Accept it: Terrorists Will Strike Again.

You've got it wrong.

If you are a cop and you have the noble intention of taking out criminals and stopping the drug trade (all noble things), and you make the call to raid a house, the outcome outweighs your good intention.

So if you kick in that door and get the bad guys, great. However, if you kick in the door and it turns out that you've got the wrong house and innocent people get hurt, your good intentions mean jack ****.

In short: You better know what damn door you're kicking in, because you're responsible for what happens after that point.

Do you understand that negligence isn't a defense?

T
K
O

However, it is ludicrous to suggest that every non-combatant killed in war is due to negligence.

Non-combatants have been killed in wars ever since the invention of guns, even when an army did it's best to spare them, which I believe we are doing.

Suggesting that trying to spare civilians but occasionally failing is morally equivalent to targetting civilians on purpose is just on the face of it baloney.

However, it is ludicrous to suggest that every non-combatant killed in war is due to negligence.

... 3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers.

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However, it is ludicrous to suggest that every non-combatant killed in war is due to negligence.

True, Brandon. Many casualties from US involvement have been due to directly targeting civilians.

The term "blowback," which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists" or "drug lords" or "rogue states" or "illegal arms merchants" often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Blowback_BCJ.html

One man's terrorist is, of course, another man's freedom fighter, and what U.S. officials denounce as unprovoked terrorist attacks on its innocent citizens are often meant as retaliation for previous American imperial actions. Terrorists attack innocent and undefended American targets precisely because American soldiers and sailors firing cruise missiles from ships at sea or sitting in B-52 bombers at extremely high altitudes or supporting brutal and repressive regimes from Washington seem invulnerable.

As members of the Defense Science Board wrote in a 1997 report to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States. In addition, the military asymmetry that denies nation states the ability to engage in overt attacks against the United States drives the use of transnational actors [that is, terrorists from one country attacking in another]."

Can you recall a time when you've ever heard any US person, other than anti-war activists, lament on the carnage caused by the USA?

JTT wrote:

Quote:

However, it is ludicrous to suggest that every non-combatant killed in war is due to negligence.

True, Brandon. Many casualties from US involvement have been due to directly targeting civilians.

Nonsense. Document for me one case of US soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan intentionally targetting non-combatants under orders. The terrorists aim at civilians as their standard M.O.

Blowback

The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

In pursuing the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger ordered more bombs dropped on rural Cambodia than had been dropped on Japan during all of World War 11, killing at least three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants and helping legitimize the murderous Khmer Rouge movement under Pol Pot. In his subsequent pursuit of revenge and ideological purity Pol Pot ensured that another million and a half Cambodians, this time mainly urban dwellers, were murdered.

Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind of unique, self-generated monster and his "killing fields" as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced from civilization. But without the United States government's Vietnam-era savagery, he could never have come to power in a culture like Cambodia's, just as Mao's uneducated peasant radicals would never have gained legitimacy in a normal Chinese context without the disruption and depravity of the Japanese war.

Significantly, in its calls for an international tribunal to try the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge for war crimes, the United States has demanded that such a court restrict its efforts to the period from 1975 to 1979-that is, after the years of carpet bombing were over and before the U.S. government began to collaborate with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese Communists, who invaded Cambodia in 1978, drove the Khmer Rouge from power, and were trying to bring some stability to the country.

Even an empire cannot control the long-term effects of its policies. That is the essence of blowback. Take the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which Soviet forces directly intervened on the government side and the CIA armed and supported any and all groups willing to face the Soviet armies. Over the years the fighting turned Kabul, once a major center of Islamic culture, into a facsimile of Hiroshima after the bomb. American policies helped ensure that the Soviet Union would suffer the same kind of debilitating defeat in Afghanistan as the United States had in Vietnam. In fact, the defeat so destabilized the Soviet regime that at the end of the 1980s it collapsed.

But in Afghanistan the United States also helped bring to power the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement whose policies toward women, education, justice, and economic well-being resemble not so much those of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran as those of Pol Pot's Cambodia. A group of these mujahedeen, who only a few years earlier the United States had armed with ground-to-air Stinger missiles, grew bitter over American acts and policies in the Gulf War and vis-a-vis Israel. In 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center in New York and assassinated several CIA employees as they waited at a traffic light in Langley, Virginia. Four years later, on November 12, 1997, after the Virginia killer had been convicted by an American court, unknown assailants shot and killed four American accountants, unrelated in any way to the CIA, in their car in Karachi, Pakistan, in retaliation.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Blowback_BCJ.html

I absolutely agree that negligence isn't a defense.

Blowback

The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

It is likely that U.S. covert policies have helped create similar conditions in the Congo, Guatemala, and Turkey, and that we are simply waiting for the blowback to occur. Guatemala is a particularly striking example of American imperial policies in its own "backyard." In 1954, the Eisenhower administration planned and the CIA organized and



funded a military coup that overthrew a Guatemalan president whose modest land reform policies were considered a threat to American corporations.

