In honor of December 15, Bill of Rights Day, a little bit of fun. If only the amendments banning detention without due process and torture (it's cruel, it's unusual) were in such good shape.
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Bill of Rights Day
15 Dec 2007 05:05 pm
Comments (27)
Probably over time, if we stay with it, we can fix the unusual part. It's already less unusual than it used to be!
This off topic, but check out the newest Giuliani video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSWu6kyYSKw
Points to note:
- Every minority in the video is either a child or a terrorist
- What I'm calling the 'terrorist huddle'
- "We've fought two great wars" . . . yeah man, those wars were totally cool
- Generally, all the stock footage from circa 1986
Happy Bill of Rights Day!
Sometimes the parties are at odds over which of our rights are worth protecting and which rights we need to be protected from. So let's take a look past the partisanship of the day and agree that these 10 basic principles are worth agreeing on and protecting.
Probably over time, if we stay with it, we can fix the unusual part. It's already less unusual than it used to be!I wouldn't be so sure about that. At least half the fun of torture comes from the howls of outrage it generates in sane people. If torture is ever usual enough not to generate outrage then really, what would be the point any more? If torture apologists wanted sadism without widespread outrage, they'd have a lot more fun in different seedy corners of the internet than they usually populate.
If torture brown people becomes blasé they'll just give up and instead finance Michael Vick's other comeback in a few years, or perhaps lead an effort to get Jonah Goldberg an appointment to fill out some Senator's term after a sudden death. Gotta get their kicks somehow.
It's cruel, it's unusual, but it's not punishment. It's just an interrogation technique. No constitutional problemo! See how easy it is?
Why do conservatives hate our national heritage?
Can we impeach Bush for torturing the English language?
If only the amendments banning detention without due process and torture (it's cruel, it's unusual)
Your sympathies for 400,000 Nazi prisoners detained without due process and with no free lawyers as well as the Jihadi "GITMO Victims" is noted, Matt.
Why do conservatives hate our national heritage?
Posted by Reality Man
Great question, Reality Man. If our national heritage meant we never killed Redcoats without trial and without a formal ruling by a lawyer in robes....
If our heritage was not of inflicting death and pain on Confederates and ording them about under military command without habeas proceedings.
If war did not involve manglings, amputations, blindings, castrations, disfiguring burns and lives spent generations after war disabled and in pain - of troops and civilians on OUR side.
Why didn't we use our heritage better, and make firing of any weapon or dropping of any bomb that could damage enemy lives far worse than waterboarding subject to lawyers and due process?
Why was not each Marine on a Pacific Island not accompanied by a defense, prosecution counsel, a jury, and a judge that could determine if the Marine could fire his rifle to inflict death or maiming on another precious human being of Japanese descent??? Or order the Marine to risk his life and try and capture the enemy instead of safely killing the foe from a distance - and then barred from coercively interrogating the foe to save other Marines?
War sucks.
Your caring, and Matts, which pretends war doesn't exist and all matters of state violence or terrorist violence can be rationalized and made just through civil law are noted.
Where were the people of such deep caring and compassion like you and Matt - when all those hundreds of thousands of presumably innocent Nazi POWs wanted ACLU Jewish lawyers and American Lefties to fight for their rights?
southpaw wrote: - "We've fought two great wars" . . . yeah man, those wars were totally cool
Yes, because the only possible way to use the word "great" is the way Tony the Tiger uses it.
Why were so few generals in WWII told what anti-American wusses they were for following those stupid 'Geneva' and 'Red Cross' crap rules so often, when their manly predecessors in the revolutionary militias and the Union army didn't? Huh? Huh? God, what a bunch of crybabies those WWII prigs were.
Chris Ford, I'll give it to you straight -
If I were convinced that it was only being used on people who we could be 100% certain were terrorists, I would not have a problem with torture.**
But I'm not, so I do.
**(As the certainty goes down from 100%, things get progressively more troubling, although I am not certain where the exact line is - definitely more than 90%).
Chris Ford is a loathsome sophist. War sucks, so anything goes? Bleh. And you're not much better, Glaivester.
How odd that torture for information of British and Hessian POWs during the Revolutionary War, and of Japanese POWs during WW II, was explicitly outlawed by George Washington and FDR, despite the facts that the other side didn't reciprocate and that both wars were unquestionably wars of national survival? I mean, didn't they see that it was no worse than killing the enemy, and therefore should be done? Could it possibly be that they recognized that it was STRATEGICALLY counterproductive? Nah.
