Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure • Hacker News Board

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#301

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

shapefrog wrote: post #251

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make no excuses. Those who commit war crimes should be held to account- and they almost always are. This thread seems to want senior US leadership held to account for war crimes when they never ordered anything illegal. War crimes are inevitable- war is waged by humans and humans make mistakes or do bad things to one another. Humans are not perfect. It's about what you do about them when you discover them. We have…

> and they almost always are I would suggest that While the investigator, judge, and jury of these potential crimes are the people perpetrating them themselves we have absolutely no idea of what proportion are or are not investigated let alone punished. Certainly, the evidence of cases that have received public attention (see the collateral murder video and 'investigation' as just one such example) shows a pattern of…

>According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Violence_against_civil...

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#302

Post by calsy » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #162

Pet_Ant wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately. They should never do anything that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans worse who suffered more from the Taliban than the US. You can’t just bomb a country, create a power vacuum, and nope out of there. Moral cowardice in the extreme. As a counter example see Japan and Iraq.

This whole post is about holding leaders accountable. The same should be true for those leaders in Afghanistan who aided the attacks on 9/11. But staying to prop up a government in a nation that had already suffered a proxy war occupation by Russia, and had sent them packing (with our help) was always a doomed effort. The culture there won't permit such a thing. So I think leaving a power vacuum would have been the l…

What connection is there with holding leaders accountable and occupying a country with millions of civilians who have no connection to any of these events and are simply trying to live?

If we use this logic, then the US should be stormed and occupied for the sins of its leaders and all innocents should be held culpable for not overthrowing their evil government.

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#303

Post by hef19898 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #132

sofixa wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd hold him responsible. He isn't the one that ordered the torture, and we don't know what he was told ( did he know the guy was getting tortured? did he know he wasn't any threat?)

He was foreign minister at that point and refused to take a German citizen back, instead he left him there. Until pressure was to high, and "public opinion" wasn't that much focused on islamist terrorism anymore. In a nutshell, a low point in Steinmeier's career, and in post-WW2 German foreign policy. Not that Germany was the only country doing this kind of shit, so.

Cannot edit anymore. Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen, he was born in Germany. I mixed that up from memory.

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#304

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

enumjorge wrote: post #216

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd really like a huge investigation of the entire conflict. What progress were we seeing to justify being there for 20 years? What were we told? What did we know? It's not totally lost if we learn from this and get better. Gitmo also needs to be emptied, at least of everyone detained from this conflict.

What you’re suggesting is that we need data to improve. But we’ve had data. We knew long ago that many of the decisions around the war on terror were bad ones and/or justified with bad information. Even many veterans who served will tell you we had no business deploying people to some of those areas. Actionable data isn’t worth very much if you don’t act on it. What we need is accountability. I don’t know how you hol…

I'm hazy on what accountability means though. Sure- I am 100% pro-accountability. If crimes are committed people should be charged.

What do you do if something is not a crime though? Vote them out? We already do that.

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#305

Post by lukifer » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #77

bambax wrote: post #31

Trump wasn't the worst US President. Bush2 was. And he is still a guest at late-night TV shows. Incredible.

You could argue Trump didn't have the wits, opportunity and time to do as much damage.

The Bush administration did plenty of damage in the first two years. (Although by all accounts, he was largely rubber-stamping the initiatives of his VP and "advisers".)

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#306

Post by croes » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

kodah wrote: post #258

croes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US even sanctions investigators of the International Criminal Court if they try to investigate US war crimes. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/14/us-sanctions-internation... *Correction ICC not ICJ

US troops are held accountable for "war crimes" if that's what you're wondering. https://www.rt.com/usa/180692-marine-taliban-urinating-video... In that specific incident, such a degree of accountability was desired to be held that the Commandant of the Marine Corps is said to have attempted an influencing campaign around their trial: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2017... I'm sure there are…

By US justice or international justice?

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#307

Post by lukifer » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

mimd wrote: post #116

You know this is an antiwar puff article by the guardian being posted to HN for propaganda purposes right?

