ojunk (Mike Weeks) wrote in message
From: (Issac Goldberg)

Members of the Armed Forces are trained to follow
orders without question. And if the orders originated
directly from the President of the United States,
there would be few in the service, if any, who would
not obey those orders, even if they were clearly illegal.

Can't think of a better example of your low opinion of members of the armed
forces, especially high ranking senior officers, then the above.

Is that the best you can do? Perhaps, like Bush, you
don't read newspapers, but apparently there have been
several members of the armed forces who willingly
tortured prisoners in Iraq, allegedly following the
orders of their superiors. Interestingly, U.S.
government lawyers in the Justice department and the
Pentagon were writing memos which tried to justify
the use of torture, including the gem that a
wartime President can break any laws he wants.
We have not been told who directed the lawyers
to write those memos, but it is fairly safe to
assume that they didn't just decide on their own
volition to write a memo to try to justify torture.
That is, it probably came from high ranking
senior officers.

It should also be pointed out that the U.S. invasion
of Iraq, in an unprovoked pre-emptive attack, was a
fundamental violation of the United Nations treaty
which was ratified by a 2/3 vote of the U.S.
Senate in 1945. According to the U.S. Constitution,
ratified treaties become the law of the land, and
cannot be violated at the whim of whoever is
President at the time. Bush the elder did get the
authorization from the U.N. Security Council for
the first Gulf War, Bush the younger was unable
to get Security Council authorization, so he
just ignored the U.N. and clearly violated
international law.

The U.N. was established with the goal of stopping
things like Mussolini's pre-emptive invasion of
Ethiopia and Japan's pre-emptive attack on Manchuria.

And speaking of high ranking senior officers, in
Operation Northwoods, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
drew up plans to create a pretext to invade Cuba.
Some of the not-very-legal suggestions made by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff we

1. Shooting down an airliner containing Americans
and blaming it on Castro,

2. Sinking a Navy ship in Guantanamo harbor and
blaming it on Castro, ["printing the casualty lists
in the newspapers would be especially effective," the
Northwood proposal said,] and

3. Shooting down John Glenn's space capsule and, you
guessed it, blaming it on Castro.

In all three instances, the Joint Chief of Staff
proposed murdering American citizens in 'false flag'
operation.

Fortunately President Kennedy rejected the plan. Score
one for the rule of law. Johnson would have probably
given the plan his OK. That is the kind of person
Johnson was, at least according to award winning
biographer Robert Caro, who provides keen insight
into what an unethical person Johnson was.