POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINCIAL TIMES
The fear of prosecution is the only effective tool we have to prevent repetition of this unholy business.
Even a failed prosecution serves this purpose to some degree. Washington careerists do not like facing the expenses and uncertainty of long trials.
Avoiding prosecution serves only to make the dirty work easily repeatable, no matter what Obama's administration may say about not using such methods again.
God, it was only in the late 1970s that the Church Committee uncovered some of the elaborate efforts to assassinate Castro, efforts in some cases using the mafia. The U.S. was running a Murder Incorporated said one observer.
Yet here we are, roughly three decades later, and the U.S. is busy assassinating and attempting to assassinate people again.
Again, it is only a little more than three decades since the killing fields of Cambodia, a true holocaust in which something like a million perished and countless were tortured and abused.
The U.S. had a major responsibility for the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. It effectively toppled a peaceful, neutral government with heavy illegal secret bombing and armed incursions, allowing the monsters to take over.
But here we are again, the U.S. every week or so uses robot drones and Hellfire missiles to kill people in Pakistan it believes are suspects in Taleban operations in Afghanistan. It not only largely kills innocent people, enraging many, it is irresponsibly weakening the government of Pakistan.
Of course, the U.S. has no more business being in Afghanistan than it had being in Vietnam, its excuse for bombing Cambodia and the scene of the world’s greatest holocaust since World War II with 3 million dead and millions of pounds of hideous Agent Orange and landmines left behind to continue killing for decades.
Clearly the savage blunders of the past do get repeated.
