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Author Topic: And yet another brillant move from the president /sarcasm off  (Read 1873 times)
Arhen
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« on: April 17, 2009, 02:48:48 AM »

Long read true but..

/sarcasm on
I think we should build nice housing for terrorists while we're at it and invite them to the US, provide them with training camps and all the weapons and explosives they'll ever need, also the housing should be placed near key political and military positions so they don't have far to travel, go Obama yay for closing down prisons and releasing terrorists or whatever they're gonna do with it.
/sarcasm off

Human Rights activists have a problem with it Huh I'm sorry but those things that are called terrorists stopped having human rights the day they decided to take lives freely.

Here is what brough on this ranting:

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama absolved CIA officers from prosecution for harsh, painful interrogation of terror suspects Thursday, even as his administration released Bush-era memos graphically detailing -- and authorizing -- such grim tactics as slamming detainees against walls, waterboarding them and keeping them naked and cold for long periods.

Human rights groups and many Obama officials have condemned such methods as torture. Bush officials have vigorously disagreed.

In releasing the documents, the most comprehensive accounting yet of interrogation methods that were among the Bush administrations most closely guarded secrets, Obama said he wanted to move beyond "a dark and painful chapter in our history."

Past and present CIA officials had unsuccessfully pressed for more parts of the four legal memos to be kept secret, and some critics argued the release would make the United States less safe.

Michael Hayden, who led the CIA under George W. Bush, said CIA officers will now be more timid and allies will be more reluctant to share sensitive intelligence.

"If you want an intelligence service to work for you, they always work on the edge. That's just where they work," Hayden said. Now, he argued, foreign partners will be less likely to cooperate with the CIA because the release shows they "can't keep anything secret."

Hayden told The Associated Press the release will give terrorists a precise guide for what to expect in a CIA interrogation if those methods are ever approved for use again.

A former top official in the Bush administration called the release of the memos "unbelievable."

"It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are," the unnamed official told Politico.com.

"We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary ... Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again -- even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake," the Web site reported.

On the other side, human rights advocates argued that Obama should not have assured the CIA that officers who conducted interrogations would not be prosecuted if they used methods authorized by Bush lawyers in the memos.

Obama disagreed, saying in a statement, "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

The Bush administration memos describe the tough interrogation methods used against 28 terror suspects, the fullest and now complete government accounting of the techniques. They range from waterboarding -- simulated drowning -- to using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls.

Other methods were more psychological than violent. One technique approved but never used involved putting a detainee who had shown a fear of insects into a box filled with caterpillars.

The documents also offer justification for using the tough tactics.

A May 30, 2005, memo says that before the harsher methods were used on top Al Qaeda detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he refused to answer questions about pending plots against the United States.

"Soon, you will know," he told them, according to the memo.

It says the interrogations later extracted details of a plot called the "second wave" to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles.

Terror plots that were disrupted, the memos say, include the alleged effort by Jose Padilla to detonate a "dirty bomb" spreading nuclear radiation.

Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first definitive assurance that the CIA officials who were involved are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time.

Holder went further, telling the CIA the government would provide free legal representation to its employees in any legal proceeding or congressional investigation related to the program and would repay any financial judgment.

"It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Holder said.

Obama said in his statement and a separate letter sent directly to CIA employees that the nation must protect their identity "as vigilantly as they protect our security."

Current CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a message to his employees: "CIA responded, as duty requires."

Some parts of the memos were blacked out, and Panetta had pushed for more redactions, according to a government official who declined to be named because he was not authorized to release the information.

The CIA has acknowledged using waterboarding on three high-level terror detainees in 2002 and 2003, with the authorization of the White House and the Justice Department. Hayden said waterboarding has not been used since, but some human rights groups have urged Obama to hold CIA employees accountable for what they, and many Obama officials, say was torture.

The memos produced by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005 were released to meet a court-approved deadline in a lawsuit against the government in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's impossible not to be shocked by the contents of these memos," said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer. "The memos should never have been written, but we're pleased the new administration has made them public."

