phillyfan26
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INDY500 said:
What didn't work before 9/11?
Also, do you not believe in the Constitution?
Britain Drops 'War on Terror' Label
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If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
What didn't work before 9/11?
Also, do you not believe in the Constitution?
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INDY500 said:
So we've detained those hijackers that crashed the plane into the Pentagon? I wasn't aware of that.
ntalwar
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INDY500 said:
Don't forget Bush killed the writ of habeas corpus. There's no guarentee that the definition of "terrorist" won't be expanded to anyone who doesn't agree with Bush in the future. In fact, he already hinted it does (per that 2001 quote).
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Vincent Vega said:
Of coarse the other side of the coin would be the 3 suspects (2 German Muslims and a Turk) that planned to attack Frankfurt's international airport, the Ramstein Air Base and discos frequented by Americans.
Were these attacks thwarted only by good police work? Maybe, but if it turns out German officials were assisted by information obtained by the questionable tactics of the "intelligence community", would that really matter?
I would hope that both the U.S. president and the German chancellor put saving lives and national defense above all other considerations.
phillyfan26
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Is it not a slippery slope, INDY?
Vincent Vega
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INDY500 said:
German police observed them for a long time and was well aware of what they were doing. As far as I know they did get information from American intelligence, but everything substantial was gathered by old fashioned police work. In fact, German intelligence hindered their investigations by holding back crucial information due to this old thinking "I'm the secret agent here and all I'm doing is more secret than anything else" just like you see in bad movies.
It doesn't justify taking away our civil rights so many people have given their lifes for and enacting laws that are frighteningly reminding of times we had hoped have finally ended for good in 1990.
It really is a slippery slope, and it's far too easy to get off the path.
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INDY500 said:
Why not take it a step further and just lock up all Muslims?
INDY500
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phillyfan26 said:
What isn't a slippery slope?
After we entered WWII and defeated the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese Imperial army in the Pacific...what was to stop our "war machine" from continuing on? Really...why aren't we living in the United States of Earth.
Who could have stopped us? Our allies in Europe were decimated, Russia was broke and had lost 10 million soldiers, Canada was, well, Canada.
We had "the bomb" and no one else did!! The world was our slippery slope. But we sent the soldiers home and went about rebuilding war torn Europe and Japan.
Maybe, just maybe, good can defeat evil without becoming evil itself. Maybe a country can protect it's citizens and respect their rights at the same time.
INDY500
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BonoVoxSupastar said:
You aren't going to answer the question are you?
Was the act of crashing hijacked commercial airliners into America's financial district and the Pentagon;
A) A domestic military strike
or
B) A civil crime
or maybe you need
C) an inside job
Answer the question or meet my "friends."
phillyfan26
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INDY500 said:
That's what I'm looking for. I'm sure it's possible.
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BonoVoxSupastar said:
You aren't going to answer the question are you?
Was the act of crashing hijacked commercial airliners into America's financial district and the Pentagon;
A) A domestic military strike
or
B) A civil crime
or maybe you need
C) an inside job
Answer the question or meet my "friends."
INDY500
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ntalwar said:
2001 quote??? You mean Bush has had 6 years to build the prisons and dig the mass graves for U.S. citizens and he hasn't done it?
Man, there's nothing worse than a slacker fascist.
Or maybe he's planning on pulling a Putin and sticking around past his constitutionally allotted time.
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INDY500 said:
That would be nice, wouldn't it?
BVS
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INDY500 said:
D) None of the above.
Now, what does this have to do with what we are talking about?
ntalwar
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INDY500
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What a hoot.ntalwar said:
It's January 1st, not April 1st.
But hey, who am I to laugh at Area 51, fake moon landings, grassy knolls, black helicopters, 9/11 truthers, Diebold, and REX84?
For I'm a global warming denier.
INDY500
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BonoVoxSupastar said:
How would you define it?
BVS
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INDY500 said:
It was an attack by a group. Not a country, not a religion, nor an ideaology.
But once again, what does this have to do with picking up people off the street, labeling them a terrorists and then being able to hold them indefinately?
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INDY500 said:
While I agree with BVS's answer, each of the above interpretations is more reasonable than the one held by some neo-conservatives.
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Wars are fought against nations, not against ideologies.
If you don't have a specific nation that you are at war with, then you don't have a war, in my opinion.
At the very least the U.S. should have declared war on Al Qaeda--if that's possible--rather than this nonsensical broad sweeping "war on terror." The so-called war isn't broad enough any way. There's been no move to check out American citizens (Timothy McVeigh types for example) that might be involved in terrorist activities. And I'm not arguing that there should be. . .just saying that the term "War on Terror" isn't even honest.
And why is that no one ever talks about the Oklahoma City bombing any more? Why didn't we declare a "war on terror" after that? And remember the Unabomber? Wasn't he a terrorist also? Or do you have to be Muslim?
If you don't have a specific nation that you are at war with, then you don't have a war, in my opinion.
At the very least the U.S. should have declared war on Al Qaeda--if that's possible--rather than this nonsensical broad sweeping "war on terror." The so-called war isn't broad enough any way. There's been no move to check out American citizens (Timothy McVeigh types for example) that might be involved in terrorist activities. And I'm not arguing that there should be. . .just saying that the term "War on Terror" isn't even honest.
And why is that no one ever talks about the Oklahoma City bombing any more? Why didn't we declare a "war on terror" after that? And remember the Unabomber? Wasn't he a terrorist also? Or do you have to be Muslim?
