06-02-2009, 01:17 AM
Quote: Human nature is pretty consistent, so when it comes to establishing one group of people over another group of people, I believe that only when the highest scrutiny by their superiors is applied will victimization not occur.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, as I certainly do not want to put words in your mouth, but from this and several of your other comments (e.g. the "Bush administration was unclear") it seems to me you incline toward the "bad apple" theory of abuse in the US military's treatment of prisoners.
I'll just repeat that this simply isn't credible. The worst excesses (like Abu Ghraib, or the two prisioners in Bagram who were suspended from a ceiling by their wrists --- one of the more "effective stress positions" I dare say --- and beaten to death in 2002) may not have been intended, but they all involve the same set of interrogation techniques pushed down the chain of command from the highest levels. Far from applying the highest scrutiny, it seems quite the opposite: that the superiors in military intelligence were pressuring their subordinates to "get results" and use highly "aggressive" methods, of dubious legality, with very little clear direction.
Of course random victimization will always occur. But that's not the explanation here---the wide-spread abuse, and in some cases torture, of prisoners by the US was the result of policy decisions by the Bush administration.