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Because he revealed evidence of one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lo

Because he revealed evidence of one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..

runawaybottle 6y ago
Was WikiLeaks part of exposing Prism as well? Or was that mostly The Guardian? I remember after 9/11 I grabbed a bunch of books about the Taliban from the library, and my dad said ‘look, the government is going to put you on a list now’, and I naively said ‘No dad, this is America’ (he was an immigrant). Sad stuff, they did put people on a list.
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
  It was really Greenwald and Poitras, and the Guardian just happened to be Greenwald's main outlet at the time. However WikiLeaks did help Snowden with his legal defense and flight to asylum in Russia.
  - asjw 6y ago
    > flight to asylum in Russia. Ironically Snowden tweets about freedom of information from Russia, where Putin literally kills journalists
    - phkahler 6y ago
      Snowden is like a thorn in the side to some people in the US government. Putin probably like him right where he is.
      - selectodude 6y ago
        No different than all of the Soviet dissidents we gave asylum to for no reason other than to piss off the soviets.
      - netsharc 6y ago
        Sadly Snowden is in a position where Putin can use him for a trade. One possible scenario I thought is Trump getting desperate and asking Putin for Snowden to be extradited so Trump can rah rah about being the man that got "the traitor". Meanwhile Putin would get whatever it is Putin wants from this trade, because as we know Trump is an unparalleled genius in deals...
        jerkstate 6y ago
        Come on. Trump's base thinks Snowden is a patriot. Do you even know Roger Stone?
        fit2rule 6y ago
        Snowden is a patriot in my mind, and I'm no Trump supporter. Just because you associate Snowden with Trump, as per standard agitprop victim procedure, doesn't mean that you should ignore the very real criminal behaviour that Snowden revealed to the world. You should probably pay more attention to the fact of illegal behaviour, more than playing cult doll games ..
        jerkstate 6y ago
        Every time I say something that can vaguely be construed as not correctly hating Trump or his supporters on this forum I get responses like this, using insulting emotional phrases like “cult doll games.” I was merely pointing out what I see as a misconception in his likely motivations. I still think the scenario GP presented is extremely unlikely and alarmist, why would you call my post agitprop and not that one?
        fit2rule 6y ago
        Just so its clear, I'm not aligned with the collective view that Trump is a Putin agent - I think this is an excuse used to ignore America's true, real crimes, against humanity which occurred way before Trump came to power, and is a deflection from the real issue - which is that America has been getting away with the murder of innocent people for decades in its illegal wars. From my point of view, it'd actually be GREAT if America could get along with Russia. This would require a great deal of humility and a vacation of vast amounts of hubris on both sides, however. "Trump is a Russian agent" is a meme designed to protect fragile American ego's from the truth, which is that America, through its unhindered asymmetric, illegal wars, is the #1 cause of violent, murderous upheaval in the world today - and therefore actually kind of deserves the orange buffoon tearing things to pieces. When war criminals are allowed to roam free, eventually the society they choose to rule becomes their target. That said, I don't love/hate Trump as an idol, either way. He is the least of America's problems. You're right though, we will trigger a great deal of animosity from the Trump-hating(,-loving) collective when we point this out. Agitprop is designed to push the collective mind in a desired direction - all the hating of Trump right now is doing, is preventing Americans from inspecting the real, legitimate war crimes and crimes against humanity that their nation has been committing - Trump-hatred is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like distraction mechanism. "The Party" (Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CFR) still gets away with murder, whoever is the figurehead...
    - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
      Ironically the US, the "land of the free", forced Snowden to stay in Russia because that's where he happened to be when the US canceled his passport.
      - Craighead 6y ago
        Ironically had Snowden sought mental health assistance he wouldn't be in Russia after breaking into secure systems he never received authorization to
    - kdtsh 6y ago
      He knows what he’s doing. If he’s quiet about Russia’s crimes against freedom of expression, it’s because he’ll be in serious danger if he says anything about them - and Snowden going under for saying something true doesn’t do him or anyone else any favours, considering if he did drag Russia through the mud we probably wouldn’t learn anything new. Never forget that he unveiled a domestic and international surveillance and spying program which is unparalleled in all of history. The fact is, for all Russia’s brutality towards journalists, the scale of Snowden’s findings of US crimes against free expression and privacy dwarf anything Putin has ever done - he wishes he could have a domestic spy agency as effective and popular as the NSA.
      - chinesempire 6y ago
        > unveiled a domestic and international surveillance and spying program which is unparalleled in all of history China
        kdtsh 6y ago
        We could argue about this, or we could agree to disagree and just acknowledge that the US' domestic and international spying programmes are some of the most far-reaching and intrusive in history.
        chinesempire 6y ago
        The problem with this definitions is not that they are wrong, they aren't, the problem is consequences. DDR was much smaller than US and his program was more limited than any actual one, given the advancements in technology of the past decades. And yet, STASI was much more effective and disruptive than many other similar projects before and after. At its peak STASI employed around 2% of the entire East Germany population. With the information gathered and the prevention of external influences, they could literally convince people that they were living in the best World possible using just a tiny wall and propaganda. Those who denied it, doubted about it, had contacts with western entities or were suspected of conspiring against the SED, were incapacitated, it doesn't imply they were killed on the spot, but they were made harmless, arrested, hospitalized, institutionalized in psychiatric wards or "disappeared" in concentration camps.
