US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1508

On December 07 2014 12:37 Simberto wrote:


That sounds like a horribly bad idea. You already have a problem with badly trained and triggerhappy police who have a tendendy to shoot too often and be too brutal in a lot of cases. The last thing you should want is put people into police uniforms who are trained even worse, and whose only job it is to basically "be muscle". There is no way of that not leading to more problems than it could ever solve.

On December 07 2014 14:02 zlefin wrote:

please don't respond if you're not going to read carefully.
I specifically said they wouldn't have the full police authority, they'd only be backup.
And I clearly stated a reason why it could help: the more numbers advantage you have, the less likely you'll need to resort to higher levels of force. And having a 2v1 is way better than 1v1.

On December 07 2014 11:30 Nyxisto wrote:

As this it the US politics thread I think it makes sense to focus on what the US does when foreign policy topics come up, also "sometimes the US does something bad, sometimes the EU does something bad" is a gross mischaracterization. Budget-wise and politically it was without a doubt the US that is responsible for the more disastrous decisions over the last few decades.

Six men held for more than a decade at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, arrived in Uruguay for resettlement on Sunday, part of a slow-moving push by the Obama administration to close the facility.

The six prisoners – four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian – were never charged with crimes and had been approved for transfer for years. A move initially planned for earlier this year was apparently held up by the Defense Department.

Early Sunday morning, the men finally arrived in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, where five were taken to a military hospital. The sixth, reportedly in a more delicate state, was taken to a different hospital, according to local media.

"We are very grateful to Uruguay for this important humanitarian action," said Clifford Sloan, the State Department envoy on Guantanamo who had negotiated the resettlement deal in January.

"The support we are receiving from our friends and allies is critical to achieving our shared goal of closing Guantanamo, and this transfer is a major milestone."

President Barack Obama took office nearly six years ago promising to shut the prison, citing its damage to America's image around the world. But he has been unable to do so, partly because of obstacles posed by Congress.

On December 07 2014 14:55 Danglars wrote:
Your selective blindness is pretty typical. You want some kind of universal declaration that the US is the bad guy, and if there's multiple bad guys, the US is always the worst. Grow up if you ever want to discuss Western foreign policy and wars. We can see that you're unwilling to accept anyone coming to the alternative conclusion when looking at recent decades of action.

He explained:

"I took it off of Facebook. People were passing the sign around Facebook and it looked like it was getting a good response, so I just decided to use it here. That’s what bar owners do. If they find out something works in another bar, they try to use it at their bar. Apparently I shouldn’t have used it. I should have thought about it a little more before I made it a shot special."

Shortly after the public outcry began, the bar posted a message thanking everyone for paying attention to them, simultaneously gloating about the attention while attempting to downplay the “racism” bit:


Revolution News culled some posts from co-owner Nate Stapleton, Rodney’s son, and from the official Mug Shots page, that place his father’s pronouncements that no ill will was meant in extreme doubt

We conclude by suggesting that although in the past, gender discrimination was an important cause of women’s underrepresentation in scientific academic careers, this claim has continued to be invoked after it has ceased being a valid cause of women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields. Consequently, current barriers to women’s full participation in mathematically intensive academic science fields are rooted in pre-college factors and the subsequent likelihood of majoring in these fields, and future research should focus on these barriers rather than misdirecting attention toward historical barriers that no longer account for women’s underrepresentation in academic science.

After a long and drawn-out process involving multiple branches of the U.S. government, the summary of an exhaustive report detailing Bush-era CIA detention and interrogation policies could be released as early as Monday. The report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) examines the CIA’s use of torture after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and looks at the efficacy of such intelligence-gathering methods.

The report, which cost the federal government more than $40 million to produce, is said to cast doubt on intelligence gains gleaned from an interrogation program that embraced torture.

The CIA has fiercely debated the report’s conclusions, and the Obama administration has warned that its public disclosure could prove embarrassing for the U.S. and even compromise its policy positions.

In 2009, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13491, outlawing torture. However, he has frequently expressed his disinterest in re-examining its past use — choosing instead to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

At the same time, SSCI charwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., initiated an investigation into the scope of the CIA program and the efficacy of its methods, which led to the report. To complete the project, researchers combed through more than 6 million pages of classified documents. The report was delivered in December 2012 and is more than 6,300 pages long.

The U.S. military overnight transferred six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay. All of them had been imprisoned since 2002 – more than 12 years. None has ever been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. They had all been cleared for release years ago by the Pentagon itself, but nonetheless remained in cages until today

As the great Miami Herald Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg notes, there are – six years after Obama was elected on a pledge to close the camp – still 136 detainees there, with 67 of them cleared for release (Democrats’ claims that Obama is largely blameless are false and misleading in the extreme, as are claims that no country will accept detainees). In a just-posted article, Rosenberg notes that the release of these six men, all in their 30s and 40s, was underway for a full year, but it “sat on [Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's] desk for months, awaiting his signature, while intelligence analysts evaluated it.”

Just as the Obama administration suppressed photos showing U.S. torture and is now attempting to delay if not outright prevent release of the U.S. Senate’s torture report, Obama officials have repeatedly sought to suppress the videos showing the horrors of force-feeding at Guantanámo. It was the family of Dhiab, the Lebanese-Syrian detainee released today, which relentlessly pursued a legal and public campaign to obtain those videos to show the brutality of this treatment.

On December 09 2014 01:22 Liquid`Drone wrote:
not in any way defending guantanamo, but of course some of the detainees were actual terrorists.. even if US forces were just randomly picking up people from conflict areas then it would still be highly likely that some of them were terrorists. (and whatever you want to say about their intelligence, I actually do believe there was an effort at targeting slightly more intelligently than that. )

I mean I agree that guantanamo is counter-productive, and I certainly think guantanamo is the type of policy which adds fuel to the burning fire of hatred (pretty much feel the same way about drones), but it's not like Obama could just release the prisoners upon entering office. Some of the detainees were in a 'hurting usa is the main goal of my life'-mode even prior to the imprisonment, and they'd be bound to be even more pissed after a couple years of imprisonment without legal cause.

Some of the detainees were in a 'hurting usa is the main goal of my life'-mode even prior to the imprisonment, and they'd be bound to be even more pissed after a couple years of imprisonment without legal cause.

even if US forces were just randomly picking up people from conflict areas then it would still be highly likely that some of them were terrorists.

On December 09 2014 03:51 Paljas wrote:

the problem with guantanamo is not that it adds fuel to the fire, but that it is a torture camp. they are not given a fair process and multiple persons in this camp are just some poor dudes which were at the wrong place and the wrong time.
its not about releasing them, but to abolish torture, a practice which has no place in a constitutional state.


What kind of argument is that.
To say "not in any way defending guantanamo" and then proceeding to defend guantanamo is the same shit you hear when people say"i am not racist, but...".

Its not about wether these dudes are actually terrorists or how good the NSA works, but how we should treat other human beings.

also:

pls, this sounds like a "all arabs are terrorists" quote from fox news or some shit.

There cant be any compromises regarding guantanamo. Its a disgrace, and nothing else