Letters to the Editor
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Where's Daniel Pearl and Mark Berg
Well we determned that the Yemani was not al qaeda.
Anti American Socialists continously claim that we are hated around the world and they have a sort of shadenfreud about it.
Why do so many peole wish to liveand work in the United States if we are so hated, Huh??
Essentially when one country's interests coincide with another's they are friends and their press proclaims it. When their interests do not coincie they are adversaries. It's always been that way and alway will be so.
Soon after the war while in France where they were on the marschall plan I'd get gratituous lectues of "The trouble with America is..." followed by a laundry list of every petty bitch that they could manufacture.
So those of you who claim that you are ashamed to be Americans Cuba calls or try Sudan.
Stephen Decatur 1816 " My country right or wrong"
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Yeah that sucks
You know what else sucks - the people, who by some estimates approach 20%, who are on death row for crimes they didn't commit. But lets get outraged about what a bunch of people 6000 miles away routinely do to one another.
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Let's Hear it for Anti-American Socialists!
This extreme nationalism utilized by the defenders of torture is the epitomy of chauvinism, bigotry and utter backwardness.
But this is the USA - there is a huge following for fascists here.
Thanks to our brain dead media and the deceitful, money grubbing politicians of both political parties of Wall Street, unfettered capitalism and imperialism.
- An anti-American American Socialist.
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Makes me Proud to be an American
I guess America's enemies now know what they can do to our boys when they capture them without facing any international out cry. Aside from my general moral outrage, this is the biggest downside of our treatment of prisoners.
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abandon your exclusive
this story needs to be on the front page of every major newspaper. offer a link to a petition people can sign, salon. do something.
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Kdollarsign, the rest of the media won't touch it anyway
That's why Salon has it and they don't.
The story was there for the taking, but the Corporate GOP/Media Complex won't touch it for the same reason that they won't talk about Sibel Edmonds or the existence of peaceful anti-US resistance groups in Iraq: It's not the story their rich and conservative GOP-aligned bosses want them to tell.
Pass this story on to the rest of the media, yes -- and shame them. If they can be shamed.
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@timbuktom
And get the poor privates and lance corporals who have to dump the secret prisoners' secret shit to testify against the brutal idiocy of our secret prisons!
Although I possess little faith that too many privates or lance corporals are going to be willing to testify, and, if they do, that their testimony will shake out the higher-ranking perpetrators. Not that I don't wish it to happen; I surely do, and that the "people" responsible for inflicting such horrendous harm on another human being be held accountable.
What your statement actually jarred in me was a long exchange of emails with a former student of mine serving as a military intelligence soldier in Afghanistan. Her training, from what little I could glean from her, seemed to parallel some of the grotesque methods illustrated by this article. I am not saying that she participated because she revealed no names or places or any details whatsoever about her "job"; I began to suspect, though, that she was rattled by some of her experiences. Although still in military intelligence, she has chosen a more benign line of duty in the military. In many respects, I am deeply troubled about the emotional impact of her service on her own mental health.
The initiation and institutionalization of torture techniques so tragically undermines, and in many ways destroys, America's real (and now former) claim--by other peoples of the world and about ourselves--that this country had established itself as the keeper of the moral high ground.
What a collective loss of respectibility we have suffered, but none of it as serious and damaging as what happened to this innocent gentlemen.
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Most Disturbing To Me
is the use of mental health professionals to further the interrogations. while there is no way to confirm that actual psychiatrists were involved, or if they were just lackeys pretending to be shrinks, if they were real doctors then they have betrayed their ethics and morals to participate in actions like this.
on a gut level this man's story sounds legit. the little details, like how many links were in the chain that bound him to the wall, don't often come up in fabricated accounts. the fact that the US government doesn't deny that they're doing things like this make it even more plausible.
our duty as American citizens, if we believe this, is to hold our government accountable. any elected representative who has supported the administration in their conduct MUST be contacted and told, by their constituents, that they will not be supported in the future unless they act to prevent these abuses.
Write a letter, on paper, or call your representatives office. Request, or demand, a reply. If we don't act nothing will be done.
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RE: INSIDE THE CIA'S NOTORIOUS "BLACK SITES"
This is US justice! There is the need for more US citizens to be educated and conscious enough to know what their elected leaders are doing on their behave. Most are so ignorant of the happenings around the world depending exclusively on their government's sponsored news. This is unfortunate. Majority are more aware of the happenings in Hollywood than the debate taking place on international issues in the Senate or House of Representatives.
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yes, all "our" parsing about what is and is not torture and, again, whether or not torture may (sometimes) be appropriate for interrogation purposes (ignoring that it produces unreliable "intelligence" and false confessions) ...
really ignore the apparently ROUTINE brutalization of our prisoners ... held in limbo, charged with nothing, and, yet apparently punished -- brutally -- for remaining alive ... prevented from suicide ... treated worse than animals ... for apparently NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER ... even Milgram and the Stanford prison experiments has some sort of purpose ...
... maybe we should sicc PETA on them ??
What did we do to Juan Padilla (on U.S. soil) or to Moussaoui or to John Walker Lindh (who I recall was waterboarded in Afghanistan before he received medical attention for the bullet in his leg) ... Even in the most exigent circumstances, what is the value of "intelligence" obtained after the first few sessions of "enhanced interrogation techniques"?
Yes, while the government seems to endlessly occupy itself parsing "torture"... this brutalization of untried, uncharged prisoners is a largely ignored other realm of war crimes.