1 Stevie, THANK YOU! I had a link to that 9/11 thing a while back and lost it...thanks so much for posting it again.

HBO had a very good 9/11 program, as well. It's available for ordering on their website. I'll get you the link.

2 Yes. There is no other reason in our hearts and souls...And there should not be.

Siempre,

Rei

3 OK, I'm in the minority here, and I'll go away soon, but I can't seem to shut up right now.

Iraq's WMDs were the premise for going into Iraq, not 9/11 and terrorism. The Bush administration has not been able to conclusively prove or even point to accurate intelligence that would indicate Saddam Hussein was in any way connected with Al Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks. Hussein was mistreating people horribly, no question at all. If we were going to go in there over moral outrage, it should have been done years ago, and we should be doing it North Korea, Rwanda, China and countless other countries where human rights are being violated day in and day out.

I'm a pretty fallen Catholic, I'll admit it, but I still believe wholeheartedly in the sanctity of human life. Not because it's necessarily the Christian thing to do, although it's supported by by scripture and doctrine, but because I'm part of the human population who was horrified by 9/11. We were attacked because we believe differently than the terrorists who tried to destroy all that's good. Can we then turn around and attack any other mother's son who is merely doing as he was taught? Isn't that what our soldiers were doing while guarding those Iraqi prisoners, just doing what they were taught?

We're reasonable, we're rational, and above all, we're good people. We don't kill others for being different or even for being wrong because each life is genuinely sacred. Someone has to rise above the hatred and violence and killer instinct to try to solve problems. We're Americans. We should be the ones doing that.

4 Jane... cool. I also wish I could get a copy of that French guys video that aired on 'regular' TV. The one where he was filming firefighters and just happened to catch it all? Yeah, that one.
First time the word 'fuck' was used on regular TV and nobody burst into flames from it. Imagine that... *snort*

Rei... Shouldn't be, but there is.

Snow... God, you're a good woman... a good person. Your enormous empathy (thanks for the appropriate word there, Orionoir) shames me, but... siiigh.
And, don't be goin' nowhere, either. I kinda need you to help me learn to temper my temper, I think. I learn a LOT from you and how you deal with "him".
If (and I believe you... hell, I've heard it before) but IF WMD were the reason for going over there, then what, exactly, have we done about 9/11 and the less-than-humans who did that? Anything? (Seriously wondering, not being a wiseass...)

I don't advocate doing what they do, the terrorists, but, when they DO do those things, we need to give back what we're given and then some, or people (countries) are going to see us as less than we think we are and do even more heinous things, because they'll know we'll just take it,
won't they? These terrorists seem to have.

I looked up 'sanctity' just to be sure I knew exactly what it means. Didn't want just 'an idea' of it, ya know? After reading that, I'm again drawn to the conclusion that you are, indeed, a much better person than I am, because I just can't see it that way.
There are many lives that just need to be ended because they're such a waste, so filled with evil. Besides BinLaden, there's people like Ted Bundy, Charles Starkweather... murderers like them. We killed them for what they did (thank Christ) and what they did was beans compared to those hijackers and other terrorists.
A life is only as sacred and holy as it is lived, to me. If all a person can do is blow up people who're different, that person should be eliminated, like the virus they are.

They attacked us for believing differently than them. Okay. Got that. Now, us attacking them would be for them attacking us, not because they worship cucumbers or goats, or whatever they believe in.
We didn't attack them for what they believe. They did that to us. We need to kick ass for what they did to our citizens who never did a thing to them.
Don't we?
How else is the world gonna know we won't stand for it?
Or... will we? Do we? If the only reason we're in Iraq is WMD, than, maybe we will stand for terrorist activities and that's scarier than anything they've done so far.

(Back to speaking to everyone now...)

Wanna know the most frustrating thing about all this for me? The more I talk to people about it, the more confusing it all gets.

