From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Jul 15 2002 - 17:55:24 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Damien writes
>
>
>>I urge people to consider the following citation from that story, which
>>I think most intelligent observers outside the USA would take for granted
>
>
> which includes
>
>
>>Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with
>>the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia.
>>Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and
>>some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence
>>agents in the black arts of terrorism.
>
>
> Your claim is that most intelligent observers outside the
> U.S. would take this for granted? Does a majority of such
> observers believe that Fort Benning is a university of
> terrorism? That's awfully strong. But it's plain wrong
> without a clear and agreed-upon meaning for the term
> "terrorism"; I would expect critics of U.S. influence
If you take the current US definition for the word we have
clearly practiced terrorism in Latin and South America and
trained, funded and aided others in doing so.
> in Latin America to constrain themselves to phrases such
> as "right wing dictatorships received much help and training
> in America in their policies of repression and political
> control". By the same token, I would not call it accurate
> to describe Fidel Castro as a terrorist. Would you?
>
There is also the matter of what we did in Nicaragua (which
earned us the unique distinction of being judged engaged in
terrorism and ordered to desist three times by the World Court),
the countries where we toppled an administration not to our
liking, various assasinations (which we bothered to prohibit the
CIA from doing in 1972), purposeful economic sabotage to change
the policies of duly appointed governments... the list goes on.
> Even for me, not usually a critic of much U.S. foreign policy,
> it's a tough call because the choices in Latin America thirty
> years ago often came down to a brutal, repressive right-wing
> pro-American regime, or a brutal, repressive and totalitarian
> left-wing pro-Soviet regime. In such cases, the Americans
> would make their predictable choices, and the Soviets theirs.
> So characterizing the American implementation of their choice
> as "terrorism" is a bit much.
>
Overthrowing a duly appointed government covertly by violent and
illegal means is by definition terrorism.
>
> Well it's certainly not easy to know whether one's judgments
> have been so influenced, any more than it would be to be sure
> that one's judgment were, for example, not influenced unconsciously
> by the natural resentment some people in small nations feel against
> large nations.
>
Small nations resent large nations when the latter attempt to
stomp on them. It is not size that is relevant.
> Your tendency to read admiringly and uncritically of descriptions
> of those "evil but characteristic stunts" exactly mirrors, in my
> opinion, the tendency of others to wrestle with the same facts,
> but from the opposite political polarity.
>
I don't see knee-jerk acceptance or denial as "wrestling" with
the facts.
- samantha
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