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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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 Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 12:47 pm Post subject: |
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Look, the Geneva Conventions only function when two or more nation-states are at war and when all parties, or at least the victors, are interested in enforcing them.
Applying the Geneva Conventions to one party in a conflict where the other party is not a nation-state is problematic and bound to be an exercise in partisan politics, or, as it is in this case, a target of opportunity for antiAmerican critics to lob attacks against the U.S. government, which is exactly what this has become.
Also, I have never agreed with the Administration's stance on torture and the semantics games they play. And I strongly disagree with a serving general taking the fifth before an investigating Congressional committee. Not appropriate. He is no longer fit to command, in my opinion.
That being said, this discussion of fair treatment is one-sided and, as I said, entirely partisan, with extremely exceptional circumstances rarely intervening, like the bipartisan support McCain was able to get on his resolution, which, as I have said before, I very much admire.
So pointing fingers at the U.S. for the problems it is causing and exacerbating in the Mid East is fine. But if you are going to stand for principles like the rights of detainees, etc., you need to apply those principles evenly and uniformly, which includes applying them to the cowards there who recoil from hard target confrontations and attack soft, civilian targets and behead their prisoners. Ultimately, I am still a former Marine, I've still got brothers dying over there. My loyalties lie with them, hands down, every time.
The insurgents don't get much sympathy from me, then. If they want to act inhumanely, they cannot complain about being treated less than humanely. *beep* them.
The whole thing is about as one-sided and ridicuolous as the discussion on Fujimori's war against Sendero, a brutal Maoist movement. Why human rights advocates would express pure and unmitigated outrage over the Peruvian govt's actions and wholly ignore the guerrillas' attrocities -- systematic executions of local officials by stoning, assassination of judges, bombings to discourage voting, their partnership with the narcotraffickers, for example -- is difficult to come to terms with, unless, of course, we recognize that the human rights people are just one more leftist-sympathizing partisan group who, ultimately, do not apply their own principles evenly...
Last edited by Gopher on Sat Jan 14, 2006 2:28 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Grotto
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:54 pm Post subject: |
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Boy you americans have mastered the finger pointing tactic! Have'nt you!
But look they did this xxx years ago.
Look over there they might have WMD.
Maybe he didnt but he might have.
Sort of we can justify anything as long as we change the freakin subject.
Didnt someone say "when you point a finger 4 point back at you" |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 2:15 pm Post subject: |
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| Grotto wrote: |
| Boy you americans have mastered the finger pointing tactic! Have'nt you! |
No, Grotto, that's what Canadians like you have done. That's pretty much all there is to most of the criticism being lobbed against the U.S. in these threads, with their sensational titles with phrases like "U.S. major general torturer," etc.
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| Didnt someone say "when you point a finger 4 point back at you" |
Never heard that one, but I have heard many like it. And in any case, it would do well for Canadians like you to contemplate the message...
I have said, elsewhere, that it is ridiculous to point fingers at people with blood on their hands in world history and current events. This is because none of us has enough fingers to point at all of the guilty parties, as all of us have blood on our hands and no one is holier-than-thou. I stand by that. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 2:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| All I am arguing is that a lot of what the Bush administration has been doing is dishonest and irregular and almost certaintly outside the bounds of legality. |
I would not take issue with this. This war was a serious mistep for the U.S. from day one.
I am concerned that so many observers of this conflict, when examining the conflict, see only U.S. misdeeds, however. They tend to see only one wrongdoer, and it's the same wrongdoer they've always obsessed on, regardless of the context or the conflict. Everyone else is treated as something like a pure victim or a wronged saint, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly, to one degree or another.
So if we are going to talk about conduct exceeding the bounds of legality in this conflict, let's start by acknowledging all of it, and, in that case, I'd have no problem talking about the U.S. and its misdeeds as a sub-topic, given that we can avoid hyperbole like "major general torturer," etc. in the discussion. |
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R. S. Refugee
Joined: 29 Sep 2004
Location: Shangra La, ROK
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 6:36 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
... Everyone else is treated as something like a pure victim or a wronged saint, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly, to one degree or another...
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Thanks, Gopher. That really clarified the the whole mess for me.
Cheers.   |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 7:01 pm Post subject: |
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It seems like you do not believe me. The mantra usually goes something like this...
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In 1973, the CIA destroyed the oldest functioning democracy in South America. Twenty years later, the agency is still trying to deny its involvement.
The CIA intervened massively in Chile's 1958 and 1964 elections. In 1970, its fears were realized-the socialist candidate, a physician named Salvador Allende, was elected president.
Horrified, President Nixon ordered the CIA to prevent Allende's inauguration. The agency did its best to promote a military coup, but the Chilean military's long history of respect for the democratic process made this virtually impossible. One of the main impediments was the Chilean army's chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, so the CIA plotted with fanatics in the military to assassinate him. The killing backfired, solidifying support for Allende, who took office as scheduled.
That approach having failed, the CIA was ordered to create a "coup climate." ("Make the economy scream," President Nixon told CIA Director Helms.) CIA-backed acts of sabotage and terror multiplied. The agency trained members of the fascist organization Patria y Libertad (PyL) in guerrilla warfare and bombing, and they were soon waging a campaign of arson.
The CIA also sponsored demonstrations and strikes, funded by ITT and other US corporations with Chilean holdings. CIA-linked media, including the country's largest newspaper, fanned the flames of crisis. The military's patriotism was gradually eroded by endless stories about Marxist "atrocities" like castration and cannibalism, and rumors that the military would be purged or "destroyed" and Soviet bases set up.
