ACLU files suit over Drone killings of US citizens
mikepegg44
Posts: 3,353
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html
What do you guys think?
Most probably know where I stand, but I am glad this will finally have to be answered and have a precedent set. I can only hope that the courts side with the bill of rights and the constitution on this one...
What do you guys think?
Most probably know where I stand, but I am glad this will finally have to be answered and have a precedent set. I can only hope that the courts side with the bill of rights and the constitution on this one...
that’s right! Can’t we all just get together and focus on our real enemies: monogamous gays and stem cells… - Ned Flanders
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
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Why didn't they simply assassinate Nazi sympathizers? Or all the Japanese who might have been loyalists...The same reason they shouldn't assassinate US citizens now...rights baby...
If all terrorists on the list of the gov't are fair game...I think a lot of people will be surprised when the knock on the door isn't in fact a candygram...
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
It is an interesting question. This didn't happen on US soil which is a big deal for me. Honestly, I can see the slippery slope but from where I am standing I'm leaning towards being ok with it.
If my door is in yemen and my house is full of terrorists I would never expect a candygram from the us gov't. These guys knew they were targets, it's not like it was a surprise.
that doesn't matter though...they are american citizens...you are afforded rights...we aren't at war in yemen...it was a targeted assassination of a US citizen...I find it deplorable...I am not defending his dumb ass at all...he was an idiot for getting involved...I worry about the implications that being deemed a terrorist threat seems to be enough justification for being killed, US citizen or not...
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
And how many US citizens have been targeted by drones and for what reasons? Are they going after people evading taxes or stealing girl scout cookies?
Just because you were born in the US doesn't give you immunity if you pose a serious threat, whether you be an al-Qaeda associate or a Bond villain. Much like in Lethal Weapon two, you can only pull so much shit under diplomatic immunity before Riggs puts a round between your eyes.
HAS JUST BEEN REVOKED!!
when you are born here you are born with certain unalienable rights or am I wrong?
we need to be better then them...It separates us from those that wish to blow up innocent people as their primary target...
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
I totally agree with you (not always a common thing in here).
By using drones... have we opened up our nation, our neighborhoods, as fair game in the rules of engagement?
Meaning, the drone pilots are in our neighborhoods, driving home after their sorties... picking up the kids from soccer practice and going out to dinner at the local Olive Garden, right?
Aren't these drone pilots, combatants?
In the conventional sense, the fighter/bomber pilots that strap an F-15 to their back and fly in harm's way are doing the same thing. The difference being, they are operating closer to the theater of operations and risk life and limb and threat of being shot down and captured. That is the risk that pilots take and they understand the risks of being in a war zone.
The drone pilots are doing the same thing, without the risk.
...
So... does that mean if an enemy agent comes over here and kills a pilot... at his home... in his car... while he is at dinner with his family... is is murder... or an act of war?
Would any bystander simply be considered 'collateral damage' the same way the neighbor of the house in Khandahar that is killed when the Hellfire missile hits its intended target?
...
I mean, if a nation like Russia or China used drones over here... wouldn't we go over there to kill their pilots? That would be justified, right? Because, after all, we all know war is Hell and we know what we are getting into when we go to war, right?
Hail, Hail!!!
This isn't a nation we are at war against. It's a fanatical ideology. It's not defined by borders or rules.
Fair enough. But, that's a different issue.
...
The issue at hand is Drones and their use.
If an enemy combatant blows himself up to kill a drone pilot, here in the U.S. Is it murder or an act of war?
Hail, Hail!!!
If we used a drone to take out a Chinese general in SE Asia, assuming they didn't retaliate by hitting a much more strategic target, they would have to undergo a lot of undercover work to determine who exactly piloted the drone in order to pull off the attack. The attack by the US would be considered the act of war.
If the DEA ever used drones to take on the Cartels, I could see them possibly having enough money to get a snitch to find out the pilot ... but again that would not be a nation going to war.
