Home Politics & Debate
If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.

cuban POW's?

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
what do people think about the treatment of the taliban in the cuban prison camp.
i have been watching this episode unfold in the news recently and had formed an opinion that surely it was wrong to treat even taliban prisoners this badly.

Upon reading a paper yesterday - which showed a taliban soldier carrying severed hands of their country man who they had just butchered my reaction to this prison camp changed significantly.
let such evil be treated harshly.
«1

Comments

  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    It is hypocritical.
    The Americans tell us that the scummy bastards deserve it, which they probably do, but the Yanks are playing a game of double standards. When the Afghans did things like this you could hear the Yanks shouting over the rooftops about it.
    Now they do it, the protests have gone mysteriously quiet.....
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    If the West is supposedly superior to the Middle East countries, the west can not resort to the same barbaric violence. America still practices the death penalty which some see as barbaric. Commiting torture and inhuman treatment just makes the west as bad as those we condemn. Ok, so it's not as bad as *them*....but it gives terrorists more reason to continue with what they do, doesn't set an example...
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    There is no excuse for mistreating prisoners...and these detainees are not being mistreated...restrained and controlled, yes!

    In the 'bad' old days they would have been found and shot in the field...perhaps some were this time too, I personally don't know.

    These men have to be processed in a manner which is safe for their keepers...and certainly they are being better treated than they treated others.

    They have clean and safe quarters, clean (orange) clothing, food which is probably better than they had in the caves ~ and that three times a day, medical attention for battle wounds, a foam pad for a matress...and probably their share of mosquitos...just like US gets down there.

    These men are being detained for trial, if found guilty most of the charges carry the death penalty and there will be no 'lengthly' appeals, etc.

    This will be a politically correct event which does not take place on US soil...or UK for that matter. A trial of terrorist a few of them may survive the experience...many, if returned to their own homelands would be immediately executed as a state threat...but they don't film this stuff in places like that.

    Just hold out and wait for the movie...which is probably in the making right now...and you'll understand everything! (ye, being sarcastic.)

    Today is SNOWDAY...16" of new powder so we're off to Stevens Pass for the day...gotta love a city like Seattle, has the weather of Paris and the mountains are an hours' drive away.

    <IMG alt="image" SRC="cool.gif" border="0">
    Edited to remove anti-semitic content <IMG alt="image" SRC="mad.gif" border="0">

    [ 22-01-2002: Message edited by: Squinty ]
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Im getting so tired of hearing all this shit in the papers..Those evil Americans.

    Those photos that are in every paper across the country were taken 10 days ago when they were first moving the prisoners into the camp. Transporting prisoners is the most dangerous time so obviously you take more care to keep them secure.

    The US has not tortured anyone. The Red cross is in the camp at all times. They are interviewing and examining the prisoners. If they were being tortured or mistreated in any way then the Red cross would have picked up on it.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Here are some photographs...see for yourself;
    http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/

    <IMG alt="image" SRC="eek.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I think this is just being used as another reason to have ago at the yanks (which cant be all bad). PoW are treated harsher than most because they will always be looking for a chance to escape. also alot of what happens is for the saftey of the gaurds, I personly think if the prisoners are fed, watered and not beaten then what is the problem.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Americans beleive very strongly in innocent until proven guilty. Well civilians do anyways. During war,some people get scared, and some people get on power trips. It does not matter what country you talk about, they all abuse their power and some POW's are always abused and mistreated, and some women and children always suffer. Nobody likes to admit that it goes on, Bit this is one American girl who knows first hand that lots of wrong things happen behind closed doors. <IMG alt="image" SRC="frown.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    "Always"?

    So, you can back up those claims? Do you understand what the word "always" means?
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    The only mistake being made is allowing photographs. Let the red cross in to check but no photo's.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    "Bbbbut... the taliban are just MISUNDERSTOOD, and really LOVING people, if you just got to know them...

    "Perhaps we should send them on holiday, and bribe them into not being naughty anymore?"

    <IMG alt="image" SRC="rolleyes.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Frankly I would favor flying lesons on the way to Gitmo for them...but some would then think me a monster and blood thirsty. Couldn't have that now could we?