    - mindslight 6y ago
      It's not ironic, but rather straightforwardly pragmatic. A free press is an ideal to strive towards because it's something that local thugs generally attempt to shut down. Distance helps prevent coercion, and the adversary of your adversary is an ally. Analogously, the US is ideally hosting as many Russian-community-focused independent speakers as possible. The question you should be focused on is why did this whistleblower have to flee to Russia to begin with?
      - chinesempire 6y ago
        Isn't it ironic to post about freedom of press from the country where press is not free and journalists are killed? Iceland and Switzerland are free countries as well and refuse extradition to US
        mindslight 6y ago
        'Isn't it ironic to post about police brutality from a city where the police beat protestors?' Unless Snowden is proclaiming the virtues of being in Russia, then where he is has little bearing on the validity of what he's saying. Either making it to Iceland or Switzerland is logistically challenging (see: Bolivia), or the downsides of being in Russia aren't particularly bad when you're not speaking out against Russian interests.
        chinesempire 6y ago
        Snowden flew to Russia He chose to go there Would it be ironic to move to a city where police is brutal, knowing very well it is, by accepting an invite from the major of the city and then tweeting about police brutality in other parts of the World? Yes it would. I live 30kms away from Switzerland, it's really not that challenging to go there. Maybe being in Geneva to secretly investigate the Swiss bank system working for CIA, writing that Switzerland is like "living in an opposite World" just because your own country is living a financial crisis (2008) while Swiss were shielded by their government from it and refusing to testify against NSA while Switzerland offered asylum in exchange for cooperation, didn't work too well for him When it became clear that there was no ground to make it a political case, they dropped the offer Switzerland provides political asylum, not criminal asylum (Whether Snowden is a criminal or not is not relevant)
deathgrips 6y ago
>4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  I think the suggestion was that the actual war was illegal, mostly proven by now, there was no basis for it. As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      Money? Grab some books on the Iraq war. There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics). In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
      - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
        There is no doubt whatsoever that the war on terror has been a calamitous waste of money. One reason for the precipitous decline in war over the last seventy year is precisely that it no longer pays: (i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas. (ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain. I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.
asjw 6y ago
> one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east. If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone ordered the killing of 34 millions of US citizens. Lucky us the red army is not the red army anymore. He founded and promoted terrorism in Ukraine, shot down civilian airplanes, bombed refugees camps, used chemical warfare, prohibited by international treaties, on civilians He also ordered the assassination of a number of journalists But Snowden is his guest, so he must be a good man...
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin
  - fractallyte 6y ago
    Yes, and one would think that after all those examples of fine leadership, us 'civilized' nations would have learned a thing or two? Putin's regime carried out these crimes in the Caucasus in the 21st century (and earlier), and they are continuing even as you read this comment...
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      The Human Rights ideology is a con. No one is willing to make it real, i.e. to wage war to force other nations to conform to it. Absent that it will continue to be internationally irrelevant, window dressing that occasionally effects marginal decisions and never impacts anyone powerful.
    - fractallyte 6y ago
      OK, for the people who disagree with my comment, here is the reason we should support investigative journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_of_Chechnya_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_... Chechnya has been essentially cut off - considering its recent history, any guesses why??
catalogia 6y ago
> 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars You've mentioned this number a few times, but I can't find a source for it. Can you point me in the right direction?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  I don’t think 4 million will be a verifiable number, but the wiki on Iraq war details somewhere in the half a million via various examinations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War If we include Afghanistan, we could be in the million range.
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    Physicians for Social Responsibility did a very interesting report on this a few years ago - the figures have risen steadily since, however: https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ Focusing on Iraq alone: -- "From the relation between the current number given by IBC and the one given for the end of June 2006 (43,394), it concludes that the number of Iraqis killed up to September 2011 is at around 1.46 million" ... "This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely." -- And then .. there is the situation in Yemen. Americans are very, very quiet about that. And there is an evil reason for that. 2 million people have starved to death as a result of American-supported genocide by the KSA.
fractallyte 6y ago
4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...
- fit2rule 6y ago
  Not really, no. This is a common justification that Americans use to excuse themselves for any responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, but anyone outside the American bubble knows that those refugees and war orphans weren't happening before some kids in Arizona went to work in a strip mall to cowardly drop bombs from robot planes half-way around the world ..

