Leaked Details of IG Report Include Use of Mock Executions

In full agreement with Kathy on this one, sickening indeed if true (and I think that likely). If we are to win the culture War vs. Militant fundamentalist Islam, we have to be better than them, not similar to them.

I would place this and other torture (like water-boarding) in the category of behavior similar to the kinds of abuse prisoners had at Abu Ghraib (the first definitive bad news after the invasion of Iraq).

Okay, I think hell just froze over. :-)

I think you mistook people who believe in fiscal conservatism and personal responsibility with the creature from the Black Lagoon Kathy. Enlightenment can catch you off guard. =D

I don't have a problem with mock executions. This may not make sense, but I do have a problem with making them think that they are next...having a gun, or drill, in the room.

A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.”

As long as we aren't trying to make them thing that they are next, I see nothing wrong with letting them think someone was executed.....I guess this is one of those fine lines that only makes sense in my head.

You don't believe in fiscal conservatism and personal responsibility, Leonidas. I know you think you do, but you don't, because you support policies that increase costs and oppose those that control costs. And there is no one who believes less in personal responsibility than a conservative Republican. Sink or swim is not an expression of belief in personal responsibility.

What Republicans who are now in Congress, serving as Governor , or who served in the recent GOP administration have resigned once it was found that they were involved in a scandal?

There is a long list of those who have clung to power despite the airing of their dirty laundry-- so obviously this is not the party of personal responsibility anymore. And members of the GOP only became fiscal conservatives when their party was in the minority- and they no longer had the responsibility to lead.

BTW I agree with Shannon Lee about the executions.

Torture or the use of mock executions don't work. Even mock executions disgust me!! Winning over a prisoners confidence and other methods work better.
http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_inter...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Showing some humanity has lasting effect:
http://www.traces.org/germanpows.html

Those German and Italian POWs held in over 500 camps across the U.S. were sent out to harvest and process crops, build roads and waterways, fell trees, roof barns, etc. In the process, they formed significant, often decades long friendships with “the enemy” and under went considerable changes as individuals and as a group—thus fundamentally influencing post-war German values and institutions, as well as American-German relations. Many even emigrated to the U.S. after the war.

From 1943-46 Camp Algona in Iowa and it’s 34 branch camps in Iowa, Minnesota and both Dakotas housed up to 10,000 German POWs. [Iowa was one of only a few states to see POWs from all three Axis nations: it’s first POW base camp, Camp Clarinda, housed initially German, then Japanese prisoners; Italian POWs built Camp Algona before German ones full occupied it.] As TRACES’ executive director and a native Iowan at home in Berlin and in Iowa, historian Michael Luick–Thrams has preserved myriad stories of German POWs imprisoned in the Camp Algona system.

Kathy

You don't believe in fiscal conservatism and personal responsibility, Leonidas. I know you think you do, but you don't, because you support policies that increase costs and oppose those that control costs. And there is no one who believes less in personal responsibility than a conservative Republican. Sink or swim is not an expression of belief in personal responsibility.

Spending other people's earned wages to fulfill your political agenda is not personal responsibility. No you don't have to be a Republican to be personally responsible, too many Republicans aren't, you could also be a Libertarian or independent, and maybe in a few rare cases a democrat, but you cannot be one if your solution to everything is spending money that you did not earn or advocating it. This is theft, not personal responsibility.