I've always wondered exactly why contract law allows for one (but not both) of the parties to arbitrarily define the terms of what either party is allowed to do under the contract. What's the point of allowing an agreement to be binding that can be completely subverted in meaning at any time?
of course, on the baron continents, most everyone has his own fortified compound, complete with armies of loyal thugs to protect their master's stores of wealth, including frozen seeds.
Well, of course everyone has a castle and warriors! Why else would you call it a baron continent?
Free software is destroying american jobs. Why do you hate america?
Because America is known to harbor bears, godless killing machines without a soul that are a threat to free men everywhere. If you harbor bears you are bears.
Actually, that's not true. Smokers (and alcoholics and other forms of addicts) have a significantly reduced chance of developing Parkinson's in the first place, but there's no studies that suggest that taking up smoking can reduce the symptoms of PD once you've contracted it.
It's a correlation and not a causation. Current suspicions are that addiction and reduced risk of PD have a shared root cause -- elevated dopamine levels in the brain.
At any rate, lighting up to prevent Parkinson's is a little like engaging in preventative chemotherapy.
One word: Quebec. Besides you already sell us 99% of your crude oil exports. Why buy the healthcare system when the oil is free? (Though, uh, if you'd be interested in selling it, I could, uh, you know, maybe find an interested, um, third party for you. Not us! You know, just, um, for a friend.)
All kidding aside, the real question is why we didn't attack North Korea -- a dangerous, evil regime that brutally oppresses its people, that's in violation of multiple UN proclamations, that has actual real nukes, that has engaged in nuclear proliferation, that is such a world pariah that is has to fund itself through criminal operations and missile trade.
The answer is because unlike Iraq, North Korea has Chinese friends and actually poses a credible threat to the US and two of it's strongest allies in the region -- Japan and South Korea. Iran has learned that it really, really needs to become a credible threat to some of America's friends (like Israel and Europe) if it wants to get some more breathing room than its alliances with Russia, China, and India afford it right now.
Regime change that comes from without, backed by use of military force. Saddam was widely hated as a thug and murderer, but in the wake of the war, we're reaping the visceral gut reaction in the Sunnis of, "Yeah, but he was our thug and murderer."
The problem is that this is a war of perception. If we get a democratic Iraq, then we may have won our goal there, but we may get a democratic Iraq who's people have all decided that they don't particularly like us. In time, I think that if we pull this off in Iraq, we'll get a good ally at least on the level of Germany and South Korea if not on the level of Japan.
In the mean time, however, every other Islamic state will know that we are willing to kill others and seed chaos and death to get what we want. Leaders in those nations get to use the US as a big scary boogeyman to divert unrest at their own policies. Al Qaeda and clones swell their ranks with the families of people who died in the occupation.
If instead we had tried to embrace Muslim nations as brothers and put pressure to open up slowly, we could have parleyed the "Today we are all Americans" attitude of the days following 9/11 into widespread admiration and gruding envy that could have led a groundswelling of support for the American way of life. We knifed that in the back when we built Gitmo, when we decided to go to war in Iraq, and when looting, Abu Ghraib, and sectarian violence there were allowed to happen.
We put the cart before the horse by saying, "Change! Then admire us," instead of "Admire us and then change." We fought a battle of ideology -- a battle for hearts and minds -- with rule by fear instead of rule by love. That was a strategic and diplomatic error that we will pay for for generations.
Once again I bring to you the examples of Bosnia and Korea. Those are what the American people, with the assistance of allied nations, can achieve when they set their minds to it. Vietnam, on the other hand, is an example of what happens when you tuck tail and run; 4 years after the pullout, 2.2 million dead, and some 1 million as refugees. Which would you prefer?
I'm with you there. I don't think we can leave. Public opinion is swinging such that we probably won't be able to stay after 2008, but I think that we have to. While we're certainly inflaming the insurgency with our presence, we cannot stand down until the Iraqis are ready to stand up, to paraphrase the President.
I just think we shouldn't have been there in the first place. That in no way changes the "Pottery Barn rule" as people have called it. We broke it, we fix it. End of story.
Eh? Well, security contractors are going to exist no atter what. Making them illegal would be a violation of the constitution. [...] I'm not sure what you're refering to when you speak about "keeping discipline" amongst them. It's certainly not the governments job to do that. Like any other civilian company, it's up to the firms themselves to enforce discipline as they see fit.
No it wouldn't be Unconsitutional -- not any more than it is illegal to make drug dealers, prositutes, and hitmen illegal. It's also isn't illegal to ban trade with Apartheid South Africa or dealings with terrorists and drug cartels overseas. That's a ridiculous assertion.