When the coup finally came, in September 1973, it was led by the most extreme fascist members of the military, and it was unrelenting in its ferocity. Allende was assassinated (some CIA apologists maintain he committed suicide-by shooting himself with a machine gun!). Several cabinet ministers were also assassinated, the universities were put under military control, opposition parties were banned and thousands of Chileans were tortured and killed, many fingered as "radicals" by lists provided by the CIA.
Under the military junta headed by General Pinochet, torture of dissidents became routine, particularly at a gruesome prison called Colonia Dignidad. It drew expatriate Nazis from all over South America, one of whom told a victim that the work of the Nazi death camps was being continued there.
No wonder the CIA tries to deny it was involved in the Chilean coup. It turned a democratic, peace loving nation into a slaughterhouse. |
First, Chile was not a democracy in 1973. It was perhaps the most democratic-like nation-state in South America. It had a multiparty political system, peaceful, election-driven power transitions. Its political economy, however, rested on a quasi-feudal system of land ownership, where, for example, landowners controlled peasants' votes in the most brutal ways possible.
Second, CIA did not intervene in Chile's 1958 elections, but it (actually, it was an inter-agency task force ran out of the JFK and then LBJ White House) did intervene in the 1964 elections. So, too, did the Vatican, West Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Cuba, East Germany, and China. U.S. intervention was certainly disproporationate compared to the others. But let's not be U.S.-centric when we discuss these elections, even if Allende himself, a recipient of Soviet and Cuban funds, hypocritically attacked Frei for receiving "foreign" contributions.
Third, "the Chilean military's long history of respect for the democratic process" is greatly exagerrated here. Zepezauer fails to acknowledge the Chilean Army's dominance of Chilean politics between 1924 and 1932, where a clique of colonels first sent the president into exile, then, on their own, dictated a new constitution, and then, Lt. Col. Carlos Ibanez del Campo, the man masterminding most of this, assumed power as dictator.
Also, it might interest you to know that the Chilean Army ran several concentration camps and tortured Communists there -- Communism was illegal then -- in the 1950s.
Fourth -- and I am only picking four objections here to keep this brief -- Zepezauer's "democractic and peace loving nation" once waged an expansionist war against its neighbors, not at all unlike the U.S. in Mexico, mind you, and at the conclusion of this war, after uneccessarily inflicting humiliations onto the vanquished such as burning Peru's National Library, it seized vast tracts of land, doubling its size, and depriving Bolivia of access to the sea in the process (and intentionally so), a punishment Chile maintains to this day, based on this history, and the fact that Chileans hate Bolivians on racist grounds (Chileans hate "Indians" and think themselves racially superior because they are whiter and more European-looking than their Peruvian and Bolivian neighbors.)
In any case, I think you see what I mean.
In any situation where U.S.-X relations are discussed, then, and in any part of the world, a similar distortion occurs. The U.S. is made to appear as the big, bad wolf, and everyone else is a poor, innocent, victim, who was really just minding their own business before Washington ruined their lives for no reason.
The U.S. is no saint. But neither is anyone else in world affairs. So let's stop scapegoating Washington and keep the discussion reality-based, then.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/CIA_GreatestHits.html |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 4:51 am Post subject: ... |
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The definitive Gopher thread.
Why not borrow from Joo and just cut and paste this into every thread on CE? |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 8:53 am Post subject: |
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Rights Group Says Abuse Was U.S. Strategy
By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has a deliberate strategy of abusing terror suspects during interrogations, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday in its annual report on the treatment of people in more than 70 countries.
The human rights group based its conclusions mostly on statements by senior administration officials in the past year, and said President Bush's reassurances that the United States does not torture suspects were deceptive and rang hollow.
"In 2005 it became disturbingly clear that the abuse of detainees had become a deliberate, central part of the Bush administration's strategy of interrogating terrorist suspects," the report said.
On a trip to Europe last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told foreign leaders that cruel and degrading interrogation methods were forbidden for all U.S. personnel at home and abroad. She provided little detail, however, about which practices were banned and other specifics.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday he had only seen news accounts of the report, but he rejected its conclusions.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/human_rights_bush;_ylt=AifXrD9LE3ESE8tZtiEiKfwDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl |
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R. S. Refugee
Joined: 29 Sep 2004
Location: Shangra La, ROK
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| Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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| igotthisguitar wrote: |
Rights Group Says Abuse Was U.S. Strategy
By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has a deliberate strategy of abusing terror suspects during interrogations, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday in its annual report on the treatment of people in more than 70 countries.
The human rights group based its conclusions mostly on statements by senior administration officials in the past year, and said President Bush's reassurances that the United States does not torture suspects were deceptive and rang hollow.
"In 2005 it became disturbingly clear that the abuse of detainees had become a deliberate, central part of the Bush administration's strategy of interrogating terrorist suspects," the report said.
On a trip to Europe last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told foreign leaders that cruel and degrading interrogation methods were forbidden for all U.S. personnel at home and abroad. She provided little detail, however, about which practices were banned and other specifics.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday he had only seen news accounts of the report, but he rejected its conclusions.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/human_rights_bush;_ylt=AifXrD9LE3ESE8tZtiEiKfwDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl |
Wait, wait. You got it all wrong. As America's favorite commentator (and Hillbilly Heroin junkie) -- The Great Bloviator himself -- says, "Ladies and gentlemen, this was no more serious than a little fraternity hazing."
I wonder which frat this guy is pledging for? |
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