Comments on: Candace Gorman

By: elethiomel

elethiomel — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:14:01 +0000

Are you seriously trying to make a statement that because the US forces in Europe at the end of WWII, after helping to defeat the Nazi machine, treated captured enemy soldiers harshly (details about which are still very much open for debate), this somehow equates to the treatment of civilians and POW’s by both the Soviet and Nazi forces during the same conflict? Not only this, but are you also then stating that you believe the US forces are worse than both of these?
Your memory is pretty short and very selective.
It is difficult to see how the opinion of someone from a country whose population almost universally colluded with the Nazi regime actually matters to anyone but himself. Just because there is cause to be angered at the way US forces are being used, you cannot brush aside History and replace it with your fanciful ideas theat German forces in WWII were somehow victims.

By: Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:34:32 +0000

Are you kidding me, Ms. Marycatherine Barton? Guantanamo Bay is a lot like a luxury resort, a five-star hotel – THE BEST. To me, it sounds like it would make a hot vacation spot, a great tourist destination, and a great place to get a little R & R. We should all be VERY GRATEFUL to our loving government that it would go out of its way to spend our money on such beautiful facilities that we can all visit one day, if we are ever that forunate enough.

By: Marycatherine Barton

Marycatherine Barton — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:52:31 +0000

Attorney Gorman is wonderful. Guantanomo must be shut down, and torture ceased. Based on all the horrifying evidence touched on by commentators and elsewhere, I hope that in the future anti-war interviewers are very careful not to generalize when comparing the way the USA government treated its foreign captives in the past to how the federalists are treating them now.

By: Walter

Walter — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:59:07 +0000

It’s not nazi nonsense. My uncle was captured by the Americans and along with 10,000 others was placed in a field with barb wire around it. When the Americans handed the POW’s(DEF’s; how convenient)over to the French, the Americans deliberately burned the red cross supplies which were meant for the German POW’s. Many were deliberately starved to death, some were so weak that they could not stand up after visiting the latrine and just fell back into the um stuff. etc.
The Americans are the biggest war criminals the world has ever seen.

By: cowbot

cowbot — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:42:24 +0000

The subject of the treatment of German POWs after WWII is relevant. It shows there is nothing new in BushCheneyCo’s renaming human beings to ‘enemy combatants’ to deny them legal due process and Geneva convention protections.

When WWII ended, Patton simply turned enemy soldiers loose to fend for themselves and find their way home. By contrast Eisenhower – a man who enjoyed a mysterious ‘fast track’ career up the military ranks and – did the opposite.

Like calling a ‘pen’ a ‘doowhackey’, Eisenhower claimed that the captured German soldiers were Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEFs) and not entitled to Geneva convention protections. He rounded up a a huge number (millions) of them in open-air camps, with no shelter, sanitation or medical care.

Then, on his orders, they were starved to death.

How many died has never been accurately determined. The German government – prostate to this day – has remained silent on this issue and never investagted. Published estimates on German POW soldiers to have died in French, British and American (not Soviet) captivity range from 500,000 to 1.7 million.

To this day, it remains one of the most under-researched and underreported of the many atrocities of World War II.

By: Oebe NL

Oebe NL — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:29:26 +0000

Strong Godwin vibes, but inappropriate again.

The actual comment is totally blown out of proportion and Tonbridge has managed not to grab the essence of it. It is neither “nazi nonsense” that didn’t really happen, nor is hyperbole the way forward and the actual numbers too are part of the historical debate. http://hnn.us/articles/1266.html

But that history should have nothing to do with the intolerable lawlessness at Guantanamo, the show-trials that can’t stand the light of day, the prisoners who cannot go anywhere, the worldwide torture network etc. It should be clear to anyone that this practice eats away like a cancer at the very philosophical foundations of America and of the entire “Western world” for that matter. In the “war of ideas” (some like to talk about, everything must be a war apparently) this is the biggest defeat imaginable.

By: J4ck

J4ck — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:40:21 +0000

@Tonbridge
That’s nazi nonsense.
8,000 – 40,000 german soldiers died in these camps. That’s pretty ‘good’ for prison camps with supply problems. (+about a million deaths in russian camps)

By: Tonbridge

Tonbridge — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:25:56 +0000

20:30 minutes in Scott Horton asks “this is not how the Americans treated actual Nazis when they were prisoners of war”. I don’t know how naive the Americans are but Dwight Eisenhower killed 1.7 million German soldiers in real death camps. They were starved to death and any American soldier caught feeding them was shot. You can watch it on Youtube simply by typing in Eisenhower death camps and see footage of American soldiers starving Germans deliberately to death.

What’s happening in Gitmo is mild compared to how Americans normally behave and leads me wonder what is actually happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.