overtone

You still haven't recognized what they did. You deny what they did, call it "demonizing" to describe its horrors and consequences in plain English, and then talk about voting for the next guy with their agenda and their line of bull and representing what they represented. And when it all turns ugly, and the money has disappeared into the offshore banks, and the dead and the ruined pan by on TV, and the refugees need to be fed and sheltered, and nothing works any more, you blame "both sides" and talk about how we all need to work together and give each other the benefit of the doubt. Again: you need to get your facts straight. All the principles in the world will not help if you never know what is happening or who is doing it. Your gullibility is a threat to your neighbors, and a betrayal of everything you claim to value. Let's try an easy one: nobody closely associated with the political faction represented by W&Cheney, their financial support, or their intellectual justifications, should be allowed to have any influence on the US response to the Paris attacks. Agreed?

Are we agreed that no current Republican Party leadership should be allowed to have any influence on the US response to the Paris attacks? Given their record, and their public statements, that is.

They are nevertheless the current problem - the group that has in fact been manipulated and pandered to in the establishment of the current Republican Party. And you act as if there is equivalent propaganda from "the left", manipulating and organizing people. There is no such thing. There is no "left" version of the rightwing authoritarian propaganda machine currently dominating the US media and political discourse. Maybe there are such vulnerable Dems, in theory. In reality, we've got the 27% Republican core voter, who has been made into a threat to the country, and then everybody else - all kinds of people, not a "side" at all but a public. Pulling out our troops, as W arranged with Maliki, had nothing to do with it. The place had completely fallen apart by the end of 2004, and our troops - which we were specifically promised would not be doing any "nation building" anyway, and could not have begun to if they had tried - were not forced out by the W/Maliki agreement until years later. As far as your fearless leader's "hopes", W&Cheney had Adnan Chalabi flown in by helicopter to become the new strongman, supposedly temporary until the Iraqis could be educated about democracy and the dangerous leftists excluded (the usual pattern in US-supported violent changes of government). It was the Iraqis who forced the attempt at democracy, partially excluded Chalabi, etc. It turns out they were already registered to vote, even - one of those little details, like the fact that before the invasion Iraqi women had more rights and freedoms than in any US-allied Muslim country in the Middle East, that were somehow not well publicized in the US.

It wasn't a "split in the soul": it was a full scale war with Iraq on the losing side, occupation by a foreign army and the agents of foreign powers, millions of refugees and casualties, the large scale destruction of infrastructure, the removal and destruction of all functioning civilian government, years of incompetent and destructive mismanagement by imposed rulers, and so forth. And W&Cheney launched that war voluntarily; all that damage that will take generations to heal was done for at best mistaken reasons using at best ineffective methods, given the declared goals. The horrors of war were unleashed on the people of Iraq for no good reason, the aftermath managed to no good end. That is a factual description of what took place - agreed and seconded by basically everyone. So that is what you are labeling "demonization" - a simple recounting of historical event, what happened and who did it. And your notion that the Democratic Party in the US is capable of fixing something like that in Iraq in seven years - even if they had had any chance of doing anything given the Republican vandalism of US politics in that time - is very strange. What magical powers do you think they have? You may be right. But after W&Cheney got through trashing the place, and the US's capabilities of dealing with it, we might have to step back from what we can no longer do much about, and hope other people with better understanding and less damaged relationships step up. Which brings us to the main obstacle in providing that support and help, for many years now: the Republican Party. Do you at least agree that no one in the current leadership or public representation of the Republican Party should be allowed any influence on the the US response to the Paris attacks? Given their record and public statements.

