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Where has our compassion gone?
by
posted 7:10 pm on July 20, 2006
As wars rage all over the Middle East, I am finding that political discussions are becoming more and more prevalent in my personal life. Because some of my comments towards the American way of conducting business in the Middle East have met with the human equivalent of a volcano eruption, I have been trying to keep my comments to myself. But today I had a conversation that really upset me and felt that I needed to address the issue in a better manner than what I handled it then. While some have called me a liberal pacifist, I argue that I am far from a pacifist; I merely offer restraint and compassion towards those who are most different than I. This brings me to the American military’s treatment of prisoners-of-war. The fact that our government refers to them as enemy combatants does not change the fact that they are entitled to humane and ethical treatment simply for being a member of the human race. Our military has boiled two documented POWs to death since the Iraq war began, BOILED then to death (how many more are swept under the carpet?). I do not care if you are Osama bin Laden or Jeffery Dahmer, we as Americans hold ourselves to a higher moral code than many others do and that moral policy should not be shattered for anyone; we are better than that. The minute we lower ourselves to the level of our enemies, we become no better than those we fight against.
Geneva Conventions state that anyone captured in a time of war be given ethical treatment regardless of the suspected crime. The Bush Administration has claimed that our prisoners are not entitled to this treatment because they are not POWs but the aforementioned enemy combatants. Our current government and military have blatantly ignored international law and disgraced our country in the process. Our reputation as a country of justice and lover of peace has been replaced because of the horrible crimes we have committed on our enemies and the innocent unfortunate enough to live in the same nation that we are tearing apart. Where do we draw the line? When are we no longer fighting for the freedom of others but becoming terrorists ourselves? The definition of a terrorist is one who uses violence to incite fear in others while achieving political or personal gain. We must reevaluate our treatment of those we are fighting before we ourselves become the terrorists that we stand against.
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