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| 5/24 |
| 2004/7/19 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:32345 Activity:very high |
7/19 So we lied about the size of the mass graves...
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1263830,00.html
But we've set our goals high and hope to turn those lies true!
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/08/29/afghanistan.mass.graves
\_ Are we supposed to infer that you support Al-Qaida from this?
I.e. "Well, Saddam Hussein/Al-Qaida didn't kill THAT many people,
and we have been killing a lot of Al-Qaida insurgents, so therefore
BushCo/America is bad." Boy, we sure need more people like you
around...
\_ The inferences made on the motd never cease to amaze me. What
about the more rational "I don't like that we decry the mass
graves in Iraq only to find that 1) we turned a blind eye when
they had happened and 2) we are again turning a blind eye to
the same actions in another place." If you're going to condemn
an action, and especially if you use it as a causus belli, you
need to condemn it across the board.
\_ Which is not how the original was posited. The original
was constructed to say that A was not as terrible as
we had initially intended and that we are doing B so
that means that the enemy isn't really that evil and
we are evil because we have allowed the same to happen
to our enemy. Also, you are painting too broad a stroke
here. The causes belli was not mass killings, but mass
killings of supposed innocents. The U.S. has always been
engaged in mass killings, whether it be Germans, Japanese,
or North Koreans. Sanctioning mass killings in the name of
security is what War is all about. If you don't like it
feel free to be a pacifist. However, idealism does not
get you far in the realm of the realpolitik.
\_ First off, the humanitarian reason for invading was well
down the list, but has since emerged as the only reason
left standing. Second, in our history you can count on
one hand the number of times we have actually used our
military for humanitarian reasons. This is not to say we
shouldn't (I personally think we don't do it enough, nor
do we have any division with the proper training to do so),
but it is an historical anomoly nonetheless, and one that
we're taking a nosedive on. Third, the premise that this
was done in the name of security, or that it has done
anything to improve security, is well in doubt.
\_ On one hand? I don't think you can count *any* events
where we used our military for humanitarian reasons. By
its very nature, the military inflicted death upon
another people is not a humanitarian act. I want you to
name that handful of so-called humanitarian uses of US
military power. You can't. There are none.
\_ Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia (supposedly).
\_ Bosnia: indiscriminate bombing from 30,000 feet.
\_ The Bosnians were grateful for the assistance.
We probably saved them from being wiped out.
Haiti: we installed or reinstalled dictators at
the point of a gun 2 or 3 times in the last
few years.
\_ Wrong. Go reread your history of Haiti. Unless
you mean 40 years when you say "few." The
only person installed in the last decade
by the US military was Aristide, who was
the democratically elected leader of Haiti.
Somalia: we got 18 dead Americans, no people fed,
a huge PR mess, and showed the world, once
again, that the US is a paper tiger.
There are no peaceful uses for military power.
\_ How about the numerous times US Marines
have rescued Americans in trouble overseas?
\_ No, we are supposed to infer that op hates America.
\_ The mass graves weren't big enough for you?
\_ So we're going to ship the bodies from Afganistan to Iraq?
\_ So Mazar-e-Sharif, a location of a prison uprising that took 2-3
days to stop and killed a CIA agent would not expect to have
resulted in prisoner deaths? |
| 5/24 |
|
| observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1263830,00.html The Observer Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered. The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves. Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead. The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights abuses and murder on a large scale - not least in well-documented campaigns including the gassing of Halabja, the al-Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages and the brutal repression of the Shia uprising - but serious questions are now emerging about the scale of Saddam Hussein's murders. It comes amid inflation from an estimate by Human Rights Watch in May 2003 of 290,000 'missing' to the latest claims by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, that one million are missing. At the heart of the questions are the numbers so far identified in Iraq's graves. Of 270 suspected grave sites identified in the last year, 55 have now been examined, revealing, according to the best estimates that The Observer has been able to obtain, around 5,000 bodies. Forensic examination of grave sites has been hampered by lack of security in Iraq, amid widespread complaints by human rights organisations that until recently the graves have not been secured and protected. While some sites have contained hundreds of bodies - including a series around the town of Hilla and another near the Saudi border - others have contained no more than a dozen. And while few have any doubts that Saddam's regime was responsible for serious crimes against humanity, the exact scale of those crimes has become increasingly politicised in both Washington and London as it has become clearer that the case against Iraq for retention of weapons of mass destruction has faded. Hania Mufti, one of the researchers that produced that estimate, said: 'Our estimates were based on estimates. |
| www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/08/29/afghanistan.mass.graves -> www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/08/29/afghanistan.mass.graves/ Click here for our advertiser Mass graves raise questions in Afghanistan How did Taliban prisoners die, and who knew? An unknown number of Taliban fighters were dumped in mass graves last year. An unknown number of Taliban fighters were dumped in mass graves last year. From Matthew Chance CNN MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan (CNN) -- In the stifling desert of northern Afghanistan, lying as still as the air, is evidence of the gruesome fate that met hundreds of Taliban fighters late last year. The ground around Mazar-e-Sharif offers abundant evidence of mass death. In May, investigators with the Boston, Massachusetts-based group Physicians for Human Rights examined a grave in Dasht-e-Leili and said hundreds of victims had been dumped there. Human-rights groups have accused Afghan forces of suffocating hundreds of Taliban fighters by locking them in unventilated steel shipping containers after their capture. The captives were taken to a prison in Sheberghan, some 200 miles from Konduz. Many are still behind bars at Sheberghan, where they told CNN of their surrender and the aftermath. They said they were packed tightly into trucks and shipping containers for the trip to the prison, and that many of their Taliban comrades did not survive. Peter Bergen: Getting al Qaeda to talk "We don't know how many people died," one prisoner said. "We know that we were about 12,000 people, and now there is only 4,000 or 3,500. UN investigators hope to unlock the mystery, and outside Mazar-e-Sharif, they are standing watch over a patch of desert where as many as 1,000 Taliban fighters may be buried. Initial findings appear to support the contention of human-rights groups -- that the men were suffocated in shipping containers, then dumped. Dostum admits as many as 200 captives died en route to the prison. But he would not elaborate on how much the United States knew or approved of his treatment of the war prisoners. He is adamant, though, that US forces were not present when the prisoners were loaded into shipping containers. Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, has said he supports an investigation into the deaths of the Taliban fighters. And State Department spokesman Philip Reeker recently said, "We're going to continue to engage Afghan authorities on this matter in order to help seek accountability for any violations that may have occurred." |