Quote:

Iraq War Not Humanitarian, Group Says

Mon Jan 26,11:53 AM ET

By MICHAEL McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - The war in Iraq (news - web sites) cannot be justified as an intervention in defense of human rights even though it ended a brutal regime, Human Rights Watch said Monday, dismissing one of the Bush administration's main arguments for the invasion.


While Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had an atrocious human rights record and life has improved for Iraqis since his ouster, his worst actions occurred long before the war, the advocacy group said in its annual report. It said there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing in Iraq when the conflict began.


President Bush (news - web sites) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) cited the threat from Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction as their main reason for attacking Iraq. But as coalition forces have failed to find evidence of such weapons, both leaders have also highlighted the brutality of the regime when justifying military intervention.


Human Rights Watch, however, rejected such claims.


"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair," executive director Kenneth Roth said.


Atrocities such as Saddam's 1988 mass killing of Kurds would have justified humanitarian intervention, Roth said.


"But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," he added. "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."


The 407-page Human Rights Watch World Report 2004 also said the U.S. government was applying "war rules" to the struggle against global terrorism and denying terror suspects their rights. It suggested that "police rules" of law enforcement should be applied in such cases instead.


"In times of war you can detain someone summarily until the end of the war and you can shoot to kill. And those are two powers that the Bush administration wants to have globally," Roth said. "I think that's very dangerous."


Human Rights Watch criticized the United States for detaining 660 so-called "enemy combatants" without charges at a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan (news - web sites).


"The administration's actions display a perilous belief that, in the fight against terrorism, the executive is above the law," the report said.


Government officials have said the lengthy detentions are vital to intelligence-gathering and that the information gleaned from prisoners has led to arrests around the world.


The New York-based group further said that European and other governments were ignoring human rights abuses in the conflict in Chechnya (news - web sites), which Russia characterizes as its contribution to the global war on terror.


The annual survey featured 15 essays related to war and human rights. But unlike previous versions, it did not include summaries of human rights events in countries where Human Rights Watch works. Instead, information on those nations was available on the group's Web site.


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Human Rights Watch: www.hrw.org



But i'm sure their opinon doesn't matter because they're "liberal" or something.

I always find it interesting when those who would paper over the missing weapons of mass distruction bring up what Saddam did to the Kurds, Iranians, & Shia as justification. The fact that Hussein was a brutal dictator is well-known.
It was well-known at the time the US government helped to finance his war against Iran. Hussein gassed the Iranians with satellite intelligence that the US government gave him.
And lets not forget his brutal repression of the Shia after the first Gulf War, a repression made possible because our government allowed it to happen.
Using Hussein's past actions (which our government did not object to at the time) as a pretext for present action is intellectually dishonest, especially when it is becoming clearer and clearer that the "imminent threat" case was false.
The comparison of the current situation to liberated deathcamps is foolish. The primary reason for waging WWII had nothing to do with deathcamps. The attempt of the Axis powers to take over the world was the primary concern.
In this case, weapons of mass destruction and the immiment threat Hussein supposedly posed to us were the chief arguments. Absent proof of this immiment threat, those arguments were just a false pretext for military action. In addition, they make this government appear negligent of the horrors Saddam had been inflicting on his people during his time in power.

There are two issues here.

1) Bush seems to have lied. The fact that we have not found WMD has nothing to do with it. First, the Aluminium tubes for uranium enrichment. But they can't be used for that, they are for rockets. And it seems GWB's people knew this. Second is the attempt to buy Uranium from Nigeria by Iraq. It was a total sham, and it seems to have been known as a sham by Cheney *a year* before GWB mentioned it in the State of the Union. Lastly was Powell's (I think it was him) comment about unmanned arial vehicles reaching American soil. This one is a farce of the highest order. Does Saddam have space warping technology now? These things couldn't get to Isreal easily, let alone the US.

All of this is part of a plan of misinformation, designed to scare the hell out of the American people, it seems. They are very serious charges, and unless the Administration is holding back some exhonerating evidence, they seem to be in trouble.

This leads to the second problem that the administration has, and it has nothing to do with a lack of WMD, either. That is the case for *why* we needed to invade Iraq today, right now, can't wait a second. Why couldn't we allow more time for inspections? What was the rationale for immediate threat? Saddam has been sitting there for 12 years in violation of UN mandates, in possession of WMD, etc. So why do we have to go now? The rhetoric, of course, was that Saddam was about to attack us. And that he was linked to al Qaeda.

Well? Where the hell is the evidence? I haven't seen any for either.

Over 500 hundred US and Brittish troops, and a few thousand Iraqis, are dead. US credibilty with relation to to our intelligence gathering ability is seriously hurt. Where the hell are the answers? This is not partisan politics. This goes to the heart of the process of our democracy. We must know the answers! If GWB is in the right, he will be vindicated.

If you can honestly read the record of GWB and staff statements on Iraq, and think they didn't take part in a deception, I really question your ability to see past your party affiliation. There are very serious problems with things that were said leading up to the war. The 3 specifics I gave alone are deeply troubling. The best case scenario seems to be incompetence at the highest levels of our government. That does not trouble you?

All this talk of the noble war, the deposed tryant, it is irrelavent. This is about how we function as a democracy. Is it OK to fabricate to justify a war?

The sad part is that 9/11 seems to have scared the sh*t so much out of so many that they're willing to accept any scary b.s. fed to them.

Last edited by whomod; 2004-01-27 7:40 AM.