In addition to detailing individual techniques, one memo also specifically authorized a method for combining multiple methods, a practice human rights advocates argue crosses the line into torture even if any individual methods does not.

The methods authorized in the memos include keeping detainees naked, keeping them in painful standing positions and keeping their cells cold for long periods of time. Other techniques include depriving them of solid food and even beating and kicking them. Sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling and threats to a detainee's family were also used.

Interrogators were told not to allow a prisoner's body temperature or food intake to fall below a certain level, because either could cause permanent damage, said senior administration officials.

The Obama administration last month released nine legal memos from the Bush administration. It probably will release more as the ACLU lawsuit proceeds, the officials said.

The lawsuit has sought to use the Freedom of Information Act to shed light on the treatment of prisoners -- though the Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions put forth in the memos and the Obama administration has gone further to actively dismantle much of President Bush's anti-terror program.

Obama has ordered the CIA's secret overseas prisons known as "black sites" closed and has ended "extraordinary renditions" of terrorism suspects to other countries if there is any reason to believe those countries would torture them. He has also restricted CIA questioning to methods and protocols approved for use by the U.S. military until a complete review of the program is conducted.

Also on Thursday, Holder formally revoked every legal opinion or memo issued during Bush's presidency that justified interrogation programs.

The documents have been the subject of a long, fierce debate inside and outside government over how much should be revealed about the previous administration's approach.

In his statement, Obama said he was reassured about the potential national security implications by the fact that much of the information contained had already been widely publicized -- including some of it by Bush himself -- and by the fact that the program no longer exists as it did.

Withholding the memos, Obama argued, would only serve to deny facts already in the public domain.

"This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States," the president said.

Those assurances are not likely to inoculate Obama against criticism from conservatives. Last month, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that Obama's decisions to revoke Bush-era terrorist detainee policies will "raise the risk to the American people of another attack."
« Last Edit: April 17, 2009, 05:08:56 AM by Arhen » Logged

Quinatan
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« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2009, 05:07:20 AM »

As I understand it, he basicly just released papers saying how we use to treat terrorits, and at the same time made a rule that we will no longer treat them that way?  Doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.  I'm sure if need be they can come up with an alternative to waterboarding and slamming people against walls that is just as effective, just looking at nicknacks on my desk I can think of plenty of torture methods.   Lava lamp anyone?  As for no longer holding "terrorists" in camps without a trial, its not like they are just opening the door and saying "Kay guys, take it easy."  I'm gonna go with taking the high road here, maybe you should treat people even terrorists with some level of basic human rights.  Not because they deserve it, but because we as a country need to give off the image of a compasionate country, not a blood hungry vengful country.
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Steeloak
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« Reply #2 on: April 17, 2009, 05:13:05 AM »

I'm sure Obama was just following his ideals in releasing this information.  Unfortunately, in the real world - putting ideals ahead of security is going to get a lot of people killed. 
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Gildan
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« Reply #3 on: April 17, 2009, 05:35:05 AM »

First, you really should link to the news article instead of bulk copy/paste, to give the original source some traffic, so they generate money and continue to produce information.

So, I'm not seeing what's wrong here, he released documents under the FOIA that shows we tortured prisoners, and how the previous administration tried to legally justify it.  It was already well know we were committing such atrocities.  The only thing interesting about them is it is documented proof instead of whistle blowers and third party reports.

And don't even get me started on how why if these "terrorists" are so bad and done so many awful things, they are not you know, being prosecuted.  How many terrorists have been convicted in Gitmo? 
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Atherin
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« Reply #4 on: April 17, 2009, 06:01:45 AM »

Now that G'tmo is closing, the military has been moving a lot of prisoners back to Bagrahm prison in Iraq.  Now the ACLU (how the ACLU has any say over how we treat enemy combatants in a theatre of war is beyond my kin but let's just move on) is up in arms about THAT prison also.  There is a push to close that place down or greatly reduce its number of prisoners and allowing those that remain to challenge their imprisonment as if they were just jaywalking in New York or something.  

