( Debunking the american charity myth )April 03, 2010 — Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com
For the full video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrf...
Aljazzera published:
(The) Two young children whose father was killed in the attack could not understand why they were targeted.
"We were coming back and we saw an injured man. My father said, let's take him to hospital. Then I heard only the bullets ... Why did they shoots us? Didn't they see we were children?" said Sajad Mutashar, who was injured along with his sister
Salwan Saeed, Saeed's son, said: "The American has broken my back by killing my father.
"I will not let the Americans get away with it.
"I will follow the path of my father and will hold another camera."
In 2006, against a United Nations target of 0.7 per cent, the US gave foreign aid which amounted only to 0.18 per cent of its Gross National Income (GNI), and it was placed above only one industrialised country, Greece, in a list of 22 countries. The actual worth of aid given by the US is substantially reduced by the condition that the products purchased with the aid money must be manufactured in the US. American products generally cost twice as much as the cost of products of the same quality manufactured elsewhere.
The conditions attached to donations for the purchase of food commodities such as wheat are all the more dismal
What is interesting (and unfortunate for the poor and the needy of the world) is that the American public believes, or has been made to believe, that their government has been too generous in giving foreign aid and that it must be cut down to one-tenth of what they think to be its present level
The results of some surveys referred to by the author show that '42 per cent of respondents believed that the nation gives more than four times as much as it actually gave, while 8 per cent of Americans thought that the US gives more than 100 times the actual amount!.
AND much more! just google the myth of american generosity.
From the book The Life You Can Save: Acting now to end world poverty
By Peter Singer
