- This week, all of America was caught up in a whirlwind
of patriotic pride and jingoistic arrogance over the supposed assassination
of CIA asset Osama bin Laden, a.k.a. Tim Osman (during his tenure at "The
Company") in a suburban Pakistani neighborhood. However, one pivotal
question was left unanswered as Americans, in a rare display, took to the
streets, some in front of the Executive Mansion, to celebrate. That essential
query being why do we train and equip such monsters in the first
place? While it's all good and well that UBL has left the building, so
to speak, the entire ordeal would've been avoided had we not trained him
in the first place, and, furthermore, had we adhered to a non-interventionist
foreign policy like the Founding Fathers advocated we follow.
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- Yet, we continue to do so this very hour, invariably
setting ourselves up for a similar situation twenty years or so in the
future. At the School of the Americas (now deemed the "Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Co-operation"), American forces train dictators
and rogue narco-terrorists in the arts of military strategy and paramilitary
operations. Is this really in our best interests? We might as well have
an international lawn sale and sell our finest weapons and strategies to
any banana republic that wants it.
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- While the government maintains that all attending receive
mandatory training in human rights and the rules of the Geneva Convention,
a 1996 investigation of the institute by the Intelligence Oversight Board
yielded the following conclusion: "[The] School of the Americas []
used improper instruction materials in training Latin American officers
from 1982 to 1991 [] certain passages appeared to condone practices such
as execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false
imprisonment." Can anyone say they are honestly surprised, given the
track record of our own CIA secret Eastern European gulags and all?
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- The implications of these CIA black projects and whatnot
are devastating for America's image abroad. The United States is widely
seen today, by both domestic citizens and foreigners, as a hypocritical
state, proclaiming the virtues of liberty and freedom while simultaneously
subverting the rights of others across the globe and training hit squads
to kill hundreds of thousands, whether it be in Nicaragua (contras), Iran
(SAVAK), or in any number of nations. One can imagine how difficult it
must be to coordinate the foreign affairs of the United States given this
track record and international reputation.
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- It is high time the United States live up to the expectations
of it's founders and stop supporting terror and tyranny abroad. Something
is seriously wrong when Russia, of all nations, a dictatorship in it's
own right, criticizes the U.S.' lackluster human rights record. America
simply invites more hatred upon itself when both it's citizens and it's
leaders refuse to confront the terrible reality that perhaps America hasn't
always been the venerable guardian of freedom it is made out to be in naïve
high school textbooks and cherry Fourth of July speeches. Whether we like
it or not, America does not reserve the right to commit genocide, slaughter
civilians, and wage total war anymore than any other nation. Trying to
ameliorate that fact by concealing human rights abuses under the Stars
and Stripes and fake talk of "freedom" lends no more legitimacy
than the classic "just following orders" Nuremberg defense.
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