Saturday, June 04, 2005

U.S.: Gitmo Detainees Will Break 'Any Day Now'

U.S.: Gitmo Quran Was Splashed With Urine - Yahoo! News

More and more details of Koran abuse are leaking out, with the hope that they will be forgotten over the weekend. Perhaps the most interesting charge is that the prisoners are worse than the guards; I'm guessing that's a trial balloon for prisoner torture as well. If the public buys that steaming pile of crap, next we'll hear that most of the detainee deaths were caused by other inmates as well.

The real story of Gitmo is the following:

"There are about 540 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about the al-Qaida terrorist network."


Of course, all hope of such information disappeared - oh, I don't know - maybe after the first year of captivity? This was the real story of Abu Ghraib and Bagram as well. Al Qaeda has scored a huge victory thanks to Gonzales and Rummy, probably beyond its wildest dreams. By giving in to their most basic, primate instincts; the Bush administration made a decision on behalf of our entire country: we would forgo civilized niceties like the Geneva Convention or humane treatment of prisoners.

We now have a stain on our reputation that harms us more than troops in Saudi Arabia ever could. It's not just the wild-eyed freaks like bin Laden that hate us, but huge chunks of the Islamic world now see we are indeed capable of evil against muslims.

With the Christocrats cheering the bumbling chimp on, and Republicans in general choosing the indefensible position of "well, torture is warranted, because every so often we're probably torturing an actual terrorist. Same with the death by beating;" we are now in a freakish moral vacuum.

It is frightening to ask a follower of Dear Leader, or even a secular Tax-Cuts-For-The-Rich neocon why they support Bush.

"He's not a flip-flopper!" But he flipped and flopped a dozen times on why we invaded Iraq.

"But he's a man of principle!" But he threw principle out the window to get this war, the Downing Street Memo documents his outright lying about Iraq.

"9/11 changed everything! You are for us or against us!! [spit begins to fly] Desperate times call for desperate measures!!!" Okay, okay; but Bush's own administration admits, after first producing a false report, that terrorist attacks have skyrocketed during the Bush administration.

[face morphing from bright red to violet] "Stop it! Stop your attacks on our President!! Terrorism may have skyrocketed, but we're dying in Iraq, not the U.S. That's what matters!"

Taking a deep breath, you hesitantly argue that our boys and girls getting shot in Iraq doesn't make you feel much better about terrorism in general, and how can anyone justify torturing to death the innocent citizens caught in our military's broad sweeps?

[blood and actual venom now drip from the incisors as they bite the bottom lip while contemplating the answer] [a feeling of utter peace and tranquility comes over their face]

"Because this is the greatest country in the world."

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