[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 09:16 +0200, said Joy to the world:

> "Bush's remarks in the Rose Garden came a day after Iraqi and U.S. 
> forces announced they had *killed* Abdullah Abu Azzam, the No. 2 
> al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, during a weekend raid in Baghdad.
> "This guy's a brutal killer," Bush said."

A couple of nights ago I heard a military representative being
interviewed on television. He was explaining that the reason the United
States does not feel the Geneva conventions should not be honoured is
that these conventions call for giving prisoners certain basic comforts
and freedoms, "and we feel these amenities are completely inappropriate
for vicious al-Qaeda killers."

Just how it is known that the people being held are in fact vicious al-
Qaeda killers is a problem that may remain unsolved, since I have a
feeling that one of the amenities the soldier gentleman had in mind was
a fair trial. It would not have surprised me at all to hear him say "We
cannot give criminals a fair trial, because the only people who deserve
a fair trial are innocent law-abiding people, but criminals are guilty."
Well, he might not have said that, if it happened he had listened to Bob
Dylan singing (sort of) "to live outside the law you must be honest."

> If one forgets a second about the battle of good against bad, 
> freedom-lovers and freedom-haters, and the suffering it causes, it's 
> quite a funny remark coming from someone for whom Jesus is the favorite 
> political philosopher

Being an unrepentant liberal professor with alleged leftist leanings, I
feel it is my prerogative to assign my students a few chapters from
Peter Singer's excellent book "The President of Good and Evil." It is
full of delicious inconsistencies in the thinking of the man who is
currently living in the White House. (Look, if we can refer to the noise
that Bob Dylan makes as singing, we can refer to the synaptic exchanges
in GW Bush's reptilian cortex as thinking.)