During School Siege, Russia Took Captives in Chechnya (kin of rebels)

[Ediacara]

During School Siege, Russia Took Captives in Chechnya
Soldiers entered homes of rebel leaders' relatives and seized 40 people, including children.

By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer

ZNAMENSKOYE, Russia — It was 6 a.m. when Russian soldiers hoisted themselves over the wall, crashed through the window and broke down the front door. Their quarries were still asleep.

Shouting, shoving and kicking, the soldiers pushed 67-year-old Khavazh Semiyev and his wife into a truck waiting outside, then went back for the others — his two sons and two nephews, his son's wife, his 52-year-old sister. Then — and Semiyev couldn't believe his eyes — they went back for his grandchildren: Mansur, 11 years old. Malkhazni, 9. And Mamed, 7.

They were driven in their nightclothes and socks through the empty early morning streets of Chechnya to the Russian army's command center at Khankala. There, the men were forced onto their knees with their heads on the ground. Sacks were pulled over their heads, and their hands were tied behind their backs. For the next 24 hours, anyone who moved from that position got kicked.

More at the Los Angeles Times

[aquart]

1. Well, that was certainly successful, wasn't it?

And after the school massacre, then what?

[RivetJoint]

2. I know I should say that was wrong

but, I can't bring myself to do so. If someone took my kids, and I could get at their's, you bet your ass I'd do so. Part of the evil of terrorism and war.

[atreides1]

5. Then You

Would be no better then those who committed this crime, would you?

This tactic of taking hostages was started by the Russians, and now it's coming back to bite them in the ass.

Rumor has it that there is a group of Chechnyen women who make up a terrorist group called the Black Widows. These are women who have had their family members killed by Russian troops, and have nothing.

So you see the Russians started it, and very few in the world did or said anything about it. Even the US looked the other way, just so we could get Russian support for our war on terror.

This was a criminal act, and if the world was black and white there would be no justification for it, but the world isn't black and white is it.

And it seems that reports are now coming out that the Russian security forces botched the operation.

What was done by both sides was wrong, period.

[RivetJoint]

7. You're right

I'd be no better. But if someone snatched my kids, and I could get at their's I would. No doubt in my mind. Most parents would do the same thing; it's a visceral human reaction.

[Aidoneus]

8. Those you're condemning apparently had the same thought

Does that interest you?

[RivetJoint]

9. What school children

were the Russians holding when the Chechins took that school? I'm not talking revenge here--actions taken after the fact to extract "justice." I'm talking "you have something of mine, I have something of your's...let's arrange a trade."

[Aidoneus]

12. Whoever they had picked up that week, or the week before

look up what the "cleansing operations"/"zachistki" have been, in the past years and this very year. It's a regular event and no Chechen is spared from the seizures, not the old or young, with a dick or without, or anybody in between.

At any rate, I'm not sure that it was Chechens that took the school. Some interesting reports suggest otherwise, and a clear and trustworthy account on the matter has yet to be decently resolved.

[RivetJoint]

14. You're missing my point

I was only speaking of a "swap" type operation. Nothing to do with revenge.

[Aidoneus]

18. No, I got your point

One of the first statements to come out had to do with Ossets & Ingushes that were kidnapped in "cleansing operations" in Ingush villages in general for months (like what'd been done to Chechens for years and years previously), and also specifically for people seized by the military & police apparatus with relation to the successful operation against Russia's Interior Ministry in Nazran back in June.

That was, fyi since it doesn't come up much in detail in the main press articles, a joint operation between primarily Ingush & Ossetian armed units, with some Chechen units providing support. For months, the state had been aggressively targetting the Ingush population as it had done to the Chechens. In response, hundreds of Ingushes had fled to southern Chechnya to seek protection under Basayev (this was a point that stopped me a couple times--fleeing to southern Chechnya for protection?!, but that's what happened), and training for a move against the regime. The result was the June operation where several hundred fighters crossed the border, won several pitched battles, took over the Interior Ministry itself, then left as easily as they had entered with a great deal of weaponry taken with them. The response to the aftermath of the battle was predictable: mass seizures of suspects or anybody at random, widespread prisoner abuse, etc.

