Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it.
You do understand that we are STILL at war with North Korea, right? It was an armistice that was signed into effect, not a peace treay or anything else. An armistice is a mutual agreement for a temporary cessation of hostilities......and that is why the DMZ between NK and SK exists to this day.
In the 50's when the Korean Conflict was fought, we had a very powerful military, one of the two most powerful militaries on the planet, and the other one was NOT NK's army. We saw NK's army as being woefully inadequate and should have been easier to defeat than Iraq's was during either of the Gulf Wars. Yet, after years of fighting in NK, we fought to a standstill vs. NK. Why? China's involvement......weapons, supplies and troops given to NK.
As far as the rationale that human rights violations are reason enough to invade, then most countries in the world are ripe for invasion in addition to NK, including the U.S. .............. (I know no one will read this......too long for the short attention spans of most of those here, but to read the Cliff Notes is to miss the meat of the stiuation and never have a full understanding, only have the buzz words in their lexicon).......
The United States has long regarded itself as a beacon of human rights, as evidenced by an enlightened constitution, judicial independence, and a civil society grounded in strong traditions of free speech and press freedom. But the reality is more complex; for decades, civil rights and civil liberties groups have exposed constitutional violations and challenged abusive policies and practices. In recent years, as well, international human rights monitors have documented serious gaps in U.S. protections of the human rights of vulnerable groups. Both federal and state governments have nonetheless resisted applying to the U.S. the standards that, rightly, the U.S. applies elsewhere.
Americans have a leadership willing to recognize some core inequities-racial, gender and other types of discrimination, for example-but nonetheless unwilling to incorporate key international human rights principles fully into U.S. domestic policies and practices, as described below. At the same time, senior figures of the congressionally dominant Republican Party and many state-level governments-which are bound by U.S. obligations under human rights treaties-have denounced international standards as intrusive while advocating policies that effectively infringe upon the human rights of citizens and new arrivals.
In 1998, the United States continued to exempt itself from its international human rights obligations, particularly where international human rights law grants protections or redress not available under U.S. law. In ratifying international human rights treaties it has typically carved away added protections for those in the United States by adding reservations, declarations, and understandings. Even years after ratifying key human rights treaties, the U.S. still fails to acknowledge human rights law as U.S. law. Moreover, the U.S. is behind the rest of the developed world in failing to ratify the key international instrument on women's rights and virtually alone in the world in failing to ratify the international children's rights convention.
In many jails, prisons, immigration detention centers and juvenile detention facilities, confined individuals suffered from physical mistreatment, excessive disciplinary sanctions, barely tolerable physical conditions, and inadequate medical and mental health care. Unfortunately, there was little support from politicians or the public for reform.
Fifty-three percent of all state inmates were incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, while criminal justice policies increased the length of prison sentences and diminished the availability of parole. The U.S. incarcerated a greater proportion of its population than any country except Russia: more than 1.7 million people were either in prison or in jail in 1998, reflecting an incarceration rate of more than 645 per 100,000 residents, double the rate of a decade before. Approximately one in every 117 adult males was in prison.
In September 2000, the U.S. produced -five years late- its initial report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). With unprecedented and welcome candor, the report acknowledged the persistence of racism, racial discrimination and de facto segregation in the United States. The tenor and content of the report signaled the U.S. recognition that despite decades of civil rights legislation and public and private efforts, the inequalities faced by minorities remained one of the country's most crucial and unresolved human rights challenges.
One of the report's most significant weaknesses was in its consideration of the role of race discrimination in the criminal justice system. It acknowledged the dramatically disproportionate incarceration rates for minorities, noted the many studies indicating that members of minority groups, especially blacks and Hispanics, "may be disproportionately subject to adverse treatment throughout the criminal justice process," and acknowledged concerns that "incidents of police brutality seem to target disproportionately individuals belonging to racial or ethnic minorities." But it did not question whether the ostensibly race-neutral criminal laws or law enforcement practices causing the incarceration disparities violated CERD, nor did it acknowledge the federal government's obligation, under CERD, to ensure that state criminal justice systems (which account for 90 percent of the incarcerated population) were free of racial discrimination.
The report did acknowledge the dramatic, racially disparate impact of federal sentencing laws that prescribe different sentences for powder cocaine versus crack cocaine offenses, even though the two drugs are pharmacologically identical. The laws impose a mandatory five year prison sentence on anyone convicted of selling five grams or more of crack cocaine, and a ten year mandatory sentence for selling fifty grams or more. One hundred times as much powder cocaine must be sold to receive the same sentences. By setting a much lower drug-weight threshold for crack than powder cocaine, the laws resulted in substantially higher sentences for crack cocaine offenders. Although the majority of crack users were white, blacks comprised almost 90 percent of federal offenders convicted of crack offenses and hence served longer sentences for similar drug crimes than whites. While recounting the unsuccessful effort to secure a limited reform of the cocaine sentencing laws (a reform which, in any event, would still have left black drug defendants disproportionately vulnerable to higher sentences), the report did not venture an assessment of whether the current laws violate CERD. Nor did it consider whether the striking racial differences in the incarceration of drug offenders at the state level was consistent with CERD, reflecting the general reluctance to subject the U.S. war on drugs to human rights scrutiny.
