Bush and Rumsfeld as ethics teachers?
Friday, June 02, 2006
FreeMarketNews.com
This Bush Administration just keeps on topping itself when it comes to
outrages.
Now, after the press exposed a couple of cases of civilian massacres by
U.S. forces--massacres the military tried to cover up--they’re calling
for "ethics training" for the troops in Iraq.
Note that we are now more than three years into the slaughter, with our
own forces responsible for the needless deaths of tens of thousands of
innocent men, women and children (the president himself has casually
acknowledged "30,000 civilians dead, give or take").
Note that the administration--including Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Commander-in-Chief Bush
himself--are responsible for the "rules of engagement" that have led to
most of those deaths--the aerial "shock and awe" bombardment of
populated cities, the leveling of cities like Samarah and especially
Fallujah, the use of prohibited incendiary weapons like napalm and
white phosphorus, the use of fixed-wing and helicopter gunships that
saturate wide areas with lethal machine-gun fire, and not least the
deadly tactics of "spray and pray" response to attack, and to
shoot-to-kill orders at military roadblocks.
This administration's talking about teaching ethics to soldiers is
something akin to having the Israeli military or Hamas teach
non-violent conflict resolution tactics, or having Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales teach a course on civil liberties and the Bill of
Rights.
This administration's idea of ethics is to redefine torture to permit
waterboarding and the use of 24-hour stress positions.
This administration's idea of ethics is to round up legal alien
residents in the U.S., including people who were given asylum because
of persecution in their home country, and to deport them back to those
countries without a legal hearing.
This administration's idea of ethics is to take the most vile symbol of
repression in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Abu Ghraib Prison, and to
convert it into a torture center for U.S. forces to use on captured
Iraqis.
This administration's idea of ethics is to kidnap people, both here in
the U.S., and overseas, and to "render" them in secret to dank, dark
gulags in former totalitarian states of Eastern Europe, and at
Guantanamo Bay, there to torture them and even kill them at will, while
hiding them and their fate from even the International Red Cross.
This administration's idea of ethics is to kidnap, render and torture
people, and eventually release them when it is finally demonstrated
that they have a case of mistaken identity, and then to refuse to admit
the mistake or even offer compensation.
This administration's idea of ethics is to lie to its own people in
order to be able to start a war against a nation that posed no threat,
for purely domestic political advantage.
The point is, we're talking about an administration of war
criminals--people who should be indicted and put on trial, or, in
Bush's case, impeached and then indicted and put on trial, for crimes
against humanity. And these guys have the gall to call for the teaching
of ethics to the poor troops it has thrown into a pointless and
hopeless war and occupation in Iraq?
Are we supposed to take this seriously?