This had, by the way, reinforced an early report I had read that the gunmen were primarily Ingushes & Ossets, with Russian army deserters and 2 Chechen 'Black Widows'. A nondescript early report of the general makeup was released by the Interior Ministry of the North Ossetia-Alania Republic, and several comperable suggestions made later. A few obviously false suggestions have been made since then, for example the makeup of the unit being half Arab & African--all speaking fluent Russian with a noticably Central Caucasian accept..

However, the state has learned too much from events before, and damn little if anything slipped out from inside, but that was clearly one of the initial remarks. So a swap was what they had in mind too, at least in theory.

[RivetJoint]

20. Not the same thing

[Aidoneus]

22. What then, was the point..

if not "take ours, we'll take yours"? That was what I thought to be the basic premise, except turned around so that by your logic you'd be the good guy in doing it. :shrug:
I have to be going now anyway. It is best to end on a point of mutual confusion. Until the evening, later than that, or never.. :toast:

[Aidoneus]

23. I take it back, one last post! (new statements on the makeup)

reposted from what I put in the other thread I'm speaking of this in, with more bits added to the end:
----------
The current "GUESS" as to who was what is as follows:
...Chechens, Ingush, Tatars, Kazakhs and Koreans among the attackers...

Yes, you read that right. Some Russian official is seriously suggesting all of that. I also read the Korean bit in a Korean newspaper. Fucked if I know what that's about, but there are a few Korean traders in the North Caucasus.
----------

"some official" being Deputy Prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky.

ex-Ingush President Aushev said that the people inside had refused to speak the Vainakh language to him. That is, Ingush & Chechen languages. They spoke Russian instead, which is spoken over all the Caucasus and Russia.

Putin's top negotiator said that he didn't recognize a Chechen or Ingush accent to the Russian spoken, according to Noviye Izvestia.

[shadu]

63. If they didn't speak Chechen and had no Chechen accent

they must be Chechens!
Did this attack follow the usual Chechen style?
I thought not.
Have the Chechens claimed this as their own?
I thought not.
What could Chechens gain from this?
Absolutely nothing the way I figure it.

[DoNotRefill]

39. The old Soviet Union actually had some sucess with that....

IIRC, they had an ambassador kidnapped in the ME, so the KGB took hostages of their own and supposedly mutilated one of them and sent "parts" and photos to the HQ of the organization that the kidnappers were part of. The ambassador was quickly released.

[XanaX]

29. The stench of "justification" in this place...

is overwhelming.

Truly sickening.

This is from today's NY Times:
Cult of Death
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 7, 2004


We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

[treepig]

35. of course, when mr. clinton murders 500,000 or so innocent children

that's A-OK! just ask ms. albright

In May 1996 Madeleine Albright, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, in reference to years of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq,

We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
To which Ambassador Albright responded,

I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0401b.asp

but of course since we're christians, and not those evil muslims, jesus has no doubt has a big grin!

[RummyTheDummy]

54. Nice numbers

Bloated. Outrageous. Completely baseless.

[Aidoneus]

55. low figures, actually

Also, an exact quote. Have seen that scene with my own eyes.

Not baseless, bloated, or outrageous, nor is it ok just because they have a "(D)" next to their names when committing these crimes.

[snowFLAKE]

57. Perhaps the numbers Are Bloated

At least that's the view of the right wing website (and I assume it's right wing based on their mission statement "The mission of The Future of Freedom Foundation is to advance freedom by providing an uncompromising moral and economic case for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government.") provided by TreePig, quoting them: "only" 227,000 to 350,000 children died.

Whew! That sure makes me feel Much Better!! Of course each and every one of These Children died a horrific, slow death from disease, and my Tax Dollars helped Make It Happen, but hey - there were only 227,000 of them - nothing to get Riled Up about.

