No Connection Between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Only if you're ignorant of the facts!

[Moderate One]

Well its always good to have a person to debate a different point of view. Hehe Goingnova hates me sometimes for taking the other perspective in my favorite role as Devil's Advocate. Its good someone else gives Goingnova a good fight.

 

[SISTER_KATE]

Nova seems to do an excellent job of holding his own in a debate. I'm just waiting for the opportunity to disagree with him but so far I back most everything he has said. Never thought I would be so agreeable. LOL

 

[GoingNova]

Oh, Chris, next time you mention Allied war crimes, might wanna leave the Russians out. The Gulags were nearly as bad if not worse that concentration camps. It brings up the average quite a bit considering Stalin has the all time death rate, not Hitler.

I believe Black Mage is correct, Stalin actually killed more people than Hitler did. I was watching the History Channel one day, and they did a comparison of the two men. It was amazing how much they had in common.

 

[GoingNova]

Nova seems to do an excellent job of holding his own in a debate. I'm just waiting for the opportunity to disagree with him but so far I back most everything he has said. Never thought I would be so agreeable. LOL

A good debater never gives up, but I believe wisdom should prevail. There sometimes comes a point in a debate when the facts are all laid out, both sides are factually correct, and opinion is the deciding factor.

Case in point, I completely respect the position that President Bush SHOULD NOT have gone to war. Truth be known, there are times when I myself ponder just that very notion. What I dislike is when people say he HAD NO JUSTIFICATION to go to war. That annoys me, because they are injecting their opinion, he SHOULD NOT, as fact.

The fact is, if you were to look at all the wars, both past and present, and lay out the reasons these wars were started, I believe the current war in Iraq would be in the top 30% of "Justified Wars". My point? Many, and I do mean MANY, a war was started for FAR LESS than this one, and with my last breath, I contend the justification, both legal and moral, for the present war in Iraq, is there.

 

[jatkins]

Or, since they are not soldiers, as defined by the Geneva Convention, and they are more than just "criminals" we could simply establish a new way of dealing with them, which is what we are in the process of doing now. I believe the Supreme Court has just decided to hear the case.

Just to make sure I'm not completely reinventing the wheel here, I'm going to refer you to my comments responding to similar arguments on the Iraq War is as Bad as the Holocaust (a statement I don't support) thread. Some brief notes:
1) These people are not worse than Nazi war criminals. They are not worse than Tim McVeigh. They are not worse than Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson. Most of these people haven't even conducted a successful terrorist operation. We treat genocidal maniacs to trials at the Hague, so what, exactly, is your point? That no international law exists that deals with crimes of this scope? Because that's just not true.

2) We're signatories to the DHR. If we want to torture people, we should at least have the intellectual honesty to withdraw from it.

3) The Supreme Court and our legal system aren't dealing with it, because the Senate just passed a resolution 49-42 declaring that the detainees can't sue the US Government. This was in the Times on Friday. The Supreme Court can't decide cases that don't come to them, and no one has standing to contest the law because the only people who were harmed are now not allowed to sue. How's that for a catch-22?

Jatkins, and all others who defend these people, I just don't understand it. These people are part of an organization that has no qualms about murdering children, and yet you defend them as though they were just ordinary criminals.

Because I believe what someone is accused of and how they should be treated by our legal system should have as little correlation as possible. At the point where they have not received trials, have not been convicted, have not even been given counsel or been brought up on charges, it's pretty hard to argue that they are all guilty. Guilty of what? They HAVEN'T BEEN CHARGED WITH ANYTHING.

Jeffrey Dahmer had no qualms about murdering children. Neither did Nazi war criminals. The detainees are not worse.

These people, if given the chance, would walk into a shopping mall, and slaughter as many men, women and children as they could, and yet you defend them.

I will defend human rights for every person on this planet. They reject human rights, and argue that we really don't uphold them either: we just use them as a cover for our real brutality. I will not give these people the satisfaction of being right about us.

The world is watching, too. Will the free nations rise to this challenge and show everyone that a system based on universal recognition of human rights is better than any other? Or will they resort to the tactics of their enemies, spurring recruitment of more terrorists, and tacitly conceding that human rights are largely artifical constructions that we invoke merely to sound good?

Don't me wrong, if we were subjecting them to torture, I mean REAL TORTURE, as in the kind that John McCain was subjected to, I could maybe understand your objection. But they are not. Sorry, I think what was done in Abu Grav was misconduct, I would not call it torture.

Okay, you have a strange definition of torture. I'm not going to explain again why I think this is torture and also why I think torture is bad. Instead, I will again refer you to my comments on the thread I mentioned above.

Overall, we have detained more than 68,000 people since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and there have been 325 complaints of mistreatment. 68,000 people, and only 325 complaints, does that sound like we are mistreating them?

The organization responsible for reporting these complaints is the very organization being accused of the mistreatment. The CIA, DIA, and DoD's internal investigations are not credible at the point where they are the ones engaging in these questionable actions.

More credible are the two (2) only independent inspections that happened at Guantanamo bay. One was the Red Cross, the other was the FBI. I refer you to the Iraq War...Holocaust thread again for the listing of the horrific details of their findings. So yeah, when the only two groups not complicit in these tactics which have examined Guantanamo have observed such horrific things, and when it seems likely that such inspections would have taken place when the guards and staff of the facility were on their best behavior, I think it's fair to say that the 325 claims is a little under-reported.

