An open letter to all those decent American's

okie, anton is inviting you to walk a mile in someone else's shoes and you can't figure it out.

Imagine if someone decided to impose their beliefs and system of government on the U.S.

Would you sit still and let it happen?

Or would you fight back?

The difference between a patriot and a terrorist truly does depend on which side you're watching from.

okie, anton is inviting you to walk a mile in someone else's shoes and you can't figure it out.

Imagine if someone decided to impose their beliefs and system of government on the U.S.

Would you sit still and let it happen?

Or would you fight back?

The difference between a patriot and a terrorist truly does depend on which side you're watching from.

We are not imposing our beliefs and system on anybody. They are free to form their own government.

You have either knowingly or unknowingly revealed your twisted mindset. So a terrorist is almost, just maybe, a "patriot" in your way of thinking. Americans are not terrorists in any way shape or form. Such delusional thinking is an offense and an insult to all decent people around the world. And your type of thinking is truly sick.

We are not imposing our beliefs and system on anybody. They are free to form their own government. This discussion gets so tiresome. Where in the world do you get these whacko ideas? If we operated like they would desire, we would simply wipe them off the map, as some of them have proposed for Israel. Why in the world do some of those people blame all of their ills on everybody else but themselves?

I am not surprised by your lack of comprehension, so I will type this slowly and perhaps you will understand. It is a very fine line between a terrorist and a patriot; it all depends on which side of the line you are standing. We in the Western World see al-Qaeda as a terrorist group but their compatriots, their country men see them as Patriots fighting a great Western evil, to them we are the terrorists but from our perspective they are the terrorists and we are the patriots … Is that clear enough for you?

Perhaps you haven't heard?
They recently held democratic elections in Palestine, a concept the Bush regime has been pushing in the Middle East for a long time Now it has happened and the Palestinian people have voted overwhelmingly for Hamas this US administration can't accept the reality of what has happened and are calling for a regime change.
The Palestinian people have spoken, it was democratic, the voice of the majority and the Bush regime is trying to make it null & void … If that isn't trying to impose on a Sovereign State I don't know what is … is it any wonder that America is becoming very unpopular around the world, if I was a citizen I would be concerned.

...Perhaps you haven't heard?
They recently held democratic elections in Palestine, a concept the Bush regime has been pushing in the Middle East for a long time Now it has happened and the Palestinian people have voted overwhelmingly for Hamas this US administration can't accept the reality of what has happened and are calling for a regime change.
The Palestinian people have spoken, it was democratic, the voice of the majority and the Bush regime is trying to make it null & void …

Not all terrorists are worth their salt. And yes, many lies are told under duress, but I think experts will tell you that using interrogation techniques bordering on torture, and including torture, does in fact obtain some useful and factual information. I think this has been proven. I say again, I do not advocate torture, unless in the extreme examples wherein many lives, property, and environment are clearly at stake, which I do not think is that far fetched at all. My example is only one of countless scenarios that any president would need to contemplate as to what the responsible course of action would be.

I was going to post something serious but I can't get the thought of a good wallow with Thomas out of my head....

but I think experts will tell you that using interrogation techniques bordering on torture, and including torture, does in fact obtain some useful and factual information. I think this has been proven.

PARIS -- Morally wrong and politically dangerous, torture is also an ineffective way to gather intelligence, security experts, veterans and military officials warned Wednesday amid a raging controversy over US tactics in its war on terror.

Statements obtained through abusive interrogation techniques are unreliable and produce poor-quality intelligence, according to experts.

"There's a huge body of literature showing not only that torture doesn't work, but that it's counterproductive," US doctor Steve Miles, the author of a study on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, told Agence France-Presse.

"Any intelligence system has more data than it has analytical capability. And what torture does is to flood the analytic system with bad data," Miles said.

"You wind up making very bad policy decisions from that kind of advice. You also wind up alienating potential informants or potential recruits who are in the population," he said.

boomerang wrote:

I was going to post something serious but I can't get the thought of a good wallow with Thomas out of my head....