runawaybottle 6y ago

Was WikiLeaks part of exposing Prism as well? Or was that mostly The Guardian? I remember after 9/11 I grabbed a bunch of books about the Taliban from the library, and my dad said ‘look, the government is going to put you on a list now’, and I naively said ‘No dad, this is America’ (he was an immigrant). Sad stuff, they did put people on a list.

AndrewBissell 6y ago
It was really Greenwald and Poitras, and the Guardian just happened to be Greenwald's main outlet at the time. However WikiLeaks did help Snowden with his legal defense and flight to asylum in Russia.
- asjw 6y ago
  > flight to asylum in Russia. Ironically Snowden tweets about freedom of information from Russia, where Putin literally kills journalists
  - phkahler 6y ago
    Snowden is like a thorn in the side to some people in the US government. Putin probably like him right where he is.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      No different than all of the Soviet dissidents we gave asylum to for no reason other than to piss off the soviets.
    - netsharc 6y ago
      Sadly Snowden is in a position where Putin can use him for a trade. One possible scenario I thought is Trump getting desperate and asking Putin for Snowden to be extradited so Trump can rah rah about being the man that got "the traitor". Meanwhile Putin would get whatever it is Putin wants from this trade, because as we know Trump is an unparalleled genius in deals...
      - jerkstate 6y ago
        Come on. Trump's base thinks Snowden is a patriot. Do you even know Roger Stone?
        fit2rule 6y ago
        Snowden is a patriot in my mind, and I'm no Trump supporter. Just because you associate Snowden with Trump, as per standard agitprop victim procedure, doesn't mean that you should ignore the very real criminal behaviour that Snowden revealed to the world. You should probably pay more attention to the fact of illegal behaviour, more than playing cult doll games ..
        jerkstate 6y ago
        Every time I say something that can vaguely be construed as not correctly hating Trump or his supporters on this forum I get responses like this, using insulting emotional phrases like “cult doll games.” I was merely pointing out what I see as a misconception in his likely motivations. I still think the scenario GP presented is extremely unlikely and alarmist, why would you call my post agitprop and not that one?
        fit2rule 6y ago
        Just so its clear, I'm not aligned with the collective view that Trump is a Putin agent - I think this is an excuse used to ignore America's true, real crimes, against humanity which occurred way before Trump came to power, and is a deflection from the real issue - which is that America has been getting away with the murder of innocent people for decades in its illegal wars. From my point of view, it'd actually be GREAT if America could get along with Russia. This would require a great deal of humility and a vacation of vast amounts of hubris on both sides, however. "Trump is a Russian agent" is a meme designed to protect fragile American ego's from the truth, which is that America, through its unhindered asymmetric, illegal wars, is the #1 cause of violent, murderous upheaval in the world today - and therefore actually kind of deserves the orange buffoon tearing things to pieces. When war criminals are allowed to roam free, eventually the society they choose to rule becomes their target. That said, I don't love/hate Trump as an idol, either way. He is the least of America's problems. You're right though, we will trigger a great deal of animosity from the Trump-hating(,-loving) collective when we point this out. Agitprop is designed to push the collective mind in a desired direction - all the hating of Trump right now is doing, is preventing Americans from inspecting the real, legitimate war crimes and crimes against humanity that their nation has been committing - Trump-hatred is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like distraction mechanism. "The Party" (Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CFR) still gets away with murder, whoever is the figurehead...
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    Ironically the US, the "land of the free", forced Snowden to stay in Russia because that's where he happened to be when the US canceled his passport.
    - Craighead 6y ago
