Letters to the Editor
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@elephantman
sources? links? help us out here.
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@Elephantman
Okay, let's say we agree. Clinton did it, too. That means it NEEDS to stop and is wrong.
Is that good with you?
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I miss...
I frankly don’t care who authorizes and performs renditions and torture; we should pack the lot of them off to The Hague. Maybe the usurpers in the Bush regime can be next in line after Charles Taylor. If Clinton did it too, then by all means give him a turn before the tribunal. It is high time we got out the tape and put our shredded Constitution back together.
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@aeschylus
Like your comment does anything other than belittle and criticize? I saw no gems of wisdom in it, no abilities at "politics and foreign affairs". It did little to rebut the statement that the U.S. is going insane, made because of the madness of torture. As a matter of fact, it lacked any factuality at all. And unlike the person you were pasting, it wasn't funny, either.
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@elephantman
Yeah, well I used to like the old man around the corner in my childhood neighborhood, til I found out he battened on little boys just like me. If anyone has done anything atrocious in my country's name he needs to be brought in. I don't care whether it's Bush, Clinton or my mother.
Just so we're clear about our partisan relationship.
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Of course you miss the point
You're of Syrian ancestry and your people came from Syria because honestly, slavery would be better than that. And they send you back to Syria because torture there is like a cab ride here. Those wacky Syrians leveled Hama, one of their own cities and killed 40,000 of their own, just to strike fear in the minds of people thinking of overthrowing the Assad. So I guess it's all relative to some extent. The liberals taught me about relativism and how there's no good or bad, just varying degrees of agitation. So in the words of some long dead guy, reap the wind, sow the whirlwind.
As you were reading this, a few hundred Congolese were exterminated, that no one cares about.
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I'm not sure where the line blurred
between interpreting the constitution and ignoring it. I truly wish I did. But I have been convinced, as I saw our rights absolutely stripped away by the current regime (a word I use without reservation), that no interpretation that gave greater power to the respective branches of government should have been allowed in the first place.
We have forgotten, as Americans, that our first job was to elect representatives, senators and presidents that would uphold the constitution, above every other concern.
We have voted ourselves careless expenditures and feel-good policy. We have ignored character as irrelevant and despised principles as lunacy. The Republic is shaken to its very foundation.
I have but one hope that it can hold even for four more years. I hope and pray that the American citizens will awaken from their engorged slumber before all is lost.
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@DrEast
First: I guess that's why they call it a "blur."
Second: Amen, brother!
Third: When The People do finally wake up there will be hell to pay.
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Get a grip, people!
The Bush administration has committed many outrages, but some perspective is in order. First of all, the suggestion that the evil U.S. media is in cahoots with the evil U.S. government to suppress the story of Maher Arar is paranoid poppycock. Check the archives and you'll see that the New York Times has published 71 articles on his case. The Washington Post has published 56 articles about Maher Arar. If the U.S. were anything like Syria, none of those articles nor the papers that published them, and continue to carry them on their Web sites, would exist. Indeed, if the U.S. were anything like Syria, there would be no federal judge in a U.S. government courtroom hearing a lawsuit seeking damages from the U.S. government, and no large team of well-paid lawyers educated at the best U.S. universities, strolling in casually from their offices to reveal violations of U.S. laws by U.S. officials, with evidence culled from government documents that the executive branch was forced by federal court orders to disclose, and there would be no Salon.com forum filled with angry rants from posters who are perfectly free to openly denounce the U.S. government from their comfortable homes scattered throughout the U.S., without a whiff of fear that there will be a knock on the door mid-rant from secret police who will drag them off to their deaths. The treatment endured by the plaintiff in this case is a very rare exception. Otherwise, why is legal immigration from the Arab world to the United States now occurring at a higher rate that ever -- more than 100,000 a year?
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C'mon, ondelette
It was a little funny. Certainly no less so than "shrubby." Would you be proud of coining that term? If so, you're a lost cause.
I didn't argue the issue at hand for a few reasons:
First, elephantman said it all on the anti-Bush front. Clinton used renditions in the Balkans. A lot of people (like the "shrubby" poster) are trying really hard to make this a practice that is strictly a Bush thing, as it supports their "Bush is evil" theory. This is an American policy. Being hyper-partisan about it is dishonest, and unhelpful.
Second, I don't know how I feel about torturing terrorists off-site. If we torture someone that is later deemed innocent, then that person is at the very least due serious compensation. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that we're doing this for the hell of it. It must be producing results. I'm sure the details would turn my stomach. Waterboarding looks awful, but I think "torture" is a bit strong. (I don't care what the experts say. I disagree with my MD friends that addiction is a disease. You can choose not to drink. You can't choose not to have cancer)
"War crimes" really are defined by the winners in any conflict. Had we lost WWII, fire-bombing Dresden (e.g.) probably would have been deemed a war crime. Still, you do what you gotta do. There's an amorality (or even immorality) involved in waging war. I'd rather not think about it too much, because some of it can be hard to take.