Terror and its impact on society.

[nabylbt]

Lots of interesting points here and here are mine:
**Negative is right to say that EU has the potential to become the next world leader but that will not be under Blair cuz he is too Americanized as most of the British opinion. It would need a clear commitment form the British island to cut clean from the states...

** Also, the WW3 is not going to happen soon at least not against the Arabic word since they can only agree to disagree. It is in the interest of all pole of interest that they remain small player since the US, EU, Israel, and even China will not tolerate having just 1 oil producer dictating whatever price they want … so no worries there



**The fact that Bin Ladin is using religion to 'try' to become a martyr is true, but that will not be hard anymore since he will be executed as soon as he is found .... ( the latest trend for US security agencies is to have suspects extracted to friendly Arabic countries Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait where human right are not enforced.... and then put to questioning .... is that respect of human right ....

**Ladyburg since we both have lived in different countries (4 personally on 3 continents) you will know that to have that many people agreeing on the same topics without knowing each other there must be some truth to it . Also, the recruitment of 'palestinian freedom fighters' or terrorists as most Americans prefer is made the more easily when you look at the us help to isreal . I am sure that a couple of F16's can deter that dumb ass to blow himself up in a bus.
As far as the biggest brainwasher well the CIA trained well bin ladin too bad they did not clean up the mess then …

**bshver I don’t think that GW need a political victory for irak since it has high rankings, he mostly wants it for economic reasons and because he try to hurt daddy. As far as the nukes it’s true they wish they did….

** Us are being judged on many factors, one of them is the imf: the us will lend you money if that country buys us goods what if they are not the cheapest? Doesn’t matter
Same things as for subventions, they criticize the world about state help, tariff, and customs when they do exactly the same.




In short to resume my opinion to every reign there is a start, a high, and a fall. In which phase is the US that is for you to answer.

To great power comes great responsibilities and for that I’ll refer you to that thread:
http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=236768

[Spyder32]

Originally posted here by Negative

Point taken. Clinton is just as bad as Bush then.



Able: yes; willing: never said anything about that. If you'd read my post, you'd know that. And besides, I didn't say they're able to, Newsweek did.
My point, as said in my original post:
Able:

The simple FACT that Europe is more important than the US when it comes to world-economy says enough, no? If you want facts, I'd be more than happy to mail you some reports.

Willing:

IF, as in a condition... I even added that that is NOT happening right now.

And YES, you're right about America having rescued Europe in the past - That arguement is so true, but keep pushing me and I'll start making the Indians/Americans (no offence)-comparison (although you don't seem to have the first clue about what Europe is about now - Germany is an ALLY right now, remember? The last WW was some 60 years ago)...



I never said Europe should be leading. Too bad for the Asians and Africans, but if you'd have taken the effort to consult some figures, you'd know that the only 'power' to be able to take over America's power is Europe. Don't call me racist or whatever for that, blame the figures.

Okay, well, my opinion is this: Clinton isn't as bad as Bush because of quite a few reasons. Clinton was presented with the option of having Bin laden turned over to him, and he denied it. Bush, on the other hand, would LOVE if someone was able to turn over Bin Laden. However, that is based on the times. Bush want's Bin laden because of 9/11. Clinton, however, didn't want Bin Laden all too much due to the fact that no 9/11 like attack happened during his presidency. If it did, I'm sure Clinton would love, like Bush, to have Bin Laden turned over.

As for Europe and America, I do believe that the only power who can take over America, would be China. I'm saying this not in economical status, but in military status. As of now, In my eyes, U.S, China, Russia, and England are the four world powers. I could be wrong, but that is what I believe. I understand Russia isn't what it used to be, but it still is strong. In economical status however, Europe would do much better than America. Now, I'm not Anti-America or Anti-Europe, and I think it's wrong to pick sides based on a number of things (like living there ).

Like I've said, this is just my opinion. I just believe that Clinton isn't as bad as Bush, and that America and Europe are equal in alot of things. Also, you need to understand that you are comparing a continent to a country. An entire continent probably could defeat a country economically (maybe militarily as well) so that wouldn't be right. Again, my opinion and I hope to add more to the discussion.

