The Logic Off Topic list

> Oh come on! Thats horseshit. There have been attrocities as large -
> but only in time of war or natural disaster.  
> Is this really the time for anti-American propoganda?

Propaganda? I've no interest in evangelizing for any anti-American
stance. America is undoubtedly the most open, democratic country
on the planet. I look forward to the day when the world at large
enjoys the same freedoms and rights enshrined in its constitution.

But are we not to examine the credentials of those who so forthrightly
condemn state sponsored terrorism? 'Those who do not remember the past
are condemned to repeat it' etc., - when is there a time to examine
history with a view to putting the present in perspective?

Are we not justified in trying to see the context of such horrendous
violence? Don't we owe it to those poor people who's lives were
cut short so miserably that we should try and see the root causes
of such acts, that others should not ever again perish so needlessly?

> Did the US create the Russian invasian of Afganistan that lead to
> the mujhadeen?

A Saudi Arabian millionaire, Bin Laden became a militant Islamic leader
in the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan. He was one of the
many religious fundamentalist extremists recruited, armed, and financed
by the CIA and their allies in Pakistani intelligence to cause maximal
harm to the Russians -- quite possibly delaying their withdrawal, many
analysts suspect. Not surprisingly, the CIA preferred the most fanatic
and cruel fighters they could mobilize. The end result was to "destroy
a moderate regime and create a fanatical one.

> > Atrocities equal to and surpassing in scale that of Sept 11th
> > litter the history books. And American foreign policy has often
> > been the protagonist.

> Name ONE that wasn't a wartime act.

There are many euphemisms for war - 'Self-Defense', 'protecting one's
interests', and, by extension, those of one's client states, and the
methods can be political, economic, military. Covert or otherwise.

For the US, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that its
national territory has been under attack, even threat. Its colonies
have been attacked, but not the national territory itself. During these
years the US virtually exterminated the indigenous population,
conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding
region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of
thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly,
extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number
of victims is colossal.

In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They
imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain,
in it's post war decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the
US moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000
deaths...complete with torture, political exile for tens of thousands
of Greeks, what we called 're-education camps' for tens of thousands
of others, and the destruction of unions and of any possibility of
independent politics. It placed Greece firmly in the hands of US
investors and local businessmen, while much of the population had to
emigrate in order to survive.

When US forces entered Korea in 1945, they dispersed the local popular
government, consisting primarily of anti-fascists who resisted the
Japanese, and inaugurated a brutal repression using Japanese fascist
police and Koreans who had collaborated with them during the Japanese
occupation. About 100,000 people were murdered in South Korea prior
to what we call the Korean War, including 30-40,000 killed during the
suppression of a peasant revolt in one small region, Cheju Island.

Laos in the '60's: as soon as social revolution began to develop
there, Washington subjected it to a murderous secret bombing,
virtually wiping out large settled areas in operations that, it was
conceded, had nothing to do with the Vietnam War.

Parliamentary governments have been barred or overthrown, with US
support and sometimes direct intervention, in Iran in 1953, Guatemala
again in '63 (when Kennedy backed a military coup to prevent the
threat of a return to democracy), the Dominican Republic in '63 &
'65, in Brazil in 1964, in Chile in 1973...

The methods ain't pretty. What the US-run contra forces did in
Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies did in in El Salvador or
Guatemala, wasn't just 'ordinary' killing. A major element is brutal,
sadistic torture - beating infants against rocks, hanging women
by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of their face
peeled back so that they'll bleed to death, chopping peoples heads
off and putting them on stakes. The point being to crush independent
nationalism and popular forces that might bring about meaningful
democracy.

While the US government pays lip service to democracy, the real
commitment is to "private, capitalist enterprise" concluded
London's Royal Institute of International Affairs. When the rights
of investors are threatened, democracy has to go; if these rights
are safeguarded, killers and torturers will do just fine.

In Central America, the number of of people murdered by US-backed
forces since the late 1970's comes to something like 200,000 as
popular movements that sought democracy and social reform were
decimated.

In El Salvador, the number of people massacred since 1978 or since
1979 when we moved in in force is on the order of sixty thousand.
In Guatemala, the number of people massacred is on the order of a
hundred thousand. 

Some specifics:

   The Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit was created, trained and
equipped by the US. Formed in in March 1981, when specialists
in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army
school of Special Forces, from the start was engaged in mass
murder. In December '81 the unit took part in operations in which
over 1,000 civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and
burning and later in the bombing of villages and murder of
hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods.
The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly.

   One Cesar-Vielman Joya Martinez detailed the involvement of US
advisers and the Salvadoran government in death squad activity
much to the discomfort of the previous Bush administration which
made every effort to silence him and ship him back to El Salvador
and probable death. Other witnesses were similarly treated.
__________________

...The same grisly patterns repeat themselves in Nicaragua,
Guatemala, Honduras - in fact, there's one CIA trained battalion
in Honduras that all by itself carried out more atrocities than
Noriega ever did.

...and Panama:
Guillermo Endara, sworn in as President at a US military base on the
day of the invasion, would've received 2.4 percent of the vote if an
election were held, according to 1992 polls. His government designated
the second anniversary of the US invasion a "national day of
reflection." Thousands of Panamanians "marked the day with a
`black march' through the streets of this capital to denounce the US
invasion and the Endara economic policies," the French press agency
reported. Marchers claimed that US troops had killed 3000 people and
buried many corpses in mass graves or thrown them into the sea. The
economy has not recovered from the battering it received from the US
embargo and the invasion. A leader of the Civic Crusade, which led the
middle-class opposition to Noriega, told the Chicago Tribune reporter
that "Economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. against our will in 1987
to oust Noriega did nothing to hurt him but ruined our economy."

