In all the publicity over former VP "Dick" Cheney and his daughter making the rounds of television programs to talk about how limited the use of "harsh interrogation techniques" was... here comes a fairly articulate former detainee to make a liar out of Cheney. No, they never waterboarded this guy, but they seem to have come up with an entire host of interesting "techniques" designed to wear down detainees and make them sing like songbirds, parroting the words fed to them by their captors. As I heard this guy talk I vaguely remembered the story of six or eight men being arrested in Bosnia who were planning to blow up an American embassy. And then the story died and was never mentioned again and here is an explanation as to why.
Think for a minute if a group of American Red Cross employees had been in Iraq or Morocco and had been falsely charged with some dastardly plan, then exonerated, and another government, oh, let's call it Russia or China for example, had kidnapped them in front of their families as they were being released from prison, rushed them to an airport and flew them to a desert Gulag for them to be tortured and mistreated for more than seven years.
What would we think of a nation that did that? Stop and think of the current uproar over North Korea snatching two American journalists (both employed by a company that Al Gore runs incidentally) and sentencing them to twelve years of hard labor. Oh, the infamy! But in regard to the beam in our own eye (to throw in a Biblical allusion) we say nothing, or we try to dismiss, marginalize, shelve and forget what our nation has done. With regard to Guantanamo Bay we have already released hundreds and hundreds of detainess, pretty much just saying "Oops, so sorry, my bad" and now the courts are forcing us to release people like this, who seem to also have been imprisoned and mistreated for no reason. It raises the question; what was the purpose of the Guantanamo facility? Was it a vast research center, designed to study how to break the will of prisoners? Using as their raw material a large group of people arrested at random? If that sounds like the sort of thing that Stalin or the Communist Chinese did and still do, you are right. Maybe it should have been called Gulag Bay. Let's call it what it was. It was a Concentration Camp, into which marginalized and suspect individuals could be thrown based on false and baseless accusations. In Afghanistan it is said that there was a $20,000 or $30,000 bounty paid for "bad guys". In a lawless culture rag-tag militias used the program as a revenue source, settling personal scores by selling individuals to the US in order to earn blood money. Our armed forces, given conflicting guidance and pressure from above, pretty much ran wild, like drunks on a Spring Break from Hell. Things like this happen in every war, but this became an institutionalized form of stupidity. And we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.
I remain puzzled by the caution of the Obama administration. I kind of THINK that the reason is that raising the issue will not bring back the dead or heal the abused and their hope is to be able to tackle some massive issues, get them in place, and then come back and make this right. Maybe that is politically smart, but in the meantime I applaud those who are hammering away at our government to force accountability. We need transparency, we need a national discussion of what was done in our names, in the end we will need some form of accountability, though what form that will take is not clear to me. I can only tell you this, no more Medals of Freedom please.
And understand this; what we did as a nation pales beside the horrors of everyday life inside China and many other nations. All one needs to do in China is put a foot wrong and you disappear, sometimes to never be seen again. No one knows how many people there are in Chinese prison camps, but some estimates are as high as 16 to 20 million. Given the size of the areas in China reserved for such "camps", and the great secrecy under which they operate, a high figure like that is possible. Another issue in China is the "harvesting" or human organs for sale to visiting "transplant tourists" by timing executions to their travel schedule. Thrifty, thrifty, thrifty. China has put on nice clothes and some lipstick, but underneath the governing elite are still pigs. But is that the point? That we are less dreadful than Communist China? Wow, what an honor! No, it is time to take back the soul of our country. The world expects no less of us and in fact yearns to have our country to admire once more. Our good name, among nations, was one of our most powerful diplomatic tools. Instead of leading a race to infamy, I for one will be glad when our country gets back on track and takes up in earnest the battle for the welfare of our people, and those of other nations. It is not a zero-sum game. Others do not have to lose for us to win. We probably do need to step up our efforts to control world population, but that is another discussion. And I wish that Right to Lifers would consider the concept of Right to a Decent Quality of Life. Much of the world lives in abject squalor, where human life is in some cases worth less than the life of a cow. If we are all part of the same vast human family, some of our cousins are in trouble. If you were an epidemic, looking for someplace to get a start, where would you begin? In Manhattan, or in the middle of a festering slum in Brazil?
