[Vision2020] Reading

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

All:

There is psychological projection in this kind of thinking about the US War 
On Terror.  The extreme irony is that the US is justifying killing of innocent 
civilians by the thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of torture in 
interrogations, unending imprisonment without access to courts, etc., as "human 
rights activities justified and acceptable," while we wage our war against 
terrorists.  We are doing the very activities we condemn "terrorists" for 
promoting.  And of course it will immediately be asserted that the difference between 
the US abuses against and killing of innocent civilians, and the terrorist's 
killing of innocents, is that the terrorists target civilians deliberately, 
while the US sponsored war activities that result in the death or abuse of 
civilians are "collateral" or "accidental."  

But in fact, because we have removed many of the human rights protections 
that the Geneva convention and other international agreements outline, we are 
killing or abusing innocents with more deliberate intentionality, and with more 
horrific methods, than is usually portrayed by US propaganda.  You can't engage 
in the military actions, the broad roundups and imprisonment of civilians to 
catch "insurgents," conducted in Iraq, without sufficient human rights 
protections, and not know that you are hurting a lot of innocent people.  Many Iraqis 
imprisoned and abused at Abu Ghraib were innocent civilians.

Another example of US human rights abuses is the US use of napalm against 
human beings, banned by international agreement, in the prosecution of the war in 
Iraq.  We hardly hear any comment about this in the media, but it is well 
documented we have used napalm against human beings in the invasion, and perhaps 
even during the recent siege of Fallujah.  If you think burning someone to 
death using a weapon that is so horrible it has been banned, is not a human 
rights violation, then discussions of "human rights" have broken down pitiably.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4395.htm

http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14920109&method=full&
siteid=106694&headline=fallujah-napalmed-name_page.html

Ted Moffett   
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