Accept it: Terrorists Will Strike Again.

The FBI defines terrorism as:

The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
April 1967
At Manhattan's Riverside Church

My third reason grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years - especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm

because I do not believe you are willing to be flexible in your conclusion that the US is a 'terrorist nation.'

Quote:

Brandon advances the lie yet again:
You won't find one because we don't do that. The people who do are violating orders.

Quote:

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.

Quote:

I didn't pretend that it didn't fit the criteria I laid down - it didn't. I'm not asking you for a case of recklessness, negligence, or indifference. I am asking you for a case during the Iraq or Afghanistan conflict of American soldiers, following orders, attempting to kill civilians on purpose as the intended, hoped for target, and the case you related isn't that. You can drag this out for multiple pages, but you have yet to find an example that fits my challenge. You won't find one because we don't do that. The people who do are violating orders.

Yes, it does fit your criteria. Here you are hand-waving again. I am informing you again that it doesn't work.

Cycloptichorn

Asking civvies to 'leave the area' first changes nothing about the morality of actions which lead to civilian deaths. This is not a complicated point to understand.

Cycloptichorn

Besides My Lai? Besides the village of Ishaqi, north of Baghdad?

Joe(and, shamefully, there have been others)Nation

The troops took direct fire from the building upon their arrival, he said. They responded first with small arms and then by calling in helicopters and, later, close air-support, essentially destroying the structure, [General] Caldwell said in the statement. Troops then entered the building and found the Iraqi bombmaker's body, along with three dead "noncombatants" and an estimated nine "collateral deaths."


"Allegations that the troops executed a family living in this safe house, then hid the alleged crimes by directing an air strike, are absolutely false," Caldwell said.

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.

I am curious how a drone can attack an area with civilians in it and anyone can claim the intent was to NOT kill those civilians.

Allowing that civilians can be collateral damage sounds an awful lot to me like the civilians are being targeted along with any military target.

Quote:

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=21440

You're backpedaling

Cycloptichorn

If you tell me that a marketplace was bombed because an Al Qaeda leader was thought to be shopping, then I would agree that the people doing the bombing simply didn't give a damn how many civilians they took down, which is tantamount to targetting civilians.

First you were forced to change your criteria to 'non-combatants,' Then you wrote:

Quote:

If you tell me that a marketplace was bombed because an Al Qaeda leader was thought to be shopping, then I would agree that the people doing the bombing simply didn't give a damn how many civilians they took down, which is tantamount to targetting civilians.

This is exactly what we do with our predator drones. Not everything we shoot at is an 'al-qaeda safehouse.' So you're basically agreeing with our position.

Cycloptichorn

Now let's charge Saddam's accomplices

9 Nov 2006
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger wonders why Saddam should be alone in the dock. Surely, those who aided and abetted his crimes, and were accomplices in other great crimes committed against the Iraqi people, should be prosecuted, too.
Let's start with George Bush senior, Saddam's sponsor, and let's not forget those journalists who echoed Bush junior's and Blair's lies that justified the invasion of Iraq.

In a show trial whose theatrical climax was clearly timed to promote George W Bush in the American midterm elections, Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced to hang. Drivel about “end of an era” and “a new start for Iraq” was promoted by the usual false moral accountants, who uttered not a word about bringing the tyrant’s accomplices to justice. Why are these accomplices not being charged with aiding and abetting crimes against humanity? Why isn’t George Bush Snr being charged?

In 1992, a congressional inquiry found that Bush as president had ordered a cover-up to conceal his secret support for Saddam and the illegal arms shipments being sent to Iraq via third countries. Missile technology was shipped to South Africa and Chile, then “on sold” to Iraq, while US Commerce Department records were falsified. Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House of Representatives Banking Committee, said: “[We found that] Bush and his advisers financed, equipped and succoured the monster...”

Why isn’t Douglas Hurd being charged? In 1981, as Britain's Foreign Office minister, Hurd travelled to Baghdad to sell Saddam a British Aerospace missile system and to “celebrate” the anniversary of Saddam’s blood-soaked ascent to power. Why isn’t his former cabinet colleague, Tony Newton, being charged? As Thatcher’s trade secretary, Newton, within a month of Saddam gassing 5,000 Kurds at Halabja (news of which the Foreign Office tried to suppress), offered the mass murderer £340m in export credits.

Why isn’t Donald Rumsfeld being charged? In December 1983, Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to signal America’s approval of Iraq’s aggression against Iran. Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad on 24 March 1984, the day that the United Nations reported that Iraq had used mustard gas laced with a nerve agent against Iranian soldiers. Rumsfeld said nothing. A subsequent Senate report documented the transfer of the ingredients of biological weapons from a company in Maryland, licensed by the Commerce Department and approved by the State Department.

Perhaps these were the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Bush was just trying to retrieve.


Why isn’t Madeleine Albright being charged? As President Clinton’s secretary of state, Albright enforced an unrelenting embargo on Iraq which caused half a million “excess deaths” of children under the age of five. When asked on television if the children’s deaths were a price worth paying, she replied: “We think the price is worth it.”

The unrelentingly callous nature of America and Americans [most] illustrates, voluminously, that they are completely comfortable with mass murder. Why set up death camps when the same thing can be accomplished in a much easier fashion?


Why isn’t Peter Hain being charged? In 2001, as Foreign Office minister, Hain described as “gratuitous” the suggestion that he, along with other British politicians outspoken in their support of the deadly siege of Iraq, might find themselves summoned before the International Criminal Court. A report for the UN secretary general by a world authority on international law describes the embargo on Iraq in the 1990s as “unequivocally illegal under existing human rights law”, a crime that “could raise questions under the Genocide Convention”. Indeed, two past heads of the UN humanitarian mission in Iraq, both of them assistant secretary generals, resigned because the embargo was indeed genocidal. As of July 2002, more than $5bn-worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN Sanctions Committee and paid for by Iraq, were blocked by the Bush administration, backed by the Blair and Hain government. These included items related to food, health, water and sanitation.

Nothing short of genocidal.


Above all, why aren’t Blair and Bush Jnr being charged with “the paramount war crime”, to quote the judges at Nuremberg and, recently, the chief American prosecutor " that is, unprovoked aggression against a defenceless country?

Powell and Rice assure everyone Iraq is NO THREAT pre-9/11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1X-I-38lrU

Precisely the same thing that Germans were hanged for, that Japanese were hanged for, "unprovoked aggression against a defenceless country", by "justice seeking Americans".



And why aren’t those who spread and amplified propaganda that led to such epic suffering being charged? The New York Times reported as fact fabrications fed to its reporter by Iraqi exiles. These gave credibility to the White House’s lies, and doubtless helped soften up public opinion to support an invasion. Over here, the BBC all but celebrated the invasion with its man in Downing Street congratulating Blair on being “conclusively right” on his assertion that he and Bush “would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath”. The invasion, it is reliably estimated, has caused 655,000 “excess deaths”, overwhelmingly civilians.

If none of these important people are called to account, there is clearly only justice for the victims of accredited “monsters”.

Is that real or fake justice?

Fake.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=417

Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair’s bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government’s lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown’s bombs.

Gordon Brown, Blair's successor as prime minister, has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide, according to the American scientist who led the 2006 Johns Hopkins School of Public Health survey of civilian dead in Iraq. While Tony Blair sought to discredit this study, British government scientists secretly praised it as “tried and tested” and an “underestimation of mortality”. The “underestimation” was 655,000 men, women and children. That is now approaching a million. It is the crime of the century.

It is the crime of the century.