Guantanimo Report: Insufficient Evidence to try

[djAdvocate]

Jun 21, 2013 18:32:18 GMT -5 Sum Dum Gai said:

Honestly I think the Gitmo detainees get blown a little out of proportion.  The guys can't be that dangerous when you get right down to it.  Terrorists thrive by having a network of contacts they can work with.  These guys have been locked up in the land that time forgot for most of the war.  The majority of their contacts are probably dead, retired, in hiding, etc.  If you let them go now, how dangerous can they really be?  These 48 dudes with their outdated terrorist rolodexes are somehow going to change the tide of the war?  Me thinks not.  That's assuming they were all actually terrorists to begin with.

the real rub of it is that 80-90% of the detainees were not even NOT the "worst of the worst" as Bush used to say, they are in NO WAY connected with terrorism.  how do i know this?  because the DOD's OWN DOCUMENTS confirm it.  just using the last 80 as an example of their "worst of the worst" about half of them are Taliban connected, not AQ connected.  the Taliban is known to SUPPORT terrorists, but they are not terrorists themselves.  if that is the standard for imprisonment, then we should imprison a number of US officials in the military who have supported terrorism in the far flung regions of the world.

If you spent the last decade in a dark hole, cut off from the world, occasionally getting the crap knocked out of you by US intelligence agents, then I handed you your 10 year old cell phone with it's 10 year old contact list, flew your ass to the back end of nowhere, and threw you out of a helicopter how much damage could you really do?  Honestly?

Do they hate America?  Sure.  Get in fucking line.  People have been hating us for a couple hundred years.  What's 48 more assholes in the world?

truly.

[djAdvocate]

Jun 21, 2013 18:41:12 GMT -5 Ratchets said:

Jun 21, 2013 18:32:18 GMT -5 Sum Dum Gai said:

Honestly I think the Gitmo detainees get blown a little out of proportion.  The guys can't be that dangerous when you get right down to it.  Terrorists thrive by having a network of contacts they can work with.  These guys have been locked up in the land that time forgot for most of the war.  The majority of their contacts are probably dead, retired, in hiding, etc.  If you let them go now, how dangerous can they really be?  These 48 dudes with their outdated terrorist rolodexes are somehow going to change the tide of the war?  Me thinks not.  That's assuming they were all actually terrorists to begin with.

If you spent the last decade in a dark hole, cut off from the world, occasionally getting the crap knocked out of you by US intelligence agents, then I handed you your 10 year old cell phone with it's 10 year old contact list, flew your ass to the back end of nowhere, and threw you out of a helicopter how much damage could you really do?  Honestly?

Do they hate America?  Sure.  Get in fucking line.  People have been hating us for a couple hundred years.  What's 48 more assholes in the world?

I think you underestimate people.  Realistically, if you are in an anti-Cuba frame of mind, and then Cuba locks you up for ten or twenty years, when you get out are you going to suddenly like Cuba?  How dangerous can they be though...

not very.  they were never very dangerous.  we kill more people in a week than most of these "terrorist groups" will kill in a lifetime.  i don't know what we are so afraid of.

[djAdvocate]

Jun 21, 2013 23:21:50 GMT -5 Ratchets said:

Jun 21, 2013 20:06:36 GMT -5 Sum Dum Gai said:

No, it was mostly a massive intelligence failure.  If a middle easterner on an overstayed student visa goes to a pilot training site and asks to be shown how to fly a plane but not take off or land these days they sure as shit aren't going to be allowed in.  If 6 guys with box cutters try to take over a flight the 200+ passengers are going to literally rip them apart with their bare hands before they're going to allow them to fly the plane into something.
Do I?  We've had tens of thousands of them in active in just Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade.  How many blown up buildings have you seen on American soil since 9/11?  As dangerous as these guys supposedly are, there shouldn't be a skyscraper left standing by now.

