Moonbat alert: Chomksy condemns Bin Laden kill.

Virus said:
Freedomhouses's index after the overthrow of Saddam (1 is best, 7 is worst):

Political Rights Score: 5
Civil Liberties Score: 6
Status: Not Free

Freedomhouses's index under Saddam:

Political Rights Score: 7
Civil Liberties Score: 7
Status: Not Free

Therefore by objective standards, Iraq is better off without Saddam.
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What's more important is that now they have a chance to improve, they now have the tools to make it better for themselves, whilst before only one gang of thugs had all the tools for themselves.
 
but Wildcat, the left (and the lolbertarians) believe that Ron Paul's foreign policy (tm) will bring about world peace (tm).
 
Shrek said:
A part from the single My Lai massacre, can you tell me if and how many US generals, commanders and soldiers where put on trial for the repeated human rights violations (=deliberated killings) done by American troops?
Can you provide me evidence?

From the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam War
(wikipedia)

The Tribunal stated that its conclusions were:

1. Has the Government of the United States committed acts of aggression against Vietnam under the terms of international law?
Yes (unanimously).
2. Has there been, and if so, on what scale, bombardment of purely civilian targets, for example, hospitals, schools, medical establishments, dams, etc?
Yes (unanimously).

We find the government and armed forces of the United States are guilty of the deliberate, systematic and large-scale bombardment of civilian targets, including civilian populations, dwellings, villages, dams, dikes, medical establishments, leper colonies, schools, churches, pagodas, historical and cultural monuments. We also find unanimously, with one abstention, that the government of the United States of America is guilty of repeated violations of the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of Cambodia, that it is guilty of attacks against the civilian population of a certain number of Cambodian towns and villages.

3. Have the governments of Australia, New Zealand and South Korea been accomplices of the United States in the aggression against Vietnam in violation of international law?
Yes (unanimously).

The question also arises as to whether or not the governments of Thailand and other countries have become accomplices to acts of aggression or other crimes against Vietnam and its populations. We have not been able to study this question during the present session. We intend to examine at the next session legal aspects of the problem and to seek proofs of any incriminating facts.

4. Is the Government of Thailand guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam?
Yes (unanimously).
5. Is the Government of the Philippines guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam?
Yes (unanimously).
6. Is the Government of Japan guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam?
Yes, (by 8 Votes to 3).

The three Tribunal members who voted against agree that the Japanese Government gives considerable aid to the Government of the United States, but do not agree on its complicity in the crime of aggression.

7. Has the United States Government committed aggression against the people of Laos, according to the definition provided by international law?
Yes (unanimously).
8. Have the armed forces of the United States used or experimented with weapons prohibited by the laws of war?
Yes (unanimously).
9. Have prisoners of war captured by the armed forces of the United States been subjected to treatment prohibited by the laws of war?
Yes (unanimously).
10. Have the armed forces of the United States subjected the civilian population to inhuman treatment prohibited by international law?
Yes (unanimously).
11. Is the United States Government guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam?
Yes (unanimously).

Prompted in part by the My Lai massacre, in 1969 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation organized Citizens Commissions of Inquiry (CCI) to hold hearings intended to document testimony of war crimes in Indochina. These hearings were held in several American cities, and would eventually form the foundation of two national investigations: the National Veterans Inquiry sponsored by the CCI, and the Winter Soldier Investigation sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
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No biased jury here, also from Wiki:

"Representatives of 18 countries participated in the two sessions of this tribunal, formally calling itself the International War Crimes Tribunal. The tribunal committee consisted of 25 notable personages, predominantly from leftist peace organizations. Many of these individuals were winners of the Nobel Prize, Medals of Valor and awards of recognition in humanitarian and social fields. There was no direct representation of Vietnam or the United States on this 25 member panel, although a couple of members were American citizens.

Of considerable interest during the tribunal hearings was the North Vietnamese response to allegations of atrocity contained in the best-selling book Deliver Us From Evil. Published in 1956, this book presented the experience of U.S. Navy physician Thomas Anthony Dooley during Operation Passage to Freedom, in which approximately 90,000 Vietnamese Christians were relocated from North to South Vietnam. The small book contained many allegations of gross atrocity by the communists against these refugees. One of the more dramatic claims was that the communists drove nails into the heads of Vietnamese Catholic priests, to simulate a "crown of thorns".