Only 3 terrorists have been "tortured" by waterboarding - which seems like a fairly banal though no doubt hughly unpleasant process to go through - as no lasting pain or physical harm comes from it, nor does it cause excruciating pain.
Contrast that to how well infidel soldiers and civilians are treated by Jihadis. Or moderate or heretic Muslims.
Our troops know to save the last bullet for themselves or a buddy.
Of the 3, there was absolutely no doubt prior to waterboarding that they were high-ranking Al Qaeda thugs, and that other methods had been exhausted in the time span allowed without getting info. Of the 3, Abu Zubiyada was Binnie's chauffer and questioned because he knew the location of top AQ when he was captured. He gave up the 9/11 Mastermind, KSM. KSM was rock hard tough, resisting all efforts to get him to reveal what other plots he had underway besides the 9/11 operation. People knew he had something up for London and something in SE Asia....KSM broke and named a couple of dozen people in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia that were to have done a massive attack in Singapore, do an attack on Heathrow by crashing planes into the passenger terminals, and the West Coast Plot, where 2-3 hijacked planes were to crash into the highest buildings in SF and LA.
Those two waterboardings saved thousands of Brits, Singaporeans, Americans.
Damn good trade-off, IMO. Fuck the enemy sympathizers who believe enemy comfort is a higher priority than saving lives from these Jihadis outside all laws of war.
3rd guy's name is not known, but considering the huge hassle of getting waterboard permission - it's obvious they have all the goods on Jihadi #3.
As for war, you can't afford to give every enemy or civilian found in company of enemy free Jewish lawyers from the ACLU, 200 thousand dollar trials apiece. (Mousaaaoui cost us 22 million to prosecute)
You hold them. Very few are guilty of any criminal charge. You hold them simply because commanders and screeners deemed them "probable enemy" and "dangerous to release".
In WWII, using that analogy again, not only did we have 400,000 Germans soldiers with only 2% Nazis, but Germans who were mostly innocent draftees guilty of nothing and even a good chunk vehemently anti-Hitler - we also had a pile of civilians, and the Brits had more. We held Vichy civilians, Italian Fascist civilians, pro-Hitler Arabs from Morocco all the way to Jerusalem in internment camps without trial or without taxpayers paying liberal lawyers to sue for them. (In WWII, "spare lawyers" were customarily handed a gun and put in general infantry or in officer ranks so they could do productive work to win the war, not win more enemy rights.)
Uh, Chris. Quite apart from your consistent failure to name sources (where'd you hear that Zubaydah gave up KSM's location, for instance?)...
(1) Torture was NOT limited to just a handful of suspects; the Bush Administration made the rules allowing it extremely elastic, and that is precisely how it leaked down into Abu Ghraib (as well as numerous other US military bases). See, once again, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/12/krauthammer-on.html .
(2) Former DIA head Harry Soyster says that torture wasn't the most effective means of interrogation even in the particular case of Zubaydah: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/12/soyster-speaks.html#more . To say nothing of Ron Suskind's account of Zubaydah's torturing that differs radically from Kiriakou's; his own "inside sources" say that what we ended up doing was torturing a man who had no further information: "Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, 'thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.' " [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211_pf.html ]. Which inside sources are telling the truth? Who knows? We certainly aren't going to find out from THIS administration.
(3) I've pointed out before what should be obvious: in the extremely rare cases in which torture might be justifiable, it is asking for trouble to allow one man by himself -- no matter where he is in the chain of command -- to give permission for it. Thus the need, if we really are going to allow torture at all, for something like the FISA Court to authorize it (with a supermajority, thank you).
(4) We're holding a few hundred prisoners in Gitmo, not thousands -- and in a "conflict" which (unlike WW II) can virtually never end. Under the circumstances, checking to confirm that we're holding the right ones -- rather than holding them just to make our current incompetent administration look better -- is really rather justifiable, don't you think?
(5) On the subject of waterboarding as supposedly merely "hugely unpleasant": it's interesting, once again, that (A) it has been officially described by the US as torture (whichever side was doing it) in every conflict from the Aguinaldo Rebellion up to the present one; (B) it's listed as one of the main torture techniques used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia's war crimes museum; and (C) James I's regime actually listed it as "worse" than thumbscrews or the Rack in its list of officially allowed but progressively more painful tortures ( http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001917 ).
