Two things. Number one Iraqis didn't ram any planes into our buildings, and had zero to do with ramming the planes into our buildings. The Iraqis never attacked the U.S. The Iraqis weren't capable of attacking the U.S. Saddam was a bad guy, but he wasn't a threat to us, nor did he have anything to do with ramming planes into buildings. I don't believe that torturing people, especially those who have never had a trial is manning up. I'm sorry that you think a POW like McCain who was kept prisoner and regularly tortured by the Vietnamese in a war is acting like a pansy. You have a strange idea of what being a man is and acting like a pansy is.
Are Iraqis suicide bombers now? Yes. This is about the war at hand, the past has nothing to do with it. How or why we got in the war is irrelevent to the current situation. This is why we are struggling because liberals and anti-war activists tie the commanders on the ground hands behind their backs with this trivial political bullcrap. Meanwhile, while the ACLU is hounding the military over every bullet fired in combat our boys are dying over there because they can't shoot to kill when they feel threatened. Stop worrying about how the hell it all started and start worrying about how the hell you can finish the job that has already been started. Bickering over how is all started or who is to blame does nothing but cost more American lives. If you want the war over with stop complaining about every little thing our military does. When it is all over you can go after the politicians if they went about it the wrong way... until then man up and get the damn job done.
Once again I commend your honesty -- you are the only self-proclaimed Christian on this BBS who is not afraid of speaking out your mind on the justification of torture based on your Biblical belief. The problem I am having, as FB eloquently pointed out, is that I consider Christianity is not about revenge but about love and peace. To my own understanding, the hardest part of being a Christian is to love your enemy, especially the ones who did the greatest harm to you. I believe it's this very Christian decree that sets those wannabes apart from the true practitioners. I would not bother to pick on you if you were merely a non-believer like me, who is not bound by any religious confinement.
You were the one that claimed 'they' started it. I was responding to your claim. However, commanders on the ground do not in any way have their hands tied because of how the war started. If we started it or if they started it doesn't tie anyone's hands behind their back. Lack of leadership, supplies, clear objectives and the like may tie their hands behind their back, but disgussing the recent past certainly doesn't affect the logistics, equipment and plans they have now. Setting the record straight about who started the action in Iraq doesn't get anyone killed. For the record I want to get the job done correctly and have wanted it done correctly since our troops went in, in Iraq. Torture does not enter into the formula for getting it done correctly. It is interesting that you are advocating support for the mission, when most of the experts agree that torture doesn't help accomplish the mission. The armed forces have actually come out and said it is counterproductive to the mission.
Sorry Svper: You're being piled on here. I tried to resist...but couldn't. Your one post, however was pretty much over the top. Perhaps the tone was not what you intended, or i've misjudged it. But take another read. I'm not shocked by much in this forum....but that one post did set me back.
War and Christianity is a difficult subject, and one I feel is not easily classified or justified... I think it all comes down to personal belief (as in what you think God tells you personally). There is a strong case for and against it in the Bible, and I don't pretend to understand it all or anywhere close to it. As mentioned in other topics I don't really enjoy organized Christianity because much of it I disagree with. I am a Christian in the fact that I believe Jesus is the savior, so please don't judge other Christians by my views. As for my beliefs on the war, I feel that it is our main goal to get our boys home. I also consider the military and any American for that matter as a member of my family... and I am selfish and want them home as soon and as safe as possible. War to me is a completely different concept, if you want to know my views of war look a George Patton, my father (vietnam vet who was a POW and critically injured) got me into reading about Patton at an early age... and I loved how he led his men. Patton took a tough, no nonsense approach to leading, something we lack greatly in the military today because of all of the outside opponents of our military (ACLU, anti-war groups, utopians, the media, etc). Much of the leadership things Patton did and said "wouldn't fly" today because of the outside oppenents mentioned above, and that saddens me. I have every faith in the men and women of our armed services but I feel that the American people have let them down in hampering their efforts REGARDLESS of how we got into the war. I hate the fact that some people can't make the distinction between us being in the war and how it started. How it started is really irrelevant when it comes to the war itself, because it is a completely different war now then it was when it started. I want our boys to get the job done and get home and I want all of these outside sources to leave them the hell alone so they can do it. This should NOT be confused with tucking tail and coming home, we should not come home until the job is done... and that would happen a lot faster if we were able to treat it as the war it is rather then a politically charged conflict.
