Mike Miller's RESPONSE TO STATEMENTS BY RUSSIAN SENATOR MIKHAIL MARGELOV on FIGHTING TERRORISM

This is a credible and not uncommon opinion voiced by Russian Senator Mikhail Margelov regarding the recent Bush acknowledgement that the United States does indeed possess secret prisons on the soil of countries that will tolerate such gulags. Mr. Margolov mentions that suspected terrorists were compelled to confess by pouring cold water on them while they were in giant refrigerators. I would like to remind Mr. Margelov that an entire catalog of tortures were used against suspected terrorists, to include waterboarding, drugging, and a variety of non-lethal and non-scarring corporal punishment regimens, to also include extreme sleep depravation, and psychological torture using threats of attack by dogs and threats of death. (Probably these tortures were used with one another, and not just one at a time) In fact, the extremely cruel, unusual and barbaric nature of the methods presently being used against POWs/kidnap victims/detainees are so severe that the U.S. government needs to perpetrate these crimes off of American soil. I would not be so critical of these practices except that it is likely many innocent and falsely denounced persons were given these barbaric tortures. I have no sympathy or empathy for a "true terrorist".

However we should all remember, that occupying armies through the ages have also faced the problem of opposing/partisan forces, and historically some of the partisans/citizens that were denounced, were denounced because of personal problems with their neighbors or enemies in the community, not merely because of their actual and legitimate partisan/resistance actions.

One of the problems in this "war on terror" that is being waged today is that when the United States began the criminal action of attacking Iraq, we put our own soldiers in a position where they are viewed as "targets" to be resisted by a "partisan movement" . There is no fine line between partisan actions and terrorism. Partisan actions are attacks against any invading army by the indigenous people to dislodge the same invading army.

Terrorism can be defined by a violent attack against a non military civilian presence, to scare or coerce them into acting differently, or voting differently, or otherwise changing their collective methods or policies.

Clearly, the deaths of unarmed Iraqi citizens "en masse" in Iraq are terrorist attacks, but also clearly, there is a mixture of terrorist and partisan attacks happening in Iraq today. This is a sad but predictable feature of sending a professional army to perpetrate a giant war crime. The professional, and essentially good hearted common enlisted American soldier, bears the brunt of partisan style attacks, attacks that have always been understood globally, and historically, as a reasonable and prudent thing for an indigenous population to do, which is, REPEL INVADERS. For example, George Bush doesn't dispute the right of the French underground to resist the Germans, or the right of Philippines partisans to repel the Japanese. When U.S. soldiers are attacked in Iraq, they are not victims of terrorism; they were attacked by a partisan force. It is currently arguable, that because there is a puppet regime/US approved government in place in Iraq today, that the U.S. military is not in Iraq against the will of the Iraqi people, and therefore, attacks against them, are not partisan attacks, but terrorist attacks.

There is clearly a giant section of Iraqi people who view U.S. forces as invaders to be repelled. I passionately agree with attacking the Taliban government of Afghanistan, because they were actively assisting Osama bin Laden after his 9/11 attack in New York, but I disagree with the torture of Afghan citizens suspected of terrorism for the reasons I have already stated. It is also only a matter of time before the U.S. policy of kidnapping and torturing suspected "terrorists" becomes the "de rigeur" practice for suppressing any political and social decent from U.S. citizens who are clearly non-violent altogether. The mistreatment of POWs and suspected "terrorists" will not only motivate victims of these measures and their families to sympathize with forces unfriendly to America, these same brutal practices will very likely provide future enemy countries some erroneous validation for similar mistreatment of U.S. servicepersons that become POWs themselves.

What kind of credibility does the US state department enjoy when complaining about mistreatment of US citizens?