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ADAM J. SMITH ON THE DEATHS OF AMERICAN TROOPS IN COLOMBIA: This week, a US reconnaissance aircraft, officially on an anti-narcotics mission, crashed in the war-torn jungles of Colombia.
For years, the American government has held to the line that our support of the Colombian military is necessary in order to fight the "narco-guerrilla" insurgency. Barry McCaffrey, former commander of US forces in Latin America, has been particularly disingenuous in portraying the thirty-five year-old Colombian civil war as a battle between an insurgency financed by the drug trade and a democratically elected government eager to end that trade. The truth, as nearly every credible Colombia expert is quick to point out, is far more complex. The Colombian military has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Add to that the fact that the military is closely aligned with various right-wing paramilitary death squads, and that elements of both are deeply involved in the drug trade. In fact, thanks largely to American prohibition, there is scarcely a part of the Colombian economy or ruling structure that has not been perversely impacted and wholly corrupted by that nation's most valuable export. The full story appears in ON DRUGS  |
KEVIN CAREY ON "THE RIGHT TO KNOW:" One of the characteristics of our age which, to demonstrate that few things are unique, we share with the Fourteenth Century is our failure to develop ethics to keep pace with knowledge. One key area is, of course, genetics, the science of what and who we are, so it is surprising in a species obsessed, in spite of a veneer of civilisation, with the survival of the race at all costs, that there has been far more controversy in the United Kingdom about genetically modified food than about genetically modified people.
Of course, in strictly biological terms the processes of modifying genes in plants and engineering conception through various forms of artificial insemination are different but the root ethical question is the same: to what extent should we interfere with the natural processes of reproduction? In both biological and ethical terms we have answered this question emphatically with the contraceptive pill on the one hand and in vitro fertilisation on the other. Priorities might change at last with the possibility that the UK may legislate, giving the offspring of donated sperm (and, one presumes, eggs) the right to know where they came from. This is clearly a case of sloppy rights theory being passed off as ethics. Let us start with first principles concerning the right to conceive and bear a child which is the root assertion from which the "Right to know" has to be derived... Read the full commentary in DAY ONE [NOTE: RON MORGAN of the BASTARD NATION Executive Commitee provides another view on the rights of anonymous donors.--Ed.] |
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OTHER EDITIONS
EDITION 177
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(Rod Amis targets the Religious Right in AMERICAN DREAMS; Kevin Carey reports from the UK on the last solar eclipse of the century in DAY ONE; G21 Loyal Readers comment on our new focus coverage in VOX POPULI.)
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