ibenez wrote: WASHINGTON — At least 21 detainees who died while being held in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed, many during or after interrogations, according to an analysis of Defense Department data by the American Civil Liberties Union (search).
So sad... awwwwww Hey MikeTheUsurper - please cry for them. :)
Gee, I've been called out, whatever should I do? How about this... The fact that this happened is a major problem. Yes, it's obviously bad for the dead guys, but it's a damn nightmare for us. We come in, preaching "freedom, democracy and rule of law," and then we have a bunch of guys croak in jail on our watch. You know what that looks like to the Iraqis and Afghanis? We look just like the guys we kicked out, except we invaded their country. Our fuck ups fuel their propaganda machine. If I had to guess if they deserved it or not, my baseline guess would be a couple yes, the majority no. The reason I say that is because after both invasions we rounded people up, and have gradually been releasing them as we find they didn't do anything. Simple statistics say that based on who we roped in and how we handle them, we probably killed too many of the wrong people, and I'm not talking about "collateral damage." Foreign Policy takes a brain. This isn't a question of "moral relativism," this is a question about holding yourself to your own standards, and if we were actually able to do that, and had enough guys on the ground, we might be able to change Iraq or Afghanistan into what we claim to want them to be. We don't have enough guys in either place, didn't plan for what we would do after we knocked the ruling governments out, and haven't lived up to our standards. Put those three together and what we're doing, instead of what we claim to be doing, is training the next generation of terrorists en masse. |