But if the Chinese government specifically targeted a drone pilot and blew up his house without being provoked, then I believe Congress would have the right to debate if it was an act of war.
Right. This reminds me of gorilla warfare. You need to adapt your strategies to deal with the risk imposed today, not yesterday.
I understand the hesitance on this one though. I'm not assuming I'm right, just my opinion at the moment.
why would you go to jail? not for saying fuck...probably for trespassing if you refused to leave...you certainly wouldn't be arrested for simply saying fuck at the top of your lungs...
but then you would be read your rights, a hearing would be set up and you would get bail or post bond. Then you would go to trail or plead guilty depending on what you were charged with...all the while you would be in what I like to call due process.
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
Maybe not arrested, but you will most likely find yourself detained and fined. You could spend money on the legal process and fight it, but that most likely indicates you are sane enough not to do it in the first place.
Anyway, lets put the focus on the guy convincing people to stick explosives to themselves and go kill the blue-eyed devil. If he was doing this from his second story apartment in San Dimas, I'm sure a unit would have been dispatched and he would have gotten his due process. But if you are operating from a lawless country and on the terrorist's most-wanted list, it not so easy to serve due process.
His due process was Obama getting on live TV and saying, "Hey, most unrighteous terrorist dude. We are most totally going to kill you for being a dick. Whoa."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Ofg2BacIM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
the rights of US citizens at home and abroad have been trampled on from a long time ago ... americans live by some kind of false ideal that their nation is somehow grounded in principle when the reality is that the US has lost any kind of credibility a long time ago ...
we neither know whether the deaths of civilians are intentional or not anymore ... we don't know if they were targeting someone because they were a threat to america or if they were a threat to the american imperialistic empire ...
i know the lot of you are gonna view this as yet another anti-america rant and get your backs up ...
but this is simply grounded in reality ... for all the discussions that have been had on this board over the years - the one thing that is essentially taboo amongst many of you "loyalists" is the history of US foreign policy and the factual evidence that america has done many evil things in the name of imperialism and greed ...
the continued apathy towards that is what allows these things to happen now and in the future ...
The suit stems from two drone strikes that took place over a six-week stretch last fall. The first, in September, killed Awlaki(so what) as well as alleged al-Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan(so what). The second strike, in October, killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son(put in harms way by his own father). All three were born in the United States(so what).
Godfather.
Here's the trap though, Obama is allowing this to happen, Mitt will allow this to happen, so what do i do? It is Apathy, but i think our Government is going to maintain control of the world be any means necessary. Whether it be by Military or Economically.
your gov't doesn't have control of the world ... multinational corporations do ... they just use the gov'ts to do their bidding ...
you are right that there aren't a lot of options ... there really is only one thing ... REVOLUTION ...
it sounds silly but that is the reality of it ... Occupy, tea party, whatever ... it's all ultimately pointing to the same thing ...
We kill one and another takes his place.
I'm fairly convinced no one will ever kill em' all. The best we can do is get the hell out of there and stop trying to be policemen in foreign lands.
That is it.
I remember asking the question, 'What does 'Victory' in Afghanistan mean?'... and no one could answer that other than saying the typical bullshit vague answers like, 'When they are a stable nation', without defining what that actually means... and how to get there from here... and how long it was going to take... at what costs.
We need to admit the fact that any chance we had vaporized when we abandoned Afghanistan and poured everything into Iraq. We need to cut our losses and admit our folly. Support our troops... reunite them with their families who love and need them.
Hail, Hail!!!