You don't have to make security contractors illegal to improve things, though. You can make it clear that contractors working for US companies are subject to US law and will be harshly punished for running rampant and acting like thugs.
Allowing heavily armed cowboys outside of the central chain of command to run around in an occupation and reconstruction effort is a recipe for disaster. It's a PR nightmare in a war for hearts and minds. Iraqis hate a lot of the security contractors because they're famous for pushing people around like they own the place. Former contractors for Custer Battles (a firm under investigation for mispending of coalltion authority money and war profitteering) have alleged that contractors have carried out abuses. Private contractors were involved in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Why do we allow out of control thugs to tarnish our name when we could provide soldiers ourselves? Estimates show that security contractor levels are at 1 for every 10 soldiers. Would hiring them through official channels and keeping them in the chain of command be that bad of an idea?
There HAS to be regulation to ensure that they don't just go running rampant. Of course, we don't put forth such rules because "private contractors" are wonderful deniable assets. They don't wear uniforms identifying them as working for us, they're bosses are uncertain, and they don't count in offical military KIA totals if they fall. The use of them for such work is often a sign of the dirtiness of the deed and is just one more reason to take them off the table as an option.
What you're really asking is "can we change human nature so that none of our soldiers will ever commit murder again".
No, I'm not. What I'm asking for is that they not be put in stressed out situations, that they not be put in situations where it's impossible to tell foe from bystander to the point that no one looks like a bystander anymore. I'm asking for accountability and punishment for wrongdoing instead of coverups. I'm asking for discipline.
Really? What part of history? [List of atrocities.] Which part of history exactly shows that "we can do better than this"? If anything, you're better today then you've ever been in history.
Things get better in some areas and get worse in others. The era of wars between Great Powers is hopefully the end of mass civillian casualties as well as the use of WMDs in war. We did not "execute surrendering soldiers on a regular basis" as far as I'm aware, but I could be wrong. I'd like to see some citations on that.
There are things that we did better in the past. We championed the Geneva Convention. We did this to prevent our soldiers from being treated poorly because we saw how they were treated by the Axis powers. We treated POWs fairly and considered widespread word of the soldiers' treatment to be a major psychological warfare advantage. For the past several decades we've avoided unilateral action, and the doctrine of pre-emptive war had been retired from our playbook. And for the love of God, I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but we didn't torture prisoners.
The pattern of history is not one of unblemished purity but one of increasing progress towards a better way of doing things. The problem
That requires a pretty "activist judge" interpretation of the amendment. The US Constitution applies to the federal and state governments. The text exists as a body of granted powers and limitations on the government. The Bill of Rights exists mostly as a check on the federal government's powers (including that of the U.S. Army). Let's look at the 6th Amendment:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Note that nowhere in this Amendment is "the accused" defined as a U.S. Citizen. Similarly, the 1st Amendment doesn't state that Congress can't limit the speech of citizens, the 5th Amendment doesn't state that only citizens can't be forced to incriminate themselves, the 8th Amendment doesn't prevent cruel and unusual punishment only against citizens, etc. Additionally, the 14th Amendment states in Section 1:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Note that the first part talks about citizens, but the second and third parts talk about "any persons." The way that the government tries to skirt 14th Amendment protections is by claiming that Guantanamo Bay is not "within its jurisdiction," but no such limitation exists on the 6th Amendment. That's jurisdictional limit has been a large part of the government's arguments against habeus corpus rights for detainees that they would certainly have if on US soil.
The government claims that "these are bad men," "the worst of the worst," but we've released a great many of them after we've gotten all the useful information we could out of them and determined that they weren't serious threats. Farsically, we've refused for a long time send some of them home for fear that they'd be rounded up in their homelands upon release and kept them imprisoned "for their own safety."
How many US citizens are being held under "indefinite detention"? To my knowledge, zero. If you can prove otherwise, you have a case I can agree with.
Currently, none that I'm aware of, but that wasn't the case from 2002-2005. Enter Jose Padilla, a natural born US citizen who was declared an "illegal enemy combatant" and thus not subject to the protections of US law by the President. He's not a great guy by all accounts -- a former gang member who converted to Islam in prison and hung out with al Qaeda members according to government allegations. He was arrested on his return to the US in 2002 from a tour of Muslim nations as a "material witness" to the September 11th hijackings and put in a military brig in South Carolina and was held for three yea
I'm going to break my response into multiple posts because the first one is so long.
The US doesn't torture prisoners. What you're doing is changing the meaning of the word "torture" to cover anything other than keeping them in a 5 star hotel and saying "please" and "thank you" every 5 seconds.
