Bush's "war" on terror comes to a sudden end

[Drem]

how long does it usually take for a government to declassify an era of its administration? i really hope i'm alive to see how many despicable things happened in our name right under our noses for the last 7 years of "warrin against terror"

[Tossica]

50 years I think.

[ClakarEQ]

I thought many documents open up after 28 years, there is an article on msnbc about when Obama's blackberry texts will be "open", can't find the article now to confirm though

[brinstar]

yeah that's another executive order he made i believe-- he made sweeping changes to the way the Freedom of Information Act is interpreted, instructing its department members to "err on the side of openness"

honestly i can't understand what everyone's so worried about, so far this week our country's leader has:

1. banned lobbyists from the white house
2. levied a pay freeze on his own employees
3. given up some of his position's power regarding the use of "being at war" as an excuse to skirt U.S. Law
4. relaxed stem cell research regulations that potentially prevented progress on curing devastating diseases
5. ordered the shutdown of the CIA's network of "black site" prisons abroad, while still allowing time to determine what should be done with their prisoners
6. banned the covert use of interrogation techniques which were already illegal to begin with (see #3)

of all of those, i can only see having a problem with #4, as that topic has quite a lot of spiritual baggage attached

but i can hardly imagine a better start to a presidency

[Drem]

pretty much

[Yamori]

We dunk people in water?! OMFG THE HORROR

The next time you've got some spare time, try this:

Tilt your head way back, looking up at the ceiling. Cover your mouth with a wet rag. Get a bottle of water and continuously pour it into your nose - breathing it in. You literally choke, you can't breathe, your body's panic system goes into overload, and you desperately have to get the water out.

Then imagine how long you could stand that (strapped down, in a secret prison) before you'd admit to anything your interrogators are asking, whether it's being a warlock or meeting an Iraqi contact in Prague.

Waterboarding isn't "dunking" people in water: it's literally creating all the sensations of drowning someone, but keeping their lungs elevated above the air passageways to reduce the risk of fatality.

Anyone that poo-poo's this or thinks it's even borderline acceptable to do something so blatantly torturous is nothing short of an amoral creep.

[Nusk]

4 is the only one i disagree with for moral reasons but everything else he has done i agree with.

the fun thing is all Obama has to do is be competent and he will be considered a great president, three days in and he is erasing the last 8 years of abuse and ineptitude this is a good sign.

[Gaazy]

Waterboarding is nothing compared to what terrorists deserve to have done to them. fuck that. They need to go be ripping off their fingernails, shooting them in the knees, cutting off their godamn hands, whatever. IF theyre PROVEN to be terrorists, a big IF there, as im sure theres been plenty of people tossed in there and not proven to be a bad guy, but IF theyre proven to be terrorists, or have any ties to these terrorist organizations, they need to have the most fucked up, awestriking, painful, most heinous torture done to the pieces of shit. Like I said, the problem with Gitmo is the way they tossed whoever they wanted without any kind of trial in there, THAt needs to be dealt with, but for the people like the 9/11 brains and people like that, fuck them. No need for execution and a nice quick death, fucking torture them to death. Let them die in the most absolute horrible pain imaginable. Hell, same way with murderers, rapists, or pedophiles as far as that goes. If you are willing to take someones life, you deserve to lose yours in the most terrible way possible. Fuck the humane shit. And Id expect the same done to me if I ever committed a crime like that and took a life. Like the people involved with 9/11 for example, torture is a fucking understatement for what they deserve. If you dont think so, go talk to the families who lost sons, daughters, fathers, or mothers in that attack.

If theyd stop giving these peices of shit a nice bed to sleep in, 3 meals a day, and on the taxpayers dollar, I bet you anything people would think twice before doing these major crimes if they knew they wouldnt have a somewhat carefree life in prison. I would love to see how much crime would go down. Not having to worry about where to get food or how they will make the next paycheck? Hell id like to see a number of how many people have lived such a shitty life they committed a major crime to go to prison on PURPOSE to know they can get by. Our prisons are a joke.

Godamn right I'm a worthless, piece of shit redneck with no care for humane treatment of convicted terrorists, murderers, rapists, and pedophile molesters, and proud of it.

If I took someones life, or brutally raped a woman, or molested a bunch of little innocent little girls and boys, your fucking right id find it acceptable to torture me in whatever ways you want.

And as far as international relations on gitmo go, im still trying to figure out why in the fuck people care so much what other people think, especially other countries. Thats whats wrong with this country, people care too fucking much what other people think of them. From girls with eating disorders who think theyre fat because of all the bone skinny woman worshipped in magazines, to you sitting at home worrying what some guy in Finland thinks about our torture techniques, for christ sakes, who gives a shit.

Ahh, bring on the flames about how retarded I am and how Im a bad American~ I invite them

[Nusk]

wow all you need is a brown shirt some black boots and a little armband with a crooked cross on it

[Gaazy]

/shrug white, black, arab, chinese, whatever, I think the worst of our society are treated like Kings compared to what they should have to endure.

[Diekan]

gitmo was always my reasoning that bush/cheney should be tried and convicted as war criminals... concentration camp that uses torture in a communist country... mostly because the things they were doing there are illegal in america. of course they say no american citizens were sent there but i really wonder if that is the truth and even if it isnt to me the constitution doesnt apply to american citizens. they are GOD given rights to all mankind and only tyrants endeavor to remove them

LOL. Gitmo isn't even close to being a "concentration camp" - wtf are they teaching you people in school these days?

The US isn't rounding up every Muslim they come across and sending them into over-populated prisons with out food and water. Gitmo is a military prison for enemy combatants.

