re: #442 Korla Pundit

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.

Do you deny that abuses have occurred at gitmo? Do you deny that they have been used as a tool for recruitment.

Please get off this “insult to those defending this country” — it is a poor fallback to attempt to vilify me for presenting these positions.

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”?

There is no serious defense for people that claim that Abu Graib is a concentration camp.

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.

The Democrats did force President Bush to change his strategy. His strategy change was made by General Petraeus. To claim that President Bush would have come to this position with-out the pressure of the opposition seems a stretch.

> 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.

Differentiate? This shit is really bad. Why do we need to put a value on one vs. another if they are BOTH ILLEGAL. Torture is torture, whether it is a mock execution or chopping off someone’s finger. We call them both 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.

We are not them.

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.

Yes we were hysterical after 9/11. That does not excuse some of the actions.

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.

No, because I am talking about blind justice. Everyone deserves a certain level of treatment when in U.S. custody. Your argument on this isn’t with me, it is with the Supreme Court.