You mean, why recognize what the Republican Party did and is doing, and hold those responsible to account? Because that is a necessary step in ridding the US of its most serious political problem, and its major obstacle to restoring reasonable government and enjoying the benefits thereof - or at least beginning the recovery and rehab. So now the Dems are to blame for the consequences of W&Cheney because they were unable to clean things up, and it's still a mess? Seriously? You must have a very, very high opinion of the Democratic Party, if you expected it to make right the disaster of W&Cheney in a few years - so that failure to completely clean up after that re-elected eight year Republican garbage fire of an administration is somehow a letdown. And that would be true even if the Dems had had actual control of the US government at any time, and could get done what was necessary to accomplish any such cleanup. You apparently expected not only miracle working from Obama, but miracle working in the face of continual and brutal Republican opposition - Republican perfidy and vandalism and intransigence and destruction of all reasonable governmental efforts is apparently your idea of normal life. You take that for granted, as reality, and grade the Dems on how well they deal with it as if it were the weather. Bad weather and Republican trashing of governance are neither of them accountable, or responsible, in your view. They are background, something we must accept as the way things are. That is kind of odd. They were both creations of W&Cheney, as was the situation in which they could grow, and the onerous restrictions on any US administration's options in dealing with them. No. What Clinton is saying is more intelligent, and less stupid, than what Trump is saying. Clinton is a rightwing authoritarian with an ass-covering deflection of the US invasion of Iraq, anti-terrorism efforts, drug wars, etc - nobody any lefty or liberal wants to see in the Presidency - but c'mon. The fact that the Republican core voter - the 27% - can't tell the difference between the fantasy base of Trump's rantings and the reality base of Clinton's speeches is a major aspect of the problem the US faces with these people. It's a much bigger threat than ISIL.

I have not assigned motivations to you, then - we are agreed. So you will not post that any more. You don't know when or where that happened. You do not see the same set of facts at all. You deny facts, and substitute imaginary situations and events. 1) A Shiite massacre occurred as a result of the US invasion. Actual events carry more weight, with me, than stuff your imagination thinks might have happened if the world were a different place. 2) The US invasion was not motivated by a desire to prevent an imminent massacre of any Iraqis (or even lift the sanctions, which were killing Iraqi children by the tens of thousands. And it was a horrible disaster for everyone involved except the Iranians and maybe the Kurds. So it was a mistake, even if it prevented some alternative universe where bad things we weren't considering happened. Imaginary alternative universes do not justify avoidable disasters caused by bad things done for bad reasons in this one. We should stop doing bad, wrong, evil, ignorant, and self-destructive things - agreed? That requires understanding what we've been doing. How else do you propose to avoid repeating mistakes of the past? If, say, you live in some bubblefantasy where Obama's troop withdrawal in Iraq led to the Paris bombings by allowing the formation of ISIL, you are badly crippled in any efforts to do anything in the real world. There may be no "solution" - W&Cheney's administration may have created a disaster we can't realistically do anything about right now. Also, there may easily be no solution that includes giving political power to the faction currently in control of the Republican Party in the US - to that or any other major problem the US faces as a country and a people. That means we should not allow the current Republican Party to avoid accountability for the bad things it has done and is doing. Because if we do, we make it easier for those using it as their political force to do even more, gain even more power, etc.

The topic was not "motivations", but expressed opinions and posting content. I don't think I have assigned motivations to you, other than the roles played directly here by this or that item of posting content. Can you quote an example? How does getting the facts straight commit injustice? Yes, it is. We live in a democracy. We are choosing our legislators and government policies. If we choose badly, we suffer the consequences. Doubt about what? About physical fact, historical event, what happened and who did it?

That does not explain where you come up with supposed postings of mine that I have not made, assigning to me opinions I have not expressed and viewpoints I do not share. These are matters of fact. You are getting the facts wrong. It is possible to get it right, however. There are well founded beliefs, accurate assessments, informed and well-reasoned opinions; these things exist. And it is possible to form an opinion (right or wrong) without denying physical reality, or getting the facts screwed up. In most people's judgments, it is better. 1) No. So unlikely as to be realistically impossible. 2) There is no "Baathist supported caliphate". 3) We were "going after Saddam" long before the Iraq invasion that set up ISIL. "Going after Saddam" was not the issue. By paying attention to the facts on the ground in the region. By paying attention to the employment of it. You are confusing religious sect with political Party. Why?

I have never "raved" against males, WASPS, the military, the CIA, religious people in general, people who live in the suburbs in general, etc. I haven't even "raved" against Republicans in general, or big oil - that is your interpretation of what in my posts is simply descriptions and accounts. Where do you get that bs? It isn't from reading my posts. Your thinking keeps leading you to posts like that - that I have "raved" against males, and WASPS, and so forth, - which have no apparent source except in some screwball reflex of your thinking. When you keep saying things that are flagrantly not so about people's posting, especially when they come from out of the blue like that (WASPS?), we notice. How can we not? It also exists when mistaken men do wrong for bad reasons. If you set out to do wrong for bad reasons, how are you a good man? You can only get credit for good intentions at most once or twice - after that, you are expected to know better. To be good men. Yes, it is. It is completely logical, and makes a lot of sense in the US right now - for example, with regard to foreign Islamic terrorism vs domestic Christian terrorism.

