The new one in power is a psycho too. it just went from one psycho to another psycho..with so many innocents killed in the process.
I think I may remember what I was reading about the other day.. they are now beheading women there for just the crime of falling in love with another and run away to plan to marry (from what I remember the women they beheaded wasnt even married so wasnt even having an affair). If I find the article about the beheading of women there happening now and the new leader saying its his country and he can do what he likes there now! I'll post the link (its starting to cause an international outcry among activists).
Yes, tania, indeed, it's horrific. Can you imagine that happening in the US and no intervention from the American law which, despite its flaws, is morally superior to Sharia?
Snaggle (and especially Snaggle for posting such atrocious misinformation and mentioning biased unreliable studies!
) and all the others who compare America to a psychotic and tyrannical Saddam Hussein, you are overlooking one important difference...
The US government is more compassionate. The innocents killed as a result of their invasions and wars were collateral damage. They weren't intentional killings. If they had a sophisticated enough weapon that would only target the enemy, they would deploy it sensibly and effectively. Clearly, they will avoid the killing of innocents if they can.
The same cannot be said of the Taliban, for example, who will torture, rape and murder anyone regardless - including little girls who wish to go to school. In case you haven't heard, a 15 year-old (at the time) Malala Yousafzai had been shot in the head by the Taliban and made a remarkable recovery. She found refuge in the UK and even met the Obamas in the US. Gordon Brown also launched a UN petition which gave rise to the officialisation of Pakistan's first Right to Education Bill.
Check her out here:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/malala-yousafzai-tells-moment-shot-2365460So, my question is, ladies and gentlemen, when the shit hits the fan, which side are you on?
War if fought needs to be fought with justice, that is only to stop aggression or terrorism and without intentionally targeting civilians. Maybe Summerland you're ignorant of the fact that America dropped two nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities - meaning that American terrorism is not a new thing. Evil is evil, it does not matter whom does it.
Because the Japanese were never imperial nuts themselves, right, smart arse? And there is never a threat that serious where a government needs to prove that they are not bluffing! Oh no! There is never an "us or them" situation...
America didn't aim for civillians, by the way. They aimed for highly weaponised military fortresses. They were attacked once and the Japanese still had no thought for the morrow nor for their women and children. So, with their inflated egos and false sense of honour, they chose to continue the war. The result: the US government, the evilest one in the world, the great Babylon, struck again...
Yeah, evil is evil, Snaggle, and ignorance is ignorance, too! If the Japanese had been smart, less imperialistic, more diplomatic, or even imperialists with diplomacy, they might have averted their atomic catastrophies. Like I said before, the USA is the lesser of evils, and, like all nations, it does make its mistakes. But you ask yourselves who in the world today is more threatening. Think about it...
On a different note...
Watching “Thirteen Days” (a film about the Cuban missile crisis starring Kevin Costner and Bruce Greenwood) made me want to look into the events that preceded it, namely, the Bay of Pigs invasion. For those who wish to know what led to the Cuban missile crisis, the story begins with a cold war between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and the close relationship the former held with President Fulgencio Batista - who applied his controversial brand of “disciplined democracy” in Cuba.
Perceiving Batista’s regime as a dictatorship, a revolutionary Fidel Castro and his cohorts managed to overthrow it. Batista’s tenure forcibly came to an end, Castro proceeded to sever all ties the former government had with the United States, and an affiliation with the Soviet Union was developed. American president Dwight D. Eisenhower became concerned about the Cuban-Soviet affiliation as it reinforced the perceived threat of international communism. Eisenhower’s solution: $13 million to the CIA (an agency founded to mainly counter espionage by the Soviet Union’s KGB during the cold war) to plan Castro’s overthrow.
However, the Americans had underestimated the Cuban leader, who also had effective sources of information and got word of a possible CIA plan to invade Cuba beforehand. The foiled invasion, supported by Cuban counter-revolutionaries, took place two years after the end of the Cuban revolution, and a year after the election of John F. Kennedy - who couldn’t cancel the invasion for political reasons. (The Cuban exiles wouldn’t have been pleased with a cancellation for sure.)