[gore]

i agree that it was well done well written, but all this talk of war just pushes my beliefe that valium should be over the counter and most drugs legalized, i think vicodin, morphine, valium and xanax should be over the counter, i mean come on, this is horrible, people are trying to rule the world, pop a few pills and theyd be like oh well ill just sit here and be cool instead of trying to hurt people, right this minute im sitting here and im on 1,000 mgs of vicodin, im not mad, im not angry, im happy and thinking posotive, and yet if i got pulled over and had one pill on me, id be in trouble....maybe people shouldnt be so uptight about some drugs (ok if your unckles addicted to crack and likes acid and has bad reactions thats different but have you honestly seen anyone on vicodin do anything but smile and be glad there pain is gone?) think about how the crime rate could drop, if people had access to valium theyd be to relaxed to be outside robbing people at gun point, theyd instead be at home watching the colors on there walls, seriously, Opium has been proven and proven again to take away physical and mental pain, and was the worlds first and all natural anti depressent, im attaching a paper i put together from my own research (thats right, im not just a pill head i actually know a few things) that iv put together from countless sites.

ok, it wont let me attach my paper, so im gunna copy and paste it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Opiates.
Homer conveys its effects in The Odyssey. In one episode, Telemachus is depressed after failing to find his father Odysseus. But then Helen...
"...had a happy thought. Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who swallowed this dissolved in their wine could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother or father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done..."

In some parts of the contemporary Middle East, chilled glasses of poppy tea are served to mourners at funerals to ease their grief.

Papaver somniferum has long been popular in Europe. Fossil remains of poppy-seed cake and poppy-pods have been found in Neolithic Swiss lake-dwellings dating from over 4,000 years ago. Poppy images appear in Egyptian pictography and Roman sculpture. Representations of the Greek and Roman gods of sleep, Hypnos and Somnos, show them wearing or carrying poppies. Throughout Egyptian civilization, priest-physicians promoted the household use of opium preparations. Such remedies were called "thebacium" after the highly potent poppies grown near the capital city of Thebes. Egyptian pharaohs were entombed with opium artifacts by their side. Opium could also readily be bought on the street-markets of Rome. By the eighth century AD, opium use had spread to Arabia, India and China. The Arabs both used opium and organized its trade. For the Prophet had prohibited the use of alcohol, not hashish or opiates.

Classical Greek physicians either ground the whole plant or used opium extract. Galen lists its medical indications, noting how opium...
"...resists poison and venomous bites, cures chronic headache, vertigo, deafness, epilepsy, apoplexy, dimness of sight, loss of voice, asthma, coughs of all kinds, spitting of blood, tightness of breath, colic, the lilac poison, jaundice, hardness of the spleen stone, urinary complaints, fever, dropsies, leprosies, the trouble to which women are subject, melancholy and all pestilences."
Later authorities were scarcely less enthusiastic. Physicians commonly believed that the poppy plant was of divine origin; opium was variously called the Sacred Anchor Of Life, Milk Of Paradise, the Hand Of God, and Destroyer Of Grief. Thomas Sydenham, the 17th-century pioneer of English medicine, writes....
"Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium."


This may be overstating God's benevolence; but by relieving emotional as well as physical pain, opiates have been understandably popular. Robert Burton, scholar, priest and author of Anatomy of Melancholy, commended laudanum - essentially opium dissolved in wine - for those who were insomniacs...
"...by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains [which] is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men..."
Indeed opium was probably the world's first authentic antidepressant. Unlike other pain-relieving agents such as ethyl alcohol, ether or the barbiturates, opium doesn't impair sensory perception, the intellect or motor co-ordination. Pain ceases to be threatening, intrusive and distressing; but it can still be sensed and avoided. At lower dosages, opium may be pleasantly stimulating rather than soporific. In the East, opium was typically treated as a social drug; and opium-smoking was a tool for conviviality. Nowadays a life of habitual opioid use evokes images of stupor and mindless oblivion, yet ironically Coleridge coined the word intensify to describe opium's effects on consciousness.