First we're going there because 9/11 was incomprehensibly evil and we have to get those bastards to ensure it'll never happen again.
Then, it's about WMD and Saddam.
Then, it's about oil.
Then, it's said to be for Bush to be a hero and get re-elected, or some such nonsense.

But, what I'm understanding now is that BinLaden blew the WTC to hell and gone and we, in turn, capture Saddam, who had not a nickle in that shit.
Why? What did that, or he, have to do with anything? Were we gonna go kick his ass anyway and just expedited it to help us get past (or forget about) 9/11? If not, then what are we DOING? (Not that whatever it is is wrong, I just don't understand, myself, what our goal is over there, if we aren't trying to kill terrorism and those who perpetrate it.)

Why were we so concerned with that moron, instead of the ones who actually did the deed and their supporters?

This keeps being called the war on terrorism.
Then, it's said not to be that, after all.
Then it is again, then it ain't.

All I know for sure is that we need to not let 9/11 go unpunished. If that's not what this war is about, then... I don't know what. To say or to think.

If those prisoners are truly innocent of terrorizing us in any way, then our guys need to cut the shit. If they WERE involved in any way, shape or form AT ALL, then they deserve everything they're getting and then some and our guys don't need to be prosecuted for anything, in my (utterly confused at this point) opinion.

My head hurts and I miss John Wayne and his way of handling assholes like them.
This country wasn't founded on eating shit and I wish to God it was still that way.
But... it isn't. Or, at least it doesn't seem to be anymore.
How sad.

Ya know, if the Mafia was in charge of all this shit, it WOULD be about 9/11 and it woulda been over with by 9-15-01. They have 'rules'. They follow them and when someone doesn't...
"Fuck us? No... fuck you." Bang.
As it should be.
(Well, it certainly gets the message across in no uncertain terms, doesn't it?)

5 Hey, its about 9-11, it's about oil, its about all those things put together. And you are right, the mafia would have done a better job of it, and they would have made a profit while doing it.

Me

PS Is any of what I wrote in my book so far of real help to you? The background was pretty extensive in the history.

Me again

Siempre

6 Snow, the WMD were *one* reason, and the President even said (more than once) that it wasn't the primary reason. Having said that:

What about the tons of chemicals recently discovered in Jordan when a terrorist cell was busted there, foiling the plot to poison gas part of their capital city? Evidence points to the chemicals being smuggled in from Iraq.

What about the Kurds who were gassed by the Iraqi army after the first Gulf War (causing the creation of the 'no-fly zones'?

What about the Iranians gassed by Iraq during their decade-long war?

We *knew* he had them. The entire world thought he still had them. We haven't found them yet, and might never. But you cannot say that there was no proof of their existance.

You also said:
"We don't kill others for being different or even for being wrong because each life is genuinely sacred. Someone has to rise above the hatred and violence and killer instinct to try to solve problems."

I agree completely with the sentiment, except for one thing: Islamic leaders have stated repeatedly from the beginning of their religion that their are only two kinds of people in the world - Muslims and Infidels. They also state (again and again) that Infidels must convert to Islam or die. *They* do not accept co-existance, and never will because it's a basic precept of Islam. "Us or them", and there's no room for "them" in their worldview.

All the good feelings and rising above in the universe isn't going to stop someone from trying to kill you if it's a holy act to him. And you have even less chance if his dying in the process is his ticket to heaven.

7 Ted, there is no doubt that the information that we had prior to 1999 was critical to the advance of the war towards Iraq. Various other factors were involved as well, including Saddam's funding of various terrorist organisations, the PLO chief among them. But he also provided sanctuary and a free passes to other groups going through Iraq. The dominant force behind the pre-emptive strike in Iraq is a direct result of Saddam's threat of wmd *combined* with the possibility that he would and could offer them to those said terrorists and also lob similar weapons into Israel and other surrounding allied Arab Nations. Saddam's proclivity to do away with his own people for no other reason than amusement was more than a good enough way for him to aid the terror underground.

