World Can No Longer Trust U.S. On Human Rights

http://www.laborradio.org/node/5094

World Can No Longer Trust U.S. On Human Rights - 01/18/07

By Jesse Russell

The United States can’t be trusted as a leader in human rights anymore. That’s according to the World Report issued by Human Rights Watch on Wednesday. The organization says that the European Union needs to step up and fill the void left by the US when it began holding individuals without trial and torturing prisoners.

:grr:

The people of the Phillipines and Hawai'i have known this since 1898...

"The hostilities in the Philippine War of Independence began on February 4, 1899 and continued for two years. The United States needed 126,000 soldiers to subdue the Philippines. The war took the lives of 4,234 Americans and 16,000 Filipinos. As usually happens in guerrilla campaigns, the civilian population suffers the worst. As many as 200,000 civilians may have died from famine and disease."

http://www.ualberta.ca/~vmitchel/fw4.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(1898-1946)

And Hawai'i

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hawaii

The people of Mexico have known this since 1848.

And the native Americans have known it since 1492...

A couple of months ago for a college course on public speaking I was doing a speech on the US's violation of human rights at Guantanamo Bay. One of the things I learned when doing research was how that the United States was a leader of human rights for just about 100 years when it came to treating POWs well. We followed the Geneva Convention back then, even when we were at war with nations who hadn't signed it themselves and might not treat our own captured soldiers under the Geneva Convention rules.

Something that hasn't been mentioned in the media about the mistreatment of POWs that should have been is that the gross violation of human rights and violation of the Geneva convention over the last few years is putting our own troops in more danger, both now and in future wars. Nations we go to war with in the future will be less likely to follow the Geneva Convention and treat our own soldiers well because of our own mistreatment today. The reason for that is they'll say to themselves "why should we treat the US POWs humanely according to the Geneva convention's rules when we know that the US probably won't do the same to our captured troops?".