An interesting assertion. This flies flat in the face of pretty much all evidence that's come to light so far. You know, I've stayed in some pretty crappy motels, but I've never had the kind of "service" detainees have had in the care of US forces.
On August 1st 2002, Alberto Gonzalez sent a memo to the President about the use of torture in interrogation of prisoners. In this document, torture defined extremely narrowly. Physical torture is defined as physical punishments that would result in severe physical impairment, organ failure, or death and psychological torture is defined as only acts with threaten the above to the interogated or to a third party and the use of drugs to alter the senses or the personality of the detainee. (You can find more torture documents here.)
This, interestingly, does not cover many of the acts that went on at Abu Ghraib. Beatings that don't cause organ failure, severe impairment, or death don't count as torture under this. Electric shocks don't count as torture under this. Sexual humilation and rape doesn't count as torture under this. Hanging people in stress positions for hours doesn't count as torture under this. Having a prisoner parade around nude and covered in feces doesn't count as torture under this. You can find many images of the abuse on the Wikimedia Commons. Be warned, due to the sexual molestation involved, most of these images are not really safe for work.
Any sane person would consider these acts as having stepped beyond interrogation techniques and into torture.
Of course, even by these harsh and extremist standards, torture went on under US forces. Manadel al-Jamadi was beaten to death in the hands of soldiers at Abu Ghraib. That certainly counts as an interrogation method that leads to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
Prisoner abuse by US forces in the "War on Terror" didn't start in Iraq, though. There were actually several deaths of detainees under US control in Bagram in Afghanistan.
Beyond that, you have Guantanamo Bay prison. The abuses of detainees at Guantanamo either haven't been as severe as those at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, or they've been kept a better secret. There have been numerous prisoners beaten (though not to death), and there is a lot of use of stress positions to cause pain and suffering to coerce prisoners as reports of treats that violated even Gozalez's standards to the family members of detainees. The tactics there that are publicly known are a lot softer than those at other facilities, but are certainly harsher than what's tolerated at prisons in US land, but there are a few things that have gotten out that suggest that some of the accusations of former inmates have some substance.
In one chilling account, Sean Baker, a soldier who served in the 438th Military Police was asked to pretend to be a resistant detainee in a training exercise in 2003. Other guards who were not aware he wasn't a detainee came in a began suffocating and beating him. The beatings did not stop with the codeword for the exercise and only stopped when he yelled that he was a soldier and they found his fatigues under the orange prisoner jumpsuit. Unfortunately, by then the head trauma led to traumatic brain injury and a discharge f
It's not productive, and it has nothing to do with setting a high standard; instead, it's the verbal abuse of one person for the sole purpose of making the other feel superior. You're setting standards which are unatainable, and then blaming te government for failing to meet them.
To state that about what I specifically complained about is unattainable is cynical defeatism.
Is not torturing prisoners unattainable?
Is following the 6th Amendment and not having indefinite detentions unattainable?
Is not privatizing an occupation (or at the very least keeping discipline in the security contractors) unattainable?
Is keeping soldier discipline and morale high enough to avoid civillian massacres unattainable?
History shows we can do better than this. I don't believe that these goals are so hard to accomplish, and I think the betrayal of the Constitution that the first two represent is far closer to treason than demanding our government do better.
Not only that but you're publicaly mocking them, thereby making them looks worse in the eyes of other citizens, your allies, and your enemies.
What would you have us do? Praise torture and the infliction of such despair as to cause repeated suicide attempts? Praise prison camps held outside the US specifically to skirt our Constitutional protections? Praise the use of unaccountable mercenaries to handle security? Or shoud I just close my eyes and pretend that we are the same as we were before and that these acts do not sully America. These things happened. Now we have to actually deal with them, and we can't do that with people attacking everybody with a sense of decency for not mutely saluting the flag and giving our blind faith to it.
As Edmund Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," and that is exactly what you are asking of us with such a cynical comment.
You'll recall that the Germans didn't claim to hate Jews because they were "so damn free". Rather, they hated them for being "explotative fascists" who "controlled everything".
That is an excellent point, and the same source, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," is still widely distributed in the Middle East where it's often treated as fact. If anything, it reinforces their perception of the US and Israel as a hegemony running roughshod over their lands. They hate the West for meddling in their affairs for the West's benefit, not for "our freedoms." (This is why the terrorists don't actually win if we throw away all our freedoms despite what people like to say as long as we still mess with Arab countries.)
We're in a war for hearts and minds and we're losing because we don't recognize what the goal is. We think that we can kick people around until they adopt our way of life and then come to love us (or at least stop hating us). That's violently putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion, and even if we recognized that and changed our policies today, it'll take 20-30 years to undo Abu Ghraib and Guantanimo Bay's effect on the hearts and minds of the Arab world.