By the nineteenth century, vials of laudanum and raw opium were freely available at any English pharmacy or grocery store. One nineteenth-century author declared: "[Laudanum] Drops, you are darling! If I love nothing else, I love you." Another user, the English gentleman quoted in Jim Hogshire's Opium for the Masses (1994), enthused that opium felt akin to a gentle and constant orgasm.

Youngsters were introduced to the pleasures of opiates at their mothers' breast. Harassed baby-minders - and overworked parents - found opium-based preparations were a dependable way to keep their kids happy and docile; this was an era before Ritalin. Sales of Godfrey's Cordial, a soothing syrup of opium tincture effective against colic, were prodigious. But Godfrey's Cordial had its competitors: Street's Infants' Quietness, Atkinson's Infants' Preservative, and Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup.
Opium was viewed as a medicine, not a drug of abuse. Contemporary medical theory didn't allow that one could become addicted to a cure. However, the chemists and physicians most actively investigating the properties of opium were also its dedicated consumers; and this may conceivably have coloured their judgement.


Writers of distinction certainly consumed opium in copious quantities. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote Kubla Khan in a dream-like trance while under its spell; opium promotes vivid dreams and rich visual imagery as well as gentle euphoria...
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Down to a sunless sea
...
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Fellow English author Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) writes of "the marvelous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain". De Quincey seems to have treated opium as a mood-brightening smart-drug. The author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) draws invidious comparisons with alcohol. He attributes a heightening of his mental powers to opium use...

"Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation and harmony. Wine robs a man of self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it....Wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilize and disperse the intellectual energies; whereas opium seems to compose what has been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. ...A man who is inebriated...is often...brutal; but the opium eater...feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of majestic intellect...."

De Quincey states that not he himself, but opium, should be regarded as the true hero of his essay. Opium was his "Divine Poppy-juice, as indispensable as breathing". By reputation, opium users have dull wits, idle lives and diminished sensibility. This was not de Quincey's verdict. He made a habit of going to the opera under its influence - and found his experience of music delightfully enhanced...

"Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind, generally increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure...It is sufficient to say, that a chorus, etc of elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life - not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents removed...and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed..."

Opium induces gentle, subtle, dream-like hallucinations very different from the fierce and unpredictable weirdness of LSD. Baudelaire (1821-67) likens opium to a woman friend, "...an old and terrible friend, and, alas! like them all, full of caresses and deceptions." Across the Atlantic, in 1842, William Blair describes his experiences with opium in a New York magazine...

"While I was sitting at tea, I felt a strange sensation, totally unlike any thing I had ever felt before; a gradual creeping thrill, which in a few minutes occupied every part of my body, lulling to sleep the before-mentioned racking pain, producing a pleasing glow from head to foot, and inducing a sensation of dreamy exhilaration (if the phrase be intelligible to others as it is to me) similar in nature but not in degree to the drowsiness caused by wine, though not inclining me to sleep; in fact far from it, that I longed to engage in some active exercise; to sing, dance, or leap...so vividly did I feel my vitality - for in this state of delicious exhilaration even mere excitement seemed absolute Elysium - that I could not resist the tendency to break out in the strangest vagaries, until my companions thought me deranged...After I had been seated [at the play I was attending] a few minutes, the nature of the excitement changed, and a 'waking sleep' succeeded. The actors on the stage vanished; the stage itself lost its reality; and before my entranced sight magnificent halls stretched out in endless succession with galley above gallery, while the roof was blazing with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was tinged with strange, gigantic figures, like the wild possessors of lost globe...I will not attempt farther to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of 'brown gum' had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words that I can command would do justice to its Titanian splendour and immensity..."

