Nah - let's return from your digression to the point of the thread.
The US military admits Koran misuse.
Many of you right folk had the detainees' stories as false just cos they were alleged terrorist detainees.
Case closed.
There's a man being held in a jail cell not a block from where I work by the name of Dennis Rader. Mr. Rader is accused of being BTK, the serial killer. He may or may not be BTK, and he'll have his day in court apparently (unless he pleads guilty). In the meantime, he sits in jail, presumed not guilty of the crimes. Now, as I said, I don't know whether Mr. Rader has ever harmed a fly in his entire life, but I would not trust Mr. Rader to be alone with my wife or my children. Would you? And if not, why not?
dlowan wrote:Nah - let's return from your digression to the point of the thread.
The US military admits Koran misuse.
Many of you right folk had the detainees' stories as false just cos they were alleged terrorist detainees.
Case closed.
Pardon? This "right folk" said his starting position is to believe the US military, not the terrorists (I mean, alleged terrorists, of course). That doesn't mean the terrorists are lying, but there must be some substantiation to their claims before I believe them to be truthful.
And before we go further on that little bit, I posed this question to Cyclops on that other thread. He didn't bother answering, I don't believe. Perhaps you'd give me your take:
On another thread, Tico wrote:There's a man being held in a jail cell not a block from where I work by the name of Dennis Rader. Mr. Rader is accused of being BTK, the serial killer. He may or may not be BTK, and he'll have his day in court apparently (unless he pleads guilty). In the meantime, he sits in jail, presumed not guilty of the crimes. Now, as I said, I don't know whether Mr. Rader has ever harmed a fly in his entire life, but I would not trust Mr. Rader to be alone with my wife or my children. Would you? And if not, why not?
LINK
The US military has admitted a few cases of Koran "mishandling," but not the toilet flushing episode. That appears to be a fabrication.
Lash wrote:And, dlowan, I know you are familiar with the therapist's rule of not playing along with false realities of someone suffering from a delusion.
Acting as though it is logical or sane to freak out over the mussing of a book is feeding in to delusion.
It is doing them a disservice. They should be given reality therapy.
Which bit of any religion is not delusional?
Would you like some reality therapy?
Toilet flushing/other misuse? So? Was the damn book mishandled deliberately or not? It seems it was.
To what degree?
You say there should be substantiation - by whom?
At what point would you consider accusations even worth investigating?
When would you have investigated Abu Ghraib? Afghanistan prisons?
You generally appear more reasonable than a number of your cohort - but again, when would you believe these accusations of abuse which have been substantiated should have been investigated?
Any sane person knows that prisoners can lie about guards.
I wonder if you also acknowledge that that any sane person believes the guards also lie - and that the situation of imprisonment is a very breeding ground of abuse - whether guards be soldiers, or not.
My belief about you is that you err too much on the side of the guards, because you wish to believe well of your countrypeople.
Your position would doubtless be that I err too much on the side of the detainees.
So be it.
I also have no idea what all this defensiveness is about - I have no trouble at all condemning my country's mandatory detention system , and I do not become wildly defensive about admitting the abuses of prisoners that have occurred therein. I could a tale unfold about our prisons - and now, it seems, our previous child "welfare" system - where terrible abuses by people charged with the care of kids who could not live with their parents are being exposed. Australians are people - they are capable of terrible brutality - I do not consider admitting this as some terrible attack upon my country. I have no concept of why some of you seem to. I really don't. It floors me.
I have no idea of why it breeds the hysterical accusations that admitting the reality of abuses by some guards is accusing ALL service people of badness. Did the Brits here become hysterical when similar accusations were made about their service people? Did Nimh become hysterical when people pointed out the intensity of Dutch response to a killing by an Islamist terrorist of the Dutch film maker?
It frankly beggers reasonable understanding.
I have no idea about the situation you asked Cyclo about - if you wish me to comment, you will have to elucidate much further.
Once upon a time there was a man being held in a jail cell in Australia by the name of William MacDonald, aka William "The Mutilator" MacDonald. Mr. MacDonald was accused of being the most feared serial killer in Australian history. He may or may not be, and he'll have his day in court apparently (unless he pleads guilty). In the meantime, he sits in jail, presumed not guilty of the crimes. Now, as I said, I don't know whether Mr. MacDonald had ever harmed a fly in his entire life, but I would not trust Mr. MacDonald to be alone with my wife or my children. Would you? And if not, why not?
Captives told to claim torture
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
An al Qaeda handbook preaches to operatives to level charges of torture once captured, a training regime that administration officials say explains some of the charges of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
The American Civil Liberties Union last week posted on its Web site 2002 FBI documents regarding accusations from suspected al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at the detention center. The organization had won a court decision that forced the administration to release scores of e-mails between agents who had interviewed captives.
U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the prison, is investigating interrogation techniques at "GTMO," as the naval base in Cuba is called, as well as the FBI-conveyed, unsubstantiated complaints. The U.S. Justice Department inspector general has begun a separate probe.
One investigator, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, said last week that the most explosive charge so far -- that guards flushed the Koran Muslim holy book down a toilet -- is not true. The Pentagon tabbed Gen. Hood to conduct a probe into how Islam is treated at the prison in the aftermath of a since-retracted report by Newsweek on the Koran claim.
U.S. officials think the Koran story -- told by a detainee who did not see the purported event -- might be part of an al Qaeda campaign to spread disinformation.
"There have been allegations made by detainees," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. "We know that members of al Qaeda are trained to mislead and to provide false reports. We know that's one of their tactics that they use. And so I think you have to keep that in mind."
In a raid on an al Qaeda cell in Manchester, British authorities seized al Qaeda's most extensive manual for how to wage war.
A directive lists one mission as "spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy."
