So I have been reading these Human Rights Watch reports on torture and the war on terror etc. and I gotta say, I'm really really disappointed. As I'm reading, I notice that if I turned any one these reports in for a grade in High School English [and not the AP stuff I'm talking "Hi my name is Bob and I can barely read because I smoke pot all day" kind of English Class] I would probably not have passed...and thats saying a lot because somehow there are Bobs all throughout the US who manage to pass...
These reports are terrible!! They are poorly written, redundant and don't really conscribe to any particulary set of academic standards. They cite what they find convenient to cite, but never the most important stuff. For instance, In a report I just read about Command Responsibility for Torture [which was way too long - the reputable information they had was about 10 pages], there is a HUGE section about memos written by White House Lawyers. HRW asserts that the memos attempt to reason away the Geneva Conventions, that the lawyers are responsible for nuclear holocaust and spiders under your bed, etc. but they do NOT cite the memos!!
At all!!
Later they cite a memo by Colin Powell, but there's not even a shout-out to one by Gonzales or Yoo. Now, we may all have read these memos, or some of them already, but that doesn't excuse HRW from being lazy or un-academic.
The problem I have with all of this is that if you want people to think you're talking about more than some vision you had smoking pot in a drum circle with your friends from the Yale Human Rights Clinical, then I'm going to need for you to cite things. You need to have EVIDENCE. This is why those who put their lives on the lines in war zones in the Sudan cannot stand overly educated lawyers and marketing majors and fancy-pants carpetbagging senators who don't know what fascism looks like. Because they see America for what it really is - the coolest country on earth and the ONLY one in the world where you can, during war time, stand on a corner in a busy metroplex with a sign blaming the President for actively causing the deaths of your country's largest terrorist attack to date and NOT DISAPPEAR. Instead, the people you accuse or terrorizing the whole world at will are dying out there so you can continue to stand on street corners like the loudmouth ignorant fool that you are.
My solution is that we send all of these people to Somalia for a little while, then ask them how they feel about the evil oppressive force that is America. If the world wants to eat McDonald's and drink Coca-Cola, let 'em! Honestly, the only people who are oppressed around here are these people - they are too stupid to think for themselves, to a little research, or make an intelligent decision about ANYTHING. Instead, they jump on whatever bandwagon Barbra Boxer is driving, and grab their kids along for the ride. You tell me, how is a Palestinian kid with a gun because his parents taught him to have one any different than a 5 year-old on a Malibu street corner with a sign calling Bush a fascist? This person's world may be even MORE dangerous then the kid with the gun...
and only in America, will we let that kid's parents continue to teach him to keep on truckin'