In North America, the initial history of Papaver somniferum was somewhat more peaceful. During the first few centuries of European settlement, opium poppies were widely cultivated. Early settlers dissolved the resin in whisky to relieve coughs, aches and pains.
The plant had further uses. Papaver somniferum produces lots of small black seeds. Poppy-seeds are an ingredient of typical bird-seed and a common garnish on rolls. Poppy-seeds can also be ground into flour; used in salad-dressings; added to sauces as flavoring or thickening-agents; and the oil can be expressed and used in cooking. Poppy-heads are infused to make a traditional sedative drink.
Many distinguished early Americans grew Papaver somniferum. Rightly or wrongly, they would today be treated as felons. Thomas Jefferson cultivated opium poppies at his garden in Monticello. The seeds from its plants, including the poppies, were sold at the gift-shop of Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants until 1991 - when a drug-bust at the nearby University of Virginia panicked the Board of Directors into ripping up the plants and burning the seeds. The cultivation of Papaver somniferum is banned in the USA under the Opium Poppy Control Act of 1942. Amateur horticulturists, however, continue to value the beautiful red, yellow and white flowers as adornments to their gardens.
Until the nineteenth century, the only opioids used medicinally or recreationally took the form of crude opium. Opium is a complex chemical cocktail containing sugars, proteins, fats, water, meconic acid, plant wax, latex, gums, ammonia, sulphuric and lactic acids, and numerous alkaloids, most notably morphine (10%-15%), codeine (1%-3%), noscapine (4%-8%), papaverine (1%-3%), and thebaine (1%-2%). All of the latter, apart from thebaine, are used medicinally as analgesics. The opioid analgesics are of inestimable value because they reduce or abolish pain without causing a loss of consciousness. They also relieve coughs, spasms, fevers and diarrhea.

Even thebaine, though without analgesic effect, is of immense pharmaceutical worth. This is because it can be used to produce semi-synthetic opioid morphine analogues such as oxycodone (Percodan), dihydromorphenone (Dilaudid), hydrocodone (Vicodin) and etorphine (Immobilon). Classes of morphine analogue include the diphenylpropylamines (e.g. methadone), the 4-phenylpiperidines (e.g. meperidine), the morphinans (e.g. levorphanol) and 6,7-benzomorphans (e.g. metazocine). Although seemingly structurally diverse, all these compounds either possess a piperidine ring or contain the critical part of its ring structure. Etorphine, for instance, is a very potent analogue of morphine. On one occasion a team of researchers, working in the 1960s under Professor Bentley of Macfarlan Smith and Co, drank mid-morning tea that had been stirred with a contaminated rod. They were soon laid out. The scientists had unwittingly drunk a drug later developed as etorphine. Etorphine is over 1000 times more powerful than morphine; it is used in dart-guns as Immobilon to subdue elephants and rhinos. Fortunately the scientists recovered.

Morphine was first isolated from opium in 1805 by a German pharmacist, Wilhelm Sertürner. Sertürner described it as the Principium Somniferum. He named it morphium - after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Today morphine is isolated from opium in substantially larger quantities - over 1000 tons per year - although most commercial opium is converted into codeine by methylation. On the illicit market, opium gum is filtered into morphine base and then synthesized into heroin.
Doctors had long hunted for effective ways to administer drugs without ingesting them. Taken orally, opium is liable to cause unpleasant gastric side-effects. The development of the hypodermic syringe in the mid-nineteenth century allowed the injection of pure morphine. Both in Europe and America, members of high society and middle-class professionals alike would jack up daily; poor folk couldn't afford to inject drugs. Morphinism became rampant in the USA after its extensive use by injured soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. In late nineteenth-century America, opiates were cheap, legal and abundant. In the judgment of one historian, America became "a dope fiend's paradise". Moreover it was believed that injecting morphine wasn't addictive. Quitting habitual opium use can cause malaise, flu-like symptoms, and depression; morphine seemed an excellent cure. In China, for instance, early twentieth century missionaries handed out anti-opium remedies in such profusion that the pills became known as "Jesus Opium"; their active ingredient was morphine.

