Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists
Feb 12th, 2008 | By Bock | Category: Bock rant, World, warI see the Americans are going to try six people for the 9-11 attacks.
Well, isn’t it about time? It sure is. Let’s try these motherfuckers, hang them and get it over with.
You know what I think about it? Would you like to know? Ok, then. I’ll tell you. As I get older I become less and less compassionate, and it seems to me that anyone who murders thousands of people deserves to get hung by the neck until headless or dead, whichever comes first.
Die, motherfucking motherfucker!
But hold on a minute, now, there, if you wouldn’t mind. Let’s be consistent about all this retribution.
This guy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? The guy who confessed to everything? Yeah, him.
Wasn’t he tortured before he confessed?
Oh, right! Sorry. I see. It wasn’t actually torture. It was only waterboarding.
Right.
Like skateboarding?
Right.
Waterboarding.
I see.
Did you ever read about the awful treatment the Japanese gave American and British soldiers during WWII? Wasn’t that waterboarding too?
No?
Oh right. That was water torture. Sorry. I forgot. When Japanese do it, it’s torture, but when Americans do it, well it’s just good old-fashioned joshin’. Just waterboarding. I wouldn’t mind trying it myself.
I suppose that would account for the odd disparity in the charges against the defendants.
Attacks on civilians. Right. I can see how the Americans would be appalled by attacks on civilians.
After all, the fire-bombing of 67 Japanese cities could hardly fall within that category considering what the Japanese were capable of: waterboarding, for fucksake! Or am I wrong? Could you say that fire-bombing 67 cities constitutes an attack on civilians? Maybe not.
After all, the Japanese did use water torture on prisoners, and people who could do a thing like that deserve whatever they get. Including attacks on civilians.
Uh … don’t they?
KSM actually admitted his responsibility before capture but that’s neither here nor there. Unless there is a proper trial, with a proper judge n jury, a proper defense, there can be no proper judgement. It’s a farce, all that defending freedom malarky but mean while back at the ranch they are torturing all and sundry….bogus all of it’s bogus……
Hmm. Who did he admit his responsibility to?
Hmm, you know who else used to waterboard people…
They’ll have another kangaroo court present fake evidence to hang these guys just before shrub leaves office because there’s all the talk about closing Gitmo by the next administration.
Monsters.
Well ,when did the US let anything get in the way of what they want (apart from Vietnam and Somalia).. Completely illegal concentration camp,illegal “interview techniques” ,the lawyers they have been given are not gonna be too bothered about getting them off,closed court and the transcripts will be fucked into a vault for 50 years… so business as usual then…
If they did the attacks ,then they should be punished but it has to be done in a court of law so as not to taint the convictions (if they are gotten) . I mean,do you think Paddy Power is taking bets on any of them getting off.. Seems pretty pointless they are being tried,they’ve already been convicted it seems.
And the forthcoming Presidential Election seems to have speeded up there Journey to Paradise somewhat.. What for this summer when Bush invades Iran because “They called me a bad name” or something..
Hmm, from a practical standpoint isn’t putting these chaps to death going to make them martyrs? I wouldn’t be rushing into that myself. Japan is a funny old place, the Tokyo Edo museum has a section on the dropping of the 2 atomic bombs. The way they tell it you’d swear they were just minding their own business when these things came out of nowhere. My grandfather’s experiences in Burma would tell a different story. Apparently the museum at Nagasaki is a little more sensible, along the lines of “OK, we were being shitheads, but that doesn’t mean you get to nuke our civilians”. Which to my mind is spot on. I guess the victors get to write the history books.
Bushido, now there was a proper warrior code.
It’s no harm if people are being tried for committing an outrageous crime which caused the deaths of 3000 innocents. The fact that the supects were tortured is hardly surprising in a country that still executes its own citizens.
I hope the trend continues and those responsible for the contrived oil war which opportunistically followed in the wake of 9/11 and has cost the lives of over 1 million and counting are similarly brought to book for their numerous crimes.