Moomaw - How odd that torture for information of British and Hessian POWs during the Revolutionary War, and of Japanese POWs during WW II, was explicitly outlawed by George Washington and FDR
Moomaw is trying to put lipstick on a pig. Not the real Washington or FDR, but the Lefty pigskin they seek to wrap both men in. Both Washington and FDR operated without benefit of well-meaning Jewish lawyers from the ACLU and Human Rights Groups obsessed with enemy rights.
What Washington and the Continental Congress did:
1. Authorize arrest and imprisonment w/o trial of Brits and British prisoners. Such prisoners were held alone in unheated stone cells for years or until they died. Survival rates in places like the Litchfield CT prison was under 50% in a year. Some were offered release (and survival) if they talked. Many did. (and the British prison ships were even worse) And Mr Ben Franklin, who Lefties love to misquote with his giving up liberty for security but getting neither, was fine with that. In fact, he insisted on his traitor son Richard being held without trial in Litchfield for 2 years until swapped, hair and teeth fallen out and nearly dead of malnutrition - for a couple of high ranking Americans the Brits had..
2. Captured unlawful combatants were slow-hanged by Washington after trial by military tribunal, generally within a week of capture.. No torture was needed. The execution was slow strangling that took 10-20 minutes to get the death done. If prisoners had something to trade, they would before choking out on the gibbet.
Before WWII, the Civil War and Lincoln was far tougher on enemy rights than either the Revolutionary War or WWII and those leaders. So Moomaw is wise not to mention our #1 President not letting anal worship of "rule of law" stop him from saving the nation.
In WWII, FDR authorized;
1. A "take no prisoners" policy on Japs for not following Geneva if Pacific Theater commanders wanted it, and they did in certain battles, after the Japs showed they would not respect Geneva conventions after Bataan. The Brits treated them the same after the Hong Kong and Singapore massacres of British subjects and local elites from Jap death lists.
2. Jap prisoners, after adequate beating to become compliant, were used by Marines on Guadacanal to march in front and point out positions, to save Marine lives. In some islands, Japs were deliberately left to starve to death, after we broke their resupply lines.
3. Some battles, they tried the hard road and the nice road on Japs simultaneously to save American lives. Treat some nice, but line up other Japs and shoot one or more if it looked like someone would breal and give away positions and main force locations.
4. FDR did not bitch when Gurkas, Singhs, and Malays working with the Brits developed their own ways to make Japs cooperate...ways involving knifework. Or efforts of US Island native scouts and New Guineans on "snatch and grabs" of Japs.
5. Over in the other theater, the European, captured Italian and German Fascists were sometimes beaten and threatened with execution if they were thought to have valuable info. Captured Germans dressed as US or British soldiers, or caught in civilian attire were shot
after court-martial in Italy and Germany. And in Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge - summarily executed without trial with FDR's assent. But German and Italian soldiers were treated very well if they got off the battlefield as a reward for treating our prisoners by the Geneva Convention. Unlike Japan, the Western Axis fought by Geneva rules then in effect, while trating the Soviets as brutally as the Soviets treated them.
6. FDR also insisted on executing captured Nazi saboteurs within a month of capture, after he decided a military tribunal should find them guilty.
7. Most imnportantly, FDR and Churchill believed in working on mass death, slaughter, starvation by blockade of food, burning and maiming of civilians - making their lives as tortured and unbearable as possible. The thinking was, by both men, that the more suffering they inflicted on civilians, the more the enemy morale would break. We bombed Nazi and Jap cities and attacked their food supplies. 800,000 German civilians burned and blasted to death, 300,000 dead of malnutrition. In Japan, we took out about 1,500,000 by FDR's bombing campaign and another 400,000 by targeting all food ships with our subs and planes...
It worked better than critics say. Both Germany and Japan were forced to make defeatist statements subject to the death penalty after the bombing and burning of civilians really took off in 1944.
================
Why were all the liberal Jewish lawyers and media people, as well as the Left in general who are now bubbering about poor innocent Jihadis - so silent about FDR's enemy rights "abuses"?
Well, it wasn't like they were pro-American.
