Browne and foreign tyrants

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

>From: "George D. Phillies" <phillies@WPI.EDU>
>Subject: Re: Browne & foreign tyrants
>There is a section of the Geneva Protocols forbidding actions in occupied
>territories directed against officers of political parties.  Under that
>section, the actions in Somalia against, e.g., the treasurer of General
>Aidid's political party, were war crimes.  No one seems to get very upset.
>
>> If there is such a treaty, the US has a long history of ignoring it.
>> 
>> 0) Attempts to kill Hitler.
>I don't think we ever tried this.

And this was a real shame.  Over 30 million people died in WWII, directly or 
indirectly.  We knew that Hitler was going to be a problem well before 1936. 
 Think how many could have been saved...

If anything, WWII is excellent proof that AP is a good idea.  Stauffenberg 
was the German who bombed Hitler's meeting in 1944 but failed to kill him.  
Stauffenberg knew as early as 1942 that Hitler needed to be killed, and a 
recent "60 Minutes" episode related how hundreds of people knew about this 
plot.

The reason he failed was that while he was preparing the two bombs in a 
bathroom, he was interrupted. (The bomb's delay mechamism was acid 
dissolving a metal.)  Rather than being caught, he left one of the 
briefcases in the bathroom and went to the meeting with only one bomb.  
Furthermore, he left the bomb at the meeting, but it was pushed behind the 
heavy table after he left, which shielded Hitler from much of the force of 
the explosion.

If AP (or at least, some anonymous reward mechanism for Stauffenberg's 
family) had been available, he would have done "the honorable thing," and 
walked up to Hitler with the bomb and instantly detonated it right there, 
resulting in both Hitler's and Stauffenberg's certain death.  At least 
hundreds of thousands or perhaps over a million people would have SURVIVED.  
As it happened, Stauffenberg's reticence caused not only his death after 
torture, but also the deaths of well over a hundred coup-plotters, but also 
the thousands that were yet to die in the last 6+ months of WWII.

Question:  Would you kill yourself to save a million lives?  Even if you 
wouldn't, would you change your mind if your heirs would be anonymously paid 
an extra $10 million dollars or so?  I'd say that's a pretty substantial 
motivation, wouldn't you?



Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com