Random Thoughts, Notes, & Incidents

It's fully appropriate that the world would (and should) come together to provide support for the victims of the recent natural disasters in South East Asia. When hundreds of thousands of people are killed in one tragic moment, it's hard not to take notice. But there are also tragedies happening elsewhere in the world, nearly every day, that don't carry the dramatic impact. Sometimes the other tragedies are overlooked because of the slow pace of the killing, sometimes because the victims are not perceived to be "innocent", and sometimes the oversight is entirely political.

In the Boston Globe, Derrick Z. Jackson writes about The 'tsunami' victims that we don't count. In this piece, Jackson compares the tragedy of Asia to the tragedy of Iraq. "Tens of thousands of people die by an act of nature and we say we cannot imagine the horror," writes Jackson. "We say it defies comprehension. We call it a catastrophe... In Iraq we kill off thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of innocent civilians with our own hands, and we reject any attempt to comprehend what we have done. Countless Iraqi civilians are homeless. We call it liberation."

Jackson goes on quoting President Bush's speeches wherein he prayed for the survivors of the earthquake and tsunami, and for those who are still missing. "In a nation that supposedly reelected Bush on 'moral values,'" Jackson asks, why have "there have been no prayers from the White House for 'all the people whose fate is still unknown' in Iraq.?"

---

Smoking gun found: Read about the memo in which Bush okayed the use of torture in Iraq and Guantanamo.