from the November 17, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1117/p12s01-woiq.html Iraqi torture practices could be more widespread Revelations this week that Iraq's Interior Ministry abused detainees in a secret prison may be just the beginning. By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor CAIRO - The discovery of malnourished detainees, many bearing signs of torture, in an underground bunker at the Iraqi Interior Ministry came after a US Army 3rd Infantry Division soldier investigated an Iraqi family's complaints that one of its sons was being secretly held. When US troops raided the facility Sunday night, they expected to find at most 40 detainees, not 173 sickly men and boys, all Sunni Arabs. Iraqi officials have since confirmed that torture implements were also found there. The revelation of torture of detainees at a secret interrogation center in Baghdad is likely to prove the tip of the iceberg if investigations are widened to look at the overall practices of Iraq's security services, human rights advocates and some Iraqi politicians say. But coming to grips with the problem will be difficult. While Prime Minister Ibrahim al- Jaafari has promised that torture at the facility will be investigated and the perpetrators punished, the Interior Ministry, which controls the police and elite units like the Wolf and Volcano brigades, has been the target of widespread abuse allegations for more than a year. Its paramilitaries largely draw from the members of Shiite militias like the Badr Brigade, which was formed and trained in Iran as opponents of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime, and their members have become deeply embedded in the ministry. A real effort to clean out the ministry, say human rights workers and Sunni politicians, would require dismissals and arrests that seem unlikely given the country's sectarian war. "I hold the view that this case is in no way an anomaly,'' says Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division. "I wouldn't be surprised if there were many other illegal detention centers either controlled by the Interior ministry or their unofficial agents, both in Baghdad and elsewhere." Ms. Whitson says abuse in Iraq is "an institutional problem" and her organization warned of the use of torture at the Interior Ministry in January of this year. Those charges, as now, prompted Prime Minister Jaafari and others to promise comprehensive action would be taken. "It is leadership that determines whether or not torture takes place, whether people get fired or go on trial,'' says Whitson, adding she isn't aware of any recent arrests or dismissals of interior ministry officials for abuse. "The Iraqi leadership is responsible and they've failed." Sunni Arabs have been complaining for months to US officials and human rights organizations about torture and disappearances at the ministry. Months ago Sunni politicians like Ala Mekki alleged the Interior Ministry kept secret torture cells in its main compounds in Baghdad. While the US has touted the human rights component of its police and military training in Iraq, history shows that respect for basic rights like freedom from torture and freedom from unlawful detention are severely eroded in war. US abuses at Abu Ghraib make this point. And with Iraq's legacy of brutal politics, limited oversight by the country's weak courts, and general support for torture and execution by millions of Iraqis - frustrated and angered by an insurgency that kills many more civilians than soldiers - severe abuses were almost inevitable. The apparent pattern of torture in Iraq also leaves the US in a political bind. "Human rights and the rule of law are central components of our relationship with Iraq and are key areas for US involvement and support,'' says Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman in Washington. "These are allegations of abuses by Iraqis against Iraqi in Iraqi facilities ... we want to see them make progress and see them reach the standards that we hold other countries to. We're counting on the Iraqis to conduct a thorough investigation." While the latest revelation won't help matters among the Sunni Arab minority whose members feed the insurgency, it is being seen as simply the latest confirmation of what they have long thought was happening anyway. "When the Shiites came into government they introduced their militias into the police forces,'' alleges Mr. Mekki, on the political committee for the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the main Sunni Arab groups. "It used to be just the Americans - you might get taken to Camp Bucca and eventually released if there was no evidence against you. But these people in police uniforms cut the story short: Abductions, torture with drills and pulled fingernails, bodies thrown into the street have become the norm." The Monitor met with more than a dozen Sunni families in Baghdad in September who alleged abuse and murder by Interior Ministry officials. Most of the dead were tortured. Ammar Hamid Khalaf Muhammed Hummos related how his two brothers Hamid and Rafa were abducted by men in police uniforms on a street in Zafranaiyah, on the outskirts of Baghdad, this May, and how he later received word that the brothers were being held in the Shiite city of Kut, and that for $8,000 they'd be released. The family didn't come up with the money, and near tears he showed photos of his brothers' badly mutilated bodies, which were recovered in a ditch near Kut. "Pulling their fingernails out wasn't even the worst part." Walid Ahmed Abbas recalled how he and a car full of his relatives accidentally tangled with US forces at an American checkpoint in Baghdad in July, with three of his relatives killed. He was grazed by a bullet and left blind in one eye. When more than 100 of his kinsmen from the Zaba tribe arrived at the An-Nur Hospital, the police decided they must be insurgents since their relatives had been shot by American troops. They arrested them, and locked most of them up in a container. Under the intense desert sun, 10 died. "The Interior Minister said it was a mistake, that generally our police officers are well behaved, but we know otherwise. This all happened only because we're Zaba and Sunni,'' said Abbas. But the most arresting interview was with a man who wanted only to identified as Abu Adhar. He was carried to the interview by four relatives. Injuries covered his face, back, and legs. He was abducted and thrown into the back of a car while investigating charges of abuse by the Interior Ministry for a Sunni mosque where he leads prayers. After driving through at least five Iraqi police checkpoints, they arrived at a house. He said he was tortured for two days with electric shocks and whips. "Then their commander said they were done, and to take me out and kill me." Driving to a field where he expected to be shot, he managed to free his hands and escape when the car slowed. A farmer took him in and contacted his family. "What's really distressing is that we promised this would stop,'' says Whitson of Human Rights Watch. "What's different? What's changed? The Iraqi people were promised something better."
