Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for
23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was
captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who
must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to
happen to him.
But I'm willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now,
that the US had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture
and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in
Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called
War on Terror.
I sure know that if my son were ever so unfortunate as to be
suckered into joining the US military and was then dispatched to fight
and kill people in some far-off land where the US had no reason to be
in the first place, and if he were to be captured, I would want to know
that my own country had been living up to the letter of the law in
respecting every clause of the Geneva Convention regarding the
treatment of captives.
administration, which simply tossed out the Geneva Conventions in 2001
and said its provisions, despite being signed into law by the US, did
not apply to the war in Afghanistan, which was the first assault in
what they conceived as a borderless and endless War on Terror, nor the
Obama administration, which has refused to grant full Geneva Convention
rights to the captives it holds in places like Afghanistan's Bagram Air
Base, or at Guantanamo Bay, or to prosecute those who tortured and
ordered torture in the prior administration, has followed the law...
For the rest of this article, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
________________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
1
1
1
