If hundreds of G.I. POW's were tortured to death, how would America react?

Let's imagine that hundreds of American G.I.'s were held in secret prisons, without legal council or visitations from the Red Cross, and tortured to death by a nation hostile to us. How would the average torture supporter react?

That's your argument, right?

That we tortured hundreds to death?

it doesn't take much to come to the 100's number. And that is just the systemic part.

If you would include our free for all contracts in South America and if you would include our little foreign legion of torturers - such as the SOA graduates, you would easily come to the 1000's.

speculation. It means evidence of people officially tortured who died. Stories like Green's are horrendous but weren't sanctioned.

What we did is heinous, but your claim demands solid evidence, not statements of belief.

Backed by a speculation.

With no evidence.

Let me know how that turns out.

it and it will go away.

I know how that turns out.

By American troops..

But of course, that's not "torture" so it doesn't count, right?

http://www.globalissues.org/article/373/afghan-massacre-haunts-pentagon

It's brutal and wrong either way, but the comparison still doesn't hold.

Not just one..

They load these things onto trains all the time, it's essentially a boxcar with removable wheels..

A "virtual train" if you will..

Bergen-Belsen?

Auschwitz-Birkenau?

If so, scream to the holy high rafters.

If not, well, scream but don't compare.

We were discussing "hundreds" and I provided evidence of similar numbers..

Now you bring the Holocaust into it?

and he comes out with this Dachau thing. Is this some kind of new moral theory?

Anything a nation does must be compared to Dachau. If it's not that bad, it's ok, cool.

what's the argument behind that?

"Hey Joe, are you ok with people getting tortured in your name?"

" Yeah Billy, I am, as long as it's not in/around/comparable to Dachau"

But of course, that doesn't matter.

And if any of you deniers would have bought some books of people investigating rendition and so on you might have found out that plus to the 5'000 container-killed Afghans from 2002 many others from that day - sometimes referred to as " the second group/batch" - just freakin' disappeared. Go and look at the numbers from 2002 and tell me where all those "Terrorists" ended up - you know, the farmers that got snatched by our warlord-friends because we promised them tons of money for any terrorist they'd find. In 2002, we didn't keep books very will, we didn't care, so it's hard to dismiss the notion that they are leading a happy torture free life now.

Anyway. I think most of this Nation is in pretty heavy denial concerning Afghanistan. Reading some of these posts, you'd think there is even a debate about our doing "the right thing". Funny how the majority of people who know Afghanistan and the war on terror dismiss that notion. Go back to 2002 and try to convince yourself that we did Afghanistan in a morally sound way. Good luck.

I'll never understand it. That article make NO claim that this atrocity was conducted by American troops. In fact, no credible source does. The most this article claims is that American troops MAY have known about these atrocities. That's different from your claim that this was done by American troops.



From the article:

"It was his commanders who transported the Taliban captives to Shiberghan. "It was awful. They crammed us into sealed shipping containers," a 24-year-old survivor, Irfan Azgar Ali, told the Guardian. "We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot."

His commanders refers to those Afghans under the control of the war lord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Now the U.S. sure as fuck should be condemned for playing with Dostum who is a sadistic and brutal freak- for more on Dostum read Ahmed Rashids 2000 book on the Taliban- but American troops did not carry this out. There is no evidence linking them to this, although the author speculates.

Those who hire a hit man are just as responsible for the killing as the person who pulls the trigger.

Do you disagree with that statement or not?

remarks about Dostum. That was not my point. And no, I don't think your comparison here wholly works. Not if you're aware of the history between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. Yes, we bear a hefty chunk of responsibility for this- and so does Dostum. He was not a puppet on a string. He was not, as far as the evidence available informs, ordered to do this by the U.S., and his history certainly demonstrates his capability. Yes, the U.S. bears a large degree of responsibility for what happened in Afghanistan going back several decades. So do the Russians. And those who actually did perpetrate these acts.

You misrepresented what the article claims when you asserted that U.S. troops did this.

Do you disagree with that statement?

or better still think illegal invasion and occupation. It was torture from day one.

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/38710lgl20090211.html

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/35281prs20080514.html

Highlights:



Go ahead, impugn the source.

Post WW2- Europe. Isn't documented of course, since we didn't have an official agency back then. Read some of our OSS ops books, or some of the Brits - or go and have a talk with Frank Olson's Wife/son and ask them why he wanted to quit the CIA. I'm sure they will fill you with his story. No documentation there, besides the stories of the people on the ground.

MK-Ultra - no documentation there, except the 17'000 pages stolen from the FBI. They do clearly demonstrate psychological abuse and torture though, be it the academic version at Allen Memorial under Sydney Gottlieb or be it the more freaky stuff - the women who testified in 1994 before congress, f.e. about being sexually conditioned in such a program. I won't post links to this as the subject is so big and the disinfo so reckless. With what I read, I don't see any denying widespread torture under MK-Ultra subprograms or parallel programs such as CHATTER/BLUEBIRD.

Russian defectors - just ask Juri Nosenko. We didn't waterboard him. But we tried all the rest. A thing very common when we handled Russian defectors. Angleton and the boys never trusted them, and Nosenko is a good example of how the US has ruined a person who was (probably) on their side. We used lots of psych. torture on him, not sure if there is documentation as to how far it went. In 30, 40 years we can talk about this, the documentation will be out by then, and I'll guarantee you that you'll find similar stories to Nosenko's that might not have turned out that well.

Some more?
Project Phoenix/ or the Vietnam war in general. Wanna deny we tortured and killed in a pretty much random fashion under Project Phoenix? Go and ask anyone who participated. No documentation there, but it's pretty clear what Phoenix was. And if I listen to Colby's and Decamps stories about it, it's hard to imagine how people did not die from that kind of torture once in a while.

And the SOA; which I considered to be the beef of my reply. Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador. Those are our cats. If it were just our money, our plans, I could live with it. But we taught them how to torture. We taught them when to torture. We taught them whom to torture. So anyone tortured by a SOA graduate was tortured by the US in my eyes. There is simply no denying that. You might want to start with the campaign to end the school of the americas (now institute of the western hemisphere) - I bet they can fill you in with everything you need to convince yourself. If not, search for interviews of SOA graduates, and hear them talk about torture.

Of course, if this is all too fishy for you, I can just give you a list of books that I have read for each of these subjects. I didn't want to claim that there was 100's of deaths from US torture in one of those specific programs, but taken them all together.. well.. easily 100's, 1000,s. We've been atop for a while now.
Of course, you can always make the argument that interrogating someone from "Al-Kaida" is very different from all the examples given above, and I would grant that, although in my view it's the same thing.
But if the question is: Did the US torture hundreds of people, and did some or many of them die?
I'd give a 100% positive yes, as I have done above. And I would probably leave them in that order, even if the first one mentioned is the least documented. After what I have read and discussed, we probably have never been more vile than in our European Intel prisons right after WW2 - understandable, but not excusable.

The people we left behind in Europe, Vietnam and all the other places probably were tortured. We didn't mind that because they didn't exist for us.

But to answer your question. I think the torture supporters would just want us to bomb whoever is torturing them and then torture the ones we pick up in the rubble afterward. You know, a butt rape for a butt rape and the whole world is lubed.

then they'd be saying that they betrayed their country ...

Gotta love our perception. LOL. great post.

Does that answer your question?

Don

I saw one person say s/he didn't think KSM was tortured enough, but aside from that person, I haven't read anything by any "torture supporters."

So I suppose your question is addressed to FreeRepublic-ans or the ether?

:shrug:

You can eliminate half (hyperbole intentional) the posts on DU.