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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (29457)	9/27/2001 12:40:07 PM
From: E	Respond to of 82486

I'm not sure it matters that the missiles weren't full of passengers. To me it matters morally whether the attempt is to maximize or minimize civilian deaths. From Christopher's second piece: ...First the actions. The central plan was to maximize civilian casualties in a very dense area of downtown Manhattan. We know that the killers had studied the physics and ecology of the buildings and the neighborhood, and we know that they were limited only by the flight schedules and bookings of civil aviation. They must therefore have been quite prepared to convert fully-loaded planes into missiles, instead of the mercifully unpopulated aircraft that were actually commandeered, and they could have hoped by a combination of luck and tactics to have at least doubled the kill-rate on the ground that they actually achieved. They spent some time in the company of the families they had kidnapped for the purpose of mass homicide. It was clearly meant to be much, much worse than it was. And it was designed and incubated long before the mutual-masturbation of the Clinton-Arafat-Barak "process." The Talibanis have in any case not distinguished themselves very much by an interest in the Palestinian plight. They have been busier trying to bring their own societies under the reign of the most inflexible and pitiless declension of shari'a law. This is known to anyone with the least acquaintance with the subject... Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant was well-known to be a civilian target, and its "selection" was opposed by most of the Joint Chiefs and many CIA personnel for just this reason... To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most elementary, at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers.... thenation.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ P.S. A point of interest: the stupid attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant was timed late at night specifically to avoid casualties to the workforce. This was a scruple that cost Clinton dearly, since the strike had been timed to coincide with the cruise missile attack on bin Laden's camps. By the time the day shift had left the plant, so had bin Laden, the meeting he was attending having ended by the time the cruise missiles fell. He was elsewhere.--E.