Different enough?

[nancylebov]

Now to the real issue, not whether we are like the Nazis, but rather why are we not different enough?

From Armando at Daily Kos. quoting Avi Schlaim, an Israeli historian.

I think the proper comparison is to the prison camps we had for the Germans (many of whom were Nazis) during WWII. Those camps were here in the US. I saw a TV show about the comp in Arizona. The prisoners were treated with so much respect that many of them went back to Germany convinced that democracy was the best form of government if it produced citizens like this.

So the proper comparison is not "are we treating the people like the Nazis did?" but "Are we treating these people like we treated the Nazis?"

By mimikatz in comments to a Washington Monthly piece.

Links found at or from pnh at Making Light

Comments

Which Nazis?

[(Anonymous)]

...the ones who were uniformed, surrendered, and acted in accordance with the rules of war, or the ones who hid among the civilian populations and murdered people with bombs and guns from the shadows?

In accordance with the modern rules of warfare, we shouldn't be keeping these guys in a detention facility where they gain weight and get medical care. We should be holding roadside tribunals and shooting them on the spot.

Instead, we feed them, give them free copies of the holy book that they use as a motivation to murder women and children, and paint arrows on their cell floors so they know which way Mecca is.

...and when we "mistreat" them, it's in ways that pale in comparison to how inmates are treated in Chicago county lockups.

Re: Which Nazis?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The quality of evidence against a lot of the prisoners isn't especially good. It's difficult to do careful police work when you don't know the language.

Which modern rules of warfare?

Which of the stories of serious mistreatment do you mistrust, and why?

And I agree that this country has a history of torturing prisoners, but I think we need to stop it.

Re: Which Nazis?

[(Anonymous)]

Read through the Geneva Conventions some time, and find out why the folks they have locked up in Gitmo and other places are outside those protections, and why they (and many, many others) should have been treated to a much shorter lifespan.

Even assuming the reports of abuse are true, almost all of them are really not "torture" as defined by the protocols found on that subject (the British often treated IRA members much worse, and were then found to not be torturing them by European courts), and the few cases of true torture and serious abuse have ended up with trials of the soldiers involved, and rightly so.

For example, almost every fighter we find shooting from inside a mosque or other "protected" building deserves a drastically shortened existence, according to the Geneva accords.