More than 30 individuals testified or provided information to this tribunal. Among them were military personnel from the United States, as well as from each of the warring factions in Vietnam. Financing for the Tribunal came from many sources, including a large contribution from the North Vietnamese government after a request made by Russell to Ho Chi Minh.[2]"
 
Pardalis said:
With that line of reasoning, isn't the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians none of our business as well?

I'll let you suck on that one for a while.
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nothing there to 'suck on'
yes, it is none of our business.
however, since our government so blindly supports anything that israel does, and the u.s. does so to the tune of several billion dollars a year, the matter is unbalanced.
therefore, my distaste for israel's actions, and my empathy for the suffering of innocents, makes it my fight too.
 
Being out for a while and reading back all the talk so far..

I notice that the situation is very much polarized in two groups, one that I may call "Pro-US" or "Pro-Imperialism" that supports the foreign interventionism of the US and another group which we may call "Anti-US" or "Anti-Imperialism" which does not.

First group says that military intervention of the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan have liberated the first from the dictatorship of Saddam and that in Afghanistan many schools and hospitals have been built
Second group says that the "liberation" of Iraq cost some hundreds of thousands of deaths and that the political situation there is far from a democracy in Western terms, let alone the fact that the US wa one of the supporters of the Saddam regime during the Iran-Iraq war; they also point out that, ten years after the start of the invasion, the situation in Afghanistan has probably even deteriorated in many aspects (look here: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2011/s3244236.htm)

I believe that both groups have some point to be made, it is true that hospitals and schools have been built in Afghanistan and that it is a great thing that Saddam is gone, it is also true that democracy in Iraq hardly justifies the carnage that happened after the removal of Saddam and that in Afghanistan things are not reall going well for a big part of the population

But this is not the point.

Both groups have (coveniently?) quietly ignored the crux of the problem.
I will state it once again: war criminals are almost all the times war criminals of opponent nations, people do not rise and ask for war criminals to be brought to trial when war criminals are their own soldiers.
I have given the example of US troops crimes in Vietnam, such crimes are all well documented, since the 70s I guess, people in the US were free to to gather and ask for a public trial of the criminals.
For the greatest part they did not.
The only reason I can find about this behaviour is that the war criminals in that case were not "terrorist" from the other part of the world, but their own soldiers.
So, the whole question of war crimes has been quietly ignored until the present day almost completely.
Public demostration againt Vietnam war were mainly aimed as stop the war after the first US soldiers were killed, but not many people asked that US soldiers should be held accountable, put on trial and eventually killed if found guilty of war crimes.
If someone else has different evidence, I would like to hear it.

Please note that this "frame of mind" (= of my country does war crimes they are not really war crimes) is not limited at all to US citizens, Japanese are still respecting late war criminal Showa Tenno, I guess there are many Chinese people who respect Mao and had Hitler won the war he would be an hero in Germany

This is the main point of discussion and this duplicity is what Chomsky wanted to point out in his small article.
 
bikerdruid said:
fatah and hamas, for better or worse.
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And Fatah is the party in power of which institution?

But thanks for putting something in black and white for us: Fatah and Hamas are the legit representatives of the Palestinians. You said it.

So that means you have to admit that the Palestinians support Nazi conspiracy theories, the religious duty to kill Jews, Arab and Islamic supremacy, martyrdom, the cult of death ect.

Fatah and Hamas believe in all those things. And you just said they are representin' the hood.
 
Shrek said:
You are implying that the jury was biased or not biased?
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It was a kangaroo court.

It would be no different from Richard Gage forming a court of inquiry into 9/11 with Avery, Gallop et al as judges.

Vietnam wasn't called the land of bad things by accident, there were plenty of "war crimes" committed by the Viet Minh as policy against the civilian populace before the first US boot hit the ground.

The US had the Tiger Force, My Lai, Bob Rheault, others that were never publicized, but we did not have an sop of genocide.

The Viet Minh/Viet Cong/NVA never admitted to or prosecuted their "war criminals"
 
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