Protest in Afghanistan after Quran burning

[nikhil25]

Re: Protest in Afghanistan after Quran burning

@Med911

Perhaps. But in so far as there criticism of US policy on detainees is concerned, they are right, and that should be acknowledged. Whatever views they hold otherwise, and whatever their motivation, it is irrelevant in light of factual evidence.

again, i agree. it’s just amusing to see muslims who otherwise support murdering cartoonists and apostates suddenly become more liberal than dennis kucinich when it comes to civil liberties in the US. conservative muslims and the ACLU make bizarre bedfellows - but at least the ACLU is consistent and principled.

And regardless of what standards we hold, at the end of the day, we are all human. There is a fine line here, but if the US can fall to the level of the most barbaric of regimes, then the line becomes more and more irrelevant. So while dictatorial regimes commit crimes with impunity, the US cloaks similar crimes in veil of democracy.

as US citizens we should oppose any deviation from ultra high standards of conduct but assigning false equivalence erodes credibility. even a grave deviation from those standards is rarely anything close to the level of “the most barbaric of regimes”. if you take the most high profile US wartime transgressions (guantanamo, abu ghraib, the mahmudiya killings, burnt korans, peeing on taliban soldiers, etc.) and try to assign a counterpart transgression by even normal armies in that part of the world (forget about “the most barbaric of regimes”)…the counterpart to each of these would be orders of magnitude worse and more heinous.

i certainly didn’t say we should ignore or accept american transgressions or crimes. my limited point was that we should keep things in perspective and not draw false equivalence between entities at opposite ends of the human rights spectrum. as bad as guantanamo might be, i would rather spend a year as an enemy combatant at guantanamo than a single day as an enemy combatant in ISI custody or at the Papa II interrogation facility in kashmir in the 1990s.

We should be careful who we label a Barbarian. Your black and white portrayal of the “other” is more reminiscent of conservative ideology then liberal/progressive. While I am loathe to say anything good of the Taliban, many innocents who have been kidnapped by them have returned unharmed. Many innocents (due to lack of any evidence) detained by the US were tortured and or killed.

in this context, “barbarian” refers to a point on the human rights spectrum. again you are wading into false equivalance. this is not a point of debate. if one party’s torture is sleep deprivation and waterboarding…and the other party’s torture is drilling kneecaps and cutting off fingers, they are not equally barbaric. if one party’s detention yields a few accidental deaths…and the other party’s detention yields large scale extrajudicial execution, they are not equally barbaric. you get the point.