      Ironically had Snowden sought mental health assistance he wouldn't be in Russia after breaking into secure systems he never received authorization to
  - kdtsh 6y ago
    He knows what he’s doing. If he’s quiet about Russia’s crimes against freedom of expression, it’s because he’ll be in serious danger if he says anything about them - and Snowden going under for saying something true doesn’t do him or anyone else any favours, considering if he did drag Russia through the mud we probably wouldn’t learn anything new. Never forget that he unveiled a domestic and international surveillance and spying program which is unparalleled in all of history. The fact is, for all Russia’s brutality towards journalists, the scale of Snowden’s findings of US crimes against free expression and privacy dwarf anything Putin has ever done - he wishes he could have a domestic spy agency as effective and popular as the NSA.
    - chinesempire 6y ago
      > unveiled a domestic and international surveillance and spying program which is unparalleled in all of history China
      - kdtsh 6y ago
        We could argue about this, or we could agree to disagree and just acknowledge that the US' domestic and international spying programmes are some of the most far-reaching and intrusive in history.
        chinesempire 6y ago
        The problem with this definitions is not that they are wrong, they aren't, the problem is consequences. DDR was much smaller than US and his program was more limited than any actual one, given the advancements in technology of the past decades. And yet, STASI was much more effective and disruptive than many other similar projects before and after. At its peak STASI employed around 2% of the entire East Germany population. With the information gathered and the prevention of external influences, they could literally convince people that they were living in the best World possible using just a tiny wall and propaganda. Those who denied it, doubted about it, had contacts with western entities or were suspected of conspiring against the SED, were incapacitated, it doesn't imply they were killed on the spot, but they were made harmless, arrested, hospitalized, institutionalized in psychiatric wards or "disappeared" in concentration camps.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    It's not ironic, but rather straightforwardly pragmatic. A free press is an ideal to strive towards because it's something that local thugs generally attempt to shut down. Distance helps prevent coercion, and the adversary of your adversary is an ally. Analogously, the US is ideally hosting as many Russian-community-focused independent speakers as possible. The question you should be focused on is why did this whistleblower have to flee to Russia to begin with?
    - chinesempire 6y ago
      Isn't it ironic to post about freedom of press from the country where press is not free and journalists are killed? Iceland and Switzerland are free countries as well and refuse extradition to US
      - mindslight 6y ago
        'Isn't it ironic to post about police brutality from a city where the police beat protestors?' Unless Snowden is proclaiming the virtues of being in Russia, then where he is has little bearing on the validity of what he's saying. Either making it to Iceland or Switzerland is logistically challenging (see: Bolivia), or the downsides of being in Russia aren't particularly bad when you're not speaking out against Russian interests.
        chinesempire 6y ago
        Snowden flew to Russia He chose to go there Would it be ironic to move to a city where police is brutal, knowing very well it is, by accepting an invite from the major of the city and then tweeting about police brutality in other parts of the World? Yes it would. I live 30kms away from Switzerland, it's really not that challenging to go there. Maybe being in Geneva to secretly investigate the Swiss bank system working for CIA, writing that Switzerland is like "living in an opposite World" just because your own country is living a financial crisis (2008) while Swiss were shielded by their government from it and refusing to testify against NSA while Switzerland offered asylum in exchange for cooperation, didn't work too well for him When it became clear that there was no ground to make it a political case, they dropped the offer Switzerland provides political asylum, not criminal asylum (Whether Snowden is a criminal or not is not relevant)

