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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (134250)	5/24/2004 6:21:02 PM
From: boris_a	Respond to of 281500

you think our soldiers have nothing better to do but to arrest and lock up anyone they want, In a totalitarian system, many, many citizens are satisfied with an explanation like that for what's happening in the Gulag.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (134250)	5/25/2004 12:48:19 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawkmoon, you referred to the following message: Deported to another continent, to a secret jail, kept in isolation, tortured by MPs, lawyer denied, Geneva convention denied, no evidence checked by an independant institution, and so on ... by responding: So you think that's what those detentions are all about, eh? Maybe, just maybe you think our soldiers have nothing better to do but to arrest and lock up anyone they want, at any time, and at great risk to their own lives, just so they can fill up those detention camps..... Or that they have nothing better to do but waste their time interrogating people who obviously have nothing to do with terrorism.. That forces me to ask; are you really an American? Do you have any appreciation for what it means to live in a free society that GUARANTEES liberty and justice for ALL? Your post screams out a "NO" answer to that question. Let me try to help you out. We DON'T, as a society, believe in guilt by "arrest." We don't presume that a person must be guilty or, "why else would our police force or military have arrested them?" We don't use the old tried and true method of justice that was used on the witches of old; throw them in the water and if they swam they were witches to be burned at the stake but if they drowned they were not, and god would take care of them. And surely you aren't so stupid or blinded by (your choice here) patriotism, partisanism or pugnaciousness, that you cannot fail to see that our "soldiers" are not god's gift to justice and fairness. Or maybe you aren't following the torture and abuse scandals which will ultimately be proven to have been widespread, encouraged, condoned or allowed by our "soldiers" at the highest levels and with the tacit or express approval of our highest civilian authorities who felt, as apparently do you, "torture's not so bad when the bad guys 'might' be terrorists" and "better to maim and torture the innocent with the guilty rather than chance letting the guilty go free. The kinds of attitudes and social theories you're spewing are all the more dangerous because you apparently feel that your "good" motives empower these "bad" methods. There is by far more evil done in the name of "good" than was ever done by those who thought they were acting evilly. May the fates spare us from the "good" advocated by men like Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearle and, yes, YOU.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (134250)	5/25/2004 3:26:23 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, arrested and held for 3 months. nzherald.co.nz <Maybe, just maybe you think our soldiers have nothing better to do but to arrest and lock up anyone they want, at any time, and at great risk to their own lives, just so they can fill up those detention camps. And you probably even believe that people like John Walker was really just an Islamic student and not a gun-toting member of the Taliban... Or that they have nothing better to do but waste their time interrogating people who obviously have nothing to do with terrorism.. All that must make sense in your own special little world... > My special little world is quite nice thanks and being arrested spoils my day. It looks like they do indeed have time to do just what you say. That guy is from Francis Douglas high school in New Plymouth and he must have been in my good friend's older daughter's class. It's a small Catholic school in a minor city on the west coast. I would bet a lot that he was a typical kiwi, out for adventure and to see the world, driven by his nomad gene which we all have [self-selected by choosing to migrate to this place at the end of the Earth]. He obviously wasn't a terrorist or terrorist supporter or he'd still be in the slammer. Then there was the case of the old civil engineer arrested in South Africa at the instigation of the FBI and held for 3 weeks, incommunicado, in a case of careless mistaken identity. Habeas corpus is for a very good reason Hawk. As the years roll by, prisoners sit in prison with the USA not recognizing human rights which they used to lecture China about. I would like to know which USA politicians have been berating China about human rights lately. That would be a laugh. They'd be laughed out of town. Denying that they were holding a New Zealander prisoner is a poor look, unlikely to gain many supporters here. Mqurice