Letters to the Editor
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More from Sands' interview with Moyers
BILL MOYERS:Do you think torture's still going on?
PHILIPPE SANDS:I don't think torture is still going on at Guantanamo. I'd have to say my own view is that there has not been systematic torture at Guantanamo. I think it was isolated to two or three cases. I think the Guantanamo facility violates international law in many other ways and is wrong in many other ways. But I don't think that there was systemic torture at Guantanamo. I think there was probably far more systemic torture in Afghanistan, at Bagram and in Kandahar, but not in the military. And I think the military has now stopped. But it's important not to forget that although the military now, following in particular, the intervention of the United States Supreme Court in 2006, very important judgment in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which said, Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions can be invoked by all detainees at Guantanamo. So on the military side, it has stopped. But there remains the other side, the dark side, as Vice President Dick Cheney called it, the CIA. And just in the past few weeks, the President of the United States has vetoed legislation which would allow the CIA, which would prohibit the CIA from using the very techniques of interrogation that are the subject of this book, as necessary in the future. And I think that has disturbed a lot of people.
I'd like to believe that and I'm inclined to. The operative word is "systemic" and professional military interrogators know better, Glenn. The unit involved at Abu Ghraib as a Nat Guard MP unit, not professional soldiers.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/budiansky
http://www.mcitta.org/torture.htm
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@ Arne re Satire
We ought to seriously consider licensing satirists
The thing is, you don't have to do satire when you're talking about the Bush Regime. Just report verbatim what they're doing or saying, and it comes out sounding like satire. Or at least it used to, when the world contained more sanity.
Is it morning in America yet? I think someone changed my clock.
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@Svensker
Is it morning in America yet? I think someone changed my clock.
It's spring. We're getting an extra hour of the Bush Administration (Iran).
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Speaking of Actual Journalists
Has Brian Williams ever responded to any of Glenn's fine reporting on GE/NBC's presentation of Military-Industrial Complex PR reps as independent analysts?
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@Arne
The colonel you asked about who committed suicide in Iraq was Ted Westhusing.
http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2440
It's a heartbreaker. Bryce followed up this past February on questions about Westhusing's death. Some think suicide is unlikely, and that someone killed him. I think the suicide story is right.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/77313/
These guys have also written a lot about the case:
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/?s=Westhusing
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@Bubbee
And there are plenty of "Zionists" who aren't warmongers and racists.
Name one.
You confuse Zionism with Likudniks and hard liners in Israel. Please stop it. You may not agree with Zionism but it is not the case that all Zionists are warmongers. That is ignorance speaking.
There are many Zionists who are not warmongers. Here are some.
http://mideastweb.org/about.htm
Ami Isseroff, for instance.
Many of my fellow Zionists do not seem to realize the genuine hurt and anger caused by the massacre in Deir Yassin, nor do they understand how this awful incident, and others that should never have happened, stand like a wall between us and our neighbors. The Deir Yassin massacre is also used by anti-Zionists as a tool in a propaganda war. I think that is detestable - as detestable certainly, as the use of terror victims and the grief of their families by the Zionist right. If we are to make peace, then there is much that both sides will need to admit, much to forgive, and perhaps much to forget.
Ami Isseroff May, 1999. (updated, February 2000)
Deir Yassin Revisited
Since the above was written, the sides in the Middle East have been busy creating new Deir Yassins. Since September 2000, over 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, and about 40 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. Some were Palestinian terrorists, some were Israeli settlers and soldiers. Some, like 12 year old boy killed apparently by Israelis, or like the tiny Arab-Israeli girl wounded in a bus explosion in Hadera, or several reporters wounded or killed by Israelis, were innocent bystanders. This new violence will not bring us closer to a solution. It will only engender more Deir Yassins. We have not learned the lessons of Deir Yassin. Those who do not study history are condemned to relive it.
Ami Isseroff, February 2001
http://www.ariga.com/peacewatch/dy/index.htm
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qs
Did you get your little problem under control, or do we need to take up a collection and buy you one of these?
http://www.carricoleather.com/images/198_nosebag.jpg
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How's the weather?
"The point is that pundits like Klein or Buchanan or Friedman just keep coming back with the same old bromides about elections (they were wrong about Wright having an effect), foreign affairs (wrong too many times to list), domestic policy (everything from the debt crisis to Katrina)and they are being proven WRONG time and time again. Yet nobody except for GG is pointing out the little emperors have no clothes."
I look at these fools like my local weather forecaster. They get paid to be wrong every single week, if not more often.
That's the kind of credibility they deserve.
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@putnik
"The sad, sad, truth is that we have become (if we have not always been) a thoroughly retributive society."
Maybe not "always". But the thing I've noticed about the Right is how familiar their weird reactive mindset colors every issue. It's so schoolyard; so bullying, and so transparently mean and selfish. And worst of all delusionally insecure.
I'm sure someone who's a better writer than me, can tie it all together. You know, the wall to keep the Mexicans out, the "hey, if they're in Gitmo, they musta done SOMETHING wrong", all people who recieve gov't largess are scamming the system. There's a consistent mean-spiritedness to it.
I get so frustrated that we liberals can't get this message out. I fear it's just to real of a message. It was just the cavalier attitude about the ease of any kind of imprisonment which set me off.
You know the old saying, "If you're not part of the solution...." These perfumed, tough-talkers are obviously not part of any solution.