    These detainees have absolutely nothing coming...and that is according to their own rule book, the qu'ran! We, US, are giving them quite a lot...but most will be tried, found guilty and then hung with a hogs hair rope & be buried with USDA Hog Guts because of their crimes agains humanity!

    Diesel

    88888888 <IMG alt="image" SRC="eek.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    The Independent

    Rupert Cornwell:
    I'm disturbed by all this hostility to America

    'To doubt the wickedness of what was happening was to be treated at best as a fool'

    At the risk of being accused of having "gone native", I confess it was a relief to get back home to Washington yesterday morning. From a distance of 3,000 miles I had read about it. I had sensed it increasingly when chatting with friends on the phone. Even so, I was unprepared for the hostility to America at loose in Britain right now.

    During a week in London, I often felt as if an entire outraged nation had little on its mind except the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The merest word of caution would draw quizzical and suspicious looks. To doubt the wickedness of what was happening was to be treated at best as a fool, at worst as an apologist for brutal tyranny.

    What struck me most was the breadth of the critical spectrum. As only to be expected, the left, with its pacifist and anti-imperialist instincts, cares especially deeply about human rights and is especially alarmed by America's overwhelming power. But the right is in there too, no less loudly.

    A fastidious MacMillan-like old guard regrets any blunt manifestation of pax Americana. "We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in the American Empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are."

    The great man's words to Richard Crossman in 1943 exactly sum up today's distaste for the swagger and bravado of Donald Rumsfeld.

    Then there are the latter-day jingoists, smarting at the fact that after the initial fanfare, Britain's role in this war has been marginal: the odd cruise missile early on, and some doubtless extremely courageous work by our special forces alongside their American counterparts, but that's about it.

    Had we not taken part, it wouldn't have made much difference. Feted in Washington when we were useful, we have now been dropped.

    The Americans of course have not helped their cause. The picture which caused the real fuss – of the prisoners in their orange jump-suits kneeling masked, gloved and chained by a razor wire fence – was a PR own-goal for the ages. This was no fuzzy zoom-lens scoop by a Fleet Street paparazzo. It was an official US Government picture, designed to show that the prisoners were being treated fairly but firmly.

    Instead it had the Mail on Sunday, no less, ranting away about torture and slavery. Had the US behaved as the British or French undoubtedly would have behaved in the same circumstances, and thrown a thick veil of secrecy over the whole business, Mr Rumsfeld would have had a much quieter life.

    But secrecy is not the American way. Pictures have been released, and reporters taken to Guantanamo Bay by the planeload. Maybe I missed them, but I do not remember Her Majesty's Government ever issuing pictures of the conditions in which IRA prisoners were detained. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has the press been given a tour of Belmarsh prison. Better to keep some things under wraps, old boy.

    Maybe, under Clinton or Gore, all might have been forgiven. But the British have always had trouble with Republican presidents, especially ideological ones. They didn't get Reagan and they don't get Bush. Turning misunderstanding into open resentment is the awkward fact that this president, derided as a buffoon, has actually managed to run a pretty competent war.

    And might not the domestic political problems of Tony Blair be adding fuel to the fire? This Prime Minister, who nailed his colours to the American mast, is now attacked for gallivanting around the world as the hospitals and Connex South East burn. Fed up with Blair's showboating? Then there's a fair chance you'll be fed up with America too.

    Most worrying is the gulf in perceptions across the Atlantic. The divide is immediately visible in the war aims. For Europe, the moral high ground matters most. By setting up Camp X-Ray, the liberals argue, America and the Western civilisation it purports to represent are sinking to the level of the terrorists.

    That is a stretch, by any objective measure. But for the Americans this complaint utterly misses the point. They believe that the events of 11 September forever give them the moral high ground in the war against terror. Washington's overriding aim now is to prevent other outrages from happening. British and other European critics seem unable to understand that the captives at Guantanamo Bay are not being denied POW status because the Americans wish to inflict special cruelties upon them – but because, if they were deemed prisoners of war, they could not be interrogated.

    The 11 September attack was the worst, but only the latest, in a series of outrages by al-Qa'ida against the US. Others, by Osama bin Laden's own boasting, were intended to follow. Interrogation offers a real hope that these plans may be foiled.