Soldiers, missionaries and patent-medicine salesmen were not alone in eulogizing its properties. A leading American medical textbook (1868) revealed that opiates...
"...cause a feeling of delicious ease and comfort, with an elevation of the whole moral and intellectual nature...There is not the same uncontrollable excitement as from alcohol, but an exaltation of our better mental qualities, a warmer glow of benevolence, a disposition to do great things, but nobly and beneficently, a higher devotional spirit, and withal a stronger self-reliance, and consciousness of power. Nor is this consciousness altogether mistaken. For the intellectual and imaginative faculties are raised to the highest point compatible with individual capacity...Opium seems to make the individual, for a time, a better and greater man...."

Racist stereotypes, rampant xenophobia and lurid images of white slave-traders abounded too. In the 1850s and 1860s, tens of thousands of Chinese had immigrated to the USA to help build the western railroads and work the California mines. Opium-smoking was an integral part of Chinese culture; and its effects offered a merciful relief from dirty and backbreaking work. But the medical tide was turning. Dr Hamilton Wright, newly appointed US opium commissioner, blamed "the Chinese vice" for corrupting the nation's youth....

So the search began for a powerful non-addictive alternative to opium and morphine. In 1874, English pharmacist C.R. Alder Wright had boiled morphine and acetic acid to produce diacetylmorphine, C17H17NO (C2H3O2)2. Diacetylmorphine was synthesized and marketed commercially by the German pharmaceutical giant, Bayer. In 1898, Bayer launched the best-selling drug-brand of all time, Heroin.

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."
ALDOUS HUXLEY
1894 – 1963
Today, by contrast, immense energy is devoted by the authorities into persecuting "illicit" narcotic users. Many drug-"abusers" feel well thanks only to the "non-therapeutic" use of opioids. They are stigmatized, pilloried and criminalized in a futile War Against Drugs. In the Inquisition against pleasure, victims of medically-sanctioned human-rights abuses - e.g. the hundreds of thousands of drug "offenders" incarcerated in the American gulag - are officially supposed to believe their malaise-ridden drug-naive state was "normal", "natural" and mental healthy. In the course of our ill-conceived Drug War, vast resources are dissipated by the state-apparatus in an effort to choke off narcotic production and supply. When these efforts are temporarily successful, drug-deprivation makes the habitual opioid user feel ill; [s]he "cold-turkeys" with characteristic dysphoria, irritability, depression and sometimes raw physical pain. The ill-effects felt from involuntary deprivation of opioids are taken to demonstrate the likely ill-effects of legalized access, a paradox that might be thought labored were its human costs not so tragic.

Even where it is acknowledged that many users have a pre-existing anxiety or depressive disorder in urgent need of relief, those so afflicted are fobbed off with often third-rate psychotropics instead. For a start, the monoamine hypothesis of depression - and the new classes of drug it has spawned (SSRIs, NARIs, SNRIs, NaSSAs, RIMAs etc to complement the dirty old tricyclics and irreversible unselective MAOIs) - is radically incomplete. A minority of people, admittedly, find such drugs effective. Often taking a licensed antidepressant is better than nothing at all - perhaps in part because of their positive effects on endogenous opioid peptide release. Yet even in the context of controlled clinical trials with relatively high dosage-regimens and artificially good rates of patient-compliance, it's rare for response-rates to reach more than 70%. Rates of full remission of depressive symptoms are far lower, perhaps 25-30%. Out "in the field", the picture is worse still. Adverse side-effects are common. Response may take weeks. Withdrawal reactions can be unpleasant.
A recognition of the crucial role of dopamine, and selective dopamine reuptake blockers, in sub-types of depressive mood-disorders might push response- and remission- rates higher. The mesolimbic dopamine system is critical to vitality, motivation, libido and a capacity to anticipate reward. Dopaminergics can also act as analgesics. Yet the FDA stymies the licensing of effective dopamine reuptake-blocking mood-brighteners at home; and applies pressure to deny access to them abroad. This is because of worries about their (sometimes) faster efficacy - and mild psychostimulant effect - raise the spectre of "abuse-potential"; and proscription, persecution and indiction are favored over consumer education. For Big Brother knows best.
"I'll die young, but it's like kissing God"
Lenny Bruce