Bock, I understand what you are saying, and believe me, as a naturalized citizen of the US and resident of NYC for the past 15 odd years I want to agree with you. However, I think that the death penalty for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks will only make them martyrs and cause further retribution to innocent civilians wherever they may be in the world. As for your comparison to the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, well, I’m, not so sure. I mean, doesn’t every country have their own history of horrific crimes against humanity, whether it be an attack on an entire city or on a group of people because of their ethnicity, race or religious beliefs? Not that I am agreeing with the decision to drop bombs on cities, but the past decisions of a few in power in no way make the decisions of the present acceptable.
Mackles: My point is simply tha tthese people are being charged with attacking civilians contrary to the rules of war, and it seems hypocritical to me.
BUSHIDO! I am going to wet myself I’m laughing so hard.
I have to agree with Mackles…we’re doomed no matter what, because any life we take as punishment or retribution (whether we execute someone or whether they get three squares a day until they kick the bucket naturally) we create a martyr. Argue about this with the BF all the time: every time you kill someone’s parent, you make another life long enemy. All this ridiculous work we do in Afghanistan or Iraq – by killing the fathers we make enemies of the sons – something that takes twenty years for us to feel the effects of – and something no politician or historian ever considers. In this day and age, I feel like we ought to just annex countries we invade…at least they’d have rights under laws, and with twenty years of McDonald’s and tv’s and sex things might change….
I wish some of my fellow Americans could look at what their own country has become and see it as clearly as those who look at it from a distance.
These prisoners have been held six and a half years and have just now had charges filed against them. That was illegal when it started but since the government managed to rewrite the laws and eliminate Habeus Corpus it is no longer a crime.
It has been admitted to that at least some of these prisoners were wateboarded and that too was a crime of torture and against the Geneva Convention as well as being against any common sense of decency for living in a modern civilized world. The US dropped out of agreements with the Geneva Convention in 2003 and then someone ordered some lawyers to write some memos to redefine torture so it was not torture and to redefine prisoners of war to be “enemy combatants”.
After holding prisoners abducted from foriegn countries without any charges for years a special trial system was invented to prosecute the prisoners even though there was already a system of courts and judges in place in the US. This new system assures that the prisoners would not have to actually be tried on US soil where some of our pesky laws they didn’t get around to rewriting might hinder their agenda.
We don’t even have to go back to firebombing civilians in Japan to find the hypocrasy of all of this. The very same band of thugs putting these six men on trial are the ones who have invaded two different countries whose governments did not attack the US, and have been the cause of numerous civilian deaths as a result of their aggressive invasions. These thugs call it preemptive war and claim the right to start a war so somebody else can’t. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it?
In the meantime six men who may or may not be guilty are likely to be executed but no matter what the outcome of their special trials one things is certain, they will be judged by a legal system rather than a justice system, justice was thrown away quite some time ago. Whatever the verdict and the result, it will be impossible for me to believe it to be the truth since the persons doing the prosecuting have been making up stuff as they go along and have shown themselves to be frauds and bullies.
Mr. T – quite right. This administration has been the worst in terms of suppression and oppression – and GITMO is the most illegal of all prison camps. Classifying someone as an enemy combatant is a bunch of BS – if you are captured during a war, and have a weapon, you are a solider, whether or not you are part of an army. More importantly, you are a human being and regardless of country of origin are due some basic rights. That’s what boils my ass about the whole thing – essentially, this is some sort of weird geopolitical racism – implying that the folks in Gitmo are somehow less than the rest of us and don’t deserve the same inalienable protections that we enjoy and offer to other citizens of this fine planet.
I am pretty sure we will look back on GITMO in twenty years like folks looked at the Holocaust….
As in
What the FUCK Were We Thinking?
I enjoyed reading all the posts, safe in the knowledge that we secular westerners don’t (generally) kill people for expressing their dislike of something.
Now, if only we could persuade the extremist fools who want to convert us by force to their notion of Islam or kill us for telling them we don’t really think that much of their ways, wouldn’t that be nice?
Collywobbles –
I’m not sure what group of secular westerners you belong to, but it seems to me there’s quite a few Americans in Afghanastan and Iraq who are attempting conversion by force and killing those who say they really don’t think much of their ways.
Eliza –
I’m not optimistic enough to think we will be around to look back on things in 20 years. Not enough people are looking around at what is happening now.
