watchingamerica.com: The Crumbling of American Democracy

[unhappycamper]

The Crumbling of American Democracy
By Lieutenant General (Retired) Gennady Yevstafyev, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service
December 16, 2005

MOSCOW: A chain of scandalous revelations about American human rights violations both in and out of the United States is increasingly distressing, even to nations that look on patiently at the conduct of the current U.S. administration. They believed that the painful lessons learned in Iraq and other places would sober up the men in Washington, but they were wrong.

The recent controversy over secret U.S. prisons in third countries and "flying prisons" prove that Washington learned nothing from previous scandals, such as the Afghan concentration camp located at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba and the crimes of U.S. officials at the secret Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib.

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Notably, a number of prisons were located in the "new democracies," such as Poland and Romania, whose leaders are impudent enough to lecture Russia on "democratic principles." Indeed, they are the real veterans of Western democracy. Their mentors are much the same. While accusing North Korea of abducting Japanese in the remote Cold War years, the themselves are not at all squeamish about using methods that we thought had long ago become anachronistic.

The Leaders of the "Axis of the Good" have not proved so angelic. It is clear that from the very beginning, the Republican Administration laid claim to a monopoly on the use of "legitimate" violence on a global scale. The world doesn't seem to have awakened to the serious weakening of democracy in that country, which used to be its pioneer. It hasn't noticed that since the time of de Tocqueville, America has been habitually exploiting, for its own purposes, the language of freedom and equality. But the words often hide the disgusting deeds which were mentioned earlier.

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