Think for a minute if a group of American Red Cross employees had been in Iraq or Morocco and had been falsely charged with some dastardly plan, then exonerated, and another government, oh, let's call it Russia or China for example, had kidnapped them in front of their families as they were being released from prison, rushed them to an airport and flew them to a desert Gulag for them to be tortured and mistreated for more than seven years.
What would we think of a nation that did that? Stop and think of the current uproar over North Korea snatching two American journalists (both employed by a company that Al Gore runs incidentally) and sentencing them to twelve years of hard labor. Oh, the infamy! But in regard to the beam in our own eye (to throw in a Biblical allusion) we say nothing, or we try to dismiss, marginalize, shelve and forget what our nation has done. With regard to Guantanamo Bay we have already released hundreds and hundreds of detainess, pretty much just saying "Oops, so sorry, my bad" and now the courts are forcing us to release people like this, who seem to also have been imprisoned and mistreated for no reason. It raises the question; what was the purpose of the Guantanamo facility? Was it a vast research center, designed to study how to break the will of prisoners? Using as their raw material a large group of people arrested at random? If that sounds like the sort of thing that Stalin or the Communist Chinese did and still do, you are right. Maybe it should have been called Gulag Bay. Let's call it what it was. It was a Concentration Camp, into which marginalized and suspect individuals could be thrown based on false and baseless accusations. In Afghanistan it is said that there was a $20,000 or $30,000 bounty paid for "bad guys". In a lawless culture rag-tag militias used the program as a revenue source, settling personal scores by selling individuals to the US in order to earn blood money. Our armed forces, given conflicting guidance and pressure from above, pretty much ran wild, like drunks on a Spring Break from Hell. Things like this happen in every war, but this became an institutionalized form of stupidity. And we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.
I remain puzzled by the caution of the Obama administration. I kind of THINK that the reason is that raising the issue will not bring back the dead or heal the abused and their hope is to be able to tackle some massive issues, get them in place, and then come back and make this right. Maybe that is politically smart, but in the meantime I applaud those who are hammering away at our government to force accountability. We need transparency, we need a national discussion of what was done in our names, in the end we will need some form of accountability, though what form that will take is not clear to me. I can only tell you this, no more Medals of Freedom please.
And understand this; what we did as a nation pales beside the horrors of everyday life inside China and many other nations. All one needs to do in China is put a foot wrong and you disappear, sometimes to never be seen again. No one knows how many people there are in Chinese prison camps, but some estimates are as high as 16 to 20 million. Given the size of the areas in China reserved for such "camps", and the great secrecy under which they operate, a high figure like that is possible. Another issue in China is the "harvesting" or human organs for sale to visiting "transplant tourists" by timing executions to their travel schedule. Thrifty, thrifty, thrifty. China has put on nice clothes and some lipstick, but underneath the governing elite are still pigs. But is that the point? That we are less dreadful than Communist China? Wow, what an honor! No, it is time to take back the soul of our country. The world expects no less of us and in fact yearns to have our country to admire once more. Our good name, among nations, was one of our most powerful diplomatic tools. Instead of leading a race to infamy, I for one will be glad when our country gets back on track and takes up in earnest the battle for the welfare of our people, and those of other nations. It is not a zero-sum game. Others do not have to lose for us to win. We probably do need to step up our efforts to control world population, but that is another discussion. And I wish that Right to Lifers would consider the concept of Right to a Decent Quality of Life. Much of the world lives in abject squalor, where human life is in some cases worth less than the life of a cow. If we are all part of the same vast human family, some of our cousins are in trouble. If you were an epidemic, looking for someplace to get a start, where would you begin? In Manhattan, or in the middle of a festering slum in Brazil?
Arthur
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