POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY BORIS JOHNSON IN THE TELEGRAPH
These are pathetic arguments, Boris Johnson.
Using every bit of logic you have - and that's not much when you cut out the unwarranted assumptions and unproved assertions you make - it could be used to defend almost any act against an accused where the public had been pre-disposed by a barrage of publicity against him to utterly dislike him.
That is not how a free society works.
Nor is it how we have an international community bound by standards of human decency and democratic values.
Yours are the arguments of a 16th century tyrant.
You either have laws and obey them or you do not, in which case anything is possible.
What these events represent is nothing other than the principles of might makes right and to the victor belongs the spoils.
I regard it is barbaric and irresponsible that a man in your position, Mayor of London, in the great nation which gave the world most of its concepts of democratic government and justice through centuries of struggle, speaks as you do.
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Response to another reader:
No, my friend, you are the one being ridiculous, actually rather more than ridiculous. Yours are the statements of a member of a raving lynch-mob.
And your numbers of bin Laden's supposed crimes, too, are beyond ridiculous. Did you get them from the Paranoids' Guide to the Internet Site?
There is not one shred of proof we have ever been given that bin Laden is responsible for anything but intensely disliking the United States and the House of Saud.
We do not know bin Laden's connection with 9/11.
I don't say there is none. I simply don't know whether there is, and you, whether you recognize the fact or not, also do not know.
And if we had proof, it belonged before the Court in The Hague. Full stop.
But the United States has never recognized the International court for War Crimes.
And why not?
Because George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would face the Court themselves on the gravest charges.
We certainly don't need paranoid speculation about what those gentlemen did. We know they destroyed an advanced society for a generation, inflicting or contributing to the deaths of about a million souls.
By the way, the number of people killed in 9/11 ten years ago was almost exactly equal to the number of innocent people Israel has killed in just the last few years of its activities in Gaza and Lebanon and on the high seas.
And only recently, we have had a report from Prof. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying that Israeli forces killed 1,335 children in direct military operations and arbitrary shootings over the last decade.
But, of course, Israel only has contempt for the U.N., just as it has for every other international organization dealing with justice or human values.