Fun fact: propaganda used to be a morally neutral term [0], which we now call "public relations", after the word took on connotations with Nazis and Soviets. Everyone who is advocating for a policy, moral position, etc., is putting out "propaganda"; by any objective measure, MLK and Thomas Paine were extremely effective propagandists, and we (rightly) celebrate them for it.

The real question is, what one is advocating for, and whether one does so honestly. And while there are certainly circumstances for justified violence, "antiwar" seems like a pretty good thing to advocate for, all else being equal. And I fail see any blatant dishonesty or bad faith in this piece, whatever the shortcomings might be of The Guardian or the mainstream press in general.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#308

Post by Anthony-G » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

> But in Serbia, where he lives, he is still considered a terrorist, and his ambitions have been thwarted. He has found it hard to make friends because people fear associating with him; a tabloid ran a two-page spread calling him a terrorist, and his acquaintances have undergone interrogation just for knowing him.

> He can’t get a job. He can’t leave the country, or drive. He has no healthcare. His relationship with a woman he loved ended after he was denied a travel document to visit her.

Does anyone know how or why Mansoor Adayfi ended up living in Serbia? I would have (naïvely) thought that Guantanamo prisoners would be repatriated to their homes or home countries. Does he have family living in Serbia? I also haven’t paid attention to the political situation in Serbia in recent years but it used to be within the Russian sphere of influence so I’d be surprised that the US would choose Serbia as the site of his new “prison”.

Edit: this report¹ from 2016 explains that

> Transfers have been slowed because many inmates were from war-torn Yemen, and so had to be returned to a third country that can provide rehabilitation and monitoring.

The report also seems to indicate that Serbia volunteered to “assist” the US and that that the Guantanamo detainees were being “transferred” (rather than being released). So, it seems that, despite not having ever been convicted of a crime, the torture survivors are still incarcerated under a form of “house arrest” by a third country – rather than directly by the US military.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20160805071557/https://www.abc.n...

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#309

Post by xorcist » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

md_ wrote: post #62

xorcist wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like Guantanamo doesn't happen because two people dream it up. It happens because a gigantic organization is committed to it. It also wouldn't have happened unless there was solid political support at the highest levels. That includes not only politicians but the parts of a democratic society that isn't necessarily directly elected, within the justice system, military and media. The system also has been hel…

For sure. But I think there's value in both focusing on systemic issues, as you say, and in associating individuals with the indelible stain of their own immoral actions. You can say that the rise of the Nazis was due to flaws in the Weimar political system and weaknesses in social institutions at that time, but you can also make sure people know the names of Eichmann and Heydrich and similar.

It was convenient that people like Mitchell and Jessen was around with the ideas they had, but even more important to know the names of are Bush and Obama. They could have ended these ideas with the stroke of a pen.

What makes this a delicate problem for the democratic institutions is that 50+% of the voters voted in Bush for a second term even in the light of the paying for prisoners and tales of torture and worse, from survivors like the three British citizens just months before the election who went on to make a movie about it.

If we still want to make sure something similar doesn't happen again, it is necessary to have a juridical institution specifically to protect human rights with the power to veto these decisions, if neither the military institutions or the democratic populace will. Otherwise history has a tendency to repeat itself.

Re: Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

#310

Post by detaro » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

Anthony-G wrote: post #308

> But in Serbia, where he lives, he is still considered a terrorist, and his ambitions have been thwarted. He has found it hard to make friends because people fear associating with him; a tabloid ran a two-page spread calling him a terrorist, and his acquaintances have undergone interrogation just for knowing him. > He can’t get a job. He can’t leave the country, or drive. He has no healthcare. His relationship with…

The US didn't want to send people back to Yemen due to the "unstable" (=war zone) situation there and fears they'd (re-)join terrorist groups, but rather in places that could do some monitoring and rehabilitation (but not US soil of course!). Serbia offered to take a few prisoners on humanitarian grounds.