re: #441 keithgabryelski

> I agree that there were some false statements made (the Koran flushing) and some opinions that were tough … but rape and slaughter happened at Abu Garib — that is the bigger picture.

No, see? You’re using Abu Graib again to smear Guantanamo. It’s different. Abu Graib was done by rogue individuals who have been punished, including jail time. That had nothing to do with U.S. detention policy. It was a crime.

Guantanamo is nothing like Abu Graib, and to compare them, which you deny doing in the same post, is an insult to those defending this country.

Gee, it turns out that 97% of the population of Guantanamo Bay are straw men!

> Two things: “concentration camps” have a connotation above and beyond most heinous crimes (or even the gulag/pol pot).

They also said the magic word “hitler” quite a bit if that is the only comparison that fits the bill for you. But let’s not make light of the gulag and pol pot. How many millions does it take to make a “concentration camp”?

> Also, “no one” is a phrase used to show that it isn’t a common belief. For instance “No one believes the earth is flat anymore” — it turns out some people do, but are nut cases and so with-out the need for a lengthy lawyer-like exception clause we can say “no one”.

So you admit that Dick Durban is a ‘nut case’ and a ‘nobody.’ Sweet. But let’s stop pretending that this was not a constant comparison from the Andrew Sullivans and the Nancy Pelosis and the Air Americas of the world.

> From my point of view: Congress forced President Bush to reconsider his options in Iraq. Instead of following the course of failure he employed and surge of troops. This didn’t seem like the course he was going to take before the Democrats won in 2006. The Democrats helped him win in Iraq, and did not cut funding (which would have be the undercutting you are talking about)

Oh, you’re killing me. The Democrats ‘forced Bush’ to employ the surge. That’s a good one. You mean the one formulated by “General Betrayus”? You are rewriting history. The Dems wanted their ‘timetable’ of retreat, remember? They know that when time is on the enemy’s side, you lose. And that was how they tried to make us lose.

The dem leadership, plus non-leadership like then-Senator Obama, did try to cut funding, but didn’t have the votes, because they knew they would lose elections that way.

> there is a difference between torture and “uncomfortable or humiliated”

Yes, but even making them uncomfortable seems unreasonable to the “anti-torture” crowd. I am also against torture. But most of the arguments against it are simplistic and don’t differentiate between forcing somebody to stand for hours at a time and the Al Qaeda torture manual that was too disgusting to even describe. You can look it up if you are curious. Now, that’s torture. Nor do they acknowledge that there is a difference between enemy soldiers, or even civilian criminals, and top Al Qaeda plotters with organizational and operational knowledge at a time when we were still expecting mass civilian casualties.

To be fair in ones assessment, one must acknowledge the mitigating circumstances. The job of the CIA, whose pre-9/11 performance was abysmal because of the legal obstacles that shacked it, had to be one of the most uncomfortable and stressful responsibilities ever assumed by somebody on a government salary. To start a witchhunt against these people now both punishes their good faith attempts to keep us safe while keeping it as clean as possible, and sends a message to the current CIA that it should go back to doing the half-assed CYA job that allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place.

Also, we are talking about 3 specific terrorists here, not about Guantanamo as a whole. Three. Three very bad people. If you want to argue about how these three villains should be treated better, you should be honest and talk about the three individuals without cloaking them in the anonymizer of the entire prison.