The judge in the current hearings called the case “an outrage.”
“After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government will succeed in getting him back home,” U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle told Justice Department lawyers during a court hearing Thursday. “Enough has been imposed on this young man to date.”
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is considering a plan to create a military prison inside the US to house those still held at Guantanamo.
http://www.google.com/hostedne…
Providing long-term holding cells for a small but still undetermined number of detainees who will not face trial because intelligence and counterterror officials conclude they are too dangerous to risk being freed.
How is it possible that anyone is “too dangerous” to be tried? If they are that dangerous, it should be easy to convict them of something. If they can’t be convicted, they should be sent back where they came from.
These people are not like us. They dress different and talk funny. They speak a different language so they can plot against us. They are evil and cunning.
<
p>Take this case for example. Looks like a child, but in reality – terrorist. The torturers were able to extract the truth. Not only did he confess to throwing a grenade at US soldiers, he also admitted to being an al Qaida operative and some involvement with the planning of the 911 attacks.
<
p>http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/de…
<
p>It is too dangerous to rely on you bleeding hearts to convict this mastermind of the 911 attacks. Naïve Americans might be swayed by the fact that he would have been 10 years old at the time. But this is proof, torture works.
Archie Bunker was a comic character when “All in the Family” premiered. He was funny because everybody KNEW (then) what a blowhard bozo he was. The initial formula of the show, that worked so well for so long, was that Edith, Meathead, and Gloria would articulate reasoned, defensible, and well-thought arguments on various issues, and Archie would respond with some racist, sexist, ignorant flame. He was sure he was right, and we in the audience laughed uproariously at his narrow-minded ignorance.
<
p>Those shows are remarkably and painfully not funny today — because a cast of media and political characters play the Archie role seriously — see Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, John Inhofe, etc. When I watched the premier episode last week, I realized that it was acutely painful and not at all funny. Archie is not a comic caricature, he is instead a prototype for the twenty-first century Republican.
<
p>I appreciate the irony in your response. Sadly, there are a huge number of people — and voters — who actually feel exactly the way you’ve so successfully skewered. Good post, Sue, even though its irony is wincingly painful.
Coming from Sue Kennedy I know she’s laying the irony on pretty thick, but if MCRD or JohnD had written the same thing, my outrage meter would be off the charts right now.
I just remember the public outrage when 18 year old American, Michael Fay, was sentenced to 4 stokes of a cane and 4 months in jail after his conviction in Singapore. Americans and public officials decried how he would be mentally scarred for life. It was understood that Americans valued human rights because we were more civilized.
<
p>Where’s the outrage for the children being abused in American custody?
I’m with you all the way.
<
p>I want to build on your point. EVERY person is somebody’s child. When we abuse anyone, we abuse somebody’s child. I can’t imagine it would hurt me any less for my daughter to be abused now, at 25, then when she was a teen. EVERY life is precious.
<
p>The double-standard you suggest goes deeper. As terrible a tragedy as 9/11 was, the American response to it has been (in my opinion) disproportionate. Americans have the child-like idea that a building full of people being destroyed in New York is a violation of some sort of universal order. We express no such reaction to the buildings we bomb in Baghdad.
<
p>Was our murder of Moammar Khadafy’s infant daughter any less reprehensible than any US casualty in our “war on terror”? Was that 15-month-old infant “responsible” in any way that makes her death at US hands defensible? Was our destruction of Dresden, a civilian target with no military significance, anything but a terrorist act?
<
p>I am married to a European (German). Americans seem to love the “stirring” sight of military jets screaming over a crowd at low altitude — we do it every Fourth of July and at the occasional Red Sox game. My wife is a product of a culture that associates death, destruction, and abject terror with the sight and sound of low-flying military aircraft. Her siblings, parents, and grandparents ran for and huddled in bomb shelters in response military aircraft.
<
p>I fear that war, for Americans, is something that happens somewhere else, kills some other nation’s children, destroys the fabric of somebody else’s life. I fear that we have lost our ability to empathize with the innocent victims that war always creates.
<
p>I am outraged by torture done in my name by elected officials of my country. I am outraged that those criminals still walk free. I really mean the “5” I gave your post.