"Millions of people suffer needlessly from agonizing pain because physicians have been reluctant to use ‘high-risk’ opioids"
Crain & Shen 2000
"The first thing they told us in medical school is that no one has ever died from pain but plenty of physicians have had their careers destroyed trying to help people who are in pain."
Comment from an emergency room physician requesting anonymity (2001)

Not only do sufferers of chronic pain and narcotic addicts stand to benefit from such harm reduction approaches but, by decreasing drug-associated crimes, a significant area of the true “drug problem” can be directly addressed, thereby benefiting society as a whole.

[bjorsimo]

Originally posted here by Negative

The States keep pushing on the fact that it is all about nukes. A leaked Pentagon-document showed a couple of weeks ago that the States themselves are willing to use nuclear weapons THEMSELVES against China, Syria, Russia, Iran, Iraq and North-Korea.
If it really was about nuclear weapons, the States should go after North-Korea. That country DOES have nuclear weapons.

It's all about nukes? Yeah right...

I wonder why the USA is so eager to use nuclear weapons all the time? What is terror, if not to threaten countries like China, Syria, Russia, Iran, Iraq and North-Korea to surrender OR ELSE?

How about putting pressure on Israel, Pakistan, India who are also nuclear-capable nations? Oh, I forgot, they are allies to the US. I could be argued that an all-out war between Pakistan and India is more likely than any, other than the US itself, which remains the primary imperialist aggressor in the world today.

Accusing the North Korean nation of being a terrorist nation along the so-called "axis of evil" is also wrong. The North Koreans only want peace, and peaceful re-unification with the South. North Korea has never invaded another country or territory, unlike the US.

-Bjørnar Simonsen-

[Spyder32]

Invaded? To my knowledge, the only country we possibly "invaded" was Afganistan. That, IMHO, was needed as their leadership promoted and harbored terrorism and supplied them. Also, those people were suffering due to the Taliban and that whole country has been in some form of war or chaos for quite some time. The U.S's goal was to bring stability and peace, not to invade Afganistan. If I'm wrong about it being the only "invaded" country, please correct me.

[imported_Remote_Access]

Interesting post Negative. Another topic about how wrong Americans are, how our society is no longer the world-power, how we're wrongfully useing military action, among other things. Well writen and thought out Neg, but like Gold Eagle said, are you not being a tad Euro centric...

[Mahakaal]

Here's an old post of mine from way back when about US Invasions OR Intervention abroad.= and at home.
http://www.antionline.com/showthread...525#post554525

[Dr Toker]

====================================================================================================================================
Europe.

Where does this all leave Europe? Europe is the only power able to stand up against America, IF the Europeans unite. And that's not happening right now: Spain (with Aznar), Italy (Berlusconi), The Netherlands (Balkenende) are on America's side. Is it really a coincidence that those countries are right-wing?

==================================================================

Still, Europe is the only alternative for the new American world order.

====================================================================================================================================

Is it me or does this sound like an argument to rally others into fightring the U.S. Not a good idea these days, as you can see.

I understand that Bush is screwing up right now. But what is he supposed to do. I hear all this talk about what he's doing and how is going to try and set up an American state in the middle of the Islamic world. I understand this isn't the wisest thing to do. It will be a critical wound for peace between the Arab nations and America, I also see very clearly that the entire UN treaty is simply a pretext for war, because from jump Bush was talking about regime change. The Weapons of mass destruction thing, just a way to put fear in the American Citizens heart, to coax us into approving his daddys war.Another thing that i find very shocking, is CNN. I was watching "The Left Debate" and they were no longer debating the fact that he even HAD W.O.M.D, but they were saying he USED them.
I don't remember that...