Who’s to be blamed for the epic failure at the Bay of Pigs? I feel that both the CIA and the White House are to blame. And a president who doesn’t back his people all the way, a ditherer who popped painkillers on a daily basis, can’t possibly be a good head of state. In Kennedy’s defence, there is evidence that the CIA had lied to him about the details of the invasion, plus the fact that he had already been deprived of military information on Richard Nixon’s orders when the two of them were running for the Oval Office. How can a president make informed decisions based on insufficient and unreliable feedback?
The initial plan involved the invasion of the heavily populated, and mostly anti-Castro, Trinidad. It would have been the most promising spot for a successful mission. This could have caused a favourable uprising, and the guerrillas would be able to hide in the Escambray Mountains where they’d be able to join forces with other anti-Castro groups already settled there. The CIA official Richard Bissle pressured Kennedy to give the green light, but this one feared making too much “noise” that could implicate the US government’s involvement, and suggested that they come up with a new site to invade. (Kennedy wanted to be able to maintain plausible deniability.)
So Bissle came up with the worst possible new site: the Bay of Pigs - something that worried Esterline (a CIA member) besides the fact that a rumour about a cutback in air support was already circulating. The bay was Castro’s favourite fishing spot, so he knew it like the back of his hand. The Cuban leader had also helped many peasants there and support for his government was rife in that part of the country.
Bissle had also misled Kennedy by saying that the bay was defensible because it was surrounded by swamps, but failed to mention that those very same swamps made it impossible for locals to join up with Brigade 2506, the CIA-sponsored guerrilla of Cuban exiles trained in Mexico which was to carry out the operation. Complacent after his WWII experience, and his success with the coup d’etat in Guatemala, Bissle was confident that the brigade would successfully back the Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF) against Fidel Castro and achieve victory. The reality, however, was that the brigade was defeated within three days. Castro’s army outnumbered them by 200/1 and there had been no American aviation support either.
Bissle planned to assassinate Castro and failed on that front, too. Initial plans to undermine Castro’s reputation with his people, such as spiking him with LSD, had been rejected in favour of having him killed by the Mafia - which would have given the US government a great cover story! Indeed, part of the funds for the Bay of Pigs mission was used to pay mobsters such as Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Bissell, and CIA director Allen W. Dulles (later forced to resign) met with them and offered $150,000 to get the job done.
The failure of the invasion (an embarrassment for the US foreign policy) strengthened Castro’s administration, and the leader announced his intention to adopt socialism and to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union. (Leading up to the Cuban missile crisis.) Castro decided to purchase oil from the Soviets and boycotted American corporations. And so it was that the cold war dangerously extended that far (close enough to the start of humankind’s extinction via nuclear annihilation). The USA retaliated by cancelling the import of Cuban sugar, and, to further the boycott, prohibited exports to Cuba - apart from certain food products and medicine which were traded in for the safe return of captured guerrilla members.
The USA condemned the Cuban government for breaching human rights with its communism. Castro riposted by stating that destitute Americans were victims of their government’s monstrous imperialism which also continued to denigrate and maltreat black people - a good point that wouldn’t hold today, but, to be fair, Americans should have listened to Thomas Paine when he said the following prior to their Constitution in 1787 (and I paraphrase whilst still conveying the pamphleteer’s brilliant centenarian hypocrisy point): “How can we condemn the despotic British, and speak of freedom from their monarch’s tyranny, whilst supporting slavery in our land?”
President John F. Kennedy never saw the end of the communist threat and was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald (yes, conspiracy theorists, it was him) shortly after the Cuban missile crisis. If you think it took a while for the CIA to spill the beans on significant details and concede its partial blame for the Bay of Pigs debacle consider this: the Holy See only absolved Galileo from his charge of heresy in 1992! Fidel Castro, by the bye, is still alive today (6th April 2014).
Maybe Fidel Castro is the Wandering Jew, condemned by Christ to roam the earth until the end of days. And perhaps he once said he is an atheist in order to taunt God.
By the way, check out the "Thirteen Days" trailer, great movie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSA7Evcy7iE