Waterboarding is wrong, as are all forms of torture. Fine, we can agree on that. But your comparison to what the Japanese were doing during WWII is appallingly ignorant:
“After all, the fire-bombing of 67 Japanese cities could hardly fall within that category considering what the Japanese were capable of: waterboarding, for fucksake!”
Apparently you forgot that 26% of all POWs in the hands of Japan died – unless they were Chinese and then only 56 survived the war. Apparently you forgot the 6,000,000 people murdered by the Japanese in their democide campaigns throughout the Pacific theatre (including the events at Nanking and Changjiao and the 100,000 in the Manila massacre). Apparently you forgot that Japan lived by the Imperially sanctioned SankÃ…Â Sakusen, a scorched earth policy, that left everyone not of Japanese decent dead or enslaved which itself resulted in over 2.7 million dead Chinese. Apparently you forgot about Unit 731 and the live vivisections without anesthesia, the amputations without anesthesia, and the victims of “tests” of biological weapons. Apparently you forgot about the many thousands who died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, and other biological disease inflicted through biological warfare by the Japanese. Apparently you forgot the Emperor’s authorization of using poison gas on 375 separate occasions in China. Apparently you forgot the mass starvation caused by Japan siphoning food off from Vietnam and Indonesia that caused millions of deaths. Apparently you forgot the systematic cannibalism testified to in the Australian War Crimes Section of the Tokyo tribunal. Apparently you forgot about the “comfort women” who were forcibly raped by the Japanese (at times in the streets with their families watching). Apparently you forgot that every single island where the allies fought the Japanese they fought fanatically to the death. Apparently you forgot that Japan was fighting a “total war” both at home and abroad and that they saw no difference between civilian and military – at times the men even brought their wives and children to the trenches with them. According to the Japanese themselves we were not attacking “civilian” targets because there were no “civilians” in Japan.
Minimizing the Japanese atrocities to waterboarding and then saying America firebombed them because of it is bullshit. We firebombed them because we had to win the damned war. They didn’t give us any other options. And if you think they did and there were other options then you had better damned well come up with some because the entire general staff of the allies couldn’t find a way. The Japanese had to be completely and utterly defeated or they would broker no real surrender. We did that. It sucked, and it cost them the lives of a lot of their own, but that was their choice. Not ours. They were the aggressor, at the outset they were the stronger military power, they were the ones who were slaughtering millions. We weren’t. Get off your damned high horse for a minute and read a history book before you try to make a point that has no basis in history.
And to those of you who want to call Gitmo the same as the holocaust I think you may want to pick up a history book too. What’s happened at Gitmo is not right, but it’s nothing compared to Dachau.
America may be headed in a wrong direction, but it’s still a far cry from what the Nazis and the Japanese were in 1942.
You appear to be saying that it’s not always wrong to attack civilians. Would that be correct?
you’d think they could have washed his hair while they were at it!
The ‘Bushido’ comment came with heavy irony. A relative – civilian – survived a Jap pow camp, but was never the same after.
Supposedly “all’s fair in love and war”, which was why the Geneva Convention was invented, as a moderating set of principles. Also the international court which, if memory serves, the USA does not subscribe to. Countries generally go to war for economic/territorial interests. And then there’s grudge/reprisal wars, ‘holy’ wars etc etc. There’s not much talk these days of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.
I reckon the morality of a state’s actions is decided by the chain of events – offensive and defensive, appropriateness of response, and the conduct of war.
A country may start so to speak ‘in the right’, defensively, but that does not mean that its subsequent actions may not amount to torture, war crimes or genocide. Historical comparisons are irrelevant.
The common problem posed by both the Jsapanese in ww2 and the radical islamists of today is that they are prepared to kill themselves to hurt us, such is their fear, or hatred, or anger towards us. We do not have any way to counter that, thus far, except the methods of Gitmo and other – probably crueller- forms of torture used outside the US on people who have been delivered there via ‘extraordinary rendition. In short, we in “The West’ , who believe in living it up to every conceivable hedonistic extreme and in clinging to life with all we have, have no clue how to defeat an enemy that believes suicide is ok.
If the US did not use a sharp shock atomic weapon would the war have dragged on and on and on.
Aside from the whole madness of war.
From a purely numbers point of view. Was it better to give the sharp shock and end the war rather than let it drag out for another year or two?
My guess is that more people would have died if the war was dragged out.