But what I do know, is that a large amount of the Arab world HATES us. Esp. the most powerfull ones. I belive that if Saddam has the weapons we speak of, he wont set them off. Like Neg said, it would be suicide. Fortunatly, its not hard to find someone who doesnt mind dying for the cause. Its THAT possibilitie that frightens me. The fact that he WONT use them, but he will find someone to do it. Thats why Saddam must be stopped. He supports the Jihadist just a bit too much in the open. Makes me wonder what this guys hiding.

[pooja]

Dunno if u've seen it already, and am not sure about how true this actually is.

Agence France-Presse
Doha, November 13

Osama bin Laden hailed the spate of terror attacks in the Arab world and Asia as well as last month's Moscow hostage-taking, and threatened US allies, in an audiotape attributed to him and broadcast by Al-Jazeera TV late on Tuesday.
The speaker lashed out at US President George W Bush, calling him the "pharaoh of the century," and at his key allies, whom he called "murderers."

"As you assassinate, so will you be (assassinated), and as you bomb so will you likewise be," the tape said, against the background of a photograph of the Al-Qaeda terror network's leader, in turban and khaki jacket, a rifle at his side.

In the message to "the peoples of countries allied to the United States," he warned them against the "alliance between their governments and the United States to attack us in Afghanistan."

He cited "Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia."

The supposed bin Laden said: "What has happened since the conquests of New York and Washington up until now -- like the operations on Germans in Tunisia, the explosion of the French tanker in Yemen, on the French in Karachi, the operations against the (US) Marines in Failaka (Kuwait), on Australians and Britons in the explosions in Bali, as well as the recent hostage-taking in Moscow and other operations here and there -- were nothing but the response of Muslims eager to defend their religion and respond to the order of God and their Prophet.


"Australia was warned about its participation (in the war) in Afghanistan and its ignoble contribution to the separation of East Timor (from Indonesia). But it ignored this warning until it was awakened by the echoes of explosions in Bali," the speaker said.

"If you suffer to see your (people) killed and those of your allies in Tunisia, in Karachi, in Falaika, Bali and Amman, remember our (people) killed among the children of Palestine, in Iraq ... and in Afghanistan," the speaker said.

"As you look at your dead in Moscow, also recall ours in Chechnya.

"For how long will fear, massacres, destruction, exile, orphanhood and widowhood be our lot, while security, stability and joy remain your domain alone," he asked.

"What Bush, the pharaoh of the century, did by murdering our children in Iraq and what Israel, the ally of America, did in bombing houses of the elderly, women and children in Palestine, using American planes, was enough for the wise among your leaders to distance themselves from this criminal gang."

He went on: "Our people in Palestine have been massacred and subjected to the worst of suffering for nearly a century.

"If we defend our people in Palestine, the world gets agitated and coalesces against Muslims under the cover of the war against terrorism, unjustly and in a false way.

"Do your governments not know that the clique in the White House is made up of the greatest murderers of the century?"

Among them, the speaker characterized US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the "butcher of Vietnam who has killed more than two million people."

Saying such an imbalance had come to an end, he added, "It is high time that equality be established to this effect," promising more terrorist operations against Western targets by young Muslims "committed before God to pursue Jihad (holy war)."

In Washington, a US official, asking not to be named, said the CIA was to analyse the voice on Al-Jazeera's tape to determine if it was bin Laden's.

The Qatar-based satellite channel did not provide any details on how it obtained the tape but said it showed that bin Laden was still alive at least until the Moscow hostage-taking in late October or the October 28 killing of a US diplomat in Amman.

On October 6, Al-Jazeera broadcast what it said was another recording of the Al-Qaeda chief in which he issued a new threat to strike US economic interests until Washington renounced its "injustice and hostility" toward Arabs and Muslims.

Ever since the US-led attack on Afghanistan late last year, there has been debate on whether bin Laden, who was in hiding there, had survived those attacks.

A former Afghan commander said in Pakistan on Monday that bin Laden was still alive and hiding in Afghanistan.




I have no inputs to give on who's or who'll be a bigger power - Europeans or Americans!

[made-ta-hack]

it's americans, of course, europe is just coming along with the america, because it aint got nothing of its own