Black Dog

Lobbing mortar rounds designed to sear the flesh from people's bones into a heavily populated area is about as indiscriminate as it gets. Strawmen and victim-blaming aside, how does the morally repugnant act of suicide bombing relate to the morally repugnant act of killing civilians? Argus would say the difference is one of intent. That may be, but the intent here was pretty clear: to kill anything still in the city, insurgent or otherwise.

I think such facile comparisons serve only to minimize the horror of totalitarian regimes. We Canadians enjoy the kind of rights and freedoms that millions of people the world over can only dream about. The mere fact that you are allowed to criticize the government without fear is proof of that. If you really think Canada is "not far" from totalitarian rule, you are terribly misinformed. But then, I expect little else from someone who is foolish enough to belive the invasion and occupation of Iraq has lessened the threat of terrorism.

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, once embraced and then shunned by the Bush administration, held talks with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday but the Pentagon did not allow television cameras to record the event. We're talking about a convicted con-artist who fed the U.S. much of the now-discredited WMD "intelligence", a guy who told Pentagon leaders that Iraqis would peacefully welcome U.S. forces as liberators, and who is under investigation for passing secrets to Iran. But even after all that, he still gets to rub shoulders with Big Time and Rummy. I had no idea that this administration could be so forgiving. Who knows? Maybe there will come a time where we'll see a replay of this touching scene.

Source? I can't wrap my head around this thinking. On the one hand, we're told the Al Qaeda members are not P.O.Ws and thus not entitled to the basic rights of a soldier. Surely, though, trying them under a military tribunal legitimizes the claim that these guys are soldiers. If they are criminals, they should be tried as such, not as soldiers. It's this kind of dishonesty and double dealing that compromises the legitimacy of the "war on terror".

So, let me get this straight: a foreign country invades and occupies your home, which (quite predictably) causes a portion of the population to rise up against the invaders. Suddenly you're responsible for the actions of those people? There's a term for punishing people for the actions of others. It's called "collective punishment". The Nazis were pretty big on that.

By all accounts? I'll remember this next time someone says some bullshit about U.S. forces taking great pains to avoid killing innocents. (warning: graphic link)

Nope. If they were fighting as Canadian soldiers under British Command, then yes. But if they were wearing the uniform of Great Britain, then no. Veterans should be honoured by the country they fight for, not their country of origin. But hey, if we want to honour those who fought for a foreign power, then maybe we should throw a parade or something when these guys get back....

I'm saying the people who are torturing people in secret have no moral values, yeah. As for the rest, well, enjoy your strawman.

In other words, you've nothing to offer but the same bad ideas which put the guardians of freedom and democracy in the illustrious company of folks like Km Jong Il or Assad? Awesome. Let there be no talk, then, of any moral compass guiding the war on terror or its supporters. Of course, when confronted with the glaring moral vacumn within themselves (not to mention, pesky facts), these people skitter off like cockroaches exposed to the light.

So, just to be clear, perjury to a grand jury was good enough to get Clinton impeached, but when it's a G.O.P hack on the line, it's no big whoop? Fitzgerald hasn't even wrapped up his investigation yet, not has Scooter even gone to trial: surely, given the litany of failures of this administration, that you Bush syncophants would learn to shut your traps until the case is closed.

Actually, you're missing the point. As I said before, it isn't just that people are being treated inhumanely (though, of course that's a major consideration), but that there's no way of knowing whether they are even guilty of anything at all. For examples, we need to look no further than Abu Ghirab, where between 70 and 90 per cent of detainees were completely inocent. According to the article that broke the story of the secret detention facilities, 70 per cent of captives have little direct connection to terrorism and are considered to be of low intelligence value. Um...not acting like the despotic third world regimes "we" claim to oppose would be a good start. How about trials? How about transparency? There's systems in place for dealing with war criminals and assorted scumbags: use them.

This is from the article I linked to above, which would also seem to correspond with information about interregation techniques used at Abu Ghirab and Gitmo. I guess the question is: are these things torture? I would say yes: there are ways to break someone that don't involve bamb shoots under the finger nails. But they are no less evil in their intent.

