General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Everyone hates ISIS....So what do you want to do about it ? [View all]JonLP24
(29,322 posts)President Karzai, Bashar al-Assad... this list goes on and on when it comes to human rights violators.
I'd stop with the (speaking from US foreign policy POV) hypocrisy, stop giving money to financiers of the Wahabbi global terrorist organization. All these bombs, CIA installing Al-Maliki as Prime Minister (and that's just Iraq), and Al-Assad himself for Syria is why they're there.
I disagree why Obama continues to use "tensions" to block torture photos & other crimes committed by the US government but he is right they certainly will use it for propaganda for recruiting (my position is NOT to do these things in the first place)
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After the 9/11 attacks, the United States quickly declared a "war on terror." In the conduct of that war, the United States invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, imprisoned hundreds of captured "enemy combatants" without trial, tortured suspected terrorists, drastically ratcheted up homeland security, conducted drone strikes and/or targeted assassinations in several countries, and conducted a vast campaign of electronic surveillance at home and abroad.
Virtually all these actions were designed to detect or eliminate actual terrorists or prevent them from carrying out deliberate attacks. In other words, whether offensive or defensive in nature, they were actions designed to win the war by thwarting or eliminating existing terrorist organizations.
But what about the parallel problem of terrorist recruitment? The other way to defeat terrorism is to make it harder for movements employing terrorist methods to recruit new followers, and to gradually marginalize the radicals within the societies in which they were trying to grow. There was a lot of talk about trying to do this immediately after 9/11: The State Department commissioned a task force report on public diplomacy toward the Arab/Islamic world, George W. Bushs administration hired a series of public diplomacy czarinas, and various experts offered advice on how the United States could undercut Osama bin Ladens message and rebuild the countrys dubious image in that part of the world. This goal also underlay Barack Obamas initial outreach to the region and especially his infamous Cairo speech in June 2009.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/26/our-one-sided-war-on-terror/
Austin, Texas The Islamic State terrorists who have emerged in Iraq and Syria are neither new nor unfamiliar. Many of them spent years in detention centers run by the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq after 2003. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, spent nearly five years imprisoned at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. A majority of the other top Islamic State leaders were also former prisoners, including: Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, Abu Louay, Abu Kassem, Abu Jurnas, Abu Shema and Abu Suja.
Before their detention, Mr. al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America. Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. At Camp Bucca, for example, the most radical figures were held alongside less threatening individuals, some of whom were not guilty of any violent crime. Coalition prisons became recruitment centers and training grounds for the terrorists the United States is now fighting.
This process began when coalition forces arrived in Iraq in 2003 and detained alleged terrorists with little preparation or oversight. Although soldiers tried to document the circumstances behind the detentions of Iraqis and foreign fighters, the process broke down under the pressure of fighting, the shortage of trained Arabic speakers, and the fog of war.
Simply being a suspicious looking military-aged male in the vicinity of an attack was enough to land one behind bars. There were 26,000 detainees at the height of the war, and over 100,000 individuals passed through the gates of Camps Bucca, Cropper and Taji. Quite a few were dangerous insurgents; many others were innocent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/opinion/how-america-helped-isis.html