Every culture, every country, needs someone to demonize. Most of the world has picked the USA to fill that role. The only unusual thing here is that most Americans have picked their own government to play that role for them.
The problem is that we've given them an excuse to do so, and that's our problem to fix. If the French aren't upset with their government about killing Africans, that's the French's lack of enlightened patriotism, but if Americans aren't upset with troops killing Iraqis, then that's our problem.
What I don't like is people who treat any criticism of our country's behavior as unpatriotic. It's the opposite. Not holding your country to the highest standard possible is unpatriotic. People who think that pride in our flag is more important than pride in our principles like to call people who try to make us stick to those pricniples "Blame America Firsters."
D: Hasn't the torture at Abu Ghraib lost us the war for hearts and minds? R: That's just the hate speech of "Blame America Firsters." D: How about Red Cross reports on torture and reports of repeated detainee suicide attempts at Guantanimo Bay? R: More "Blame America Firsters." D: Massacres in US military operations? R: "Blame America First," again. D: Corruption in military contracts leading to Iraqi unres-? R: "Blame America First!" Don't you get it. We've done nothing wrong! NOTHING! And the French did it first anyway, so there! D: Who cares about the French. This is about us living up to the standards of our fore- R: LA LA LA LA LA! OH SAY CAN YOU SEEEE!
And it just degenerates from there. Maybe I'm paraphrasing a little.
No, but it will most likely mean they will be replaced by politicians who are touchy feely and believe we shouldnt' do anything to stand up to militant Islam. Well, unless you think lobbing cruise missles into baby food factories is something.
I take it you consider kicking over a country and turning into a hotbed of terrorism over aluminum rocket tubes, a forged purchase letter "signed" by a dead man, and mobile weather balloon stations to be doing something more substantial, then?
Damn right. There's an enormous amount of hypocrisy when people get outraged about these issues that they read about over the internet (via routers, and cables that were made with slave labor), sitting on a chair (that was made by slave labor), sipping their coffee made from beans (harvested by slave labor) in a plastic mug (you get the idea).
I see. So, the only sane alternative is to simply accept that slave labor happens and that we shouldn't do anything about it. After all, that's what the North did after all those years of wearing Southern cotton, right? 'Cause, you know, being a little hypocritical for still engaging in a society and trying to fix it from the inside is soooo much worse than condoning it's every sin by shrugging them off with apathy.
Humans are social animals, and unfortunately, we have a tendency to pawn off responsibility for our actions if we do them as a part of the group, especially in obedience to a hierarchy. Workers obey mangers. Managers obey executives. Executives try to maximize profit for shareholders. Shareholders come and go with only profit as a motive. There are moral and ethical people who will refuse to the wrong thing even when it's easy, and there are people who ethics are revealed to be a house of cards when the supports of shame and personal responsibility are taken out from them. Corporations, like any other group, take out the supports and leave people to dangle over the abyss on their own strengths.
Anyone familiar with the Milgram experiment or the Stanford Prison experiment should not be surprised at the callous brutality that humans are capable of when it's the "expected" thing to do.
In order to have a middle class, you need businesses to start up. In order for that to happen, you need an investor class to front the money.
Money for businesses does not come exclusively from the angelic gifts of the wealthy. For the longest time there's been this concept of an institution where people pool their money into saving's accounts which draw their interest from interest on payments to loans handed out to people with business ideas, newly purchased homes and cars, etc. It's called a "bank."
Credit unions are a testament to the fact that it can be done with a pool of small initial investments. Also, investments in stocks and bonds can be done by large numbers of middle class investors as well as by small numbers of upper class investors. Heck, sometimes the government even gets involved with giving low interest loans to small businesses to kick-start economic growth!
There is no reason for wealth and power to concentrate in the hands of a select few for the economy to run well.
Those of us who are rational realize that a system based on greed must be regulated since enlightened self interest isn't a sufficient control for everyone, and that a system that fails to reward based on merit inevitably leads to stagnation.
As with most things in life, there are shades of grey here.
Hear, hear! It's rare to see sensible moderates on the issue on the internet at times.
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I've always wondered exactly why contract law allows for one (but not both) of the parties to arbitrarily define the terms of what either party is allowed to do under the contract. What's the point of allowing an agreement to be binding that can be completely subverted in meaning at any time?
See the comment title. I mean, I'd hope he'd give the browser his blessings or else no one else will.
I just saw the typo in the original post and realized you were already mocking it.
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!
But not the Cub Scouts. They're bear funders and sympathizers. America has no need of their brand of extremists.
of course, on the baron continents, most everyone has his own fortified compound, complete with armies of loyal thugs to protect their master's stores of wealth, including frozen seeds.
