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by david927·17y ago·view on hn ↗
If you murdered someone, that would be a simple act; the legal process, though, would be complicated. I'm sure there are aspects of the legal process in terms of repatriating the inmates, for example, that are complicated. What is not complicated is the violation of human rights they suffered.

I apologize for the "Nazi thing". I lost my temper; I'm sorry. But that brings up an interesting point: the holocaust was legal. Some did "not like it," but it was legal. So in 1948, the entire world came up with a set of guidelines called the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights that gave everyone -- Jews, Blacks, Muslims, everyone -- basic rights, regardless of what a country currently wants to make legal to "expedite its security".

You talk about propaganda, so let's talk about facts that no one disputes: More than 90% of the inmates in Guantanamo Bay were sold into captivity, most were never even charged with any crime let alone given a trial, and they were tortured. For eight years. Don't you see? If that's legal in any way, it can't be. The minute we make an exception for a dark-skinned Afghani, we send ourselves back to the time when exceptions were made for Jews and Gypsies, and we undo all the good work that was accomplished in the shadow of our shame.

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And I'm pretty sure that the U.S. has signed a treaty (treaties?) making torture illegal, so the administration's behavior is illegal in addition to being immoral. The Bush administration gave absurd definitions of torture to try to classify the torture they were engaged in as not-torture, but I do not think anyone outside of the Bush administration, or knee-jerk partisans, take their definitions seriously.