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Well, it's like you'd posted before Anthony:

"... the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Here, AI is the peacemaker being dismissed, and the arrogant fascist is the president. The ignorant people are the dwindling numbers who still believe the earth is flat. The same flat earth people dragging the sane majority down with them.

careful with the facist references Jer, you're likely to start another "off topic/missed point" tirade by the Fritz bullet point commandos.

I'm moved to say something but find myself unable on account of my exploded head.

Careful nothing; the shoe fits. Just that instead of being told it plainly fits, flat earth people are being told there is no shoe, and insisting others blind themselves equally. To say there is a shoe, is lack of "patriotism".

Agree with you, Jer! Fuck 'em!

(Can you tell I'm mad as hell?)

Are you okay, Anthony? You've been very shrill the last few days. I can imagine the spittle flying from your lips as you read your posts outloud. Everything going alright at home?

Anyway, Bush did pay "lip service" to the allegations, but claiming that specific accusations were investigated in a transparent manner.

Aren't the sources of an allegation, especially if those sources are people who have the avowed intention of destroying the United States, important? If those accusers have an agenda, have an interest, isn't that something that we should take into account before we uncritically accept the word of some unaccountable international organizations?

Of course, the gulag accusation, and the use of the term gulag, is insulting to the highest extreme. Anyone who knows anything about the Soviet system of labor camps would see that the use of such a term in our case belittles the suffering of the Russian people. I would recommend that you check out Gulag: A History, by Anne Appelbaum before you so casually throw around terms like gulag and concentration camp.

By the way, I'm not trying to justify a little torture in the face of a lot of torture. I'm just pointing out that if abuses have occurred, and we have every reason to believe that they have, they are aberrations and not the very point reason for existence of the system, as we saw in the Soviet Gulag.

Fritz, to your first comment, my response:
Kiss my ass, you condescending twit.

To the second:
He claims that specific allegations are investigated in a transparent manner. This is demonstrably false. His administration has done everything possible to hinder such investigations by any but the most biased bodies. One cannot truthfully investigate oneself.

Since when have these people "avowed their intention" to destroy the United States? If the system was in any way transparent, we would know these things. As it is, no one knows what, if any, charges have been filed against these people. They are outside of the law, which is un-American.

Further, it is only a Republican talking point that all the allegations come from detainees. They do not. Some do, and they are corroborated by other accounts. The order of the day may be to portray the report as the offhand scribbling of some no-account lefty organization, but it doesn't make it so.

The gulag comparison. Once again, comparing one thing to another does not imply agreement on all points, and the "it's an insult to those who suffered" canard is bullshit. It's an honor to those who suffered that we act diligently to ensure that it never happens again. That we make sure to keep history in mind and be aware that those who perpetrated horrible acts in the past also truly believed themselves to be justified. Your line of reasoning that any comparison to a horrible event in history must exactly match on all counts or be deemed an insult is just pathetic.

Gitmo is not the gulag, granted. It's much warmer down there.

The question of motive is conveniently never addressed. What would be the motive for AI to fabricate these charges? You and your ilk like to accuse the left of paranoia, but the implicit argument from your side in all of this is paranoid in the extreme.

The only people being "uncritical" here are the Bush administration and their supporters. There is no investigation, only an outright dismissal invoking the same tired, manipulative themes.

The aberration is not the torture, the aberrations are the exposed cases of torture. This is institutional. These acts exist in an environment explicitly created by Bush and his friends (Gonzales, notably).

Turn the other way if you like, Fritz. Stick your fingers in your ears and sing "la la la la" and pretend all of this is justified. I won't.

"People who hate America" btw must mean the Supreme Court, a federal district judge, U.S. military investigatons, and the FBI. Amnesty International (read the report) bases all their findings on American sources such as the above. There are no allegations by people trained to lie, except perhaps the President.

Anne Applebaum wrote:

Like Khan and Schulz, I am appalled by this administration's detention practices and interrogation policies, by the lack of a legal mechanism to judge the guilt of alleged terrorists, and by the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse. But I loathe these things precisely because the United States is not the Soviet Union, because our detention centers are not intrinsic to our political system, and because they are therefore not "similar in character" to the gulag at all.

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