…except for your use of the term “murder” and other implications that we targeted innocents. I was 8 when this happened an am in no position to debate the merits, but I do vaguely remember when this happened and that it came on the heals of terrorism tied to Libya. If we were correct about the nature of our targets then I don’t know why a 15-month old was present, but we did not deliberately target her for execution so the term murder, at least as I understand the term, does not apply.
The “mission” was deliberate. His residence was specifically targeted by precision bombing, in the dead of night. The presence of his family was specifically known to US intelligence. The attack was personally ordered by Ronald Reagan. I was 34 when this happened, and I do remember it vividly.
<
p>The un-premeditated killing of a victim, resulting from an assault where the death of a victim is a distinct possibility known to the perpetrator, is second-degree murder.
<
p>Second-degree murder is still murder. The excuse that the US attack was retaliation for heinous Libyan crimes is just that — an excuse.
I linked to the article at the word “murder” in your previous comment, which is all I had to go on for the purposes of this discussion. In at least two different places it refers to terrorist bases and military targets. The bombing that resulted in his daughter’s death is identified by the article as Qaddafi’s headquarters, not his residence.
<
p>I’m concerned that you almost seem to be advocating that we never hit back when we are hit and I can’t agree with that. We should of course be very deliberate in choosing our targets and try to spare innocent lives, but retaliation to me is legitimate, not an excuse. The trick is to go after the right country (like Afghanistan rather than Iraq with regards to 9/11). If our adversaries force innocents into dangerous places to be used as human shields so they can claim a propaganda advantage I say too bad. Their blood will be on their hands, not ours.
There is no “right country” for the 911 perpetrators. It was a crime, not an act of war. The 911 perpetrators were overwhelmingly Saudi. Afghanistan is a much more convenient villain than Saudi Arabia — we don’t need Afghan oil, we don’t prop up Afghan tyrants.
<
p>A man, even a leader, having his family sleep with him is hardly an example of forcing innocents into a dangerous place. In this case, his headquarters was also his residence. We knew that.
<
p>You argue that “retaliation is legitimate”. Do you accept the same premise from those who view us as Satan incarnate? Rightly or wrongly, the sympathizers of AQ make the same argument in defense of their terrorist attacks against us.
<
p>The cycle of terrorist violence will only stop when the participants stop. As difficult as it always is to internalize, it is always easier for us to change our behavior than to change someone else’s.
<
p>Palestinians will continue terror attacks “in retaliation” for Israeli terror attacks so long as Israelis continue terror attacks “in retaliation” for Palestinian terror attacks. AQ will continue terror attacks against US interests for as long as the US continues terror attacks against AQ interests.
<
p>This is why “war” is such a colossally wrong metaphor for stopping terror. Terrorism is a disease, not a war. Terror is a tactic, not a war. Terrorism is not only a disease, it is an auto-immune disorder. AQ uses our own fear and insecurity to provoke us to continually escalate the “war on terror” — bankrupting ourselves and destroying the free society that makes us their adversary. They succeeded admirably during the Bush administration, they played Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney like puppets on a string.
<
p>When we retaliate against terror, we only exacerbate the disease, like scratching a mosquito bite to stop the itch. Yes, we should take steps to eradicate the mosquitoes. No, we should not scratch the itch — no matter how tempting our passion for revenge.
I’m not interested in the country of origin of those who attacked us on 9/11. I’m interested in the country that had given AQ safe harbor. That was Afghanistan, not Saudi Arabia and, I think we all agree, not Iraq. Not hitting back is a weakness and I do not accept your implication of moral equivalency. Simply calling it a crime doesn’t get us anywhere. The perpetrators themselves died on 9/11 leaving nobody to prosecute. After the embassy bombings in Africa, and the USS Cole, an all-out attack on Afghanistan was not only justified, but long overdue in my opinion. We’re not perfect by any means, but we were absolutely justified in this case. Yes, killing 3000 people going about their jobs is an act of war. We did absolutely nothing to deserve that. AQ’s beef is that we’re a presence in Saudi Arabia, but apparently they either didn’t get or choose to disregard the memo that says we’re there with the permission of the Saudi government.
There’s that Bin Laden guy. Bush lost interest in him when he decided the time was ripe to invade Iraq – if he ever had any interest in him in the first place. If there’s some renewed interest in catching him, we haven’t been made aware of it. He was the mastermind, wasn’t he?