[shadu]

62. that statement comes back to haunt her every time she speaks

at first she claimed she did not say it/could not recall having said it. What a statement to have to account for.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

30. No. Most parents would go after the PERPETRATORS

and leave their family alone. "Tribal Guilt" is one of the most pernicious concepts that can inhabit a person's mind.

[Surf Cowboy]

13. Whatever it is you're smoking, please roll me one...

WTF are you talking about?

The Russians didn't just go and take a bunch of Chechen hostages, forcing the Chechens to retaliate.

The Chechens started this, and they'll get what they deserve. I think the Russians should run them through for about 6 months and see how bad they want to fight afterwards. Fortunately for the Russians, they are not as squeamish about dealing with murderous terrorists.

If someone punches me in the eye, and I decide to defend myself by punching him in his, I'm no better than he is, simply because I defended myself?

Your thought process is refreshingly naive. And people wonder why the public doesn't believe that Dems will be tough on terror.

Get a grip. It's OK to kick someone's ass from time to time, and believe it or not, on occasion it can do some good. If the Chechens don't like it, they can give up the names and locations of the Rebels and their supporters. Otherwise, tough shit. You can't have assholes taking kids hostage.

[nodehopper]

27. The Russians have committed atrocities in Chechnya for years

This is what creates the kind of atrocious terrorist behavior in Chechens. Obviously the terrorists who took that school were murderous animals, but don't go around saying Russia didn't start it. Most of those people have had their entire families, including children killed by Russian forces. You should read up on the history of the conflict. Chechnya wanted independence, Russia is keeping them with military might, because they have oil. Sounds familiar?

[Swede]

44. The Russians have to stop the muslim terrorism before it spreads.

North Ossetia,Ingushia,Georgia, where will it end?

[nodehopper]

48. One way of stopping it would be stopping their

colonization of independent territories.

[makhno]

50. No, it doesn't sound familiar

Were the Iraqis killing, kidnapping and displacing Americans in Baghdad or Najaf before the war?

Take your own advice and read up on the history of the conflict. The parallels you're trying to draw have no basis in fact.

[Surf Cowboy]

58. Umm, no. It doesn't sound familiar.

Iraq was not a part of the United States for 50 years. Chechnya was a part of the USSR for quite some time, and I think there would be a greater similarity drawn between the U.S. trying to keep Alaska in the union because of their oil.

Russia didn't lie to its citizens about Chechnya, and most Russians believe Chechnya is part of Russia and should remain so. Not familiar to America.

Not quite the parallel I think you were striving for.

[SOS]

59. The Chechen/Russian conflict

didn't start last week. The Tsars forcibly annexed these areas into the Russian Empire in the 19th Century. In 1944 Stalin deported Chechens, by the hundreds of thousands, to Siberia.
Many thousands of men, women and children died under brutal conditions.
To say "the Chechens started this" is historically inaccurate.
You suggest that Russia "run them through" for six months.
They've been doing that since 1994, although this war has never been of interest to our junta media.
They have already burned Grozny to the ground:

There's nothing left here to "run through".
And no, this is not a justification for the slaughter at the school. Both sides are guilty of plenty.
It is interesting to note that the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, used as a pretext for attacking Chechnya for the second time, may have been the work of FSB:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/03/05/russia.blasts/

[makhno]

49. Can you please elaborate

I'd like you to support the following assertion:

This tactic of taking hostages was started by the Russians

Can you please provide a source or two that explains how that came to be? My impression has been that kidnapping was something of a national industry in Chechnya.

Even the US looked the other way, just so we could get Russian support for our war on terror.

You know, of course, that the war in Chechnya has been going on since 1994, with troubles starting as early as 1991. Back then, the War on Terror was but a gleam in the neocons' eye.

[DrWeird]

41. So you're defending the Chechans?

After all. Russians killed their kids.

