June 16, 2005

The following is the first of my letters to friends and family from my travels in Argentina this summer.

Hola mis amigos,

So I´m currently in a Hostel in Buenos Aires and I must say that it´s been one of the most intesting trips of my life. After flying to Atlanta then Santiago, Chile I spent nearly six hours exploring the airport/sleeping before I finally got onboard a plane destined for Paris. On my right was a spaniard going to Buenos Aires, on my left was a french woman on her way to Paris. After landing at four in the morning I boarded a city bus which took me completely around the city in a good two hour ride where I managed to miss my stop by about 3 blocks. The Lime House Hostel is probably one of the most hidden places in the city, being found only through a single door (operated by a switch which takes up to a minute to work) down a darkened alley. But the people within were nice enough, and the second I had set down my stuff down I was offered a Quilmes (hands down the nastiest beer I´ve ever tasted, but the only widely available beverage). After a 6+ hour nap I thought I´d take a stroll around the city, which ended in getting completely lost, then thinking I´d been found, only to realize that I was once again....completely lost. Seeing the back streets of this town and the poverty which they attempt to mask was both humbling and heartbreaking. Everyone here smokes, constantly. There were some beautiful parks which I found eventually, and each one was crawling with dogs (there are about as many petshops as there are markets). Today I´m going to catch a bus north to Iguazu Falls where I´ll be staying for about 3 days. That´s all for now, peace,

Dave

Next

The litany of lies and hypocrisy that passes for information from this administration just keeps rolling on. It will take this country years to undo the damage to our image this pathetic excuse for an administration has caused.

In the news today are a couple of items that stick in my craw more than usual, even for this group of maladjusted sycophantic oligarchs.

The first is the criticism of Iran’s elections by George Bush. While Iran is far from a free country, how can Bush point fingers at any country’s political system when we are strong allies with a fundamentalist Islamic religious dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, or Musharraf, who came into power via a military coup in Pakistan (President-General, my ass), or the horrible regimes in places like Uzbekistan. (I won’t even touch on the fact that Saddam, Noriega, and Bin Laden were all previously allies and CIA operatives.)

To point at the countries we don’t like while ignoring the glaring failures of our allies only emphasizes the obvious hypocrisy. This is also going on at a time we have the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere on our doorstep (Haiti) and have done little to change the cycle of poverty, violence, and anarchy there. We may not care what the rest of the world thinks, but they do, and don’t have 15-minute attention spans.

In other news, yet another innocent Iraqi was killed by US troops in an overreaction of violence. A female high school teacher was driving behind a military convoy, was fired upon “in warning”, then shot to death.

From the article: “It's not clear how often Americansoldiers, strangers in a strange land where it's virtually impossible to distinguish friend from foe, mistakenly kill Iraqi civilians. U.S. officials say they keep no statistics, and since last year, the Iraqi Ministry of Health has refused to release the ones it keeps.”

We don't keep statistics on the number of innocent people we kill. We don't even track the number of claims filed against us. We shoot first and ask questions later. This was publicized because it was so blatant. Not only do we not know how often this happens, we don't even bother to keep count.

And we expect the world to believe that we are in Iraq for the people’s safety and freedom?