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I just hesitate to believe any of that, without seeing it from a source I trust. The news media is NOT one of those sources I trust. (Think the Gitmo Koran flushing thing.) It’s not a slam on you, just a statement that I choose to believe the absolute best about our military unless presented with irrefutable proof to the contrary.

In the Canteen thread here for the last few Monday threads, we’ve been looking at the Geneva Conventions. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on that subject, and the thing that makes my blood boil is to realize that we have signed these documents about how we’ll treat our enemies, POWs, etc. and our enemy hasn’t. IOW, we treat them with kid gloves, and they behead our soldiers and hang their burned carcasses from bridges. So I guess I have a little trouble getting upset if one of our guys might sleep deprive one of their guys a little in order to get some information that might save an American life or two.

So I suppose I could see how this argument WOULD work. If our Marines were treated outside of Geneva convention rules for POWs, then they do have a leg to stand on. IMHO.

>>I just hesitate to believe any of that, without seeing it from a source I trust. The news media is NOT one of those sources I trust. (Think the Gitmo Koran flushing thing.) It’s not a slam on you, just a statement that I choose to believe the absolute best about our military unless presented with irrefutable proof to the contrary.<<

I didn’t take that as a slam - you point out a serious problem - our information comes through the media.

And I don’t want to believe we would use the techniques described in the GST program. But there is enough indication that the techniques were approved at least up through Donald Rumsfeld that I don’t think the government will accept 18 hour interrogations as overly harsh.

Here is a page that allegedly has links to documents with Rumsfeld’s signature authorizing pain and feigned drowning.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/

There is also the problem of the Attorney General’s statement that “The Office of Legal Counsel concludes that physical pain constituting torture “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Indicating that lesser pain for coercion was legal.

Again, I take this all with a grain of salt but I hope the Haditha lawyers have some other defense planned.

IMHO, the Pendleton eight are not POWs and do not come under the Geneva Conventions in the case. They are suspects are the accused in a criminal proceedings and if the government used any kind of torriure against them then they are wrong. If it were found out that the police had used these same tactics against a civilian criminal I bet they would go free. When I was an investigator, working as a DOD cop with the Navy, we would never have been allowed to use types of interrogation techniques.

War is hell, sometimes innocents get killed. If these marines were ambushed and were taking fire from this house or suspected the terrorists were in that house they had the right and duty to go dig them out. But there have been all kind of statements made about the little girl who said she knew the IED was going to go off. How did she know that? Was it one of her family members that planted it. I know from experience, having worked in Iraq, that these people will lie. They have even killed civilians and then tried blaming it on our soldiers. Even doctors have told the media of hundreds of people being killed by allied strikes and after fire fights. When it was checked out they found it was a lie.. And we are going to try and sentence our marines on the words of these people?