• Archive through October 24, 2001 October 24 - 03:18 pm [11]

Buddy, Tim,
Your responses are honest and heartfelt, and I thank you for them. When we are wronged we are entitled to justice. This goes for every person in this world, American, Afgani, Saudi, etc. If my family were victimized by the murderers that attacked New York, I would be enraged. All thought of civility would be extinguished and I would seek revenge. Thank God that is not the case, and I wish it had never happened to anyone. Murder is unexcusable.
Harsh language will not provide justice. Only the capture and trial of these maniacs will suffice. Wholesale military assault on Afganistan is not justice.
We are bombing people as innocent as the New Yorkers who were murdered. We are destroying civilians who have been terrorized by the Tailban for a decade already. We are bombing water supply, food supply, sewage treatment, power plants.
We are doing the Talibans job for them.
We have become terrorists.
We are not attacking the people who are sheltering the theoretical liquor store robber, we are murdering the people who have been held hostage by the robber already!
Meanwhile the robber is getting away clean. After we are done, their reign of terror is that much more entrenched. Their goal is to keep the people of Afganistan under their boot heel. We are doing their dirty work for them.
Even if we drag Osama's body out of the rubble, will you call that a victory? A victory built on the murder of many, many innocent people who had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with terrorism?
That is not victory, that is slaughter.
As practitioners of martial arts we know that violence is the last resort. We know that beating someone will only cause them to return with a knife. We know that the best win is one where you didn't even have to fight. But when fighting, one fights for their life, and only then.
We are inflicting wholesale punishment on innocent people who have been more brutalized by the Taliban than we could ever imagine.
I know you guys don't approve of this and only seek justice. Please reconsider this war, as we are slaughtering the wrong people. Although it will be difficult we must stop and find another way.

Sincerely,

Jess

Jess,

do you realize that Afgans fleeing the country are reporting that the Taliban are placing anti-aircraft cannons on top of hospitols and apartment buildings? Not becuase they are taller than surrounding buildings, but because they are baiting the U.N. to kill more civilians.

The saying "war is hell" is acurate. If I walked into your dojo, shot and killed several of your classmates and made it clear that I and my friends (the fanatics) will never rest until we've killed you and the rest of your classmates- would you kill me or try to find another way?

I agree that violence breeds violence. I understand the U.S. forgein dabblings have helped create this thing we now face... but terrorists
have shown that they plan to terrorize Americans. We can stop them or become terrorized. If that means war... that means war. We gave the Taliban weeks to turn over the criminal or suffer the consequences. Did the terroists give the 6,000 mothers and fathers in the world
trade center any such warning?

Canada and Mexico are not involved... maybe you
should consider relocating to a country with fewer enemies and less military might.

Dear Tim

>Who is to blame for the death of my family?
>The police, or me?

Hmmm, I do not think that your exemple is appropriate. I will give another one that I think suits this situation better.

There is a criminal who is -- together with a bank manager -- robbing the bank of that manager. The police is arriving before they have finished their job so they take dozons of customers as hostages. The police is atacking the robbers who still have the customers as hostages. At the end three robbers and 24 normal customers are dead.

Who do you blame? The robbers or the police?

I would probably blame both.

Volker

I blame whomever taught Volker to read and write.

that example make no sense at all.

http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory102501b.shtml

>that example make no sense at all.

Just because you don't get it?

since we are bommbing the afghan people and then droppigng food could we not just drop big food bombs that kill and then feed anyone left standing?

"There is a criminal who is -- together with a bank manager -- robbing the bank of that manager. The police is arriving before they have finished their job so they take dozons of customers as hostages. The police is atacking the robbers who still have the customers as hostages. At the end three robbers and 24 normal customers are dead"

You neglected to mention that the robber (and his accomplices) live at the bank managers house.. with the bank managers mother, 6 sons, 4 daughters and a bunch of in-laws. In this situation... robbery was never a motive. The 'robbers' walked into the bank and killed everyone inside- taking nothing- only hoping to instill fear in all other bankers in the world.
The 'robbers' then get chased by the police back to the bank managers house where they hide among the innocent members of the managers family.
The police demand the manager turn over the robbers to face justice for killing a bank full of innocent bankers. The manager says 'no'.
The police say... 'these guys are dangerous and have made it clear they want to kill more bankers.
you have two weeks to hand over the 'robbers' or we will have to enter your house and get them with force'.

the manager says 'no'.

THREE weeks pass with no robbers being handed over for their crimes... the police enter the house and some people get killed including members of the managers family.

Who caused the deaths of the managers families?

(A.) the police who are trying to stop the 'robbers' from killing more innocent bankers?

(B.) the 'robbers' who killed innocents and then
hide among more innocent people?

(C.) the manager who harbored the killers knowingly in his own house and refused to hand them over for crimes he aided the robbers in committing?

From our local newspaper in Syosset, N.Y.:

Former U.S. karate team coach Terrance "Tokey" Hill will start teaching people how to use parts of the plane to defend themselves at cruising altitude. Among the lessons: how to unscrew an armrest to ward off an attack, use a seat cushion as a shield and turn trays, hot beverages or plastic-cup shards into weapons. The course will be taught both, at New York College in Syosset, N.Y., and at Mr. Hill's school in Port Washington, N.Y.