Svper - quick question. What are your thoughts on "process?" Should the decision to torture / not torture be made before or after culpability has been established? If "after," then how should it be established? If "before" is good enough, who should make the decision? Should that decision-making procees be made public? Should there be a process? Or should we just torture when we believe we have just cause? How about applications of those principles at home? If we think someone is a murderer, but they are not yet proven guilty in a court of law - can we hypothetically torture them to extract info about other crimes?
Svpernaut, what on earth does the ACLU have to do with anything? I don't get it. They are running around in Iraq putting shackles on our fighting men and women? That's news to me, and I thought, being a news junkie, as well as a political junkie, that I was pretty well informed. And Iraqis subjected to torture because they are suspected insurgents or terrorists? What is American about that? You seriously believe we ran around in WWII torturing the enemy left, right and center? Hell, even the Nazis, when it came to our POWs, largely respected the Geneva Convention. The Nazis! Look, I liked the movie Patton myself. I've seen it about 6 times. George C. Scott was incredible in the role. Iraq is not WWII. It isn't a movie. It didn't, sadly, have a leader like Patton prior to the invasion, or we would never have gone in with half the troops we should have, or disbanded the Iraqi military, a shocking, grossly stupid decision you can lay with the man you support, the fellow where the buck stops, the guy responsible, George W. Bush. Patton, as you will recall, was for keeping the German military together and going straight at the Soviet Union. He would never have condoned tossing away the one remaining force for stability in Iraq, the military. Think about it. Your guy made one mistake after another. He replaced those who fought to go in with a much, much larger force, pre-invasion. He didn't send in several more divisions early on, after the invasion, when it might have made a difference. I could go on. Your guy blew it, and we are paying the price for his incompetence today. I don't get it. I respect you for being passionate about your beliefs, but I just don't get it. I won't get into the religious aspect of any of this, because I am agnostic. I will say this, however... one doesn't need to be religious, or have religion, to know that torture is wrong, that invading a sovereign nation that wasn't a clear and present danger to our country was wrong, that misleading the nation into going into that war was wrong. That to keep incompetent advisors, and to promote them, when they have failed you and the nation is wrong. That, and so much more. And the worst thing that people could do today is to keep quiet about the failures of this President. Bush and his party need to be punished where it hurts, at the polling booths across America. To sit back and say nothing at a time like this is the act of a coward, in my opinion, or the act of someone divorced from reality. If ever the people of this country needed to shout to the rooftops the gross incompetence and abject failures of a President and his Administration, it is now. Bush and his party have failed our country. Voting them out of power at the earliest opportunity is the best thing we could do for our armed forces, and it is the America system of punishing politicians who have led us down the path of ruination and despair. Keep D&D Civil.
How? How exactly are they "monsters" as you so eloquently put it, if we invaded them? Funny that none of this was taking place before we invaded. There were no WMD and Iraq had no ties to 9/11. I think "how it started" is pretty damn relevant. Pray tell, what exactly is this "job" you want the boys to get done? The only way we can leave this war without an even greater threat to our national security is by winning the hearts of the Muslim world. Torturing detainees isn't exactly going to accomplish that. I would have taken more time dissecting through your posts but your demagoguery had grown so laughable in itself that I chose just to respond to your very last paragraph. Judging by your fear of a "loss of identity" in the Illegal Immigrant thread, coupled with this, you have some serious xenophobia and anger management issues you need to get taken care of.
