Impeachment Will Be Insufficient
But it might be all we can hope for.
I consider myself humane. I would not willingly wish suffering on anyone. Which is why I'm specifically not overtly hoping the Bush cabinet, including Cheney and Rice, are accidentally electrocuted during a screening of a video from Guantanamo Bay.
Assuming they are not arrested and turned over to the appropriate authorities.
For Rick Wilson and Muneer Ahmad, [the] nasty truth led to an unnerving conclusion: After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration effectively kidnapped hundreds of innocent people because they looked like Arabs and shipped them to a detention facility designed to torture them nonstop and in perpetuity. If the president were tried in the Hague, the prosecution would have an easy case.
Read the Rolling Stone article. This is how they treat a fifteen-year-old boy whose legal status is at best uncertain.
No. Stop. Go back and actually read the damn article.
If there were any justice in this world, Bush and Co. would be thrown from office like the refuse they are, kidnapped, and shipped immediately to some convenient hellhole to begin an instructional five-year sentence under the same conditions that their victims have experienced.
Why are Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad such bitter foes? After all: torture, unaccountability, the conviction they were sent by god ... they have so much in common!
posted by Metro @ 11:29 am
11 Comments:
I read it all.
May Bush and cohorts rot in the hell of their own making.
Lori
hWorre - Steady the Ship
Can I repeat the Oracle's sagacious Alternative Counsel to Neo :
"Have some Apple Pie"
Perhaps Mr Bush & his Cohorts would also benefit from doing likewise
Your obedient servant etc
G E
I couldn't read the whole thing. It was making me sick. I've bookmarked it, though, and will go back later.
I think it's clear I'm voting for Gitmo time for any of the criminal psychopaths involved in Bush's War to Prove My Dick's Bigger Than Daddy's.
@M. EAgle:
Were I to serve any pie to Mr. W and Co. I might well feel bound, in the name of humanity, to lace it with a generous portion of strychnine.
@WC:
I think it's worth remembering that every American who chose to vote for Bush after 2003 was willingly participating in this. The world knew what was going on no later than 2004.
The moral cowardice of so many in the face of fictional boogeymen scares me more than "the terrorist threat".
Bonsoir M Metro
The Oracle thinks you need some Apple Pie as well
Tot siens
G E
@Herr Eagle:
Possibly. Yet what emotion other than outrage is appropriate in this case?
Shall we be measured, then, in our response to torture?
Should we be nuanced, while people like this try to extend their power across the world?
Should we, in short, sit back and be "good Germans" as the things we respect and value about western society are brought under attack by those who were supposed to be the pinnacle and guardian of those ideals?
What else should one feel, please?
Bonsoir M Metro
I do not in any way wish to defend maltreating anyone - the Rolling Stone account (if true) seems to raise seroius concerns
However, does your Outrage extend to the Murder of the (presumably) unarmed & defenseless Pushtu translators who were slaughtered by this young man and his friends ?
Is it a matter of indifference to you that he killed an American Soldier - it could have been a Canadian or a British Soldier .. or more (to him) worthless Pushtu translators
He seems to matter to you - what about them and their human rights ?
It is evident that those brave American Soldiers shewed a humanity and a mercy to him, which he & his friends did not shew to those "Pushtu translators"
... and which those Islamic sadists did not shew to those too-many unarmed & defenseless Muslims (and non-Muslims) that they slaughtered without warning or provocation in the Twin Towers, after spending the previous night in brothels
And what do you suggest should be done about this young man
.... he clearly went to Afghanistan to kill people, with [apparently] every encouragement from his inhuman family
Are you suggesting that he should be allowed to return to Vancouver, with every opportunity to kill someone you and I do care about ?
... or would you like him and his murderous colleagues to be set free to roam the Streets of London, where the lovely Miss Eagle often frequents an Underground Station that these Islamic Murderers neglected to blow up, only because (on one occasion) they failed to assemble their bombs competently
Perhaps Miss Eagle could learn Pushtu, thereby becoming a Pushtu translator whose Murder the Rolling Stone Magazine could treat with such cavalier indifference
As to his uncertain legal status, I wonder if it is indeed that uncertain - when captured, he was certainly engaging in organized hostilities
AND before we uncritically accept the Rolling Stones account, should we not be considering its veracity
.... where did these accounts of maltreatment come from ... was it solely from his family .... is there any independent verification
Perhaps it is this Eagle that needs some Apple Pie
Your obedient servant etc
G Eagle
I actually had a similar response to Mr. G. Eagle regarding the Rolling Stone article and whence came its sources.
But part of what sickened me about the article was the portrayal of Omar Khadr's family. He was obviously indoctrinated at a very young age and pressured into participating in the terror movement (for lack of a better term) by his father. If he was 15 at the time of his capture, he was a minor. Taking into account the alleged brainwashing by his family, I find it hard to hold him completely responsible for his actions. It seems that the US would like to make an example of him despite these mitigating circumstances. Why not just extradite him and stick him in a medium security facility somewhere where he might be rehabilitated?
I make a mean apple pie.
Dear N-American Wild=Hound
You have (as usual) a good point .... several good points ....
... as indeed does our Freond M Metro .....
Ahhh .... Apple Pie .... mit Cream ....
Yrs ever
G E
@ Herr AdlER:
The translators were betrayed, both by the men who murdered them, and the ones who sent them to be murdered. Their lives are no less valuable, and I suppose that if someone forced me to choose between saving Khadr's life or the life of a translator, I would cold-bloodedly have picked a translator.
I would also have chosen to save the life of an American soldier.
If someone had told me of what Khadr would be saved for, five years of torture and imprisonment without rationale or purpose, I might have thought it more merciful to let him die.
But this isn't about the easy choices. It's about how we set ourselves apart from the savages. It's about questioning the worth of a righteous cause that provides excuses for savage and unrighteous acts.
If Khadr was, as I tend to think, operating as a terrorist, then he was a criminal and should have been tried as such in the country where the crimes were comitted.
If he was acting on behalf of the Taliban, the defacto government of Afghanistan, then he was an enemy soldier, entitled to the protections of Geneva and a trial in a war crimes court for the killing of the translators.
But whatever he was, he was clearly a young man confused and corrupted by a poisonous family. And whatever he and his brothers were, they are no longer. Of that I am sure.
Your argument about setting these "murderous" people loose is deeply flawed. But I suggest you take it up with the US government, who have released at least 150 already and are planning to release roughly 275 more. Without charge, without justice.
Of course the 80 they plan to actually charge (with undefined offences in a kangaroo court with unwritten rules) won't be getting justice either.
As for evidence of torture used in the US cause: When an administration has to enter a Clinton-esque "well it all depends what you mean by 'sex'" defence of its "harsh interrogation procedures"--or when the Bush White House has to issue a manual detailing just how close you can get to drowning a waterboarding victim, do you really need to ask if what's going on is torture or not?
Dear M & W-C
Thank you for such thoughtful comments .... yet again ....
Yours ever
G E
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