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Topic: 'The Detainees' Innocence Was Inconsequential' (Read 815 times) |
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Blunderov
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'The Detainees' Innocence Was Inconsequential'
« on: 2009-03-20 15:23:57 » |
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[Blunderov] Hanging is too good for them. (I'm anti-death penalty by conviction but in this instance the exception proves the rule I suppose.)
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/132360.html
'The Detainees' Innocence Was Inconsequential'
Jacob Sullum | March 20, 2009, 12:11pm
We knew that many of the "enemy combatants" imprisoned at Guantanamo—identified by the Bush administration as "the worst of the worst," "very hard cases," "the hard core," etc.—actually were innocent men, mistaken for Al Qaeda hangers-on or kidnapped and turned over to U.S. forces in exchange for bounties. But the details revealed this week by Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Colin Powell when Powell was secretary of state, are still infuriating:
There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed...
The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation....
The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership [including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney] 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.
But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror...Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released....
[An] ad hoc intelligence philosophy...was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance...All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals—in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.
Wilkerson adds that "it has never come to my attention in any persuasive way—from classified information or otherwise—that any intelligence of significance was gained" through this approach. Of the nearly 800 men detained at Guantanamo over the years, he says, "two dozen or so...might well be hardcore terrorists." He castigates Cheney for his recent claims that President Obama is endangering national security by planning to close Guantanamo and either try or release most of the prisoners held there. By Wilkerson's account, Cheney has long known most of these men are nothing like "the worst of the worst," and he is continuing to cover for that lie.
More on innocent men at Guantanamo and the future of indefinite detention here, here, here, and here.
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letheomaniac
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Re:'The Detainees' Innocence Was Inconsequential'
« Reply #1 on: 2009-03-24 06:53:27 » |
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Blunderov:
Quote:| (I'm anti-death penalty by conviction but in this instance the exception proves the rule I suppose.) |
[letheomaniac] I think that the death penalty should only ever be employed against corrupt politicians. Perhaps that would be a good incentive for them to behave themselves. A pox on them! 
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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Blunderov
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Re:'The Detainees' Innocence Was Inconsequential'
« Reply #2 on: 2009-03-24 13:21:26 » |
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Quote from: letheomaniac on 2009-03-24 06:53:27
I think that the death penalty should only ever be employed against corrupt politicians. Perhaps that would be a good incentive for them to behave themselves. A pox on them!
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[Blunderov] Perhaps gangster capitalists and banksters too? China gives them short shrift. Maybe the USA should do the same. A cautionary tale for Wall St?
http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/17/2006-yuan-baojing-billionaire/
2006: Yuan Baojing, gangster capitalist
16 March 2009, 22:13:01 | Headsman
On this date in 2006, one of Beijing’s wealthiest plutocrats (along with two of his relatives) caught a lethal injection for the shady side of his business.
Yuan Baojing, “stock market whizzkid”, had risen from the nameless masses of China’s countryside to prosper in “Red” China’s authoritarian capitalism.
Though worth billions (or at least hundreds of millions), Yuan went down over the trivial sum of $9 million — the amount he reckoned a business associate had taken by fraud.
But then, it’s always impolite to count the corpses stuffed into the pillars of capital. The surprise here is that Yuan got caught: he’d hired a dirty cop to kill that business partner, but after the plot failed the cop started blackmailing the tycoon. Yuan responded by hiring his brother and cousin to pop the cop.
Yuan survived a scheduled execution the preceding October by transferring billions in assets to the Chinese government — understandably triggering some complaints about fair play.
Those billions bought him five months.*
On this date, he and his hirelings were given a public trial in Liaoyang, followed by an immediate lethal injection in one of China’s mobile execution vans.
* The mogul’s wife, Tibetan dancer Zhou Ma, was herself swindled during this period as she spread around cash trying to save her husband’s life.
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letheomaniac
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Re:'The Detainees' Innocence Was Inconsequential'
« Reply #3 on: 2009-03-25 05:36:59 » |
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Quote:| On this date in 2006, one of Beijing’s wealthiest plutocrats (along with two of his relatives) caught a lethal injection for the shady side of his business. |
[letheomaniac] They probably used one of these:
According to http://exiledonline.com, this is the very latest in Chinese mobile execution technology. The team at eXiled think that it would provide a very elegant solution to America's surplus bankster problem because, as they put it: "It’s cheap, reliable, and it’s funny as fuck." Read the article here: http://exiledonline.com/mobile-execution-bus-fleets-the-solution-to-americas-banker-problem/
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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