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

To: carranza2 who wrote (133642)	5/20/2004 11:55:09 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

You can reflect your true believer mindset on to me as much as you want, if it makes you feel good. There's plenty of evidence that sometimes last fall word came from on high to start whacking people around in Iraq. There may be inconsistency in the details, but the big picture is really not as obscure as you'd like it to be. The "due process" argument is sort of ironic too, in light of this little tidbit: "In almost all instances..., arresting authorities provided no in formation about who they were, where their base was located, nor did they explain the cause of arrest. Similarly, they rarely informed the arrestee or his family where he was being taken and for how long, resulting in the de facto "disappearance" of the arrestee.... Many [families] were left without news for months, often fearing that their relatives were dead. " We might pass over with a shiver the word "disappearance," with its unfortunate associations, and say to ourselves, once again, that this was war: insurgents were busy killing American soldiers and had to be rooted out, even if it meant one or two innocent civilians were sucked up into the system. And then one comes upon this quiet little sentence: "Certain [Coalition Forces] military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake." (from nybooks.com ) Of course, given that the "media" has this occasional bad habit of following the news in the conventional sense of the word instead of just regurgitating White House press releases like they oughta (ref: #reply-20145236 ) I fear you may be subjected to more unpleasant coverage in days and weeks to come. Or maybe they'll come to their senses and tell us all what a nice place to be Iraq is these days, who can say? As far as "facts be damned", my usual rebuttal is that iconic Reaganism, "facts are stupid things". Conservatives love the facts they agree with, anything else, gets deconstructed to death. Big whip.