My understanding is that Osama was thought to have been in Afghanistan, under the active protection of the Taliban regime. This was our key reason to go in (at least in my own mind). For me the strongest reason to oppose going into Iraq when we did is precisely so we could focus all our attention and energy on Afghanistan, thus increasing our chances of getting bin Laden.
I think we all agree that Osama Bin Laden is the appropriate person to hold responsible for 911. The way that you treat something like a crime is to arrest, prosecute, and (if convicted) punish the perpetrator.
<
p>You wrote “Simply calling it a crime doesn’t get us anywhere”, yet you seem to agree that the capture, prosecution, and (if convicted) punishment of Osama Bin Laden is what we should have pursued.
<
p>It sounds to me as if you are therefore saying we should treat 911 as a crime, in contradiction with your earlier statement that such an approach wouldn’t get us anywhere.
<
p>Harboring an accused criminal is itself a crime. Had the US maintained a laser-tight focus on capturing Osama Bin Laden — including taking necessary steps against a government (or quasi-government) attempting to hide him — then we would have avoided most of what has blown up in our faces after the foolishly inept response of the prior administration.
<
p>In arguing that “an all-out attack on Afghanistan was not only justified, but long overdue in my opinion”, you assert a moral justification to kill civilians because of the actions of their government. Isn’t that the same moral justification claimed by AQ against the victims of 911?
<
p>You entire line of argument here — particularly when you say “Not hitting back is a weakness” — flies in the face of the Christian doctrine you often site as your own moral authority.
<
p>To sum up, had we treated 911 as a criminal act, we would have been more successful at bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives would have been saved, and we would not be having this argument. Instead, because the prior administration pursued the same fundamentally-flawed logic that you advocate, we are mired in two wars while squirming to avoid the logical and moral consequences (including, by the way, the abuse and torture at GITMO and AG) of that flawed reasoning.
Sorry if I’m not making myself clear. I believe that we had dual justification to go into Afghanistan – in particular to smoke out and capture Osama and in general to overthrow the Taliban. I actually completely agree with this pargraph:
<
p>”Harboring an accused criminal is itself a crime. Had the US maintained a laser-tight focus on capturing Osama Bin Laden — including taking necessary steps against a government (or quasi-government) attempting to hide him — then we would have avoided most of what has blown up in our faces after the foolishly inept response of the prior administration.”
<
p>I just think that the use of force was part of the necessary action, but like I said, my position WAS to maintain a focus on Afghanistan. Maybe my all-out attack line was hyped rhetoric, but it was not intended as condoning the targeting of civilians. We don’t need to carpet-bomb Kabul, but we do need do dismantle the regime beyond doing only what is absolutely necessary to get Osama himself.
<
p>Finally, please don’t ascribe views to me I don’t have. I absolutely do NOT support the abuses which have occured in our name at places like Gitmo. War is hell, no question, but I tend to think there are times when overwhelming force (Dresden, D-Day, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki come to mind) is the best way to make it abundantly clear that some things will not be tolerated. Of course we’re allies with both Germany and Japan now because our postwar leaders also knew how to handle the aftermath. As for my Christian values, I try to live my own life that way, but I believe nations have a right (and a duty to their citizens) for self-defense.
You wrote:
<
p>You then followed that with this:
<
p>I highlighted Dresden because it had NO military significance. It was firebombed specifically in order to terrorize the German civilian population (“break the enemy’s will to fight” and all that).
<
p>My point is that once you frame this as a “war”, then the rest follows. The “war is hell” argument is a useless self-serving excuse. Once we adopted the war metaphor, then “enemy combatants” follow. Once we dehumanize them into “evil terrorist monsters”, then its perfectly acceptable to torture, abuse, and murder them — after all, look what “they” did to Daniel Pearl, and all that. Their detention must, of course, be “for the duration of hostilities” — in this case, all eternity, according to our former president. That’s because there was no enemy to either accept surrender from or, for that matter, offer surrender to.
<
p>Whatever right or duty you give ourselves, you must be willing to simultaneously offer our “enemy” — you would advocate Afghanistan (for the time being). Who should we have gone to “war” with in retaliation for the Oklahoma City bombing?
<
p>This isn’t a war, Christopher. Nobody argues against a right to self-defense (except perhaps if you offer an argument that the Taliban should not resist our attempt to unseat them). The appropriate self-defense against 911 was to capture and prosecute the criminals who perpetrated it. Since most of them died in the in act, OBL was about all we had left.
