Monday, April 30, 2007

A Post For My Anonymous Critic

Dear App and Really App,

This is, I guess, a somewhat red-letter day. After right at seven months of blogging, I got my first hate comment. If you want to know what I’m talking about, read the comments on the last post. App/Really App didn't leave a link, so other than what Sitemeter tells me, I don't know who he or she is. A/RA, Google and the Pentagon do know.

App has done me a favor. He’s (I've decided App's a guy) provided the impetus to do a follow-up post on the other side of my disgust for our government’s absolutely stupid treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo. This post will set out a view that I thought about while writing the post that App doesn’t like. I’ve actually been thinking about it a bit while driving, not walking, down the streets of greater Atlanta today.

Just before I came home to read App’s criticisms of my views, I spent an hour at the neighborhood pub talking to a friend that is a policeman. My policeman friend is not a liberal/commie/pinko like I am.

A bit of disclosure, most of my friends and relatives initially think I’m a bit of a LCP (see last paragraph). I think of them, to an extent, as being just this side of the Attila family tree. Over the years, we’ve jibed at each other, but then we talk, that First Amendment stuff that App seems to disapprove of, at the end of the day, week, month and year, we find out we are closer to agreeing about many things than we thought at first. Yeah, that talking rather than yelling will get you in trouble – you might learn something. Here's some guilt. The post yesterday yelled. Not my normal style. Probably, had I been more compelling, App might have not felt complelled to yell back.


So anyway, I told my cop friend about the article that led to the post. He shook his head, not in a dismissive way. Rather, in a “can you believe that stuff” way. (I’m using no expletives or bad language in this post.)

I then went on to lay out what you will read in this post and what, were I and App to talk about, we might come to agreement about. App, leave a link. It won’t hurt.

I’m a big boy, figuratively, not literally. The old cliché is “war is hell.” I know for thousands of years people have been killing, maiming, torturing and coercing other people to get an upper hand in conflicts.

I spent much of the last four years giving our government the benefit of my doubt about Iraq, not Afghanistan, that one made and makes sense. From what I can see now, our government lied to us, not once but many times. I think we need to get the, oops no swearing, out.

Leaving that conclusion out, and assuming for the sake of the post that we should have invaded Iraq, the Bush Administration, leading or being lead by the Military is/are the most inept and duplicitous prosecutors of a war that I know of, and I have a major in History. Forget the strategic and tactical errors.

Let’s bore down to the detainees and others that didn’t get to Guantanamo.

Here we’ll take a side trip first. Another friend, referred to in a previous post as Big Rick, in another conversation enabled by that pesky First Amendment, while I was ranting about the Justice Department’s efforts to afford no protection to detainees, and while they were at it, to stack the deck against what turns out to be about 300 now innocent people, not my conclusion, that of the State Department, stopped me and asked me “do you want to know how hot dogs are made?’

To cut out the point of the story, he was asking me what App yelled in his comment. “You people want to be free and safe, but don't want to hear or take any of the actions necessary to keep you/us safe.”

I told Big Rick, and now tell App, that I know about what happens to keep us safe. No, I don’t take those actions. I have friends and family members that have. I respect them for having done so.

Here’s the payoff. Torture and coercion are real parts of war. I may not like that; but, I’m enough of a realist to know that that is the case. What is not part of war is for our government to keep a bunch of guys in a minimally humanitarian environment, and I think I’ve way over described the environment, for as many as five years, while going out of its way to describe them as “the worst of the worst,” try to, and succeed in getting Congress to finesse a definition of torture and coercion that protects the military and intelligence services from the consequences of what they did to these people ( the Administration wouldn’t have had to worry about this stuff had it done what its predecessors had done in the past, do it and keep your mouths shut), try to get the lawyers that represented them fired by their bread and butter corporate clients, and then, finally when they found out, apparently some time ago, that they had made a bit of an “oops,” complained about those darned (not a swear word) other countries that won’t take back the people we, how’s this for a benign statement, “in error,” swooped up. (Having read that, I’m pretty sure that is a real live sentence, just a bit long and obtuse.)

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Gonzalez, Secretary of State Rice and the people that work for them have gone way out of their way to do stupid and unnecessary things to harm people down in Guantanamo and us civilians with First Amendment rights, not privileges App, up here in the States.


So talk with me App, no yelling. I can take it.

12 comments:

mist1 said...

Hate mail is how you know that you're a big deal.

Dave said...

Damn, I have a guilty soul. I just read your post and left a less than comlimentary comment, but, I thought that it was "constructive." Then I get you ironic(?) comment.

Is it all about me or you?

Ripple said...

When you put a Bush and a Dick together we all get....(insert "4-letter" word)

Anonymous said...

Hi RTW....it's App. I'm not a blogger, but I love to read Blogs. I really love hearing all different kinds of people's points of view. I'm not a right or left winger, but consider myself a centrist. I've read your blog in the past and have found it very interesting.

