to back up his claims that the US has a high tolerance for atrocities when it serves one of the US' goals... and that therefore it should not be a gigantic surprise when someone gets one in on the US.

This does seem to be the claim for which he's taking all the flak.

Sounds more like people attempting to deny reality because it might mean something about one of their social identities that's less than perfect to me.

For example, the gyrations the Republicans are going through to justify approving Gonzalez for Attorney General. Outside the US, his appointment (and probable approval) are pretty much taken as continuing evidence of the hysteria and madness that has taken hold of the US, and esp. US elites. The idea that you're going to appoint someone who called the Geneva Convention "quaint" and that claimed that torture used to gather information rather than for the purpose of inflicting pain is not really torture to become your top cop just makes your government look incredibly bad. The fact that there doesn't seem to be much of a backlash against this by the public makes your country look bad.

After all, it's not a long way from smacking around Gitmo inmates to smacking around the freshly arrested in a police cell... esp. if it's only to get "information" rather than getting a bad cop's jollies off.

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not responding to any posts where you mention Churchill.

Look, for many years the US in support of the multi-nationals that call it home has supported atrocities in many locations around the world; against trade unions, against economic nationalists who wanted to nationalise or simply encourage local industry, and so on. That this would result in a lot of people hating the US should not come as a great surprise, as they realise that the people who are randomly killing their union leaders have been trained and paid by the US. That this would eventually blow back on them should not be a great surprise either. What exactly is wrong with saying that? It's not like their hasn't been a boatload of evidence for this: United Fruit, Guatemalan death squads, Nicraguan Contras, etc (and I'm only using Central American examples because I'm more familiar with them; it's not like they don't exist in other developing nations). Saddam Hussein in the eighties is a sterling example of this particular practice; the fact that Hussein basically murdered his way to the top and laid waste to large swaths of ethnic minorities didn't bother the US one bit until he started threatening their interests.

He's just pointing out that expecting people to take that sort of thing with no complaint is extremely unrealistic. For that, he's being pilloried, because a lot of Americans want to feel that their country is completely without responsibility in the motivations of the WTC attackers, so that they can feel justified in any action taken against the ones they feel are responsible. This has some very negative effects for your country. One of the most notable is that the US is currently spending a lot of lives and money attempting to punish a bunch of people that had nothing to do with it, while ignoring a lot of the real perpetrators.

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------