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INDY500 said:
To get back to that, there were several good reasons not to try to force a USE with the "war machine":
- Economically, it wasn't favorable to go to war with any other nation. There was not much to gain, but everything to lose, and the US citizens would have seen a sharp decline in standard of living very soon. It just wouldn't have make sense to battle every country on earth, and in the long-run not even possible.
Russia may have suffered a lot during WWII, but it wasn't lying on the ground waiting for the last hit by any means.
It was in no interest for the US to go on fighting anyone.
- You should remember that the Marshallplan and all the support Germany received wasn't just a good deed by the Americans, but clearly aimed at building a shield against the Soviets and their territory, the later Warsaw Pact countries. That was one of the main priorities and main reasons why we received all that money and support.
- The US government and military was smart enough to know that you couldn't use "the bomb" exhaustively because there would be nothing to be gained, but a whole world destroyed. And the wars in Korea or Vietnam wouldn't have looked that much different then as they did five respectively twenty years later. You would have had the human resources for such an undertaking. Your military isn't invincible, and wasn't back then. Pyrrhus should tell you something here.
- The US had more important things to care about as being the next one to try, and fail, to be the imperial power of the earth.
And eventually they got close to being something similar for quite some time.
And, yes, good prevailed here and Truman sent the troops home.
But this should remain the key sentence:
Maybe a country can protect it's citizens and respect their rights at the same time.
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BonoVoxSupastar said:
9/11-- just a random attack by a group, totally unrelated to previous or subsequent attacks and with no underlying ideology. Well, if you believe that you should pooh-pooh the War on Terror I guess.
The street is their battlefield. Civilian clothes their uniform.
phillyfan26
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INDY500 said:
He never said it was random.
The point he's making is that it wasn't an attack by the Muslim faith. It wasn't an attack by the country of Afghanistan, or of Iran, or of Iraq, etc. These were not soldiers. These people were just in a group.
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INDY500 said:
It wasn't random or unrelated to previous attacks nor was it without underlying ideology.
So declare war on the group then! That would make sense!
The War on Terror is like declaring War on Fear (wait. . .isn't that essentially the same thing?) or War on Hate or yes, a War on Poverty or a War on Drugs. . .all nonsense.
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Wasn't Nazism an ideology that used the resources of Germany to spread. One needn't be German to have been a Nazi after all. The 30 Years War was about ideology wasn't it. What of civil wars?maycocksean said:
I understand your point and you are correct, radical Islam can't be bombed, isolated, embargoed or entered into treaty with. It is, to be sure, a new type of War -- but a war nevertheless. And we are still in the process of discovering the most effective ways to win it. There are many ways to win a war of ideology.
Do you have to be Muslim? As tragic as OKC was, when terrorists start shouting "McVeigh" as they martyr themselves in place of "Allah" then we can include it in the 21st Century War on Terror, otherwise it truly is an individual act of domestic violence, like Columbine, Virginia Tech and past presidential assassinations have been.
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Fascism was in power in Italy, Spain and Portugal as well, and was quickly introduced by the Vichy government in France either.
The Allies didn't fight Fascism, but the Great-German, Italian and Japanese armies. (ETA: Well, they fought against fascism, but the opponents were defined more clearly.)
These have been wars against specific nations. A war against the Fascist ideology what have meant that they went after those who held Fascist views.
And I don't think that's comparable to the situation the US is currently in, where you don't have a clearly defined enemy.
The Thirty Years War was a war between the religions, but also about gaining resources, and a war of the monarchical powers in Europe, but again, there have been two clearly defined enemies, and it's still been a war fought out by the militaries of the nations involved.
That's both much easier to fight than a "war on terror", where you have so many factions and so many enemies you are in fact fighting a hydra.
And torturing and detaining inhumanely and stooping to the level of your enemy is only recruiting more and more enemies to fight.
The Allies didn't fight Fascism, but the Great-German, Italian and Japanese armies. (ETA: Well, they fought against fascism, but the opponents were defined more clearly.)
These have been wars against specific nations. A war against the Fascist ideology what have meant that they went after those who held Fascist views.
And I don't think that's comparable to the situation the US is currently in, where you don't have a clearly defined enemy.
The Thirty Years War was a war between the religions, but also about gaining resources, and a war of the monarchical powers in Europe, but again, there have been two clearly defined enemies, and it's still been a war fought out by the militaries of the nations involved.
That's both much easier to fight than a "war on terror", where you have so many factions and so many enemies you are in fact fighting a hydra.
And torturing and detaining inhumanely and stooping to the level of your enemy is only recruiting more and more enemies to fight.
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INDY500
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phillyfan26 said:
He never said it was random.
The point he's making is that it wasn't an attack by the Muslim faith. It wasn't an attack by the country of Afghanistan, or of Iran, or of Iraq, etc. These were not soldiers. These people were just in a group.
Doesn't make the people they murder any less dead.
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INDY500 said:
And my statement never said nor implied that.
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Vincent Vega said:
Very true, nobody (including GWB) said it would be easy or quick. It may take generations.
Well Vincent, when we "torture" it is to gain intelligence to protect lives -- not to coerce a phoney conversion or a denouncing of former beliefs -- and if we have videotape we destroy those tapes. Our enemy posts their "torture" videos on the internet. We aren't stooping to their level.
But let's say for a moment that Guantanamo Bay is doing more harm than good and must go. So we close it and give all current detainees a plane ticket to Berlin and 50,000 Euros.
You cool with that?
INDY500
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phillyfan26 said:
Then in the spirit of the new year I'll retract it.
Happy New Years.
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