To make compromises, you have to start from principled positions. Just what are Kerry's?...... The only reason to support him now is because he's not Bush; compelling pro-Kerry arguments don't surface easily in the mind. Doug
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I would highly recommend reading the Taguba torture report listed on the url (see thread, FWD Torture Report Available).
I haven't finished it yet, but I get the idea. The point to reading it is to view the system itself that constitutes Bush's War on Terror, which is run by DoD and Rumsfeld. Basically it is a network of confinement facilities for intelligence gathering, interrogation, classification and disposal of large numbers of people swept up in a broad and indiscriminate manner. To accomplish this, DoD has created a military gulag system in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and Guantanamo. The report mentions other detention centers and confinement facilities by name and classifies its captives as High Value Detainees (HVD), Low Value Detainees (LVD), and Criminals. Evidently `civilian' and `innocent' have no military category of their own.
According to the report, the Abu Ghraib population is mostly composed of LVDs and criminals. In other words Abu Ghraib has little value for mining military intelligence in the pursuit of the War on Terror.
The first and probably least compelling reason to dismantle this system is because it is a political abuse of the US military. There is no war (an occupation is not a war), there is no aggressor state and therefore no formally identifiable enemy, there are no strategic military objectives. Therefore words like `prisoner of war' and `enemy' are meaningless. That is to say the adversary is defined by arbitrary political policy and the random circumstances of capture on an ad hoc basis and neither has anything to do with a military objective of the kind a military force can achieve.
So, for Kerry this means that not only does he have to have a plan to get out of Iraq immediately, but he also has to dismantle the entire Bush War on Terror and creat a new policy framework to deal with terrorism. The current policy and its system is not a fixable system and not a fixable policy. It is fundamentally flawed (besides being completely beyond any legal civilian, military or international review mechanism) and will therefore only generate massive abuses (crimes) at every level from meaningless conflicts, slaughters, and human rights abuses, to massive contractor frauds and scams.
Not that any of this makes any difference at all, but for the record...
CG