America's Debate, a discussion forum asked three 
questions about Guantanamo Bay
after the first publicly reports of
harassment from ex-prisoners
at Guantanamo Bay in 2004: 
"Do you believe the accusations of 
those released?

And do you believe the detention of these 640 
people, in the manner being used, is justified?

Finally what do you think about Colin Powells 
comments, do Americans traditionally treat people 
in a acceptable manner? "


MIM answered: 
http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/index.php?sho
wtopic=5700&st=30&#entry91987 March 17, 2004:

mim3 for the Maoist Internationalist Movement:

If Uncle $am did not have anything to hide, those 
prisoners would not be down there but handled by 
the usual Geneva Conventions. So of course I 
believe the reports of torture.

Some of us have an overly inflated view of 
Amerikans, but it's been known for sometime that 
Amerikans will do terrible things. Check Stanley 
Milgram's study that showed 65% of Amerikans would 
shock someone to death just when asked to, a 
famous psychology study: 
http://www.stanleymilgram.com/milgram.html

Also relevant would be Phil Zimbardo's Stanford 
Prison Study where participants merely pretended 
to be prisoners and still got guards to abuse 
them:

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/relaged/...8pris
onexp.html

All this is a way of saying Amerikans have a lot 
of authority/violence "issues" and their 
motivations are not pure as snow, quite the 
opposite. Their motivations have been ruined by a 
heirarchy of wealth and power with selective 
rewards like oil. 

[Why the above turned out true despite numerous 
denials: 1) Less than two months later, most 
famously, the world learned of U.$. torture and 
killing at Abu Ghraib. 2) 
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/15/halabi.investiga
tor.reut/ 3) Afghan torture stories also started 
to break in the mainstream media.

Numerous people said "Americans" "would not do 
that," but as they were saying it, the Abu Ghraib 
scandal was already a few weeks underway, unknown 
to the Amerikan public which only learned of it 
months after it began, thanks to the gutlessness 
of the Amerikan media that sat on the story until 
May, 2004 as requested by the Pentagon.]