Well, yesterday was quite a day for agent provocateur and Congresswoman Alexandria Occasio-Cortez.
After the Abu Ghraib incident, I don't think anyone can rightly just outright refuse to believe it is possible that guards at an American detention facility could be engaged in brutal and humiliating acts against foreign detainees. For that matter, American prisons don't always treat actual American citizens very well either. Still, the CBP denies her basic claims about detainee treatment; and while there's no reason to doubt that a Border Patrol-celebrating secret Facebook group might contain some pretty nasty memes, at this point it's too early to suggest that CBP membership in the group is widespread. That could be true; it was true for the Marine Corps in similar circumstances.
At this point it's unclear how the facts will shake out. Treacher is right that we must have answers. However, it should be clear that the best thing to do is to close these camps -- by returning everyone to where they came from, as quickly as possible, accepting no new persons. If they come claiming to be a family unit, by all means return them as a family unit. We can avoid the danger of mistreatment of detainees by detaining no one.
"We can avoid the danger of mistreatment of detainees by detaining no one."
ReplyDeleteThe left agrees with you. The only problem is that they want these people released INSIDE the U.S., not outside.
I'm aware. I agree with them, for that matter, that these folks should not be detained. Almost none of them has a facially valid asylum claim: none who entered Mexico from some other country first, as they should apply for asylum in Mexico or whatever other first safe country they entered; and none from Mexico, as there is no genocide or political cleansing in Mexico of the sort that asylum treaties were designed to cover.
ReplyDeletePutting them in camps for months until a judge can see them to tell them that is unnecessary. I don't think it's cruel, in the sense of being intended to cause cruelty; it's intended to give them a fullness of rights to have their case heard. But it's causing pain, even if it isn't doing so via cruel intention. We need to just start sending everyone home.
For the record folks. Some of the Abu Ghraib photos were fake. The following three photos show the same "human pyramid" with different backgrounds.
ReplyDeletehttps://tinyurl.com/y2m7ckh9
https://tinyurl.com/yxrm3vcq
https://tinyurl.com/yymuyojo
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." ~ Ecclesiastes 1:9
Um, Roy, those first two are exactly the same background, and the third is obviously different as it's looking in the opposite direction. Don't post stuff like that here, please.
ReplyDelete@douglas,
ReplyDeleteDifferent people in the background.
"Don't post stuff like that here, please." And you are?
@douglas,
ReplyDeleteMy apologies. I see that you are the proprietor. I certainly don't mean to tread on any toes here. You mentioned Abu Ghraib in the post and I thought it appropriate to tie it to the current topic of fake news.
If you examine the images you will see that the pyramid is exactly the same - notice the positions of the soft green masks. In the first the person shown is looking at a clipboard or pad. The second shows Lynndie England and her cohort. At the time of the incident there was another image from the rear perspective (3rd image) showing England and the mustache guy on the other side. I have been unable to find that one.
Again, I did not mean any offense. Perhaps you could post some guidelines on what is acceptable.
Douglas is one of my respected co-bloggers. The Hall is mine.
ReplyDeleteThe rules are here.
I don't actually have a rule against posting conspiracy theories, since they're likely to get shot down rapidly with this crowd, and it's generally a decent exercise to watch a conspiracy theory go down in flames.
It occurs to me, for the first time, that I also don't have rules against 'hate speech,' although I do recall having asked someone to please express his antisemitism somewhere else. These days everything is 'hate speech,' of course, but the real thing isn't likely to go over well here. With the possible exception of Communists/socialists/WokeProgressives, as well as actual declared enemies of America like al Qaeda, real hate speech hasn't come up, not in the 16+ years this place has been operating.
But the basic rules are those of the long-gone Texas Mercury. You can fight an idea as hard as you want, but be nice to your neighbors. Even while you fight them; especially while you do.
On the particular subject of Abu Ghraib, there were eleven soldiers convicted at court martial. There may, of course, also be false claims; insurgents doubtless claimed many things in the wake of the event. But there was wrongdoing enough, by sworn soldiers and officers of the United States, which is the only point I was raising. We can't dismiss it, as pleasant as it would be to assume that our sworn personnel would do nothing so immoral.
ReplyDelete@Grim,
ReplyDeleteThank you.
I wasn't suggesting any kind of conspiracy. Given their penchant for photography I suspect those goofballs faked the pictures for their own amusement. What caught my attention at the time was that nobody seemed to notice an obvious discrepancy. That's just a quirk of mine. I spent my professional life programming computers where a fanatical attention to detail is the only way to succeed.