Terrorist aquire WMD?

Heres what i dont understand and see if anyone can explain it to me...If terrorism is the targeting of innocent civilians than how is the USA administration not terrorists?

But why is it okay to bomb 2 cities KILLING LITERALLY EVERYTHING?
Men, women, children, plants, trees, animals.....why is THIS indiscriminate killing okay?

Why is it not terrorism?

Why is it 'colletral damage' and not murder say if a terrorist commited the act.

The USA administration fears that terrorists may get hold of a WMD....I would say they already have and not only that they have used it!!!

The bomb didn't win it

Dominick Jenkins
Saturday August 6, 2005
The Guardian

The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.

Article continues
It did not bring about surrender. With 62 Japanese cities destroyed by firebombs and napalm, Japan was not overwhelmed by the destruction of one more. The army minister, General Korechika Anami, told the supreme war council that he would fight on. What actually brought about surrender was the combination of the Soviet Union's entry into the war on August 8 and the US decision to let Japan retain the emperor.

Max Hastings, on these pages last week, gave the impression that most of Truman's contemporaries thought he did the right thing. Eisenhower urged Henry Stimson, the secretary of state, not to use the bomb on the basis of his belief "that Japan was already defeated and that the dropping of the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary".

Other commanders made similar statements.

The men in command and on the ground did not share Hastings's argument that the "inexorable logic of war" meant the US had to drop the bomb.

What can we learn from this history? It is not one of damning Truman. What this history shows is that George Bush's dream of dominating the world through massive investments in new nuclear weapons repeats a failed project. It is no alternative to the hard work of developing political solutions to problems such as Iran and North Korea, or to building up disarmament treaties.

The end of the cold war has given us a second chance. Preparations at Aldermaston to build a nuclear weapon to replace Trident should stop, and the government should support Jack Straw's initiative to save the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and restart nuclear disarmament.

• Dominick Jenkins is Greenpeace UK's disarmament campaigner and author of The Final Frontier: America, Science and Terror

[email protected]

Because, although it is a war crime, civilians were not directly targeted.

Also, terrorism is said to refer only to acts by non-government organizations. Even if the US government did target civilians, it would be a crime against humanity instead of terrorism.

oralloy wrote:

Because, although it is a war crime, civilians were not directly targeted.

Also, terrorism is said to refer only to acts by non-government organizations. Even if the US government did target civilians, it would be a crime against humanity instead of terrorism.

I personally consider you to be mincing words here. I consider that your statement to the effect that "terrorism is said to refer only to acts by non-government organizations" is an unsupported statement from authority, which authority i have no reason to believe you possess. It has long been recognized that terror is an "accepted" means of waging war. By accepted, i mean that some governments have considered the attempt to break the will of an opponent nation's population a reasonable military doctrine. Hitler's attempt to accomplish that end through the bomging of residential areas is an obvious example. Although initially seen as a failure, and since widely considered to be a failure, newer scholarship suggests that after the end of the blitz, the renewal of terror attacks with the V-rockets had a significant demoralizing effect on the people of England. To suggest that this was an example of a rogue government would be disingenuous, as well. Churchill's reasoning that the area bombing of German industrial cities would be effective because factory workers who get little or no sleep will not be effective at work the next day is a lame attempt to explain away the use against the Germans of a tactic visited upon his own nation. I also consider that this was a significant factor in Curtis LeMay's bombing of dozens of Japanese cities.

From William the Bastard/the Conqueror's "harrying of the North" in the late twelfth century through Wallenstein's devastation of North Germany in the Thirty Years War right up to the Second World War, terror has been a weapon in the military arsenal. One might well wish it were not so; nevertheless, it is by no means reasonable to state that terror is by definition only practiced by non-governmental groups.