Boston & Cowardice & America the Blind
By Barry Lando
Indeed, “Cowardly” is the epithet being used by political figures across the United States; it was used by an editorial writer in Kansas City Star and a spokesman for the United Maryland Muslim Council in Baltimore.
“Cowardly” is the term being used in messages of support from abroad, from the Prime Minister of India to the Prime Minister of Italy.
But, if that be the definition of cowardice, what could be more cowardly, than the now cliché image of the button-down CIA officer agent driving to work in Las Vegas to assume his shift at the controls of a drone circling high over some dusty village on the other side of the world?
How different are the images produced by such attacks—shattered bodies, dismembered limbs, severed arteries, frantic aid givers and terrified survivors—how different from the moving images of the tragedy in Boston now being broadcast and rebroadcast on TV stations around the globe?
Bombs from Boston to Baghdad:
What Is the Value of a Human Life?
By Lindsey German
As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge
Judged by the media coverage, it is hard not to conclude that western lives are valued much more highly than those of people in Afghanistan, Iraq or the Middle East.
The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid.
The Other Face of Political Violence
By Charles P. Pierce
April 16, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"Esquire" - Likely lost amid all lachrymose coverage of the act of political violence in Boston yesterday will be the release of a magisterial, non-partisan report concerning the decade of political violence organized and executed by the American government, and concerning the subsequent shameful abandonment by the current administration of its affirmative moral obligation to let the American people know fully what had been done in their name, and too often with their tacit and overt consent, and the degree to which we are all complicit in outright extrajudicial barbarism.
The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been "the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.
The United States of America tortured people. It tortured a lot of people. It lied about torturing people. It lied about torturing a lot of people. It tortured on its own, and it subcontracted the job to countries with more experience at it, since the United States never had made torture a policy before. Within the government, the theory and practiced of torture was discussed by a bunch of bloodthirsty legal aesthetes.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34635.htm
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