[atreides1]

3. I Will Bet

That this doesn't show up on CNN.

[Ediacara]

4. It's headline #2 on the LA Times' homepage

So maybe CNN will pay attention...

[Aidoneus]

6. nothing new, of note

They've been seizing the old and the young for years. One event that comes to mind saw a group of old men shaken down for money; when they didn't have bribes, some of them were shot.

These "cleansing operations" (literal translation of the term zachistki) take place regularly, I'm surprised the LA Times noticed them finally. The concentration camp & detention center at Khankala is one of the most feared locations in the world, rather like Khiam was for the Zionist occupation of south Lebanon except far worse than even that horror. Tens of thousands of people have passed through there, and many don't ever come out.

[coalition_unwilling]

10. According to various human rights organizations

Over the past decade, 44 out of every 1,000 Chechens (including a lot of Chechenwomen and children) have either been killed or 'disappeared' by Russian Security Services and Russian military. That's 4.4%, or about 8 million Americans by comparison.

When you reduce a subject people to desperation, as the Russians have done to the Chechens (and Muslims in the Caucasus in general), the occupied will resist by "any means necessary", including taking your children hostage.

[Aidoneus]

11. that actually was just the last year

the figures from before, that is, during the periods of the immediate invasions, are much higher--more like 20%.

[Name removed]

15. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[coalition_unwilling]

16. How about an immediate pull-out of Russian troops from Chechnya?

Putin in his meeting with international journalists yesterday refused even to consider starting talks to end the war in Chechnya.

In other words, Putin is willing to sacrifice the lives of Russian children rather than initiate peace talks? So who's the real terrorist\animal?

[RivetJoint]

17. Why pull troops out of your

own country? Chechnya is part of Russia.

[Aidoneus]

19. for starters,

it's not "their own country" any more than Iraq is American property. Sure, they'd like it to be, but the people who live there have other designs and some means to act on those wacky ideas. Never has any legitimate representative of the Chechen nation submitted to the Russian state. In fact, every properly representative government of the last half millenia has done exactly the opposite.

[RivetJoint]

21. Cechnya is recognized

as part of Russia by all international standards. Nice try.

[coalition_unwilling]

26. If Chechnya is part of Russia . . .

Then Putin has been declaring war on his own people, at the very least, and not on "international terrorists" as he and his coterie have been trying to spin it.

Again, acc. to international human rights organizations, 44 out of every 1,000 civilian Chechens have been either killed or 'disappeared' by Russian Security Services and\or Military over the past decade. (That's a conservative estimate; another poster on this thread says the real % goes as high as 200 out of every 1,000 Chechens.)

[RivetJoint]

31. It is part of Russia

that doesn't mean his own people can't be terrorists.

Tim Mcveigh...

[coalition_unwilling]

32. Spare me the "terrorist" mumbo-jumbo

As Reuters pointed out shortly after 9/11, it refused to use "terrorist" for the simple reason that one person's "terrorist" is another person's "freedom fighter".

Unless you're an unabashed statist??? (That is, the state by its very nature is incapable of terrorism.)

[RivetJoint]

33. Reuter's is wrong

Freedom fighters don't take childern hostage nor murder them; terrorists do

[coalition_unwilling]

34. Do you have any estimate of how many Chechen children

have been killed by Russian military and security services over the past decade?

All your Manicheanism, however, goes for nought; when an oppressed people becomes desperate enough, they will resort to the worst sort of tactics (taking children hostage).

Calling oppressed people who resist their oppressors "terrorists" doesn't really do much to solve any problem. Ronald Reagan called Nelson Mandela and the ANC terrorsists back when he was Prez. Meanwhile (or maybe even before that), Reagan had destroyers off the coast of Lebanon firing high explosive shells into civilian residential areas of Beirut.

My point is that states find it very convenient to call groups "terrorist" as it relieves them of the burden of having to consider those groups' grievances.

