Father's Day is a good time to contemplate the similarity of the U.S. military's torture techniques to those used by Stalin's NKVD and Hitler's Gestapo. Not that the truth has ever mattered to the American right wing, the spokesman for The New American Cruelty. You have no morals or principles you will not shed on someone else's whim, and you run from fact like a cockroach from the light.

http://www.w3ar.com/a.php?k=489

EXCERPTS:

Stress positions include Japanese kneeling positions, Soviet "sitting" positions and the Israeli shabeh techniques. But the American form draws on the oldest technique of all, forced standing (called the planton in Latin America and the stoika in the Soviet Union). The hooded man in the famous photo from Abu Ghraib was kept standing on a box for a whole evening. Like water torture, forced standing leaves no marks.

Two experts commissioned by the CIA in 1956, Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle, described the effects of forced standing: The ankles and feet swell to twice their size within 24 hours, and moving becomes agonizing. Large blisters develop. The heart rate increases, and some people faint. The kidneys eventually shut down. ...

Sleep deprivation reduces a body's tolerance for physical pain, causing deep aches first in the lower part of the body, followed by similar pains in the upper body. Sleep-deprived people are also highly suggestible (a condition not unlike drunkenness or hypnosis), making sleep deprivation ideal for inducing false confessions.

The Gestapo was the first to use sleep deprivation to gather information. In 1942, Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller authorized "sharpened interrogation" for terrorists, approving sleep deprivation, starvation, exhaustion exercises, regulated beating and confinement in dark cells -- but only to gather intelligence on those who had "plans hostile to the state," not to get confessions of guilt.

Gestapo torture actually went beyond these methods, but Mueller's order was the only one the Allies found. When confronted with the order at Nuremberg, Werner Best, the Nazi governor of Denmark, objected to what he considered the hypocritical criticism of an American investigator. "Similar methods were used in other countries," Best said. ...

Yet sweating remains a common technique in many countries. After 9/11 the U.S. military authorized sleep deprivation for up to 72 hours, far longer than what Ashcraft was subjected to. The U.S. interrogators and military police who applied these methods at Abu Ghraib may not have known it, but they were acting in a tradition that includes colonial imperialists, Stalin's secret police and the Gestapo.

Oh please. You'll seize upon any excuse to spew. It doesn't matter what day it is.

Willy,

When are you going to compare the torture techniques that the terrorists in Iraq use to the Gestapo or the Soviet Gulags? If you are so concerned about human-rights then you should be condeming these acts. Or are you only concern with the issues that benefit you personally. Why aren't you asking Amnesty International or the ICRC to investigate the terrorist? Why aren't they visiting the terrorist run prisons? Why aren't the terrorist performing internal investigations to see if their members are upholding the Geneva Conventino Rights?

When are you going to compare the torture techniques that the terrorists in Iraq use to the Gestapo or the Soviet Gulags? If you are so concerned about human-rights then you should be condeming these acts. Or are you only concern with the issues that benefit you personally. Why aren't you asking Amnesty International or the ICRC to investigate the terrorist? Why aren't they visiting the terrorist run prisons? Why aren't the terrorist performing internal investigations to see if their members are upholding the Geneva Conventino Rights?
What's your point? Yes, of course the insurgents are bad guys and do horrendous things. They remind me of the Japanese in WW2, only milder. I mean, the Japanese were about as bad as it can get. But the U.S. Marine Corps didn't torture Japanese POWs. Why? Two reasons. First off, humane treatment worked better. Secondly, back then Americans actually believed that we were called to a higher standard. Guess what? The U.S. won that war.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6kt7j/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/aamitcsm.pdf

Guess what? From what I understand, the Japanese POWs were treated much worse than the combatants at Gitmo, and the combatants aren't even covered under the Geneva convention; they don't represent a country and they don't wear a uniform. They're given special halal meals, with special halal meat--that's blessed by an Islamist imam. They're given such special treatment that although they were caught on the battlefield in Afghanistan we didn't shoot them! Instead, we gave them their own islamist prayer rug. Their own brand new koran. A sign in their cell that shows the way to mecca. A prayer cap. A prayer cup. All of which they didn't have when they came off the battlefield. The fact that they're complaining about the air conditioning being turned down too far or cold food is just too bad. These guys are getting medical and dental care, and have it better in Gitmo than they had when they were free. Their motto is "war is deceit" and they're instructed in the training manuals to lie and complain about how their captors treat them. It's called al-taqiyya. Lying for the sake of Islam. They will do ANYTHING to promote the cause and the American left is helping them. Too bad they don't realize that these people are also instructed in the Koran to kill the infidel. They'd just as soon cut your head off as look at you.

It is a question of priorities:

The torture policies of the Islamofascists and their Baathist fellow-travelers are well-documented, on videotape they themselves shot.

Torture has been PROVEN to be their official policy ... while we (still!) have no PROOF from the critics that torture is American policy (in contrast to abuses perpetrated by rougues within the guard ranks, or the detainees themselves).

Why aren't the critics going after the KNOWN, DOCUMENTED torturers with more fervor than the unproven ones? IMO, it;s because they only want to execute partisan sniping, instead of really ending torture.

It's difficult to rebut Rich's statement because he starts from a position that the U.S. hasn't tortured anyone. He holds to that position in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. But until he faces that fact, it's pointless to join him in a debate over whether or not there was a torture policy. There was such a policy, by the way, but Rich isn't the guy to debate it with because he's incapable of recognizing or telling the truth. You could be sitting with him watching the sun rise and he'd tell you, no, the sun rises in south.

Greyhawk and others:

It's difficult to rebut my statement because he starts from a position that the U.S. hasn't tortured anyone as an implementation of policy ... that those responsible for abuses that might be viewed as torture acted outside of government policy and have been, per policy, investigated, tried, convicted and removed from guard duty ... that there are no substantiated cases where US soldiers raped detainees, only repetition of the allegations of detainees (and one poster here) ... that even the vast majority of mistreatment perpetrated not by policy, but by rogues within the units responsible for guarding these prisons, does not rise to the level of torture as history defines that practice.

Of course, this all doesn't matter to those among us who broad-brush the Big Lies over the truth.

wow...how did a simple fathers day wish become a spark for such a political debate?

I agree with Rich in the above statements. Those who acted against US prisoner policy were properly tried and convicted. That is the current state of affairs for the US and God bless America for dealing with the perpetraters so decisively and quickly. We really brought justice to the situations as soon as we could. Why then do people continue to mention these abuses?
Rich also points out how very very well prisoners are treated by the US. The excellent treatment of prisoners, and the professional job of our men and women in uniform deserves more mention than the few abuses. The excellent treatment of prisoners is a documented US policy and a verifiable fact. While its important to expose and eliminate abuse, its disproportional treatment in the media leads people to believe it is more prevelant than it actually is.
Those who accuse the US only reveal their bias; they have a greater desire to blame the US than to blame real evil doers.