Originally posted by: TravisT
Who said i was justifying it? It's bad, just as I said. But lets move past this... those guys are already being released from prisons who will likely eventually end up killing americans, or atleast attempting to, again in the future.
First of all, unless you are posting from Iraq (which seems unlikely), you know nothing whatsoever about who is being released from Abu Ghraib, and who is being retained. As suspect as the management of that facility is nowadays, it seems safe to presume they are not releasing the most dangerous inmates. Given that a high percentage of the detainees (70-90%, according to ICRC) are innocent, I doubt they are putting murderers at the front of the line to be released.
Secondly, DoD's apparently deliberate dumbing-down of the Geneva Convention will foreseeably have painful, even deadly consequences for American GIs in the future. If you don't think that matters, I respectfully disagree.
Lastly, given that more than 25 detainees have died in US custody since 9/11, I think the jury's still out on whether Nick Berg's case is necessarily clearly worse than anything the US has done to detainees.
As a GI, I am absolutely horrified by how far we have sunk in our (likely misguided) efforts to get intelligence. All the applicable reasearch says that information gained through torture is of questionable reliability anyway, so it's hard to know whether any of this did any good in the first place. Meanwhile, by abandoning our conscience when it comes to the treatment of our enemies, we have effectively lost all credibility with the rest of the world. What a friggin' disgrace.