Comments on: Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists

By: Rhebogue Ranter

Rhebogue Ranter — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:04:57 +0000

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.

By: Collywobbles

Collywobbles — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:24:29 +0000

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.

By: Conan Drumm

Conan Drumm — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:10:41 +0000

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.

By: galwaywegian

galwaywegian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:51:46 +0000

you'd think they could have washed his hair while they were at it!

By: Bock

Bock — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:30:37 +0000

You appear to be saying that it's not always wrong to attack civilians. Would that be correct?

By: SandH

SandH — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 05:58:33 +0000

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.

By: mr.terwilliger

mr.terwilliger — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:37:31 +0000

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.

By: Collywobbles

Collywobbles — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:45:05 +0000

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?

By: eliza

eliza — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:24:56 +0000

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?

By: mr.terwilliger

mr.terwilliger — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:48:51 +0000

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.