May 21, 2005

• Course they were right. I mean, we torture and humiliate the Islamic prisoners, but we would never harm their Korans, oh no. It's fucking ridiculous. I mean, the whole fucking thing is ridiculous, the war, the fuckheads who wanted it, the lies, the deaths.. christ, what an absolute clusterfuck.
• Well said, Chyren. Prove it.
• Prove what?
• Duh!?!? Describe the clusterfuck, please...
• Iraq, fool.
• It's more complicated than that. /derail
• I'm assuming Red Cross reps know Al Qaeda detainees are trained to lie about things like: torture, Quran desecration, abuse, and other such touchy subjects. Given that no Red Cross reps actually saw said desecrations, where's the news? Detainees have been crying military abuse since they were captured and detained. No surprise there. At least our detainees have a voice. In Iraq I believe they clubbed your knees. In Saudi Arabia, Christian detainees aren't allowed to even read Bibles, much less complain about Bible burning or toilet flushing.
• But Saudia Arabia are our wonderful allies.
• As the challenger, the burden of proof is on you, junior. How is it NOT a clusterfuck.
• Operation Enduring Freedom™ does not condone this kind of thing. Now get out there and Support Our Troops™.
• At least our detainees have a voice. I'm not sure what bothers me more: the idea that people actually call these people detainees, a term created by the Bush Administration to avoid sticky things like the Geneva Conventions and due process, or the idea that no one, including the Red Cross, really knows what's going on at Gitmo because access is so severly restricted. And f8x, comparing US detention procedures to those of dictatorships? Not helping your case.
• an interesting logic there surlyboi. i expect Bush will say something like that the next time a reporter asks him a "hardball" question. on preview, it is a clusterfuck.
• f8x - that's a piss-poor combination of taking as given that all detainees were in fact Al Qaeda with super terror training; and 'whataboutery' comparisons with shitty treatment of prisoners under other regimes. Neither argument is good enough. There's enough evidence to suggest that many complete innocents have been held, the IRC is not in the business of baseless accusations, and comparisons are odious and irrelevant.
• I think the characterization that "Newsweek was right" is just a bit premature, although I suspect that they were essentially correct in their broad assertion of Koran desecration and probably even correct about the toilet assertion, the technical disparities with which report be damned. Nevertheless, the media has been chomping at the bit to catch Bushco in flagrante delicto, yet given the success of Rove and the other bulldog protectors in turning these attacks back on the press when less than fully supported the press needs to get back to basics and concentrate on the facts and give up on the smears. There are sufficient bad facts to hang Bushco.
• Perhaps no one flushed the book itself, but: So perhaps they were totally wrong and printed a factually wrong story from shady sources, but they were right anyway. Bush would be proud of that kind of logic. Come on. They fucked up, it does happen, even with stories you personally want to believe. There are plently of legitimate things to be angry about in the world right now.
• Smo: Would it feel better if I called them prisoners? What's the friggin' difference? They're in there, we're out here. comparing US detention procedures to those of dictatorships? Not helping your case. I was actually attempting to contrast the two, and I certainly wasn't using it as an argument. Merely as an "oh hey, here's an interesting tidbit." Abiezer: You're right, I'm assuming that everyone there was Al Quaeda. Not a good assumption. However, given that the Quran allows Muslim devouts to lie about things like this, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't just Al Quaeda prisoners saying these kinds of things.
• Show me the money!
• Okay, I'm a bit touchy on this issue. Sorry about that, but it really bothers me, the way the US government has manipulated language to get around human rights issues and the rule of law. If these people really were prisoners (of war, or simply criminals), then the US would have to treat them as such.
• I wasn't attempting to hijack language. It's convenient to refer to them as detainees since that's what everyone calls them, and I'm not sure that changes the nature of their detainment. But that's just me.
• These people have been held captive for years with no charges against them, no access to representation, and no end in sight to their ordeals, and you're concerned about what may have been done to a book??? The mere existence of this illegal prison camp should have the entire civilized world up in arms. The fact that the majority opinion around here is that all religion is a crock of shit should make this Quran stuff a non-issue.
• Ah f8x, Just think a moment. What if the allegations are true? Surely you have to give that at least a glancing nod. Since the prisoners aren't allowed normal US legal help so they can't really tell us what their situation is, why would you assume that this is all lies? I don't know if it's truth, so I'm hoping that the process opens up enough to test whether it is or not. But, with things as they are, how will we ever really know? The evidence which seems to rolling out now supports the allegations. Is that abuse all right with you, if it's true? If you were held prisoner, and your captors abused the Bible, how would you react? Come on, sweetie, I know you're wiser than you've let on in your comment. Since they've never been tried, or even charged with specific offences how do we know if they really were terrorists, or just caught up in a dragnet of some sort. The secrecy in this case is very scary for those of us who don't trust our government implicitly. And. probably should be. In the past, it was you Republicans who distrusted the government, so have you gone over to the "dark side" now? Come on, I'd enjoy another debate with you, and I promise I'll zap the folks who do the knee jerk thing, since it's my turn to be god in our little community.