Truly -

Rei

8 You just go ahead and chant your mantra, Snowball, and nothing bad can ever happen to you, because bad things only happen to bad people.

9 Ok.. I am listening to the hearing now with Rumsfeld and I just do not understand how high the horses have gotten for the majority of those questioners. I can understand the emotion and anger in John McCain, after all he was imprisoned and literally held as a golden trophy by the VietCong for half a decade. He was beaten and broken. But coming from Robert Byrd, who used to wear a nice white hood himself and do all those same forms of terrorist activities to the African American and Jewish people of his home state for FUN is a bit much.

I think truly that the politicians have become cartoon characters of themselves and I am not liking it. This has become a smokescreen for avoiding other issues, such as Jamie Gorelik and her memo to dis-assemble the intelligence community. Alot of things have gone wrong, and there is no one person to blame, but that event should definitely be focused on as well instead of being swept aside for a bunch of our soldiers inflicting psychological, not physical, damage to people they needed to get to talk.

Off my Podium now...

Next?

Rei

10 Everytime I see something like that it's like re-living it.

I hate to see this everytime but we ALL need to be reminded what started all of this....and that we, as Americans, intend to finish it and to make those bastards rue the day they were conceived.

Lock and load.

11 Babe, what I tried to explain to you when you called yesterday, is pretty much what Snowball
is trying to impart. 9/11 has nothing to do with our attacking Saddam. That attack was justified by the (seems now) false reports of Wmds, and his
imminent use of them. The twin towers, Saddam gassing members of his own population for being anti-Saddam have nothing to do with Bush's decision to attack. (It's perfectly ok to gas
or otherwise abuse your own citizens. Germany could have gassed Jews for a decade, but war was declared because he attacked other countries.)

Keep in mind that OIL is a large factor when discussing the Middle East. We came to the Saudi's aid, and kicked the Iraqi army's ass
a few years ago because of, basically,OIL.

Your poignant film of 9/11 is heart-rending, but has nothing to do with us being at war with
Iraq. (A war which was declared won by Bush
a year ago, by the way.) I talked to you about
Osama; you didn't know who he was. (A bad guy,
maybe a president of some bad country?) You didn't
know that Bush is a republican.. You have no idea
about the politics and problems of the Middle East, but you are completely pissed the big mess
we're involved in now, and you should be. But be pissed for the corrct reasons, and be pissed at
the proper people. You must realize, now that we
are into a (Holy) war, that we are attempting to
indicate to the Muslim people that we don't hate
Muslims or the Muslim religeon. We are trying to appear as the apotheosis of Saddam or Ossama.
"We're here to help you folks! Muslims and Christians working together in mutual respect,
to help make your lives better, and to never denigrate your beliefs..."

This episode in the prison has ruined any chance of convincing any Muslim that we're the
'Good' guys and those stinking Ossama/Saddam
types are the 'Bad' guys. As a public relations
disaster, it would be difficult to imagine worse.

You are indignatly pissed, good for you.
But you haven't paid one minute's attention over
the past several year to what's been going on, and what's at stake. It is way late to attempt
to explain to you how wrong mistreating those
prisoners was. And, for Christ's sake (or Allah's) don't be taking pictures!

Enough ranting, I love you.

Dad

12 I agree with alot of what you say, haveayen, but there is much more to it than that. Oil, is most definitely not the primary reason for this war.

This war against terrorism, Bin Laden, Saddam, Taliban, Al Qaeda, you name it, has been declared upon us for a lot longer than since september of 2001. In 1993, the world trade center was bombed the first time, and that is when we should have thrown our muscle into the fire. In Somalia, while our troops were trying to ensure the delivery of food to the starving people there, agents of the taliban and al qaeda threw themselves into the fray against us with the drug lords in mgadishu, again, we did nothing but turn our backs and wash the blood from our hands.

