I was angered, frustrated and upset by the words of A.I., not because they were deriding the US, but because I am ashamed of what goes on in our military prisons. As a world super power, arent we supposed to be an example of how human rights should be applied, not an example of how they should be violated?
There was a report on NPR yesterday on the same topic.
How do you feel?
If you can tolerate your government taking away your own personal freedoms, why would you worry about a bunch of terrorists in a prison? On the other hand … 
djm
Because, my friend, I still belileve in universal human dignity. Theres a big damn difference between my personal issues with my govornment at home(however I may or may not like it) and people hurting other people. No matter how you feel about your or my govornment, I think that we can both say that the US should be examples on treating people in a humane and fair manner.
A others who have read my posts before may know, yes, I would rather live in Canada, but theres still that little part of me inside that wants to believe in my country, and believe that it still believes in some of the basic liberties that it was founded on and grew to appreciate. If Bushy wants to spread democracy so damn bad, he ought to treat these prisoners as if they were citizens of the same democracy and afford them the basic human liberties due to us all, specifically, the reasonable expectation of humane treatment by captors. At the basic level, some could define it as the freedom from torture.
If this “war on terrorism” is truly a war (and it is, not some “police action”) then those people in prisons, who in some cases it has yet to even be established that they are linked to al Qaida, are protected under the Geneva convention.
I’m sorry to rag on ya man, but think of it from my perspective. As much as I want outta here, I was still born here, and it effects me emotionally to hear of my countrymen mistreating people so badly. Its not to say that this kind of thing hasnt gone on before, it’s just that this is so much more publisized and out in the open.
again, sorry for the rip, but I just feel very strongly about this.
If I’m up yer way again soon, I’ll buy ya a Molson to appologise 
Heres another article, this one from the BBC, along those same lines.
Tyler - tongue in cheek (and I have big cheeks! 
)
Point is, your gov’t is doing those things in your name. In fact, your country’s involvement with these folks was done in your name. Bush made it clear from the outset that the US will not honour the Geneva convention. Americans must be prepared to be treated the same in the countries of those affected.
Some might say your gov’t is doing all this to protect your oil supplies, but US gas prices are higher than here, now. I never thought I would see that!
djm
Yes, unfortunatly they are doing things in my name, but it does not mean I have to like it…I take consolation that I did not vote for the current leadership, though.
Isn’t it ironic, though, how they want to spend all that money to wage a war to ‘protect’ our oil interest instead of developing alternative fuel source technology. Hydrogen Fuel cell cars might have been the new thing on the roads instead of hybrids with that kind of money thrown at it.
Forget it.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
This is a myth. The Geneva Convention specifically excludes terrorists such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as they represent no country.
There have been plenty of these terrorists who have been returned to their country of record because of the Geneva Convention rule.
Show us. And then explain to us why these terrorists aren’t being given criminal trials, if they are not combatants.
Criminal trials under what system? The one they seek to destroy? The one they do no recognize?
Yes. And is this some sort of religious argument? Or are you telling me that the US government in the Constitution and under its international treaties has not committed to either treat people as combatants (according to the Geneva Convention) or as criminals (according to the US constituion)?
Then let’s consider trials against them by families of the murdered.
And why should they be given protection under the Constitution?
And yet the only trials that have been considered are ones against the US.
RUtrad, you are getting back to Tyler’s concern about what gets done by a gov’t that is supposed to represent a leading democracy in an advanced world, versus a vicious linch mob from some third-world gutter seeking bloody-handed revenge. By behaving like some of the moral-backwaters of the world, the US puts itself on their level - not exactly inspiring behaviour from a country that has set itself as “the world’s policeman”.
djm
Because their protection under the Constitution is all of our protection against an unaccountable, powerful government that snatches people up in the night, tortures them, tries and kills them secretly. All of our safety and liberty in this country depends boundries that we put on the government to just take people and torture them “because they are really evil.” A free, rights-respecting government will treat even the most evil and wicked according to standards of fairness and justice it has set itself.