So what have the commanders on the ground in that theatre of war been doing as a response?  Now there is a trend for commanders to blow up known enemy targets instead of capturing them because they know they will probably not be able to get the timely intelligence out of them that they need.  If they know they are going to have to go through a drawn-out process to even get to the point where they can question the prisoner with his court-appointed attorney present etc... etc... they would rather not even bother with the hassle.  So they send in the Predators and blow them up and move on to the next target.

Thank you ACLU for sticking your nose into a theatre of war and getting more enemies killed and preventing commanders on the ground from gaining timely intelligence from active combatants.
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Erebethor
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« Reply #5 on: April 17, 2009, 09:38:34 AM »

Great move Obama!
Arhen, as far as I can see you're taking the republican view. Killing someone is a terrible thing yes, but why sink to their level? Anyway, the suicide bombers WANT to die, so why give them what they want? No, for these kinds of people, life imprisonment should mean LIFE staring at a white wall in Alcatraz or wherever. If they kill someone, yes they become bad, but they don't change into a different species or anything. THEY ARE STILL HUMAN!!
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« Last Edit: April 28, 2009, 02:24:12 AM by Erebethor » Logged

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« Reply #6 on: April 27, 2009, 10:26:44 PM »

If you torture people because you 'Know they deserve it', what makes you better than they are?
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Erebethor
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« Reply #7 on: April 28, 2009, 02:27:32 AM »

No-one really deserves torture but sometimes it is an unfortunate necessity that must be used to save peoples lives when there is no other choice. Like they do in Spooks sometimes. Mostly however, just leave them staring at a blank wall until it's time for exercise and gruel.
Ereb
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Arhen
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« Reply #8 on: April 28, 2009, 05:00:55 AM »

Don't get me wrong Ereb, I never said lets kill them all, because that is clearly what some of them desire, I meant lets not release them from prison like genius president wants to do.

I think they should be left to rot in jail in the worst conditions possible without allowing them to kill themselves, that way maybe it'll send a message to those others waste of life.. altho they're probably too darn stupid to understand it..
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Gildan
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« Reply #9 on: April 28, 2009, 02:58:42 PM »

Don't get me wrong Ereb, I never said lets kill them all, because that is clearly what some of them desire, I meant lets not release them from prison like genius president wants to do.

I think they should be left to rot in jail in the worst conditions possible without allowing them to kill themselves, that way maybe it'll send a message to those others waste of life.. altho they're probably too darn stupid to understand it..

I agree completely.  Just show me what crimes they have committed.  I mean clearly they are guilty of something, being as they've had 5 years to try them all - oh wait, I see what we did here, we forgot to find out what they did and prosecute them in a court of law.  Or maybe, we simply can't because we have no evidence of wrongdoing?
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Steeloak
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« Reply #10 on: April 29, 2009, 08:51:05 PM »

Yer right Gil - I'm sure they are nothing but innocent peasants who were kidnapped by the evil imperialist American war machine for no crime other than being brown skinned and non christian.  They should be released - it's the only just & humane thing to do.
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« Reply #11 on: April 29, 2009, 10:27:29 PM »

Yer right Gil - I'm sure they are nothing but innocent peasants who were kidnapped by the evil imperialist American war machine for no crime other than being brown skinned and non christian.  They should be released - it's the only just & humane thing to do.

If they committed crimes they can be prosecuted for and held captive than do it.
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Quinatan
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« Reply #12 on: April 30, 2009, 04:56:15 AM »

I just had in imagine of a political cartoon pop in my head.   A over the top arab terroirst is in court, the judge says "and now you will be tried before a group of your peers" and in the jury box its all comically obvious terrorists.
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Steeloak
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« Reply #13 on: April 30, 2009, 05:08:41 PM »

Hehe - Osama's Dream Jury....  If the Turban don't fit you must aquit!
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Erebethor
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« Reply #14 on: May 01, 2009, 12:21:49 PM »

MY EYES! ::) THE STEREOTYPES! lol  ;D ;D ;)
Ereb
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Only when the last tree has been cut down,
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Will we realise we cannot eat money.
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