...The US backed dictators in the Dominican Republic, the Philippines,
Duvalier in Haiti... but so long as profits flowed out of their
countries into the US they were supported enthusiastically. The same
story with Mobutu, Ceaucescu and Saddam Hussein ... and, too, Suharto
of Indonesia...

Suharto has been "our kind of guy," as the Clinton administration 
described him, while carrying out murderous aggression and endless 
atrocities against his own people; killing 10,000 Indonesians just 
in the 1980s, according to the personal testimony of "our guy," who
wrote that "the corpses were left lying around as a form of shock
therapy." In December 1975 the UN Security Council unanimously ordered
Indonesia to withdraw its invading forces from East Timor "without
delay" and called upon "all States to respect the territorial integrity
of East Timor as well as the inalienable right of its people to
self-determination." The U.S. responded by (secretly) increasing
shipments of arms to the aggressors; Carter accelerated the arms flow
once again as the attack reached near-genocidal levels in 1978. In
his memoirs, UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan takes pride in his
success in rendering the UN "utterly ineffective in whatever measures
it undertook," following the instructions of the State Department,
which "wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this
about." The U.S. also happily accepted the robbery of East Timor\ufffds oil
(with participation of a U.S. company), in violation of any reasonable
interpretation of international agreements.

And so it remained, through atrocity after atrocity, In 1997 he made
his first mistake. One thing was he was beginning to lose control.
If your friendly dictator loses control, he's not much use. The other
was, he developed an unsuspected  soft spot. The International
Monetary Fund (IMF), meaning the U.S., was imposing quite harsh
economic programs which were punishing the general population for
the robbery carried out by a tiny Indonesian elite, and Suharto,
for whatever reason, maybe fearing internal turmoil, was dragging
his feet on implementing these.

Then came a  series of rather dramatic events. They weren't much
reported, but they were noticed in Indonesia.
In February 1998, the head of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, flew
into Jakarta and effectively ordered Suharto to sign onto the IMF
rules. Shortly after that, in May 1998, Madeleine Albright telephoned
Suharto and told him that Washington had decided that the time had
come for what she called a "democratic transition," meaning, Step
down. Four hours later, he stepped down. This isn't just cause and
effect. There are many other factors. It's not just pushing buttons.
But it does symbolize the nature of the relationship.
__________________

Africa:
South African attacks supported by the U.S. during the Reagan years,
when it caused over $60 billion in damage and 1.5 million deaths in
neighbouring states according to a UN Commission, not to speak of
some events at home and with ample U.S./UK support. 

...And Saddam:
Throughout the period of his worst crimes, Saddam remained a favoured
ally and trading partner of the US and Britain, which furthermore
abetted these crimes.  The Reagan Administration even sought to
prevent congressional reaction to the gassing of the Kurds,
including the (failed) plea of Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Claiborne Pell that "we cannot be silent to genocide
again" as the world was when Hitler exterminated Europe's Jews.

So extreme was Reaganite support for their friend that when a ABC
TV correspondent revealed the site of one of Saddam's biological
warfare programs a few months after Halabja, Washington
denied the facts, and the story died. There were no passionate calls
for a military strike against this brutal killer and torturer.
Quite the contrary: much of what was known, including US support,
was downplayed or not reported.

...Palestine:
In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have
collapsed long ago were it not for American backing and the
long standing support for Israel's brutal military occupation,
now in its 35th year: Washington's decisive diplomatic, military,
and economic intervention in support of the killings, the harsh and
destructive siege over many years, the daily humiliation to which
Palestinians are subjected, the expanding settlements designed to
break the occupied territories and take control of the resources,
the gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, and other actions
that are recognized as crimes throughout most of the world.

Iraq:
The destruction of infrastructure and banning of imports to repair it
has caused disease, malnutrition, and early death on a huge scale,
including 567,000 children by 1995, according to UN investigations;
UNICEF reports 4,500 children dying a month in 1996. In a bitter
condemnation of the sanctions (January 20, 1998), 54 Catholic Bishops
quoted the Archbishop of the southern region of Iraq, who reports that
"epidemics rage, taking away infants and the sick by the thousands"
while "those children who survive disease succumb to malnutrition."
The Bishop\ufffds statement, reported in full in Stanley Heller\ufffds journal
The Struggle, received scant mention in the press. The U.S. and
Britain have taken the lead in blocking aid programs \ufffd for example,
delaying approval for ambulances on the grounds that they could be
used to transport troops, barring insecticides to prevent spread of
disease and spare parts for sanitation systems. Meanwhile, western
diplomats point out, "The U.S. had directly benefited from [the
humanitarian] operation as much, if not more, than the Russians and
the French," for example, by purchase of $600 million worth of Iraqi
oil (second only to Russia) and sale by U.S. companies of $200
million in humanitarian goods to Iraq. They also report that most of
the oil bought by Russian companies ends up in the U.S.

========================================================

And, unfortunately, this is only a fraction...

I think we're all agreed that massive injustices take place all over
the world on a daily basis. Just let's not accept so readily and at
face value what our governments and media would have us believe.