Blowback from this led to a Marxist guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s and so to CIA- and Pentagon-supported genocide against Mayan peasants. In the spring of 1999, a report on the Guatemalan civil war from the U.N.-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification made clear that "the American training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques" was a "key factor" in the "genocide.... Entire Mayan villages were attacked and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered in an effort to deny the guerrillas protection. According to the commission, between 1981 and 1983 the military government of Guatemala-financed and supported by the U.S. government-destroyed some four hundred Mayan villages in a campaign of genocide in which approximately two hundred thousand peasants were killed.

Jose Pertierra, an attorney representing Jennifer Harbury, an American lawyer who spent years trying to find out what happened to her "disappeared" Guatemalan husband and supporter of the guerrillas, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, writes that the Guatemalan military officer who arrested, tortured, and murdered Bamaca was a CIA "asset" and was paid $44,000 for the information he obtained from him.

Visiting Guatemala in March 1999, soon after the report's release, President Clinton said, "It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.... The United States will no longer take part in campaigns of repression."

But on virtually the day that the president was swearing off "dirty tricks" in other people's countries, his government was reasserting its support for Turkey in its war of repression against its Kurdish minority.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Blowback_BCJ.html

Accept it: Terrorists will eventually get Nuclear material, and they WILL threaten to use it.

Maybe we should figure out how to stop growing terrorists? Just a thought.

Accept it: Terrorists Will Strike Again.

Really, can you think of a more asinine title.

Truth would demand it read,

Accept it: Terrorists Will Respond To Our Terrorism.

Or maybe even more realistic,

Accept it: People Just Simply Aren't Going To Tolerate Our Terrorism

Brandon9000 wrote:

JTT wrote:

Quote:

However, it is ludicrous to suggest that every non-combatant killed in war is due to negligence.

True, Brandon. Many casualties from US involvement have been due to directly targeting civilians.

Nonsense. Document for me one case of US soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan intentionally targetting non-combatants under orders. The terrorists aim at civilians as their standard M.O.

Fallujah. The US military declared the entire town to be a 'war zone' and proceeded to attack anyone left in the place after giving the civvies 'time to evacuate.' Tons of civilian casualties. Problem is, we had no authority to declare that these people had to leave their homes in the first place; only military might to force them to do so. This does not give us justification for doing so.

They also used White Phosphorous in a civilian zone, which they knew would lead to civilian deaths. Read for yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Fallujah#White_phosphorus_controversy

This whole conversation would be a lot more straight-forward if you would just admit that you don't give a **** about killing civilians who happen to reside in countries that the US feels like attacking. Right?

Cycloptichorn

Quote:

Blowback

The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

In pursuing the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s, President Richard

...

the CIA, in their car in Karachi, Pakistan, in retaliation.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Blowback_BCJ.html

Quote:

I absolutely agree that negligence isn't a defense.

One might wonder where that would put you regarding active genocidal policies, Brandon?

Quote:

Blowback

The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

It is likely that U.S. covert policies have helped create similar conditions in the Congo, Guatemala, and Turkey, and that we are simply waiting for the blowback to occur. Guatemala is a particularly striking example of American imperial policies in its own "backyard." In 1954, the Eisenhower administration planned and the CIA organized and



funded a military coup that overthrew a Guatemalan president whose modest land reform policies were considered a threat to American corporations.

Blowback from this led to a Marxist guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s and so to CIA- and Pentagon-supported genocide against Mayan peasants. In the spring of 1999, a report on the Guatemalan civil war from the U.N.-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification made clear that "the American training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques" was a "key factor" in the "genocide.... Entire Mayan villages were attacked and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered in an effort to deny the guerrillas protection. According to the commission, between 1981 and 1983 the military government of Guatemala-financed and supported by the U.S. government-destroyed some four hundred Mayan villages in a campaign of genocide in which approximately two hundred thousand peasants were killed.

Jose Pertierra, an attorney representing Jennifer Harbury, an American lawyer who spent years trying to find out what happened to her "disappeared" Guatemalan husband and supporter of the guerrillas, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, writes that the Guatemalan military officer who arrested, tortured, and murdered Bamaca was a CIA "asset" and was paid $44,000 for the information he obtained from him.

Visiting Guatemala in March 1999, soon after the report's release, President Clinton said, "It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.... The United States will no longer take part in campaigns of repression."

But on virtually the day that the president was swearing off "dirty tricks" in other people's countries, his government was reasserting its support for Turkey in its war of repression against its Kurdish minority.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Blowback_BCJ.html

What's one to do, Brandon, when there are flat out admissions, by a president, to war crimes/genocide/mass murder, think up some different excuses?

Your mind reading sucks. I ask you for a time when they intentionally target civilians and you tell me about an event in which they asked civilians to leave. It doesn't qualify. Try again.

Asking civilians to leave, and then attacking anyway when they don't, is intentionally targeting them. We had no right to order them to leave their homes whatsoever.

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Asking civilians to leave, and then attacking anyway when they don't, is intentionally targeting them. We had no right to order them to leave their homes whatsoever.

And this [not to mention more than a couple other things] doesn't qualify the US as a terrorist nation, Cy?

It's you, Cy, who doesn't understand the meaning of the terms. The USA has long engaged and still engages in policies and practices that are precisely the definition of state terrorism.

There's just too much history for you or anyone to rewrite, though I have to allow that it is being attempted, on the grandest of scales.