And yet the only trials that have been considered are ones against the US.
You are being more incoherent than usual.
‘American Gulag’
Thursday, May 26, 2005; Page A26 (Washington Post)
IT’S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It’s particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world’s political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world’s dictators but for the United States.
That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference held to mark the publication of Amnesty’s annual report, the organization’s secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the “gulag of our times.” In her written introduction to the report, Ms. Khan also mentioned only two countries at length: Sudan and the United States, the “unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power,” which “thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights.”
Like Amnesty, we, too, have written extensively about U.S. prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have done so not only because the phenomenon is disturbing in its own right but also because it gives undemocratic regimes around the world an excuse to justify their own use of torture and indefinite detention and because it damages the U.S. government’s ability to promote human rights.
But we draw the line at the use of the word “gulag” or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there – including new evidence of desecrating the Koran – have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin’s lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China’s laogai , the true size of which isn’t even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty’s legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as “hysterical.”
My comment:
I think the problem in the whole episode here is that the America-bashers, Bush-bashers, et. al., are confusing government policy with the sordid actions of a literal handful of people.
Did abuses occur? Well, we already know that they did, and the people responsible have been and are being held, accountable for their actions. But to implicate an entire government is pure folly. Of couse, I have my hunch as to why this is receiving the hue & cry that it is… it’s all about bashing Bush.
I don’t know when I’ve ever seen such hatred. Especially when one considers that we are dealing with this type of global threat. (Still don’t think it’s global in nature? Consider what just happened in Indonesia yesterday, or in Spain, or …)
I found the article offensive as well, but mostly because Amnesty International is engaging in useless, misleading hyperbole. The gulags killed millions of people. Millions. They were responsible for as many deaths as Hitler was, only less people know about them, so you don’t automatically lose the argument by making the comparison. Getting worked up about a few hundred murderers, and comparing their incarceration to the relentless slaughter of millions of innocent people is asinine.
Making such a comparison does nothing for the case at hand, because it simply reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of history, and a tendency to exaggerate. And if you are exaggerating on your comparisons, why should anyone take anything you say seriously? They shouldn’t.
EDIT: while I was posting, the previous post came up, and I agree with the Washington Post’s take on the matter.
And sadly, it’s no surprise either considering the fact that the US has been doing this covertly by training and funding death squads, secret police, etc., and deploying them to countries they’ve overthrown and installed dictators in all around the world for the last 50 years. But now that the Cold War is over the US is becoming increasingly overt. Amnesty International has been involved in bringing justice to the victims of US sponsored tyrannies all along, but this might be the first time they’ve implicated the US president and Administration themselves to be arrested and tried.
One concern here that’s not being discussed at all is …
Who says all the people who’ve been rounded up are terrorists?
The Afgani taxi driver who died after being beaten by US interrogators was determined to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s been reported that some of the Guantanimo detainees could not be shown to have any connection with terrorism at all.
One of the reasons for rules in such matters is to protect those who are not terrorists, who are not our enemies. I’m not so concerned about how terrorists are treated, though I do believe we should rise to a higher standard than our enemies. My great concern is that innocent people who happen to be Muslims and who happen to come from certain parts of the world are being seriously mistreated, with no recourse for sorting out their situation and gaining any kind of relief.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Ok, Chang, let us know when enough people have been tortured and murdered before it matters to you. The comparison to the gulags is about the concept – not the score card.
The comparison is inept, and it isn’t solely so on the basis of numbers. Those sent to the gulag were innocent of any crime, except (in most cases) being in Stalin’s way. However, given the slant of your posts, I think you would probably had little problem with the torture and murder of the kulaks in Stalinist Russia…they were money-grubbing capitalists after all. :roll:
Those in Guantanamo Bay are criminals, and though it seems their conditions are not the best, they are still criminals. For the same reason, though I feel bad about some child-molester getting raped in an America prison, I feel worse about some girl returning from swimming practice getting the same treatment.