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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike M who wrote (12251)	4/11/2003 12:59:38 PM
From: zonder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21614

France, in particular, lives in a "glorious in their own mind" past with not a whit of moral persuasion or manifest destiny. And that must be why more than 80% oppose the invasion of Iraq. After decades of alliance with the US where they have pretty much never opposed the US. I see. I live in a little town surrounded by France. I speak French. I talk to them and follow their press in their language. I can tell you that illusions de grandeur is not the reason why they oppose the current US policies of preventive invasion. But I guess that must be incorrect because your press tells you that it's because they are "glorious in their own mind" that they oppose the US invasion of Iraq. Are you beginning to see a parallel with that way of thinking and the way you accuse Arabs of hating the US because their press tells them to? People like Osama don't need the US to project their hate I would agree with you that Bin Ladin is a different case. But we were not talking about him. We were talking about Arabs and Middle East people (not all of whom are Arabs) and Muslims in general.

To: Mike M who wrote (12251)	4/11/2003 1:16:37 PM
From: paret	Respond to of 21614

CNN Admits it hid news on Saddam's Brutality CNN: The News We Kept to Ourselves By EASON JORDAN NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL April 11, 2003 ATLANTA — Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff. For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk. Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers. We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails). Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed. I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us. Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad. Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home. I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely. Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.

To: Mike M who wrote (12251)	4/11/2003 4:02:17 PM
From: paret	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21614

WHEN HAS DIALOGUE EVER DEFEATED EVIL? Iconoclast ^ \| William Grim iconoclast.ca Excerpt---- So the question now is: When has dialogue ever defeated evil? Why is it that the proponents of "engaging in dialogue" never give one concrete example of its success? It is because no such examples exist? Let's get realistic. We cannot negotiate away the cancer of Islamic terrorism. We cannot talk our way out of the evil that confronts us. We must destroy it utterly through the judicious use of our military might. Peace conferences and treaties mean nothing to our enemies. Indeed, even the Prophet Mohammed himself signed a ten-year peace treaty with the Koreish, an enemy tribe. But after two years into the treaty, Mohammed's military position improved, and he invaded and slaughtered the Koreishites. Significantly, the abrogation of the treaty with the Koreishites is often mentioned by Yassir Arafat and other Muslim leaders as a model for Islamic "diplomacy." Again, I ask the question: When has dialogue ever defeated evil?