In a message dated 6/27/2005 2:42:25 AM Mountain Standard Time, qtopic+15-cysSFgyrHZf@quicktopic.com writes:

1. Part of the problem is that many of the people in Gitmno and Abu Ghraib were not captured at the scene of the crime
-- most were. And several who persuaded the interrogators that they were innocent and were accordingly released...
 
...were later caught fighting us again, after boasting of how they fooled the credulous, sentimental infidels.
 
Better safe than sorry. As I said, it's a war -- and in war, innocents suffer. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
 
During WWII, the father of a friend of mine was in a Canadian armored-car unit in Belgium. They conducted "reconaissance by fire".
 
When I was a kid listening to his war stories, I asked him what this meant. He replied that it meant shooting up farmhouses with a .50 calibre Browning -- whose bullets will go through an ordinary house wall as if it were paper.
If there were Germans in the building, they shot back. If it was Belgian farmers, they just died.
 
As to prisoners, in the unit of a guy I met (2nd Infantry, fought from Normandy to Bohemia) they had two sets of orders for them.
 
One was for when they had time and people to spare, and it was "take them back to the trucks", which meant exactly what it said.
 
If they didn't, it was "take them down to the end of the road", which had an unspoken codicil: "And shoot them".
 
Which he did -- he was the squad BAR gunner, and had an automatic weapon, so he got the unpleasant job of finishing them off.
 
Putting a gun to the head of a prisoner in the field and telling him to talk or die was also fairly common.
 
>The humane treatment of prisoners is a necessity because of those innocents
at least.
 
-- no, it isn't. As I said, innocents die in war. If you're not prepared to kill innocents, you can't fight at all.
 
>2. You don't get to be "the side of good" just by saying so.
 
-- actually, all you have to do is look at the other side. Ba'athists (fascists), al-Qaeda... have you ever _listened_ to these people? The 'fierce war' against the 'evil concept of democracy'?
 
>"Good" is what you do. "Good" is treating prisoners decently.
 
-- see above. We shot and tortured prisoners in WWII, and we burned whole cities full of innocent civilians to the ground.
 
The transport-net bombing of France just before D-day killed tens of thousands of French civilians, who weren't even enemy nationals.
 
War is hell. Hadn't you been told?