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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (125980)	3/12/2004 1:25:43 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<I entertain the possibility that a crime was committed (killing Abbas)> Good. And I will admit a possibility that he died of "natural causes". <Patterns don't equal proof.> True. But you employ a double standard here. For any proposed war crime committed by Americans, you require 100% proof. You don't require that high a standard, for anybody else. If the available facts were identical, except Abbas had died in the custody of Italy or France or Israel or Russia, you'd be much more willing to conclude (based on the inevitably incomplete evidence) that Abbas was murdered. Selectively asking for absolute proof, is your way of selectively averting your eyes from evil. <I flip a coin seven times. All heads. Therefore, I will always flip heads.> There is no cause-and-effect relationship, between one coin flip and the next. There is an obvious relationship, between what a group of people do one day, and their likelihood of doing it again the next day. Group behavior has patterns. So, for instance, the fact that nobody has been punished for beating to death those prisoners at Bagram "with blunt instruments", means U.S. soldiers have impunity for war crimes. This increases the odds that, when more prisoners die in custody, the cause wasn't "natural".