Because the U.S government can be trusted to decide who's innocent or guilty when it comes to 'terrorism' charges, right? Just like Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-American witch-hunts were perfectly fair and balanced?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/03/ ... -al-arian/
A Federal Witchhunt
The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
One of the first big show trials here in the post-9/11 homeland was of a Muslim professor from Florida, now 49, Sami al-Arian. Pro-Israel hawks had resented this computer professor at the University of South Florida long before Atta and the hijackers flew their planes into the Trade towers, because they saw al-Arian, a Palestinian born in Kuwait of parents kicked out of their Homeland in 1948, as an effective agitator here for the Palestinian cause. As John Sugg, a fine journalist, then based in Tampa, who’s followed al-Arian’s tribulations for years, wrote in the spring of 2006 on this website:
"When was al-Arian important? More than a decade ago, when Israel’s Likudniks in the United States, such as [Steven] Emerson, were working feverishly to undermine the Oslo peace process. No Arab voice could be tolerated, and al-Arian was vigorously trying to communicate with our government and its leaders. He was being successful, making speeches to intelligence and military commanders at MacDill AFB’s Central Command, inviting the FBI and other officials to attend meetings of his groups. People were beginning to listen and to wonder why only one side of the Middle East debate was heard here. That was the reason for Al-Arian’s political prosecution."
Now the United States is a country that is blessed by a constitution, a Bill of Rights and the rule of law, all of them upheld with degrees of enthusiasm that rise and fall according to sex, income and ethnicity. The fall is particularly drastic if your name is Arab, you publicly profess the justice of the Palestinian cause. Living in Florida doesn’t help either.
At the direct instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the feds threw the book at al-Arian in February 2003. He was arrested with much fanfare and charged in a bloated terrorism and conspiracy case. He spent two and a half years in prison, in solitary confinement under atrocious conditions. To confer with his lawyers, he had to hobble half a mile, shackled hand and foot, his law files balanced on his back.
The six-month trial in US District Court in Tampa featured 80 government witnesses (including 21 from Israel) and 400 intercepted phone calls (the results of a decade of surveillance and half a million recorded calls). The government’s evidence against Al-Arian consisted of speeches he gave, magazines he edited, lectures he presented, articles he wrote, books he owned, conferences he organized, rallies he attended, news he heard and websites no one accessed. One bit of evidence consisted of a conversation a co-defendant had with al-Arian in his dream. The defense rested without calling a single witness or presenting any evidence since the government’s case rested entirely on First Amendmentprotected activities.
The man presiding over al-Arian’s trial was US District Court Judge James Moody, a creature from the dark lagoon of Floridian jurisprudence. Hospitable to all testimony from Israelis, Moody ruled that al-Arian and his associates could not say a single word about the military occupation or the plight of the Palestinian people. During closing arguments, the prosecution noted a document that mentioned UN Resolution 242. Moody nixed that on the grounds that it showed Palestinians in altogether too warm a light and therefore might tax the objectivity of the jurors. As Sugg wrote after that ruling, if MLK had been on trial in Judge Moody’s courtroom for disturbing the peace, he wouldn’t have been allowed to mention Jim Crow or lynchings.
In December 2005, despite Moody’s diligence, the jury acquitted al-Arian of the most serious charges. On those remaining, the usual prosecutorial flailings under conspiracy statutes, jurors voted 10 to 2 for acquittal. Two co-defendants were acquitted completely. It was a terrible humiliation for the Justice Department, which had flung an estimated $50 million into the trial.
A jury split 10-2 in a defendant’s favor doesn’t augur well for conviction in a retrial. Indeed in the spring of 2006 the government declined to retry a wealthy Tampa businessman (the founder of Hooters) on tax evasion charges because the jury was hung 6 to 6, and therefore the proportion was too high to realistically expect a conviction during a retrial.
But the feds insisted they wanted to put al-Arian through the wringer again and — prudently, given Moody’s prejudice-al-Arian’s lawyers urged him to make a plea and put an end to his ordeal and end the suffering of his family.