The world's largest prison population continued to grow because of punitive criminal justice policies that mandated harsh prison terms even for minor nonviolent offenses and increased the length of sentences, and because of increases in the number of inmates returned to prison for parole violations. In August, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that the number of men and women behind bars in the U.S. at the end of 1999 exceeded two million and the rate of incarceration had reached 690 inmates per 100,000 residents -a rate that is the highest in the world (with the exception of Rwanda). The Department of Justice also revealed that approximately 1.5 million children -2 percent of the country's children- had a parent in state or federal prison.
Prison was not reserved for notably dangerous or violent offenders: approximately 70 percent of all new admissions to state prison in 1998 (the most recent year for which data was available) were people convicted of nonviolent property, drug or public order offenses. The unrelenting war on drugs continued to pull hundreds of thousands of drug offenders into the criminal justice system: 1,559,100 people were arrested on drug charges in 1998; approximately 450,000 drug offenders were confined in jails and prisons. According to the Department of Justice, 107,000 people were sent to state prison on drug charges in 1998, representing 30.8 percent of all new state admissions. Drug offenders constituted 57.8 percent of all federal inmates.
Racial minorities comprised a strikingly disproportionate percentage of the prison population. African Americans constituted 46.5 percent of state prisoners and 40 percent of federal prisoners, although they constituted only 12 percent of the national population. Nationwide, black men were eight times more likely to be in prison than white men, with an incarceration rate of 3,408 per 100,000 black male residents compared to a white male rate of 417 per 100,000. But in eleven states, black men were incarcerated at rates that were between twelve and twenty-six times greater than those of white men. The Department of Justice estimated that 9.4 percent of all black men in their late twenties were in prison in 1999 compared to 1 percent of white men in the same age group.
Drug law enforcement practices that disproportionately target black Americans contributed to wide disparities in black and white incarceration rates. Nationally, black men were admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate relative to population that was 13.4 times greater than that of white men. Black youths with no prior admissions were admitted to public correctional facilities for drug offenses at forty-eight times the rate of white youths. In some states the racial disparities were even worse: in seven states, blacks constituted between 80 and 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison and, in at least fifteen states, black men were sent to prison on drug charges at rates that were from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than those of white men. The concentration of drug law enforcement in low income minority neighborhoods and higher arrest rates for black drug offenders than white were primarily responsible for the remarkable racial disparities in drug offender incarceration.
China. Iran. Saudi Arabia. Congo. What do these four countries have in common? They are the only four countries in the world that execute more people than the United States.
A comprehensive review of capital cases over a twenty-three year period by a team of university professors revealed that more than two of every three death penalty sentences were overturned on appeal. The study found that capital trials were persistently and systematically fraught with error and injustice, including poor legal representation of capital defendants by incompetent attorneys and prosecutorial misconduct.
Although racial disparities in the application of the death penalty among the states have long been documented, a new study by the U.S. Department of Justice found dramatic racial and geographic imbalances in the administration of the federal death penalty as well. The study found, for example, that 80 percent of federal defendants who faced capital charges, and 74 percent of convicted defendants for whom prosecutors recommended the death penalty, were members of minorities. The study increased public concern that race plays an impermissible role in death penalty decisions.
The U.S. continued to be one of only six countries to execute persons who were younger than eighteen when they committed their crime. The imposition of the death penalty on persons who were under eighteen years of age at the time of their offense violates the provisions of several international and regional human rights instruments. Despite nearly unanimous international condemnation of the use of the death penalty for juvenile offenders, six countries in the world -Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Yemen (nice company to be in)- were known to have executed juvenile offenders in the 1990s. The United States led the list with nine executions between 1990 and 1998, one-half of the known worldwide total for the period.
Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".
He is, of course, quite right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists that they "must at all times be protected... against insults and public curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be prosecuted for war crimes.
This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.
His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention.
It is not hard, therefore, to see why the US government fought first to prevent the establishment of the international criminal court, and then to ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its jurisdiction.
Additionally, Congress has passed legislation that could hamper implementation of a treaty to ban chemical weapons. The Senate continually refuses to consider a broad nuclear test ban treaty while at the same time successive administrations have lobbied India and Pakistan to sign.
The United States has opted out of a convention to ban land mines and, alone among NATO allies, refused to participate in a permanent international court for war crimes.
Apart from Iceland, the United States was the only industrial power that did not sign an agreement reached in Japan to reduce global warming.
When Americans think ''human rights,'' they assume the term applies to somewhere else. Something to worry about in Africa, or Bosnia, or Colombia. Yet human rights battles are fought on American soil every day, right in front of our faces -- in our neighborhoods, our schools, our city halls, our homes, our jails. In these places, and in many others, people struggle continually against assualts on their most basic rights. Sometimes they win triumphant victories. Sometimes they suffer crushing defeats.
So please, don't think the U.S. is any special place for human rights....while we may not pubically torture and execute prisioners, and some persons would even argue about that, witness the over 12,000 complaints by citizens each year over excessive use of force by police, we are no saints here. And if you go further back in our history, you'd find the U.S government using blacks as test subjects for studying the long-term effects of syphillus, LSD effect studies on unsuspecting U.S. citizens, and on and on.
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