those responsible are punished. But as to policy, dictating abuse. Surely you aren't suggesting that?

Posted by GMRoper at June 4, 2005 08:55 PM

That's 1,000 pages thus far.

Read this, GM:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37943-2002Dec25¬Found=true

The above link concerns extraordinary rendition (aka outsourcing torture). Rendition is clearly against the Convention Against Torture. The COnvention Against Torture is the law.

"Too, those in custody have, by all accounts been trained to lie about their conditions"

Proof? Not all of those arrested are Al Qaeda operatives.

By the way, a former colleague of mine was on United Flight 175 (http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2001/09/18/pbsister.htm)

I have no doubt that she would be outraged by what the Bush administration was doing.

Posted by Randy Paul at June 4, 2005 09:03 PM

For crying out loud! The terrorists are coached...they have training manuals for how to behave under certain conditions! In their training manual it clearly states to complain about mis-treatment by your captors!

It's amazing to me that someone would say the terrorists at gitmo don't know why they're there. They were taken off the battlefield in Afghanistan, trying to kill Americans. They are so backwards, so uncivilized, that they throw their urine and excrement at passersby!

They wouldn't hesitate slitting someone's throat; that's what they were trained to do. To be whining and complaining about their mis-treatment is to jump on the Al Jazeera train.

Oh and btw, Amnesty International is a good for nothing organization; their whimpering about Saddam's mis-treatment of his people and their sorry excuses for demands for him to stop killing and torturing them just about says it all.

Steve, I see you making the rounds all over the place with this nonsense. If I ever see you making a point that is worthy of consideration I'm going to mark it on my calendar as a first.

Posted by Cao at June 4, 2005 09:27 PM

" Too, those in custody have, by all accounts been trained to lie about their conditions."

I doubt it, you presume a level of sophistication about the average prisoner that is unrealistic. Also you're presuming a level of association with groups like Al Qaeda that is also very unrealistic given what we know about how the warlords turned over people as part of a general racket to get $ from the US. The US, having few assets on the ground and even fewer people who understood the language and cultures of Afghanistan was very vulnerable to such abuse of the 'process'.

Posted by steve at June 4, 2005 09:46 PM

By the way, GM good thing you qualified it as "Gitmo prisoners". Never mind the fact that AI also mentions Camp Bucca, Camp Cropper, Bagram Air Base and Kandahar Air Base among others. Let's look at one case at Bagram:

"Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.

"Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.

"'He was a shy man, a very simple man,' his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.

"On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.

"At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.

"Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar's family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)"

So here's someone who, contrary to your assertion "was randomly picked off of the streets" of Khost in this case.

You should read the whole article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5090&en=4579413ecb14ce16&ex=1274241600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

As for their being punished, you should pin your concerns on something more than hope:

"Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were 'remarkably similar' to those used at Bagram."

That's some punishment.

A suggestion, by the way. Please allow HTML in comments.

Thanks!

Posted by Randy Paul at June 4, 2005 10:41 PM

HTML now allowed as an experiment. GM's Corner

Posted by GMRoper at June 4, 2005 10:58 PM

What's fascinating to me is how the 'liberal' media refer to that torture as *abuse*. If even 1/10th as such torture occurs to an American soldier or mercenary, it's torture and torture alone.

Posted by steve at June 5, 2005 10:08 AM