The terms of the plea agreement were in line with Al-Arian’s long-standing contention, despite the government’s accusations, that he never contributed to the violent actions of any organization. The government settled for a watered-down version of a single count of providing services to people associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Statement of Facts in the agreement included only these innocuous activities:
(1) hiring an attorney for his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, during his deportation hearings in the late 1990s;
(2) filling out immigration forms for a resident Palestinian scholar from Britain; and
(3) not disclosing details of associations to a local reporter. (I remain completely baffled as to why it should be a crime to withhold information from a newspaper reporter.)
A central aspect of the plea agreement was an understanding that al-Arian would not be subject to further prosecution or called to cooperate with the government on any matter. The government recommended the shortest possible sentence.
On May 1, 2006, al-Arian came before Judge Moody for sentencing. Watching the proceedings Sugg, as he reported on the CounterPunch website, noted a smug air among the prosecutors. He also noted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had arrived in the Tampa area five days earlier. Under the plea, al-Arian’s sentence amounted to little more than time served, followed by his departure from the United States. But Judge Moody sentenced al-Arian to the maximum, using inflamed language about al-Arian having blood on his hands, a charge one juror said the jury emphatically rejected.
Now al-Arian faced eleven months more in prison, with release and deportation scheduled for April 2007. But the feds’ appetite was far from slaked. In October, Gordon Kromberg, an assistant federal prosecutor in Virginia notorious as an Islamophobe, called al-Arian to testify before a grand jury investigating an Islamic think tank. The subpoena was a outright violation of al-Arian’s April plea agreement and his attorneys filed a motion to quash it. The motion included affidavits by attorneys who participated in the negotiations attesting to the fact that "the overarching purpose of the parties’ plea agreement was to conclude, once and for all, all business between the government and Dr. al-Arian." The defense lawyers insisted that al-Arian would never have entered a plea that left him vulnerable to government fishing expeditions.
Al-Arian’s lawyers feared that their client was being set up for a perjury trap. Up in Virginia, Kromberg ranted to al-Arian’s attorney about "the Islamization of America," while down in Tampa, Judge Moody ruled that federal marshals could drag al-Arian to Virginia to testify. On November 16, al-Arian was brought before the grand jury and placed in civil contempt for refusing to testify.
One month after al-Arian was placed in civil contempt, the grand jury term expired, so Kromberg promptly impaneled a new one. Al-Arian was again subpoenaed and again expressed his ethical stance against testifying. This judge also held him in contempt, which could prolong his imprisonment by up to 18 months.
Al-Arian, who is diabetic, then went on a hunger strike. February 26 marked the sixth week of his water-only hunger strike, in which he has lost 40 pounds and has grown considerably weaker. On the 23rd day of his hunger strike, Al-Arian collapsed and hit his head; he has since been moved to a federal prison medical facility in Butner, North Carolina.
On January 22, when Al-Arian appeared before Judge Lee on the charge of contempt, he had this to say about his recent treatment:
"In the past three weeks, I have been to four prisons. I spent fourteen days in the Atlanta penitentiary under 23-hour lockdown, in a roach and rat infested environment. On two occasions, rats shared my diabetic snack. When I was transported from Atlanta to Petersburg (Virginia) and from Petersburg to Alexandria, they allowed me only to wear a t-shirt in subfreezing weather during long walks. In the early morning, the Atlanta guard took my thermal undershirt which I purchased from the prison and threw it in the garbage and when I complained, he threatened to use a lockbox on my handcuffs which would make them extremely uncomfortable. In Petersburg, the guard asked me to take off my clean t-shirt and boxers and gave me dirty and worn out ones. When I complained, he told me to ‘shut the f up.’ And when I asked why he was treating me like that, he said ‘because you’re a terrorist.’ When I further complained to the lieutenant in charge, he shrugged it off and said if I don’t like it, I should write a grievance to the Bureau of Prisons. When I said he had the authority to give me clean clothes, he refused and said if I don’t like it I should write a grievance to the Bureau of Prisons. During one of the airlifts, an air marshal further tightened my already tightened handcuffs, and asked me ‘Why do you hate us?’ I told him, ‘I don’t hate you.’ He said, ‘I know who you are, I’ve read your s-h-i-t.’ These are examples of the government’s harassment campaign against me that’s been taking place for years because of my political beliefs."