[RivetJoint]

36. The fact remains

Terrorists target innocents; "freedom fighters" don't.

[coalition_unwilling]

38. Would you agree then that Reagan

was a "terrorist," since he had destroyers off the coast of Beirut firing high explosive shells into residential areas, under the pretext of attacking "terrorist." Or are you going to stand on the distinction between targeting children and hitting them by accident?

[RivetJoint]

40. Yes, I am going to stand on that

distinction. You don't see a difference?

[coalition_unwilling]

43. I see a difference, I suppose, but

when the end result is dead children, whether it happens deliberately or "by accident" seems to render the distinction meaningless.

Dead children are dead children and whether they died by being deliberately targeted by resistance groups or by being accidentally hit by a military behemoth certainly makes no difference to them (being dead) and precious little to their parents, I would hazard.

The point I was trying to make (I think) is that all the moaning and groaning over the dead children of Bezlan neatly elides any grief for all the dead children of Chechnya who are no less dead for being killed by Russian Security Services than for being targets of "terrorists." This is what Manichean struggles of "good vs. evil-doers\terrorists" ultimately reduce to, imo. Lots of dead civilians.

I wish someone other than us two were chiming in on this, as I have this feeling we're talking past one another.

[snowFLAKE]

42. Care to Elaborate

On just how the Death of Children that results from firing High Explosives into a residential area can be considered "by accident?"

:freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak:

On edit:

Here's a Few More "accidental" deaths for Your Consideration:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1212-01.htm

[coalition_unwilling]

45. Point well taken, but I think you may have mis-construed my position

Altho I probably should have put "by accident" in quotation marks. The person shooting into Beirut probably did not "intend" to kill children, but that was the result of his\her actions since high explosives never have successfully distinguished between a terrorist and a child.

[snowFLAKE]

46. Well OK

But it remains baffling to me how a residential area can be Cluster Bombed (or whatever) and then the Perpetrators can claim to be "Shocked, Shocked I tell you" that Children Died.

Sure, in the case of Beirut the Perpetrator was Reagan - maybe he's that stupid, I'll buy that. But in other cases, the perpetrators are much more nefarious.

Consider the Bush I/Clinton sanctions against Iraq:

"Since the program began, an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died as a result of the sanctions?almost three times as many as the number of Japanese killed during the U.S. atomic bomb attacks."

http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html?pg=1

According to Madeline Albright these deaths were regrettable but "worth the cost" - in fact they were the deliberate intention of the United States

"U.S. intelligence assessments took the same view. A Defense Department evaluation noted that ?Degraded medical conditions in Iraq are primarily attributable to the breakdown of public services (water purification and distribution, preventive medicine, water disposal, health-care services, electricity, and transportation). . . . Hospital care is degraded by lack of running water and electricity.?

According to Pentagon officials, that was the intention. In a June 23, 1991, Washington Post article, Pentagon officials stated that Iraq's electrical grid had been targeted by bombing strikes in order to undermine the civilian economy. ?People say, 'You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage,'? said one planning officer at the Pentagon. ?Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions-help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.?"

also from http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html?pg=1

Come on - these deaths are neither Accidental nor are they Unintentional as you claim. They are a deliberate policy of ours. But it's nice, nevertheless, to sit around and post how Evil the Muslim and Chechan Terrorists are and How Pure we are.

[coalition_unwilling]

47. Yes, I'm with you 100% (I think)

A dead child is a dead child, and it matters little to me how that child died. The point I've been trying to make in all my previous posts (apparently not so successfully) is that calling the perpetrators "terrorists" allows the state(s) not to have to negotiate for redress of grievances.

The context for Bezlan is that (depending on which human rights organization you consult) between 44 and 200 of every 1,000 Chechens have been killed or "disappeared" by the Russian military or Security Services in the past decade. No one has called what Russia is doing in Chechnya "terrorism." But when those who have suffered under Russian brutality resist, suddenly their tactics, which have the exact same outcome as Russian tactics, are labelled 'terrorists'.