deathgrips 6y ago

>4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.

runawaybottle 6y ago
I think the suggestion was that the actual war was illegal, mostly proven by now, there was no basis for it. As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Money? Grab some books on the Iraq war. There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics). In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
    - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
      There is no doubt whatsoever that the war on terror has been a calamitous waste of money. One reason for the precipitous decline in war over the last seventy year is precisely that it no longer pays: (i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas. (ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain. I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.

asjw 6y ago

> one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east. If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone ordered the killing of 34 millions of US citizens. Lucky us the red army is not the red army anymore. He founded and promoted terrorism in Ukraine, shot down civilian airplanes, bombed refugees camps, used chemical warfare, prohibited by international treaties, on civilians He also ordered the assassination of a number of journalists But Snowden is his guest, so he must be a good man...

barry-cotter 6y ago
> If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin
- fractallyte 6y ago
  Yes, and one would think that after all those examples of fine leadership, us 'civilized' nations would have learned a thing or two? Putin's regime carried out these crimes in the Caucasus in the 21st century (and earlier), and they are continuing even as you read this comment...
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    The Human Rights ideology is a con. No one is willing to make it real, i.e. to wage war to force other nations to conform to it. Absent that it will continue to be internationally irrelevant, window dressing that occasionally effects marginal decisions and never impacts anyone powerful.
  - fractallyte 6y ago
    OK, for the people who disagree with my comment, here is the reason we should support investigative journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_of_Chechnya_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_... Chechnya has been essentially cut off - considering its recent history, any guesses why??

catalogia 6y ago

> 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars You've mentioned this number a few times, but I can't find a source for it. Can you point me in the right direction?

runawaybottle 6y ago
I don’t think 4 million will be a verifiable number, but the wiki on Iraq war details somewhere in the half a million via various examinations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War If we include Afghanistan, we could be in the million range.
- fit2rule 6y ago
  Physicians for Social Responsibility did a very interesting report on this a few years ago - the figures have risen steadily since, however: https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ Focusing on Iraq alone: -- "From the relation between the current number given by IBC and the one given for the end of June 2006 (43,394), it concludes that the number of Iraqis killed up to September 2011 is at around 1.46 million" ... "This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely." -- And then .. there is the situation in Yemen. Americans are very, very quiet about that. And there is an evil reason for that. 2 million people have starved to death as a result of American-supported genocide by the KSA.

fractallyte 6y ago

4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...

fit2rule 6y ago
Not really, no. This is a common justification that Americans use to excuse themselves for any responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, but anyone outside the American bubble knows that those refugees and war orphans weren't happening before some kids in Arizona went to work in a strip mall to cowardly drop bombs from robot planes half-way around the world ..