9/11 dude learns to breathe under water

[Twisted Intestine]

Yeah, that's a good point. Just seems like they're attempting to hide it from American's more than from the hostile groups though.

If they actually followed through and sentenced those responsible I could see alot of terrorist groups not hating America/The Obama administration so much though. It's not like they just want to kill people for the fun of it, they have their reasons, and might see the prosecution of those people as a "positive step forward", or whatever they'd say. Whereas since it's already pretty much universal knowledge what went on, they can use Obama hiding the information as grounds to say he's no better than his predecessor.

It's pretty much a one way street and they'd use Obama hiding it or releasing it as propaganda against their enemies though.

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

Ideally this is another mess that wouldn't have to be cleaned up, but whatever. Thanks again, Texas!

 

[NoCalMike]

I think people are missing the point that other countries have already seen these photos. It's not like Al Qaeda doesn't have every piece of evidence that has leaked via actual NEWS organizations from around the world.

Part of releasing these photos, is so the AMERICAN public can have a little self reflection, and so that maybe the 50% of our citizenship that is denying that torture happened, will STFU for a second and look at the evidence of what happened with their own eyes.

As it stands right now, we are going to have torture-denyers in the upcoming generation, people claming it never happened.

I read an article about Germany in post WW2, they actually took the people to the concentration camps and made them look at what happened. They wanted as many witnesses as possible, so that it could never be denied, and so that hopefully it could never happen again.

It seems as if our government is taking the exact opposite actions.

 

[bigolsmitty]

Congress's braindead NIMBYism on Gitmo is stupid.

 

[snuffbox]

Even Russ Feingold folded this morning. Depressing.

 

[bigolsmitty]

I couldn't believe it when I read your post, snuffbox, but it's true.

http://senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&session=1&vote=00196#position

 

[snuffbox]

The powerful Whips & Saddles industry must have spent a lot of money on our august Senate.

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

Again, this is unbelievably retarded. What do they think will happen? The terrorists will just be plopped down in random spots and will begin blowing themselves up, with atom bombs.

 

[NoCalMike]

So an interesting tidbit, was going around some newswires, apparantly the CIA memos that they tried to claim Nancy Pelosi was briefed on in 2002 contained the Acronym "EIT" (Enhance Terrogation Techniques) but that was a term coined in 2006 and never appeared on any other single memo availabe from 2002-2005.

Also, why do people have such a hard time believing the CIA would lie? I mean it is kind of part of their job in a lot of instances.

 

[ericmm]

It just seems to me like the American Senate and Democrats especially were just *broken* by the Bush Administration's skill at portraying dissenters as "anti-American" and they've just been utterly domesticated. Mention the word "terrorist" or "security" and they just fucking FOLD.

Almost everyone from that time period seems so weak now...

 

[snuffbox]

You could be right about some individuals, eric. But several of the senators came in after 2006 and some just this past January.

Are we going to have to elect sub-35 year-olds to ensure we dont have a Congress of bent cowards?

 

[snuffbox]

I wonder how many of the old anti-communist Republicans are going to get Obama's point about 'rule of law vs. rule of force' from this morning's speech.

Cheney's speech is embarassing.

 

[NoCalMike]

Yeah the problem is most of them are still acting cowardly. They have the majority, they have the President they said they needed elected to get things done, but most importantly, they have the will of the american people on their side, yet they still aren't acting very differently from how they did the past eight years.

 

[snuffbox]

It will be hard for me to campaign for Feingold next year after yesterday's bizarre vote.

 

[bigolsmitty]

I am actually pretty shocked at Feingold's vote, and would like to hear an explanation. Your or Dobbs (or Brody lol) should contact his office.

 

[snuffbox]

He's running with the "plan" canard.

 

[bigolsmitty]

Conservative radio shock jock Eric "Mancow" Muller (sample quote: "Obama can keep his "hope", the rest of us would like to keep our money, guns, and God!") decided to prove that waterboarding isn't torture by subjecting him self to it on the air. Of course, as my colleague Chris Orr has pointed out, getting waterboarded for a limited duration under circumstances you control is nothing like being waterboarded as a prisoner. Still, the experiment was interesting:

"The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay South answered, adding, "He's going to wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this."

With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.

Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/05/22/one-less-torture-advocate.aspx

 

[samoarowe]

Awesome. That's probably not going to make Sean Hannity want to follow up his boastful offer anytime soon.

 

[bigolsmitty]

General David Petraeus said this past weekend that President Obama's decision to close down Gitmo and end harsh interrogation techniques would benefit the United States in the broader war on terror.

In an appearance on Radio Free Europe on Sunday, the man hailed by conservatives as the preeminent military figure of his generation left little room for doubt about where he stands on some of Obama's most contentious policies.

"I think, on balance, that those moves help [us]," said the chief of U.S. Central Command. "In fact, I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines."

http://americanfootprints.com/drupal/node/4401

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

^^ Genuinely great news. How will the wingnut Right continue to spin this as the enemies of their policies pile up on all sides?

 

[BruiserBrody]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4741.shtml

9/11 related...

 

[Dr. Zaius]

Given the size and depth of the evidence from a variety of sources that Al Quaeda was behind 9/11, I simply can't comprehend the continued skepticism.

 

[NoCalMike]

How to Make Terrorists Talk; Cookies!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/09171190149100

He had no intention of cooperating with the Americans; at their first meetings, he refused even to look at them and ranted about the evils of the West. Far from confirming al-Qaeda's involvement in 9/11, he insisted the attacks had been orchestrated by Israel's Mossad. While Abu Jandal was venting his spleen, Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: "He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it." At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor. "We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan recalls. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures."


It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda - including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers - but the cookies were the turning point. "After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan says. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."

Bush Administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, had previously claimed that Abu Zubaydah supplied that information only after he was waterboarded. But Soufan says once the rough treatment began - administered by CIA-hired private contractors with no interrogation experience - Abu Zubaydah actually stopped cooperating

 

[bigolsmitty]

Quick reality check:

According to data provided by Traci L. Billingsley, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, federal facilities on American soil currently house 216 international terrorists and 139 domestic terrorists. Some of these miscreants have been locked up here since the early 1990s. None of them has escaped. At the most secure prisons, nobody has ever escaped, period.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219268/

 

[BruiserBrody]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5395830/Abu-Ghraib-abuse-photos-show-rape.html

Those old...believed fake photos..... finally getting a little uproar it seems

 

[Czech]

another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee

What's going on with these arabophones?

 

[Big Green]

another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee

What's going on with these arabophones?

Learning Arabic is the GAY thing to do?

 

[Jingus]

And the full circle is made to the complaints in the gay marriage thread that too many Arabic translators have been kicked out for queering. I am impressed.

 

[Big Green]

And the full circle is made to the complaints in the gay marriage thread that too many Arabic translators have been kicked out for queering. I am impressed.

Queering doesn't make the world work.

 

[Jingus]

That is indeed the quote I was thinking of. So which story's the right one? That they're kicking out gay Arabic translators all willy-nilly, or that they take gay Arabic translators to Abu Ghraib in order to sodomize the prisoners?