The above comment was for Jim S.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=15511

HILLARY CLINTON’S RIGHTWING RECORD
ON INTERNATIONAL LAW

STEPHEN ZUNES, FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS – Senator Hillary Clinton has opposed restrictions on U.S. arms transfers and police training to governments that engage in gross and systematic human rights abuses. Indeed, she has supported unconditional U.S. arms transfers and police training to such repressive and autocratic governments as Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, and Chad, just to name a few. She has also refused to join many of her Democratic colleagues in signing a letter endorsing a treaty that would limit arms transfers to countries that engage in a consistent pattern of gross and systematic human rights violations.
Civilian Casualties

Not only is she willing to support military assistance to repressive regimes, she has little concern about controlling weapons that primarily target innocent civilians. Senator Clinton has refused to support the international treaty to ban land mines, which are responsible for killing and maiming thousands of civilians worldwide, a disproportionate percentage of whom have been children.

She was also among a minority of Democratic Senators to side with the Republican majority last year in voting down a Democratic-sponsored resolution restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries that use them against civilian-populated areas. Each of these cluster bomb contains hundreds of bomblets that are scattered over an area the size of up to four football fields and, with a failure rate of up to 30%, become de facto land mines. As many as 98% of the casualties caused by these weapons are civilians.

HILLARY CLINTON’S RIGHTWING RECORD ON INTERNATIONAL LAW

STEPHEN ZUNES, FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS – Senator Hillary Clinton has opposed restrictions on U.S. arms transfers and police training to governments that engage in gross and systematic human rights abuses. Indeed, she has supported unconditional U.S. arms transfers and police training to such repressive and autocratic governments as Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, and Chad, just to name a few. She has also refused to join many of her Democratic colleagues in signing a letter endorsing a treaty that would limit arms transfers to countries that engage in a consistent pattern of gross and systematic human rights violations.

Civilian Casualties

Not only is she willing to support military assistance to repressive regimes, she has little concern about controlling weapons that primarily target innocent civilians. Senator Clinton has refused to support the international treaty to ban land mines, which are responsible for killing and maiming thousands of civilians worldwide, a disproportionate percentage of whom have been children.

She was also among a minority of Democratic Senators to side with the Republican majority last year in voting down a Democratic-sponsored resolution restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries that use them against civilian-populated areas. Each of these cluster bomb contains hundreds of bomblets that are scattered over an area the size of up to four football fields and, with a failure rate of up to 30%, become de facto land mines. As many as 98% of the casualties caused by these weapons are civilians.

Senator Clinton also has a record of dismissing reports by human rights monitors that highlight large-scale attacks against civilians by allied governments. For example, in the face of widespread criticism by reputable human rights organizations over Israel’s systematic assaults against civilian targets in its April 2002 offensive in the West Bank, Senator Clinton co-sponsored a resolution defending the Israeli actions that claimed that they were “necessary steps to provide security to its people by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas.” She opposed UN efforts to investigate alleged war crimes by Israeli occupation forces and criticized President Bush for calling on Israel to pull back from its violent re-conquest of Palestinian cities in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

Similarly, when Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other reputable human rights groups issued detailed reports regarding Israeli war crimes during that country’s assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Senator Clinton insisted they were wrong and that Israel’s attacks were legal. Furthermore, though these groups had also criticized the radical Lebanese group Hezbollah for committing war crimes by firing rockets into civilian-populated areas in Israel, exhaustive investigations have revealed absolutely no evidence that they had used the civilian population as “human shields” to protect themselves from Israeli assaults. Despite this, Senator Clinton, without providing any credible evidence to the contrary, still insists that they in fact had used human shields and were therefore responsible for the death of more than 800 Lebanese civilians.

Senator Clinton has voted to send tens of billions of dollars unconditionally to Baghdad to prop up that regime, apparently unconcerned about the well-documented reports of death squads being run from the Interior Ministry that have killed many thousands of unarmed Sunni men.

In Senator Clinton’s world view, if a country is considered an important strategic ally of the United States, any charges of human rights abuses – no matter how strong the evidence – must be summarily dismissed. Indeed, despite the Israeli government’s widespread and well-documented violations of international humanitarian law, Senator Clinton has praised Israel for its “values that respect the dignity and rights of human beings.”

And YES – she highlights the sexism Hillary and Sarah suffeered (and the rest of us along with them). Great interview.

Thanks, Susan!

No problem increasing drug awareness and anti drug messages in schools. (I find it ironic/interesting that some people thought the war on drugs was just stupid and not worth the time) See, to me, all of those things directly attack the multitude of problems related to drug cartels. Doing these things will have measurable results; blanket bans will not.

I am for the legalization of drugs, not because I think it is a “stupid” war (your words) but because it has no chance of success-none. A simple process-flow diagram would demonstrate the impossibility of winning such a war.

I have some questions for your to ponder, xax:

1) How successful has the “war” on drugs been? (If your answer is that the prices have gone up, go to #7)
2) Exactly how has it deterred the cartels from running their drugs?
3) How much money have we spent fighting this war that shows no signs of success?
4) How much more money would you like those cartels to be able to make?
5) How many years have we fought this war and how many more will we be fighting it?
6) How many more police will become corrupted by the promise of cash from these druglords to look the other way?

and

7) Who is benefitting from this “war”? The DEA, which needs an enemy to take on, and the Cartels, which love the money they make. The American public ends up both paying both sides, in one way or another.

Doing these things will have measurable results; blanket bans will not.

Agreed. Now take your own logic one step further–blanket bans on drugs did not work, is not working, and will not work. There is no objective evidence of progress in this war except that the Cartels get richer and more violent; the DEA gets more and more money; drug users are still getting high; and the violence is getting worse. Legalizing drugs would make the Cartels irrelevant. The cash cow would be dead.

Daddy Kennedy made all his money before Prohibition was lifted and I’m sure he wasn’t happy when it ended, since it was good for his business. Ironically, when you take the position that you do concerning the “war” on drugs, you are actually aiding the same cartels you so despise.