Afghanistan = The New Gitmo

[PatrickHenry]

One more reason for siezing Afghanistan: http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanista...440836,00.html

Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay. Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.

I want the world to know that the bloodthirsty criminals in charge of Washington, DC these days are not representing the American people in their unslaked thirst for more pain and ferocity against innocent Asians. If only America could wake up to the fact that 9/11/2001 was a false flag operation, they would demand an end to the atrocities. Media America-worship has blinded our nation to the horror of the foreign invasions and occupations in central Asia.

we met Dr Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, established in 2003 with funding from the US Congress to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women's and children's rights were protected. He was delighted to see foreigners in town. At his office in central Gardez, Bidar showed us a wall of files. "All I do nowadays is chart complaints against the US military," he said. "Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them. Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who've been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails." He pulled out a handful of files: "People who have been arrested say they've been brutalised - the tactics used are beyond belief." The jails are closed to outside observers, making it impossible to test the truth of the claims. Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military jail. When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a $100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases, people have simply disappeared.

US military, retired? When are you going to stand up against your former commanders and sound off what the honor of America really means? Rule of Law, Rules of War, Treatment of Civilians? A helping hand up, not a rifle butt in the face or a cluster bomb in the living room? This isn't war against terror, it is terror as a way of doing war. It is beneath the great promise that the Republic once held, now sadly waning...

...perhaps this event above all others - of a nervous phalanx of US marines forcing its way across a prayer ground on one of the holiest, most joyous days in the Islamic calendar, an itching trigger away from a Somalian-style dogfight of their own making - is the one that encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with the global war against terror. The US army came to Afghanistan as liberators and now are feared as governors, judges and jailers. How many US marines know what James Madison, an architect of the US constitution, wrote in 1788? Reflecting on the War of Independence in which Americans were arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial by British forces, Madison concluded that the "accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny"

That's what taking direction from the long known criminal conspiracy referred to as the "CIA" gets the USMC. The right to be the muscle behind the tyranny.

[PatrickHenry]

Anybody find it ironic that the US accuses Castro of being a tyrant and imprisoning people without legitimate cause, but then the Administration uses a US base on the island of Cuba to lock up people without any charges? For years upon years?

Does this seem right to you?

[Nono]

Well, Pat, we're so used to US hypocrisy these days that one's sense of irony gets kind of dulled.

[fushigi]

Quote by: PatrickHenry Anybody find it ironic that the US accuses Castro of being a tyrant and imprisoning people without legitimate cause, but then the Administration uses a US base on the island of Cuba to lock up people without any charges? For years upon years? Does this seem right to you?

The difference is the detainees in Afghanistan aren't U.S. citizens.

[Nono]

Quote by: fushigi The difference is the detainees in Afghanistan aren't U.S. citizens.

Big deal, fushi. Human rights are universal.
Yeah, we're all ready to hit the streets and protest when Boy George comes to town, but when Hu drops by, we shrug and say, "Well those guys only do it to their own citizens."

In both cases we wriggle out of things on the basis of nationality.
That's a kind of hypocrisy too.

[RickSp]

And now if you are a US officer in Afghanistan it is clear that you can get away literally with murder.

Case Dropped Against U.S. Officer in Beating Deaths of Afghan Inmates

The Army has dropped its case against the only officer to face criminal charges in connection with the beating deaths of two prisoners held by the United States in Afghanistan, military officials said yesterday. The officer, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, led a reservist military police company that was guarding the main American detention center in Afghanistan when the two men were killed within days of each other in December 2002. The prisoners died after guards kneed them repeatedly in the legs while each was shackled to the ceiling of his cell. Captain Beiring, 39, had been charged with lying to investigators and being derelict in his duties, in part by neglecting after the first death to order his soldiers to stop chaining up prisoners by the arms at the behest of military interrogators who wanted to deprive them of sleep before questioning. The collapse of the case is the latest and most embarrassing of several setbacks for the team of Army prosecutors that has been working for more than a year on the deaths, which occurred at the military detention center in Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul.

[xyzer]

What absolute rot this thread is!!!! Patrick posts assertions from a British news paper which quotes a "human rights" activists opinions without amplification of the facts.

Sure Patrick in a war situation when renegade Afghans start shooting at them, the marines or any other military organization retaliate and snuff out the murderers. It doesn't make a damn what holy day it is one doesn't just stand there gawking when an enemy attacks.Hadn't you heatrd terrorists an anarchists relish holidays as a good time to attack.
Are you so naive that you think in a wartime combat environment those who would kill you are to be treated gently and afforded due process on the battlefield. Nonsense

Neither Patrick nor RickSP live in the real world of military operations in a war. They are naive! They join a bunch of peaceniks lost in a wartime situation...
Rick implies that a guilty man has been released by the military as some sort of cover up for his supervision of wrong doing. Thats an insult to our military and those who serve it!