Measured against José Padilla, a man driven insane on Rumsfeld’s orders, I guess al-Arian is lucky. He’s alive, and still sane, though getting weaker by the day. He needs all the support we can muster. Across the globe, where al-Arian’s case has aroused much outrage, respect for the US commitment to Constitutional freedoms sinks lower still.
http://freesamialarian.com/
Sure, before it was the big bad Communist bogeyman that justified invading and carpet bombing Vietnam and killing approx 2 million people, training, funding, and publicly supporting and defending death squads in Latin America who committed genocide against the indigenous peoples.
Then the big bad bogeyman was drugs, that justified the U.S invading Panama and murdering over 9000 civilians, crushing people to death in the streets with their tanks, e.t.c.
Now the big bad bogeyman is 'terrorism'. But only their terrorism. Your terrorism is good terrorism. And the terrorism of your friends, like Israel, is also good terrorism. Their terrorism is bad terrorism. The Anti-Apartheid terrorism of the ANC used to be considered bad terrorism, until it was successful in ousting the racist Apartheid regime, and so now the U.S government refers to that terrorism as good terrorism.
By the way, are you suggesting the U.S has always followed the rules of engagement?
That means they are also illegal when carried out by Americans. Because America does not stand above the law.
http://compliancecampaign.wordpress.com ... ional-law/
In new low, U.S. claims extrajudicial assassinations legal under domestic, international law
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder this week laid out the Obama administration’s most comprehensive defense yet of its extrajudicial assassination policies.
Holder’s speech at Northwestern University School of Law on March 5 was notable both for its sweeping redefinitions of certain legal principles – on both the domestic and international levels – and for its skillful utilization of Orwellian doublethink to simultaneously trumpet principles of “American exceptionalism” while undermining the core values that underline those principles.
Holder boasted, for example, that “even when under attack, our actions must always be grounded on the bedrock of the Constitution – and must always be consistent with statutes, court precedent, the rule of law and our founding ideals.” He proudly cited, in particular, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, “which says that the government may not deprive a citizen of his or her life without due process of law.”
The attorney general then went on to rationalize the U.S. government’s systematic betrayal of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, particularly through its indefinite military detention policies and its program of targeted drone strikes on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals who have been designated by the Executive Branch as enemies of the United States.
This policy has been roundly condemned by human rights organizations and the international community, especially after last fall’s assassination-by-drone of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
As Reuters described the assassination program last October,
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.
In his speech at Northwestern, Holder defended the process by which individuals are targeted for elimination, arguing that although it is done entirely in secret, it nevertheless follows the Fifth Amendment’s due process requirements.
“Some have argued that the President is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces,” Holder said. “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”
However, as former State Department diplomat Peter Van Buren explained in an article at Huffington Post, Holder’s word games over due process vs. judicial process flies in the face of the original intent of the Fifth Amendment:
Like most of the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is beautiful in its brevity and clarity. When you are saying something true, pure, clean and right, you often do not need many words: “… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
There are no footnotes in the Fifth Amendment, no caveats, no secret memos, no exceptions for war, terrorism, mass rape, creation of concentration camps, acts of genocide, child torture or any evil. Those things are unnecessary, because in the beauty of what Lincoln offered to his audience as “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” the government would be made up of us, the purpose of government was to serve us, and the government would be beholden to us. Such a government would be incapable of killing its own citizens without care and debate and open trial.
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, pointed out the inherent danger with entrusting one man – in this case the president of the United States – to decide who lives and who dies based on secret evidence without any sort of judicial review:
Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact. Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.
In addition to arguing the constitutionality of the extrajudicial killings of American citizens, Holder also blithely asserted that the policy is in compliance with international law.