The JESS mindset


By V Hansen

The Pacifist

Q. Violence begets violence. What did war ever solve? Do we have to reply in kind — to get down to their level? Haven't we learned more than "an eye for an eye" in the last thousand years? You cannot bomb in my name.

A. Violence can, in fact, often breed an endless circle of violence (note Northern Ireland) — but only if there is no clear moral consensus, and it is practiced solely in equal measure. But overwhelming violence in response to great evil, while tragic, is not therein evil. Such a military response constitutes real humanity and bravery because it is not rhetorical or cheap, and stops the killing on the part of the killers. Those who work in peril 20 hours a day on carriers and behind enemy lines on the ground did not ask for this war, but they are nonetheless fighting to ensure that their own children and those of others to come do not have to make the sacrifices they are now so bravely enduring.

War — whether to end slavery, to ruin the Nazi death camps, or to dismantle the Japanese military — has in fact ended great evil inflicted on millions. And if we don't reply now — as we didn't to Hitler after Czechoslovakia, the Italians in Ethiopia, or the Japanese in Nanking — murder unchecked goes on to kill millions. Ask the Cambodians, Bosnians, or Tutus. We have learned from the last 2,500 years that human nature is unchanging and that the well-intentioned efforts to disarm and outlaw war are dangerous — and that such utopian pacifism is always at someone else's expense: usually those poorer, less educated, and not so "sophisticated" as yourself.

Can you please tell me what you would have advocated on December 8, 1941? And if we cannot in your name bomb the source of our terror, can our domestic forces at least use deadly force here at home to protect civilians from more crashing airliners and suicide bombers?

The Voice of Moral Equivalence

(Like the Pacifist, the moralist offers no realistic plan of action to deal with September 11, but wishes to force you to concede that you are in fact a murderer like the Taliban).

Q. They bomb us, we bomb them. They kill children, now we kill children. So what is the difference between them and us?

A. Quite a lot. First, we do know that almost 6,000 innocent were murdered, but we do not know how many Afghani citizens have been killed — either due to misplaced American bombs or to Taliban shells falling back among their citizens or to Taliban executions and terrorism against their own people. We do know that it is the deliberate policy of the Taliban to put their combatants among mosques, hospitals, and schools to ensure their survival, out of the expectation that Americans, unlike themselves, would not deliberately inflict collateral damage. If our enemies know that difference, why do not some of our own citizens, such as yourself?

For the sake of argument, let us assume that more than 100 noncombatant Afghanis have so far been killed. The dead, of course, are the dead, and their loss is tragic. But there is a difference, a moral difference, between deliberately targeting civilians in peace and deliberating attempting to avoid them in war — especially at the risk of endangering the lives of our own pilots. And just wars have never been waged with 100 percent moral perfection, but rather — as against Germany or Japan, for example — with the full knowledge that innocents die in order that the mass murder of their governments be stopped, and on the expectation that their own lives, and those of their children, will not in the future be sacrificed as victims of or abettors to their own government's evil

CoolHand-
Me, a Pacifist? If only I could live up to such standards. Thanks though. Anyways, I look forward to further debate. Since I have to be going, please check out this article, it makes some good points.
-Jess O'Brien

What's the difference between Al Qaeda and Fort Benning? (english) by marco (for www.monbiot.com) 11:28am Fri Nov 2 '01
America's Terrorist Training Camp What's the difference between Al Qaeda and Fort Benning? By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th October 2001
"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention.
For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at Al-Qaeda's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.
Until January this year, WHISC was called "the School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946 SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch shows, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni.
In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's "D-2", the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti- insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt, and Mejia Victores studied at SOA.
In 1993, the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.
Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefitted from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico.
All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA's graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven ex-pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year a SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its graduates from Colombia than from any other country.
The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts ...intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.
Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself WHISC. As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress, "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic."
But visit WHISC's website and you'll see that the School of the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked "History" fails to mention it. WHISC's courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of counter drug operations." Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is the fact that WHISC's "peace" and "human rights" options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them.
We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the Al-Qaeda training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia?
Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag.
You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But, try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and the war now being waged in Afghanistan.
www.soaw.org/trainingterrorists.html

A UBM -unidentified blind man- on the loose

http://www.webconspiracy.com

The poster two posts above...

Obviously spends a lot of time "Seeking The Curved Thru The Straight"

How about Seeking To Know What You Are Talking About

As In The Light Thru The Fog

But then again a very familair refrain is heard from those lispy foggy Rice a Roni types

A refrain borne from those many frustarting moments of

"Seeking The Straight Thru The Curved "

Moe Howard's sons discover the only way to defeat a Yoga Stylist.

This clip is long but teaches a very valuable lesson about the dangers or Yogis.

Bob#2
(edjucating you)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrYlNNy929Y

That Yogi guy was unbelievable.

I could have done without the joint crunching sound effects.

And Bob2, a little respect, it takes more than a haircut to make you a Stooge.