Bush Administration Secretly Authorized CIA Torture

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Saying someone is ugly on a bbs certainly is only dragging your own reputation through the mud even more. But anyway, this is the most truthful post you've made.

What's fascinating is why you find it so irresistable. It's why i engage with you and haven't put you on ignore....because it's so incomprehensible what makes that drive tick.

 

Make you look good? To who?

You can say whatever you want, but you did lie about your ethnicity. Those quotes were posted. The quotes where you admitted lying about it were posted as well.

It was all from your words.

I would say I hope you don't get offended by me bringing this up, but since it is all a joke and you are a different plane of intellect much higher than I am, I am sure you won't be offended that I first fell for the HILARIOUS joke where you were pretended to be a different ethnicity... Boy is that funny now that my stupid idiot dense mind is able to digest it! Absolutely HI-LAR-I-OUS!

Then I also fell for the joke where after being called out for lying about it, you admitted that you were lying about it. Your own words referred to the incident as you lying about it. I wish I wasn't so dim-witted, because right now I can only chuckle about that one, but before too long I'm sure I will be laughing about it. I'll work harder to get the punchline of that high fallutin' joke.

 

Bats have sonar dummy.

 

don't worry, you have hope.....

 

I wrote up a very long winded reply and just decided that it was a ginormous waste of my time.

But I'll summarize for you: America does not live up to what it should be. End of story. Is that the end of the world? No, not really. All governments (some more extreme than others, obviously) fail. It's inevitable.

More importantly - you say I'm leaving. You are, for the moment, wrong.

Unfair. That's quite a leap. I am cynical to the point of disillusionment, but I vote all the time which puts me above 58% of the rest of the country for starters. Seeing you throw around phrases like "responsibility" is laughable, given your unflinching support of unamerican activities provided its for your 'side'. The typical nationalist tunnel vision - and I don't have it.

What is it about this that makes you so darn insecure? My convictions are completely unaffected by borders. They are independent of the manure that occurs in government. Taking dual citizenship is not a renunciation of convictions - its just another affirmation that those convictions take precedence over patriotic horse**** like "love it or leave it".

 

Yes I did. And I won't take it back. It's the truth.

Telling me to just leave won't make the above statement less true.

You got off on the wrong foot by taking the above statement and turning it into some variation of "rhad hates america" - the usual Hayesian absolutism. I've always hated that tactic (as you well know), and this time it really set me off.

The ideologies that America was founded upon and struggled to represent are still the best any nation has ever had. They are fantastically written tributes to the fundamental rights owed to every person. They are very dear to me.

But I can't hide from the reality that change in America is becoming more and more foreign to its own foundation.

Should I fight for those ideals? Yes.
Should I be surprised when that does not necessarily result in anything? No.
Should I prudently prepare for that inability to change course? Yes.

 

Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII
Interrogators Fought 'Battle of Wits'

By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 6, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100502492_pf.html

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece.

"I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war," said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City.

The veterans of P.O. Box 1142, a top-secret installation in Fairfax County that went only by its postal code name, were brought back to Fort Hunt by park rangers who are piecing together a portrait of what happened there during the war.

Nearly 4,000 prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, were brought in for questioning for days, even weeks, before their presence was reported to the Red Cross, a process that did not comply with the Geneva Conventions. Many of the interrogators were refugees from the Third Reich.

"We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice," said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.

The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.

"During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone," said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. "We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

Exactly what went on behind the barbed-wire fences of Fort Hunt has been a mystery that has lured amateur historians and curious neighbors for decades.

During the war, nearby residents watched buses with darkened windows roar toward the fort day and night. They couldn't have imagined that groundbreaking secrets in rocketry, microwave technology and submarine tactics were being peeled apart right on the grounds that are now a popular picnic area where moonbounces mushroom every weekend.

When Vincent Santucci arrived at the National Park Service's George Washington Memorial Parkway office as chief ranger four years ago, he asked his cultural resource specialist, Brandon Bies, to do some research so they could post signs throughout the park, explaining its history and giving it a bit more dignity.

That assignment changed dramatically when ranger Dana Dierkes was leading a tour of the park one day and someone told her about a rumored Fort Hunt veteran.

It was Fred Michel, who worked in engineering in Alexandria for 65 years, never telling his neighbors that he once faced off with prisoners and pried wartime secrets from them.

Michel directed them to other vets, and they remembered others.

Bies went from being a ranger researching mountains of topics in stacks of papers to flying across the country, camera and klieg lights in tow, to document the fading memories of veterans.

He, Santucci and others have spent hours trying to sharpen the focus of gauzy memories, coaxing complex details from men who swore on their generation's honor to never speak of the work they did at P.O. Box 1142.

"The National Park Service is committed to telling your story, and now it belongs to the nation," said David Vela, superintendent of the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

There is a deadline. Each day, about 1,100 World War II veterans die, said Jean Davis, spokeswoman for the U.S. Army's Freedom Team Salute program, which recognizes veterans and the parents, spouses and employers who provide support for active-duty soldiers.

By gathering at Fort Hunt yesterday, the quiet men could be saluted for the work they did so long ago.

 

That was a really cool article, rimrocker.

 

Yes, it is. Be prepared to hear, "9/11 changed everything." "Those old bastards don't know their ass from a hole in the ground." "The context is totally different. You can't compare how they interrogated POW's in WWII with how we have to interrogate captured terrorists." "Those were POW's and we have captured terrorists. We can do what we want. They are not POW's." And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.

Or, just silence, ignoring anything that shows the horror and stupidity of this administration.



D&D. Impeach Bush for Promoting Torture.

 

Sadly I am prepared to hear just that.

Instead of finding wisdom from those who've been in similar situations they are forced to try and discredit, rather than admit what they've been doing isn't right.

 

From Captain's Quarters...

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

 

Some more from the Bush-haters...