Taking a Wrong Turn to the "Dark Side"

While wandering about the web, searching for what some would call the truth, I happened to come across a few articles that had the same thing in common. While the subjects of these stories were not even remotely connected, the underlying theme that brought them together was abundantly clear, that this nation has taken a wrong turn towards the dark side.

I’m sure that many people think I am being needlessly dramatic and think of me as someone overly pessimistic by phrasing what I’m about to say in this fashion, but let me make myself clear, I don’t believe for a minute that I am. This dark side that I will attempt to illuminate can’t be explained in simplistic terms; good/bad, black/white, right/wrong. No, it’s not that easy. Maybe good/evil is the most succinct way I can approach our nation’s bellicose behavior and attitude as of late.

I came across this headline in the New York Times; “Britain Joins a Draft Treaty on Cluster Munitions”. Upon reading the article, I found that 25% of cluster bomb victims are children that play with the unexploded bomblets, according to human rights groups. The nations that oppose the ban on cluster bombs are China, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan and Brazil. The United States apparently does not want to give a potential military rival any advantage, children are damned, and that is what our country is doing, damning any child that has the unfortunate circumstance to live inside or near a war zone.
The second headline that caught my attention was “Human Rights Report Assails US”.I wanted to understand why a human rights group would want to “assail” my country. Once I started to read the article I knew the answer, I should have known what the subject of the article was going to be about by the headline. The United States was specifically singled out because of the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo and other secret detention facilities around the world. The report criticized the practice of “extraordinary rendition” and also blasted Russia, China, and the EU for “complicity” with the US concerning rendition flights. The Chinese and the Russians received mention for their own human rights violations, but the prime offender was the US. According to Amnesty International as reported by The New York Times; “The report assailed the moral leadership of the United States, saying that, as “the world’s most powerful state” it “sets the standard for government behavior globally.” But, Amnesty International said, the United States had “distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law.”
The two headlines above are just a small sampling of human rights violations that our country is guilty of. It appears that in the twenty first century the United States no longer seems to care about the image it portrays to the rest of the world. There was a time, not too long ago, when the US was not the prime recipient of human rights groups’ attention. The American people at one time were outraged at the actions of China and Russia in regards to these types of violations. While the US has never been completely free from violations of international law, we weren’t the prime offender, year after year, as we seem to be now. It seems that America is not only unconcerned about its image but worse, it also seems to be unconcerned about basic moral issues, such as children being injured or killed by cluster bombs and people suspected of terrorism being kidnapped and imprisoned without benefit of legal consul or even the most rudimentary aspects of the rule of law that we so vigorously tout as the pretext for involvement in other nation’s affairs.
There are so many other violations of human rights that the US has committed in this “new” century, that I could fill page after page with them. While we have never been squeaky clean in this regard, the attitude of our government never appeared as unconcerned as it does now. Worse yet, the people of this country have never been as callous in their disregard over our government’s human rights offenses as they appear to be today.
The use of torture inflicted upon suspected terrorists and terrorist sympathizers seems to be tolerated. The opposition to such methods seems to be regulated to that portion of our people that fall into the “dissident” or “anti-war camp”. The American peoples lack of concern over the use of depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has been cited for a rise of 600% in the incidence of childhood leukemia in these countries. The torture at Abu Graib and the result of the investigation that followed which resulted in just a few court martial’s that placed the blame on lower enlisted people, all under the rank of sergeant, even though it is common knowledge that CIA personnel were basically in charge of prisoner interrogations. The absence of any investigation over the clear use of white phosphorus against the entire city of Falluja, in which photographs of dead women and children clearly demonstrated that they had been burned to death with white phosphorus. The dead bodies were burned beyond recognition, but their clothing didn’t show any trace of fire. The reports given at “The Winter Soldier” conference in Washington this spring when Iraq War veterans testified that they indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians on the order of their commanders.
There are so many violations that one must keep a list that seems to grow longer each day. Congress must be made aware that the American people, at least those that care enough to write a letter or make a phone call, will not tolerate this government’s clear lack of respect for international law. These are not issues of left or right, liberal or conservative, republican or democrat, these are issues of right or wrong, moral or immoral and I’ll repeat the phrase that I started this article with; good or evil. It appears that when George W. Bush decided to take on the “evil-doers” he need not have looked father than the West Wing.