You have it backwards. The white male Republicans are responsible for the behavior of the group to which they deliberately and self-confessedly belong, which they support, which they defend and excuse, which they enable and encourage and cover up and deny. Just as the members of ISIL are. Against a group like ISIL you can't afford to panic and flail around and abandon your principles of justice and doing what's right - that lack of backbone and tendency to panic is your central flaw, that they are exploiting. The Republican core electoral base, call it whatever you want to, has no idea what "direction" the country is going or who is taking it there. What they like and don't like are figments of their imagination in the first place. First you have to find out about reality, so you have some idea what you are in fact doing. The Tea Party goes to the Fair, 1928: http://i.imgur.com/k8Wpxbq.jpg

So does anyone remember the much mocked claims made by the hippies and whackos and anti-science victims of Dunning-Kruger, to the effect that one of the serious problems with the major GMOs currently marketed was their all but inevitable breeding of resistance to the relatively benign herbicides and pesticides they exploited (Bt and glyphosate), with various consequences all generally unfortunate (especially: the loss of the better chemicals to responsible use)? Among the expected consequences - expected by the Luddites etc - was to be an expansion of the GMs involved to include increasingly less benign chemicals (and of course an increasingly complex mixture of adjuvants and auxiliary stuff not available for public viewing or governmental regulation). Some update: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/24d-captan/24d-ext.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic_acid http://www2.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/registration-enlist-duo http://www.gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/15902-farmers-and-ngos-condemn-usda-approval-of-monsanto-s-gm-dicamba-tolerant-soybeans-and-cotton http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/10/15/enlist-duo-everything-you-need-to-know-about-new-dual-herbicide-resistant-crops/ The money quote is buried about half way down, in which he validly and responsibly states (possibly for protection of whatever future his reputation still has) that his arguments in the rest of the essay do not apply to the real world: since the entire reason for the new products is to handle situations in which glyphosate resistant weeds have become a problem, and farmers do not follow best practices that cost them serious money, that combination is the real world circumstance of their use. http://www.croplife.com/crop-inputs/adjuvants/spray-drift-enters-more-complex-era/ http://msdssearch.dow.com/PublishedLiteratureDAS/dh_092a/0901b8038092a9ec.pdf?filepath=enlist/pdfs/noreg/010-80241.pdf&fromPage=GetDoc Meanwhile: http://pratoslimpos.org.br/?cat=4 Anyone with some Spanish or familiarity with Latin word roots in English can get the drift of the Portuguese - essentially, the article reports that in 2015 non-GM soybeans in Brazil gave around 5-6% higher yields (solidly consistent with most other side by side comparisons of such crops) and between 10% and 180% higher profits per acre (that’s less typical), compared with the two varieties of GM soybeans marketed there by Monsanto. There’s a problem, in that the acreage of the non-GM was comparatively restricted in scale and distribution - the comparison should be viewed warily. Also, I have no familiarity with Brazilian sources. But that restriction itself reveals a further problem with the GM soybeans: the seed market in Brazil is (essentially) controlled by Monsanto, and Monsanto enforces an 85/15 GMO/Conventional seed ratio in its Brazilian sales. So conventional seed is often not available. That is part of the reason so much acreage is planted in what by now is seen by many farmers to be less profitable crops And in the side topics: http://www.gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/16557-seralini-s-team-and-criigen-win-two-court-cases-about-their-research-on-toxicity-of-gmos-and-pesticides

That terrorism by Muslims these days is often justified by appeal to the precepts of Islam and the need to support Islam against its powerful enemies is a fact - that's how its perpetrators often justify their actions. How you take that is up to you. It is also a fact - mostly unrelated and coincidental, in my opinion, but apparently and disturbingly and unarguably well correlated withal - that the US and other self-described champions of Western civilization have consistently and for a long time treated the ordinary believers in Islam with a lack of consideration for justice, mercy, common sense, or even common decency, that is disheartening to the extent it does not startle and vice versa. Are we now. Was that the priority, then, of the cadre of warmongers and profiteers and their PR agents who sent the US military full force into Afghanistan and Iraq, who set up Bagram and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (and several others not as famous) with the restraint attachments firmly bolted to the floors and the ceilings and the walls according to engineering blueprint, the drains and electrical outlets designed and installed by professionals in the trade? Because they and their PR agents are on my television screen right now, praising their own past efforts and maneuvering for even more power, more scope for their agenda. And using this Paris attack as a pretext. An interesting assessment, based on my postings of physical fact and historical circumstance and political action, and denial of revision or obscuring bs. When a simple description of what happened and who did it leads you to make that judgment as if it were automatic, a direct implication of my posting, - - well, that is informative, or could be. I wouldn't, but I can see where you might. You have a track record. Am I allowed to remind you of it?