Well, of course everyone has a castle and warriors!
Why else would you call it a baron continent?
Oops, messed up the formatting -- trying again...
IRONY.
Free software is destroying american jobs. Why do you hate america?
Because America is known to harbor bears, godless killing machines without a soul that are a threat to free men everywhere. If you harbor bears you are bears.
Put a stop to America's bearrorism today.
If you ban exploits, then only the criminals will have exploits.
So, um... which one's yours? I'm hoping it's the first one, because -- dang -- that one's got some seriously vicious snark to it.
Smoking can help people with Parkinson's.
Actually, that's not true. Smokers (and alcoholics and other forms of addicts) have a significantly reduced chance of developing Parkinson's in the first place, but there's no studies that suggest that taking up smoking can reduce the symptoms of PD once you've contracted it.
It's a correlation and not a causation. Current suspicions are that addiction and reduced risk of PD have a shared root cause -- elevated dopamine levels in the brain.
At any rate, lighting up to prevent Parkinson's is a little like engaging in preventative chemotherapy.
If that's the case, why isn't Canada a state yet?
One word: Quebec. Besides you already sell us 99% of your crude oil exports. Why buy the healthcare system when the oil is free? (Though, uh, if you'd be interested in selling it, I could, uh, you know, maybe find an interested, um, third party for you. Not us! You know, just, um, for a friend.)
All kidding aside, the real question is why we didn't attack North Korea -- a dangerous, evil regime that brutally oppresses its people, that's in violation of multiple UN proclamations, that has actual real nukes, that has engaged in nuclear proliferation, that is such a world pariah that is has to fund itself through criminal operations and missile trade.
The answer is because unlike Iraq, North Korea has Chinese friends and actually poses a credible threat to the US and two of it's strongest allies in the region -- Japan and South Korea. Iran has learned that it really, really needs to become a credible threat to some of America's friends (like Israel and Europe) if it wants to get some more breathing room than its alliances with Russia, China, and India afford it right now.
How do you define "forced regime change"?
Regime change that comes from without, backed by use of military force. Saddam was widely hated as a thug and murderer, but in the wake of the war, we're reaping the visceral gut reaction in the Sunnis of, "Yeah, but he was our thug and murderer."
The problem is that this is a war of perception. If we get a democratic Iraq, then we may have won our goal there, but we may get a democratic Iraq who's people have all decided that they don't particularly like us. In time, I think that if we pull this off in Iraq, we'll get a good ally at least on the level of Germany and South Korea if not on the level of Japan.
In the mean time, however, every other Islamic state will know that we are willing to kill others and seed chaos and death to get what we want. Leaders in those nations get to use the US as a big scary boogeyman to divert unrest at their own policies. Al Qaeda and clones swell their ranks with the families of people who died in the occupation.
If instead we had tried to embrace Muslim nations as brothers and put pressure to open up slowly, we could have parleyed the "Today we are all Americans" attitude of the days following 9/11 into widespread admiration and gruding envy that could have led a groundswelling of support for the American way of life. We knifed that in the back when we built Gitmo, when we decided to go to war in Iraq, and when looting, Abu Ghraib, and sectarian violence there were allowed to happen.
We put the cart before the horse by saying, "Change! Then admire us," instead of "Admire us and then change." We fought a battle of ideology -- a battle for hearts and minds -- with rule by fear instead of rule by love. That was a strategic and diplomatic error that we will pay for for generations.
Once again I bring to you the examples of Bosnia and Korea. Those are what the American people, with the assistance of allied nations, can achieve when they set their minds to it. Vietnam, on the other hand, is an example of what happens when you tuck tail and run; 4 years after the pullout, 2.2 million dead, and some 1 million as refugees. Which would you prefer?
I'm with you there. I don't think we can leave. Public opinion is swinging such that we probably won't be able to stay after 2008, but I think that we have to. While we're certainly inflaming the insurgency with our presence, we cannot stand down until the Iraqis are ready to stand up, to paraphrase the President.
I just think we shouldn't have been there in the first place. That in no way changes the "Pottery Barn rule" as people have called it. We broke it, we fix it. End of story.
Eh? Well, security contractors are going to exist no atter what. Making them illegal would be a violation of the constitution. [...] I'm not sure what you're refering to when you speak about "keeping discipline" amongst them. It's certainly not the governments job to do that. Like any other civilian company, it's up to the firms themselves to enforce discipline as they see fit.
No it wouldn't be Unconsitutional -- not any more than it is illegal to make drug dealers, prositutes, and hitmen illegal. It's also isn't illegal to ban trade with Apartheid South Africa or dealings with terrorists and drug cartels overseas. That's a ridiculous assertion.
