<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/20/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">Pat Kraut</b> <<a href="mailto:pkraut@moscow.com">pkraut@moscow.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
If the bad guys are allowed to do anything and we tie the hands of our<br>military and police what do we gain? A righteous attitude? We could take<br>that righteous attitude into a jail cell or worse. No one lost a hand in the
<br>'torture' it was more like a fraternity/animal house thing. </blockquote><div> <br>
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.<br>
<br>
You are the same kind of lunatic as a Holocaust denier. <br>
<br>
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..<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Someone was<br>prosecuted and they are doing time for it...unlike any middle eastern<br>
country. The people at Gitmo are not US citizens. We could argue all day and<br>not settle this between us but for me it is not necessary to give those who<br>are trying to destroy us equal rights. Does that make them 'political
<br>prisners' OK so be it.<br>Don, they truly mean to take us over and eliminate all or any freedoms we<br>have left. If we make it so hard to save us we deserve what happens to us.</blockquote><div><br>
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!<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
-- ACS<br>
</div></div><br>