[Vision2020] Big Brother

[Andreas Schou]

On 10/20/05, Pat Kraut <pkraut at moscow.com> wrote:
>
> If the bad guys are allowed to do anything and we tie the hands of our
> military and police what do we gain? A righteous attitude? We could take
> that righteous attitude into a jail cell or worse. No one lost a hand in
> the
> 'torture' it was more like a fraternity/animal house thing.


Hey guys, remember the wacky scene in Animal House where James Belushi is
sodomized with a glowstick? I laughed 'til I *burst*. Or the scene where
they chain Dean Wormer to the floor in the 120+ degree boiler room for three
days without food or water until he urinates all over himself and tears out
his hair? Or the scene where Flounder urinates on a Bible? I was in
stitches.

You are the same kind of lunatic as a Holocaust denier.

You simultaneously claim that torture is okay, but that we'd never, ever do
it! We did it. We authorized it at the highest levels of the Pentagon, and
we passed it down through Janice Karpinsky and Geoffrey Miller, and we got
caught. Worse, we tortured people pretty much at random: at Guantanamo,
cannon fodder destined for insurgent fighting in Kashmir, and in Abu Ghraib,
people rounded up pretty much at random based on ethnic division and paid
tips. Our leaders shamed our nation in front of the entire world, and we
gained nothing..

My grandfather, who was an Air Force radio operator in the Pacific theatre
of World War II, tells a story where -- some years later -- he runs into a
German colonel, captured in France, who had later immigrated to the United
States. Why does he tell him that he immigrated? Because his treatment in
the American POW camp to which he had been confined was superior to his
treatment in the German army, even as an officer. It's that treatment, the
knowledge that in that war, the enemy was your moral better, that
permanently killed fascism in Germany; that made Germany, so many years
later, our friend and ally. I want those we capture on the battlefield in
Iraq to think the same of us fifty years later, but they won't, because our
profound moral failure has made us failures on the battlefield.

We are America. We do not ever condone torture, period full stop. When we
do, we cannot look away, and we must punish those guilty; not just those
that betrayed their consciences and performed the acts, but those that
ordered them. In a just world, those people are tried and executed.

Someone was
> prosecuted and they are doing time for it...unlike any middle eastern
> country. The people at Gitmo are not US citizens. We could argue all day
> and
> not settle this between us but for me it is not necessary to give those
> who
> are trying to destroy us equal rights. Does that make them 'political
> prisners' OK so be it.
> Don, they truly mean to take us over and eliminate all or any freedoms we
> have left. If we make it so hard to save us we deserve what happens to us.


They intend to take us over and eliminate all or any freedoms we have left,
so to combat that, we must pre-emptively eliminate all or any freedoms we
have left!

We can't ignore terrorism, but its effects have been grossly exagerrated to
leave us all in fear. Over the past thirty years, more Americans have died
from bee stings, dog bites, and lightning strikes than terrorist attacks.
Sick days caused more damage to our economy in 2001 than 9/11.

Even if there was a terrorist attack every week killing, say, 100 people, by
what mechanism do you propose that Islamic terorrists 'take us over' and
rule our country? Islamic theocracies barely have the wherewithal to run
themselves, much less mount a successful transatlantic invasion of the
largest military power in the world. Even the most idiotic, apocalyptic
right-wing fantasy doesn't provide any mechanism for us to be invaded or
'taken over'. They can intend to take us over all they want: it is a
pathetic delusion of grandeur.

-- ACS
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