• I would laugh at people who tried to torture me by destroying books.
• Rock on, rocket. And my beef isn't so much with whether Newsweek got the story right or wrong as much as it is with the fact that they served as yet another excellent scapegoat for the White House's incompetance and that the hue and cry over their slip up has once again served to distract people from the actual heart of the matter. That being that many, many people are being held without representation or so much as a single concession made to the fact that their treatment is far below the rights and priviledges granted to EVERY POW per the Geneva Convention.
• I would laugh at people who tried to torture me by destroying books. Depends on how strong your faith in your favorite religion is. I'd laugh too, but that's because I'm a heathen infidel bastard. I can, however, see how people who believe a book could be sacrosanct would lose it if that book was desecrated.
• It's not that the book was abused in itself, but why it was done in that context of course. I've no brief for that kind of religion, but I would expect respect for rights and common decency from the forces of my state. The willingness to engage in such abuse is what's wrong.
• As far as I'm concerned, they're either Prisoners of War or they're Criminals. The current administration doesn't have the werewithal to shit or get off the pot, and the vote tally shows that the US public (or at least a large enough plurality) don't much care. As for the "desecration" of the Quran, the Bible, the Principia Discordia, or Dianetics, anyone who gets up in arms about maltreatment of a book is guilty of idolatry. Christian or Muslim, if a thing is Holy, they're idolaters, and hypocrites to their own faith.
• rocket88 - you are very right that the real scandal should be the very existence of prisoners held without charge or trial for years on end. Aside from the sheer immorality and illegality, keeping someone locked up for years is a sure fire way to make sure that if they weren't a USA hating terrorist before, they will be now. But the Quran issue is real - it has a real significance. It's not idolotry, that's worshipping images (not that there's anything wrong with that). They believe that it is the living word of God. The Sikh holy book is similarly revered. If it happened, it was a form of psychological torture. I wouldn't destroy a Quran any more than I would stamp on a cross or an image of the Virgin Mary.
• (sorry - it was chimaera who said idolatry - No, it isn't idolatry for Muslims to revere the Quran.)
• jb: i think chimaera is taking what most mystics and scholars believe to be the intended interpretations of the teachings of the 'prophets'. the Quran or the Bible can't actually be 'heaven' or be 'god'. therefore to worship it so blindly as to kill and be killed for it is taking an image or mataphor for god as the real essence of god. this is idolatry according to religious teachings. and this kind of idolatry is really quite dangerous when great leagues of people and nations get behind it and consider the goings on as religious wars or the spread of freedom or political ideals. No, it isn't idolatry for Muslims to revere the Quran. Nor is it for Christians to revere the Bible. But to take these things as the literal words of God (as they and we often do in popular pulpit belief) is idolatry in every sense that the true orthodox teachings of our religions meant to prevent.
• uhmyang pretty much nailed my intention with using the word "idolatry." That which is holy in the Bible and the Quran is not the pages upon which the ink is written, nor the cardboard, leather, and glue. That which is holy, and the only thing which is truly holy in these religions is God/Allah Himself. It is one thing to revere the wisdom and the message, but it is another entirely to worship a physical item so much that mistreatment of the paper in which that wisdom is temporarily embodied is a transgression worthy of a holy war, or a fatwa declaring the transgressor fair game for death. Worship of a physical item (whether it be a totem, graphical depiction, or even a book in which is printed the words of God) is idolatry. How is the worship of text on a page different from the worship of a drawn icon?
• psst. What's the newsweek article? I've been out of the loop.
• All the ocupation/liberation/invasion (take your pick) business has been plastered with psychologic operations to destroy morale and inflame passions based on imagery. Why the emphasis on videos and pictures taken of detainees being interrogated and tortured? Because it's one thing to hear your family was mistreated in a jail, another to see pictures of them doing the very taboo things their faith prohibits. Why the mediapathic fall of the statue, why the haggard Saddam dragged out of his rathole? (And why the Saddam in pants, now). Because the image strikes deep and gives credence to the message. And it works both ways. The photo of the guy with the hood and the outstretched arms had a much wider impact on many of society's sectors than any explicit written accounts of even worse things already reported, months ago. People saw a nice all-american female soldier's picture and it fired up people's passions. It's just a book? Sure, desecrating an object is a lesser action than making prisoners play nude twister with dogs, but it's the basis of their faith. Want to unite them, make them even more fanatical on their beliefs, add another example of western evilness? Well, great job. Perhaps that's the idea. Just a book.. I imagine an invading army's ocuppation burning the big cities' libraries or, say, the Declaration of Independence would have an equal impact on the invaded population. It's symbols. We get our buttons pushed on a primal level and we react. The point is to see just who's pushing them, and to what purpose we the masses are reacting...