<
p>I submit that the real motivation is revenge, not self-defense. Now that we know who he is, do you seriously think he is a threat to US? We were just discussing Moammar Khadafy — he was surely an evil terrorist in 1986, yet he was suddenly a good-guy when it suited the prior administration’s agenda. Was the bombing of his home “self-defense”, or just plain old revenge?
<
p>Sorry, I reject your entire line of reasoning. If and when a nation launches an attack on the US — Pearl Harbor being the classic example — then self-defense is a sound reason to go to war in response.
<
p>That is most emphatically not what happened in 2001, and that is why we are so fu**ed up eight years later.
This line especially:
<
p>”If and when a nation launches an attack on the US — Pearl Harbor being the classic example — then self-defense is a sound reason to go to war in response.”
<
p>As far as I’m concerned, Pearl Harbor is EXACTLY what happened on 9/11! Yes, they commendered 4 of our own commercial jets rather than use a legitimate Air Force with Afghan flags nicely painted on the wings, but that’s a distinction without a difference. More people died in the 9/11 attacks than at Pearl Harbor (3000 vs. 2400) and yes, I would absolutely categorize it as an act of war. Oklahoma City was entirely domestic in nature so of course there was nobody to go to war with. If we had discovered the McVeigh and Nichols were acting as agents of a foreign government and said government was supplying them, training them, etc, that would be another story.
<
p>”Now that we know who he is, do you seriously think he is a threat to US?”
<
p>Are you refering to Osama bin Laden? If so the answer is of course I still consider him a threat. If we ever do manage to get him there will be successors waiting to plan the next. As for Qaddafi, he isn’t stupid; he felt our wrath once and I’m sure isn’t keen on a repeat. In that regard one might argue that what we did “worked” in terms of dociling him. I appreciate that there are moral objections to the bombings I cited, but we have to weigh whether good will ultimately come of it. Counterfactuals and hypotheticals are impossible to argue, but I know Truman claimed for example, that forcing the end to WWII with the two Japanese bombings ultimately SAVED lives on both sides.
<
p>Finally, please stop the slippery slope arguments such as this:
<
p>”Once we adopted the war metaphor, then “enemy combatants” follow. Once we dehumanize them into “evil terrorist monsters”, then its perfectly acceptable to torture, abuse, and murder them — after all, look what “they” did to Daniel Pearl, and all that. Their detention must, of course, be “for the duration of hostilities”.
<
p>This absolutely does not reflect my views. Anybody we capture should be allowed to challenge his detention, certainly should not be abused or tortured, and meanwhile be treated as a POW in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
to you views that aren’t yours, I have to ask if you really don’t believe in self-determination. Because it sounds like you don’t when you say this:
My own belief is that other countries have the right to set up whatever screwy system of government they want. By ‘they’ I mean whatever portion of their residents is sufficiently motivated. That means it isn’t our business to prevent Ho Chi Minh being elected leader of Vietnam, it isn’t our business to install the Shah in Iran, and it certainly isn’t our business to overthrow the government of Afghanistan. Not to mention Saddam Hussein, either coming or going, or any number of Banana Republicans.
<
p>You say war is hell, but I doubt that you have any real appreciation for the full meaning of that expression. It’s not just a hardship for those who live in a war zone; it’s a disaster of Biblical proportions. Bush’s greatest crime was to casually wage war on people who had done nothing to us. He did it twice.
I don’t recall that it was; I thought it was some warlords that just decided to take over. Yes, in general I believe as the nation that once declared to the world that it was mankind’s right and duty to set up a government of their own making we should not overthrow democratically-elected governments as we have in Iran and Chile inter alia. There are absolutely justifications if said government starts being a menace to the rest of the world. So electing Minh President of North Vietnam – tolerable; his invasion of South Vietnam – not tolerable. As for Saddam, I mostly object to the timing; I’m among those who wish we had pushed to Baghdad in 1991 so he wouldn’t continue to be a thorn in our side for the next decade. I think Hitler of all people has a lot to teach us here. That is once you start invading your neighbors the world has to push back. Neville Chamberlain tried the pacifist route and got Europe exactly nowhere. Speaking of Hitler, I would also say that even if he never invaded a neighboring country, but imposed his “Final Solution” just within the Weimar Republic, humanitarian outrage would cry out for intervention, political boundaries notwithstanding.