We, because no one else will, need to protect ourselves from this madness. Saddam had threatened the world, us, israel, and, saudi arabia specifically for years with the threat of nuclear and bilogical warfare. He had developed missiles, and purchased them and the technologyfor them, from france, germany, japan, korea and china. Can you imagine what would have happened if he had lauched his scud 2 and scud 3's into ryadh or jerusalem loaded with a few megatons of nuclear mushrooms? He did not, and I am glad that he was not allowed to simply because we called his hand and threw him out of his spider hole covered in the muck of his own filth.

I do agree that the oil is a secondary issue, simply because he could have denied the world all of Iraq's reserves simply by adding some biological contaminents to the oil. He never had a chance to do that either. And Theresa Heinz Kerry can drive John Kerry to his botox sessions in one of their 20 SUV's now without fear of where to get some gas.

Truly,

Rei

13 9/11 has nothing to do with our attacking Saddam.

I would have to strongly, albeit respectfully, disagree with that statement. 9/11 completely changed our world-view and our approach to national security. In the previous couple of hundred years part of our national defense was predicated on the notion that we were relatively safe from invading forces and the dangers they would impose. We thought of ourselves as being isolated by oceans from any possible threats thus any immanent invading army.

9/11, as the Administration has pointed out, was a wake-up call that the above approach was no longer valid. The thought process that applies to an invading army does not apply to stratagems of terrorism. It became apparent that a handful of dedicated people with access to the kinds of weapons that are so readily prevalent in today’s post Cold War world could cause as much, if not more, damage than an invading army. Also a small handful of people are able to blend in and are much more difficult to locate and isolate; especially in a free society such as ours.

Also 9/11 demonstrated that to wait until after we are attacked to retaliate is just not feasible. Someone sets off a suitcase nuke, detonates a dirty bomb, or releases a chemical that kills tens of thousands or, perhaps, hundreds of thousands and then retaliate is just not acceptable. The post 9/11 world is much different. We are now in an era of preemptive strikes against a viable threat.

Now, take the above information and combine it with the following facts.

Fact: Saddam had WMD and demonstrated that he was willing to use them against his enemies i.e. the Kurds and Iranians.

Fact: Saddam was actively working towards the procurement of a viable nuclear weapons program.

Fact: There is no evidence that Saddam was supplying money and arms to al-Qaeda although there is substantial circumstantial evidence that he was allowing training to take place in his country.

Fact: Saddam did financially support terrorist organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others. He is particularly noted for financially supporting families of suicide bombers who killed Jews.

Fact: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others, have publicly stated that they consider the US their enemy and have called for our destruction.

Fact: After Gulf War V 1.0 Saddam agreed to let arms inspectors destroy his weapons programs. Instead he kicked them out.

Fact: Saddam provided no proof that he actually destroyed his weapons programs.

Fact: Every credible intelligence organization, including that of the UN Security Council all insisted that Saddam still had the weapons.

Fact: Saddam plotted for the assassination of George Bush V 1.0.

Fact: Saddam hated the US.

When you combine the above facts with the realities of a post 9/11 world and, to me, it is apparent that 9/11 had everything to do with our attacking Saddam.

Another fact to remember is that G.W Bush never claimed that Saddam was an “imminent threat”. You will not find any transcript of any interview or speech that he claimed Saddam was an “imminent threat” (I may be wrong, I’m going off my memory. If anyone finds something to the contrary please let me know). What G.W. did say was that he did not want to wait until Saddam became an imminent threat to act.

I do agree, in part, with the notion of “holy war”. Nobody wants to admit it, especially the current Administration, but that is pretty much what it is. I’d take it a step further in that it’s more of a cultural war than a holy war. You can find roots to this conflict that go back to way before the advent of Judeo Christianity or Islam. Simply put Judeo Christianity is a product of the West and Islam is a product of the East/Middle East. It’s far more complicated than that but at its most basic that’s pretty much it.

This conflict can be traced back to the Persian Campaign against Ancient Greece. The Battle of Salamis circa 400 BC was one of the great turning points of humanity. Had the Persians won we, most likely, would be living in a very different world now. The fact that the Greeks stopped the Persians and destroyed their army means that we had a Rome, a Venice, the notion of Democracy, etc.