• You see, those who are saying the destroying of Korans is exposing the hypocritical idolatry of the Islamic practitioners are really not understanding what this is actually about, imho. Basically, the Koran is the unadulterated word of God. It hasn't been edited or changed like the Bible, and is much younger. It was dictated to Mohammed by an Angel. In some Islamic states, defacing a copy of the Koran is punishable by death, because this is the word of Allah, people, it's not the fucking yellow pages. This is not idolatry, because an idol represents an entity. The Koran is the communication of the universal creator. They respect and honour this document in some ways, I suppose, precisely because of the prohibition against representational figures. Now, obviously, this is irrational and I don't believe that the Koran is the word of God or any other Demi-Urge. However, Islamic people really believe this shit and this is why they are getting upset. It's a taunt, an insult, coming on top of thousands of other insults they believe they have endured for generations, now. Bottom line: you cannot *force* these cultures to change their beliefs. It is not going to happen. Violence will not change the symbols they identify with. The only thing that will happen is that you will make resistance to, and hatred of 'the West' even stronger in these Islamic states, and possibly strengthen the desire for jihad in ordinary everyday Islamic people against all of us; people who under other circumstances wouldn't much care about us anyway. So whether you think it's stupid or not, you've got to decry this kind of activity, because it's not helping anything, and is probably making things much worse for much longer. Winning hearts and minds indeed.
• Knowledge is god, just as work is god, or more to the point, life. Religion is fundamental to the advacemnet or at least maintainance of a culture. Now, the issue is not flags, fags, or statues, it's war. Now if were going to drop bombs on populated cities, we might as well be men about it and wipe our asses with their beepin' holy books. Destroy them mentally, and such. Oh, wait, I think we've done that already. It's war right?
• I agree with many of the things folks have said here. However, there are two points I wish to make: 1. Are these detainees lying to the Red Cross? Perhaps. But (a) I daresay the Red Cross probably has ample experience with detainees suffering in all sorts of conditions telling them all sorts of things to be able to determine what is and is not credible; and (b) if this were an isolated case or set of cases, that would be one thing -- but the examples of Abu Ghraib, and (earlier in our history and the history of our client states) East Timor, Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, et cetera, suggest that this sort of psychological warfare is not at all uncommon. So -- again -- it's true that Newsweek's journalistic credibility has been badly damaged, and they should not have run their story. But It's also wickedly disingenuous for the Bush administration to pretend that the info in the article was so far outside the bounds of possibility. 2. In addition to what Chyren said about the nature of the Quran, many in the Islamic world see this entire affair as a continuation of the Crusades. And as much as Bush insists that this is not a war against Islam, he also keeps insisting that God is on our side and he's backed up by a phalanx of Christian fundamentalists every bit as zealous as the missionaries from ages past.
• Hello! God died a couple milenia ago, we have presidents, or priministers nowadays. The Queen of england is the closest person to an actual god. It would be nice if people used proper language, instead of outdated archaic terms. "can't we all just get along?" Reginel Deny
• God died a couple of millenia ago? Well, shit, I missed the fucking obituary on that one. There's me thinking he never actually fucking existed in the first place.
• The Red Cross conducts their interviews like police interviewing suspects - they keep them separate and then see where everyone's stories match up. So unless every single person in GitMo sat down and decided among themselves, "If the Red Cross shows up, this is what we'll tell them..." (which I promise you, is a level of complexity well beyond your average terrorist-idiot) then if enough prisoners tell the same story, it can be pretty well accepted as being true. Further, the Red Cross does NOT make allegations like this lightly. The vast majority of the time, they work very quietly with whatever governments are concerned to get the problems worked out without making it public. They only take steps like this if A)they are convinced what they're reporting is real, and B)the government in question has been completely uncooperative. And for those of you demanding proof, what sort of level of credibility do you have? Do you SERIOUSLY think that the US military would invite the ICRC in to watch a beating for shits n' giggles? Or that military commanders would actually WRITE DOWN all the times they've knowingly violated the geneva convention? I'm sorry, but with all the things our government has been proven to have done - the Abu Ghraib pictures, the killing of the Afghani prisoners - then I simply cannot be a skeptic when things like this come along. The military has lost all credibility when it comes to the ethical treatment of prisoners in this whole stupid mess, and at this point, the onus is on THEM to start clearing their name. Whether it's fair or not, pretty much any allegation at this point is going to be assumed to be true. Hiding behind papers and saying "Well, no one wrote down their violations of human rights in an official log... so it never happened!" fools absolutely no one. And until they clean up their act and give the world a reason to trust them again, their denials are absolutely worthless. And trust me, as an American, I can think of NOTHING that angers me more than the thought of innocent (as in untried) people being tortured - TO DEATH - by a bunch of lying, hypocritical pieces of offal who DARE claim that they're doing these things in the name of freedom. They piss on freedom every day that this goes on.