I was bored at work and skimming through a bunch of blogs and then I read your last article and it just sent me off the deep end along with some of the Bandwagon comments. Believe me, I Hate War! I want us out of Iraq, Afghanistan and this Guantanamo mess. But we all have to take a step back and think about what's going on sometimes. We'll never know what some of those detainees at Guantanamo have done. (I'm sure we didn't arrest them at the local Afghany McDonald's) but War is bad. If we have to detain 400 possible terrorists to stop the US from getting attacked....so be it. If the US got enough information from 5 of them to stop us from being attacked....so be it. Most of these detainees are not good people. If they were the local village idiot, we wouldnt have wasted our time with them. After 9/11, we have to admit, there are groups of people that want us all dead....DEAD...and the only thing that will stop them is our Gov't. Do I like this??? Absolutely not! Do I trust our Gov't???? I can't say I do. BUT, you, your family, your friends, myself and my family have been safe and I am Very Appreciative of my Gov't being there for us.
I don't want to turn on the TV and see that parts of NY City have been blown up by dirty bombs. I don't want to look back and say...."well......maybe we should have been more aggressive." It's just too easy for everyone to rip the Gov't.........until a tragic event happens. We heard all those Morons rip Clinton for 9/11, because he didnt attack Al-qeda when he was president.
We just all have to know that there are some things the gov't must do for the safety of this country. We all hate it, but in this new world.....it's reality. Let's Appreciate the Freedom we have!

Ryan said...

Well, now I must defend my "Bandwagon" comment.

Firstly, I don't ride the bandwagon. If I see something I disagree with, I will think hard about my point of view, and even longer about the approach - but I don't agree just to fit in. I have already proven this on this blog in the past....

Secondly, I have to argue your logic App. This is completely missing the point of what Dave was stating, but you argued that we should feel safer by having the detainees locked up.

Does that make you feel safer?

If you want to be really safe, you need to quit driving your car because you stand a much better chance of getting killed driving away from a terrorist attack than you do actually being killed in the attack. That was thrown out as an example... I could go on and on.

Thirdly, At what point are we going to wake up and realize that we have signed, or in the process of signing away every and all freedoms that our forefathers fought hard for us to have. Is that freedom? Is having a full body search completed before entering a football stadium freedom... does this make you feel safer, or just plain violated and criminalized?

Our government may thwart an attack by beating, squeezing, and illegally twisting something out of a "bad guy".... ultimately - if someone wants to do great harm, they will. With or without "protection" from our government.

It's all about how people are - clever when they need to be. There is absolutely nothing that our government can do against this, but if it makes you feel safer to have some "bad guys" locked up being violated, all the power to you.

You should consider not ever leaving your house, because you are much more apt to be killed by a neighbor in your own country rather than an out of country terrorist.

I'll keep my freedoms and take my chances.

fermicat said...

From what I've heard, a lot of those "dangerous detainees" at Guantanamo were not picked up by US Forces as I had been led to believe, but were turned in for a reward by others. It does not surprise me to find out that the government has now figured out that hundreds of them pose no threat. What to do with them now? Sticky issue. I'm sure that many of them are now very pissed off. Maybe dangerous. I would be, if I were in their shoes. We created this problem; now we need to find a solution.

Anonymous said...

You people want to be free and safe, but don't want to hear or take any of the actions necessary to keep you/us safe.

That means switching to alternative fuels and stopping our incessant and unwelcome meddling in the Middle East.

Imprisoning, killing, and torturing people isn't making me feel any safer or freer; in fact, just the opposite.

Blu Jewel said...

i dont think i've ever actually gotten "hate" mail from one of my posts. conflicting opinion; yes and i welcome that. i like a good debate and i think the challenging view points are healthy. i reserve the right to say what i want; how i want as it's MY blog and if you dont like it, then you dont have to come by.

all is all, i think it's good that you were challenged and sent "hate" mail, it shows you've stimulated someone's mind.

Dave said...

Well guys, too much stuff to respond individually to.

Not a yell in any of the comments.

After the fact, I wish we had followed Thomas' approach and spent the money on thinks that would make us more independant from the Middle East's problems.

Having gone there, I know we had to engage in the messy part of war.

Now though, five years later, we haven't, by being in Iraq, prevented any terrorist attacks. We may have done so, and probably have, by other efforts - those efforts are where the money and manpower should be directed.

I really don't buy the idea that the people in Guantanamo that they plan to release are dangerous. If they were, I don't see that we would be releasing them given all the efforts made to keep them this long.

And welcome App and Blu Jewel. Come back often.

Dave said...

Kvatch and Life Hiker,

To defend App a bit, I think in his last comment, he backed off the attacking the left wing stuff a bit.

From his third comment, I get the sense that he is as frustrated with the war as any of us; but, he may not have gotten, and may to get, to the point where he agrees that the war and the detainee policy has been bungled.

It took me a long time to conclude that we never should have started the war and that we should end it now.

Being the lawyer that I am, I've always opposed what we've done in Guantanamo and other places I think exist that we don't know about.

I started this string by a strident post. I received an "in kind" comment. The point of my comments to my own post is that, if we all sat down, we would find more agreement than disagreement.

emmapeelDallas said...

The Homeland Security Act scares the bejesus out of me...and I don't feel safer because of the basic civil rights violations being committed in the name of "security" at Guantanamo. Can you tell I was married to a civil rights lawyer for most of my adult life?

Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment at my blog. From what I've read of your writing, I'll be back here regularly.

Judi

Dave said...

Thanks Judi.

For anyone else reading these comments, hit the link to Emmapeeldallas. Judi is a pretty good writer.