Finally, if I were an internee, I probably wouldn't report mistreatment, if only because I wouldn't believe it would do any good. Empirically, it hasn't, so that's a reasonable position.

Further investigations have found that of those 325 cases, 100 were legitimate. Guess what? 100 people have been punished. Doesn't sound like torture to me.

You haven't established that that's the same 100 people. And the "further investigations" were done by the very same agencies that were accused of mistreatment. Again, not exactly credible. When the government refuses full-access to non-partisan and cross-partisan observers, its "investigations" become completely worthless.

Given the circumstances, and what these people are cable of doing, I see absolutely nothing wrong with what we are doing.

They're not capable of much when starved, tired, beaten, overheated, and lying in their own feces.

Further, I think treating them as soldiers or criminals would endanger the lives of our soldiers and our citizens, and frankly, they come first.

I refer you for the fourth time to the earlier thread, where I discuss how torture doesn't work, and is actually detrimental to the war effort.

Just my opinion. I respect yours, I just don't understand it.

My opinion is just this:
1) Human rights are human rights. You either respect them in all cases or recognize that they are a sham. Not respecting them proves our enemies right about us: we don't really believe in the moral principles we espouse, we just claim to in order to justify our imperialism. It also reduces our capacity to lobby other countries to do better in the field of human rights, by destroying our moral credibility. Human rights abuses in China are harder to get outraged about when we don't respect rights either. And it doesn't matter that they violate them much much more: rights are not a matter of degrees. They either exist or they don't.

2) Torture doesn't work. People will say anything. These people don't have current information. Terrorist organizations are cell-based so these people didn't know anything to begin with. They are likely to lie just to get the pain to stop. That causes us to divert resources to cover non-existent threats, increasing the likelihood of a successful attack in a different place.

3) Torture and abuse cause outrage in the Muslim world, leading to a greater proclivity to join and endorse terrorist groups. Recruitment pamphlets from terrorist organizations recovered during the war have listed abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay as justifications for violence against the United States.

4) People are not guilty until a court says they are. They are not implicated until they are charged. It is unacceptable to prevent any findings of fact in this matter. The power to suspend all legal rights is not a power the government should ever have in any case. The precedent it sets is terrible.

That, put very, very briefly, is the outline of my argument. Even if you don't agree with the points I make, I'm not sure how you could possibly misunderstand it.

 

[GoingNova]

My opinion is just this:
1) Human rights are human rights. You either respect them in all cases or recognize that they are a sham. Not respecting them proves our enemies right about us: we don't really believe in the moral principles we espouse, we just claim to in order to justify our imperialism. It also reduces our capacity to lobby other countries to do better in the field of human rights, by destroying our moral credibility. Human rights abuses in China are harder to get outraged about when we don't respect rights either. And it doesn't matter that they violate them much much more: rights are not a matter of degrees. They either exist or they don't.

2) Torture doesn't work. People will say anything. These people don't have current information. Terrorist organizations are cell-based so these people didn't know anything to begin with. They are likely to lie just to get the pain to stop. That causes us to divert resources to cover non-existent threats, increasing the likelihood of a successful attack in a different place.

3) Torture and abuse cause outrage in the Muslim world, leading to a greater proclivity to join and endorse terrorist groups. Recruitment pamphlets from terrorist organizations recovered during the war have listed abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay as justifications for violence against the United States.

4) People are not guilty until a court says they are. They are not implicated until they are charged. It is unacceptable to prevent any findings of fact in this matter. The power to suspend all legal rights is not a power the government should ever have in any case. The precedent it sets is terrible.

That, put very, very briefly, is the outline of my argument. Even if you don't agree with the points I make, I'm not sure how you could possibly misunderstand it.

Allow me recant: I understand your positon, I just disagree. Strongly.

 

[Guest]

Too bad I wasn't around to get into this debate.

So where are all these debaters hanging out today? I would love to find their forum! Did any of them leave a forwarding address?

 

[Choscura]

as far as i can tell, you can be a patriot or you can be a good muslim. you cannot be both.

 

[Choscura]

theres plenty of links, but the simple fact is that saddam and bin laden did not get along very well. saddam was more forward moving (sounds funny saying that), had christian churches and didn't enforce any law so strictly as his own (as opposed to muslim holy law). bin laden has been stereotyped enough for most people here to know what he probably thought of that.

it doesn't rule out cooperation at some low level- like a mutual "I won't bomb you if you don't bomb me" deal- but it makes high level stuff unlikely. certainly nothing hussein would be personally involved in, or any of his immediate family- you think udey was going to give up his ****-swing and paris hilton sex tapes for some crazy **** who lived in afghanistan so they could piss off a country with more functional nukes than you'd need to blow up mars? I don't.

 

[Guest]

Makes sense - fundamentally different except for their hate of a common foe - the US.

 

[jatkins]

Mrsd607 suggested I come back and check things out. I didn't expect to see something like this:

as far as i can tell, you can be a patriot or you can be a good muslim. you cannot be both.

I have Muslim friends. They vote, they pay their taxes, and several of them are warhawk Republicans who supported the invasion of Iraq. They also strictly obey the tenets of their religion. So tell me, Choscura; are they unpatriotic? Or are they bad Muslims?

And if you would, a follow-up: how arrogant do you have to be to think you are equipped to judge either?