You don't have to make security contractors illegal to improve things, though. You can make it clear that contractors working for US companies are subject to US law and will be harshly punished for running rampant and acting like thugs.
Allowing heavily armed cowboys outside of the central chain of command to run around in an occupation and reconstruction effort is a recipe for disaster. It's a PR nightmare in a war for hearts and minds. Iraqis hate a lot of the security contractors because they're famous for pushing people around like they own the place. Former contractors for Custer Battles (a firm under investigation for mispending of coalltion authority money and war profitteering) have alleged that contractors have carried out abuses. Private contractors were involved in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Why do we allow out of control thugs to tarnish our name when we could provide soldiers ourselves? Estimates show that security contractor levels are at 1 for every 10 soldiers. Would hiring them through official channels and keeping them in the chain of command be that bad of an idea?
There HAS to be regulation to ensure that they don't just go running rampant. Of course, we don't put forth such rules because "private contractors" are wonderful deniable assets. They don't wear uniforms identifying them as working for us, they're bosses are uncertain, and they don't count in offical military KIA totals if they fall. The use of them for such work is often a sign of the dirtiness of the deed and is just one more reason to take them off the table as an option.
What you're really asking is "can we change human nature so that none of our soldiers will ever commit murder again".
No, I'm not. What I'm asking for is that they not be put in stressed out situations, that they not be put in situations where it's impossible to tell foe from bystander to the point that no one looks like a bystander anymore. I'm asking for accountability and punishment for wrongdoing instead of coverups. I'm asking for discipline.
Really? What part of history? [List of atrocities.] Which part of history exactly shows that "we can do better than this"? If anything, you're better today then you've ever been in history.
Things get better in some areas and get worse in others. The era of wars between Great Powers is hopefully the end of mass civillian casualties as well as the use of WMDs in war. We did not "execute surrendering soldiers on a regular basis" as far as I'm aware, but I could be wrong. I'd like to see some citations on that.
There are things that we did better in the past. We championed the Geneva Convention. We did this to prevent our soldiers from being treated poorly because we saw how they were treated by the Axis powers. We treated POWs fairly and considered widespread word of the soldiers' treatment to be a major psychological warfare advantage. For the past several decades we've avoided unilateral action, and the doctrine of pre-emptive war had been retired from our playbook. And for the love of God, I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but we didn't torture prisoners.
The pattern of history is not one of unblemished purity but one of increasing progress towards a better way of doing things. The problem
The US constitution applies to US citizens only.
That requires a pretty "activist judge" interpretation of the amendment. The US Constitution applies to the federal and state governments. The text exists as a body of granted powers and limitations on the government. The Bill of Rights exists mostly as a check on the federal government's powers (including that of the U.S. Army). Let's look at the 6th Amendment:
Note that nowhere in this Amendment is "the accused" defined as a U.S. Citizen. Similarly, the 1st Amendment doesn't state that Congress can't limit the speech of citizens, the 5th Amendment doesn't state that only citizens can't be forced to incriminate themselves, the 8th Amendment doesn't prevent cruel and unusual punishment only against citizens, etc. Additionally, the 14th Amendment states in Section 1:
Note that the first part talks about citizens, but the second and third parts talk about "any persons." The way that the government tries to skirt 14th Amendment protections is by claiming that Guantanamo Bay is not "within its jurisdiction," but no such limitation exists on the 6th Amendment. That's jurisdictional limit has been a large part of the government's arguments against habeus corpus rights for detainees that they would certainly have if on US soil.
Gitmo violates several parts of the 6th Amendment. Prisoners do not have a right to a speedy and public trial there. They don't have a right to an attorney, and they don't have the right to confront witnesses against them. In fact, the trials that they do have exist in a sort of legal black hole. The Bush administration even went so far as to assert before the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that prisoners had absolutely no right to question US actions in Guantanamo even if the government went so far as to torture or commit summary executions.
The government claims that "these are bad men," "the worst of the worst," but we've released a great many of them after we've gotten all the useful information we could out of them and determined that they weren't serious threats. Farsically, we've refused for a long time send some of them home for fear that they'd be rounded up in their homelands upon release and kept them imprisoned "for their own safety."
How many US citizens are being held under "indefinite detention"? To my knowledge, zero. If you can prove otherwise, you have a case I can agree with.
