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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (132209)	5/8/2004 11:01:46 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<I WANT these people to be convicted..> The house cleaning is long overdue -- if Rumsfeld is the first to be tossed out of office so be it. Cheney should be next. I don't know if either can be prosecuted in the criminal courts of the United States of America, but I certainly hope no effort is spared investigating them.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (132209)	5/8/2004 12:59:40 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

What good came out of having those photos released? Those pictures destroyed two growing myths that needed destroying. One myth was that Americans "don't do things like that, and certainly not at the behest of those we put in charge." The second was that we can "trust" the police power of the government and need not concern ourselves with such liberal concepts as legal protections for the "rights" of the "guilty." In addition, I wonder if the humiliation and regret will do us some good? Maybe we'll stop smugly believing that anything done in our name is unselfish and noble and that our "superior moral standing" gives us the right to impose our will on the world. This might help us open up our minds to the possibility that the criticism and resistance we're getting in the Muslim world isn't necessarily from American haters who "hate freedom." One thing for sure, we've now learned a lot more about why our Attorney General and our Pentagon try to keep total, blanket control of the terrorists and other prisoners, and why they keep them from meeting with those pesky attorneys or those do-gooder Red Cross workers. Every once in a while it's good to have a practical lesson to reinforce our understanding of why our forefathers valued the rights of the accused and feared the police power of the government more than they feared the release of a few of the guilty.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (132209)	5/8/2004 3:27:16 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

If you were prosecuting this case, would you feel like the illegal release of those photos might have compromised your ability to convict these people on the basis of being able to obtain a fair and impartial jury? Rumsfeld most definitely talked about this. It is a VERY fine line.... First, we have to figure out what possible reason the few in the prison thought it was appropriate to actually do the deeds of abuse. What were they thinking? It is going to be MOST interesting to see WHO and then WHY the photos were taken in the first place.... and then to see WHO took them out of the files, and WHY.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (132209)	5/8/2004 4:55:36 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Most of the people being prosecuted won't get a real jury anyway, they're being court-martialed. I fail to see how a panel of military personnel is the same as a jury. The good that came out of it is that we now know - as members of the general public, we have the right to know. It's true that the sexual abuses are illegal, but what about stripping prisoners naked, and forcing them to listen to loud music, and verbal abuse, and sleep deprivation, and the other stuff that apparantly are considered to be perfectly acceptable? There doesn't appear to be any accountability built into the decision to do these things to the prisoners. The only general, as far as I can tell, says she had no responsibility for the administration of the prison. Who's in charge? You may not care about that, but I care, deeply. Where are the grownups?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (132209)	5/10/2004 11:10:16 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

According to John Kerry, he committed far worse atrocities while serving in Vietnam, yet many want him to be President. "What good will come out of this"? 1. The left will use it as an excuse to gut the military. 2. The left will use this as a justification for their loathing of the military. 3. The left will use this as a weapon against Bush. 4. The left will use it as a reason we should leave Iraq immediately. 5. The left will use this as a tool to move America toward our foreign policy being dictated by the U.N. 6. The left will use this as a reason we should place our military under the flag of the U.N. You can already hear the faint cries, we aren't morally or ethically entitled to lead the world toward liberty and freedom, only the U.N. is.