Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Universal Declaration of the Human Right to Starve”

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February 13, 2006

Universal Declaration of the Human Right to Starve

Hatched by Dafydd

So now we can add to the list of American liberty-violations against terrorists -- a list that already includes denying POWs their right to have Ramsey Clark as their private attorney, their right to worship Allah by ordering hits on blasphemers, and the right to force Christian guards to treat the Koran like a holy relic. The new terrorist right, according to United Nations "human rights experts," is the right to starve themselves to death in protest. In fact, refusing to allow them to starve themselves to death now counts as torture:

U.N. Says Guantanamo Detainees Were Tortured
Associated Press
Monday, February 13, 2006

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A U.N. investigation has concluded that the United States committed acts amounting to torture at Guantanamo Bay, including force-feeding detainees and subjecting them to prolonged solitary confinement, according to a draft report obtained Monday.

That's the attention grabber; but the real story is that these "experts" arrived at their happy conclusion, that America is torturing detainees, by first rejecting the idea that the war against jihadi terrorism is "an armed conflict."

The draft report, which will be presented to the next session of the human rights commission, dismissed the U.S. claim that the war on terror constitutes an armed conflict. It also said that the detainees at Guantanamo had a right to challenge their detention, and that right was being violated.

But consider this: all those detainees in Guantanamo Bay were captured in either Afghanistan or Iraq... which means that the U.N. also believes that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were not "armed conflicts!"

So an -- let us be neutral here -- an event that involves hundreds of tanks, warplanes, helicopters, mobile artillery, and about two hundred thousand soldiers, live fire at real enemies (killing them by the thousands), hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance being dropped on people's heads, conquering countries, deposing terrorist governments, and enforcing (at gunpoint) a new kind of law that includes democracy and civil liberties... this sort of event doesn't count as an armed conflict, according to five U.N. human-rights experts appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Commission in June, 2004.

This is breathtaking.

Of course, there is a method behind the utter madness: by stubbornly refusing to call these "events" armed conflicts, the experts need not apply the rules of war to POW facilities like Camp X-Ray, and its successor, Camp Delta. Legally, they can investigate Gitmo instead as if it were a civilian prison.

And in a civilian prison containing ordinary people convicted of ordinary criminal offenses, it would certainly be a terrible violation of human rights not to allow those people to have attorneys, not to allow them trials, to simply scoop them up and plop them into la calabooza, there to be interrogated endlessly to get them to rat out their friends. And that, evidently, is just how these "experts" view the war on militant Islamist terrorism: ordinary people merely trying to exercise their freedom of religion, rounded up in indiscriminate dragnets (probably on the basis of race and faith) and being browbeaten just because they won't squeal on their equally innocent buddies.

It's quite clear these "experts" began with their conclusion, then reasoned backwards to what initial findings they needed to make about Gitmo from the git-go in order to arrive where they wanted to be.

'Tis the gift to be simple
'Tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be

Like Shakers, most members of the U.N. nomenklatura define themselves as "pacifists;" but unlike Shakers, the U.N.'s definition of pacifism is to applaud any violence committed by a non-Westerner against the West, but to condemn in no uncertain terms any attempt by the West to defend itself. To quote David Bowie, "this ain't rock'n'roll; this is genocide!" Or in this case, democracide.

I could have titled this post "the U.N. Chooses Up Sides;" but of course they did that decades ago... probably shortly after 1948, if you know what I mean -- and I think that you do.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 13, 2006, at the time of 5:10 PM