Forbidden Donut

I'm not sure where this is going, but I'm intrigued. Subscribing now.

BAMP.



No indication that it can't or won't be done. But missed deadlines on shit like this will piss a guy like me off pretty well.

Yay. Maybe it will stay open after all.

Hey. Fuck you.

But thank you for your service.

1903: GB opened as a fueling station. "Given" to us as part of a treaty we signed with Cuba. The treaty limited its use to fueling and naval purposes only.

1959: We place an embargo on the communist bastards. Preventing any US corporation from doing business with the island nation. But we didn't close GB. This pissed off the Cubans. We pay them for it. Castro has refused to cash all the checks (save the very first) on principle. We use the one cashed check as a legal argument for the ratification of the lease by the Cuban government.

2002: We add your beloved military prison, in violation of the initial treaty that allowed us to open it.

2002 - present: We hold a new class of criminal/warrior hybrid there outside of the bounds of both the Geneva convention and our US constitution. We torture people there, too.

Present: We fail as a nation to find a way of dealing with these legal Frankensteins that have been generated by the previous 6 years of this nonsense.

Your reaction?

Yay.

fantastic...

/Maybe a little less "Fuck you." and a little more "What the fuck?" would've been in order above.

Ok, I have no problem shutting it down. But first we should stop taking prisoners and just start lobbing off heads instead. More humane that way I guess.


My point is really, it's not really an invalid prison. Just because some questionable activities (in some people's minds) may or may not have happened there doesn't mean they should shut it down. How does putting a prison in it break the treaty? Does that make McDonald's illegal? We had one of those on our base too. There are military prisons in US bases all over the world, including a large one at the base where I work. The prison in Gitmo is only a portion of the purpose of the base there.

Shady shit happens at prisons all over the world all the time. You don't see them getting shut down.

Shutting down the prison just satisfy a political agenda is a really shitty move.

Kind of unrelated, but I saw this today. First time I've really seen water boarding done or its effects. I thought it was interesting to watch.

http://content1.clipmarks.com/content/7E8A...4-3A07CF501B7C/

In that post you compared a prison to a mcdonalds.

Also, "questionable activities"!? "In some people's minds"!? By questionable activities you mean things like the guards putting hot sauce on rolls of toilet paper and lacing prisoners' food with laxatives. You mean things like forced stress positions for the maximum duration of the human body. You mean things like waterboarding. Which is not interesting, but torture. No they do not bleed. No it doesn't look awful. But by all accounts your brain absolutely and unconditionally believes that you are going to die. The rack didn't leave permanent marks either. Neither did the stone press. And I don't believe that electrocuting somebody would show up a few months later.

I guess those are all just humane and effective methods of "intelligence" gathering?

Oh that's cute. You might want to know that in reality, the towel is just the beginning. It's also 30 seconds on, 10 off. Repeatedly. Maximum allowed time was 15 minutes, I believe. That must be followed by another rest period, and the session *can continue*... If the cloth does not produce adequate results the subject's mouth is covered in cellophane and several small holes are poked above the center of the subject's mouth. Water is the slowly poured into these orifices. 10 to 15 seconds are usually all that is required to induce a shock response. If I remember the memo correctly, if they did that it was required... as a humane measure... to allow the subject 10 minutes to overcome the instinctual tremors.

But yeah. That video was cute.

img src="http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waterboard3-small.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Let us ponder the question of whether the Khmer Rouge was torturing people.

we only ever waterboarded 3 people and one of them was khalid sheikh mohammed (albeit like 150 times). why dont you cry a river for them. the average person breaks in like 15 seconds (based on training we do to our own soldiers) and the interrogators who did it to KSM were flabbergasted that KSM didnt break until 90 seconds in. thats not 15 fking minutes.

So now we are judging torture not by action but instead by quantity?

And recipient, I guess.

I'd also like to add that I'm so disgusted at the moment by Eve's post that I'll have to get back to it later.

And of course, who's doing it.

I would hope it lasts longer then the 5 seconds the guy in the video could take. Otherwise I don't see it being that effective.

Regardless, I don't want to turn this into another 'what is torture' discussion; I think we all know where everyone stands on that.

I'm curious why you think the prison should be shut down. It's not illegal to operate there. Like I stated earlier, a political agenda is a poor reason to close it, or anything else for that matter. Why is it important?

First of all, the legality of pretty much anything we do is beyond reproach, since we make the rules before doing it.

I'll let US Marine Brigadier General Michael Lehnert, first commander of the prison cover the bolded question:
"I think we lost the moral high ground. For those who do not think much of the moral high ground, that is not that significant. But for those who think our standing in the international community is important, we need to stand for American values. You have to walk the walk, talk the talk."

Now, why is keeping this prison more important to you than our international standing and diplomatic capital?

Especially given it's "questionable" status and the "questionable" activities that go on there?

First of all, we only KNOW about 3 people. They haven't even stated in the report that said there were three that they were the ONLY three. Why did you come to the conclusion that we've only done this to 3 people? And yes. WE did it. You and me, kiddo. And when we knew that 15 seconds is a long ass time to be able to withstand this "technique" we still did it to a man for 6 times that duration. And then decided to do it 149 MORE times. Think about doing it for the 81st time for a moment. 80 sessions of a "technique" and nothing useful comes out of it. What kind of masochistic, subhuman, vindictive monster thinks to himself "one more ought to do the trick" instead of, "hey, do you think this really works?"

I'm not planning to shed a tear for the people we tortured. But the fact that real people can justify this shit sure does upset the christ out of me.

BE OUTRAGED.

THE SHEEPLE WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND!

HOTLINKZ 4 TEH OUTRAYJ
/this is the internet. we use pictures here.

You know that's not real, right? And that it never happened?

I'm sure you did, and that you're just being tongue in cheek. I just thought the rest of the class should know.

For the record:
One version of this email forward states that the terrorists were forced to dig their own graves, and that this stopped islamic terrorism for 50 years in the Philippines. Another states nothing about who dug the graves but says that islamic terrorism ended for forty years worldwide!

Both insist that Muslims believe that physical contact with a pig bars them from heaven. Both insist that they want to go to heaven because of the virgins. Both of these have been characterized as "offensive caricatures of Muslim beliefs."

In fact, Frank E Vandiver, a scholar who researched Pershings life and career in depth for a biography he wrote, has said:
"I never found any indication that it was true in extensive research on his Moro experiences. This kind of thing would have run completely against his character."

And we all know that even if it were true, and this really happened, that all it means is that we've always been amoral, xenophobic bullies. Even in WWI! Fortunately we were better than we are now back then!