Yes, we did. Right up at the last minute, with Saddam's military at the border of Kuwait, our ambassador (April Glaspie) told him that what he was obviously preparing for was ok by us - that the US had "no position" on Saddam's quarrel with Kuwait, and he could do as he liked. Apparently the US - with a former CIA head as President - underestimated his goals. But that was afterwards. Recall the quote, you can find it on wiki (they omitted the usual italics, I added them back): Or recall the context: http://articles.latimes.com/1992-02-25/news/mn-2628_1_foreign-policy - - - And having been betrayed by the purveyors of that nonsense, for about the fiftieth time, you learned absolutely nothing. You still listen to those people. You still vote for them. You take them seriously when they pontificate about the current situation in Iraq. No, "we" don't. We are looking at Islamic justified terrorism financed and organized from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and so forth, as much as from Iraq or Syria. The terrorists come from all over - France, Belgium. The worst of the Islamic terrorism is in Africa, especially in Boko Haram regions. The situation in Syria and Iraq is terrible, but those guys are just the current rallying point, they aren't the end all and be all of Islamic jihad. All that stuff is in the promotional videos they use for recruitment. Let's start with something at hand, less alien and and more our business: what you describe there is essentially the situation we in the US face with the current Republican Party and its recruits. A pyramid scheme of lies, a core of twisted religious justification, even occasional horrible violence imposed by the self-sacrificing upon the designated enemy of the day - informed analysts have been calling it the "American Taliban" for many years now. How do we pull the plug on it? If we can't even do that, surely something like ISIL is beyond our reach.

Why an obligation? Had we done something wrong? Yes, it was. We broke it, prevented it from recovering, and stuck around for more than ten years trying (and failing) to make sure it did not repair itself in ways we did not want. We encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait, and used that (and his overreach) as a pretext for destroying his military and imposing sanctions to prevent him rebuilding it. That was in 1990. We kept the sanctions in place for a dozen years, increasingly severe (the death toll among Iraqi children was variously estimated in the tens to hundreds of thousands), without creating the revolt and disintegration expected. It was fourteen years and full scale military invasion later - in 2004 - that the beginnings of Sunni ISIL began to emerge from the wreckage of the country, its ethnic cleansing, and its emerging Iranian backed Shia State. It was ten years of military occupation later that the US was forced to abandon its temporary bribery based lull in the Sunni revolt by the terms of W&Cheney's treaty with the Iranian backed Shia government, which promptly cut off the bribe money to the despised Sunni - and here we are. It's a fact that years ago the US had provided Saddam with the makings and technology of chemical weapons, which he had produced and used in quantity; that he had acquired basic nuclear technology and a weapons program; and that he had the capability of producing biological weapons. It's also a fact that by the time of the US invasion the UN inspections and US sanctions enforcements had largely divested him of WMDs, there was very little chance of him possessing anything other than some old and nonfunctional gas shells hidden somewhere, and UN inspectors had been in Iraq with complete access right up until the preliminary bombing forced them out, easily capable of having any WMDs the US thought were present destroyed as they had all the others over the years. It's also a fact that Saddam had been fought to at best a negative draw by the Iranians, back when he had US support and all his nerve gas and the like and the Iranians were still in recovery from their revolution and under serious international strictures - not exactly a modern Wehrmacht, eh? Chemical weapons in themselves were of course not a threat to the world in general, or the US in particular. The bogeyman used to further panic the US population in the wake of 9/11 was nuclear weapons supposedly about to be given to "terrorists" by Saddam, or perhaps manufactured in quantity and used in a massive suicide strike against Israel for some reason - the threats were short of specifics and long in rhetorical emphasis. But they sold the war. And the Iraq War brought us to the modern circumstances - with our natural ally in the region (and the only regional army with any track record of fighting hard), Iran, difficult to coordinate with, and everybody else amoral scum trying to keep a lid on psychopathic thugs.