Currently, none that I'm aware of, but that wasn't the case from 2002-2005. Enter Jose Padilla, a natural born US citizen who was declared an "illegal enemy combatant" and thus not subject to the protections of US law by the President. He's not a great guy by all accounts -- a former gang member who converted to Islam in prison and hung out with al Qaeda members according to government allegations. He was arrested on his return to the US in 2002 from a tour of Muslim nations as a "material witness" to the September 11th hijackings and put in a military brig in South Carolina and was held for three yea
I'm going to break my response into multiple posts because the first one is so long.
The US doesn't torture prisoners. What you're doing is changing the meaning of the word "torture" to cover anything other than keeping them in a 5 star hotel and saying "please" and "thank you" every 5 seconds.
An interesting assertion. This flies flat in the face of pretty much all evidence that's come to light so far. You know, I've stayed in some pretty crappy motels, but I've never had the kind of "service" detainees have had in the care of US forces.
On August 1st 2002, Alberto Gonzalez sent a memo to the President about the use of torture in interrogation of prisoners. In this document, torture defined extremely narrowly. Physical torture is defined as physical punishments that would result in severe physical impairment, organ failure, or death and psychological torture is defined as only acts with threaten the above to the interogated or to a third party and the use of drugs to alter the senses or the personality of the detainee. (You can find more torture documents here.)
This, interestingly, does not cover many of the acts that went on at Abu Ghraib. Beatings that don't cause organ failure, severe impairment, or death don't count as torture under this. Electric shocks don't count as torture under this. Sexual humilation and rape doesn't count as torture under this. Hanging people in stress positions for hours doesn't count as torture under this. Having a prisoner parade around nude and covered in feces doesn't count as torture under this. You can find many images of the abuse on the Wikimedia Commons. Be warned, due to the sexual molestation involved, most of these images are not really safe for work.
Any sane person would consider these acts as having stepped beyond interrogation techniques and into torture.
Of course, even by these harsh and extremist standards, torture went on under US forces. Manadel al-Jamadi was beaten to death in the hands of soldiers at Abu Ghraib. That certainly counts as an interrogation method that leads to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
Prisoner abuse by US forces in the "War on Terror" didn't start in Iraq, though. There were actually several deaths of detainees under US control in Bagram in Afghanistan.
Beyond that, you have Guantanamo Bay prison. The abuses of detainees at Guantanamo either haven't been as severe as those at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, or they've been kept a better secret. There have been numerous prisoners beaten (though not to death), and there is a lot of use of stress positions to cause pain and suffering to coerce prisoners as reports of treats that violated even Gozalez's standards to the family members of detainees. The tactics there that are publicly known are a lot softer than those at other facilities, but are certainly harsher than what's tolerated at prisons in US land, but there are a few things that have gotten out that suggest that some of the accusations of former inmates have some substance.
In one chilling account, Sean Baker, a soldier who served in the 438th Military Police was asked to pretend to be a resistant detainee in a training exercise in 2003. Other guards who were not aware he wasn't a detainee came in a began suffocating and beating him. The beatings did not stop with the codeword for the exercise and only stopped when he yelled that he was a soldier and they found his fatigues under the orange prisoner jumpsuit. Unfortunately, by then the head trauma led to traumatic brain injury and a discharge f
To state that about what I specifically complained about is unattainable is cynical defeatism.
- Is not torturing prisoners unattainable?
- Is following the 6th Amendment and not having indefinite detentions unattainable?
- Is not privatizing an occupation (or at the very least keeping discipline in the security contractors) unattainable?
- Is keeping soldier discipline and morale high enough to avoid civillian massacres unattainable?
History shows we can do better than this. I don't believe that these goals are so hard to accomplish, and I think the betrayal of the Constitution that the first two represent is far closer to treason than demanding our government do better.Not only that but you're publicaly mocking them, thereby making them looks worse in the eyes of other citizens, your allies, and your enemies.
What would you have us do? Praise torture and the infliction of such despair as to cause repeated suicide attempts? Praise prison camps held outside the US specifically to skirt our Constitutional protections? Praise the use of unaccountable mercenaries to handle security? Or shoud I just close my eyes and pretend that we are the same as we were before and that these acts do not sully America. These things happened. Now we have to actually deal with them, and we can't do that with people attacking everybody with a sense of decency for not mutely saluting the flag and giving our blind faith to it.
As Edmund Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," and that is exactly what you are asking of us with such a cynical comment.
Well, as someone involved, how would you categorize forced regime change?
You'll recall that the Germans didn't claim to hate Jews because they were "so damn free". Rather, they hated them for being "explotative fascists" who "controlled everything".
That is an excellent point, and the same source, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," is still widely distributed in the Middle East where it's often treated as fact. If anything, it reinforces their perception of the US and Israel as a hegemony running roughshod over their lands. They hate the West for meddling in their affairs for the West's benefit, not for "our freedoms." (This is why the terrorists don't actually win if we throw away all our freedoms despite what people like to say as long as we still mess with Arab countries.)