    But there is another and deeper chasm, between how the US imagines its actions are seen in the world, and how the world actually sees them. Americans are convinced their country is universally perceived as champion of liberty and democracy. The truth is that we foreigners admire America for its energy, its invention, its ability to create wealth. Increasingly though, we perceive the talk about freedom and democracy as just another smokescreen for the advancement of US national interest.

    As for me, a wanderer between two worlds, I'll know what to expect the next time I'm in London.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    <IMG alt="image" SRC="mad.gif" border="0"> "edited to remove anti-semetic content <IMG alt="image" SRC="mad.gif" border="0">

    Afraid you lost me on that one...the arabs are semites, the jews are semites, so, I guess I'm lost on this one. Criticism is not anti/semetic...observing facts isn't either, perhaps the world isn't supposed to notice bad behavior by a semetic nation.

    Anyway, you lost me on this one, I simply don't know what I said that would garner this one...though it is true, we speak the same language differently.

    SNOWDAY today...I'm out of here in a few minutes, we got 5' of new snow since last Sunday.

    <IMG alt="image" SRC="cool.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Oh, and PC - spineless conformist monothought packaged as pablum for the hard of thinking.

    <IMG alt="image" SRC="eek.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Political Correctness: What results after the use of propaganda, verbal intimidation and browbeating to shame the masses into supporting political positions that -- to any thinking individual -- are ridiculous.
    A good example: ridding the culture of any references to American Indians. If I was an Injun, I would say: "Hey, why are you trying to erase everything about my people?"

    But upside down PC says I'm supposed to be offended by seeing the word "Brave" being attached to sports teams.

    Only in the world of liberalism does this make any sense.

    But of course, it's really all about exercising power. The dupes who parade around with signs are the "useful idiots" as dubbed by Comrade Lenin.
    <IMG alt="image" SRC="eek.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I have no sympathy for those arab pigs.
    They do not even follow their religion.
    I did not know that masturbating infront of visitors, squirting toothpaste up their asses and urinating and defecating on themselves and eachother was a part of Islam.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Are people calling themselves Americans acting towards captured Taleban and al-Qaeda soldiers in ways that deny the 'natural human rights' of the detained? No.

    Are people calling themselves Americans acting towards captured Taleban and al-Qaeda soldiers in ways that the Americans would probably not like directed at them? Yes.

    Go figure.

    [ 03-02-2002: Message edited by: MacKenZie ]
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Originally posted by MacKenZie:
    <STRONG>...

    Are people calling themselves Americans acting towards captured Taleban and al-Qaeda soldiers in ways that the Americans would probably not like directed at them? Yes.

    Go figure.
    </STRONG>

    Never really enjoyed people shooting at me, even when I was shooting at them. Such is the nature of war...

    Was there a point attempting to be made?
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I am a little unclear.Are the detainees at camp X-ray POW's or suspects in a criminal investaigation.If they are the former then they should be treated under UN guidelines(I think there is some doubt as to whether they are), if they are the latter then surely they should be treated well because they are only suspects and hence innocent until proven guilty.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Well, not really because they are being classed as terrorists and not soldiers. Meaning they are subject to a whole host of laws not covered by UN convention.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    But are they going on trial, if so then America has no right to treat them in this manner if they have not been proven guilty. It is interesting to note that ALL the men recently arrested in Leicester as terrorist suspects under the new laws were released.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Originally posted by Thanatos...AGAIN:
    <STRONG>Was there a point attempting to be made?</STRONG>

    It was late, I was feeling obscure. What I was trying to say (and poorly, I admit) was that while the American tactics at Guantanamo may not be 'nice' and wouldn't be right under the rule of 'do as you would be done by,' they do not violate the Constitutional rights of those held (because they don't have any) or even their 'natural human rights' (because, again, they don't have any).
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Originally posted by Toadborg:
    <STRONG>But are they going on trial, if so then America has no right to treat them in this manner if they have not been proven guilty.</STRONG>

    America (who is America?) has all the 'right' it needs until someone or something stops it. The rest of the universe will decide whether or not America has a 'right' to do what it does, just as with the rest of H. sapiens.

    Ah: a thought. Even if America has a 'right,' America isn't doing anything. People are. How can a mob be right to do something that would be wrong for an individual to do?