No, I don't. But it gives me hope to see that my recitations of historical fact and current circumstance are taken that way - despite the waterboarding bizarro spiel you haven't drowned in the koolaid, unable to tell right from wrong altogether. You recognize some things as bad, even if the US did them. Timing. The French are up to their asses in a US launched mess they warned about, and you mock them for not helping the US launch it? The French would be within their rights to ship every Middle Eastern refugee they can round up directly to Texas, along with a bill for their trouble.

? This business of who's a real American is your thing, not mine. I have always included the current electoral base of the Republican Party as part of the real US. Try as you might to corral the entire population of the US behind your gullibility and the warmongering of the W&Cheney administration in the Middle East, it remains the doings of particular people with the support of particular people. There are plenty of Americans who never fell for it, never supported it, never spent three minutes trying to excuse it, and to this day do not live in denial, unable to admit the simplest of physical facts; and dissing the French, just to keep the fantasy walls in good repair. The US would have been better off bringing violins to the Iraq War, than ignoring the French when they warned against that obvious disaster. And the fact that the French are now paying part of the price for the US failure to heed reason or behave decently, just makes dissing them that much more dishonorable.

The Christian religion, a monotheistic one, was founded in communism - it was the core of the religion for hundreds of years. The core practice of capitalism - loaning money at interest - was forbidden to Christians for even longer. http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/1998_usury.htm Note that by "usury" was meant the charging of simple interest on a monetary loan, and then later (1500 years after the founding of the Christian Church) relaxed to the charging of "excessive" simple interest. The practice of compounding interest was of course much worse, not only usury but a species of fraud, until recently.

So the only reason you can think of for not invading other people's countries, not setting up systems of torture prisons, not drone striking civilians, not destroying whole civilizations and installing military and fundamentalist tyranny over their populations, and so forth, is to avoid "pissing off a Muslim Fundamentalist"? Actually, my observation was that the French do not deserve to bear the consequences of US behavior in the Middle East. And it was a response to your mockery of the French in their refusal to join the US in committing the horrible foolishness that is behind this latest crisis. The French were right, the US was wrong, and the French are paying for US folly.

Global sea levels have risen as predicted, global temperatures have risen as predicted (not only amount, but location and timing), severe droughts have struck the places named most vulnerable to AGW drought, also wildfire, the Arctic ice on both land and sea has melted back (faster than predicted, actually, but the IPCC is known to be "conservative" and bend over backwards to avoid alarming predictions), methane releases from high northern stores both land and sea have increased substantially, acidification of the shallower parts of the ocean has increased rapidly, and so forth.

You really don't know any better than that? Let's start from the basics: Most of the prisoners did not come from battlefields, and many were not captured by us. Things done on battlefields are not generally labeled "crimes" - it's an odd term, as if the US military invading another country were enforcing the law. The prisons the US set up did not resemble POW camps. Instead of POW setup holding people captured in battle, as would be expected in something considered a war, we set up a system of torture prisons to "interrogate" mostly people who were either captured by us in civilian environs (during house to house searches, say) or delivered to us by their local enemies, often for bounty payments, for whatever reasons they had. These prisons were similar in form and function to the ones employed by tyrants and oppressors everywhere - we used Saddam's buildings, even, in Iraq, as well suited to the purpose (the drains for the blood and filth produced during sessions, the wall and ceiling and floor attachment points for the chains, the electrical outlets for the more sophisticated implements, were already installed). The consequences of this were manifold, and almost all bad. For example, the headchoppings you find so memorable began, in Iraq, in direct and explicit response to what we did in those prisons. The early stages of the rallying of what has become ISIL trace in part there, reinforcing the effects of Bremer's "de-Baathification" and the ethnic cleansing that followed. And so forth. So this has nothing to do with the current refugee crisis in Europe, you think?

It's just a rule: First person to mention Al Gore on a science forum in an argument about climate change loses the argument. It's got nothing to do with Al Gore himself.

Suicide probably is not. Self sacrifice for a cause may be related to a mental disorder in many cases, but the sociopaths in ISIL are not the ones blowing themselves up.