If captured, the manual states, "At the beginning of the trial ... the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison."
The handbook instructs commanders to make sure operatives, or "brothers," understand what to say if captured.
"Prior to executing an operation, the commander should instruct his soldiers on what to say if they are captured," the document says. "He should explain that more than once in order to ensure that they have assimilated it. They should, in turn, explain it back to the commander."
An example might have occurred in a Northern Virginia courtroom in February.
Ahmed Omar Abul Ali, accused of planning to assassinate President Bush, made an appearance in U.S. District Court and promptly told the judge that he had been tortured in Saudi Arabia, including a claim that his back had been whipped. He is accused of meeting there with a senior al Qaeda leader.
Days later, a U.S. attorney filed a court document saying physicians had examined Ali and "found no evidence of any physical mistreatment on the defendant's back or any other part of his body."
Larry Di Rita, spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said two Guantanamo commanders told him that al Qaeda detainees are experts in circulating false charges among the more than 500 fighters captured in Afghanistan.
"There are elements within the detainee population that were very effective at getting other detainees agitated about the Koran by making allegations," Mr. Di Rita said. "They particularly focused on the practice of their faith and the Koran being kept from them. So people should not be surprised when detainees come out and make these kinds of allegations. It causes the reactions we've seen."
He added, "None of this is meant to excuse the situation we found when individuals were unfortunately abused at Abu Ghraib. That was wrong."
There already has been one Pentagon review of accusations of abuse at Guantanamo. Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, the Navy inspector general, released a report in March that found three substantiated closed cases of "minor" abuse in 24,000 interrogations -- one assault and two female guards' making sexually suggestive gestures to detainees.
"It bears emphasis that the vast majority of detainees held by the U.S. in the global war on terror have been treated humanely and that the overwhelming majority of U.S. personnel have served honorably," Adm. Church wrote.
To go in believing that all accusations of torture are false is as dumb as going in believing that they are all true.
Your posting about instructions to claim torture - so?
I will try and unearth watever your point is about the alleged serial killer then.
You still haven't received it, huh?
The truth about Guantanamo Bay
Michelle Malkin (archive)
June 1, 2005
The mainstream media and international human rights organizations have relentlessly portrayed the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as a depraved torture chamber operated by sadistic American military officials defiling Islam at every turn. It's the "gulag of our time," wails Amnesty International. It's the "anti-Statue of Liberty," bemoans New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.
Have there been abuses? Yes. But here is the rest of the story -- the story that the Islamists and their sympathizers don't want you to hear.
According to recently released FBI documents, which are inaccurately heralded by civil liberties activists and military-bashers as irrefutable evidence of widespread "atrocities" at Gitmo:
A significant number of detainees' complaints were either exaggerated or fabricated (no surprise given al Qaeda's explicit instructions to trainees to lie). One detainee who claimed to have been "beaten, spit upon and treated worse than a dog" could not provide a single detail pertaining to mistreatment by U.S. military personnel. Another detainee claimed that guards were physically abusive, but admitted he hadn't seen it.
Another detainee disputed one of the now-globally infamous claims that American guards had mistreated the Koran. The detainee said that riots resulted from claims that a guard dropped the Koran. In actuality, the detainee said, a detainee dropped the Koran then blamed a guard. Other detainees who complained about abuse of the Koran admitted they had never personally witnessed any such abuse, but one said he had heard that non-Muslim soldiers touched the Koran when searching it for contraband.
In one case, Gitmo interrogators apologized to a detainee for interviewing him prior to the end of Ramadan.
Several detainees indicated they had not experienced any mistreatment. Others complained about lack of privacy, lack of bed sheets, being unwillingly photographed, the guards' use of profanity, and bad food.
If this is unacceptable, "gulag"-style "torture," then every inmate in America is a victim of human rights violations. (Oh, never mind, there are civil liberties chicken littles who actually believe that.)
Erik Saar, who served as an army sergeant at Gitmo for six months and co-authored a negative, tell-all book about his experience titled "Inside the Wire," inadvertently provides us more firsthand details showing just how restrained, and sensitive to Islam -- to a fault, I believe -- the officials at the detention facility have been.
Each detainee's cell has a sink installed low to the ground, "to make it easier for the detainees to wash their feet" before Muslim prayer, Saar reports. Detainees get "two hot halal, or religiously correct, meals" a day in addition to an MRE (meal ready to eat). Loudspeakers broadcast the Muslims' call to prayer five times a day.
Every detainee gets a prayer mat, cap and Koran. Every cell has a stenciled arrow pointing toward Mecca. Moreover, Gitmo's library -- yes, library -- is stocked with Jihadi books. "I was surprised that we'd be making that concession to the religious zealotry of the terrorists," Saar admits. "t seemed to me that the camp command was helping to facilitate the terrorists' religious devotion." Saar notes that one FBI special agent involved in interrogations even grew a beard like the detainees "as a sort of show of respect for their faith."
Unreality-based liberals would have us believe that America is systematically torturing innocent Muslims out of spite at Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile, our own MPs have endured little-publicized abuse at the hands of manipulative, hate-mongering enemy combatants. Detainees have spit on and hurled water, urine and feces on the MPs. Causing disturbances is a source of entertainment for detainees who, as Gen. Richard Myers points out, "would turn right around and try to slit our throats, slit our children's throats" if released.
The same unreality-based liberals whine about the Bush administration's failure to gather intelligence and prevent terrorism. Yet, these hysterical critics have no viable alternative to detention and interrogation -- and there is no doubt they would be the first to lambaste the White House and Pentagon if a released detainee went on to commit an act of mass terrorism on American soil.
Guantanamo Bay will not be the death of this country. The unseriousness and hypocrisy of the terrorist-abetting Left is a far greater threat.
