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Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocenthttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090319/ap_on_...mo_wrongly_held"There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."...the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence."It did not matter if a detainee were innocent....""U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released."Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly had no connection to al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."Some 800 men have been held at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and 240 remain. Wilkerson said two dozen are terrorists....."I'm very concerned about the kinds of things Cheney is saying to make it seem Obama is a danger to this republic," Wilkerson said. "To have a former vice president fearmongering like this is really, really dangerous."

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so, George Bush locked up 533 guys who had so little evidence against them that a while later George Bush let them go.Am I supposed to be impressed?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIKARidne7g
I remember that time Bush also made fun of the handicapped on national T.V.! What a rube, you know? It's a good thing he's gone and respect is brought back to the presidency. Good riddance to that hillbilly.
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I remember that time Bush also made fun of the handicapped on national T.V.! What a rube, you know? It's a good thing he's gone and respect is brought back to the presidency. Good riddance to that hillbilly.
if he starts locking up innocent handicapped people in jail, your argument would have more......relevance.
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point is if bush had said something mean about the handicap the media would be screaming impreach, also if he mispronnounced Orion and made it sound like "oreo" you can bet we'd still have another week and a half before they would stop playing it on tv, and people would say that bush is a retard

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point is if bush had said something mean about the handicap the media would be screaming impreach, also if he mispronnounced Orion and made it sound like "oreo" you can bet we'd still have another week and a half before they would stop playing it on tv, and people would say that bush is a retard
he said stupid stuff for 8 years. I dont think people would have been screaming impeach in the first few months. It is so tired to compare the reactions to Bush 7 years in to the reactions to Obama a few months in.If Obama is still offending the Special Olympics and mangling speeches in year 3 by all means go nuts.
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If Obama is still offending the Special Olympics and mangling speeches in year 3 by all means go nuts.
Who cares about who he is offending? I care about the spending, lies, waste, entitlements....basically eveything he was going to "change"...og yea and "transparent"!!! LOL good luck with that.The only thing he was honest about was attempting to spread the wealth!! Which will fail as well.
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Who cares about who he is offending? I care about the spending, lies, waste, entitlements....basically eveything he was going to "change"...og yea and "transparent"!!! LOL good luck with that.The only thing he was honest about was attempting to spread the wealth!! Which will fail as well.
Well that doesn't mean he shouldn't try, doesn't it?Let me tell you the story of a " The Little Engine That Could"vets_payne2.jpgChugga chugga chugga ...Choooooo Choo
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Well that doesn't mean he shouldn't try, doesn't it?Let me tell you the story of a " The Little Engine That Could"vets_payne2.jpgChugga chugga chugga ...Choooooo Choo
a "Major Payne" reference? you, sir, are a true Renaissance Man (also a good movie).
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he said stupid stuff for 8 years. I dont think people would have been screaming impeach in the first few months. It is so tired to compare the reactions to Bush 7 years in to the reactions to Obama a few months in.If Obama is still offending the Special Olympics and mangling speeches in year 3 by all means go nuts.
He's been doing it for a year, what's the limit?
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He's been doing it for a year, what's the limit?
That's a very good question, and I agree that the whole comparison to Bush thing is very tired. You should get Obama to stop doing it- when's the last time he hasn't whined about "this is my inherited problem?" The difference is this- I knew a month in Bush wasn't the brightest, I also knew that he wanted the best for American citizens, and much of how he believes, I believe. Lower taxes. Freedom of choice unless you fell like killing an innocent, and yes that includes unborn babies. Keep America safe against enemies. Try and not **** up what we got going, you know? Him not being the brightest wasn't an issue. In comes Obama, and he is pretty much the anti-Bush in every aspect, and now we have a problem, because it's not just on a personal IQ level it's on an ideological level. Which should be expected, he's a Dem, except he is so far to the extreme it's tough to keep up. It's like every day is a rapid succesion of "WTF?" I mean, we are just digesting the whole AIG non-story and while that hub-bub dies down we find out he's trying to figure out ways to get vets to pay for there own treatment, and while I say "WTF?" the whole world doesn't notice because they are talking about the flavor of the week non-story, then, while the non-story still has em steaming Timay comes out and talks about legislation to start just taking over companies that the Government deems to big to fail yet they deem they must be failing and I say "WTF?" and since everyone is so angry at companies they don't care, this must be a good thing. Then, still another story comes out with detailed Obama thoughts on limiting executive compensation, and not just for companies that have received Government funds. Again, "WTF?" So, all of these things going on, you would think that him directly making fun of retards would be an issue, right? Nope- it's just an opportunity to see how words hurt, brought to you by Lord Obama. I ****ing give up.
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Every time one of these non-stories comes up I start looking at C-Span again to see what Congress has cooked up that they don't want us to really check into. By the way, if you watched Geigner today, you realized that he really doesn't think there's anything wrong with CDS's even when those trading them have no skin in the game. He tried to dance around it but if you read between the lines, even with the superregulator that he seems to be promoting, it'll still be business as usual on Wall Street.

