Sigh, a US jury acquitted the two Salvadorean Generals from their 1980 charge for murder of four American nuns. I’m not a Catholic, but I find the brutality of the murder reprehensible and the fact that the Generals were not brought to justice simply awful.
I a heard lawyer on NPR yesterday who said that all of the deaths of innocent people were tragic, but in the grand scheme of things (i.e., in the context of a bloody civil war), they were just four women. The generals could not be linked directly to their deaths.
Here’s a cite to look at: http://www.lchr.org/lac/nuns/nuns.htm sponsored by human rights lawyers. These women were not innocent victims “caught in the crossfire”, but pointedly taken out by opportunists who felt immune to any official followup.
If the US is unwilling to count US soldier body bags and therefore will not send troops into genocidal situations or situations where human rights are being flagrantly stomped on, the pursuit of human rights violators is about the only alternative action to take to limit these crimes against humanity.
Sanctions do not work; check out the rising infant and childhood mortality and morbidity rates in Iraq which are a direct result of the embargo.
Moving this to MPSIMS.