We're in a war for hearts and minds and we're losing because we don't recognize what the goal is. We think that we can kick people around until they adopt our way of life and then come to love us (or at least stop hating us). That's violently putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion, and even if we recognized that and changed our policies today, it'll take 20-30 years to undo Abu Ghraib and Guantanimo Bay's effect on the hearts and minds of the Arab world.
Every culture, every country, needs someone to demonize. Most of the world has picked the USA to fill that role. The only unusual thing here is that most Americans have picked their own government to play that role for them.
The problem is that we've given them an excuse to do so, and that's our problem to fix. If the French aren't upset with their government about killing Africans, that's the French's lack of enlightened patriotism, but if Americans aren't upset with troops killing Iraqis, then that's our problem.
What I don't like is people who treat any criticism of our country's behavior as unpatriotic. It's the opposite. Not holding your country to the highest standard possible is unpatriotic. People who think that pride in our flag is more important than pride in our principles like to call people who try to make us stick to those pricniples "Blame America Firsters."
D: Hasn't the torture at Abu Ghraib lost us the war for hearts and minds?
R: That's just the hate speech of "Blame America Firsters."
D: How about Red Cross reports on torture and reports of repeated detainee suicide attempts at Guantanimo Bay?
R: More "Blame America Firsters."
D: Massacres in US military operations?
R: "Blame America First," again.
D: Corruption in military contracts leading to Iraqi unres-?
R: "Blame America First!" Don't you get it. We've done nothing wrong! NOTHING! And the French did it first anyway, so there!
D: Who cares about the French. This is about us living up to the standards of our fore-
R: LA LA LA LA LA! OH SAY CAN YOU SEEEE!
And it just degenerates from there. Maybe I'm paraphrasing a little.
No, but it will most likely mean they will be replaced by politicians who are touchy feely and believe we shouldnt' do anything to stand up to militant Islam. Well, unless you think lobbing cruise missles into baby food factories is something.
I take it you consider kicking over a country and turning into a hotbed of terrorism over aluminum rocket tubes, a forged purchase letter "signed" by a dead man, and mobile weather balloon stations to be doing something more substantial, then?
You may now flame me; I am full of love.
I almost want to make that my sig. Man I wish I had mod points.
Damn right. There's an enormous amount of hypocrisy when people get outraged about these issues that they read about over the internet (via routers, and cables that were made with slave labor), sitting on a chair (that was made by slave labor), sipping their coffee made from beans (harvested by slave labor) in a plastic mug (you get the idea).
I see. So, the only sane alternative is to simply accept that slave labor happens and that we shouldn't do anything about it. After all, that's what the North did after all those years of wearing Southern cotton, right? 'Cause, you know, being a little hypocritical for still engaging in a society and trying to fix it from the inside is soooo much worse than condoning it's every sin by shrugging them off with apathy.
Humans are social animals, and unfortunately, we have a tendency to pawn off responsibility for our actions if we do them as a part of the group, especially in obedience to a hierarchy. Workers obey mangers. Managers obey executives. Executives try to maximize profit for shareholders. Shareholders come and go with only profit as a motive. There are moral and ethical people who will refuse to the wrong thing even when it's easy, and there are people who ethics are revealed to be a house of cards when the supports of shame and personal responsibility are taken out from them. Corporations, like any other group, take out the supports and leave people to dangle over the abyss on their own strengths.
Anyone familiar with the Milgram experiment or the Stanford Prison experiment should not be surprised at the callous brutality that humans are capable of when it's the "expected" thing to do.
In order to have a middle class, you need businesses to start up. In order for that to happen, you need an investor class to front the money.
Money for businesses does not come exclusively from the angelic gifts of the wealthy. For the longest time there's been this concept of an institution where people pool their money into saving's accounts which draw their interest from interest on payments to loans handed out to people with business ideas, newly purchased homes and cars, etc. It's called a "bank."
Credit unions are a testament to the fact that it can be done with a pool of small initial investments. Also, investments in stocks and bonds can be done by large numbers of middle class investors as well as by small numbers of upper class investors. Heck, sometimes the government even gets involved with giving low interest loans to small businesses to kick-start economic growth!
There is no reason for wealth and power to concentrate in the hands of a select few for the economy to run well.
Those of us who are rational realize that a system based on greed must be regulated since enlightened self interest isn't a sufficient control for everyone, and that a system that fails to reward based on merit inevitably leads to stagnation.
As with most things in life, there are shades of grey here.
Hear, hear! It's rare to see sensible moderates on the issue on the internet at times.