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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-hou...ale-debunk.htmlAbu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush's Exhibit A in defense of the "enhanced interrogation" procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders.But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago -- and as The Post now confirms -- almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong.Zubaida wasn't a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn't holding back critical information. His torture didn't produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn't save lives.All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well.Indeed, the Post article raises the even further disquieting possibility that intentional cruelty was part of the White House's motive.The most charitable interpretation at this point of the decision to torture is that it was a well-intentioned overreaction of people under enormous stress whose only interest was in protecting the people of the United States. But there's always been one big problem with that theory: While torture works on TV, knowledgeable intelligence professionals and trained interrogators know that in the real world, it's actually ineffective and even counterproductive. The only thing it's really good as it getting false confessions.So why do it? Some social psychologists (see, for instance, Kevin M. Carlsmith on NiemanWatchdog.org) have speculated that the real motivation for torture is retribution.And now someone with first-hand knowledge is suggesting that was a factor in Zubaida's case.Quoting a "former Justice Department official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida," Finn and Warwick write that the pressure on CIA interrogators "from upper levels of the government was 'tremendous,' driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates..."'They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new,' the official said. 'They'd say, "You aren't working hard enough." There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't talk, we'll do whatever.'"'[article continued at link]
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  • 3 weeks later...
Wall Street Journal story about the release of the torture memos by BOwe kept them up, and almost put one of them in a box with a *gasp* a bug.
The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.
Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.
The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.
The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.
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So what you are trying to say, is that torture works? Is that why people have used it since the beginning for time?Torture is taking someone and putting them on a board and having ropes on their arms and legs then pulling a crank to pull their limbs to cause pain.Not letting people fall asleep or making them stand up for long periods of time, thats just good strategy

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So what you are trying to say, is torture works? Is that why people have used it since the beginning for time?Torture is taking someone and putting them on a board and having ropes on their arms and legs then pulling a crank to pull their limbs to cause pain.Not letting people fall asleep or making them stand up for long periods of time, thats just good strategy
Thanks, Sayid.
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Wall Street Journal story
safe to ignore....and did you know that Bush's legal team that came up with all these "interrogation methods" also thinks putting them out in the open is a bad idea? Wowie! There's another shock!
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So what you are trying to say, is that torture works? Is that why people have used it since the beginning for time?Torture is taking someone and putting them on a board and having ropes on their arms and legs then pulling a crank to pull their limbs to cause pain.Not letting people fall asleep or making them stand up for long periods of time, thats just good strategy
actually those people using it from the dawn of time were wrong. Most studies show that torture will get you "information" but usually unreliable information as the torturee will say anything to make the pain stop. maybe thats why all our intel going into the Iraq War was wrong. never know. (just kidding, they messed that up without torturing anybody, I know.)also, most people are having a lot more problems with the simulated drowning thing (and whatever happens at rendition prisons which could be anything) than the not letting them fall asleep thing. good try, though.
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actually those people using it from the dawn of time were wrong. Most studies show that torture will get you "information" but usually unreliable information as the torturee will say anything to make the pain stop. maybe thats why all our intel going into the Iraq War was wrong. never know. (just kidding, they messed that up without torturing anybody, I know.)also, most people are having a lot more problems with the simulated drowning thing (and whatever happens at rendition prisons which could be anything) than the not letting them fall asleep thing. good try, though.
I don't know how reliable the information obtained from sleep deprivation would be either. After all sleep deprivation has been known to cause drops in concentration, memory impairment, compromised decision-making abilities, hallucinations, impaired judgement, impaired impulse control, and temporary insanity.
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I don't know how reliable the information obtained from sleep deprivation would be either. After all sleep deprivation has been known to cause drops in concentration, memory impairment, compromised decision-making abilities, hallucinations, impaired judgement, impaired impulse control, and temporary insanity.
bad beats usually cause this as well
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actually those people using it from the dawn of time were wrong. Most studies show that torture will get you "information" but usually unreliable information as the torturee will say anything to make the pain stop. maybe thats why all our intel going into the Iraq War was wrong. never know. (just kidding, they messed that up without torturing anybody, I know.)also, most people are having a lot more problems with the simulated drowning thing (and whatever happens at rendition prisons which could be anything) than the not letting them fall asleep thing. good try, though.
This arguement that torture is unreliable is flawed.We don't use one source of information to make decisions, we use multiple ones.So if a person says one thing, and it doesn't check out anywhere else, than we don't use it.But as the article I linked to showed, over half of what we know about Al Qeda we got from 'torturing' 30 guys for a few days....so I guess it did work.
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