While I don’t necessarily agree with all your views, I totally applaud your ability as a thinking American to express yourself. Our constitution guarantees this, and hopefully that’s a value that all Americans, repubs and dems alike would be willing to give their lives for. I especially admire your ability to say you don’t agree with the use of torture, in spite of what right wing folks might think or say.

Thanks for being a patriot, Love, a Sister Dem Liberal *Patriot*

Typically, non-military prisoners are considered spies or renagades (terrorists). The treatment of these prisoners has always been the worst. After interrogation which almost always include some measure of torture they were usually executed by hanging or firing squad.

So quite beating your breasts and being apologetic for the so-called mistreatment of these rabid dog terrorists. In my opinion, they do not deserve any sympathy what so ever.

I’m impressed. I was against the war–not out of any love for Saddam Hussein, but because of my belief that we needed to concentrate on the decisive point, which to me was Al-Quaida, and I did not buy the claims of linkage. So I can’t share your perspective entirely, but I do respect your integrity, guts and willingness to see the accumulating evidence that we have done a big thing badly, as it concerns our treatment of detainees.

Your commentators seem to think that equivalency to our enemies is all we need to achieve (reminds me of the military theory of replication–that both sides to a conflict come to resemble each other) and to extend equivalence to individuals as well–torture of detainees is ok, as many–or some–are terrorists and deserve punishment.

I won’t belabor the point. Torture is inherently heinous. Torture of the innocent is especialy so.

We won’t agree on a lot of issues, but we do agree that the U.S. is more than just the biggest kid on the block. We are the standard bearers of freedom. That doesn’t mean we don’t defend ourselves. But it does mean we have an obligation to not be savages.

I honor your commitment to that, and to the truth, wherever it leads.

Shooting captured prisoners? Do a Google search on “Peiper and Biscari and Sicily” Assaults on non-combatants? Check out Sherman in Georgia or Sheriden in the Shenandoah.

The difference is quite simple: now we cannot claim to be unaware. So the choice is simple: Are we going to surrender, as Islam requires by the word’s very definition? Or are we going to fight as before? The choice is yours; no one can make it for you.

So how high up does all this go? Remember that the Bush White House asked Gonzales for a legal justification for torture - and they got it. Remember why Gitmo was specifically sited where it is. Remember Rumsfeld’s “Interrogation Matrices.”

Yes, the problem is systemic. We’ve been getting reports directly from detainees, reporters from WAPO, the Guardian, the Independent, Salon, Slate, NYT, members of the Red Cross, the Taguba Report, and those in Congress who’ve seen images from the held-back material. It isn’t anti-American to acknowledge that we have a serious problem here. Quite the reverse.

Our so-called-liberal-media is always among the last to deviate from the approved line and about the last to know if it doesn’t comes from a Washington source.

As an example, well before the war using London and Canadian sites it was possible to determine that Iraq had disbanded its nuclear weapons program immediately after Gulf War 1, that it had no biological or chemical weapons programs for the last ten years, and that the links to terrorist groups were being overstated and were extremely ambiguous. Even now the reports of the leaders of the US WMD searchers when they said WMDs were not carried out of the country were relegated to the back inside pages.

The first recovery step when you realize that you have been misinformed should be to broaden your information sources.

Yes, there are much more terrible cases of abuse out there and they are fairly widespread.

Here is a recent one: For two and a half years US authorities moved Benyam Mohammed around a series of prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay in September last year.

In an statement given to his newly appointed lawyer, Mohammed has
given an account of how he was tortured for more than two years after
being questioned by US and British officials who he believes were from
the FBI and MI6. As well as being beaten and subjected to loud music for long periods, he claims his genitals were sliced with scalpels.

From his diary

They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed … I was just shocked, I wasn’t expecting … Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn’t want to scream because I knew it was coming.

One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. “I told you I was going to teach you who’s the man,” [one] eventually said.

Of course, this gets much wider play in the Arab countries particularly - part of our losing campaign to “win hearts and minds” and show we’re “spreading the blessings of liberty and democracy.”

Gary

http://www.agonist.org/annex/taguba.htm

and then think about this:

“Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress last year, after viewing a large cache of unreleased images: “I mean, I looked at them last night, and they’re hard to believe.” They show acts “that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane,” he added. A Republican Senator suggested the same day they contained scenes of “rape and murder.”

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000990590