• reb'n.
• Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting [FAIR] has a good post about this whole mess. Newsweek's retraction of the Quran story, contrasted with the lack of any correction of its "green mushroom" claim and other similarly erroneous WMD coverage, is quite illustrative of the actual rules—quite different from the ostensible rules that are taught in journalism school—that govern contemporary journalism.
• which I promise you, is a level of complexity well beyond your average terrorist-idiot Upon what is this promise premissed?
• so I send my kid to fight a war of attrition. That is sick and sad. I'm an old lady and I would rather go instead.
• where do I sign up? I'm not that old. I could probably pass the physicals. I can kill. Whatever it takes. Let's get this shit done. No hanging over my kid's head. It's not her fault. But it's her legacy: such a proud thing to inherit: the rumbling anger of the free world.
• Ok, sorry, I'm done.
• Ok, sorry, I'm done.
• Harper's reprinted this interview. It sounds authentic to me.
• Wolof, given that the Guantanamo prisoners don't get a lot of chances to congregate in groups and chat amongst themselves, I'd say such collusion would be quite a feat, indeed.
• Just a bit of "mishandling".
• U.N. human rights investigators, citing "persistent and credible" reports of torture at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, urged the United States on Thursday to allow them to check conditions there.
• The whole setup at Guantanmo is in violation of the Geneva Concentions and is going to be a lasting blot on the reputation of the United States. Use of the word 'detainee' is shameful, an attempt to pretend prisoners are not really prisoners and that their captors are therefore somehow ?magically? exempt from the Geneca Conventions which the US has signed. The allegations of torture and the degrading treatment meted to these prisoners have been consistent for three years. The condoitions under which they are being held contravene the very principles of govenrnment and human rights which have lain at the heart of the US. There is a strange disconnect here, but it won't last -- the blindfold will eventually drop from American eyes. In this case, where the buck stops is pretty obvious to most of the world.
• I'd venture to say that some half of American eyes aren't covered by the blindfold already. My country is kind of insane right now, but hopefully just temporarily -- but even if so your point that we'll be digging out from under the mess for awhile is well taken.
• Good point, HW, but I'm not as optomistic. I don't think we'll take a critical look at Gitmo for at least another generation. Look what happened to the Japanese at the start of WWII - we still don't really talk about that.
• Bah, hit "post" before I was ready. In response to Bees, I have to say I don't think international opinion makes any difference to quite a lot of Americans, and probably won't for a very long time. I hear people my age and younger than me talking about how it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us as long as we're "safe", and it's just too bad if other countries view our actions as illegal/immoral/sucky. I believe responsibility for that lies with our current administration - I don't believe there's ever been an American leader so unconcerned about how the international community views us. Then again, I don't know that there's ever been an American leader so unconcerned about how the American people view him... One thing I feel is certain: this administration has been so awful, so uncaring about so many very important things that it will spawn a generation of unusually honest and open-minded politicians.
• Minda, I think we're already taking a critical look at Gitmo. I mean, it's even in the mainstream media, every day.
• Guantanamo doctors under attack The US military has defended the role of doctors in refining the coercive interrogation tactics being used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. [...] Meanwhile, US Vice-President Dick Cheney on Thursday defended the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. He said they were well treated, well fed and "living in the tropics".
• Think it's starting to heat up in Washington now -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld all on the defensive this week. Two former presidents saying, shut it down. Congress starting to balk. Heh. But I am waiting for the real fireworks. Right now its only a few sparklers we're seeing. But the night is young.
• These retards will never back down or apologise for anything, not until the big hammers come out. This SOB in the WH needs an impeachment, but that will never happen, what with all the dittoheads in congress.
• bees, didn't you mean "the night is young, and romance is in the air"?
• New York Times now reports over 200 captives are now on hunger strike at Guantanamo, 20 of them hospitalized and being fed by nasal tube and/ir treated for dehydration. This am,ounts to about one in three of the thoise imprisoned there.