I'm Absolutely Horrified

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John from Inluminent sent me a comment and I read his post on the Nicholas Berg killing. Following a link, I found a place to download the video early this morning and I watched it. This was tough - I saw the Daniel Pearl video and was absolutely appalled by it. The Berg video, however, is especially grisly. I felt physically ill watching it.

I read a translation of the Arabic the killers were speaking before killing Berg. I can't even fathom someone saying "God is great" while in the process of beheading someone. Whether you're a Christian, Jew or Muslim, your God doesn't want you killing people in his name. Terrorists - If you think you're getting 72 virgins in the afterlife for killing "infidels" you'll be awfully surprised when God takes a giant shit on you and sends you right to hell where you belong for killing innocent people in his name.

Screw Semantics. It's a Concentration Camp

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Prisoners at Camp X-Ray

I don't know how I missed this story. I might very well be the last blogger in the Western world to learn about this, but if what this British detainee says is true, then Americans have a moral duty to see to it that George Bush cannot continue to establish law-free zones around the world in order to torture and abuse detainees.

This Guantanamo Bay prisoner claims he was physically assaulted on a regular basis, shackled for 15 hours a day in a hunched-over position with the schackles cutting into his skin, forced to live in a wire cage with no protection from the elements, given contaminated food and water and denied access to toilet or washing facilities. According to his story, this only just scratches the surface of the abuse endured by other prisoners at Camp X-Ray.

Now that instances of torture and abuse have been, and continue to be, revealed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it makes me wonder how we can justify this systematic lawlessness and failure to abide by our own rules. We see photographic evidence of torture and mistreatment of prisoners, confront the administration and hear back nonsense about it being appropriate for the U.S. armed forces to "set the conditions" necessary to extract information from prisoners.

The semantic game that our administration has been playing is insulting. We ask whether people are being tortured and the administration responds with, 'Well, what do you mean by torture?' This is insulting. It's time to avoid playing the semantic game and call a spade a spade.

Camp X-Ray is a concentration camp. The Abu Ghraib prison is a concentration camp. "Just following orders" is not an excuse.