While acknowledging that “it is preferable to capture suspected terrorists where feasible,” Holder claimed “that there are instances where our government has the clear authority – and, I would argue, the responsibility – to defend the United States through the appropriate and lawful use of lethal force.”
“This principle has long been established under both U.S. and international law,” he said. Citing the President’s wartime powers purportedly authorized by Congress in 2001, he elaborated on the corresponding authority that supposedly exists on the international level:
Because the United States is in an armed conflict, we are authorized to take action against enemy belligerents under international law. The Constitution empowers the President to protect the nation from any imminent threat of violent attack. And international law recognizes the inherent right of national self-defense. None of this is changed by the fact that we are not in a conventional war.
This claim, however, ignores longstanding complaints from the international community over the United States’ lawless prosecution of the war on terror in general, and the drone assassination program in particular.
A 2010 United Nations report stated that a targeted killing outside of an actual battlefield “is almost never likely to be legal.” It rejected “pre-emptive self-defense” as a justification for killing terrorism suspects far from combat zones.
“This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the U.N. Charter,” said Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. “If invoked by other states, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.”
Failing to mention these grave concerns articulated by the international community regarding the legality of the U.S. drone program, Holder instead zeroed in on the word “assassination,” which he called a “loaded term.” He acknowledged that if these killings were considered assassinations, they would be unlawful.
“Some have called such operations ‘assassinations,’” he said.
They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self defense against a leader of al Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful — and therefore would not violate the Executive Order banning assassination or criminal statutes.
Most definitions of “assassination” include two components: that the killing is carried out as a surprise and/or secret attack, and that it is done for political and/or religious reasons.
As the Harvard Law Review pointed out in 2006:
Black’s Law Dictionary defines assassination as ‘the act of deliberately killing someone especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons.’ If termed ‘assassination,’ then attacks on leaders have been construed as prohibited by Article 23b of the Hague Convention of 1899, which outlaws ‘treacherous’ attacks on adversaries, and by the Protocol Addition to the Geneva Convention of 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflict (Protocol I), which prohibits attacks that rely on ‘perfidy.’
Whether the targeted drone strikes authorized by the President fall under common definitions of “assassination” is a matter of debate. Without a doubt, the strikes contain certain aspects of what are traditionally considered assassinations, in that they are deliberate, surprise, targeted killings of public figures outside of combat zones.
But regardless of the terminology used to describe the killings, the larger point is that the law explicitly prohibits extrajudicial executions, including state-sponsored assassinations, and requires that even the worst criminals be granted due process and fair trials.
In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observed that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
By separating concepts of “due process” and “judicial process,” and distinguishing unlawful “assassinations” from allegedly legal “targeted killings,” Eric Holder’s speech to Northwestern has taken this maxim to a whole new level.
The fact that the highest law enforcement official in the land was making these spurious arguments to one of the nation’s most elite law schools should send chills down the spine of anyone concerned about the future of the rule of law, and the rights of people anywhere to be protected from arbitrary, state-sanctioned, extrajudicial murder.
that is what i was trying to get at with my post ... but generally, peeps don't want to hear about america the bad ...
Good job I'm here to set them straight then
This is almost word for word what I teach my classes. Why is it un-American, or un-patriotic, to critique your nation? As a nation, we have done bad things to other nations, usually in the name of democracy then we have a difficult time understanding how other nations become frustrated with us. Perhaps if we spent more time in examining our history and our current actions then trying to do better then we might continue being a great nation. Unfortunately, I feel the US is heading for a big fall (mostly, we will no longer be THE superpower - pretty sure China is going to take over that spot).
I think this quote might be appropriate from the book I'm reading:
"Confucius said that one of the key requirements for turning a decadent society into a virtuous one is respect for the the truth. Any group, company, school, or state that refuses to permit its members so speak the truth is doomed to suffer, because without a knowledge of true conditions it's impossible to correct problems."
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
this is the proverbial nail on its head