Did it ever occur to you USA haters that in the main our military is honorable and the charges might have been dropped because they couldn't be proved. Not so to you ?patriots? who mistrust the military which protects you in times of need! You can't wait to see the bad in this great country and those who serve it. You can't wait to condemn the country that gives you all the freedoms and prosperity. And above all, you so quickly condemn those who place their lives on the line to serve you! All you need is an assertion by a lobby or activist group to release yout bile!

fushigi is right...Castro imprisons, tortures and executes his own citizens in a peacetime environment! Castros refuses to let Cuban citizens travel unescorted outside Cuba and in fact wont let them emigrate out of his poverty stricken dictatorship/

To compare that tyrant with Bush and the USA is indicative of a juvenile mentality, lack of knowledge or a mind so clouded with political hate as to be blind to reality.

[Clarence]

[quote=xyzer]
Rick implies that a guilty man has been released by the military as some sort of cover up for his supervision of wrong doing. Thats an insult to our military and those who serve it!

QUOTE]

Hey, at least he got a speedy trial.

[fushigi]

Quote by: Nono Big deal, fushi. Human rights are universal.

I'm just saying it's a lot easier to justify human rights abuses in a foreign war zone with a fragile government than in a country where the government is legitimate, popular, and firmly in control (like Cuba or China).

Quote by: Nono Yeah, we're all ready to hit the streets and protest when Boy George comes to town, but when Hu drops by, we shrug and say, "Well those guys only do it to their own citizens." In both cases we wriggle out of things on the basis of nationality. That's a kind of hypocrisy too.

Not sure with your impenetrable shroud of sarcasm whether you're saying you folks do or do not protest Chinese human rights violations. Do you?

[RickSp]

I am so sick of being insulted by apologists for torture and murder. Always willing to ignore or twist the facts. He calls us "America haters" while defaming the most sacred American values and principles. Idiotic and as fucking unpatriotic as you can get.

Afghan prisoners beaten to death at US military interrogation base

Two prisoners who died while being held for interrogation at the US military base in Afghanistan had apparently been beaten, according to a military pathologist's report. A criminal investigation is now under way into the deaths which have both been classified as homicides

3rd of detainees who died were assaulted

More than a third of the prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were shot, strangled or beaten by U.S. personnel before they died, according to death certificates and a high-ranking U.S. military official. More than a third of the prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were shot, strangled or beaten by U.S. personnel before they died, according to death certificates and a high-ranking U.S. military official.

Army file details deaths of Afghan detainees

NEW YORK Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him. The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, about 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. The story of Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page file of the army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times

[fushigi]

Quote by: xyzer Did it ever occur to you USA haters...

A bit off topic but I have to mention it X, the freedom to protest and tendency to complain about anything and everything our government authorizes is as American as apple pie. It's what keeps American values American, and what separates us from dictatorships where citizens aren't allowed to protest openly.

Some of those who protest torture in Afghanistan love America as much as you, they just hate torture. And some who justify torture in Afghanistan hate America. The two simply aren't related.

And what's with the personal attacks anyway? If I criticize a mother who beats her kid with hot rakes it doesn't make me a mother-hater, it just means I want her to cool it.

[Nono]

Quote by: fushigi Not sure with your impenetrable shroud of sarcasm whether you're saying you folks do or do not protest Chinese human rights violations. Do you?

Looking back on my post I see that I could have phrased it more clearly. By "both cases" I meant the claim that they're foreign nationals in Gitmo or Chinese nationals in China somehow makes a difference.

My point is a criticism of the many people who protest against Bush at the drop of a hat but somehow can't get off their asses when Hu or Putin show up. An example is Bush addressing the Australian parliament and being heckled from the benches, then Hu addressing it only a week later to polite silence.

[xyzer]

There you go again Rick...Believing implicitly the assertions of reporters who were not on the scene. How are you so certain that a reporter in LA knows first hand what went on? Another at the NYTimes has the correct figures? ad nauseam.

I suggest that those who believe news people who believe, and quote from unamed sources and reside thousands of miles away from these so called sources are agenda driven and up to their armpits in cornflakes.. As you mature you learn to question the sources of what you read and quit believing them implicitly. News organizations are not peopled with truth tellers.

Add to these unproven, and probably incorrect, assertions that we were in a wartime situation at the time... a time when the enemy was trying to kill our troops at every opportunity..an enemy that does not wear a uniform or believe in face to face combat...and you have a problem that passivity and gentleness will not solve!

[RickSp]

Quote by: xyzer There you go again Rick...Believing implicitly the assertions of reporters who were not on the scene. How are you so certain that a reporter in LA knows first hand what went on? Another at the NYTimes has the correct figures? ad nauseam. Add to these unproven, and probably incorrect, assertions that we were in a wartime situation at the time... a time when the enemy was trying to kill our troops at every opportunity..an enemy that does not wear a uniform or believe in face to face combat...and you have a problem that passivity and gentleness will not solve!

There you go again, preferring your own fantasies to fact.

The accounts were based on US Army reports. You probably don't believe those either. In your world, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, USA Today and the Guardian, among many others are part of a great leftist/Islamist/Communist/Democrat conspiracy to spread lies about the US. Sure. When confronted with facts deny everything.

You obviously believe only your own imaginary worldview. You justifying murder and torture as just part of war time. What unmittigated crap. Disgusting and un-American.