http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0528-24.htm

Oh! The ignominy of beating a dead subject to death.

The first of the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal has been court martialled and found guilty of the crimes she was charged with. The others currently have their trials pending.

Keep on beating that horse Os, I think it still might be breathing a bit.

More whitewash. The issue is no some dumb redneck soldier, the issue is that this sort of policy comes from the top, and those guys (criminals of 9/11) are still in power and you fools are allowing that to happen.

You are remarkably stupid. I am honestly surprised that any human has such a lack of the simple mental faculties that you display at every turn.

You are a hateful, rude, boorish, unintelligent, humorless, and overall unlikable human being who preaches the evils of the west and the virtues of Radical Islam but is far to petrified of the application of his own viewpoints to move to a country where shariah law is implemented. No, far better be it to keep sitting in comfortable, civilized Canada, making cars for Ford, one of the very corporations you so profess you're hatred of.

I can't decide whether to be disgusted by or to pity you. In the end I'll probablly settle on a little of both.

Rather than insulting Osmanli why don't you address the subject.

Dead horse, no, but it stinks like one!
As much as you might wish it away, it won't go away with the locking up of a few patsies.

With reference to the other US Gulag, Guantánamo Bay, the following is an opinion piece by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times.


Thomas L. Friedman: Guantána- NO
Thomas L. Friedman The New York Times

SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2005

LONDON Shut it down. Just shut it down.

I am talking about the war-on-terrorism POW camp at Guantánamo Bay.

Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if the United States keeps the Gitmo prison open than if it is shut down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.

If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantánamo has become for America's standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press. Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what America's closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press.

It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London that begins, "An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in the first high-profile whistle-blowing account to emerge from inside the top-secret base." Google the words "Guantánamo Bay and Australia" and what comes up is an Australian ABC radio report that begins: "New claims have emerged that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are being tortured by their American captors, and the claims say that Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are among the victims."

Just another day of the world talking about Guantánamo Bay.

Why care? It's not because I am queasy about the war on terrorism. It is because I want America to win the war on terrorism. And it is now obvious from reports in The New York Times and other newspapers that the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks? This is not just deeply immoral, it is strategically dangerous.

I can explain it best by analogy. For several years now I have argued that Israel needed to get out of the West Bank and Gaza, and behind a wall, as fast as possible. Not because the Palestinians are right and Israel wrong. It's because Israel today is surrounded by three large trends. The first is a huge population explosion happening all across the Arab world. The second is an explosion of the worst interpersonal violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the history of the conflict, which has only recently been defused by a cease-fire. And the third is an explosion of Arabic language multimedia outlets - from the Internet to Al Jazeera.

What was happening around Israel at the height of the intifada was that the Arab multimedia explosion was taking the images of that intifada explosion and feeding them to the Arab population explosion, melding in the minds of a new generation of Arabs and Muslims that their enemies were JIA - "Jews, Israel and America." That is an enormously toxic trend, and I hope Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will help deprive it of oxygen.

I believe the stories emerging from Guantánamo are having a similar toxic effect on us Americans - inflaming sentiments against the U.S. all over the world and providing recruitment energy on the Internet for those who would do us ill.

Husain Haqqani, a thoughtful Pakistani scholar now teaching at Boston University, remarked to me: "When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantánamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: 'That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial."'

Guantánamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty. If we have a case to be made against any of the 500 or so inmates still in Guantánamo, then it is high time we put them on trial, convict as many possible (which will not be easy because of bungled interrogations) and then simply let the rest go home or to a third country. Sure, a few may come back to haunt us. But at least they won't be able to take advantage of Guantánamo as an engine of recruitment to enlist thousands more. I would rather have a few more bad guys roaming the world than a whole new generation.

"This is not about being for or against the war," said Michael Posner, the executive director of Human Rights First, which is closely following this issue. "It is about doing it right. If we are going to transform the Middle East, we have to be law-abiding and uphold the values we want them to embrace - otherwise it is not going to work."

Because I have grown tired of trying to have a serious interchange of ideas with him.

He is boorish, rude, will denounce any and all resouces that can be shown to support a conclusion other than the one he has already made to be lies spun by a world conspiracy of malicious Jews, and he connects any and all problems in the world with Israel and the United States. It is impossible to have a serious discussion with one who wears his blinders as tightly as OsManli does.

Then put him on your ignore list, but don't insult him.

Any comment on what Mr. Friedman has to say?

I pretty much agree with Mr. Friedman the vast majority of the time. I admire him and have read many of his books, my favirotes being "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" and "From Beirut to Jerusalem"

While I agree with Mr Friedman's basic sentiment in this article as far as functionality goes I don't think what he proposes is practically implementable.

I distinctly remember an era when the USA led the audience of the world theater in a certain virago -- addressing the inessential torturing and denial of basic human rights of political, or war time prisoners held captive in other countries.

During this time that audience looked upon us as the lively protagonist; the cowboy with the white hat; that hero with the flowing red cape!

Oh, how things have changed concerning this subject!