The main driver was Mother Russia was attacked, and the Center of progressivism and communism needed to be defended by any good liberal Jew or Leftist in America. Who had of course been crying to keep Americans out of it and avoid helping the British imperialists until their Dear Soviet Union was hit. The Jews and Leftists then shifted to FDR - politically and in media coverage - and gave him his razor-thin margins to do Lend Lease and impliment the large draft FDR wanted. Throughout WWII, Jewish lawyers and Leftists avoiding suing on behalf of Nazi POWs or those enemy aliens being interned or relocated.
The Soviets and world progressivism needed to be saved first. Even the ACLU shut up, rather than risk members being shunned as reactionaries who loved Nazi and Jap rights more than Soviet lives...
And also, Chris, what is this thing about Jewish lawyers from the ACLU? You got a little thing about that?
Boy, did I ever post too soon. This Chris Ford character is way out in the blue sky.
Yes indeed. Dr. Goebbels on one side of the family and the Marquis de Sade on the other, maybe?
Still, I fully agree with you, Chris. Thank GOD George Washington was an ax murderer.
Like I said before, ignore Ford. He's gonna shoot his wife or something and get executed any day now.
Wonder why we never hear from SLC berating Ford for being anti-Semitic? I mean, I say ANYTHING against Israel, SLC is right there. Ford rants for half the page against Jews explicitly blaming them for absolutely every Communist plot ever fantasized, and where's SLC?
Interesting, hmmmm?
And also, Chris, what is this thing about Jewish lawyers from the ACLU? You got a little thing about that?
Posted by SqueakyRat
Yep. I got a little thing about that.
They were dead silent in WWII as human rights of Nazis and Japs, the millions of POWs we had - were "violated" wholesale. As they were when the communist butcheries transpired from the 20s to the 70s that murdered more than the Nazis and Japs put together - but all over America for Vietnam and Iraq. And not just the ACLU, but the owners of the Times and Post and their various "Front" organizations.
Now they are in full frontal blubbering about precious terrorist rights of Jihadis at GITMO, insistance that combatants killing American soldiers receive civilian court trials or be let go, Abu Ghraib, and how they must undermine America the Fascist to help create the international institutions and "rule of law". Law created by Elites controlling those institutions to bypass nations and the wishes of voters in those nations.
It is no accident that hard-Left Jews with family histories of communism have run the ACLU executive committee and been executive directors of it since the end of the 50s. Even now, Soros has two past executive directors of the ACLU, Ayren Neier and Ira Glasser, running the Soros Foundation and all it's Front groups waging war on Western institutions and America. Nor is it an accident that Jewish lawyers of the Left head up other transnationalist, international law favoring groups like Medicine sans Frontieres, Amnesty I, Human Rights Watch.
In Europe, Asia, and most the 3rd World - the "WWII's greatest victims shall never be criticized no matter what they are sticking their noses into since then" immunity amulet - has expired. And the criticism, particularly of Israel and Jewish meddling in nations sovereignity in favor of globalist economic and legal systems with Jews main beneficiaries of wealth and power over others, is vehement.
In America, the alienation from Jews on the Right, neocons who got us in Iraq, the Israel-First AIPAC types, and those on the Left - the Christian, America-bashing ACLU & Sulzberger criminal/enemy rights types has grown. Along with alienation caused scandals in significant part caused by Jewish prominence in Ruling Elite corruption of Wall Street, and the K Street corruption of our political system.
The immunity amulet is not quite gone yet in America, but resentments are accumulating and are no longer being dismissed as blind bigotry by those Americans who have psychological issues or just are envious of Jews in charge of so many things on the Left and Right and in the economy and law that seem to be hurting the country.
Why do I suspect that Dershowitz, Krauthammer, and all the other crazy neocons will eventually come to regret all the endless articles they're written advocating torture for "bad people"...
I rest my case. (At least now we know what his information sources are.)
Hey, didja hear the one about the Jew-Fearing Neo-Confederate with a hankerin' for Jap-bustin'?
I'll tell ya sometime.
Oooookay, Chris, maybe you'd like to go lie down for a few years. Feel better, y'know?
Nah, if he lies down, he'll pass out and his wife will do a Lorena Bobbitt on him.
Comments closed December 29, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
... from my cold, dead quarters!
Posted by Media Glutton | December 15, 2007 5:45 PM