It amazes me that the bullshit peddlers in this thread claim we're not imposing our "values" on anyone, and yet we insist that Iraqis have "democracy," even though Iraq is an abortion of nation, established for the convenience of the English exploitation of their oil resources. The Sunnis and Shi'ites and Kurds never lived together in peace, and the Turks were not stupid enough to attempt to make them do so.

All we've done in the middle east is impose. There never was a democratic government in Iraq, and no one there ever wanted one. Each faction has always wanted dominance or independence.

It is the height of hubristic idiocy to show up, insist that they be "democratic," all the while planning to force them to "liberate" women (when it just ain't gonna happen) despite their religious prejudices, to unify, despite their religious and ethnic prejudice, and to wave the banner of democracy when we know that true democracy would lead to a Shi'ite, likely theocratic state, and sectarian and ethnic warfare.

The most that could pragmatically be expected in Iraq is that the Shi'ites would unite with the Kurds to take vengeance against the Sunnis. I have not the least doubt that the Shi'ites are suppressing violent reaction to Sunni provocation because they simply intend to wait us out, get rid of us, and then turn on the Sunnis and exterminate them (or at least attempt it). All the while, we've got idiots in this country parroting the stupidity of the neo-con assertions about democracy in the middle east, when all they've ever wanted was the oil.

You jackasses would buy anything if the **** merchant has the appropriate conservative credentials.

The world community is supposed to be a civilized world, just like you desire to live in a civilized and safe community wherever you live. If it is not, then efforts need to be made to try to help the community out before the criminal element completely destroys it. I would submit to you that sitting inside your house looking out the window while some of the neighbors are burning other of your neighbors houses down and killing them is not exactly the responsible thing to do. And becoming a little bit involved is not exactly imposing on anybody that shouldn't be imposed on a little bit for safety reasons and in the interest of maintaining a civilized neighborhood. After all, we are not confiscating their houses and families. We are simply counseling and making it clear they need to live lawfully and peacefully with their neighbors.

Setanta, if some of your neighbors vowed to kill one of your best friends and also vowed to kill you . . . [/qutoe]

Hussein and the Ba'ahtists did not vow to kill me, nor to attack the United States/

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. . . and made it known they were working on weapons and poison to accomplish the samej . . .

The Iraquis repeatedly denied that they had weapons of mass destruction or programs to manufacture them.

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. . . and some of them had been caught trespassing on your property and destroying some of your property . . .

Provide any evidence that the Iraquis, in any form of agency, were ever apprehended on American territory, destroying American property.

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. . . and you tried to counsel them to straighten out their dysfunctional families and mind their own business . . .

In international relations, one may loudly and publicly deplore the treatment a regime doles out to its people, but it has never been considered a basis for unilateral military action. We did not use the treatment of the Iraqi people as a causus belli before the war--that's just some horseshit your ilk came up with after the fact, when it became embarrassingly clear the we didn't know which palm tree they had parked their WoMD under, because we never found any WoMD. We didn't counsel, them--we forced them accept UN inspectors. Then, whe those inspectors did not find evidence of WoMD, we threatened them for not cooperating. When the inspectors said, excuse me, but they are cooperating, we then publicly slandered the inspectors and said we were going to invade them anyway. In all of this, "We" refers to the Idiot in Chief and his Forty Theives of Baghdad.

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. . . and even had Social Services to visit with them and tell them they needed to change their way of thinking . . .

Horseshit, this is the weakest part of a truly idiotic attempt at an analogy. There is no international equivalent to "Social Services," and we invaded Iraq without and express and explicit United Nations resolution to do so.

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. . . and when some of them turned on each other and were killing each otherj . . .

That did not occur until after we had invaded the country. There was an abortive attempt at an uprising in 1991, after Pappy Bush sent a false signal that he would support an uprising--but it was ruthlessly crushed and the Iraqis first learned what inveterate liars and how completely unreliable the Bush clan is.

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. . . and the police were sent to try to help straighten them out so that responsible members of their families can get their houses in order, I suppose that would be regarded as imposing on them?

We are not the police, and the world does not consider us the police, and the world, in its overwhelming majority, did not want us to invade Iraq. The world at large was justifiably alarmed at the prospect.

There is little point in discussing such a topic with you if you are just going to make sh!t up when you get in a tight corner, and can't face the truth.