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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 581
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WCL 581 Apr 2008
Criminals at large
More disquieting news from the U.S. this month. Demands on the military from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus threats to Iran, have deterred volunteers. As a result the standards for admission have had to be lowered and more convicted criminal are now to be enlisted. Burglars and rapists are among the ex-convicts to be accepted into the marines and the navy although not yet, it seems into the army. Perhaps it has enough already.
The victims of U.S. invasion or occupation are thus likely to play host to even more malevolent ex-criminals than has been the case heretofore. These newcomers will have served their time as convicts before being allowed to enlist. Expiry of sentences is now to be sufficient warrant for their being considered suitable. But of course there is no guarantee that a time-expired criminal is a reformed criminal...
The United States of America, a plutocracy with democratic pretentions, occasionally reveals its belief in national sovereignty in despite of world opinion and other human beings. The notorious facts about the downgrading of law - domestic and international – by the Bush entourage, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, have now been demonstrated in a new book by Philippe Sands. His earlier work Lawless World is being given aded force by his examination of the American acceptance of torture as a normal means of strenuous interrogation.
What emerges from a thorough investigation of how such things can happen is the revelation that the grasp of legal reality- in a country with more lawyers than anywhere else, is a failure of understanding. The leading general - the head of the chiefs of staff - was so ignorant of his own professional standards that he thought that torture was accepted in his own military manual - and then failed to check the truth.
In the past there have been notable American world citizens, from Ben Franklin to Albert Einstein, who have wholeheartedly accepted the sentiments expressed in a later book by another, Let's Join the Human Race, but too many today have been seduced by power, explicitly accepted with the recognition that the U.S. is an empire. This, first publicly acknowledge by a George W. Bush staffer, is almost certainly the clue. Americans, who are often addicts to money and power, have become so accustomed to the U.S. wielding power across the world, that they tend to think sovereignty entitles them to world domination. Friends are led into agreement, neutrals coerced into acceptance and opponents demolished by brute force.
John Roberts
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