    Question: Is America male or female? Germany is male (der Vaterland - the Fatherland) and Russia female (Rodina - the Motherland).
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Why the hell dont they have any human rights, have you been paying attention?

    An attitude like that is as bad as there ideas that westerners deserve to die and have no rights, everyone having rights is a fundamental pillar of the "democrcies" that we are trying to protect!
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    They have the right to be interrogated;

    They have the right to tell the truth;

    They have the right to admissions of guilt or innocence;

    They have the right to be subjected to drugs to determine the verasity of what they say;

    They have the right to bow to mecca five times a day;

    They have the right to be fed and housed while US determines their destiny;

    They have the right to a 'drumhead courts martial';

    They have the right to be found guilty;

    They have the right to bend down one last time and kiss their asses goodby as the hogs hair noose is placed around their neck;

    They have the right to a bag of USDA Hog Guts for their burial!

    Yes, the Gitmo prisoners have rights...just none that anyone with a sound mind would want.

    And, I predict that a small few will be found not guilty and returned to either their country of origin or Afganistan (New Texas).

    <IMG alt="image" SRC="eek.gif" border="0">
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Originally posted by Toadborg:
    <STRONG>Why the hell dont they have any human rights, have you been paying attention?

    An attitude like that is as bad as there ideas that westerners deserve to die and have no rights, everyone having rights is a fundamental pillar of the "democrcies" that we are trying to protect!</STRONG>

    Starting with the last point, I would not support democracy for any group larger than, oh, a largeish town. Above that it is impractical, and I go for representative republican government. Which is not democracy, as others here have repeatedly pointed out, and rightly so.

    So, back to the interesting point: name a 'natural human right.' Go on.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Starting with the last point, I would not support democracy for any group larger than, oh, a largeish town. Above that it is impractical, and I go for representative republican government.

    Cant be sure but I think it was the Greeks who set out that 5000 people was the optimal number for true democracy. When more than that it was better as a Republic of some kind.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Originally posted by MacKenZie:
    <STRONG>

    Starting with the last point, I would not support democracy for any group larger than, oh, a largeish town. Above that it is impractical, and I go for representative republican government. Which is not democracy, as others here have repeatedly pointed out, and rightly so.

    </STRONG>

    <IMG alt="image" src="http://www.stopstart.fsnet.co.uk/smilie/thumbs.gif"&gt;
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I like your point on democracy, I agree we do not live in a democracy because a country is too large and complicated.

    There are probably no such things as 'natural' human rights but there are rights within a society and are the norm today, these include Habeas Corpus and the right to humane treatment. These rightss are accepted in the Western world and ought to be upheld if we sre to consider ourselves in the right.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I'm pleased by the response to my point about democracy. 5000, eh? Interesting: I shall remember that.

    'Natural human rights' are a fallacy, no doubt. What 'right to life' has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not take any notice of the pleas, however impassioned, of civil-rights lawyers. What 'right to life' is there for a man who knows he must die in order to save his family? The right to liberty? Liberty is never free, as the Founding Fathers well understood: they were pledged to buy liberty through blood, toil, tears and sweat. And happiness? Well, I can 'pursue happiness' wherever I am: that's a fact, not a 'right.'

    So, what we call 'rights' are ultimately just coventions. At first social conventions, then codified into legal entitlements. There are two criticisms, closely related:

    1) Any rule will be wrong at least some of the time. At the least it will be innacurate. Would I torture a random bloke off the street? No. Would I torture someone that I had cause to believe could tell me how to disarm a mega-nuke about to kill several million people, if there were no other choice? Yes.

    2) Rules are made by men, and men are fallible. The (legal) entitlements we grant are not God-given. To say that the current system of 'rights' must be right (note the switch from noun to adjective) because it enjoys the support of X% of the population (has anyone counted recently?) is nuts. By the same logic the Nazis were utterly right in what they did.

    Ultimately, what does one have a 'right' to do? Whatever one can get away with. So, for the moment, America has a 'right' to act as it does.

    Often we agree to play by certain rules, but anyone who really understands a rule knows when to break it.

    [ 05-02-2002: Message edited by: MacKenZie ]
Sign In or Register to comment.