Eventually the Greeks seeded the cultural that is known as the West and the Persians seeded the culture that is much of the Middle East. Again, a great simplification, but still, at its most fundamental, how it is.

The conflict between Christianity and Islam is an extension of the greater cultural conflict that dates back to the two different burgeoning societies that begat the West and the Middle East/Arabic cultures.

With an ever-shrinking world the two cultures are, again, beginning to clash. Because they are so divergent, I believe, it is impossible for them to merge; I’ve got some three thousand years of history on my side on this. This culture war is just beginning in my opinion and we will have years, perhaps generations, of coming conflict.

The reality is that there is, quite possibly, more at stake than what many can imagine. What is at steak, ultimately, is the survival of our culture. Not a lot unlike ancient Greece and the Battle of Salamis.

It’s far more complicated than this but it’s a basic run down.

Oh yeah, there’s also oil too.

14 I'll just toss into the discussion that Spain was specifically targeted because King Carlos and Queen Isabella (yep, of Christopher Columbus times), fought a war and expelled the Moors from the Andalusia region of Spain. The Moors were Muslim, hence Islam wants "their" territory back. In Islam's eyes, Spain should be a Muslim country. They're heavily Catholic, hence infidel, so blowing up trains full of civilians is a religious act and perfectly acceptable to them.

Unless and until Islam goes through their own version of the Reformation, we will be at war with them. Even if we don't recognize that war, they do.

15 i know there are smart pro-war people and dumb anti-war types (i'm the latter) -- although i feel it to be so, i cannot truthfully look at the pro-war arguements as simple hatefulness, self-indulgence, self-deception, vacant deluded wishful self-important sin. i know that's not a good way to think, because political differences are irrelevant to shared humanity, to our common belonging. even believing as i do that god is dead (he was a wonderful god) and america is dead (she was a wonderful country) i still feel that being american is meaningful, it's a relationship that i have to you, a sibling american.

what annoys me no end, though, is this mindless blood-lust, what was the phrase, there are many lives that need to be ended because they are such a waste. i don't know how to answer that: where would i begin?

if someone dear to me were killed or even just hurt, i would be quite likely to kill the attacker on the spot. it's not good to be impulsively lethal in this way, but i think it's part of who i am. with a little time, though, i'm sure i would try to act in a way wh best served the living, the people to whom i'm responsible, eg, myself, the rest of my family.

i do not believe there exists a nation or (even a terrorist group) which allows itself to act on impulse. a nation attacks and kills because its leaders believe that to do so will serve some national interest. a leader who makes war for motives of revenge, personal gain, irrational obsession or rank stupidity, to me, this leader is a failure, right across the board, strategic, diplomatic, economic, political, moral.

our grandparents' generation is to date the only one to use nuclear weapons on civilians. it's kind of mindblowing that those men, knowing as they did the catastrophic nature of those bombs, actually dropped two of them. still, in no way do i believe that truman was the failure that george w bush is now: truman's calculation was essentially sound, he knew that the loss of life collateral to an invasion of japan would be exponentially larger than that of hiroshima and nagasaki. he acted in his nation's best interest.

why does 911 justify anything? my brother was not in the wtc on that day (he was due there in the evening) but he was mere minutes away from dying in the wtc bombing of 1993... his path train drove straight through the debris. does this somehow entitle me to be stupid about geopolitical strategy? and really, if you want to destroy the country most responsible for 911, why not bomb the daylights out of our nominal ally, saudi arabia... the wtc terrorists were virtually all saudi nationals (as is bin laden; and the money was saudi; and the saudis warned bush in july (how did they know?); and in the summer of 2003, look at the action in saudi investments, they were unusually eager to unload their (substantial) stakes in citigroup, american express, etc.)

you know who i want to kill? litterbugs. can't tell you how it pisses me off, bottles and cans everywhere i take my toddler.