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Save the fetus, but let the babies die. The “Culture of Life” in Kansas.
Just another day in the pro-life agenda!
Okay so let me get this straight 1.) “Pro-lifers” not only make the initial hypocrisy of claiming to want to be all for life, yet they place a level of apathy once life has been conceived, once that life is grown and now living within the terrible conditions the average citizen must undergo so technically they’re “pre-conception” lifers. 2.) They also leave out the apparent speciesism they blissfully and ignorantly leave out when making their pro-life claim. That’s to say, they only favor human life (and like mentioned earlier, up until a point). So now it’s really just ” pro pre-conception human lifers” (What a mouth-full no wonder they decided to go with pro-life instead, not only is it shorter but you can trick a couple of people into your side with the misleading title! Brilliancy at its best!). You’re either 100% pro-life or you’re not, it’s a very simple concept people like to hide behind in order to treat women as though they are not equal to men.
• 1953: USA overthrows democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadeq of Iran, then installs dictator Shah
• 1954: USA overthrows democratically elected President Arbenz of Guatemala 200,000 civilians killed
• 1963: USA backs assassination of S. Vietnamese President Diem.
• 1963-1975: American military kills 4 million people in Southeast Asia.
• September 11th, 1973: U.S. stages coup in Chile. Democratically elected President Salvador Allende assassinated. Dictator Augusto Pinochet installed. 5,000 Chileans murdered.
• 1977: U.S. backs military rulers of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadorans and 4 American nuns killed.
• 1980S: US trains Osama bin Laden and fellow terrorists to kill soviets. CIA funds $3 billion.
• 1981: Regan administration trains and funds “contras” 30,000 Nicaraguans die.
• 1982: US provide billions in aid to Saddam Hussein for weapons to kill Iranians.
• 1983: White House secretly gives Iran weapons to kill Iraqis.
• 1989: CIA agent Manuel Noriega (also serving as President of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington. So, US invade Panama and removes Noriega. 3,000 Panamanian casualties.
• 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait with weapons from US
• 1991: US enter Iraq. Bush reinstated dictator of Kuwait.
• 1998: Clinton bombs “weapons factory” in Sudan, factory turns out to be making Aspirin.
• 1991: American planes bomb Iraq on a weekly basis. UN estimates over 500,000 Iraqi children die from bombing and sanctions.
• 2000-2001: US gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan $245 million in “aid”
2001: 3,000 murdered in 9/11 attacks.
Consider Anwar al-Awlaki: Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post describing what the establishment thought of Awlaki ten years ago:
In November, 2001, the very same Washington Post hosted one of those benign, non-controversial online chats about religion that it likes to organize; this one was intended to discuss “the meaning of Ramadan”. It was hosted by none other than … “Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki.”
More extraordinary than the fact that the Post hosted The New Osama bin Laden in such a banal role a mere ten years ago was what Imam Awlaki said during the Q-and-A exchange with readers. He repudiated the 9/11 attackers. He denounced the Taliban for putting women in burqas, explaining that the practice has no precedent in Islam and that “education is mandatory on every Muslim male and female.” He chatted about the “inter-faith services held in our mosque and around the greater DC area and in all over the country” and proclaimed: “We definitely need more mutual understanding.” While explaining his opposition to the war in Afghanistan, he proudly invoked what he thought (mistakenly, as it turns out) was his right of free speech as an American: “Even though this is a dissenting view nowadays[,] as an American I do have the right to have a contrary opinion.” And he announced that “the greatest sin in Islam after associating other gods besides Allah is killing an innocent soul.”
So what happened? When exactly did Awlaki become “The Next bin Laden”? Al-Jazeera has an interview with him where he explains exactly what happened:
I have been seeing my brothers being killed in Palestine for more than 60 years, and others being killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And in my tribe too, US missiles have killed 17 women and 23 children, so do not ask me if al-Qaeda has killed or blown up a US civil jet after all this. The 300 Americans are nothing comparing to the thousands of Muslims who have been killed.
The “collateral damage” that we ignore creates the very entities that we’re fighting. Every time we drop a bomb on a child, that child’s mother, father, brothers, sisters, friends and extended family come to hate us just a little more. There is only so far you can push a person before they (justly or not) snap and resort to violence.
There was a point where I naively thought that this was by mistake, that Government officials couldn’t possibly understand the consequences of their policy. With the information that Al-Qaeda is on the verge of collapse, however, and the knowledge that the military spending is at least 5% of our GDP, the military industrial complex is a powerful political entity, and that George Bush, our former president is quoted as saying ”The best way to revitalize the economy is war, and the U.S. has grown stronger with war,” I am led to the conclusion that what we call “collateral damage” is just a tool to create more imaginary villains for us to spend money fighting.
While Obama talks of saving civilians in Libya, information about innocents killed by U.S. drones is kept secret.
The big focus of the Obama administration in the last week has been, in President Obama’s words, “to stop the violence against civilians.” That’s in Libya, of course, where Moammar Gadhafi was threatening to quell a rebellion based in Benghazi.
In this context, it’s particularly striking to read the news from the ACLU — which has been waging a legal battle to wring information from the government about American drone strikes — that the military doesn’t even keep a tally of civilian deaths caused by drones:
The Department of Defense has confirmed that it does not compile statistics about the total number of civilians that have been killed by its unmanned drone aircraft. The DOD disclosed this information in a letter in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas.
…
According to the DOD, the military’s estimates of civilian casualties do not distinguish between deaths caused by remote-controlled drones and those caused by other aircraft. While each drone strike appears to be subject to an individual assessment after the fact, there is no total number of casualties compiled. Moreover, information contained in the individual assessments is classified – making it impossible for the public to learn how many civilians have been killed overall.
That Defense Department letter is here (.pdf).
Many significant details about the use of drones by both the military and the CIA are shrouded in secrecy. The CIA, for its part, has entirely refused to respond to the ACLU’s request for information about the drone strikes in Pakistan. Now we also know that the Defense Department does not keep a tally of civilians killed by drones.
Read More: Salon.com
