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Sept. 12, 2006 Of my 640 articles, I’ve never written one on the treatment of detained suspected terrorists, as at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib, or on Qur’an desecrations, and I did not follow those issues at all. Neither have I ever written anything on wire-tapping or the Patriot Act. I’m just not interested. The Constitution means little to me, as I outlined in my articles on the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. As for the treatment of prisoners, though I don’t know the numbers involved, I assume that they were small in comparison with the numbers of Iraqis slain as a consequence of the unjustified American invasion. So the question of whether or not they were too harshly treated is a secondary question. In other words, I just don’t care. The question that concerns me is how it is that Americans can go on blithely acting as if the acts of so-called terrorism were spontaneous manifestations against a law-abiding nation that offended no one. A former contributor to UK , William A. Hurt, posted an article defining clearing what constitutes regular warfare, guerrilla warfare and terrorism, showing very convincingly that they are three distinct approaches to countering an enemy. http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/uk_news/article064.html I accept Hurt’s definitions, and I don’t think that I’ve ever said that the USA engages in terrorism. This rhetoric is widely used among Islamic and alternative news sources, but I have always avoided it, preferring to stick to the accepted definitions. But it would be a casuistry to maintain that a man killed in a fraudulent invasion was less grievously wronged than a man killed in act of terrorism. As Hurt says, terrorism is the tactic of those who cannot afford regular military action. They have to make the best use of the resources at their disposal. At long last, some of the mainstream media are owning up to 50,000 or 60,000 deaths in Iraq . My personal feeling is that the figures are really much higher, perhaps in the 200,000 range. If we add up the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and assorted terrorist casualties, the whole figure comes to less than 3,000. So it looks as if Iraqis have been killed in much greater numbers than they’ve killed, No doubt, someone will rush to say that US forces were not responsible all of the Iraqi dead, and I don’t have any facile breakdown that I can offer, but I’m sure the US must have killed tens of thousands anyway. Now the Senate Intelligence Committee has confirmed the non-existence of any Osama-Saddam links, while Kay and Duelfer long ago proved false the WMD claims. Too, it has turned out that George Tenet claims he was pressured by the White House to present tailor-made intelligence to justify the war. In other words, the war was a thoroughgoing hoax. I don’t see how any honest person can fail to see the justification that Iraqis and their sympathizers have in acts of terrorism. In their place, I would do exactly the same thing. Setting aside the treatment of prisoners as a minor side-issue, I think what the US needs to do is review its foreign policy in the Middle East, taking a more balanced approach, rather than backing Israel at every juncture. Otherwise, the terrorism will continue throughout the 21st century. We've already seen it go on 58 years. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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