Vietnam did not happen the way you think it did.
Ho Chi Minh would have won an election in the South, if we had allowed one to be held; that’s why we didn’t. Look up the 1954 Geneva Peace Accords. The South was an artificial construct, and intended to be a temporary one. We attempted to make it permanent.
<
p>Afghanistan was not becoming a menace to the world. That its government was not democratically elected is not especially relevant. We do not have divine right to say whose government is blessed and shall endure, and whose is damned and shall be cast down. It is exceedingly arrogant to talk as if we do.
Giving aid and comfort to the likes of Al-Qaeda is the definition of a menace if you ask me.
<
p>It appears there were shenanigans on our part (surprise, surprise) with regard to Vietnam, though to be fair there was blame to go around and we didn’t even sign the Accords you refer to. Obviously this was not unprecedented. We partitioned Korea and Germany with Communists as well. I have plenty of criticism for our foreign policy of that era, but it does fit the pattern and context of the time. Yes, we should have “allowed” (as if it’s our place to do so) elections.
Of course it’s our place to do so, since to do so would have meant butting the fuck out of their peaceful transition to a self-determined government. We didn’t sign the Geneva Accords because we had no intention of allowing their implementation – especially not those articles that provided for self-determination. Thank you for characterizing as “shenanigans” the actions of my government, which resulted in the deaths of almost 60,000 young Americans, the wounding of 300,000 others, and the deaths of as many as 2 million Vietnamese.
<
p>Your attitude toward interference in other countries’ affairs enables the warmongers, even if you aren’t one yourself.
I think we agree on this point more than you’re making it sound like. I put “allowed” in quotes precisely because to me it’s so obvious that a sovereign nation should have elections and by right does not need our permission. It is arrogant of us to think that we should have any say or that we’re in a position to grant permission that is not ours to grant. As Ecclesiastes might say, there is a time to interfere and a time to not, but we should always start with the default position of recognizing governments that result from free and fair elections, even if we don’t like their policies.
We should also allow other peoples to choose their own governments, without trying to bully them into choosing ones we approve of. We did not do that in Vietnam; we subverted the agreement that France and the Viet Minh had reached.
<
p>Notice that I did not say we should allow other peoples to choose their own democratically-elected governments. We should do that, of course, but if they choose to set up a theocratic dictatorship, we should not try to thwart them. If their government starts attacking other states, it should be restrained, but that’s true whether it’s a dictatorship or a representative democracy.
<
p>Afghanistan did not attack the US. A small group of extremists did, not a country or even its government. Our response punished the entire population of the country, most of whom were entirely innocent of any part of the crime those extremists committed. To the 3000 dead US citizens of 9-11 we have added more than twice that number of dead Afghan civilians. Have we made anything right by doing so?
…with all except the last paragraph. It is clear to me that the “government” (I’m not sure the Taliban was recognized but that’s what it was for all intents and purposes.) approved and sanctioned the attack. If not they should have done everything in their power to track down and hand over bin Laden and they didn’t. We have given Afghanistan a freer government in the process (albeit with more work to be done), so yes I would argue that we’ve made something right. I would also go a little further than restraint if a government attacks neighbors. I would push back AND depose, otherwise we risk them doing it again. I don’t mind if the people elect a theocrat, communist, etc, but a free and fair election is the only way we can be sure it really was the choice of the people.
There’s that Bin Laden guy. Bush lost interest in him when he decided the time was ripe to invade Iraq – if he ever had any interest in him in the first place. If there’s some renewed interest in catching him, we haven’t been made aware of it. He was the mastermind, wasn’t he?
Until Eric Holder appoints a special prosecutor to look at the torture policies (and other War Crimes) of the Bush administration (and the Obama administration??), until we fully investigate and prosecute those who ordered the torture, those who aided the torture, and those who physically carried out the torture, then I’m afraid we’re all complicit in these crimes. “That” is who we were, who we are, and who we will continue to be- unless we say unequivocally that torture is wrong and a crime. Lost amid Gatesgate last week was a story in Newsweek saying that, finally, it appeared that Holder was “leaning toward” actually doing something about these crimes. I hope Holder does the right thing, despite Obama’s “let bygones be bygones” b.s.