July 16, 1993,

The individuals accused of attempting to assassinate former US President [George Walker] Bush in Kuwait have been arrested and face trial.

Will anyone be indicted for firing a missile into the metropolitan home of a one-and-half year-old child?

US President Clinton announced that he ordered precautions to "minimize loss of innocent lives." Twenty-four missiles were fired into a large crowded city and only eight people were reported killed, so apparently the US military succeeded in following his directive.

However, the world keeps hearing about American respect for individual human rights. What about the individual human rights of this child?

Setting aside the human rights of the child's father and the other six civilians killed by the same missile, we can concentrate on an individual who must have been absolutely innocent of possible support for the government of Iraq which was the target of this retaliatory attack by the US.

We can assume that no one intentionally targeted this child, so no murder charge would be filed. But a charge of manslaughter seems appropriate and consistent with American jurisprudence.

Had President Clinton announced that he had ordered the military to take all precautions so that no innocent life would be lost, the problem of  whom to indict would be complicated indeed.

In that case, a charge of manslaughter could hypothetically have been brought against military personnel  for disobeying a presidential order by intentionally seeking the deaths of innocents whom the president had ordered spared. Perhaps even the corporation that manufactured the missiles could be indicted, for false claims of missile accuracy. Could a charge of negligence be brought against US military intelligence personnel who programmed the target?

But the president said quite clearly "minimize."  The one-and-a-half-year-old's life is the minimum part of the president's order.  It is not legitimate and logical to ask whether this child had any human rights which were violated by President Clinton's order stipulating minimum loss of innocent lives?

Had the US proposals been agreed upon at the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights, could the mother of  this Iraqi sue the US government in a UN court?

This same week, we heard of and read about the businessman in San Francisco venting his frustration about an alleged injustice by fatally shooting eight people more or less at random - individuals who happened to be around the offices of his supposed enemy.

Certainly no one could compare this intentional murder by a mentally disturbed person with a military order from the leader of the world's only superpower. But the question of what constitutes lawful respect for individual human rights of all people glaringly applies to any case of violent retaliation.

Former President Bush's human rights were threatened, and although he was unharmed, some non-American lives or rights to life were deemed expendable in what was described by Clinton as an appropriate retaliatory response. The child's death becomes appropriate.

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