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06/12/2004:

"Hypocrisy: The US Government's Biggest Single Problem"

by Charley Reese, www.antiwar.com

The biggest single problem the federal government has is its hypocrisy. It talks one way and acts another. It talks of spreading democracy while supporting dictators; it blathers about human rights while violating them; and it claims to promote the rule of law while scoffing at laws it considers inconvenient.

If the basis of our foreign policy is going to be American security and American economic gains, then we ought to say so and shut up about spreading democracy and promoting human rights. Instead, we steadily destroy our credibility in the world by talking one way and acting another.

We more or less invented war crimes by staging the show trials at Nuremberg, Germany, at the end of World War II. We happily hanged German and Japanese officials. Now, however, the world wants to establish a permanent international tribunal to try people for war crimes. Our reply is, "No way." Not only are we not supporting the international tribunal, but we are exacting agreements from individual countries to never offer up Americans to their jurisdiction. War crimes, applied to us, are "just politics." Full Article