You have got to be kidding. That is, in black and white on my screen, the classic excuse and denial combination of every torture regime that ever had to justify its behavior to an unfriendly audience (most never have). It's been in the news, it's been in the movies, it's a click away anywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilawar_(torture_victim) There is no excuse for an American knowing no better than that about how prisoners were treated at Bagram, at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo, at how many others we don't even have a solid count. Do we include the Syrian torture prisons we subcontracted to? The Israeli setups we picked up techniques and borrowed "interrogators" from? No government ever set up a torture operation whose actual primary function was obtaining information. And the US operations set up by W&Cheney were no exception - most of the people "broken down" had no information, for starters, as is usual in such setups. That did not interfere very much with obtaining confessions from them, of course. Oh, please. Torture is torture. We hanged Japanese officers for doing to actual American soldiers what we did to ordinary civilians in Gitmo, and we were justified in hanging them. So we say. But we don't do. You, who have fought and voted and argued against holding anyone accountable for the organization and setup and operation of torture prisons by the W&Cheney administration - are you sure that isn't who you are? You have had plenty of opportunity to actually oppose that garbage, at a minimum by voting against its perpetrators. 1) So why the difficulty in simply describing, factually, what was done and when? What's the problem with getting the facts straight? 2) Like what problems have we "solved"? Delusion and fantasy. The Iraq War "solved" nothing, and made most things worse, and is showing signs of turning into near total victory for Bin Laden (remember his stated strategy was to have the West break itself - its economy, its social and political hold on the East - in wars it cannot fight forever and cannot win). Or maybe Iran - we'll have to see how it plays out. Yeah - how did that happen? Do you have any idea? Do you remember way, way, way back to like fifteen years ago with the WMDs, twelve years ago with Bremer's triumph, ten years ago with all those tens of thousands of trained Iraqi soldiers fighting for democracy, maybe even eight years ago when the "Surge" put those guys on the payroll for a few months? Or did this latest horror just rise up out of nowhere into your view, completely unconnected with Abu Ghraib, completely unconnected with Adnan Chalabi's free ride into Iraq or the installation of Al Maliki, completely unconnected with US policy toward the Kurds or the Saudis, just emerge from the sand like something in a Hollywood movie? On the grounds that becoming the monster you fight is a victory for monstrosity. On the clear and explicit grounds of the declarative sentences in that Bible you pretend is the basis of your morality. And the thread point is, that this refugee crisis in Europe is partly - perhaps largely - of US creation. And it seems bad form - at a minimum - to say anything disparaging about the French, who have been put in a bad position at least partly by US bad behavior.

If you pay attention to the post I was replying to, you will notice that I was referring to US behavior over the past 75 years. The claim was that for 75 years the US has always been on the side of democracy and against strongmen, mullahs, and dictators. I simply pointed out that any such claim was in error. The US has deposed dozens of democratic, reasonable, decent governments and replaced them with rightwing strongmen and dictators and even a couple of mullah types. The US did this a lot. That would include the fairly decent government we deposed in order to install Saddam Hussein, for example. And the fairly decent government we deposed to re-install the Shah of Iran, leading after decades of strongman rule with all the usual atrocities etc to the Iranian Revolution - which, since the decent folks had been harshly suppressed, turned out to be a fundie Islamic State headed by an Ayatollah. There is no reason to get the facts wrong, though. It's not Monday Morning quarterbacking to point out that in the past 75 years the US has deposed quite a few democratically elected and not at all horrible governments and installed rightwing strongmen and dictatorships in their place, that anyone trying to rewrite the plain history to say the US has for 75 years always been on the side of the decent democracy and against the strongmen or dictatorships is simply in error. Badly in error. Whatever the reasons, the US did these things, in physical fact. I do. Not only do you have no idea who was put in Gitmo (most of them were innocent of terrorism, and the ones who were terrorists were not chopping off heads - that was done by other people) or probably how they were treated (the same guy set up the interrogation protocols and other aspects of Abu Ghraib), but your notion that human concern is some kind of disposable courtesy we don't extend to our enemies is not sensible or right - and directly contrary to any actual Presbyterian upbringing you may have had. Fact: the first American head to be chopped off in Iraq came after the photos of Abu Ghraib were released - you remember the guy who was beaten to death in one of the "interrogation" cells? The photos of rape scenes? The accounts of threatening and torturing wives and children of suspected "terrorists"? Do you recall that Abu Ghraib was one of Saddam's ugly prisons? Israel keeps expanding its territory - is there some limit to how much water and land they are allowed to seize from their neighbors, and if there is how should we get them to respect it? They've accomplished that by fencing the Muslims who used to live all across the area into small apartheid regions, and abusing them.

The French intellectual Chamfort wrapped this up in one little line, defining the "fraternite" of the French Revolution: "Be my brother or I will kill you". It's not unique to theistic religion.