Quote:Nice - so automatically if some one is from the south they are a dumb redneck trailer trash and everyone from the north is educated and respectable.
Of course! Haven't you realized that by now?
If I need help, give me a redneck over a Beautiful Person every time.
posting without reading previous posts on purpose, to record my own first thoughts, although not exactly first as I saw this pic earlier today. But first, as in that photo will - if not supplant - annex space near the napalmed girl of decades ago.
For me it is hard to adjust in tune with friends and family points of view of L. England. She seems calm, within the requirements of her job. This is either brainwash or who she is, but she is at some comfort level.
In the meantime I have been reading a couple of books from a literate mystery series I have been rather promotional for in the past, quite a smart series, and ... in these last two books of this week's purchase, I must back off, as in would it be better to throw away the books (me, a bookburner - or what?, and choosing to throw away, as the violence described is too instructional.)
Anyway, in those rather awful books, let me not judge, I am sure the people at the press had these same questions and decided to print...
Soho Press, books by J. Robert Janes... but I cannot but make the connection, re women involved in violence, from the book to the reality.
This image re the woman and the leash is almost brutally iconic, crystallizing a girl to woman in passage, or was it in passage?, and also iconic, in the degradation of a prisoner forever. The two are intertwined. I cry for both, but more for the fellow, what ever he might have been said to have done.
That we are involved in this kind of capture and perhaps instruction kills me.
What a multiplex of ignorance we are.
-- Rush Limbaugh
Now we know what Limbaugh was doing on those oxycontin-dazed nights: fumbling for his passwords, looking for those homoerotic websites.
Quote:I think this **** lies in all our hearts, pray providence it is never awakened.
Yes.
Thus the danger of hubris - of considering oneself, or one's group, or one's faith, or one's nation exceptional, of being above the rest.
PDiddie wrote:
-- Rush Limbaugh
Now we know what Limbaugh was doing on those oxycontin-dazed nights: fumbling for his passwords, looking for those homoerotic websites.
Jesus...I just don't have the imagination to predict what spin some of these people will come up with. The cause of the atrocities is porn, and the liberal worldview that has allowed it.
McGentrix wrote:My brother was an MP in the Air Force. He didn't think very highly of most MP's then as they tend to be a bit obnoxious and power hungry.
Quote: I am sure that probably extends over to the Army pretty well.
Please don't generalize using second hand information. This thread seems full of it and a lot something else.
The woman is not "just following orders." That stale line didn't hold up at Nuerenburg ans doesn't hold up now. What any of these stupid people did was just that and wrong. Too bad the US doesn't belong to the ICC (International Criminal Court), but there must be reasons for that. "People" like this individual would
really have to answer for their actions.
Regarding another profession, she
wouldn't get $50 for a session, unless the person was
really depsparate. Junk mail ads will tell you that.
Quote:Too bad the US doesn't belong to the ICC (International Criminal Court), but there must be reasons for that.
The reason would be that the NeoCons were planning war in the M.E. for a decade and knew that the US Armed Forces would be using 'strong' methods there. I'd also add that the use of Reservists was necessary to short-circuit any of the qualms a professional soldier would have about shredding the Geneva Convention.
Mr stillwater
We can't blame the Bush administration for not signing onto the ICC, as Clinton too refused to sign on as well.
This is a broader or deeper problem...the notion of American exceptionalism. Also, I suspect that the Pentagon would fight tooth and nail against a President who attempted to sign on. Of course, if every country operated the same way, we'd be going nowhere.
blatham wrote:Mr stillwater
We can't blame the Bush administration for not signing onto the ICC, as Clinton too refused to sign on as well..
I just cranked
"president clinton" & icc & support through Google and it seems that he WAS much in favour of it.
Quote:Permanent Court: In 1995, President Clinton announced U.S. support for a Permanent International Criminal Court, and we are committed to the establishment of a Court with broad-based support before the end of the Century
.
In fact the US WAS a signatory of the treaty until Dubya formally revoked it:
Quote:NEW YORK - May 6 - The NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court, a worldwide alliance of more than 1,000 civil society organizations and independent legal experts, expressed its disappointment at the announcement today by Marc Grossman, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, that the Bush administration had formally revoked its support of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The treaty, signed by former President Clinton, will create the first permanent, independent tribunal capable of trying individuals for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide upon entry into force on July 1st.
A more specific search strategy should find dates and other signatories.
Which leads us back to the question, why drop out of a treaty may stop you from the following:
"Willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health."
"Killing or wounding treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army."
"Committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."
"Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such an attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment...."
Looks like you are right. Initially, he'd refused to sign on, then there was a change. Though I'm unclear on what stipulations (to pacify the military) Clinton ended up with before signing. The step not achieved was ratification by Senate, it seems. Then the Bush administration said definitely not, and effectively withdrew signature.
Chatter about the ICC is meaningless. Even if the US had signed onto the ICC The ICC would only be able to step in if the US didn't investigate/prosecute on our own.
No, fishin, it isn't meaningless at all.
Very few other issues speak so poignantly to that tendency in America to consider herself exceptional and meriting special treatment in the world on the basis of unique fundamental goodness such that she ought not to be bound to the very same standards and controls she insists must obtain elsewhere in the world.
Less romantically, it speaks to the hubris of the set of notions which have led to justification of unilateral military action in the world.
Even less romantically, it speaks to the American military's crude and bullying demand for power with minimal constraints...constraints which can be minimized even further through secrecy and through covert alliances with powerful sectors of the administrative branch.
If anything good can come out of this ridiculous goddamn mess at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere it is the complete discreditation of unilateralist action and of this danger in American self-regard which everybody else in the world perceives except too many of you.
I'm not going to, for the eighty-seventh time here, repeat the long list of positives about America. Right now, they play a distant distant second place role to how your country is fukking up.
So tell me blatham - what exactly would be different right now with the cases of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib if the US had signed and ratified the ICC?
Quote:Very few other issues speak so poignantly to that tendency in America to consider herself exceptional and meriting special treatment in the world on the basis of unique fundamental goodness such that she ought not to be bound to the very same standards and controls she insists must obtain elsewhere in the world.
You can piss and moan all you'd like about US unilaterism but the fact remains that the US already has laws and a judicial process in place to deal with the events at Abu Ghraib and by having those in place the ICC, under it's own provisions, would have no authority in this case.
fishin
Turn the telescope around.
What changes in the mentality of the US military (or administration) would have had to take place for them to not fight against the treaty and its ratification?
Then you get some pretty clear differences appearing likely in abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Look, you and I have been arguing this for two years now. Our friendship has flourished and withered, it seems, in about equal measure over that time. The question of whether your view or mine correlates more closely with the real state of affairs, on this and a few other matters, isn't in much danger of being resolved. I hope you know that is fine with me. There are few people here I enjoy or like more than you, and they have breasts.
blatham wrote:fishin
Turn the telescope around.
What changes in the mentality of the US military (or administration) would have had to take place for them to not fight against the treaty and its ratification?
Then you get some pretty clear differences appearing likely in abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Look, you and I have been arguing this for two years now. Our friendship has flourished and withered, it seems, in about equal measure over that time. The question of whether your view or mine correlates more closely with the real state of affairs, on this and a few other matters, isn't in much danger of being resolved. I hope you know that is fine with me. There are few people here I enjoy or like more than you, and they have breasts.
mine are hairy I'm afraid, so I guess I'm off that shortlist.
Your name, I'm sorry to inform, wasn't even on the long list.
My goal, though hate to make explicit that which is essentially a covert op, is to convince all other males but for me to undergo a gender reassignment operation.