By all accounts, and that includes the UN inspectors and the Iraq Survey Group, Iraq not only had no WMD, but had no active WMD programs. But no proof. Just tiny bits of ciorcumstansial evidence circulating through the fevered imaginations of far-right conspiacy nuts. By the U.S's own admission, foreigners fighting in Iraq make up as little as 10 per cent of theinsurgency. Most of those were drawn to the conflict as a result of the U.S. aggression. The possibility is far greater now. Iraq has become a training ground for the small numbe rof foreign fighters. Even native born Iraqis are starting to export terrorism to other countries. The U.S. has opened a pandora's box. The term conspiracy denotes something well-organized. While anti-western sentiment, rooted in part in a radical interpretation of Islam, is widespread, I would hestitate to call it a conspiracy. What's more, the responses to 9-11, the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq have excrabated the problem. Just goes to show that the neocon apple never falls far from the Trotskyist tree.

Nonsense. This is particularily asinine when you consider this current "wa" is being fought (so we're told) between the forces of freedom and civilization and those of barbarism. Take away any sembelance of rules or diplomacy and you are left with a nest of vipers, none of whom deserve anything more than extinction. Ignoring the historical context to this conflict is no way to resolve it. So torture doesn't work, but we should let them torture anyway?? What I find interesting about the revalations that the CIA has adopted old Communist Bloc interregation techniques is that those techniques weren't designed to produce intelligence, but false confessions.

Link.

So, one irrelevant figurehead denounces another irrelevant figurehead and this is news?

No Shady, you were trolling. The leak matters, but so does the information it contained. You deemed the latter irrelevant in an attempt to draw some equivilance between this and the Plame case. Humourously enough, in both cases, the leak is linked to Dick "Big Time" Cheney. HRW

Depleted Uranium, I think. Monty puts it on his cornflakes every morning because it helps him see the ThoughtRays that beam from the Soviet-style CBC, liberal news sources and even left-ish internet discussion board posters, which then enables him to reject those who seek to contaminate his Pure Thoughts and turn him into a baby-eating, Islamofascist commie atheist Democrat. Thus "DU rejects."

Right. The evil google people are censoring any reference to this character. You're such a crackpot. BTW, I've never set foot on DU. You stupid crackpot.

Even the death penalty, which I personally believe to be wrong, is accompanied by some due process. The problem with torture, in this context, is that it occurs with no oversight and no process to determine if the people being tortured "deserve" to be tortured. Now, that's not to say torture is a acceptable punishment if it follows due process, but only that the analogy is flawed.

As near as I can tell, the administration's response to all this has been "We don't torture , but please don't take away our ability to torture people if we want to." I've never been one to qualify my support of human rights. There's no "ifs", "ands" or "buts" about it. Given tortures ineffectiveness as a means of generating reliable information, I don't see any circumstances in which it would be acceptable, especially by a country to which individual rights and personal liberty are suppossed to be paramount.

Argus, Warrena and his ilk, in their rush to create an Islamic boogeyman, are mighty quick to assign deep, political motives to a rabble of young, uneducated men who, as you would say are "gleefully taking part in the general mayhem". The best explanation I've heard is that this is an incoherent revolt by kids. There's no political dimension. No "intifada" on the streets of Paris.

Wow. Suddenly, they're just crawling out of the woordwork. What I wonder, though, is why they've all been holding out so long and allowed poor Scooter and Turdblossom to get worked over by that mean old Fitzgerald. I'm sure the special prosecuter would interested to know why these fellows haven't come forward with these revalations before. Maybe the FBI could pay them a visit? Wilson never said that Cheney sent him, only that the vice president’s office had questions about an intelligence report that referred to the sale of uranium yellowcake to Iraq from Niger. CIA officials were informed of Cheney’s questions. "The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office," Wilson wrote in July. Also, Wilson's claims that Iraq did not attempt to buy uranium have held up for two years. The final Iraq Survey Group report concluded, “ISG has uncovered no information to support allegations of Iraqi pursuit of uranium from abroad in the post-Operation Desert Storm era.”

Personally, I'd rather this kid get his day in court. That's more than many, many others caught up in the "war on terror" will ever get. I fully expect, though, that the outcome has been predetermined.