Being the Government Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

Being the Government Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

By Ivan Eland
March 30, 2004

http://www.independent.org/tii/news/040330Eland.html

The apology of Richard Clarke, the chief counterterrorism adviser to the Clinton and Bush administrations, for the U.S. government’s failure to protect its citizens on September 11 starkly contrasts with the U.S. government’s standard operating procedure. Sitting government officials, whether in Democratic or Republican administrations, rarely apologize for any transgressions of the state, no matter how grievous.

For example, the Clinton Justice Department never officially apologized to Richard Jewel, the man wrongly accused of bombing the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. More recently, several (detainees at the)... government’s maximum security prison in Guantanamo, Cuba were released with a mere private apology after years of captivity with no charges ever being filed against them.

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Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at a Pentagon news conference, referred to their experience with totalitarian-like treatment in the following derisive way: “So they get interrogated for a couple of years. Then at some point you say we think we got what we need out of this crowd—-five people-—and let’s move them along.”


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for soooo many reasons, war crimes and crimes against humanity not the least of them, IMHO.