Oh my bad.  Since they haven't blown up any skyscrapers since 9/11 I guess they must be a bunch of backwards idiots LoL.  Probably why we just stood up AFRICOM a couple years ago...because there is no way Al Quida would be dumb enough to go into impoverished nations there to recruit people to their cause.  I'm glad I've been enlightened LMAO!!

there are about 50k militant terrorists worldwide.  less than half of them are Islamic, and less than half of those have the US as a target.  that is still a lot of terrorists, but i am pretty confident we could handle the problem if we really wanted to.  i have concluded that we are using terrorism the way we used the Cold War- it is our new way to motivate US citizens to support policies they would never, in a clear and confident state of mind, support.

[djAdvocate]

Jun 21, 2013 15:20:07 GMT -5 Ratchets said:

Jun 20, 2013 10:36:31 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

there are such things as "just wars", and there are wars with no legal or moral justification whatsoever.  let's not conflate them.

But we don't go to war because of legal or moral reasons, we go to war because it's in our best interests to do so...

so did Germany.  that should tell you something about that principle.

[djAdvocate]

Jun 21, 2013 17:39:09 GMT -5 Ratchets said:

Anyway, war is really messy.  Back in the olden days Knights would ride into battle with their lances and banners streaming and all the chicks loved it, and they rode off into the sunset just happy as can be.  But that all ended several hundred years ago - where DJ thinks we should be currently fighting? - and the modern battlefield is much different.  I think our military was a little slow to embrace that fact, and also that our populace was veeeery slow to embrace it.

the US has always been serially isolationist, and for very good reason.  we have friendly neighbors, massive bodies of water on either side, and a powerful military.  really, we have very little to fear in this world.

it is surprising how fearful we are.

but i think we agree that we need to stop thinking of the future as a world where armies solve problems.  the wars of the future will be asymmetrical, and are more easily (and, imo, better) handled by small bands of assassins than enormous divisions of personnel and equipment.

[djAdvocate]

topping for relevance.  torture report to be released tomorrow.

[The Captain]

Good call DJ. I am interested in what is does, and doesn't have to say.

[The Captain]

Related news:

www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-bases-embassies-prepare-for-violence-with-release-of-senate-torture-report/ar-BBgvTHk

There's too much in there for me to excerpt one paragraph that I think is on point.  I will be interested to see Sen. Susan Collins' "additional views" counter report.

[ken a.k.a OMK]

Water boarding and deprived sleep doesn't come close to beheading. Terrorists don't need anymore info to hate us.

[djAdvocate]

Dec 9, 2014 11:13:52 GMT -5 ken a.k.a OMK said:

Water boarding and deprived sleep doesn't come close to beheading. Terrorists don't need anymore info to hate us.

bombing the shit out of them is pretty good reason, too.  it is hard to imagine how they could possibly hate us more.  but we'll see.

[ken a.k.a OMK]

dj, I was just referring to the report from GITMO, but you are right. They probably hate us most for our actions in their territory. Makes me wonder what would happen if we just left that area alone.

[djAdvocate]

Dec 9, 2014 11:31:33 GMT -5 ken a.k.a OMK said:

dj, I was just referring to the report from GITMO, but you are right. They probably hate us most for our actions in their territory. Makes me wonder what would happen if we just left that area alone.

....or work CONSTRUCTIVELY with them.

imagine us building schools and hospitals, for example.

that would really suck the life out of organizations like the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood.

[dondub]

Building schools and hospitals does not enrich the Carlyle Groups and Halliburton's/Kellogg~Brown~Roots of the world, so fat chance that's going to happen.

[djAdvocate]

Dec 9, 2014 12:17:18 GMT -5 dondub said:

Building schools and hospitals does not enrich the Carlyle Groups and Halliburton's/Kellogg~Brown~Roots of the world, so fat chance that's going to happen.

it happened once.  but i agree: we are largely a corporatist oligarchy now, so there is little chance.