As for this idiotic notion of taking the "higher ground" - oh how quickly we forget the past. So fucking what if we dip our ENEMIES into a tub of water... oh the terror! How many heads have 'they' cut off in the name of Allah, or how many thousands have been killed or wounded in the suicide bombings they've conducted over the years. Have we forgotten the three thousand+ our own countrymen that were killed by them? And, you want to cry about dipping them in water? Boo fucking Hoo. We're not cutting off fingers and toes here. We're not lopping their heads off. We're not pouring battery acids down their throats. We're DIPPING THEM IN WATER and getting information that is ultimately saving lives.

It's rediculous... the same liberalism that rather than punishing a child molester, treats them to a lollipop and some theorpy before sending them back out onto the streets.

Higher moral ground my ass.

"Concentration camp" - what a bunch of bullshit.

I suppose you'd be all for bring them here, to the US, and giving them full access to our justic system and courts to be tried under the very constitution they've sought to destroy? I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if you did.

[Arlos]

Why, do you think our Constitution and justice system so fragile that they couldn't handle trying people for which we supposedly have evidence of wrongdoing against? Hmmmm?

Do you suddenly want to abandon the Constitution as our basis of government now? Or did you simply forget that the Constitution bans "cruel and unusual" punishment?

Oh, and furthermore, you know why torturing people is a bad idea? IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. That whole "dirty bomb" plot the administration was going on about for a long time? Never existed. Was completely a fabrication made up because someone who was being tortured wanted to make the pain stop, and made up something he thought his torturers would like to hear. Notice it's never mentioned today, and no one was ever prosecuted for it, even the supposed mastermind, Jose Padilla? What works are the same techniques that the FBI uses and are in the army Field Manual. Look at the case of L’Houssaine Kherchtou. He really WAS a senior Al-Qaida operative involved in the bombings of US embassies in Africa in the late 1990s, and by treating him humanely and by arranging medical treatment for his wife, he told us everything, including incredibly detailed information on how they used NGOs to move money around, how they got false passports, everything. He even testified against fellow members who were involved with the plot in open court, and helped get them convicted.

As for Gitmo, how many hundreds of people that were held there were later released, after years of captivity with no charges ever filed? How many people did we scoop up and detain with no way of fighting that detainment who were utterly innocent of any wrongdoing?

Furthermore, show me one good reason why being in conflict with bad people means we need to descend to their level? Hmmm? Did we gas, torture, and slaughter german soldiers we captured because of what the Nazi government was doing to Jews and others during WW2? How about Japanese soldiers when they manifestly WERE badly mistreating our soldiers? Again, hell no. So why the fuck should we THIS time? We *HUNG* people for WAR CRIMES for waterboarding our troops captured in battle.

Ultimately, the war against terrorism is a Public Relations campaign in many ways. If the US can be shown acting in evil ways, and to be oppressing a people and a religion, terrorist groups like Al-Qaida have an easy time recruiting new members. Look at all the statements of foreign fighters captured in Iraq about why they were there, and how many of them were related to Abu Gharib, Gitmo and torture. The better America looks, the harder it is to find recruits, as their claims can be shown to be lies, and in the absence of hatred, it's awful hard to find people willing to blow themselves up...

-Arlos

PS. Oh, yeah, your attempt to conflate child molesters into a conversation about terrorism was so bizarrely retarded and utterly off the wall, without anything resembling intellectual thought or valid argument that I just had to boggle and laugh that you thought it in any way somehow supportive of your case.

[brinstar]

hah we were about due for an outraged diekan post weren't we

[Harrison]

The better America looks, the harder it is to find recruits, as their claims can be shown to be lies, and in the absence of hatred, it's awful hard to find people willing to blow themselves up...

You know damned well that's never going to stop. They're always going to do it regardless of our world image. Do you think the clerics preying on the uneducated(...because that's exactly what they're doing.) are ever going to stop even if we never again step foot in the middle east?

[brinstar]

i for one would sure like to find out

[Harrison]

It's worth a shot, but I know for a fact they won't stop. They've been slaughtering each other for thousands of years. It's what they do. It isn't going to magically stop now.

If we pulled out entirely, let Israel do as they please, etc. Israel would whip their dick out and piss all over the middle east. I'm pretty sure they don't because we're like "Ummm, no. None of that Israel, behave."

[Arlos]

Yeah, there will always be some people willing to believe anything and wanting to participate in attacks against the US, sure. But how many LESS will there be when we stop providing them such a massive casus belli?

-Arlos

[Harrison]

I'm not sure. I think it's just going to progressively get worse, regardless of our presence there or not.

[Arlos]

The only way Israel could do that is if it was willing to nuke the crap out of everywhere around it, at which point someone else would step in, Russia or China, and return the favor, turning Israel into radioactive glass. Not an option.

If we TRULY pulled out of the area, that would also mean we stopped sending Israel the billions and billions in aid we send them, which means they wouldn't be able to afford the military they have economically.

Even if we DID Still support them, the rest of the region has caught up enough militarily that Israel couldn't just walk all over them any more like it did in the 60s. Just look at what happened when Israel tried to take on just Hezzbollah a few years ago, they got their dick handed to them.

-Arlos

[Nusk]

great maybe when they come for the <insert subclass you belong to here> and put them into a camp to be tortured to protect america no one else will care either

hope you enjoy having water forcebly inserted into your throat

[araby]

I heard this on the news that morning on the radio and thought, "I want to meet the meet President." That's the first time in my life I've ever thought that.

Not only did we witness the action of a man showing interest in humanity, he's doing it swiftly. I have positive feelings about the future. Obama's task force will decide what to do with the detainees and I have no reservations about this decision.