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Originally Posted by Hari_Om
I am OK with people who do not throw stones.
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Hari Om,
So if Stalin didn't publish a report on human right abuses, you'd be fine with the fact that he killed millions of people? A sort of practice what you preach moral relativism? I don't think that this is really what you are saying, but that's what it means when put to paper and then taken to its logical ends.
This is in the same weak category of argument that I see some Americans make when they say that "we'll, Abu Ghraib was bad, but it's not as bad as what those terrorists do, so it's okay." Both are junk arguments.
The fact is that the United States sets standards for human rights and we call people to the carpet to account for those human rights violations. If you actually read the varying reports, some of the classifications are based on what a government does to stop these violations. So, what is the US doing to prevent its own violations? You can look at the record and find hundreds of inquiries and investigations, you can find hundreds of soldiers and persons convicted and sentenced to punishments in accordance with what the evidence could support in a trial by jury consistent with the American civilian court system.
To expect that any nation could field a military that is void of any violations of any international convention or moral code is unreasonable and impossible. I'm sure that you could rattle off plenty of incidents that are less than savory that have been committed under the auspices of your government.
I'm not trying to turn this into a India vs. US thread, but just want to make sure that as we debate the actions of individuals, that we analyse proper the role of the state in those actions. Maybe the investigation will turn up something pervasive in the Haditha incident, but so far, what we have is a staff sergeant who allowed his unit to get out of control (in contrast to the My Lai incident in Vietnam, where the culpability ran up to the general officer level in terms of the attitude that allowed a festering moral peversion against Vietnamese to turn into a massacre).