Blogger Arkansas Hillbilly said...
Mimi,
I for one am glad the President is closing GTMO. I was there when we opened it (part of the fleet hospital treating the wounds of the detainees), and I can tell you that it was never meant to go on this long. We knew that 95% of them were just some poor schmucks who were given weapons and told to fight, but we didn't know which ones, and so many of them were sick and wounded and needed help. I remember one guy we brought back from the brink of death from TB in particular, and the amputations that had to be done to save alot of them. My unit did a lot of good at the time.
Some of those guys are bad men. When he first arrived, David Hicks swore he would "kill an American before I leave". That's the scary part to me. I believe in due process, and I am ashamed of what GTMO became, but when it started we were trying to sort the bad guys from the good,treat all the wounded and hopefully get information WITHOUT torture. When I was there the mere mention of that word was shunned for fear of being accused of it. I used to be proud of the things I did there... and still am of the accomplishments. But all the allegations of torture after I left, what it became, I am horribly ashamed of the whole mess. You shouldn't be ashamed to serve your country, but there it is. Thank you Mr. Bush and Chaney.
Thank you for your words, Arkansas Hillbilly.
I would like to point out that David Hicks was only convicted because he pleaded guilty to escape GTMO and be able to spend his final year in an Australian Prison. He is now a free man living here in Sydney. While I think he was a silly boy and deserved some punishment (and if I was treated like he was I might say such silly things too), his treatment has done more to alienate Australians from the USA than anything else I can think of. (Of course this was the Bush administration and not the nice people of the USA like Mimi)
ReplyDeleteBe careful of the Manicheism, AH.
ReplyDeletePeople aren't "good" OR "bad". They DO good AND bad.
JCF, for whom Gitmo's closing---and lawful TRIALS of the ACCUSED---can't come soon enough.
Thanks for putting that out there Mimi. Fascinating insights.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the bad things that has happened in all this is that the fundamental decency of the average American serviceman as described by AH has been undermined and degraded by forcing them to participate in the abuses that occurred at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. And what happens to those folks when they come back home? How can they shut off the brutalization that they participated in? Once you dehumanize anyone, how do you shut it off?
ReplyDeleteBrian,
ReplyDeleteDuly noted, but his bit of hubris was said when he first arrived, which was a week befor I did. At that time torture was still anathema to US personnel. I don't know when the tactics changed, but it was after I was there.
JCF,
Also noted.
I am not saying these men don't deserve a trial, that was what was supposed to happen at the outset. I am saying it went on too long, and grew into a monstrosity. It was originally meant to be a place to detain combatants while they sorted out who was really Talibani and who wasn't and hopefully get some intel by being the good guys, treating their wounds, etc. GTMO was the safest place away from the fighting that was concidered "American soil" and isolated enough to be a difficult target for terrorist attack. Now it is something I don't recognize.
When I first heard the allegations of toture, I was enraged at the media for probably over reacting. I honestly could not believe that US personnel would do that, after having been there. I didn't want to believe it I guess.
AH, none of us wanted to believe it. But for the horrifying pictures, fewer of us would believe it today. Even until now, Cheney maintains that waterboarding is not torture.
ReplyDelete