How Has This Happened?
I'm not going to talk too much about this, but readers should be aware of the fact that our country has developed a web of gulags imprisoning thousands of individuals, none of whom are charged with crimes.
What have we become?
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.
Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.
"It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release - without charge - last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."
Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq. U.S. war prisons legal vacuum for 14,000
What have we become?
posted by JimK at 3:47 PM
2 Comments:
Jim writes,
I'm not going to talk too much about this, but readers should be aware of the fact that our country has developed a web of gulags imprisoning thousands of individuals, none of whom are charged with crimes.
Apparently you have never read or are even vaguely familiar with the genuine article, the Soviet Gulag. Here is a quick primer here,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
The repeated use of the term "gulag" on the left is as abusive a use as the term "holocaust" on the right (to describe the present regime of abortion on demand post Roe).
What have we become?
Ok, you asked the question..."what have we become??? Well, after having read AP op-ed writer...opps, I meant Patrick Quinn's article I am even more convinced that we have not yet been taught a lesson sufficiently brutal enough to get us to wake up and smell the coffee. One would think that September 11th, 2001 was enough...apparently not.
Well, we should all take heart because at least one liberal is waking from the slumber to the realization of what must be done.
Here is Sam Harris in the LA Times (hat tip: Best of the Web, WSJ's OpinionJournal.com),
My correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world--specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.
This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world--for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy. . . .
And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.
(and here is the direct link to Harris's op-ed,
http://www.latimes.com/
news/opinion/
la-oe-harris18sep18,0,1897169.story
And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from ...
I cannot possibly imagine why this quote is relevant to what I posted. Defend all you want, Orin, America is embarrassed.
JimK
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