[dondub]

Loved the Cheney response. Afterall, it was his 'torture' lawyers, David Addington and John Yoo that wrote the policy. That so many career military men retired instead of staying in a military apparatus that tortured people, says all I need to know about how they warped the legal opinions. "Gosh, it's not torture because we say so, therefore it isn't, so there." That our country was led by such morally corrupt fascists was unconscionable and BushCo. should be charged with crimes against humanity.

 I doubt Cheney will be visiting Belgium in his retirement.

[billisonboard]

  What is the proper song to use as an overture?

[djAdvocate]

Dec 9, 2014 13:45:07 GMT -5 dondub said:

Loved the Cheney response. Afterall, it was his 'torture' lawyers, David Addington and John Yoo that wrote the policy. That so many career military men retired instead of staying in a military apparatus that tortured people, says all I need to know about how they warped the legal opinions. "Gosh, it's not torture because we say so, therefore it isn't, so there." That our country was led by such morally corrupt fascists was unconscionable and BushCo. should be charged with crimes against humanity.

 I doubt Cheney will be visiting Belgium in his retirement.

i hope he does. 

[EVT1]

Someone should rip his heart out and give it to someone that deserves it.

[EVT1]

Dec 9, 2014 12:19:30 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

Dec 9, 2014 12:17:18 GMT -5 dondub said:

Building schools and hospitals does not enrich the Carlyle Groups and Halliburton's/Kellogg~Brown~Roots of the world, so fat chance that's going to happen.

it happened once.  but i agree: we are largely a corporatist oligarchy now, so there is little chance.

We are bordering Fascism- give it a few years.

[djAdvocate]

Dec 10, 2014 0:02:09 GMT -5 EVT1 said:

Dec 9, 2014 12:19:30 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

it happened once.  but i agree: we are largely a corporatist oligarchy now, so there is little chance.

We are bordering Fascism- give it a few years.

i think the NeoFascists had their moment, and it is swinging back the other way, but we will see.

[OldCoyote]

Dec 10, 2014 0:00:43 GMT -5 EVT1 said:

Someone should rip his heart out and give it to someone that deserves it.

Have you no respect for the Office of the Vice President of the United States?

[OldCoyote]

Don't you just love our CIA, A group of Americans with such high moral standards that they decide the torture people after they already have " sung like a canary".

You have to remember these are not the bad ones,  those have long ago censored.  No wonder Americans are hated around the world, If it wasn't for the money we give out,

We would not have a friend in this world.


www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/08/world/does-torture-work-the-cias-claims-and-what-the-committee-found.html

[billisonboard]

Dec 14, 2014 7:45:49 GMT -5 deminmaine said:

When it's all over we'll note that:

On the frontier we scalped injuns

During the Civil War we partially suspended Habeus Corpus

During WWII we rounded up thousands of Japanese Americans and put them in camps- and stole their property.

After the 911 attacks we tortured a few enemy irregulars.

And so it goes.

Yes. Let's create a list. Here are a couple more:
Moro Crater
My Lai

[djAdvocate]

Dec 14, 2014 8:34:48 GMT -5 billisonboard said:

Dec 14, 2014 7:45:49 GMT -5 deminmaine said:

When it's all over we'll note that:

On the frontier we scalped injuns

During the Civil War we partially suspended Habeus Corpus

During WWII we rounded up thousands of Japanese Americans and put them in camps- and stole their property.

After the 911 attacks we tortured a few enemy irregulars.

And so it goes.

Yes. Let's create a list. Here are a couple more:
Moro Crater
My Lai

the contras also tortured people.  we funded them.  they were a terrorist group, as well.

little facts of history we tend to forget.

and it wasn't a few, in the case of recent torture.  it was a few HUNDRED.  over 100 died during interrogation.  about 2/3 of them have "homicide" at the hands of their torturers listed as cause of death.  we know that several on that list were completely innocent.  in one case (Dilawar), they pulplified his legs, and then poked him until he died because they "liked to hear him scream".

WE'RE NUMBER ONE!
WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!