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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mighty_Mezz who wrote (3949)	2/10/2001 11:55:50 AM
From: Mighty_Mezz	Respond to of 6089

With release of truth commission reports in several Central American countries -- most recently in Guatemala -- there can no longer be any doubt about the historical reality. In the 1980s, U.S.-backed forces committed widespread massacres, political murders and torture. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Many of the dead were children. Soldiers routinely raped women before executing them. There can be no doubt, too, that President Reagan was an avid supporter of the implicated military forces, that he supplied them with weapons and that he actively sought to discredit human rights investigators and journalists who exposed the crimes. While the CIA reported secretly on the massacres, Reagan publicly claimed that the Guatemalan government was getting a “bum rap” on human rights. It is also clear that the massacres at El Mozote and other villages across El Salvador, the destruction of more than 600 Indian communities in Guatemala, and the torture and "disappearances" of dissidents throughout the region were as horrible as what Slobodan Milosevic's Serb army has done in Kosovo. But for Milosevic and four of his henchmen, there are war crime indictments. On May 27, they were formally charged with the murders of 340 named ethnic Albanians and the forced deportation of some 740,000 others. Few would dispute that Milosevic and others involved in the “ethnic cleansing” campaign waged throughout the former Yugoslavia deserve their time in the dock. Yet, for Reagan, there are only honors: his name added to National Airport and etched into an international trade center, even a congressional plan to carve his visage into Mount Rushmore. Accountability requires at minimum a recognition of responsibility. ... But even more corrupting in its own way was the slippery refusal to debate the rationalizations openly. While the "moral equivalence" debate captivated some intellectual circles, the Reagan administration's basic strategy was simply to lie. Rather than defending the atrocities, Reagan and his loyalists most often just denied that the crimes had happened and attacked anyone who said otherwise as a communist dupe. Mostly, this lying strategy worked and spread a pollution that corrupted American political life. By the end of the Reagan-Bush era, the national media no longer put up any fight for these historic truths. The Watergate press corps of the 1970s had evolved into the Monica Lewinsky press corps of the 1990s. But in our view, there are two important principles here: first, that truth is fundamental to a healthy democracy, and second, that the rules of common decency must be applied to all human endeavors. There are some acts that are simply wrong no matter who does them or why. consortiumnews.com