Bdos: Life in wonderland

The United States and the Bush Administration in particular, is facing some of its toughest decisions that put to the test its talk and concepts about rights and freedom, not only at home but abroad. If anything, what is transpiring shows that when under pressure good intentions can be abandoned and senseless, if not brutish approaches, can be embraced.

It will be recalled that not so many months ago the Bush Administration refused to be involved in any World Court that would have the right to try Americans for any atrocities committed in other parts of the world. The Bush Administration claimed that Americans would be victimised on political grounds, perhaps an admission, or a fear, that citizens of America are not beloved by people in many parts of the world.

How this dislike can reveal itself came through most brutally stark when not many days ago, Iraqis on the rampage in Fallujah hacked to death four American contractors working there in the rebuilding programme. The American military has been enraged by these acts of brutality and have launched an attack on “insurgents” in Fallujah, killing so far an estimated 600 people, and while accepting a truce has demanded that Iraqis in the city bearing arms must lay them down and must surrender those responsible for the four killings.

That situation remains unresolved but with a possibility of even more deaths. But while noting the outrage the American military feels over brutal deaths of American citizens, the Bush Administration does not show the same consideration towards what commentators have described as brutal treatment of the hundreds of “enemy combatants” held at its Guantanamo base in Cuba. These people have no rights, human or otherwise, and are deliberately denied any rights that they might have been able to claim if they were held on American soil since the base is “alien territory.”

What bloody wonderland do the idiot editorialists in the Caribbean inhabit? Do journalists think at all? I've yet to discover that many do. Would it have hurt this editorialist to attempt to grasp the distinction between a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention and an enemy combatant? Does he realize that the U.S. is at war with these Islamics jihadis, are there any other kind? Why should a bunch of murderous thugs, who would destroy the U.S., be accorded Constitutional rights and privileges? Would it have killed the writer to use his head for something else besides a hat stand?