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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Now This Is Rich

May 17, 2011 by Jan Herman

Surely you’ve read the news that Gadhafi is being sought for war crimes. You may recall that America’s BananaRepublican gangsters never committed any war crimes — not in Iraq and not in Afghanistan. Unlike Gadhafi, our very own gang of culprits is above reproach.
Postscript: May 21 — Let this be a reminder: Stupidity, Arrogance, Criminality.
PPS: May 22 — The online edition of today’s NYT lead editorial, Malign Neglect, lacks the subhead of the print edition: “In declining a case brought by torture victims, the Supreme Court undermined confirmed the rule of law war criminals.”
(Need I say strikeouts & boldface added? — JH)

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  1. william osborne says

    May 17, 2011 at 11:05 pm

    The Iraq War was a war of aggression initiated through intentionally fabricated evidence, as was the Vietnam war. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg held that waging of a war of aggression is “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
    Even at minimum estimates, hundreds of thousands of people have died in Iraq, and at least three million in Vietnam, due to America’s illegal wars of aggression. These wars included war crimes such as intentional attacks on civilians, the widespread use of torture as evidenced by Abu Ghraib, the use of white phosphorous bombs in Fallujah, and atrocities like Mai Lai. Especially appalling was the highly documented rampage of the 101st Airborne’s Tiger Force in Vietnam that included rape, torture, and murder – and even horrors such as making necklaces out of human ears. See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Force
    Gaddafi might be a war criminal, but his actions pale in comparison to our own government’s, not only in sheer bestiality, but especially in magnitude. Especially notable is the lack of any effective reaction by American artists to our own crimes. Why are they so silent?

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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