It's like once you've labelled someone or some group a "terrorist", that person ceases to be human and instead becomes 'The Other', non-human and demonic. All discourse stops when the word is deployed. So I don't really feel the word has much usefulness, other than to play on people's fears.

[makhno]

52. That's a good one

No one has called what Russia is doing in Chechnya "terrorism."

Russian extra-judicial killings in Chechnya are well documented in both mainstream and dissident literature, in Russia as well as in the West. Russian actions have - often correctly - been described as "state terrorism." Just because you haven't kept up doesn't mean no one is writing about what's going on in the region.

It's like once you've labelled someone or some group a "terrorist", that person ceases to be human and instead becomes 'The Other', non-human and demonic.

Yawn. Please don't bring your identity politics strawman into this discussion.

As an aside, I find it highly amusing how a poster's reference to a 20% civilian casualty rate in Chechnya quickly becomes a "human rights organization" statistic in the echo chamber of amorality.

[snowFLAKE]

56. Then I assume you'd also agree that our actions in Iraq,

Afghanistan, and many other places, are State Terrorism, too?

And, they tend to Irk Me just a tad more, considering that I'm complicit albeit Quite Unwillingly.

[makhno]

53. that actually was a lie

Human Rights Watch cites 200 disappeared between 1999 and 2002; 800 are listed as missing, although these might well include fighters who left to wage jihad against the Russians.

As far as civilian casualties go, I've seen numbers between 40 and 100 thousand for each of the two wars. Given the historically reliable method of cutting in the middle, we can assume casualties to be on the order of 140 thousand over ten years. It's tragic, but it does not 20% make.

[makhno]

51. Any means necessary, eh?

So you're advocating murdering children? Words fail me.

[coalition_unwilling]

64. Words fail you because you are setting up a straw man

Describing the tactics and strategies of resistance movements is a far cry from "advocating murdering children".

If I had written that one abolitionist tactic was to seize Federal Armories, would you then accuse me of advocating seizing Federal Armories (as John Brown did at Harper's Ferry)?

[Cravat]

24. Too graphic.

The discussion of terrorism is a dirty matter. Some of the actions taken on both sides of this conflict are too grapic for discussion on a public forum. That being said, I think there is a world of difference in taking a few relatives in for questioning( remember, they don't have our Bill of Rights) and mass murder of children.

[NickB79]

28. Right, it was just for questioning

Just like how the US "questioned" thousands of prisoners in Iraq with broom handles in the ass and severe beatings. I have no trust in the Russian military humanely questioning anyone, especially Chechnyans.

[Cravat]

60. Facts not fiction.

It is tripe like this that makes this board unreliable. I must wade through mounds of garbage to find the facts. This means that I cannot quote DU when having a rational discussion on another board. Don't exaggerate, use facts, and bring the tech.

The logistics of "thousands" of broom handles up asses is impossible. And "thousands" of beatings will just wear a poor interrogator out. Can you imagine the morning staff meeting? "You, Capt. Smith. You will get you platoon together, go down to supply, get some brooms, have them cut to proper length, and go insert them in the prisoners asses."? It just didn't happen.

Having served in one of the more extreme units in the Corps, I do know some guys who would ass rape some one for fun. But these acts were not organized and are not effective. And there were not "thousands."

Get your numbers straight.

[snowFLAKE]

61. I suspect that the Real Reason

That you cannot quote DU when having a rational discussion (ha ha) on another board is that it'd promptly get you banned from your favorite site.

[Democat]

25. While Bush snuck Bin Laden's relatives out of the U.S. after 9/11

:(

[wolfgirl]

37. On a personal level I absolutely

would want to lash out at those that were hurting my family. But if I was the leader of a nation, that responsibility would overshadow my own personal inclination.

It is a horrible situation and I make no excuses for the rebels (terrorists) but I believe the Russians seizing these families was wrong and will only compound the problem.